Influenza kind of sucks...

Well those moments became days...

The whole influenza epidemic thing is driving me crazy. Here's more or less a chronology of what has happened from my perspective (politically and socially-wise) in Mexico, which is believed to be the origin of this virus mutation:

• First, two weeks ago, the Mexico City's head of state (some kind of mayor), Marcelo Ebrard, comes out in television on April 23th at around 7pm warning citizens about a new virus spreading through the city, and calling for cancellation of all education activities and massive events in Mexico City. This was after several samples of people who died with influenza were sent to a laboratory in Canada (we have no such fancy thing as a laboratory to analyze viruses) and they were confirmed to have a new swine virus.
  
• Then the chief of health in Mexico joins in and tells us more or less the same, about the virus coming from swine and calling for the suspension of all the massive activities in the country. This message, since it was preceded by Mexico City's mayor message, was misunderstood in many states to mean that only in Mexico City this was to happen.
• Pretty much everybody with influenza (of any kind) is added to the list of sick people, leading to exaggerated counts of about 2000 sick and 160 dead.
• By Saturday, several really crazy conspiracy theories start appearing, not only between people, but also in some printed media.
• The television media becomes obsessed with the subject and only gets to worsen everything (and I mean really obsessed, you cannot turn on TV without seeing something about the virus, or the usual "don't kiss, don't shake hands, clean everything, clean your hands, wear a surgical mask" repeated all the time), paranoids start appearing everywhere (I have a friend who told me that her mom forced the whole family to disinfect the whole house with chlorine... talk about overreaction), those with crazy conspiracy theories only get crazier, people who could not care less... well to those stay the same.
• By Sunday statistics start varying too much (check this questioning to the Secretary of Health), some claim only 20 with the disease others only 8, some others keep the number around 200... apparently an internal communication problem in the government.
• On Sunday night there's some rumors about whether we'll have to go to school the Monday or not... The funny thing is that our campus' director gets involved with the students through Facebook before using the official media.
• On Monday, here in Jalisco, most of the basic education schools are open, but they get the order to close. Around noon there's the official clarification that the order to close schools was meant to be national.
• Guadalajara became a (relative) desert that day after the announcement.
• Monday evening we get notice that classes are suspended until May 6th (which eventually became until May 7th).
• Through the week, the WHO raises the alert to 5 (possible pandemy). Flights from Mexico to other countries are being screened, quarantined or cancelled. China is the first country to offer help to Mexico.
  
• At some point in time during that week which escapes my memory, our president makes an emergency decree giving the SSa (secretariat of health in mexico) the power to break into houses, quarantine people, close places, regulate traveling and inspect travelers between others. This is barely covered by the TV news, and only a few days after it happened.
• The Mexico's secretary of finance (the biggest man in Mexico, Agustín Carstens) acquires a credit from the World Bank to help fight the epidemic, of about 200 Million US Dollars.
• The senate took advantage of the situation and lack of interest from mainstream media to make it legal to posses small quantities of certain drugs. Whether this was a good move or not is still a heavy debate, specially with the lack of control there is over our automatic murder machines, also called drug cartels (somebody has to sell those now-legal quantities of drug, right?).
• China quarantined 71 people (15 mexicans?) and the whole hotel they were staying in (only one of them was found to have the virus) . This was pretty much the only international issue which got large coverage by the Mexican mass-media. Although I understand that China has a lot to fear from a epidemic virus, I feel they overreacted when they didn't allowed the Mexican ambassy to at least talk to them. They were returned to Mexico yesterday (May 8th).
  
• Last Thursday we finally came back to classes (not exams, as we were originally told by our director... which kind of screwed my whole timing). That day, our state governor admitted that there were at least 15 (and up to 26) confirmed cases of this barely-lethal virus, this was after almost two weeks of him repeating to dead that there were no cases in the state. Then yesterday, on Friday, he officially canceled all kinds of massive events, education and what-not until May 18th. This really screwed up my timing. Now I don't have a clue about how I'm going to get graded in some courses. Failing only one of them could make me graduate until next year.
• Right now the official number of infected people with the virus in the country is around 1600.
  

So there it is, there are many details missing, but be assured that the whole thing is way too messy. Now here in Jalisco everything is closed again, so that means no theater, no bars, no anything...

Oh, also I forgot to say that we are just about to start elections (for federal and state legislators) so every move that the government does generates more conspiracy theories everywhere...

GSoC Application.

Since the paranoia has grown in many people here in Mexico about the influenza, I've had a lot of free time, which I've mostly wasted with friends and/or google reader instead of doing GSoC work or school work... I'll put a post about it in a few moments.

Just a few days ago, matekm, a fellow GSoCer who's also working in OIIO (although in the library portion) posted a comment here asking for my GSoC application... the only reason why I didn't upload it first was because I thought that no one would care, but one person is already more than enough :).

So, here it is, copy-pasted from melange, hopefully the formatting is retained:

Title:	Give "iv" some love
Student:	Ismael Cortes Vazquez
Abstract:	Iv, the image viewer included with oiio, currently only works with OpenGL 2.0 or superior and lacks some fancy and interesting tools which could be done with OpenGL, my proposal is to implement both. I also propose some "extended" objectives which are meant to be taken as optional and which not necessarily fall in the iv/OpenGL realm (but are cool, interesting and challenging anyway).
Content:	Objectives: Sorted by the order in which I expect to achieve them. The expected time listed is what I consider would be a worse-than-average case, including only implementation and some creative-testing (which means that doesn't include high-level design, discussions or documentation). Do note that this is only an estimate and Murphy's law tends to get in the way of estimates. Add support for OpenGL < 2.0 to "iv". (Total: ~61 hours) Work on integrating GLEW to the external dependencies (please, I'd like to do this myself to get used to your build system internals). (8 hours) Work on using GLEW to detect the OpenGL version. (3 hours) Work on using GLEW to detect support for shaders extensions (fragment_shader, vertex_shader and shader_objects) even when OpenGL < 2.0 is detected and to use them 10 hours) Work on using an OpenGL fixed-pipeline with less features compatible with OpenGL 1.2.1. (40 hours) Add some nice transitions (Total: ~122 hours) Work on adding support for (pre-)loading more images as multiple textures at the same time (8 hours) Work on a architecture to make adding transitions (other effects?) as easy as possible (40 hours) Work on using multitexture to support fancy transition effects. (Total: 30 hours) wiping (using fragment shaders?) (10 hours) blending (10 hours) saturate/desaturate (using fragment shaders?) (10 hours) can come up with more during development... Work on using geometry to support fancy transition effects. (Total: 34 hours) alternative wiping (could be used only for non shader GPUs) (10 hours) paper-like folding. (16 hours) zoom-out/in (8 hours) can come up with more during development... Work on adding support to IvPreferenceWindow/ImageViewer::*Settings() to choose transition effects. (10 hours) Add some interactivity! (Total: 32 hours, excluding "interactive effects") OpenGL-based realtime rotations using the mouse. (8 hours) make it flexible enough to support multitouch in the future ;) OpenGL-based realtime contrast and brightness adjustment to image (16 hours, or only 8 if only one is done) Shaders-only version (8 hours) Multitexture-only version (8 hours) OpenGL-based interactive effects (~30 hours) wobbly moving (like wobbly windows) (10 hours) dragging to see a part of the next image (like when you fold the top of a paper on a stack of papers) (12 hours) 3D view of intensity/single-channel (like bumpmapping but using the image data... might be useful to see where's noise, over/under exposed parts of pictures...) (12 hours) A total of 241 hours (half of 12 weeks, with 40 hours per week) Extended goals: These are other things which I'd like to do but which I can't guarantee I'd be able to (for time reasons). I do expect to be able to at least do one of them. These are to be considered optional deliverables. Add support for jpeg-2000 images using libjasper (32 hours). Add an external (dockable?) window which shows thumbnails of loaded images. (32 hours) Add a very fancy kind of transition: using either ferns (easy and fast) or surf with random trees (hard, slower, but heavily tested) features, detect the same object(s) within two images and do a homography-based transition by rotating, translating and scaling the image to make it fit the detected similar object. (Probably 50 hours... depends on some not-yet-considered factors). Add the chosen feature detector to ImageBuffer? (?) Add a feature matcher somewhere (either to iv only or some part of the library) (? it's easy with ferns, not so much with surf). Add a homography calculator like RANSAC (either to iv only or some part of the library). Action Plan: Take advantage of the month before the GSoC start to get used to some inner parts of "iv" and to start discussing some implementation details with mentor/developers/community. (I could add GLEW to external during this time as a way to get used to the inner-workings of the build system). During summer, report advances each week (but expect me to communicate much more often!) and do an update on expected ETA of subprojects at least each month. Discuss implementation details and problems before getting to do them with the mentor, and if necessary the mailing-list to get wider range of input. Try to commit early and often, but avoid breaking the builds. Timeline: This is based on development estimations (assuming a worse-than-average case) which take into account research, design, implementation and testing and the official dates from Google. April 20th, to May 23th - "Bonding" with community/developers. Research of some necessary algorithms. Start messing with the code. May 24th, to June 13th - OpenGL < 2.0 June 14th, to July 4th - Nice transitions (Goal 2) up to (and including) goal 2.3 (multitexture support of fancy transitions) July 6th up to July 13th - Mid-term evaluation July 5th, to July 25th - Finish whatever was left of transitions (geometry support of fancy transitions and settings) (Goals 2.4 and 2.5) July 19th, to August 1rd - Interactivity (Goal 3). August 2th, to August 16th - Extended goals, buffer time (just in case). August 10th - I go back to school this day (!). You should expect that my time working gets reduced on weekdays and increased on weekends. This is the suggested pencils down date anyway. August 17th - Firm pencils down. Final evaluation. Name (and hope you don't mind if I put some more info about myself): My full name is Ismael Cortés Vázquez, I'm 22, and I live in Jalisco, Mexico. And since there's no other place to put them, I can be reached at leamsi.setroc@gmail.com which serves as e-mail, MSN handle and Google Talk handle. School: I'm a Computer Science and Technology student at the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, in the Guadalajara campus. Courses: I'm studying a Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology in what I believe you call Senior Year (that's the last year, right?). I've taken courses in all the basics (Discrete Math, Calculus, Statistics, Data structures, Algorithms, Databases, Operating Systems), some cool stuff (Intelligent Systems, Cognitive Science, Distributed Applications, Compilers, Ethics) and some boring stuff (Web development, Intro to programming, ...). Right now I'm coursing Computer Graphics, Modelling and Animation in 3D, Computational Intelligence (which has been mostly about Genetic Algorithms and Programming), Entrepreneurship, "Communicative, Strategic, And Far-Sighting Competencies" (which is a single class split in 3 classes), and Citizenship. Expertise (HW, OS, languages, libraries, GUIs, etc.): HW: Only x86. OS: I'm mostly a Linux guy but I'm familiar also with Windows. And with that I mean that I've done development (in several languages) in both of them. Languages: My main strengths are C (which I learned when I was ~12), C++ (which I started to learn when I was ~13), Python, Ruby and Common Lisp. I'm also familiar with Java, C#, Prolog, Scheme, x86 Assembler and Smalltalk. And have some knowledge on Haskell and Erlang but not enough to quickly read trough a program without a reference. Libraries: Many. But (to whatever degree) relevant to the project are: Qt4 (I never cared to learn version 3), OpenGL, Java's Swing, Boost (not all of it, tho'), C++'s STL, DevIL (which just came back from the dead a few months ago) and OpenCV. GUIs: I've used standard Windows api (Win32) windowing, Qt4 (Also PyQt4), Java Swing, and wxWindows (only through ruby, though). Build systems: I'm familiar with creating Makefiles and CMakeLists, and have used pretty much every other there is (Scons, Waf, autoconf, ...) Parallel programming: I'm pretty intimate with POSIX's pthreads and Windows' threads, and I'm very familiar with OpenMP. I've only started to learn CUDA and I'm still too new to it. Tell us about your programming experience, especially anything to do with graphics or images. When I was 16-17 I did a Game Engine for Windows based on OpenGL (then it was at version 1.5), DevIL (for loading images and textures) and OpenAL (for audio). That got me started into graphics, 3D and audio processing, videogame programming in general as well as working with large projects and using CVS, which eventually lead me to decide for a CS major rather than Electronics. It also convinced me that I can learn much more by myself than in school. And no... I never actually did a videogame as I never felt that I didn't have any cool enough ideas. Last August I started working with some friends from college and a profesor on a robot able to participate in the Robocup@home contest so I've been learning about and falling in love with Computer Vision and image processing in general. This is not a school course and we've already started to see some government sponsorship (which is too hard to get here in Mexico) and also from Nvidia (who gave us four Tesla GPUs). This semester I've been taking a course on Computer Graphics which refreshed my OpenGL knowledge, and the final project is to make a small but functional 3D editor so I've been working quite a bit on OpenGL+Qt4. Another non-graphics related but important experience (for me at least) was when I worked as an intern for IBM last year from May to December as part of the Speed Teams. I worked on adding support for some non-IBM IPDUs to Active Energy Manager 4.1 through SNMP. I've done some other things but I don't feel they are relevant to the project. You can read about them in my Resume. Why are you intersted in this project? Because I was looking to do something with OpenGL but not the same old Game-related things. That's the main reason. I feel that there's enough room in here to be creative and make some cool and useful work with iv. Also it is a flexible project and I'm all in favor of flexibility when it comes to software development. An OpenGL-based image viewer can do so much and has a lot of potential. Also, if the trend keeps going as is, everybody will have a 3D-based desktop and GUI-programs in a few years, so it feels like a good strategy to get ahead of the game.

Edit: Well, blogspot's WYSIWYG editor did screw the formatting. I tried to reformat it to be as close as possible as what I submitted, hopefully it makes sense.
Edit 2: Also, take into account that the scope did end up changing quite a bit:
Support for big images is a big priority for the OIIO guys (and a goddamn interesting problem... specially with gigapixel images), so I'll do that as soon as I get it totally working with OpenGL 1.x

Robbers...

Well, it finally happened. Our house was robbed yesterday while I was at college. To be honest I didn't see this coming and also it seemed that the robbers had been watching for a while. Why? Because they thought that there wasn't anyone at home (which was almost true).

My brother was sleeping in his bedroom when the assholes came in. He says that at first he thought that it was my mom making noises until he started hearing some unknown voices saying "quick! quick!". He woke up and watched outside the door of his room.

His room is actually a big closet in my bedroom so that means that when he comes out of his room he actually enters my room.

Well, he was able to see the face of one of them (he apparently was eating some lemon pie which my little sister had made the day before). Immediately when the robber saw my brother he challenged him ("What!? What!?" and then tried to slam the door on his face). He went out running and screaming "Let's get out of here, motherfuckers!".

My brother was dumb enough to try to follow them (what if they had a gun?) and he was able to spot a red pickup right outside the house in which they all left.

Those sons of a fucking bitch where trying to stole the piano, and they succeeded at getting it outside the house. It seems that they went straight into my bedroom as they stole the most in here: my H2 Zoom Recorder, my Canon A590IS camera, my new Sony Alpha-200 DSLR camera, and my Panasonic MIDI keyboard, these last two were gifts from my grandfather. They were also about to stole a CRT monitor from my desktop computer but it was probably too heavy for one of them and they just dropped it.

They also stole a flat monitor from another computer and ripped the keyboard. They only stole some crappy "jewelry" (actually only plastic) from my mom and sister.

Thankfully my brother is fine. The house has now become a fort: We changed the locks (since apparently the thieves where able to either pick it or get a key...). We are thinking of installing a movement detector inside the house which I got 4 months ago. We put padlocks in all the doors which can use them.

I'm not sad or anything but I am getting a little paranoid. Hopefully it will pass, but right now every little noise is waking me up, even tho' I know that the chances of getting robbed again are basically nil.

Oh... what a shitty evening.

Of course, it should be pretty obvious that with the current economical state along with the lack of social achievements from the local and federal government, criminality will get on the raise. And actually, I'm pretty sure it's been raising since 2001 or so.

GSoC here I go!

Yay! Happiness!

I was accepted at the Google Summer of Code for this summer (May to Aug) and boy... it felt great when I knew that. To be honest I wasn't eagerly expecting the date (the same day that the best mexican comedian died), nor the message of acceptance, and really didn't care too much if I wasn't selected --after all this is going to be my last summer vacation for a good while and resting is a priority to me. Because of this I was surprised about feeling happy with my acceptance. Odd.

As I mentioned already a long time ago, this is a great opportunity for me to give something back at the open source community and get some bucks to start paying the credit which has allowed me to stay at school (and I own much more to my dad... that's another story). Also I expect this will help me overcome my fear of getting into open source projects, as I've always felt that it's a little hard to build a coder reputation without a project or a really good series of patches. Of the few things that I know about myself is that I always keep up to my compromises (even if I avoid getting them), so this sure is a good way to motivate me through summer.

I'm also lucky enough that I will not have any final exams this semester (or it doesn't seem like I will) so I'll be able to start source chucking in about two weeks. That should allow me to get a much better time allocation and better results.

My project will be revolving around "iv" (I pronounce it like "eve", but that's because I'm reading it like it were Spanish, it is probably like "I.V."), an image viewer application for mac and linux which is part of the Open Image I/O library ("OIIO", man I love these acronyms... this one, if pronounced in spanish sounds like the word "hoyo" which means "hole").

It has two neat things:

• First and most important (IMHO) is that it uses OpenGL for showing the images and that gives it a big bunch of flexibility.
• The other is that it uses Qt4 for the interface, and that makes it 100% portable, flexible, simple and native-looking (and with Oxygen, it just looks lovely).

The great thing is that I already know both of them, specially OpenGL, and I've been using Qt4 for some time now.

Other than that I do have another good new for me, but that's for another post, and I'll wait until I get more details from INTEL (you can start guessing).

Crappy president...

I've been more than convinced that the last president we had, Vicente Fox (AKA "El Chachalaca", AKA "El Presichente"), was nothing but a charismatic incompetent idiot, a failed attempt of cowboy to whom many owned enough favors that he became a presidential candidate. I even have the hypotesis that he was supported as a candidate just because he was charismatic and would get many votes (and therefore many proportional seats in congress) not because they thought he would be a good president or could even win (back then, the only one believed to win was the PRI).

I got more evidence about this after the Vatican decided that he had personality disorders (and therefore accepted to divorce him from his ex-wife).

Now even more evidence as the congress is studying the results of his period as president and have these sad results:

• Economic growth of only 2.28%, even when we had twice the expected income from oil.


• Competitive index reduced from place 48th to 55th


• Public debt increase in 236%, which is equivalent to 43% of the GDP.

I do wonder how the heck did we come out alive after his term... and if Jalisco's ex-governor ever decides to run for president we're going to be absolutely screwed.

Digikam 0.10.0 and KDE4

Just a quick note. I decided to give Digikam 0.10.0 a try... well actually a good definite update to that version since running 0.9.x with only a few parts of KDE3 installed was not as pleasant as it should be.


Anyway, upon startup Digikam wouldn't show me any images on the albums. You can read about a guy with the same symptoms but a different problem here. Among the many possible solutions given in that thread, there's one which did the trick: running kdeinit4 (I'm using fluxbox so that may be the reason why it's needed) totally did the trick.

Edit: I had another problem (the tag hierarchy not being saved to XMP and therefore not being able to restore it without the database) which was fixed by upgrading to exiv2 0.18 (I was using 0.17 before).

WTF Google?

Google just showed me this weird message:

This account has been locked down due to unusual account activity. It may take up to 24 hours for you to regain access.

Unusual account activity includes, but is not limited to:

1. Receiving, deleting, or downloading large amounts of mail via POP in a short period of time.
2. Sending a large number of undeliverable messages (messages that bounce back).
3. Using file-sharing or file-storage software, browser extensions, or third party software that automatically logs in to your account.
4. Leaving multiple instances of your Gmail account open.
5. Browser-related issues. Please note that if you find your browser continually reloading while attempting to access your Inbox, it’s probably a browser issue, and it may be necessary to clear your browser’s cache and cookies.

What the Fuck? I've never ever had a problem with GMail, are these the signs that a change of e-mail provider might be just around the corner?

All that I was doing was going through a (very big) ppt presentation within the "view as presentation" feature of GMail... and suddenly I started getting messages about not being able to display slide 90 or similar and it logged me out of Gmail with this message.

I've never, ever said this before but: Fuck You, Google.


It seems to be working now (5 minutes or so after), but still, that wasn't a nice thing...

WTF?

And the fucking worse thing... some idiots stole the bell we had outside.

That fucking makes me mad!

Finite...

How much I'd like to believe that this life is not the end. I can't.

How much I'd love to believe that our sacrifices won't be useless.

That our thoughts won't be forgotten.

That our teachings will be listened to.

That the constant tick of the clock won't be gone for no good reason.

I'd be fine being a normal person. Believing what's to believe to be able to take this life on your back, to get rid of the pain.

But then you try, and you fail. And there's no second chance. ...And there is no way to win either.

I'd love to be able to ignore the future. I'd like to never have this interconnecting thougths.

You don't see what I see. I don't see what you see.

You've given it your best shot. But still can't get over it.

You're not crazy. You are just feeling the sorrow of failure. The sorrow of knowing that you won't have another chance.

I'd be happier if you could go back in time and fix me. Fix you. Fix everything.

I'd like to never let you down. But I'm not perfect, and neither are you.

This is the fucking hate towards this unfair life. Is stupid. Is pointless. Is hard. Is filled with pain and happines and love and hate and...

And you just cannot fix it!

Don't you hate it, too?

Don't you hate knowing that, because by being yourself you just screwed up another persons life? Knowing that, because of your stupid mistake (there are no smart ones) you'll regret your choices for the rest of your life?

Don't you fucking hate that you are aware of them? Of those mistakes, of those thought hunters. Never leaving. Always digging deeper. Stopping you from starting over.

Life is a bitch. Bitch.

The worst part is that, it won't be gone until I am gone.

Iron Maiden is My Religion

Yesterday I went what's probably the best concert I've ever been to in my life. Iron Maiden Rocked and Quite Fucking Hard.

The show was at the Vicente Fernandez Gomez' Arena. Unfortunately this place was originally meant to have spectacles of Charreria, not musical concerts, so the acustics are pretty much horrible.

The ticket said that the concert started at 21hrs but I got there at around 20:10. As I was getting closer to the arena I could hear the powerful double bass drum of Carcass warming up the people. I had to go around the arena to get inside it. I was lucky enough to be able to buy the most expensive tickets: up to the front. It was a general area so there was no place to sit... not that I wanted to, tho'. Went right inside and I immediately felt the wall of air by the power of the sound coming out of the speakers.

Got closer to the stage. I had never really listened to Carcass, and I'm not a big fan of death metal and not a fan at all of grindcore/hardcore (or anything with *core* in its name) music so it took me a while to get the cling of their music. The truth is that the ambient, the people, was already getting wild so I had no choice but to start head-banging and jumping with them. I didn't got to hear anything from the stunningly beautiful Lauren Harris... so either she played before or didn't play at all (she could've played between 20:30 and 9:10, when Carcass stopped pulling out their music and before Maiden showed us the teaser of Flight 666).

"¡Muchas Gracias Cabrones!" (Roughly "Thank you very much, motherfuckers!") was the last thing we heard from Carcass. Then we had to wait for half an hour listening to several hard rock and heavy metal songs and watching how they finished setting up the stage.

Then... black out. Transylvania coming out of the giant speakers. A teaser video of Flight 666 started playing on the two giant screens at each side of the stage. They played some scenes about the Ed Force One and airports and then...


Aces High. Fucking amazing. It took me a while before I realized that I was actually seeing them live... I had to see Bruce standing on the edge of the stage and then it hit me: I'm seeing Iron Maiden... Iron Fucking Maiden! And they are right in front of me. "Rolling Turning Diving! Going in Again! Run, Live to Fly, Fly to Live, do or die!" I've never punished my vocal chords so hard (they still hurt and it's already been more than 24 hours).

They followed with 2 Minutes To Midnight, and then Wrathchild "Yes I'm a WRATCHILD!". The public was absolutely amazing and we were only getting started. Right after Wratchild we were chanting so hard that Harris & co had to stop for couple of minutes.

We started with "Bruce! Bruce! Bruce!" right after the last chord... then a happy chanting, pretty common in concerts here in Guadalajara (and in Football all around the world): "Oh-eeeh oh-eh oh-eh oh-eh, Maiden Maiden". Bruce sat and heard amazed chants with which we were paying tribute to the beast. "I love you too!" was his answer... then he procceeded and complained a little about the acoustics ("I say hello and I hear 'HELLO HELLO Hello hello hello' coming also over there") and went on to properly introduce the show:

"We have prepared something very special and a little different than last year."

He then introduced us with the Children Of The Damned and also the Phantom of The Opera.

Many more great songs and hits followed, songs which have shaped my musical taste since I was a teenager: The Trooper (the guy who filmed this was pretty close to where I was, but this one can actually be listened to), Wasted Years, Powerslave (which is one of my favorite songs ever), Run To the Hills...

I was amazed to see that they dared to play Rime Of The Ancient Mariner in its whole integrity. And then, right after Run to the Hills they started playing the song which started it all for me: Fear Of The Dark... this is the song which introduced me to Real Heavy Metal, to Iron Maiden, to the 80's, to an entire new musical style. Unfortunately some asshole thought that he was hearing Atreyu or something similar and started a moshpit right next to me. Stupid Idiot Motherfucker. I wasn't able to hear a good part of the song because I had to take care of not being hit by this asshole. Anyway we started chanting from the beginning of the song and only stopped to hear that great solo by Mr. Gers which is a little too hard to sing along.

Then came Hallowed Be Thy Name, one of the greatest metal songs to be ever written in history. Great to sing along, specially at the start of it. After that, the the usual fake ending, "Want you to stand and stare. Want to see your blood." --Iron Maiden, the song, during which a 5 meter Eddie dressed as a mommy came from the back of the stage, started to move its hands and at the end of the song throw fireworks from its eyes. They pretended to leave, while we sang more "Oh-eeeh oh-eh oh-eh oh-eh, Maiden, Maiden"

Then, in the middle of the dark, a pair of red eyes started moving slowly towards the public and the narration by Barry Clayton began: "Let them who hath understanding reckon The Number Of The Beast...".

The Evil that Men Do was what followed along with a super cool giant Eddie with a gun which he pointed at us, and finally "Sanctuary" with the usual 5 minute break where Bruce talks. In this case he said that They'll be coming back after they release their next studio album which should be next year if I remember and understood him correctly, so until 2011 that is.

And after they left, they didn't came back to the stage. My only complaint: they should still play The Clansman, it was a great song in the Rock In Rio live album and singing "Freedom!" at full volume was my other dream besides singing along with Fear Of The Dark. Not that I really expected them to do it, tho'.

So that's all I've got to say. And I'm happy 'coz Guadalajara Screamed for Bruce all night long.

Fucking ALSA.

I was fighting with JACK/ALSA/ChucK today for three hours trying to get capture to work in my laptop. Finally I stumbled upon a solution in the Jackit-devel mailing list, which I quote here because is subscribers only:

Asbjørn Sæbø says:

SigmaTel STAC9200

Symptoms: Jackd timed out in realtime mode, gave hundreds of XRUNs in non-realtime mode.

Fix: The input of the card must be _activated_. There is a control (a "switch") for the input that needs to be turned on. In alsamixer, go to the "Capture" page, locate the Capture control and enable it by pressing SPACE, after which the letters "CAPTUR" are shown in red at the bottom of the control. (There are several controls titled "Capture" at the bottom, the correct one is the one labeled only "Capture" when looking at the "Item" in the upper left corner of alsamixer. The other two controls may not be enabled this way.)

Indeed I kind of remember doing something like this in my old laptop (which had a crappy VIA soundcard... well at least that did have a hardware mixer unlike all other crappy cards) to get JACK working... but I didn't remembered how to exactly.

So, thanks a lot Mr. Asbjørn.