With a Skype call we were able to finalize my future job today. Beginning May 2006 I’ll be working for local.ch. While working freelance I already worked for local.ch while it was still in it’s planning stage. See also my previous post (in German) about what local.ch is going to be.

In London a ca. 5 meter long whale swam in the Thames. They are now trying to convince the whale to swim back to the sea. (Via SF Tagesschau) Update January 25: The whale died (I’m late with that update, it already happened January 21)

I have so far neglected to give you actual information about life in Peru. So let me now give you some information about transportation here in Lima. There is no viable public transportation except buses and taxis. What I miss most are trains as I’m an avid train user in Switzerland and have owned a General Abonnoment for several years now. The buses (called “combi”) are run by individuals. They buy a bus, decide on a price, put on a bus number or a route and drive that. That’s all. To my knowledge there are no bus maps available centrally. So if you want to know if it’s possible to get from point A to B by bus you have to ask a local. Unfortunately it’s very difficult to use the bus from my apartment to the office. So I have to take a taxi every time. In Lima you fix the price before entering the taxi but in other cities there seem to be different rules. The cheapest fare for anything here I’ve ever gotten was 3 Nuevo Soles. From my apartment to my office (or the other way) I pay between 5 to 7 Nuevo Soles. Depends on the time, the mood of the taxi driver, my mood, the traffic and probably other factors as well. As it often the case in Peru they will often give you a higher price only because you’re a foreigner. Every week a few taxi drivers hope I’m just a tourist and will tell me the route costs 10 Nuevo Soles. This is probably more common than normal, because I always tell them to drive to Cruz del Sur, the bus company. They then think I want to travel somewhere and so I can only be some stupid tourist. Truth is that I work just opposite the road of Cruz del Sur and that almost every taxi drivers knows where that place is. They probably don’t know the Diego Thomson, though. When a taxi driver tells me that fare is 10 Nuevo Soles I don’t even bother to negotiate and send him (no, I’ve never seen a female taxi driver so far) away. They then always want to negotiate and immediatly drop down to 8 or even less Soles. But I send them away for the principle which is that I don’t want to sit in the taxi of a dishonest driver (who might just as well try to physically rob me later). I have heard by the way, that in Cusco the procedure is different. There you apparently don’t negotiate but just tell the destination and board the taxi. At the end you give the driver 2 (day price) or 3 (night price) Soles and all is good. Sounds like a better (and cheaper) system to me. Also one peculiarity is that many times the taxi driver hears where you want to go and immediately declines to the trip. Without even asking how much you’re willing to pay. What exactly is the reason for this I don’t know, but that reminds me that I should ask a taxi driver next time I get an opportunity. This was very common in La Paz where we had a hard time finding a taxi to the bus terminal because so many taxi drivers just flat out declined. I hope that summarizes the public transportation system in Lima correctly. There is also a Wikipedia article: Public transport in Lima. Place ny additions or questions in the comment section. ...

Today in the morning I successfully held the first Linux course in my teachers schooling series. The topic was installation of Skolelinux. It went very well and I think the students actually understood most of my Spanish. Juan blogged the whole class (though in Spanish). They were very enthusiastic and one of the teachers (or students rather - for a short time) started to investigate and looking for many programs. I showed them the Gaim instant messenger and they liked it. Also they were blown away by my description of diskless thin clients. The before-mentioned teacher is thinking about setting up a few Pentium 1 computers at his home. With thin clients that could be easily done. So I’ll show them how to do this in the network administration course. As the installation part is now finished, I’ll directly continue with system administration next Tuesday. I had originally planned on two days of installation. There are pictures of the class in Flickr account but they are only available to my friends for privacy reasons. ...

The Canada on Rails conference has been announced. This is to my knowledge the first conference fully dedicated to Ruby on Rails. Cost ist 250 Canadian Dollars. The conference ist from April 13 to April 14. I’m planning to go back from Peru mid-April and a layover in Canada sounds very attractive. But I probably couldn’t fly directly (and I don’t want to change planes in the US of A) and it might be quite expensive anyway. So I guess I won’t be able to take the opportunity. But sure would be fun (and a learning experience which is one of my definitions for fun). ...

Ich habe die Domain dieses Weblogs von weblog.patrice.ch auf weblog.patrice.ch geändert. Die alte Adresse funktioniert jedoch nach wie vor und leitet zur neuen weiter. Das Weblog wird weiterhin von KAYWA gehostet. Bitte aktualisiert eure Links und Feedreader.

I have changed the domain name of this weblog from weblog.patrice.ch to weblog.patrice.ch. The old domain name still works and redirects to the new one, though. Also I’m still hosted at KAYWA. Please update your links and feed readers to reflect the new realities.

During the next 2.5 months until the end of March I’ll be holding teachers schoolings. During that time, I’ll teach the following courses: Linux installation: SkoleLinux and it's goals, Installation, Grub, Partitions Linux administration: Gnome desktop environment, software installation, text environment (bash, processes, commands, etc.), system booting, X Windows, display managers, other graphical environments Network administration: Users, permissions, thin clients, theory about networks (server, cables, switches, hubs, etc.) Python: Basics, Python documentation, object-oriented programming, graphical programming using PythonCard and Boa Constructor, file system, database using SQLite, Internet programming, program design,UML, XML, Python software examples PHP: HTML, CSS, LAMP installation, PHP basics, documentation online, Databases with MySQL, phpMyAdmin, object-oriented programming, program design The Spanish program is online: El programa de la capacitación enero - marzo 2006. I'm sure this will prove to be quite a challenge for my Spanish. But I'll give my best. Any feedback to the course contents?

The name sucks. But the new MacBook Pro looks promising. I guess I’ll have to convince my boss to provide me with one of those as my work machine.

The blogug.ch list has lead to some nice additions in the Swiss blogosphere. Matthias of blog.ch is now using them for some more views. He also analyses the long tail of the Swiss weblogs. Most of the tags apparently come from list.blogug.ch. So dear bloggers in Switzerland: please claim your weblog and edit your tags. Or alternatively: become an administrator and tag other weblogs. Meanwhile Alain (who also provides the blogug.ch domain name) announced the gallery of Swiss weblogs. Leu then compiled a 30 seconds blog movie from the screenshots. I’ll try to include the screenshots into the blog list next week. Also I’ll have to find a way to automatically add new blog.ch subscriptions to the blog list because most additions still are added over there. Also I’ll have to work with Matthias on the URL sheme. Because I manually normalized all URLs in the blog list (adding slashed to domain names for example) he missed many of the tags (see his blog tags where many blogs lack the language tags which I have added to every blog). So stay tuned for the update, I’ll try to do something next week. ...