Bitácora de José L. Redrejo

One of the modules I teach in Vocational Training includes learning the Python programming language. As a joke, I once told my students that if they asked in advance, they could take an exam using AI. To my surprise, this week they actually took me up on it.

Throughout the year, I’ve often explained how to use AI as a learning assistant—to study, to prepare exercises, and to ask questions. Both my students and I know perfectly well that, at their current level, any of their previous exercises or exams could be solved flawlessly by an AI. So we all understood that this exam needed to be something different.

Over the past few days, I’ve picked up my old project: a Python library for a low-cost RFID reader I’ve been experimenting with. You can grab one for under €50 on AliExpress along with a hundred tags for just a few more euros. It’s a Chinese-made UHF reader, which means it can scan multiple tags at the same time.

Unfortunately, there’s no Linux driver available—only a C# driver for Windows plus a sample app from the manufacturer. So, I had to create my own cross-platform version in Python.

Over the years this blog has gone through various technologies. I started with b2, then, following the logical path, moved on to its derivative, WordPress. I stayed there for over 20 years, the last 11 without publishing anything. Life — that thing that keeps you busy and completely shifts your focus.

This summer, after getting tired of occasionally having to spend time updating WordPress to patch security holes, I took advantage of my vacation to switch to a static site generator. No more databases, no more PHP: pure HTML generated from Markdown.

It is time to begin transitioning to my new key (in fact, it was time to do it a long, long time ago). Click this link to find the properly signed, full transition statement. I m not going to paste the full statement into this post, but my new key is:

pub   4096R/A1DE50E9 2009-08-01
      Huella de clave = C3C7 AB73 05C8 5849 C4BE  8BE8 5E08 AFD2 A1DE 50E9
uid                   José L. Redrejo Rodríguez <jredrejo@debian.org>
uid                   José L. Redrejo Rodríguez <jredrejo@merida.uned.es>
uid                   José L. Redrejo Rodríguez <jredrejo@gmail.com>
sub   4096R/1120CE38 2009-08-01

With the ⤽Escuela 2.0⤳ project in Spain, finally, the kind of laptop to be delivered to the student is the same kind of laptop I wanted to use in Extremadura one year ago.

A year ago, when we decided to go with our own pilot project ⤽one on one⤝ in our schools, there were several discussions, and finally the kind of delivered laptop was in a higher category. Anyway, I always had the same feeling, the laptop should be a subnotebook because of these reasons:

First of all, I want to welcome the new readers I’ve got after become part of planet Skolelinux. It was a surprise to me when I received an email from Japan commenting my blog. As usual, the “global village” is a real fact, but it’s still amazing for me.

This is a small post to remind some of the things I still remember of the past summer:

I want to thank all the Debconf 9 organizators, specially to Anto Recio who worked really hard to be able to support (in all the sense of the word) so many geeks for two weeks.

With almost a delay of one year, as time has been spent in many other tasks, I can finally announce the new release of ControlAula, almost ready for its massive update.

The new version has been rewritten from scratch to be more maintainable and make adding contributions an easier task.

It’s also easier to set up and the network doesn’t need to fulfill so many conditions as in previous versions. Anyway, most important changes are on the user side.

I’ve done my first upload of a package to the Debian repository. In fact, I had uploaded some packages previously, but not by myself as I wasn’t an official Debian developper and didn’t have the needed rights. Some (great) sponsors did it on behalf of me. Today I’ve got my Debian account, and I’ve checked everything worked with a package that was ready to be uploaded since some days ago.

So I did:

After the ControlAula announce in GnomeFiles, I received a lot of messages asking it to be internationalized. Many of them also asked me to increase the number of computers/classroom because more than 20 were needed in some places. And, as usually happens in the open software world, some people have sent me code with improvements. These reasons have made me release a new version: version 0.8 with these new features:

February, 26th & 27th I traveled to FOSDEM.

There I could listen to very interesting speeches and contact personally with some of the people who we want to collaborate with in LinEx. Thinking of the migration of the ministries of my regional government, and because of its possible use in education replacing the famous-used-overbloated V. Basic, Gambas is one of the most interesting projects. I had the chance to be there with Daniel Campos, Spanish developer who did the net, xml, compress and gtk components for Gambas. There we had the great pleasure of meeting Gambas’ author: Benoît Minisini.