radek.cc

Oh my, seems like I’ve been naughty.

Colombia has changed a lot during Álvaro Uribe’s presidency; the current reality is nothing like the one portrayed by the stereotypes still popular in Europe.  Doesn’t seem like a crime & drug capital of the world at all.

Neverthless, not suprisingly, cocaine is quite plentiful in Colombia.

It’s funny to watch some tourists, asking in hushed, conspirational voices: “dude, do you know where I can get some coke”…  Well, sure I do, dude.  Ask the taxi driver.  Ask the guy selling cigarettes on the street.  Ask the first barman you’ll get to a small-talk with.  If you’re too shy to ask, just walk slowly around the tourist area, a black guy in his late 40s will approach you with friendly small talk about party & girls.

Cost.  From 5k to 20k COP (that’s about 2.5-10 USD) for a gram; more than that is a rip-off.  Usual price should be around 10k; more should mean better quality, but you never know what you’re buying.

Quality.  No idea.  I’ve tried ~4 different sources; all tasted differently.  The best one was a gram I got from a taxi driver, as a gift (I tipped well two night before, though).

I’ve read somewhere, that the stuff which reaches Europe is being further processed / flavored, with significant additions of extasy and other… whatever.  Seems about correct, according to my one-time European experience.

Laws.  Posession of up to 1 gram is legal.

Effects.  Well, tricky.  If you’re careful with the amount (say, up to 0.3g during an evening, for the quality I had my hands on), there isn’t much.  If you go harder, the night can get fun (in the crazy kind of way), but you’ll pay for it on the next day.

It’s not just the hangover and running nose; it’s the (extremely unpleasant) feeling of paranoia and slipping into the world of hard to describe insanity.  Basically, you’re going nuts.  There is an urge to just follow Marla and slide, but I didn’t dare.

No regrets, but I’m through with this shit for a long while.

I thought I´m so fucking awesome, nobody can steal from me.  Well, I just waved my Eee PC and cell phone goodbye.

How: 3h bus ride from Montanita to Guayaquil (Ecuador).  Modern, clean bus.  Two of us,  a bit of a hangover, but mostly awake (13:00).  Keeping our bags in the overhead storage space.  Nobody was walking around, as far as I remember.  A man tried to help me with putting the bag into the storage space, but I stopped him and did that myself.  After the ride, one of the passengers passed me the bag, when I was standing up.

Outside of the bus, I noticed the bag is too light and too soft — the netbook is gone.  I thought I left it in Montanita, have excluded the possibility of theft on the bus, seemed too difficult… but then I noticed the loss of the cell phone, and everything clicked together… the man with the guinea pig (distraction), the helpful passenger…

Fuck, fuck, fuck.  I´m lucky they left the passport.

Before I figured things out and notified the police (a helpful lady from the tourist information office was kind enough to translate), the bus was gone to another destination… I bet the driver knew what´s going on, but the friendly cops couldn´t do anything more.

I mark this Technical, for it´s a good lesson about backups.  The last one I (probably) can recover is from 2006, and that´s just the most critical stuff (my SSH and PGP keys, etc).

The phrase ¨epic fail¨ somehow doesn´t seem appropriate.

I’ve updated perl.spec to v5.12.0 (on HEAD).

Not sent to builders — this will require more testing and rebuilding of whatever depends on libperl.so and the directories, which usually results in a temporary mess.  I’m not going to do that: EBUSY.

Packages for i686 (just bare perl & perl-dirs) can be found at:

poldek -s http://carme.pld-linux.org/~radek/perl-512-i686/

Notes:

• suidperl has been removed
• microperl is currently broken (does anyone care?  if yes, speak up)
• @INC order has been changed to the one PLD has since v5.8.0 (site, vendor, priv), therefore rendering the -INC patch obsolete; please be testing it (perl -le 'map print, @INC')

See perl5120delta.pod for the release notes.  Official release information is here.

DNS hosting, it seems so simple, yet it’s so tricky…

All domain registrars I know of provide the service, but:

1. the interface is usually too crude and simplistic (I do want the TXT, SRV, IPv6 support and overall fine-grained control over the zone’s content),
2. I want to manage the domains from different registrars in one place,
3. I don’t trust them; they’re in the business of making money from registering domains, not providing a reliable DNS service.

FreeDNS has been the perfect solution so far: operated by Piotr `Beeth’ Kucharski, whom I trust, and hosted on SGH’s servers, an entity I have trusted.

Recently, SGH has demanded a copy of the database, and when Piotr refused, they have blocked his access and took over the service, claiming rights to the data.  Trust FAIL.

If you’re keeping your domains there, it’s time to find an alternative.  Frankly, I don’t know of one at the moment.

Update: FreeDNS::42.

Source link (in Polish) with information about the issue: http://42.pl/freedns.html; the comments on Wykop are also useful.  The only thing I can infer from the discussion is that someone at SGH is up to something evil.

I left India, after almost six months.

Bus from Mapusa to Mumbai (15h); BOM -> DXB -> LHR -> GRU -> GIG; over 50h of travel in total.  First two flights with Emirates, the latter two with TAM.

• Emirates: not bad, but you have a long way to go to match Kingfisher.  Bonus points for electricity sockets in the economy class.  1h delay at your home airport, from exclusively yours super-modern terminal is a FAIL.
• TAM: you suck.  Food is so-so.  Not enough room for the legs.  Movie and music selection is laughable, compared to Emirates.  Booze selection: sigh.  Using the same flight code for two different flights: EPIC FAIL of the moronic kind (hint: it’s an identification code, it’s supposed to be unique).  Three hour delay before GRU -> GIG: pathetic.
• lastminute.com: you suck.  Blocking money on my account and not issuing the ticket is bad enough, but I could understand.  Lack of e-mail confirmation of the issue, vague information over the phone (after 4th attempt, each time waiting ~4 minutes for irrelevant announcements and going through the menus) and the fact that the money is still blocked I can’t understand.  Not having a clue what’s going on in your information system is typical for British software, isn’t it?  Dear lazyweb, what are good alternatives?

DXB airport’s Terminal 3 is quite awesome.  Clean, well organised, modern look, very good signs, plenty of shops / cafes; just a good airport.

BOM airport: OK, I think I’m through with visiting India.  Enough.  I still have about five drafts of articles… will get around to putting the finishing touch on them, sometime.

Rio de Janeiro: I’m here since 24h, and the city seems awesome so far.