Short cuts

Still alive?

2008-06-03T08:19:00.001-07:00

Yes, I am still alive even though I haven't had much time to write on my blogs.

Since I don't have much time to write much and I don't want that to be the just message of this post, I will write quickly about something I did and post a video (again).

Last weekend I went to see the Blue Man Group in Geneva with my wife. If you have no idea what the Blue Man Group is, you should get out of your cave more often :-) (or look at this website).

It was the "How to be a megastar 2.1" performance. I really enjoyed it and I recommend to everyone who likes theatrical acts that incorporate rock music (with an emphasis on percussion), odd props, audience participation, sophisticated lighting, and large amounts of paper (took it from Wikipedia :-)). Well, if you do not know whether you might like it or not, just check the video. It is the beginning of the performance I attended, with exactly the same artists.

????

2008-05-05T05:28:00.000-07:00

I have no words...

Random Numbers

2008-02-29T05:36:00.000-08:00

This week I was skimming over a JavaScript book and I found an interesting piece of code. In JS, Math.random() returns a random number between 0 (inclusive) and 1 (exclusive). Here is the algorithm the book suggests to get a random number between 0 and 4:

do{

} while (iValue > 4)

Awesome!!

It is assuring to know that the algorithm will not only generate a random number between 0 and 4, but it will also take a random number of steps to finish. That's what I call taking random number generation to the next level.

The book is "Learning JavaScript" (O'Reilly) and the algorithm is shown on page 91.

Dilbert

2008-02-06T18:12:00.000-08:00

I have recently discovered some Dilbert cartoons on YouTube. This is not the best one, but it is a nice one to start with:

Asimo

2008-01-29T15:31:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday I went to the Balloon Festival of Château-d'Oex, here in Switzerland. My main intention there was to take nice pictures of the colorful balloons with mountains covered in snow as the background. Well, I can say that at least some of the 500 shots I took were nice.

However, what really took my attention was not the beauty of the event, but the presentation of the Honda humanoid robot called Asimo. If you had never heard of Asimo before, it is worth checking its web page here. You can find even some videos there.

If you are too lazy or too busy to visit the web page, here is a YouTube video with basically everything I saw during the presentation.

It is just amazing!

Eyes!

2008-01-24T08:55:00.002-08:00

Today I will write about some of the nonsense that crosses my mind from time to time.

Sometime ago I was wondering why evolution did not make us with four eyes instead of just 2. I mean, how come Spiders managed to end up having eight eyes while us, supposedly superior human beings, have just 2. Wouldn't it be nice to have an extra eye on the back of our heads so that we could see what is going on all around us? I am convinced that an individual with four eyes would be more likely to survive on a hostile environment like a jungle or a company office. Maybe we are just an intermediate step of evolution towards a human being with more eyes.

Actually, some of my freckles seem to be sensitive to light. At least my dermatologist told me that they could turn into skin cancer if I overexposed them to the sun. The positive side of this is that my descendants might evolve to having more than just a couple of eyes and take over the world as a new superior species. All of a sudden, I started to feel like an X-man or one of those weird characters in the TV Series "Hereos."

Kite

2008-01-22T04:30:00.000-08:00

This piece of news fascinated me:

Kite to pull ship across Atlantic

I hope this idea flies.

Automatically up-screwed

2008-01-17T03:22:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I just hate Linux. I have OpenSuse 10.3 (x86_64) on my laptop and one week ago it notified me that I should download some updates. It turns out that these updates screwed up with my Eclipse application because of a very stupid mistake somebody made. Is it so difficult to come up with a tool for automatic updates that allows testing and rollbacks in a straightforward way?

???.com

2008-01-09T14:51:00.001-08:00

There are so many web 2.0 companies around these days that I could not help thinking about a new one I could create myself. After five minutes of intense brainstorming I came up with the excellent idea of implementing a web site that keeps track of the people you have kissed (French kisses only). This idea is based on a careful study I performed 10 minutes before I started writing this post. According to my research, most successful web 2.0 applications satisfy two important conditions:

a) They look attractive to teenagers

b) They are viral (you are somehow forced or compelled to invite your friends to take part of it)

My proposal satisfies these two constraints. If I remember well (it's been so much time since I was a teenager), most teenagers love to brag about their conquests. Letting your friends know who you have kissed is just perfect for such teenagers (specially because you are not forced to
update your profile in case you kissed Ugly Betty). The way I think of this web site, you could create statistics about the countries/states/cities of people you have kissed, as well as a "to
kiss" list with people you intend to kiss in the future. It is just so perfect that I do not know why it does not exist yet.

I still have to think about a good name for the site, though.

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T08:11:00.000-08:00

And a new year comes...

I had a wonderful time this holidays. I do not recall eating so much and so well before in my entire life. Lobster, prawns, foie gras, steak, veal, pizza, spaghetti, quesadilla, and much more. I had such a great time that I do not regret the extra kilos it brought about. Now I have an extra reason to start running again.

I wonder if other people like eating as much as I like. What about you? Do you also enjoy eating good food?

I wonder if there is some Web 2.0 service dedicated to food lovers. I'll put it on my list of things to google about when killing time.

Happy New Year!

xkcd

2007-11-26T10:51:00.001-08:00

Today's xkcd comic is just great! Last time something like that happened to me was a few months ago when I tried to install Fedora Core 7 on my Thinkpad x61s together with Windows Vista.

Amazingly, I never learn the lesson and always insist on trying whenever I buy a new computer or a new OS seems to be good enough to give it a try.

Enjoy it!

Australian actresses plagiarize quantum mechanics lecture

2007-10-27T07:14:00.000-07:00

I found this hilarious in many senses:

http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=277

My impression is that whoever came up with this commercial is a complete moron. To start with, the dialog sounds horrible because it was meant to be rhetorical and the models do a terrible job "acting" on it (they do not look intelligent at all). Actually, it made me remember of my primary school plays with kids reading papers on stage. That not being enough, the dialog was stolen from a lecture on the web and the guys responsible for the ad, who paid a lot for the scenery, models, filming, etc, did not even care to send an e-mail asking permission to the professor who wrote that. If I were him, I would sue them, mainly for the poor job they did with the commercial. It degrades his work.

The perfect operating system

2007-10-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

By now, I truly believe there is no such a thing as a perfect operating system, and there will never be. Let me start by analyzing the lifecycle of successful operating systems. They all start simple and lacking a bunch of cool functionalities and capabilities, but they work fine for what they are supposed to do. Like always, simple things that work attract clients (in this specific case, users). When an OS becomes famous and people all over the world start using it, its developers feel forced to extend the original design, adding more features to satisfy the users' complaints. At this point the OS starts to collapse under its own complexity.

My theory is that the systems become so complex and under the responsibility of so many people that nobody actually takes responsibility for the problems they have. I will try to make it clearer with an example: I am now using a brand new laptop that has both Windows Vista and Linux installed and, believe me, none of the two operating systems works properly. Before you blame it on me, let me say that I have reasons to believe that I am not completely dumb, and I do have some years of experience with both Windows and Linux. Moreover, the problems I am talking about are not very obscure. I am talking about simple things like using Word and Internet Explorer on Windows, and LaTeX, Eclipse, and Firefox on Linux. Yet, Windows is as slow as a turtle trying to walk sideways and hangs every once in a while. Moreover, when it hangs, it does it in such a way that I have to restart the machine twice to make it work again. Linux is faster and more stable, but it does not recognize half of the hardware I have, including simple things like the sound and wireless cards.

Clearly, if the software was simple or few people were involved in the development of the operating system, no end user would ever face these problems. I am assuming developers at least try to use and perform simple tests on the features they implement before shipping the final product. Thus, there is no way they would not notice the problems I just mentioned. However, what I think they do when they notice this sort of problem is to blame on somebody else. With a clean conscience, they avoid solving the problem and concentrate on more features for the next version.

For the users, it remains to wait for the next version, hoping that the current problems will be solved and no other will be crated. Meanwhile, we learn to work around and live with the problems the current OS has. It was always like that, and it will always be.