Planning a trip to Thailand

Well, here we are again, packaging our stuff ready to go, this time for 20 days, to Thailand. As I posted previously, that trip is completely self-made, but with a certain level of quality (we are not teenagers with a bag on his back and a few euros in their pockets).

The planning started in the middle of august, because this year my partner was working in a tourist town for all the summer, so we choosed to travel in November. The choice of Thailand was quicker, looking for a country beautiful, safe, with sunny beaches (to replace the worked summer of my girlfriend) and with a lot of diferent things to see.

Once selected the country, it was the time to see agencies (Our first thought was to purchase a travel using agency) but we are'nt as rich as other people, and the travel was out of our budged. For those more lucky with the money, I have to recommend the following agencies (in Spain) that seemed so interesting (and both has good references from my friends): Bidon5 and Muztag.

We choose to travel alone, by our own resources and using Internet as agency... so the first thing we buy was the fly. Purchasing 2 month from the departure time we have saved 1.000€, so it's so important to do it as soon as you want to travel. The second thing to buy? Well, in our case it was a travel insurance, that can be purchased online on any major insurance company, but it's not necessary to do it soon, because it has always the same price.

One of the premises of the travel is do it safe, so we contacted the foreign office of our country to know information about the country in the health and security areas. To travel to Thailand, and specially if you do it alone, it's recommended to update your vaccine card, and compulsory if you want to reach the northern provinces of the country. In Spain you need to contact the International Vaccine center, and it's important to do it soon, because it's possible to get a meeting with them with a few weeks or month before the call.

The vaccines we get from the doctor were the yellow flu (i'm not sure of the translation from spanish, sorry), hepatitis and malaria (using the famous Malarone).

Those were our first steps to plan our travel... the next day I'll talk about the day by day planning...

I hope you enjoy it!

Traveling without agency

The first time we, my girlfriend and I, made a travel without any travel agency was two years ago, going from Barcelona (Spain) to Istambul (an incredible city everybody have to visit) for seven days.

In that travel we purchase the fly and the hotel using an agency but that was the last thing we did with it, because handling a LonelyPlanet on my hand, we discovered the city better than with any one can do. Now, thinking about that travel, my memories come to me about the people, smiles, unique situations or special places we met. No stones and history comes to me, only beautifull thoughts about the people of the city and the atmosphere of that millenial city.

Now it's time to travel again, and this time we planned to go to Thailand. We are two days from the fly that will send us to the other point of the world, and this time all our travel was plannified and executed without any agency, only Internet.

In the next post I'll explain how we plannified the travel and the required steps to do it safe.

Firefox gaining share again

Firefox is gaining share again in the browsers field versus Internet Explorer. That's not new looking the evolution of the share of the Mozilla browser, rising in a stable manner.

Meanwhile Firefox 2, the new release of the browser, is reaching the second beta release

That are good news for everyone, because it seems the future of the applications will be on the web. I think It's important to reach a balance between Microsoft and the others, and open source software is a good way to fight against the economic interests of macro-companies involved in software development.

Castle of Escornalbou

Escornalbou it's a castle and a monastery first referenced in 1153bc that can be found at 27KM from Salou. It was inhabitated until 1835bc when the religious order of Franciscans leave the place.

The complex includes the castle and his walls, a church, the buildings inside the castle and an hermitage on the top of the moutain that can be reached through a path across a beautiful forest.

On the top of the mountain, where you can found the hermitage, offers you awesome views of the 'Costa Dorada' (Golden coast in english) from Tarragona to Salou and Cambrils.


Coming back to Salou or Cambrils I advise you to reach the Parc Sama, a park builded a century ago by the philanthropist Marquis of Marianao, where you can see one of the best gardening examples of XIX romanic period.

Geocaching: Found the Cache

A few weeks ago, walking on a wild life park near La Pineda I found a family with a GPS looking for something on the middle of the trees that can be found in the area. The father aproched to me with a GPS device and he told me that they were looking for a treasure... The treasure they was looking for was a tupperware containing a notebook, a pen and one or more gifts with a plastified paper explaining what was all that stuff... in fact it was a cache.

Geocaching started a few years ago, under Clinton mandate, when he decide to enhance the civilian use of GPS satellite system allowing for that purpose the same precision as the military one, 3 meters. A few weeks from that day, the first cache was placed on the USA.

The game is so simple. All you need is a GPS device (I use a HP hw6500 that unifies cellphone, PDA and GPS) and a connection to Internet. You can start your adventure connecting to the geocaching site and registering for a new user. Then you'll be able to access the database of caches arround the world, finding the nearest to your coordinates. Each cache page give you information about the place, that it's usually a beautiful place to go, information about the coordinates where you can found the cache, and a log showing the people that have already found the cache before you.

To find the cache I recomend you to get a good topographic map of the area (In Catalunya you can get the maps for free from the Institut Cartogràfic Català saving them on the GPS device with a waypoint locating the cache.
To find it, you have to approach to the coordinates and start the finding, because it's hidden. When you get it, it's time to read a few entries from the notebook and register your found. Then look for the gifts that can be found in the tupperware and make trade with them (if you get one of the gifts you have to put another one for the next geocacher). Now take a breath and take your time exploring the nearby area, because the caches can be founded on beatifull places in order to discover to the geocachers.

I hope this post will encourage you to start this funny hobby that can give you good moments in beautiful places and can be played any place arround the world, near your residence, in a travel... Good luck with the caching.

Trekking: From Vilaplana to La Mussara

Today I will talk about a hike to know the mountains near the Costa Dorada (Golden coast in English), where you can found the tourist's popular towns of Salou, Cambrils or La Pineda.

The first mountain you found coming from the coast is La Mussara, that's a plateau of 900 meters of altitude where you can found a few towns, some of them abandoned (like the town of La Mussara, on the top of the mountain).

The hike I want to propose to you is an interesting walk from the base of the mountain to the abandoned town of La Mussara. A beautiful route where you'll see the mediterranean vegetation and a good views of the land between that mountain and the sea.

Whe start the trek from the town of Vilaplana. As an easy way to arrive to that town you can follow the route planned by ViaMichelin from Salou to Vilaplana. The trek starts crossing the small river at the end of the town, the town is small enought to found it quickly.

Our first steps give us a view of almond trees, a typical plantation of that area. the road ends on a fork and a post giving us two ways to arrive to La Mussara. Today we'll turn left to follow El camí de les campanilles. A few hundred meters from that point we found another fork where we'll turn right starting the ascension to the mountain, ending the cement road and leaving the plantations.

The path now goes inside a forest, where we'll found the tipical tree of the mediterranean forrests: the red pine. After a slope we'll found a post indicating that we need to leave the path and following the track in front of us. Our path is indicated by painted signals yellow and green, and there's no way to get lost. As usual in those marked paths, you'll found on the forks of the tracks a cross on a stone on the wrong paths.

After a hard slope inside the forest, we'll find an electrical tower, that give the name of our hike (Camí de les torres). Now we leave the forest to hike a beatiful path where we'll see the thickets with dozens of flowers (specially in spring). In that part of our hike we'll follow the electric towers a few hundred meters again.

Now the path climbs the mountain again with a hard slope (pay attention on a left curve where you'll see the way walked before), and finally the track will follow the face of the mountain with a beautiful red stone typical of that area.

A few meters and we'll found another post. That's the fork between el camí de les torres that follows the path on the same level, and el camí de les campanilles that's a hard slope that climbs the mountain and we'll use to descend of La Mussara in our return hike. We'll follow the path on the same level following again the electrical towers.

Again the path, a few hundred meters following the towers climbs the mountain. We had left the Mussara mountain on the right and now we'll start a hard slope that will give us to a path suitable for 4WD vehicles, where we'll turn on the right following that path.

Now we have found a metallic post giving us three ways: the final stage of our hike is rising the mountain to the left. It's the hardest stage of our hike and it's a good idea to rest a few minuts and eat something to get energy.

The final stage starts on the forest. The path leave the forest at the end in front of the face of the latest meters of our hike. Now we need to take care of our steps because the track is small accompanied by the face of the mountain and a precipice.

The first thing we see at the end of the track is a big stone with a metallic post in front of us that we need to climb, founding a prairie and the abandoned town of La Mussara. Take a look around and you'll see the land between the mountain and the sea.

Rear La Mussara you can wee the plateau. There is a lot of tracks that can start from that point and we'll see in a future hike. On the right, looking to the town you can see a television repeater with two towers.

Once we can take a look to the town and rested for a while, now we can take the return path. We'll to the return using a more abrupted path that will give us a reduction of the time of 30 minutes, using el camí de les campanilles. We start the return on the same way as we reach the top of the mountain until we reach the fork with the metallic post at the base of the latest stage of the hike, taking a path that starts from the fork and goes straight ahead of our way.

The path, not marked on the map I give you (click on the image to take a larger view of it), goes from point 25 to the 14 following the waypoints numbered between 22 to 25.

Finally we'll reach the path already walked with a fork marked by a wood post. Now the path is the already walked by us on the climb of the mountain.

I hope you'll try this hike, specially if you're a tourist on Salou. You'll know another kind of hollidays also interesting and beautiful.

For those that have a GPS map I give you the waypoints file to follow that hike. If you are also interested in the maps I have used to create the waypoints, feel free to send me an email.

Good luck.

OpenDocument, PDF, ISO and more

I have readed in Slashdot and Barrapunto (in spanish) that OpenDocument has been voted in as ISO/IEC 26300.

A year ago I was in a conference organized by Adobe. One of the papers talked about the problem of electronic persistence of documents, because, what will happen twenty years from now when I'll try to read a Word document created using Office 2000? How I'll read it?.

Adobe was moved to stablish an electronic document format for long term preservation, giving a way to describe a document like the paper version of it, and without any trick like macromedia flash, movies, audio or nothing else that can be saved from the time.

The problem with PDf standard is that it's not modifiable in a easy way, and that's the reason there is people trying to create an electronic standard for electronic documents. In the ring you can found two fighters: Microsoft with his new Office release using his own XML standard and OpenOffice with OpenDocument.

It's clear that the future of document management is the XML, we can see it in movements and protocols like SOAP or XHTML, but the problem is to reach a consensus to stablish only ONE standard in electronic document management.

I'm so pessimistic, I know it, but I guess the future will be an open standard (OpenDocument) used by a few of us, and a widely used format used by everybody else (MS Office). I also guess that the release 2 or 3 of that standard will get the fusion of this formats giving us a real standard used by everybody 5 or 6 years from now, like happens with HTML and the Microsoft extensions.

I'm sure that we'll need to wait for it but we'll see it.

Configuring a Linux host to receive log messages from external systems, including Windows

This article was moved to a new blog: Sysklogd Blog

My new Flickr photography space

I have created my photography gallery under Flickr. As my first step into adding my 'photographed' life, I have added a few photos from my travels to Istanbul and London, and a sunset from Guadalajara.

The travel to Istanbul was 2 years ago, and it's my best experience by far in leisure. This city it's a very interesting aproach to the Muslim religion and a travel also, to the past and to the frontiers of two of the most important religions of the world. You can see churches, mosques, and roman buildings together giving a rich mosaic of how the history has created a city on the banks of bosphorous, also the edge between asian an europe continents.

We travel to London a year ago for a week, and was so beatiful, and expensive!!! London, in my opinion, one of the most modern cities at least of Europe, and possibly of the world, offers a good amount of stones and iron (past and present) giving an balanced mix between the old and the new.

Finally, I wanna talk about Guadalajara, where we stay in the holiday house of my couple uncle's. It was a very good place to rest and recharge our energy, with good landscapes (and so different of the landscapes from Tarragona, a mediterranean place).

I will post new photographies as soon as possible from my archive. I have updated also, the links on the left side of the blog to refer to the different categories of the flickr site.

I hope you'll enjoy it!

Debian GNU/Linux 3.1r2

Se acaba de publicar la nueva versión de Debian, en concreto la
Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 updated (r2).

Como actualización más destacable se encuentra la solución al fallo de paso de variables de sudo (DSA 946-1), que dió quebraderos de cabeza a más de uno, ya que la primera actualización del paquete daba problemas de interacción con otros paquetes que usaban este programa internamente por no pasar algunas variables estandar.

Pachelbel a YouTube

Avui, llegint elPais he llegit un article sobre una web on la gent penja videos casolans. Entre ells he trobat aquest, que la veritat és molt bo sobre una reversió del Canon de Pachelbel.

És curios, fa unes setmanes no sabia ni qui era Pachelbel ni que habia escrit un cànon, i la veritat és que ara me'l trobo fins hi tot a la sopa, i la veritat és que m'agrada, encara no l'he aburrit tot i que el Victor me la fica tot el dia.

Per tal que pogueu disfrutar d'ell l'adjunto:

Mi nuevo portátil

Bueno, ya llevo una semana trabajando con mi nuevo portátil y la verdad es que estoy bastante impresionante.

Ya hace tres años que trabajo habitualmente con portátil, y su mayor pega, desde mi punto de vista, es el peso. Yo no es que viaje mucho, y menos con el portátil, pero solo tener que llevarlo a casa y al trabajo diariamente o casi-diariamente se vuelve en una tortura cuando uno tiene que ir siempre cargado con el maletín y los tropecientos cables asociados.

Como hecho diferencial de este portátil respecto a otros que estuve valorando en su momento está la pantalla, que es impresionatemente brillante, su acabado, en metal, que espero resista mi ritmo de vida (los anteriores portatiles siempre han acabado a los pocos meses con rasguños en sus carcasas de plástico... y el hecho que tiene una bateria que dura más de 3 horas sin recarga. Desde el punto de vista de potencia, el procesador Centrino Duo y 1GB de RAM han dado a este producto un acabado realmente asombroso: potencia, poco peso, resistencia y mucha estética.

La verdad es que no se me ocurre que más se puede pedir a un ordenador. Creo que el futuro de los portatiles se puede ver en estos equipos.

Por fin el parche de Microsoft al exploit "createTextRange()"

El martes Microsoft publicó los parches a 3 fallos de seguridad que han dejado vulnerables las maquinas con sistemas operativos de Microsoft. El boletin de seguridad de Microsoft ha llegado despues de la polemica sobre porqué Microsoft no rompió su politica de entrega de parches mensuales (el primer martes de cada mes) aún sabiendo que se estaba explotando el fallo de forma activa.

La verdad es que yo siempre he considerado un grave fallo el funcionamiento de los ActiveX, ya que ofrece una puerta abierta a tu maquina, y la verdad es que viendo los numerosos fallos críticos que ha sufrido este componente de Internet Explorer creo que no deberia existir una plataforma como ActiveX tan vinculada al sistema operativo.

En este sentido creo que un ejemplo a seguir es Java, que con su sandbox ofreció desde sus inicios una forma bastante fiable (aún así han salido fallos de seguridad de implementaciones concretas de la JVM) deshabilitando, por defecto el acceso a la maquina.

Esperemos tardar un poco a poder sufrir otro fallo en el software de Microsoft del que desgraciadamente todos dependemos.