Why I changed to DuckDuckGo.

Posted on April 4, 2012 by chavezgu

I never thought one day I would change from Google to another search engine, but that day has come. DuckDuckGo is an incredibly useful search engine that, IMHO, is better than Google.

First, I would like to say that I’m really happy that someone outside of a big company is trying to innovate in the search engine area. It’s an area so dominated by Google (at least in the western world) that a lot of people wouldn’t consider to invest time and money in this field.

DuckDuckGo got famous because it’s pretty much anonymous. They don’t track you the way Google does. I thought that was the only reason someone could use it. Oh boy I was wrong. What I really like about DuckDuckGo is that you can search everywhere in just one place. Let me explain: If you go to ddg.gg (yes, they have a short version) and if you type: “!g ducks” you are actually searching in Google. C’mon, go ahead and try it. They have a list of 100 websites were you can search directly. Want to search something on Wikipedia? Just type “!w” before the term you’re looking for. Are you a Bing fan? Just type “!b” before whatever you are looking for. Check the list. Here’s a short version of the list:

!a Amazon
!yt Youtube
!y Yahoo.
!tbp The Pirate Bay
!i (or !images) Google Images.

The list is big and complete. As an Arch Linux user, I use a lot !archwiki and !aur. The list is really good if you are a developer:

!so StackOverflow
!gh github
!bb bitbucket.
!sourceforge

And the list goes on and on. There’s at least one option for every major language.

Want to know the current weather? Just type it. Geolocation does the rest. Almost every major feature of the Google search engine is already in DuckDuckGo. It’s full of goodies, check the normal ones and the tech ones. Also DuckDuckGo is integrated with:

so you get these results instantly.

DuckDuckGo deserves a fair try. Try using it as your main search engine for a week. Maybe you’ll join the movement

When NOT to open source

Posted on March 28, 2012 by chavezgu

A couple of weeks ago I was watching the awesome videopodcast: The Linux Action Show. It was the 200 episode so I was expecting a hell of a show. They decided to interview Richard Stallman. I think rms(Richard Matthew Stallman) needs no introduction. All people involved in technology and know who that guy is.

One of the interviewers was Bryan Lunduke, an independent developer who got quite famous for ranting against Apple not so long ago. He was supposed to ask rms one simple but interesting question: “How, an independent developer like me, can develop free software and still being able to feed my kids?”

The answer: go to work to a software factory or simply find another career. That answer astonished me. Stallman simply said that he preferred all software business developing proprietary software to fail. Then, maybe, we can figure it out a way to make money and still develop free software.

I’m sorry that’s just not the way. If you’re a Windows or a Mac user thinking all Linux(or GNU/Linux according to rms) users are like that, think again. Right now, tons of users use open source and free software even in proprietary platforms. We don’t use because it’s ethical, we use it because is better. I prefer Chrome or Firefox to Internet Explorer because I think, no, because I know they are just way better. I use Apache for my server not only because it’s free, but also because I know is one of the best web servers out there. Actually, besides the proprietary web server of Microsoft, I don’t know about other proprietary web servers.

So, why some open source software is clearly as good or even better than proprietary software, but other kinds are clearly behinḍ̣? All software should be open source? All software should be closed source?

As anyone who has studied some computer science and algorithms, we always know that some algorithms are good for something things and bad for others. Open source and proprietary software behave the same way. In the amazing book “The Cathedral and the Bazar” Eric S. Raymond discussed, among other things, the way you can make money with open source and when to open source(he’s also the creator of the term)

So there just 5 simple rules, that I call the “Raymond’s laws for Open Source” for deciding if you should go open source:

Reliability/stability/scalability are critical.
Correctness of design and implementation cannot readily be verified by means other than independent peer review
The software is critical to the user’s control of his/her business.
The software establishes or enables a common computing and communications infrastructure.
Key methods(of functional equivalents of them) are part of common engineering knowledge.

So the first law refers simply to a robust system. That’s why Google doesn’t use Windows Server. Reliability is really important for them and no wonder why they picked Linux as the foundation of their server infrastructure. Same for Amazon or Facebook.

The second law applies to all cryptographic algorithms. It’s know that security through obscurity simply does not work. Open source algorithms are better because anyone can check if they work or not, and some times that’s the only way we know they’re secure.

The third law is the actual reason why big companies pick open source web servers or databases. They don’t want to depend on other companies when their infrastructure is critical for them. Can you imagine Amazon depending on Microsoft for their infrastructure? All their services would depend on the ability of Microsoft for resolving their problems instead of solving them by themselves. That’s simply not a good business decision.

Fourth law refers to the point where open source excels: infrastructure. The Linux kernel, the Apache web browser and Firefox or Chrome have something in common: they are all infrastructure. We don’t really care when we buy a book on amazon if Amazon is using Linux and Apache(I think they’re not) and I’m using Firefox. All I care is about the experience and if I get my book.

Browsers are a platform now, not the end product. Is not what they do, but what you can do with them. The browser experience is that you enjoy the webapps you use, not if you enjoy using the browser itself. The best infrastructure is transparent. That’s also why open source frameworks work great, because the user experience is not about the framework, is about the app or the service.

The last law refers for software that implements, for example, a very well know algorithm. All the implementations of the quick sort should be open source in case someone wants to verify it.

So when NOT to open source? If the software doesn’t fulfill any of those rules it’s probably a good idea not to release the source. For example, most AAA games don’t need to be open source because:

Reliability is not exactly critical. Neither stability. No one wants a buggy game but is not so hard to make an stable game without being open source.
The design of the game does not need to be verified by other people. In fact, I believe games are like programming languages, they are best designed by just one person or a very small committee.
Games are not business critical to any consumer, because they’re just entertaining.
Games are not creating an infrastructure. At least not yet.
Each game is (supposed to be) unique, so they are clearly not part of any common knowledge.

Some companies make the hybrid approach: they use and even make open source but their primary application or service is closed source. The best example is probably Facebook. They developed Cassandra and HipHop and they released the code because they knew they were part of their infrastructure, but not their product. The product is you.

That’s why we see right now a lot of startups building proprietary software using open source tools. These tools are great for the infrastructure, but the application or service is best to be proprietary in order to achieve economic success.

I always try to use the best tool for the job. Most of applications I use every day are open source: mutt, the Linux kernel, vim, Firefox, etc. But I don’t feel wrong when I fire up Steam and I start playing. I know there no so many economic reasons to make a game open source. But the experience is great.

Further reading: Go ahead and read “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” You can read it on line for free. It’s a great book about the hacker culture, software developing and geekness in general

The Browser: The New Dumb Terminal.

Posted on March 21, 2012 by chavezgu

Back in the day when the command line challenge was actually not a challenge but normal life, computers were big, noisy and very expensive. Users had to type in terminals connected to this type of computers, usually called mainframes. All the computation was done in the computer, not in the terminals, that’s why they were called dumb terminals.

You can go ahead and watch this video where you can see how they actually looked like. They were actually big in those days even though no computation was done in those things. Ahhh the good old days. By the way did you know that terminal emulation programs emulate an actual physical terminal? I use urxvt which emulates a DEC VT102 terminal. So chances are that your terminal emulation program emulates the same terminal or the more advanced DEC VT220

Then computers started to get smaller and smaller and more and more powerful. Within years computers were small enough and powerful enough so you didn’t need to be connected to the mainframe anymore. But then the Internet revolution happened and we began to depend more and more on the Internet and specially on the Web.

Now, everything seems to be on the “cloud”. That’s why I always say that the future of the Internet is not very clear, because it’s all cloudy. Although we hear some people are saying that the web is dead, more and more applications are being developed as web apps instead of desktop apps. Maybe the operating system you’re running doesn’t matter anymore because you run everything on your browser. You can create and edit documents. see who’s in a relationship, express your feelings to the world, listening to music, watch videos . Nothing heavy weight is actually done in your computer. Except for the Javascript. Actually browsers now are more like Javascript compilers than anything else.

Now we even have actual computers sell as modern dumb terminals! Google believes that the browser and it’s ecosystem is mature enough that you actually don’t need anything besides that. And who knows? Maybe they’re right. I’m writing this inside a browser and it’s my main program every time I use my computer. Now we are more worried about being cross-browser than cross-platform.

You can even have a remote desktop for gaming or just because you need one! Yes, yes I know. These are not actual web apps, even the last one is designed for tablets. Tablets are also an example of modern dumb terminals. So we should called it the iDumb? The Galaxy Terminal? This guy even decided to change his laptop for an ipad and a linode account.

So as in fashion, we are seeing a trend that is coming back. In a Not only computations our done remotely, our files are in a remote server too. In the past, computers were delivered with the software and the source, and the tools for starting programs yourself. Now you have a license that allows you to use the software, but you don’t own it. Maybe in the future you will have a license to access “your files” but you don’t actually own anything. Maybe I don’t have as many songs in my drive as the Spotify catalog, but I actually own my songs. (Did you know that Spotify streams in Ogg Vorbis? Good for them)

If the cloud is access to everything, own nothing, I don’t like the future or even the present. I believe a hybrid approach Amazon Cloud Player or Google Music where you can play your files and also you actually own them is the way to go.

The Command Line Challenge.

Posted on March 7, 2012 by chavezgu

When I started using Linux I avoided the command line as much as possible. Then I started realizing that the command line is in fact very useful. Then I started digging in what you can actually do on the command line and I never stopped learning ever since.

But I had a problem. I found it difficult to learn commands when you actually have GUI applications that replace them. It’s hard to get into the environment and become proficient if you only do some tasks on the command line. Back then you had to use it for some things, but distros like Ubuntu have the unofficial goal of preventing the user to go to the command line. I knew that If I really wanted to master the art of the command line I would have to make it my only environment. So I created the Command Line Challenge.

The idea is simple: Use only the command line for a period of time. If you think of this like a game, the levels would be:

Easy: 1 day.
Medium: 1 week.
Hard: 1 month.
Ultimate Geek: 6 months.

I started with the easy level just to realize it’s possible to do it at least one week. In order to have a working command line environment for an every day use, you may have to install the following software.

Browsers

I used both lynx and elinks. lynx has more options and is more powerful in general, but elinks has a better rendering and looks. elinks is not able to log into Facebook (a feature rather than a bug maybe?)

Text Editing.

Vim. That’s pretty much everything you need. Actually if you use emacs with lots of plugins to do a lot of stuff you’re probably ready to take the challenge. I recommend Vim because I use it every day. If by using only a text editor you’re able to learn to develop without an IDE you get bonus points.

Email.

If you’re not using mutt right now then you’re missing a lot. mutt if fast, highly configurable and runs on our command line. There’s a mutt challenge too, that challenge is about that if mutt is able to do everything that you can do in Gmail, but that’s a topic for another post. I find mutt even more powerful. Here’s a guide to keep mutt synchronized with your gmail account.

Music

Frankly, I’m surprised that there are plenty of options to listen music on the console. I guess sysadmins love music too. My favorite choice is cmus. It has vim-like key bindings so it just feels natural if you’re used to mutt or vim. There are plenty of other options like moc or mp3blaster but if you live the vimian way of life like me stick with cmus. You can also use mpd a nice daemon that plays music, specially useful if you want a music streaming solution. You can control it via vimpc

Chat

Laughing in front of a black screen because somebody told you a joke make the people around you think you’re some kind of a psycho but chatting is well supported in our powerful consoles. If you can use ~~irsi~~ irssi to chat in irc channels, but that’s not all, you can download bitlbee to tunnel different IM protocols to irc. So you can have all your conversations centralized in an irc way. If you don’t like that approach you can use finch an ncurses version of the popular pidign.

Pictures.

Yes. You can see pictures on the command line without a graphical interface. How? Directly from caca labs, comes libcaca! A graphics library that outputs text instead of pixels, so that it can work on older video cards or text terminals. Be sure to check in your distribution because in Arch the package is called libcaca but all the binaries you need to see pictures (cacaview) come in that package too.

Videos.

Videos are just pictures passing by really fast, so videos are also possible. For that you’ll need the fantastic mplayer or vlc. You need to specify to use the caca driver with mplayer like this:

mplayer -vo caca video

With vlc you can use the nvlc to use vlc in a nice ncurses interface. What’s the quality of these videos? Well you can’t ask much, but for anime or cartoons the videos are actually fairly good.

File manager.

Just because you’re on the command line that doesn’t have to stop you from using a file manager. Lots of people use midnight commander even in a graphical environment. I prefer to use a more vim-friendly approach. I like ranger because I already know all the key bindings that I need. I like it so much it’s my default file manager(shame on you nautilus)

Tmux

Tmux is terminal multiplexer. What does that mean? In simple terms is like a window manager for your terminal. You can have tabs, split windows and a nice status bar among other things. My life is not the same after I met tmux. There’s an excellent tutorial and a book about how can you improve your productivity with tmux.

Gaming.

Playing on the command line is something every geek has to experiment. Nethack is a really famous dungeon game. If your gaming needs aren’t that complicated, you can try tetris on emacs by pressing M-x tetris. I recommend to become familiar with emacs first. At the end of the challenge you should see: “Achievement Unlocked: Geekiest gaming experience”

These are just options so you can dive into the command line directly without being a terrible painful experience. The truly art of the command line is to learn the bash, how to write scripts to avoid repetition and more important, to understand that in UNIX a word is worth more than one hundred clicks. Have a cheatsheet with you with all the basic commands and remember that man is your friend.

I recommend you should go and have a look at Matt Might’s blog. He posted some really interesting articles about what you can do with a UNIX command line. I specially recommend this one.

So, challenge accepted?

Update: Richo pointed out in the comments another alternative to moc and cmus. Also I you use twitter I recommend you bti and tyrs. If you think you need to learn the basics before diving in I recommend linuxcommandline.org I believe there’s a new book about it.

User Friendly? I Choose Expert Friendly

Posted on January 27, 2012 by chavezgu

I don’t know about you but to me the term user friendly is everyday becoming more like a pejorative rather than a feature. Let me explain: I’ve realized than almost everything requires time and effort (sometimes a lot) in order to have it just the way you want it. This is specially true if you really care about customizing your environment . Let me give you an example: vim. Vim is a fantastic editor and in my opinion the best editor around. Nevertheless I’ve spent a lot of time and effort just to learn how to edit with it and playing with the configuration file just to make it perfect for my needs. At almost every level of software tools or programs there’s at least one that take this approach.

Another example would be linux distros. We have Ubuntu and works just fine for a lot of people. So why do we need distros like Arch or Gentoo? Because some people like to spend countless hours adjusting their systems to have the way they want it.

This trend is not exclusive for software. You can see a lot of examples like this in the food world. Some people care a LOT about hamburgers, steaks or even salads. They’ll tell you that McDonald’s is complete crap(it is) and that if you really want a real hamburger you should go somewhere else.

So if you are really into something you have to leave the “user friendly approach” in order to a more “expert friendly solution”. I’ve been thinking about programs or web apps that are ”expert friendly”. During my search, I’ve noticed that there are different level of expert friendliness. I decided that 3 levels are enough.

Level 0 is an application, system, platform designed specifically to be user friendly. A lot of mobile apps are a perfect example of this. No matter if you’re an expert user or a first time user, the experience is more or less the same.

Level 1 is when the software is designed to be user friendly, but if you’re an expert user you can modify the behavior at decent level. Also, some software provide shorcuts for repetitive tasks, so they also qualify for level 1. The Twitter and Gmail webapps are examples of that.

Level 2 is software specifically designed to power users. They can include a default configuration, but almost every user would modify the standard behavior. The level of customization is high to very high. Examples of this would be vim, emacs, mutt or awesomewm.

Sometimes you can make a level 1 app to a level 2 via an extension. Firefox + Pentadactyl is definitely a level 2 but Firefox alone would be level 1.

I have made a list of the software I use every day listing it’s level.

Firefox + Pentadactyl: lvl 2
AwesomeWm : lvl 2
KDE : lvl 1
mutt: level 2
vim: level 2
clementine: lvl 1
urxvt: lvl 2

As you can see, I don’t depend on any level 0 software. I think that’s specially true for almost every computer-science oriented user. I’m not a Mac user, but it seems to me that there are a lot of level 0 software in their ecosystem. It’s also a UNIX operating system, so you can also use level 2 software.

So next time you hear an app is suppose to be really “user friendly” maybe you will consider that more like a bug rather than a feature. At least for you.

España para los mexicanos.

Posted on January 21, 2012 by chavezgu

Soy, soy lo que dejaron, soy toda la sobra de lo que se robaron.

Este artículo abre una nueva categoría de artículos que serán comunes a lo largo de la vida útil de este blog. Hablaran acerca de mis viajes haciendo una comparativa de como los ve un mexicano. Definir mexicano sería bastante complicado y está fuera del alcance de este blog, pero no es bastante complicado comparar otro lugar con México si que conociendo un poco del entorno social, político, económico y cultural que tiene este país. Creo que casi cualquier persona que lleva un tiempo viviendo en este país podría confirmar que:

Los mexicanos somos en general impuntuales.
En México existe una gran desigualdad social.
La corrupción es un problema muy grave y extendido.
Mucha más gente ve telenovelas de las que acepta verlas.

Habrá que entender también que todas las personas vivimos en contextos diferentes y pues sería imposible que mi experiencia o mi visión del país se adaptara a la de todos.

Una vez aclarada la naturaleza del artículo es hora de proceder al tema central del mismo.

España es uno de los países más visitados del mundo y sin duda alguna uno de los más famosos también. Su gastronomía y su cultura son apreciados en casi cada rincón del orbe.

Mi primera gran sorpresa fue la gran división política, cultural, social y hasta lingüística que tiene el país. En México nos habían llegado las noticias del grupo separatista ETA, pero no sabía que casi media España no quiere ser España. Las comunidades autónomas de Galicia, Cataluña, País Vasco, Valencia, puede que alguna que otra que no conozca, reclaman la independencia del reino en mayor o menor medida. He conocido personas que amablemente te dicen que su pasaporte es español, pero su nacionalidad es vasca. A pesar de las diferencias que tenemos los mexicanos, muy pocos sectores o grupos de mexicanos tienen tendencias independentistas. Además, por muy extraños que nos parezcan algunos acentos del país, la inmensa mayoría mexicana habla español como primera lengua. En España, existen millones de personas que su día a día es hablar en catalán, gallego o vasco. Este último ni siquiera tiene relación alguna con el latin, lo que hace sentir a la gente de esa región (o país según la opinión de cada quién) aún más distante de España.

Lo que más me sorprendió de España fue sin duda alguna la cantidad de inmigrantes que tiene. ¡España recibe alrededor de 50 inmigrantes cada hora! Por las calles de Barcelona puedo constatar la presencia de personas de origen chino, pakistaní, latinoamericano, etc. España es sin duda alguna un país multicultural a niveles que México no está ni siquiera cerca. México es un país generador de inmigrantes, no receptor.

Aunado a un país que sufre del tipo de problemas resultado de la inmigración, España se encuentra sumida en una profunda crisis económica. Las cifras de desempleo son alarmantes. La situación no parece mejorar en un futuro próximo. A pesar de la profunda desigualdad social que impera en nuestro país, la situación económica no se encuentra a ese nivel. Nuestros niveles de desempleo se encuentran mucho más controlados que los españoles.

La diferencia entre la gastronomía española y la mexicana es tan grande como el océano que nos divide. El maíz, eje central de la comida mexicana, apenas si es usado en España. Decir si la comida mexicana es mejor que la española es una cuestión muy personal y subjetiva, sin embargo, los chefs españoles se han convertido en una sensación mundial debido a la innovación de sus recetas y por estar en lo más alto de la llamada gastronomía molecular.

España en general es un país bastante abierto a nuevas ideas y tendencias. La tolerancia de las relaciones de personas del mismo sexo es evidente hasta en las leyes. Muchas personas llevan tatuajes o perforaciones en el cuerpo y no parecen ser discriminadas de ninguna manera. En México aún llevamos cargando siglos de estigmas relacionados a los tatuajes y las perforaciones. Las personas con preferencias sexuales distintas a la norma aún siguen siendo objeto de burlas y discriminaciones. Además el aborto es legal en España mientras que en México existen mujeres presas por esta práctica.

Entonces, ¿qué es lo que queda del gran Reino de España? ¿Dónde está esa gran potencia que vino a conquistar a muchos de los pueblos de América? ¿Se puede reclamarle a un español de origen chino los destrozos cometidos por los españoles hace 500 años? ¿Se puede reclamar a España las atrocidades cometidas hace muchos años?

Para concluir, España es un país interesante porque está pasando por una transformación. La grave crisis económica ha provocado que se cuestione la misma naturaleza del reino, de como se maneja su política, economía y gobierno. La gran cantidad de inmigrantes hará que los españoles tengan que replantearse que significa ser español.

Si te preguntas como es la gente y como se relacionan, será algo que tengas que descubrir tu mismo. Podrás incluso ver como en un territorio relativamente pequeño tiene tanto que ofrecer.

Extra: La frase de arriba es un extracto de la canción “Latinoámerica” de Calle 13. Esa frase es la misma que casi todos los mexicanos hemos dicho alguna vez al preguntarnos sobre nuestro subdesarrollo. Si no has visto el video deja de hacer lo que estas haciendo y velo ahora mismo.

Never Break The User Experience.

Posted on January 20, 2012 by chavezgu

I’ve been using Arch for 2 years in a row and now I can’t live with out it. Yesterday I tried to install Arch Linux on my PC. It did something that reminded me Ubuntu. Apparently there’s a big problem with the brand new 3.2.1 kernels.

This comes just a few months after Linus Torvalds said that the most important thing is not to break the user experience. I said earlier than reminded me of Ubuntu because some years ago a simple update broke my X server. That’s completely unacceptable. Also that the new kernel broke my experience.

I came to Linux because I was tired of all this things but of course there’s no perfect operating system. Or kernel. So after this experience I’m going to have another operating system with an really stable kernel. Because everyone needs something stable to rely on.

A Linux War?

Posted on January 18, 2012 by chavezgu

During the last winter vacation I was (still) reading 2 books from Eric S. Raymond: The Bazar and the Cathedral and The Art of Unix Programming. Both of those books explain the history about the hacker culture, the Internet culture(tcp/ip), UNIX and open source.

Raymond explains there is black chapter in UNIX history: The UNIX wars. This was the time when several companies tried to make UNIX a commercial product and started fighting against each other and several UNIX hackers didn’t see that Microsoft was becoming the next IBM and that the chips from Intel would win the battle. After the war, UNIX was almost history.

Nowadays I think Linux as dark as that one, especially in the desktop. Yes it’s true that Linux is more popular than ever thanks to Android, but I’m not talking specifically about the kernel. I’m talking about the desktop. I believe the market share of the Linux desktop is actually shrinking. The reason: Mac OS X.

Because we as Linux users have our usual flame wars about distros, sound, etc. Apple took and is taken people from Linux to their side. I know far too many people than now have an Apple computer but in the past they were Linux users. This is specially true if you ask web developers. A lot of other technical people are also moving to an Apple computer. Just take at your local university. Even the computer science department has a lot of people using an Apple computer.

I don’t think the Linux desktop is going to be history in a couple of years. I seriously believe there’s something that as a community we’re failing to deliver.

You’re free to use whatever you want. Just remember, UNIX is not only a type of operating systems. It’s also a philosophy of sharing and contributing. Apple is, well, not very good at that.

Further reading: You can read both of the books of Raymond online. I prefer to read them on my kindle so I bought them on Amazon.

Hello, my name is Gabriel.

Posted on January 4, 2012 by chavezgu

and I’m NOT an alcoholic although I enjoy the occasional beer. My full name
is Gabriel Alejandro Chavez Gutierrez but nobody calls me like that. Just the Mexican government. You can call me Gabriel or by my alias: chavezgu.

Now that you know my name maybe and if you’re still interested you may want to know
another few things about me. I’m a university student. I’m studying something
related to computer science. I wish I could say I’m studying computer science but
in Mexico is more related to engineering than to science. My university calls something like “Engineering in Computer Technologies” I’m also 22 years old and my favorite things are: eating, traveling and technology. In that order.

I’m starting this blog because I have a lot of things to say about pretty much
anything. I usually give my opinion if I consider that I know enough about that
matter. I tend to have strong opinions about politics, ethics, technology, religion and food.

So I’ll give you some aspects about me that will probably give you an insight about
what my posts would be like. I’m a(n):

GNU/Linux user. (Arch linux distribution)
promoter of Open Source.
Vim user.
Atheist.
gamer. (PC, I know quite controversial if I’m a linux user. I’ll post about it)
Mexican (born and raised in Mexico)
movie fan.
redditor.

I’m planning to post almost everything in English but there will be some posts
in Spanish. Those post will be in Spanish because they talk directly to Mexicans.

That would be all for my introduction. Have a good one.

BTW: If you’re wondering why the title of my blog is “Oldboy” that’s because
that’s the name of my favorite movie. Oldboy is a Korean movie directed by
Chan-wook Park. The focus of the movie is vengeance and it forms part of a trilogy that are not related between them, but all of them are about vegaence. If you would like to know more about it you can read the IMDb page or read the article that got me interested in that movie.(in Spanish)