Seven of Nine : Resistance is Futile

I just wanted to quickly edit the Spanish Wikipedia OSGeo article (we did not have anything there yet shame on us...) because I have a presentation the day after tomorrow on Informatica 2009. Anybody who feels like it please help to bring my stumbling into shape.


To make the article look a little nicer I tried to upload the fricking logo - it took me around a dozen tries and more or less 20 minutes (slow network and all, conceded). But still - am I that old already that I am too dumb to simply upload a file? No way. Its the fricking licensing and copyright hell that got the better of me. How is the OSGeo logo copyrighted and can it be licensed? Huh? Can't tell? Me neither, and I have driven the whole thing as Marketing chair until it finally was done and then uploaded it everywhere until some grumpy old men complained that there are more important things to do than mind logos. Short of a clear directive I now suggest that it is under Creative Commons as the rest of the web site. Anybody wanting to complain please go to Wikimedia Common, place a complaint and have it removed. Hehe. Btw. this also allows for my long standing wish to make it possible to make modifications of the logo. Attribution derivative.


So where are we going to end up when we go down this road? Obviously in Hell, that is always the end of the road when it goes down, but is there no other way? Trying to understand the Flickr ToS rendered me helpless lying on my back twitching in legal convulsions. Either I just don't get them or they really suggest that you deliver them everything no questions asked. So I had to start my own Web Album - and obviously added my own Copystraight notice. Proliferation sucks but what else could I do? I am not going to give all my photos to a corporation that does not even have ToS under their own name and wants me to concede them all and get nothing back.


Initially I wanted to write about Informática 2009 but the Venezuelan Ministress for the Public Power of Information Technology got me silently raging and I need to cool off a little before trying to formulate how she got all wrong. Control the content of the web to shape society. Please!

We are finally leaving Peru and we are leaving behind our car. Friends take it over to go traveling in Peru. Before handing it over we gave it to our garage of trust for maintenance and as we will be leaving in a few hours a friend has to pick it up. He never was there before so I compiled some information and maps here for him to find it.


If you ever need a good mechanic in Lima I can highly recommend the taller where Abdon Quispe works. He has been working many years for Volkswagen in Perú until they shut down the plant. Now he works with a group of other mechanics in Surquillo, Lima. He has repaired our beetle and now maintains it while we are away. This is the address of the workshop:


Abdon Quispe

Gonzales Prado 1395

Surquillo, Lima, Perú

This is the best map that I could find. There is also quite a bit of geometry in OpenStreetMap but it still misses quite a few road names (some new ones should show up next Thursday if Potlatch ate them correctly).


If you happen to have a GPS, the coordinates are -12.115989, -77.016953. The entrance to the taller in February 2009 looked like this:




Right around the corner at -12.113765, -77.022045 you also find a VW dealer that has most parts in stock.


So what are we (or us - them OSGeo and OSM geeks) missing to be able to make this without using Google Maps (thanks to Google for making this possible in the first place and raising the bar for us...)? Probably everything is there, it is just not yet integrated well enough for All to be able to use it. That should be possible to overcome.


Hm. I am still missing something standardized to make a reference to the OGC... Maybe I should add the coordinate as a GML or KML (whcih then again is Giggly...). They are everywhere, hopefully this monopoly will not cause havoc as Paul is already pointing out.

Up there on the right hand of Mount Vallanjanaru in a little valley our car got stuck behind a land slide, in Spanish "Derrumbe".




We had to take a taxi to get out of there after climbing Mount Vallajanaru because there was nothing else we could do. Getting a taxi in that area is also somewhat difficult because in the valley there is no cell phone connectivity and only few taxi drivers want to go to such a remote place anyway due to the risks of the road that is in a wretched state. Fortunately our guide Daniel Milla knows a taxi driver who also goes to remote places, they work together when Daniel guides tours.


Both the taxi driver and our guide were pretty sure that it would take weeks if not months until something "official" can be started. It is low season and even the Guardaparque has moved to another place, the Refugio where our car is parked is currently not occupied. As we have just a few days left until our flight goes to Habana in Cuba where we attend Informática 2009 we start our own mission impossible with two shovels, a pickaxe and lots of good cheer. And it worked out fine, see the picture story of the rescue mission.

Sadly this is the last leg of our journey in Perú. We were welcomed by friendly people everywhere, the landscape is fantastic, the roads are beyond description and all in all it was a great trip.


No more words, here are the Pictures from Huaraz.


Thank you Perú.


Arnulf & Athina.

Finally something cyberical in my Blog. It started off as a minor nuisance. Google insisted on giving me http://www.google.com.pe/ because I am currently in Huaráz, Perú. No matter what, it would not let me search DotCom. Why that? Google sucks.


Well too bad but so what. Then things became a bit more complicated on the local end. No more web editing from my notebook. The connection to the local network in Hotel Andino worked fine (great Hotel by the way). My Firefox start page is http://www.osgeo.org (to have a peek at the Blogs) and all appeared fine. http://wiki.osgeo.org worked fine as well until I wanted to edit the Board page to add the next meeting time and date. Instead of saving the data I received a 0 kb file for download with the name of the PHP script. Same with my webmailer (SquirrelMail), I could read messages, delete or move them to another folder but I could not send message. Instead I get a download dialog with a 0 kb file for download named "compose.php". Strange. Trying out my own server arnulf.us in Germany did not get me anywhere either. Serendipity (my Blog software) worked fine to browse but not to write. More severely SSH sessions on my private server also worked but no way to scp or rsync data. gFTP did not work either. It opens fine but then nothing. Now it becomes tricky. The files gets created on the other end but it is empty with 0 kb and the software eventually times out with a more than less useless error message.


What to do. The hotel also has a few public PCs on the corridors which I then used to edit the time and date of the board meeting. So far so good but what the heck is the problem with my shiny new EeePC with Eeebuntu? Next thing I tried GoogleMail (which I only use under severe pressure...) and it worked fine. This is hilarious - I cannot use my own SquirrelMail installation on my own Debian server from my own Eeebuntu notebook each of which I have installed by my very sorry self but I can do GoogleMail from an "anonymous" Windows box? Ahrgl. Something seriously wrong is going on. I suspect that the hotel runs a firewall/webwasher/whatever that does not like PHP with Post or something alike. The director is very helpful but as his own Windows PCs al work fine I run out of arguments. Ah well, if you are using a custom open-something... I don't know. I cannot even blame him, he belongs to the 99%.


I thought that using a proxy might help. But it needed to be a very close proxy on the local box. And one that encrypts stuff prior to relaying it would also help to prevent the ISP to sniff into what you are doing. The natural choice seemed to be the Tor Project which I wanted to test for ages but never got around to before. Installing and configuring Tor and Privoxy takes but a few minutes although it is probably still too long and too complicated for 99% of humanity. It works right away, as expected a bit slower but not as badly as feared. And wonder over wonder - I can now edit the Wiki and send Emails with SquirrelMail. I also found out how to scp through Tor but it does not really make sense because ssh is already encrypted from my box to the server. It only puts loads on Tor's efficiency.


So find something else.


Maybe Google will help: But now that I am anonymous Google does not really want to help anymore, at least not for free. It gives a 403 permission denied explaining that you are probably a virus or malware. It wants to know who you are. Google is not for free, not even searching. You pay for it with your privacy. After typing in the captcha Google is back online and gives you some information. But which information does it actually give you? The search results "feel" different (and my guts are always right). This is scary. Turning off cookies is where the real fun starts. As Google does not know anything about me or my whereabouts any more I end up Google "sökning" and "zoeken" and "searching" (but at http://www.google.ca). Did you ever "Iskanje Google" (http://www.google.si/). This is the Tor network effect, you never know where your package leaves the anonymous web.


So what do you think? Are you prepared to pay Google with your privacy to "find" things which Google thinks are best for you. Sometimes I wonder.