Absurdities of who to (poorly) spend (public) money

This morning, in the radio, I have listened a news about the ryanair company is asking for better subsides to work in the Lleida's airport (and for sure the other company on this airport vueling would be asking for it). A few days a go the news was from pyrenair how abort the operations from this airport due to the poor results (3 weeks if I remember correctly).

Note: I didn't know that this pyrenair company was operating from this airport until they cancel the operation. The biggest "ad" was when they cancel the flies...

In this crisis we are making a thing that I see as a mistake: many companies are receiving subsides to continue their business. From this fly companies to the car manufacturers. The issue that I can see is this is not fixing the problem. Instead of make easy the people to be in the capitalist system (do trips, or change your car in this examples) the public money is used to things like build cars and store them. We still have people working on this car manufacturing, when the same people has not enough salaries to get this cars. Stock issue is comming...

After the first two days of the storage commissining

As Ollupac ask for, some (unofficial) information will be written about who was the thing this weekend.

As usual, there is absolutely nothing in the Alba's website. I miss a lot public information about the progress, in the same order that I miss the web site in Catalan and Spanish.

Even that, this weekend we have not been able to do the first turn of the storage ring. What has been done, in deed, in the commissioning of the bt-extraction and the sr-injection: the transfeline from the booster to the storage.

We may be too optimistic in who difficult can be this process of extraction and injection can be. Realize that the beam has been accelerated in one circumference (we say that it has an orbit) and it is displaced to bigger one with a very precise operation in a small tube.

We didn't get the first turn in the storage ring (we only pass up to two bending, about one sector). But this was the first time we put this up an running. As soon as we receive another temporal permission or the definitive one, we will try again.

Think first vs. Extreme programming

During many years I had the feeling that I programme too slow. Yes, I thought I have this disadvantage against some other programmers I know. I devote the people who is writing a solution when I am still reading the problem.

But during this lasts weeks of more calm development, I realize that I was not taking into account another factor on this equation: bug fixes.

Almost all the written code would requires some maintenance. In my case, I have realized that the faster, the often. I mean, often the things that I wrote too fast I had to review and fix. Or even worst, a hard refactorization when the time goes in a secondary term.

I understand that in some moment a hackish can be a necessary tool, but does someone measure this as a cost? In many consultant companies where I have work, they measure how fast you write and almost never how good you think.

I will always remember the day that I have received a warning from the project leader to explain why my code has less lines that yesterday: "Easy, I found a way to optimize main method of the scheduler task" (ingénu). The thing goes worst when he orders me to undo this optimization. The final solution was to have two methods and the compiler forgets the old/long because is not called.

After this personal battle that I hope is not bothering you too much, I go back to the origin of this post. There are programmers who are better codifiers under extreme programming environment, others (I think my case) codes better under circumstances that allows to think in the solution before.

Probably is a thing to measure in an abstract way and do some statistics, but how is the bug-pattern? The thinkers can try extreme programming, but can be satisfactory the other way around? How the codes evolve in terms of bugs and patch releases?

Finally, I think programming is a team activity (or the project is small enough) and a good boss, more than recruit the best ones, must recruit a good balance of extreme programmers and thinkers. Thinkers some times can decay in "never release" because some improvement can be added.

Or perhaps I am confuse and wrong in what I am saying...

Happy Alba this weekend

Finally one of the milestones arrives! This weekend we will (try to) have beam in the storage ring.

Don't misunderstand the "try" in parenthesis, everything is prepared and tested. All the subsystems has been check and recheck preparing the day that we have permission to inject in the second ring, but they never work together like they will do this weekend (other ways this test have already been).

I didn't wrote here when we had the booster commissioning (I had this blog a little abandoned at that time) but yes for the linac's commissioning and first beam.

Looking on the wikipedia's image, the storage ring is the one with the red boxes. the booster is represented with the smaller internal circle and the linac is the straight line in the middle.

Our synchrotron is a bit different because the booster and the storage rings shares the same tunnel. But this doesn't matter in terms of operation (only in terms of installation: a ring cannot be tested when the other is under installation).

There will not be radio frequency in the storage ring (as a first test it is), and this means that after the acceleration of the beam in the booster (from 100MeV given by the linac to the 3GeV of the booster), the beam will have a very short live time. The goal for this weekend is one turn, but 4 sectors will also be great (but more than a turn will be the best). Probably many re-injections will be performed and perhaps some synchrotron light will be seen in the ccds with I'm in charge in the machine diagnostics control.

I like to see this goal accomplished and I have confidence on that. We already demonstrate it in the booster commissioning when the master goal was 600 MeV of acceleration and we reach 2.7GeV a few day before the end of the commissioning.

Many Spanish people tries to go work to Disney Land Paris

A few days a go, in the news, they explain that Germany is offering jobs to Spanish engineers, and many people is trying to find a job there. A job is a job and I will no discuss about go or not to another country to work (even if I think this is not a bad option).

The reason of this post is due to the announcement in the news the queue of people trying to apply for a job in Disney Land Paris. This is not new, because almost every year this park is offering this temporal jobs. The new thing is that in Spanish news they remark the salary. Spanish people seems to be really happy to go Paris for this salary, also when the IMF, with in the austerity measures says that the Spanish salaries are to high and must be reduced (starting with the public employees).

The incompressible thing is that this succulent offer to work in France per 1378€ (gross per month) is near to the minimum salary in this country (1343.77€ in 2010). When in Spain this number is 633.30€ (smaller than in Ireland (1100€), but bigger than Greece (563€)).

Elliptic curves in the master branch of GnuPG

A few days a go, a branch for elliptic curves support un GnuPG has been announced, and I wrote here 4 words about this goal.

This month the branches has been merged to the master. First in the libgcrypt, and the next day to gnupg, and the mail thread is long with some "congrats" words. Is a really good thing to have this implementation available for the general usage.

By now, this keys are only available for "--expert" usage, and it must be like that. This is one of the steps to have them accessible for all of us and have this type of keys and algorithms used in the day by day. A cryptographic development has to follow a process of audit before an official release, and even that I should be audit forever.

This is not a lack of confidence with the developer (perhaps a bit, no worries, it's only crypto-paranoia) but the trust in the algorithms and the implementations below the secrets we put in must require a level of revision. Is not the same problem, if a program fails and some system is not accessible for a couple of hours, than if your private mail communication (ciphered) becomes compromised and some who you don't like can read them.