Yesterday I bought Laura's birthday present: a tiny barebone Shuttle SK41G. This little champ wears: chipset VIAKM266/8235, a built-in S3 Savage8 VGA card (I'm afraid it sucks), Realtek ACL650 sound card (supports 5.1), built-in Realtek ethernet 8100B, AGP and PCI slots, all kind of ports and TV out. I've decided to put the minimun (and cheapest) accessories: an AMD Duron 1600 processor, 256 Mb of memory (DDR 266 MHz), 40 Gb hard disk and a combo drive DVD+CD-R: total, less than 350 euros. Enought to improve her very old Mac and my ancient 386SX box she's using right now.

Well, the box is fantastic, small and silent. I've installed Debian Sid from a Sarge netinst CD without any problem. Everything was detected during the installation so I did't have to fight with it. The only remarkable fact is the VGA card: a built-in one which doesn't seem to work properly with savage X server and it crashes. At the moment, I'm running the vesa server. I haven't find much information about how to fix it. Any idea? Please, do comment...

Right now it's running a base system with a spartan WindowMaker and an ssh server (I'm connecting from my laptop). However, in the following days, I'll have to remove all that and install a more Laura-friendly (and cute) KDE desktop, OpenOffice, MPlayer, XMMS, k3b, etc. and set up a dial-up conection with a 56kb modem (she doesn't need DSL at all). When it's ready, I'll give it to her, despite her birthday is in July. I hope she'll enjoy it.

The other day, when I got home, I turned on the computer and LiLO failed :-| "WTF!" --I thought--- "I bet my brother has something to do with this..." Whatever, I post this so that I don't forget it any more.

Recovering the (lost) LiLO:

1. Run Knoppix from the CD.
2. Mount the root partition by typing, in my case: mount /dev/hda6 /mnt/hda6
3. Enter in the partition with: chroot /mnt/hda6
4. Run lilo: lilo -v
5. Exit by typing (Guess??): exit
6. Reboot and LiLO is there again

Two hours ago I've finally finished the dissertation of my research-year and I've sent it to my advisor. I guess I still need to read it conscientiously in order to correct typos, add some figure and things like that but the worst part of the hard work is already done. The deadline is next tuesday but I do want to hand it ASAP: tomorrow if I can.

If accepted, I have to defend it in the present of a board of examiners on July, 14.

Changing the subject, let's talk about publications: besides the ACL, two more papers that we submitted in the last months has been accepted by conferences' comittees: SEPLN (the Natural Language Processing Spanish Society) and COLING (a Computational Linguistics Conference). We seem to be experiencing a great Streak of luck :-)

Richard Stallman is on tour in Spain for two weeks, visiting universities and some late night tv shows, like a famous rock star. Note that most people don't know who he is, but little by little he's finding important places in press. Linux is not a extrange term any more, free software either.

Madrid is next station and tomorrow he's gonna have a talk at the UPM Faculty of Computer Science. He's gonna talk about "GNU/Linux and free software" and I think I'll miss it, 'cause I know this lesson and I'm pretty busy these days. But wednesday, he'll be back to talk about "Copyright and Community", and I guess it'll be more interesting.

If I can take some pictures I'll upload them anywhere.

This morning I've finished the first version of my 2nd-year research dissertation and finally I've given it to Julio (I should've done this last friday, though).

After a short conversation with him about what I'd written, I've realized there's still a lot of work to do: some sections need to be completed, more cohesion among the chapters is needed and I even have to repeat some experiments, specially those related with the statistical relevance of the data. Me and the R project, whatever ;-) For the moment, tomorrow I'm gonna finish the state of the art and then I'll see how to continue. The deadline is May 25.

Today, Labor Day, is a happy day for Europe: ten new countries (most of them, part of the former Comunist Bloc) become members of the European Union which also means the biggest enlargement and the definitive union after the Cold War and the Second World War.

We open our doors (and minds) and welcome Poland, Czeck Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Malta and half Cyprus (I think it's a shame the wall that keeps divided turkish and greek peoples).

What we need now is a true European Constitution which will lead the life of 450 million people from 25 countries, while waiting the arrival of the future members.

Yesterday, we received good and bad news: on one hand, the first paper we sent to the ACL 2004 Main Conference was accepted and this happen to be a huge success for the UNED's NLP Group 'cause it's the first time we get it!! We all were pretty happy and we even celebrated it taking a shot of Mezcal: someone remembered there was the bottle a couple of Mexican visitors brought some months ago, and nobody noticed it was 11 am ;-)

On the other hand, the bad news is that the paper (another one) we sent to the Text Summarization Workshop was refused by the Program Committee and we had worked a lot on those experiments.

Well, life is weird. Sometimes. Anyway, I guess we're going to spend some days in Barcelona in July.

Finally, on last April, 12 I was confirmed that my university had accepted funding my internship at the USC Information Sciences Institute. From September to December I'll be working with the guru and his team at ISI's Natural Language Group, which will be a great experience.

I haven't started to prepare my trip to Los Angeles yet, but I'll use this journal to comment some fantastic adventures. The next chapters of the story will be:

• Getting the visa.
• Finding an appartment in the Marina del Rey area.
• How to survive in LA being an european without a car.
• Improving my poor english :-(

• To be continued...

This is the first entry of my journal, just to try how it works. I usually post in my so-called blog: Ignoto et quasi Occulto.

When will we have the second post?? Mmm... I dunno.