My thoughts about Stallman and Jobs

Posted on 8 October, 2011 by luisivan

Steve Jobs died a couple days ago. Everyone said good words about Jobs, his products and his life, and how he made the world a better place.

Jobs was the best salesman of the world, that’s true. He was the most brilliant and the most inspiring.

But the world isn’t a better place thanks to him. As Richard Stallman said:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

Stallman is a very strange person, but he is usually right. And in that post about Jobs, he was right.

Some of the people saying that Stallman is ill and that Jobs made the world better are people that don’t know who’s Stallman.

Stallman is the creator of one of the best creations of humanity, free software.

Don’t forgot that your iPhone is running thanks to Stallman’s work. Yes, and Jobs’ work too. The difference is that Stallman released the source code of his creations and Jobs’ didn’t.

Read it again and think, did Jobs make the world a better place?

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HackNow

Posted on 23 September, 2011 by luisivan

Yap, I won HackNow

So I’m the best hacker under 18 in Europe. That’s awesome

The prize was the best smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S2), 5000€ and give a talk at HackFwd Build 0.7 event.

The SGS2 is awesome, its display is incredible, and it has even HDMI!

And the 5000€ will help me found my first startup that I’m going to create with my friend Alberto.

But I think the best prize was the opportunity to give a talk at Build 07, place where the best tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and investors of Europe share their thinkings.

The travel from my city (Oviedo, Spain) to Berlin was very long (about 12 hours using bus and plane).

When I arrived Berlin I saw an open city with dynamic and very polite citizens. I saw bikes everywhere and I didn’t hear the amount of noise we have in Spain.

The hotel of the event was good and it had free WiFi!

The place that hosted the event was very cool. Very open and very geek. It had ping-pong table!

All the speakers were amazing in their talks and there was a very good atmosphere of networking, collaboration, innovation and work.

My talk was good and I didn’t make so much english mistakes :P

When I finished my talk people made me a couple standing ovations and three or four very interesting questions about On, my environment and my future.

I met incredible people such as Lars Hinrich, Christian Boos, David Bizer, Mikko Järvenpää, Tom Hulme… and a lot of other very big professionals and amazing persons.

The event was an unforgettable experience.
I definitively want to create my own startup :)

http://hackfwd.tumblr.com/post/10517597027/hacknow-winner-luis-ivan-cuende

HackNow Winner Luis Iván Cuende from HackFwd on Vimeo.

Posted in Asturix, News | Leave a comment

Campus Party 2011

Posted on 18 July, 2011 by luisivan

Puesto de sala de Asturix en la Campus Party Valencia 2011

I remember when I was one of the 800 european young chosen to assist to Campus Party Europa 2010, and Asturix was chosen one of the 20 best Innovation projects. It was awesome.

This year Asturix was chosen a collaborator community for the Campus Party Valencia 2011, so I went to the event with my father and Ricardo, the delegate of Communication of Asturix.

Pau, Maddog and Luis Iván Cuende

First day (July 11) was horrible because the travel was long (about 12 hours).

In the inauguration of the event Pau García Milá presented me to Maddog. Thanks Pau, you’re big!

People from Futura Networks gave us cool sites in the first table of the Innovation area. We were in the table of organizers and speakers, with our 12-years old PC, my father’s netbook and the Ricardo 6-years old laptop. Just funny.

Luis Iván and Ricardo taking lunch with Jon "Maddog" Hall

Second day was very different. Ricardo and me went to the other extreme of the table, the place in that Jon “Maddog” Hall was, and we talked with him about 1 hour. Time later we take lunch with him. He is a very humble and accessible person. We made him a lot of questions. Maddog is an incredible person that truly understands the free culture. He is a very humble person.

Maddog gave me 10 minutes after his incredible talk about the history and future of Linux. View it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH8cnZU6EC4 !!!

Luis Iván Cuende with Jon "Maddog" Hall

The only talk we cannot see live was the Kevin Mitnick show. Yes, it was a show. I thought that Kevin would be a cool hacker, but he is a prepotent person. He started his video with  ”Kevin can penetrate all the computers“. That’s no a humble person IMHO xD. He said very intelligent things as “I changed the sound of a nuclear plant to Impossible Mission hahahaha” or “It makes pi pi pi po po poooo hahaha“. Ricardo and me were making a lot of jokes about Kevin, it was funny.

The other days we have lunch another time and dinner with Maddog and I talked with Pau García Milà (creator of eyeOS), Erik Schultink (CTO at Tuenti) and Sebastián Muriel (VP Corporate Affairs at Tuenti), Pep Gómez (18-years old entrepeneur), Cezar Busatto and Daniel Bittencourt (people from Porto Alegre), Sanjay Fernandes (from Colombia), Gabriel Vano (creator of GiveLife Color System) and Daniel Burón (from Gizmodo).

I’m forgetting a lot of people, sorry but I have very little memory :P

Unforgettable experience.

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It’s all about the desktop

Posted on 30 June, 2011 by luisivan

I used Linux the first time 3 years ago, when I was 12.
The first distribution I installed was Fedora 7, with Gnome. What a good times.
All was new and excitement.
But Fedora was too boring so my father installed Kubuntu 8.04 in my old laptop (that nowadays is dead). That version of Kubuntu shipped KDE 3.5, the funniest desktop I have ever seen. I remember the hours of customizing the desktop or when I used Kommander to create my firsts apps. I loved KDE 3.5.
Cause of my love with Linux I decided to start a small Linux distribution, Asturix.
The first version came with (surprise!) KDE 4.0, the most unstable desktop :P
Later I made another version with Gnome 2.24.
Gnome just bored me. Always the same stuff in the same form. Boring.
KDE 4 was a new form of made things, perhaps more cool. Just funny.
Months later I made the Lite version of Asturix, using LXDE, that added fresh air to the desktop scene.
I chose Gnome as primary desktop for the second version of Asturix. KDE was very unstable, but I made a version with KDE 4.2.
After that the game started to change: KDE 4.3 was a stable desktop.
So in Asturix 3 we (a lot of incredible people joined the Asturix ship) chose KDE 4.5 for the standard edition and LXDE for the lite edition.
Nowadays KDE is a stable, productive desktop that is easy to use but has a lot of advanced stuff too.
LXDE now is… okay, I understand that is a small project (not as big as KDE or Gnome) but it’s obsolete. As XFCE, just need more love.
And when all the desktop scene looked so boring, Canonical launched Unity.
I love Canonical cause they make good products but, after all, it’s a company, so they have economic influences.
And sometimes that isn’t good for users.
Then Gnome 3 was released. I really love parts of the Gnome 3 UI, it’s a totally rethink of the desktop. But it’s very closed for the user (sometimes unusable) and it has very few options. But at all is a UI refresh, nothing more. There aren’t changes of how we interact with our computer.

But now people doesn’t want a desktop. Now people wants social networks, and a browser to access it. Cloud computing and other stuff. I like the concept of cloud computing because the data can be accessed everywhere, but I don’t like the cloud computing the big companies want to sell us. Cloud computing rocks if you have your data, perhaps your private cloud. If a big company has your data, the data isn’t yours. That’s a problem.

Nowadays we have another risk, or perhaps a vintage: SaaS (Software as a Service). We are seeing a lot of software that runs on the cloud. That’s cool! You can access the app from everywhere and the developer can update the app quickly. But it’s a very important risk, because you have a huge dependency.

The web technologies are moving forward very fast, and now our browsers aren’t just a tool to see information, they can run apps.

There is an OS that is a browser: ChromeOS. ChromeOS isn’t nothing revolutionary, is a thin client oriented to the web. A normal user surf the web, so the user only need a browser. The apps and data are in the cloud.

Where is the free (as freedom) software here? It isn’t. Richard Stallman said that a lot of times. So we have to make something to help free software.

As Tariq Krim, founder of Netvibes and Jolicloud, said in the Forum Impulsa: “We can’t change the world. But we can change the rules of the world”.
So we can use the web technologies to make local and hybrid apps. That’s what Mozilla announced to the world with its Open Apps project. We use existing tools for a different purpose.

People need to continue owning theirs data. People need to continue owning their apps. People need to continue using their desktop.

So I announce that the Asturix project is developing the next-generation desktop: Asturix On.
It’s a minimalist and content-centric connected desktop. It’s based on the latest and most rocking web technologies.
It isn’t only a desktop, it is a wrapper for creating and porting webapps to any Linux environment.
It doesn’t pretend to be another boring framework to amplify fragmentation, but a tool for helping developers to make incredible web-based UIs or hybrid apps, or porting existent with few clicks.
It will work on mobile devices such as tablets. At now the targets are desktops and 8.9-10.1 tablets.

We will anounce more news at asturix.com
Stay tuned!

Posted in Asturix | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Forum Impulsa 2011

Posted on 26 June, 2011 by luisivan

Photo with Tariq (right), the creator of Netvibes and Jolicloud

When two months ago I received an email inviting me to the Forum Impulsa and two weeks ago the scholarship to go, I thought it was good.

But it wasn’t good. It was incredible.

The first day all the young people of the Forum did a huge brainstorming and networking, a creation workshop.

The second day was the best, and one of the best days of my life. Very good speakers talked about entrepreneurship, enthusiasm, education and transformation of the world.

 

Photo with Magnus, the creator of Lazy Town

I talked (okay, my english isn’t the best you have ever seen) with very very important people as Magnus Örn Scheving, Tariq Krim and, in my native language with Pau Garcia-Milà

Magnus project is curious: fight obesity using a TV series.

Tariq created Netvibes, that was a very successful startup, and now it’s working in his 2nd startup, Jolicloud. One of the most interesting parts of Jolicloud is its web shell, and we’re developing something similar in Asturix, Asturix On, so I think we should maintain contact.

 

Photo with Pau, creator of eyeOS

Pau is the founder of eyeOS, the leader of web desktops nowadays. IMHO he is the referent in entrepeneurship in Spain.

All the people in the Forum said that the spanish education system is a shit. And it’s true. But when I say “This education is a shit” in Asturias, people thinks that I’m mad. It’s a fact that Spain is going to crash if we don’t change the education now. We have to change it NOW, if we think we will be able to do it tomorrow, we’ll fall down quickly.

And I think the main message of the Forum was: It’s the moment. Don’t make it tomorrow if you can begin now.

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Getting MD5 or SHA1 hashes using Golang

Posted on 1 June, 2011 by luisivan

Go is a cool programming language, but it use an innovative terminology that sometimes is different than the way we code in other languages.

So here is how to generate a MD5/SHA1 hash using Golang.

We need to import that:

import (
    "crypto/md5"
    "crypto/sha1"
)

And this is the code:

string := "Go rulz!"
/* We are going to get the string of the MD5 hash
of the string "Go rulz!"*/
md5 := md5.New()
md5.Write([]byte(string))
md5String := fmt.Sprintf("%x", md5.Sum())

// And the SHA1 string
sha1 := sha1.New()
sha1.Write([]byte(string))
sha1String := fmt.Sprintf("%x", sha1.Sum())

md5String should be 3b57412713c4d0084e55185602dc75d1 and sha1String should be 8cd5dadbdad25e93d0c548f0e47fab6451e7eb87

So that’s easy!

Posted in Coding, Go | Tagged | 4 Comments

Golang Brush for SyntaxHighlighter Evolved

Posted on 1 June, 2011 by luisivan

I wanted to post Golang code in this blog without worrying about the syntax highlightenment, so I read http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/syntaxhighlighter/adding-a-new-brush-language and created a plugin that contains the Golang Brush created by Allister Sanchez http://hackgolang.blogspot.com/2010/05/syntax-highlighting-for-golang.html

You can use go and golang shortcodes for posting your code

Simply get it at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/golang-brush-for-syntaxhighlighter-evolved

Here’s an example:

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
	fmt.Println("Hello, 世界")
}

Enjoy it!

Posted in Coding, Go | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Solitra

Posted on 21 March, 2011 by luisivan

Este finde estuve en el Solitra que fue un rotundo éxito gracias al sudor y lágrimas de una persona que se ha esmerado durante semanas y casi meses para que lo fuera.

Mi ponencia fue Emprender con y en software libre http://luisivan.net/slides/emprender/

La presentación la hice con Landslide, el framework de Google usado en http://slides.html5rocks.com, así que 100% software libre.

En el congreso conocí a la gente de Emergya, Zentyal y AbanQ, con los que estoy seguro que entre todos haremos grandes cosas.

Un gran congreso, una gran ciudad, y una mejor gente.

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Tutorial de iniciación a HTML5

Posted on 21 March, 2011 by luisivan

Aquí os dejo un tuto de iniciación que he creado para un trabajo de la asignatura de informática: Introducción a la programación web con HTML5+CSS3+Javascript

http://luisivan.net/tutos/progweb/

Es muy sencillo, es una iniciación

Posted in Web | Leave a comment

El año de Internet

Posted on 23 February, 2011 by luisivan

Cuando Internet fue creado en la década de los 70, nadie se podía imaginar el impacto que supondría para nuestras vidas.
Gracias a WikiLeaks nos hemos enterado de lo que los gobiernos no nos querían contar.
Gracias a Facebook nos hemos organizado para reclamar nuestros derechos.
Gracias a Twitter hemos dejado de ser simples espectadores de la caja tonta para pasar a vivir el conflicto en tiempo real.
Y, como no puede ser de otra forma, gracias a otros miles de millones de sitios webs hemos hecho fluir la información.
Hasta ahora podríamos hablar de que Internet era una droga más, usada por los de arriba, como es la caja tonta, para conocer más a fondo a la plebe y sus debilidades.
Pero el juego ha cambiado: el fluir de información nos ha hecho enterarnos de lo que no querían que supiéramos.
Todo un conjunto de problemas se han sumado en los países árabes para desembocar en revoluciones.
Ahí es donde acaba un problema y empieza otro: acaba un régimen autocrático y empieza otro régimen autocrático, pero este camuflado por una democracia.
Pero el problema no termina en los países árabes.
Para llegar a la conclusión de que la mayoría de las democracias son una farsa, tan sólo tenemos que preguntarnos estas seis palabras: ¿por qué no tenemos democracia directa?
Cuando hace ya miles de años, el pueblo griego comenzó a utilizar el sistema democrático, sí que podíamos afirmar con rotundidad que no disponían de la tecnología suficiente para ejercer una democracia directa de verdad. En cambio en el siglo XXI, contamos con una herramienta que nos permitiría llevar a cabo una democracia directa sin problema: Internet.
En vez de llegar a casa después de trabajar 8 horas a cambio de un pésimo salario, encender la caja tonta (vulgarmente llamada televisión) y ver como nuestro querido gobierno aprueba la ley Sinde, la subida de la luz o el retraso de la edad de jubilación, lo que haríamos sería encender el ordenador y votar lo que deseamos para nuestra nación.
Las propuestas más votadas serían llevadas a cabo por el poder ejecutivo, que simplemente se dedicaría a acatar las exigencias de su pueblo.
Ahora es cuando el político X dice, como si tuviera idea alguna de lo que sale de su boca, que el falseamiento electoral sería elevadísimo, que hay regiones sin Internet, que entonces los hackers (digo hackers porque los políticos no se enteran de que la palabra adecuada es crackers) camparían a sus anchas…
  1. El falseamiento electoral sería más complicado. Tenemos DNIe y codificación SSL. ¿Qué más queremos?
  2. ¿Regiones sin Internet? También ahora hay gente que se tiene que desplazar al colegio electoral más próximo para votar. Además, gracias a la conexión vía satélite las regiones donde no se pueda obtener conexión quedan restringidas a unas cuantas zonas salvajes.
  3. Hacer una web segura tampoco es tan complicado. Con lo que ahorraríamos en diputados podríamos crear un búnker con protección nuclear si hace falta, y contratar a unos cientos de ingenieros de software.

No obstante, este modelo de democracia directa, también denominada democracia real, está comenzando a dar sus primeros pasos en Islandia, país que ha cortado relaciones con el FMI y en el cual los banqueros y los especuladores están en la cárcel.
Centrándonos en la nación española, creo que pido demasiado para un país que aún sigue ostentando una monarquía y cuyos dos principales partidos, casi los únicos que la población conoce, son de derecha y de extrema derecha. Lo peor es que incluso uno de ellos va de socialista.
Cuando el Partido Pirata, el Partido de Internet o cualquier otro partido defensor acérrimo de la democracia directa consiga un escaño en el Congreso, entonces quedará un atisbo de esperanza para nuestro país. Mientras tanto, el futuro será tan negro como el humo que nos han vendido.

Sí, nos han vendido humo. La democracia nunca ha existido. Los señores feudales y la nobleza siguen conquistando el mundo, ahora encarnados en la banca y, en general, en los capitalistas.

Sinceramente, espero que me esté equivocando, y que la población cambie el sofá por la calle, y el mando de la televisión por las pancartas. No olvidemos que los derechos que ostentamos los tenemos graci

as a que nuestros antecesores invirtieron sudor y sangre en garantizarnos un futuro mejor.
Al fin y al cabo, espero que este pase a ser el año de Internet, o lo que es lo mismo, el año del conocimiento, el año de la unión y de la democracia.
En fin, soñar es gratis

Posted in Opinion | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments