Is this valid?

self->scans = malloc(self->max_scans * sizeof(self->scans[0])

You're using the derreferencing of a unallocated variable for setting it's size... but it works! mmmhhh...

I did so few that I could write this blog.

• Talked with my adviser, he wants now a frontier based exploration... more job to do...

• In thursday a visitors will come to the lab... more job to do...

• Found in the lab a firewire 6pin to 4pin converter! I gotta test it... more job to do...

• Wrote my project proposal for the uncertenty class... more job to do...

• Is F. here?

• Gotta go home, grab anything for eat, try to read a paper, try to read the current book, sleep, sleep, sleep until tomorrow... more job to do...

• Faust - Goethe (12/2004 - 08/01/2005)

• Arráncame la vida - Angeles Mastretta (09/01/2005 - 12/01/2005)

• Demian - Hermann Hesse (12/01/2005 - 16/01/2005)

• 1984 - George Orwell (17/01/2005 - 05/02/2005)

• Delirio - Laura Restrepo (06/02/2005 - 12/02/2005)

• Crimen y Castigo - Fyodor Dostoevsky (13/02/2005 - 26/03/2005)

Chale, me eché más de un mes leyendo el librajo. Bueno, ahora leeré un dulcecito.

El miércoles pasado regresé a Cuernavaca con la seria intención de trabajar en mi proyecto de tesis, pero también mi hermano Ricardo vino a la ciudad de la eterna primavera con intenciones totalmente opuestas: recorrer los alrededores.

Así que el primer día fuimos a Tepoztlán. Un cerro endemoniado de subir (1 hora hicimos), una bonita vista, un pequeño basamento piramidal, gente de todos lados (suecas, japoneses, italianos y chilangos). Terminamos agotados, y la idea era ir a Taxco al día siguiente, pero el cansancio nos venció al levantarnos ya muy tarde. Así que decidimos recorrer la ciudad: El jardín Borda, el Palacio de Cortés, la Catedral, la plazuela del zacate y un paseo por una barranca, además de una opípara comida en el Marco Polo, fue tour realizado.

Ese día sí regresamos temprano y pude avanzar un poco en el trabajo que originalmente había propuesto.

Pero hoy finalmente fuimos a Taxco. Es parecido a Guanajuato, pero su Catedral churrigeresca no tiene igual. El cansancio nos venció rápido y terminamos en un bar frente a Catedral. El regreso fue todo un viacrucis de semana santa, ya que nos agarró en el camino el éxodo de los chilangos que regresaban de Acapulco. Tres horas en un camino de una y media.

El sopor de la cerveza me hace pensar cosas raras.

Several weeks ago a master peer began an interrogation about myself: how I feel, how I perform with girls, how I respond to certain scenarios, etc. I decided to open myself to other and put an effort in trusting people, so I tryed to answer her as honestly as I could.

Since I've memory, I always put apart my feelings. I'm no the kind of guy who is in touch with his feelings, and simply I don't do it because it has been painful, and after a while of been confronted with my sensitivity, I get anxious and a bit paranoic.

And my peer did that: pushed with her questions. But add a few more accidents: I've to help in her thesis in my position of lab in charge (see further) and we're work team in a subject.

Anyway, sincerely, I've to thank her, because now I see a problem with myself that I've to solve: I need to face my feelings.

But it is enough of rationalisms, I'm going to write my anger:

The history with this girl began in the first semester, we went in a team for two subjects, but she's civil engeneer, so she stood in the position of "I don't code, I only do powerpoint presentations". I would accept that I'm biased in the size of coding effort, but nevertheless I felt really annoying spent my last year "holy week" coding for a JSSP problem, and give her a good score in something that (now I realize) she didn't understand a bit.

After that semester I told myself not go in a team with her again. But this last semester I've to team with her again. At least the subject isn't about code, but to do powerpoint presentations, so she's in the mood.

In the other hand, she have been asking me questions about J2EE. I hate J2EE, (whole Java in fact) and the only things I know about is because the subject we team in the first semester. Nevertheless I gladly answer all of her question. As a reward of it, and as responsable of the lab, her advisor required me to set up a J2EE framework in order to facilitate her his thesis work. I would like somebody to facilitate my thesis too.

As I said that first semester: I feel like a mule trying to pull a cart.

I can understand her position: she's not a IT student.

Enough of anger. Maybe I'm not fair in this rant, but it's the way I feel.

Java

I'd lie if the proposal to install J2EE envirnoment utterly disliked me. The challenge sound as a happy procrastination. So I started the last saturday in the morning.

I had to install JBoss, MySQL and CPetstore in a bloated and badly installed FC2 (why everybody likes fedora?). I didn't want to do it in a download/compile/install fashion, I've the power of apt-get. Found JPackage. a repository of Java RPMS. Great!

• First attempt: apt-get install jboss oups! I need the sdk... mmhh Blackdown? Sun? IBM?.... Let's follow the leader: Sun... 1.4 or 1.5... let's be cautious: 1.4

• apt-get install jboss... oups! a lot of broken dependencies... why? I have to "apt-get source -b" a bunch of packages... damn! and all of them are zips which must be downloaded from java.sun.com accepting a crappy licence... shit!...

• apt-get install jboss... finally. Now let build cpetstore... ok... let's fire jboss... ough! it didn't work.... why??? Those cryptic messages from server.log are simply useless...

• aha!! the docs of cpetstore requires 3.2.3 and the JPackage installed 3.0.8... mmhhh... let's try 4.0...

• ough!! more dependencies???!!! jdk 1.5 is mandatory??? fuck them...

• ok... I found the devel repository on JPackage, and there is JBoss 3.2.6... let's go get it... ough!! still need more dependencies... a lot more... and more manual downloads from java.sun.com, and recompilations...

• Shit! It uses tomcat5, and tomcat5 requires jdk 1.5... shit! ok, let's install it...

• Everything it's set up, let's fire CPetstore... Damn! didn't work too. What a hell! the docs say 3.2.3!!!

• Fuck JPackage, fuck Fedora, fuck RPMs, fuck JBoss, fuck Tomcat, fuck J2EE, fuck Java... I just want throw all away. As a matter of fact, it wasn't my business, I shouldn't be doing it...

• Ok, let's take a breath. First, let's uninstall jdk 1.5, then grab 3.2.3, from JBoss site, the whole enchilada package, put it on the bigger partition (home), then install CPetstore...

• It worked! it worked!

I finish all this today at 8pm... Remembered when I done all this in my mithyc lap Angelina with Gentoo: emerge jboss and everything was running smoothly. Gosh! how I detest Fedora.

Now leave alone, I have a thesis to work in....

One of my hypothesis of my master's work is that you can do sensorial fusion between several distance mesaurement sensors, specially sonar and laser. So I started a simple experiment: log the data in a typical travel of both sensors and graph their mesaurements in order to compare their diference.

I was expecting that the sonar beam match with the shortest laser beam in it's correspondient beams set.

I set up a player configuration logging all the gathered data. In 5 minutes of operation the log fetched 3.9M of raw data.

Well, I though, lets process this bunch of data with OO Calc and graph each instance of time. But I've to preprocess the data in a form that could be imported by Calc, like csv, and facilitate the charting operations. Perl was the path to follow.

The whole thing become slow, mouse tedious operations, and hard to alineate all the data. Waste almost all the day trying to achive that. Very frustrating without results.

Late at night, when I was in bed, a glorious idea came to me: let's use gnuplot!

In the next day I recode the pre-processing script and write a new one which open a pipe to the gnuplot process, send the charting data, et voila! and also it display the distance at every moment in time, resembling and animation. Just beautiful.

It was when I realize: Spreadsheets just sucks! they're slow, bloat, rigid... at least when you want deal with big chunks of raw data.

Well, the bad news is that my expectations weren't true always, there are many times where the beams don't match at all. Explanations: a) we're sensing two different planes (the laser is above the sonars); b) both sensors don't sense synchronously, the sonar is far more slow than laser; and c) a sonar is damage.

Now I've to report this and see the adviser's feedback.

A bright day, beautifull day. Woke up, read a while, watch TV, smoke, when to the cinema: Sideways, good movie. Buy groceries, and bought the book México mutilado. Got back.

But the interesting thing about of this day is that I didn't cross a word with no person, except the esencial comunication... When the loneliness is a personal choose, it's so lovely.

Hoy, en este medio, declaro que estoy completamente enamorado de Laura García.

Chale, siempre enamorado de causas imposibles... Debería hacerle caso a Oliverio Girondo:

"No sé, me importa un pito que las mujeres tengan los senos como magnolias o como pasas de higo; un cutis de durazno o de papel de lija. Le doy una importancia igual a cero, al hecho de que amanezcan con un aliento afrodisíaco o con un aliento insecticida. Soy perfectamente capaz de soportarles una nariz que sacaría el primer premio en una exposición de zanahorias; ¡pero eso sí! -y en esto soy irreductible- no les perdono, bajo ningún pretexto, que no sepan volar. Si no saben volar ¡pierden el tiempo las que pretendan seducirme!

Esta fue -y no otra- la razón de que me enamorase, tan locamente, de María Luisa.

¿Qué me importaban sus labios por entregas y sus encelos sulfurosos? ¿Qué me importaban sus extremidades de palmípedo y sus miradas de pronóstico reservado?

¡María Luisa era una verdadera pluma!

Desde el amanecer volaba del dormitorio a la cocina, volaba de comedor a la despensa. Volando me preparaba el baño, la camisa. Volando realizaba sus compras, sus quehaceres...

¡Con qué impaciencia yo esperaba que volviese, volando, de algún paseo por los alrededores! Allí lejos, perdido entre las nubes, un puntito rosado. "¡María Luisa! !María Luisa!"... y a los pocos segundos, ya me abrazaba con sus piernas de pluma, para llevarme, volando, a cualquier parte.

Durante kilómetros de silencio planeábamos una caricia que nos aproximaba al paraíso; durante horas enteras nos anidábamos en una nube, como dos ángeles, y de repente, en tirabuzón, en hoja muerta, el aterrizaje forzoso de un espasmo.

¡Qué delicia la de tener una mujer tan ligera..., aunque nos haga ver, de vez en cuando, las estrellas! ¡Qué voluptuosidad la de pasarse los días entre las nubes... la de pasarse las noches de un solo vuelo!

Después de conocer una mujer etérea, ¿puede brindarnos alguna clase de atractivos una mujer terrestre? ¿Verdad que no hay una diferencia sustancial entre vivir con una vaca o con una mujer que tenga las nalgas a setenta y ocho centímetros del suelo?

Yo, por lo menos, soy incapaz de comprender la seducción de una mujer pedestre, y por más empeño que ponga en concebirlo, no me es posible ni tan siquiera imaginar que pueda hacerse el amor más que volando.

Depressive noise

Y ya que estamos sumidos en depresiones del sábado por la noche, qué mejor que la poesía que le dio nombre a la película de Amenavar:

Mar adentro,

mar adentro.

Y en la ingravidez del fondo

donde se cumplen los sueños

se juntan dos voluntades

para cumplir un deseo.

Un beso enciende la vida

con un relámpago y un trueno

y en una metamorfosis

mi cuerpo no es ya mi cuerpo,

es como penetrar al centro del universo.

El abrazo más pueril

y el más puro de los besos

hasta vernos reducidos

en un único deseo.

Tu mirada y mi mirada

como un eco repitiendo, sin palabras

‘más adentro’, ‘más adentro’

hasta el más allá del todo

por la sangre y por los huesos.

Pero me despierto siempre

y siempre quiero estar muerto,

para seguir con mi boca

enredada en tus cabellos.

A guy in au showed some interest in my effort to put the pmap on-line, so I set up a repository in the catedra's cvs.

I feel shame because are only a few lines of code, for "2 months of work".

But I'm happy because Andrew solved the problem with lodo, and now my code map a simulated environment on-line without race conditions

Jackie is the DF... again... now she went to the Lenny Kravitz concert. I feel a little sorry: Joshua didn't want sell me his tickets.

The wine is over, no beers either...