Franchu’s lair

Two weeks ago I spent a wonderful time in Cluny, France in the General Assembly of the Board of European Students of Technology (BEST) with almost 200 students from all Europe. We also found some time to visit a little bit the city

If you have the opportunity to pass by, it has a very nice abbey that can be visited with some wonderful gardens where you can just hang out and relax on the grass.

It is also worth a visit to the “Tour du Fromage” with wonderful views over the village and a walk to the Quinconces.

This village can be reached easily by bus from Macon which is on the TGV line from Paris to Lyon.

Lately I have found myself in situations in which I needed to bypass some limitations of the network I was connected to, name it bypassing an paranoid firewall or proxying my connection when my ISP lost access to part of the Internet.

Whatever you use it for, it is none of my business… it is not rocket science and is available anywhere online, but I also blog it so that I can use it as a reference in the future

SOCKS proxy server (makes the remote machine act as a SOCKS proxy server through a port of the local machine)

ssh -D localport remote.machine.com

REVERSE TUNNEL (makes a port in the remote machine connect directly to a port in the local machine)

ssh -nNT -R localport:local.machine.com:remoteport remote.machine.com

FORWARD TUNNEL (makes a port in the remote machine available in a port in the local machine)

ssh -L localport:local.machine.com:remoteport remote.machine.com

Hope it will be useful for you too… and if you know of more possibilities, do not hesitate to share them with the rest

It is always interesting to follow the coverage of the elections of one country in media from other countries and the very stupid analysis they make of the results.

This comment could sound pretentious if it wouldn’t be for the fact that I was voting last sunday in France for the presidential elections, that same night I was listening to the french media announcing the first results, and the next day I was back in Spain following the analysis of the results.

Sunday night in France I was following the TV and all the major channels were having some special shows to follow the results. They had advertised that the results would be announced at 20.00 CET sharp, and as there was not much to say they were just losing time until the time came. At 20.00 CET they finally announced the so called results of the election and let the nation know who are the two candidates that are still running for the second round of the elections in two weeks.

When they announced that Sarkozy (right) and Royal (left) were the lucky ones, there were burst of joy in the HQ of their parties and sadness in the HQ of the rest of the candidates. So far, nothing unusual. The problem is that only 30 minutes later, they made clear that those were just the results from a poll and that the official results would be available during the night. My question is… what would have happened if the poll was totally off?

Anyway, the first reactions from the people they were interviewing were the traditional… tonight democracy is the winner of the election bla bla bla… and all this fueled by the high participation rate (>80%). There were some people saying also that the french have shown that they are interested in politics and that this is the reason for the participation numbers.

Back in Spain I was hearing similar comments in the media… French people are interested in politics, what do French politicians have that Spanish don’t? etc…

And in those cases I cannot stop wondering if journalists are plain stupid or have a severe memory problem. Other times I think they are happier ignoring reality and making up their own stories in order to promote a mass manipulation agenda… but that will be the topic of another post.

Back to the participation figures, I will explain very easily why people have voted massively for these elections in France.

In the last elections that were also held in two rounds, from all the candidates that were covering the whole political spectrum only two candidates went on to the second round. The candidate from the right and the candidate from the far-right. This was an unexpected outcome for the first round and was mostly blamed on low participation figures that favored the far-right candidate. It is clear that the voters of the minority are always going to cast their votes (and that party votes are a fairly steady figure, meaning that he has a sizable mass of followers), therefore if the people who vote for the rest of the options do not vote what happened in the last elections become a quite probable scenario. Back then, people hated the idea of being back-handed and forced to vote for one candidate in order to avoid a worse outcome. Some people were forced to choose the lesser of two evils in order to avoid further damage.

So, after seeing those elections in perspective, it should be clear to everyone that people in France have not voted because they are really interested in politics, they have voted because they saw what could happen if they didn’t. This time at least you can choose between a right-wing or a left-wing candidate… now it is up to the voters to decide which one of the options they feel more comfortable with.

It seems that we learned the lesson… there might be hope for the human race after all