Logging for a buggy mind

ElmCity project

2009-10-26T13:14:00.000-07:00

hace bastant tiempo (como 5 años?) se me ocurrió la idea de que debería haber en internet un agregador de "eventos en tu zona", porque los que trabajamos en casa, tenemos grandes necesidades de enterarnos de lo que ocurre en nuestra ciudad para poder participar en actividades sociales (sociales en el sentido de conocer gente de verdad, no de "redes sociales"). Más o menos la función que hace la Guia de Butxaca o la Guia del Ocio en Barcelona. Pero on-line. sería fantástico.

pues bien, existen diferentes portales que lo hacen, pero claro para poder hacerse ricos intentan "quedarse con todo el mercado", y no permiten exportar o importar los eventos programados en sus páginas a otras páginas de eventos.

Por ejemplo imaginad que una página pudiera publicar un "feed" de eventos, al estilo RSS o ATOM, i que tu tuvieras un agregador de eventos, y te registraras como suscriptor de eventos de los temas que más te gusten (por ejemplo, todos los eventos relacionados con web 2.0 en barcelona, todos los eventos relacionados con programación, todos los eventos relacionados con cata de vinos, etc etc).

Tener una página personalizada donde agregas todas las fuentes de eventos que te interesan seria magnífico.

Pues esto (me parece que) no es posible porque Upcoming.com, Eventful.com y los que sean, prefieren que los "eventos" no sean "sindicables"... muy mal, porque incluso hay un estándard del IETF para sindicar eventos (se llama iCal y es heredero de vCal).

pues un ingeniero de Microsoft ha decidido realizar esta visión... y lo mejor: con las "Best Tool for the Work", es decir, utiliza Python, Azure, C#, Del.icio.us y otras herramientas.

el proyecto se llama elmcity (http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/) y puedes añadirte como "curator" para tu "agregador de eventos". Yo ahora mismo me he puesto como "curator" de barcelona. Entonces tu publicas los "eventos" en del.icio.us, y elmcity los pilla, los agrega con otros relacionados, y genera un feed iCal para que tus amigos puedan suscribirse a los eventos de la zona con iCal (compatible con Google Calendar).

mola, no ??

finanzas

2009-01-09T04:19:00.000-08:00

estoy leyendo el artículo de Martin Varsavsky sobre Madoff en el huffington post, y dice que Piedrahita tenía a 2 Phd's investigando el fondo de inversiones de Madoff y que no hallaron nada irregular porque les dieron información fraudulenta.

Esto de las auditorías y las investigaciones sobre cómo funciona una empresa, desde siempre me ha causado bastante intriga, es decir, por ejemplo: cómo un registrador de la propiedad te asegura que una casa no tiene gravámenes ? pues va a los registros oficiales, y si allí no pone nada es que no los tiene. Cómo un auditor te asegura que una empresa cumple algunos requisitos ? pues te lo asegura "bastante", es decir, ellos van a la empresa y le dicen al jefe "Danos estos papeles y estos datos" y el jefe se los da, entonces los auditores te aseguran que "siempre y cuando el jefe nos diera los papeles correctos, esta empresa cumple tales requisitos", cuanto más "física" es la auditoría más auditable es: si hay que hacer un recuento de activos y la empresa vende camiones, van los auditores a la empresa, cuentan los camiones que hay y luego multiplican y esos son los activos, pero si la empresa vende software, entonces tienen que ir al jefe y pedirle los datos ( y igual piden acceso a las máquinas y miran unos cuantos logs del apache). Y si la empresa es un fondo de inversión, entonces es que por muy Phd's que sean los auditores, es un puro cachonde: van al jefe y le piden los excel que demuestra que todo funciona, y el jefe le pasa los excel... Un puto excel ! si me quereis auditar ahora mismo os paso unos excel q he hecho que demuestran que soy cojonudo. Claro, supongo que pueden llamar al banco y confirmar si la empresa auditada tiene XXmil euros en tal y cual cuenta, o a ver si los resultados publicados de una de las empresas participadas por el fondo realmente está teniendo beneficios... pero no dejan de ser todo excel's !! no hay nadie que vaya a contar camiones... la verdad me fiaría mas de un FP contando camiones que de 2 PHd's leyendo Excel's.

total que no entiendo mucho como el Piedrahita ese dice "Oh, no ! esque teniamos a 2 Phd's comprobando que los datos eran ciertos, por eso nos sorprende tanto que Madoff nos haya timado Cincuenta-Mil-Millones-De-Dólares (CMMdD)" moraleja: no le dejes a nadie CMMdD a no ser que hayas contado por lo menos medio millón de camiones contantes y sonantes.

children-proof world

2008-11-03T13:55:00.001-08:00

I'm in a hotel in London. I have some back-sore so I went to reception and asked for some Aspirin or Ibuprofen: "We dont have any because we dont give the guests because they could be alergical or something. Its hotel policy". Fuck policies: I'm asking for an aspirin (not Ketamine or some Opioid), I have a fuc*in back sore I can't sleep.
This is something I find weird in England: Policy Policy Policy.

let's try to relax and sleep a little... maybe some mantras will help.

good night and long live policies !

Sex and the olympic city

2008-08-23T11:54:00.000-07:00

"Sex and the Olympic city"... how much I'd love to have been there !
;)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/olympics/article4582421.ece

Amazingness tech

2008-08-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

This is one of those developments/technologies that really amaze me, and make me sad I can't live 200 years just to see how technology evolves. Take a look at the video... and think, how great would it be to fill in a form with: "How many lines of code had all the project in whose Elias Baixas worked and were not related to SIP?" and Tachán ! have the result right away !!! imagine the potential

http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/

enjoy !

Loving aquamacs

2008-07-02T15:09:00.000-07:00

Hi ! 8 months ago I was looking for the definitive text editor since I had just bought my new Macbook Pro... it was an intense research: I've always used Vim fluently (although not many plugins), Emacs quite a bit, and then I bought TextMate... it was nice but all my experience and pooled knowledge on Emacs would go through the sink.
But then I discovered Aquamacs Emacs... I must tell: It is excellent.

I was afraid it would be one of those marginal projects that start and only get some love once a year or so, but I was wrong: they've released two new versions (1.3 and 1.4) since I started using it, each new version Much better than the previous one.

Now I've been programming Rails, and I missed that feature of footnotes plugin that let you directly open some file that has thrown an exception by clicking on an txmt:// link on the page.

Ive been trying to create an emacsclient URL protocol handler with python and registering it to the operating system so that eny emc:// URL would be opened by EmacsCLlient (and thus AquamacsEmacs) but this way has been quite painful and at last I've found a much simpler solution:

create this AppleScript:
property eclient : "/opt/local/bin/emacsclient -n "
property eclientexec : "/opt/local/bin/emacsclient -e \"(goto-line "
property eopen : "/usr/bin/open -a /Applications/Aquamacs\\ Emacs.app "
(* copied from http://lists.apple.com/archives/applescript-users/2005/jun/msg00785.html *)
to split(needle, haystack)
set oTIDs to the text item delimiters
set the text item delimiters to needle
set hay to (text items of haystack)
set the text item delimiters to oTIDs
return hay
end split
(*set t to "I really like pie"
set commentString to item 1 of split({""}, t))
returns "I really like pie" *)

on open location this_URL
set the my_URL to text 7 thru -1 of this_URL
set the my_FILE to item 1 of split({"&"}, my_URL)
set the my_LINE to item 2 of split({"="}, my_URL)
do shell script eclient & my_FILE
do shell script eclientexec & my_LINE & ")\""
(*display dialog my_FILE*)
end open location

compile it and make an application, then on firefox you just click on an emc:// link and it asks you what application to use, go and find your recently created appplescript App, and Tachan !!

I use 3, but I think it should work on 2, if it doesn't you'll need to register a protocol handler on your Mac for emc:// URLS, that is done by adding this:
(this should be XML but I've seen that blogger removes the xml tags, so indentation stands for the XML tags, quoted strings are the element contents, but when you create the XML you should *remove the quotes* !)
array
dict
key
"CFBundleURLName"
/key
string
"EmacsClient URL"/
/string
key
"CFBundleURLSchemes"
/key
array
string
"emc"
/string
/array
/dict
/array

to the Info.plist

Then on the footnotes Rails plugin, change vendor/plugin/footnotes/init.rb

Footnotes::Filter.prefix ||= 'txmt://' if RUBY_PLATFORM.include?('darwin')

to be

Footnotes::Filter.prefix ||= 'emc://' if RUBY_PLATFORM.include?('darwin')

that should be all !

please if you've read this and found it interesting, leave a commend saying Yes ! !
so I will consider to continue posting my little mac-emacs-ruby-whatever tweaks or not..

elias

interface de pagina web

2008-06-19T16:21:00.000-07:00

esta pagina web es acojonante, super cyberpunk, me encanta:

http://kashiwasato.com/

elias

Continuous partial attention and the like

2008-05-23T03:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I read the last writing from Paul Graham about procrastinating: he's completely nailed it down: distractions used to come from the TV, we banned the TV, but they now come from the internet, which is our work-tool !

Today I just read the one from Giles Bowkett (and TimBray reference), and I've repeatedly read aabout people's fascination with reddit/slashdot/hackernews... I used to be subscribed to slashdot but I finally got to quit (like w/ tabacco).

Now my only time-sink is my reader.google.com... oh god how much time it takes !! I sometimes feel like the Little Prince when he had to prune his baobabs... every day he had to get-up early in the morning and execute this ever-lasting routine of prunning the baobabs, and if one day he forgot, more work he would have for the next day.

That's how I sometimes feel about reader.google.com, I have to go at least once a day to "prune" my feed-reader !! It's like if someone wanted to feed me with lots of info against my will !! so I have to go everyday to prune the info so that I don't drown in it if there accumulates too much.

It used to happen this same thing with gmail, but at some point I decided there was nothing wrong with having N unread messages in my inbox, so now I have my gmail with 2811 unread messages and nothing happens, I just feel allright... I don't prune the baobabs anymore, I just let them grow...
so I think I should do the same with reader... nothing happens if you start to let the unread items grow !!!

but anyway, I would really appreciate if google added a "Pause feed" feature to reader.google.com so that I could pause some feeds... Its *not* the same as unsbuscribing, because in reader.google.com I created my database of interesting news feeds, and some of them I maybe want to unsubscribe *temporarily* just to avoid information overheads ! so I use googlereader as a Bookmark or database of interesting news feeds that I always want to have searchable, but I want them to be temporarily paused, wouldn't that be useful ? to me yes.

de gimnastas solidarios a calistenistas autosuficientes

2008-05-23T02:12:00.001-07:00

Acabo de dejar Gimnastas Solidarios, por fin ! después de un año en el programa "Apadrina un gimnasio", mi gimnasio ya se ha independizado !! me alegro mucho por él, ahora podrá hacer su camino sin mi ayuda ! espero que las cosas le vayan muy bien, al fin y al cabo este intenso año de relación nos ha unido bastante ! (aunque no lo suficiente).

Hace exactamente un año me apunté al gimnasio de la barceloneta, creo que era mayo o junio del 2007, en todo este año he ido 2 veces al gimnasio y una a karate !! y pago 33 euros al mes !! bueno, esto de apadrinar gimnasios ya sabeis que es duro, pero merece la pena ! cuando ves a tu gimnasio crecer, independizarse de ti e iniciar su propia andadura... es emocionante !

tengo que decir que me siento libre, libre de gimnasio y de recibos de gimnasio.

Quiero agradecer la ayuda de la ONG Gimnastas Solidarios que me asesoró siempre perfectamente en todo el complicado proceso de apadrinar un gimnasio, y en concreto a Soledad Gómez de Apadrina un Gimnasio por su ayuda y atención en los momentos más difíciles del apadrinamiento.

Ahora he iniciado una nueva aventura con Calistenistas Sin Fronteras. Después de haber visto las películas 300 y "Into the wild" (o Rutas Salvajes, en spanish) me interesé por el mundo de los calistenics, que aunque tengan este nombre tan guay, no son más que los mismos ejercicios que haces en el gimnasio, pero *sin máquinas*, es decir, que vayas donde vayas, estés donde estés, hagas lo que hagas siempre podrás hacer Calisthenics !!!

Basicamente calisthenics es hacer cualquier ejercicio en el que la resistencia la ofrezca el peso de tu propio cuerpo. Esto tiene varias ventajas: no necesitas pesas, y nunca te vas a inchar como un globo, porque tus músculos estarán hecho a la medida de tu cuerpo, el ideal de belleza griego!
Los típicos abdominales, flexioines, pull-ups... son calisthenics, pero hay más !

"Calisthenics originated in ancient Greece. It is mentioned as a Persian scouts' report on Spartan warriors before the Battle of Thermopylae, who misinterprets calisthenics as a sign of weakness."

Es decir que los Espartanos estaban tan cuadraos porque siempre que se aburrian se ponían a hacer Calisthenics.

Que me venga el Xerxes ese a tocar los conejos después de hacer mis tablas de Calisthenics, ya verá ya !!

Y el Cristopher McCandless de Into The Wild, también se pasaba el día haciendo calisthenics, y para los que no lo sepais, yo quiero ser un Cristopher McCandless !! (pero sin comer bayas de las malas, eh !)

best regards,

Elias

jajaj

2008-05-16T02:29:00.001-07:00

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=irule2

first meta-circular person

2008-04-01T02:29:00.001-07:00

my first comic-blogging a-la xkcd

Elias, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful program

2008-01-11T06:24:00.000-08:00

Today I started slime and it said something like "this could be the start of a beautiful program" and it remembered me the famous Casablanca phrase:
"louis i think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship", so I made this little emacs startup greeting:

(defun startup-echo-area-message ()
(format "%s, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful program" (getenv "USER")))

just for fun.

on the other hand, I'm developing an emacs library to retrieve problems from projecteuler.com directly to an emacs buffer, so whenever I'm bored, I can try to resolve those little beautiful mathematical problems in Emacs.

its almos ready, I'll tell you.

elias

economy in general

2007-12-11T07:24:00.000-08:00

hi !

I've recently seen these 2 videos on video.google.com:

Zeitgeist The Movie:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5547481422995115331

and

Money as Debt:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279

both quite interesting (though maybe not as scientific accurate and prove-bearing as exptected..)

those lead me to this interesting article on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage

"The revenue derived from issuing currency" from a goverment or private company as the FED.

I recently bought George Soros's Open Society, which I'm really eager to start reading... what might a pure-economist understand by "Open Society", as opposed to what a geek like me does understand ?

lets see !

I'll try to report about this in an upcoming post.

web 2.0 bubble song

2007-12-05T15:09:00.001-08:00

can't help but blogging it ;)

artículo interesante "programming collective intelligence"

2007-11-29T16:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2007/11/14/an-interview-with-toby-segaran.html

este tío dice:

"what's still lacking is something which finds information online for me that I will find interesting; I know there are a number of attempts to solve this problem and I've tried many of them but nothing has retained my attention so far."

éste, lo que necesita es un agregador de RSS 'inteligente' como el mio, que sugiera posts basándose en la probabilidad condicionada de Bayes de que te guste un post basándose en los que has dicho q te gustaban.

bueno, lo del bayes lo he metido a la fuerza para hacerme el interesante, pero + o - cuela, no ?

elias

nueva idea

2007-11-29T15:37:00.000-08:00

Últimamente, cuando leo mis RSS, veo bastantes posts comentando otros posts que ya he leido (porque también los tengo en mi rss).

Esto es ineficiente (a primera vista).

La solución es : cada post lleva una etiqueta (o "tag") invisible, que apunta al post original que se está comentando.

Entonces mi lector de RSS, detecta que yo ya he leido el post original, o alguno que ya comentaba este tema, y me lo marca como 'menos interesante'.

Esta idea es genail. Si fuera a montar otra empresa, haría un lector de RSS online con esta 'feature'... pero ahora que lo pienso, los usuarios tendrían que indicar cual es el post original. O bueno, en realidad yo podria 'inferir' esa información de los keywords, y links del post. Eso añadiría la salsa mágica diferenciadora de mi lector de RSS.

Por otro lado, soy usuario de muchas redes sociales distintas. Según mi punto de vista, todas intentan crearse un 'perfil' de ti, de quién eres tu, de qué te interesa, quienes son tus amigos... para utilizar eso para enviarte publicidad 'enfocada' a tus necesidades. Esto da mucho dinero (preguntarle al zukerberg de facebook, sino ;P).

Realmente siento que si hay algo que es lo que define mejor mi perfil en internet, son los RSS que leo.

pues en la próxima red social que haga, voy a sugerir a los usuarios que sean amigos de otros usuarios basándome en la correlación de sus RSS. Si hay mucha correlación, serían buenos amigos, sin duda. Si no hay correlación, también podrian ser buenos amigos, pero con menos afinidades en el internet, por tanto menos interés de ser amigos 'a través de internet'.

esto creo que es una idea potentísima. Si conozco a alguien que lea los mismos RSS que yo, seremos amigos, sin duda.

Ejemplos de las 2 ideas expuestas:

Hoy leyendo el excelente Anarchaia, me he cruzado con la noticia de que Mauricio Fernandez ha lanzado ruby-wmii. Ya lo sabía porque estoy suscrito a eigenclass.org.
También ponía que google abría su highly Open Participation Contest. Lo sabía porque estoy suscrito a developer.google.com (o como se llame).
También ponía artículos de Lambda The Ultimate, a los que también estoy suscrito. Y a ruby inside, al q tb estoy suscrito.

También estoy suscrito a bubblegeneration.com, y a las news de sourceforge y developerworks, para estar siempre a la última de qué pasa en el mundo open source.
también estoy suscrito a xkcd y a "La viña del Señor" por la risa, y a fogonazos.com, por pasar 10 minutos al dia con algo interesante.

etc, etc.

te partes de la risa

2007-11-22T15:15:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWyKOvX00h0

jjajajaja !!

es hilarante, como el gas !

my fingers hurt again

2007-11-22T13:56:00.000-08:00

Did I tell you that I had Repetitive Strain Injury some time ago ? at that time I think I was using VI... or maybe emacs ?

I've heard VI is more ergonomic, that's why even though I love emacs, I'll start using VIPER mode, which uses some of the ergonomic-key-bindings of VI.

great stuff.

xkcd

2007-11-16T05:56:00.000-08:00

I usually fear to re-publishing a re-furbished (like my Mac:) article I've read in another blog, because maybe my readers have also the other blog in their RSS feeds. but this time Icant help it. This is hilarious (for hackers)

http://xkcd.com/341/
http://xkcd.com/342/
http://xkcd.com/343/
http://xkcd.com/344/
http://xkcd.com/345/

elias

Mal parto me raya, se atormenta una vecina, el porro folar, y los conejos

2007-11-16T04:07:00.000-08:00

A mi familia siempre le han hecho mucha gracia los chistes que solamente se basan en confusion linguística. A mi abuela le encanta el chiste "que le dice el gallo a la gallina ? 'qué-quieresque-te-diga'"... o el de "qué se ve desde la montaña más alta de Toronto ?": "Torontontero", que hace gracia solo porque decir "torontontero" es gracioso (y por lo de "toronto entero").

A mi hermano le encanta cambiar y modificar las sílabas de las palabras. Ahora recuerdo:

"Se atormenta una vecina"
"Mal parto me raya"
"Porro Folar" (en vez de forro polar)

las dos primeras las sacó de una obra de teatro (se las copió) y el porro folar no se de donde lo sacó. Pero cuando habla siempre cambia alguna sílaba y consigue resultados muy divertidos.

A mi también me hace bastante gracia, últimamente digo bastante "Estoy hasta los conejos", o "No me toques los conejos", (en vez de co-jo-nes).

Últimamente he leido bastantes posts sobre el tratamiento informático de las palabras y los lenguajes.

Por ejemplo hay un post del director de research de Google Peter Norvig que explica el algoritmo que usa google para sugerirte que has hecho un error en el 'spelling' de tu búsqueda (eso que te dice Google de ... "quizás quiso decir: sexo" cuando buscas 'seco' :P). Está hecho en python aquí: http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
usa el teorema de Bayes de probabilidad condicionada.

Y los de PowerSet también están haciendo virguerias con el procesamiento del lenguaje natural.

y mi amigo Ero, un tiempo también estuvo muy interesado en el procesamiento del lenguaje, y llegó a descubrir por su cuenta los 'word-clusterings' (para luego darse cuenta de que alguien lo había inventado antes :P) también programado en python, y supongo que con el teorema de bayes.
Hace un tiempo también puso un post sobre python y procesamiento de palabras, aquí: http://blog.dkbza.org/2007/06/powerset-and-garden-path.html

Hace poco tiempo vi que Peter Norvig ha encontrado el Palíndromo más largo del mundo con un algoritmo hecho en Python (http://www.norvig.com/palindrome.html)

Y Paul Graham inventó el primer filtro anti-spam utilizando el teorema de Bayes, la probabilidad condicionada y python http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html.

total, que esto del procesamiento del lenguaje parece algo muuuuuuuy complicado pero se pueden hacer pequeños experimentos caseros, sin programar demasiadas lineas, que pueden dar resultados espectaculares.

Parece que Python y el teorema de Bayes son los elementos clave para hacer estos experimentos.

Mi aportación al tema:

Para aprender python y a usar el Bayes ese, voy a hacer un programa que tu le des un refrán o dicho, y él te busque todas las posibilidades de permutaciones y cambios de sílabas en las palabras del refrán, que den como resultado otro refran ligeramente distinto pero que en el cual las palabras también tengan sentido. Osea que a este programa tu le dirás

"Mal rayo me parta" y el te responderá:
"Mal rato me tarta", "Mal pato me raya", "Mal paro me tarta", "Mal parto me raya", etc.

o "Se avecina una tormenta" y él te responde:
"Se atormenta una vecina", etc.

molaría, no ???

bueno, tengo mucho trabajo y no creo q lo implemente. Alguien se anima ?

elias

Nostalgia

2007-11-01T15:32:00.000-07:00

"I spend most of my life in anticipatory nostalgia, aware of the memories I’m creating. ”

jajaja

from http://project.ioni.st/

:P

linux,windows,linux,mac

2007-10-31T10:47:00.001-07:00

Spectrum-Amiga-WIndows-Linux-Windows-Linux-Mac, this has been my Operating System periple. Some time ago I wrote a blog post entitled 'switch back to windows', when I recalled windows sucks, I got back to linux, and new I've got a mac with a Leopard in it.
In editors, I've been using VI *a lot*, also Eclipse *a lot*, then I learned EMACS and I loved it.

becaus I'm learning ruby, I have a mac, I bought TextMate, as all of the rails core developers use MAC with TM. 39 euros.
It works quite nice, but EMACS is OSS, so it has far more plugins, modes, and stuff. I got used to emacs keybindings, so after having spent 39 euros on TM, I'm sticking to EMACS again. It's just more powerful and it helps you to learn LISP which is also a plus.

Aquaemacs has nothing to envy to textmate. its MAC-OS look'n'feel, with keybingings, integration with OS and the like.

But its a *fkin* hell to configure it with the META symbol bound ALT key, and then also get the ç, {, }, á, ] and all that stuff, this was my first approach:
(when (eq system-type 'darwin)
(progn
(setq mac-option-modifier 'meta)
; (setq mac-pass-option-to-system t)
;and because the last statemet, we need all this weird stuff... no AltGr in mac!
(global-set-key "\M-`" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "[")))
(global-set-key "\M-+" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "]")))
(global-set-key "\M-7" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "\\")))
(global-set-key "\M-´" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "{")))
(global-set-key "\M-ç" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "}")))
(global-set-key "\M-1" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "|")))
(global-set-key "\M-2" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "@")))
(global-set-key "\M-3" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "#")))
(global-set-key "\M-4" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "~")))
(global-set-key "\M-º" (lambda () (interactive) (insert "\\")))
(global-set-key [(control return)] 'set-mark-command)))

but couldn't get the { and } to work, but I'm thinking the best will be to switch off the (setq mac-option-modifier 'meta)

UPDATE
I seem to have found the solution, just look at site-lisp/macosx/emulate-mac-keyboard-mode.el
and you'll see how to modify your .emacs to achieve the beautiful { and } and \ with your aquaemacs with spanish keyboard :D

back to electronics

2007-10-31T10:38:00.000-07:00

I used to study quite a bit of electronics back at university. At some point, I assmebled a printed board with a microcontroller, 8052 or something like that. I knew voltages and so.

But I've been devoted to software for long time now, and I dont remember anything. I love the internet, so I found instructables.com and creationist.net, then I wanted to do electronics again.

These are my two next projects:

Build a laser burner:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chC8fz-RxTs

build a Time Fountain (this one is _amazing_):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvY7NGncCgU

yesterday I was trying to make the laser. I have lots of electronic devices in my room, because everytime a broken electronic gadget comes to my hands, I 'deconstruct' it and keep the interesting parts (for fun) (motors, lasers, sensors, etc) so I had 3 spare lasers from an HP laser printer and a DVD burner.

so I went to ondaradio and bought a power supply (110 euros), asked for 1W laser but they dont sell lasers anymore. They dont have UV leds (for the time fountain).

at home, I burnt the 3 lasers. Advice: a laser needs a resistor, otherwise it burns.
Next DVD burner I get, I'll have my laser, with a resistor :)

Interestingness

2007-10-31T00:32:00.000-07:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

also see

http://fogonazos.blogspot.com/2007/04/esperando-los-dioses.html

:)

this is also great :

http://www.behance.net/Gallery/energie-in-motion/42738

specially the video:

whats 2.0 ?

2007-09-28T04:19:00.000-07:00

lately I find myself using X 2.0 quite frequently... we're facing philosophy 2.0, the world is in its second review. the concept of God needs a 2.0...
yesterday I read what Tim o'reilly thinks is 2.0:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/what_would_goog.html

Tim says it all depends on "the way these companies act with regard to the data they collect". 2.0 web services "mines its database in real time and builds the results right into its customer-facing applications" using some heuristics on this mined data, they achieve a far greater user experience. He also says its something about 'liveness' of the thing.

a Blonde 2.0, OTOH, thinks 2.0 is "a better and more effective way for us to act upon the same human needs that we’ve always had such as connecting, communicating, and receiving feedback from others" (http://www.blonde2dot0.com/blog/2007/09/27/the-death-of-web-20-cmon/)

2 faces of the 2.0: better understanding of the data collected, and better processing by the power of many to offer better user experiences.

I dont have an opinion, myself. Well, I guess I might have one, but dont regard it very relevant.

(UPDATE:)
well, putting it another way, I think the 2.0 is a marketing/social/business thing. I am an engineer, so I dont give much credit to these 'trends'. I remember talking to my partners about a web page, they kept saying 'yes, you do this in ajax', I didn't get the whole sense of what they meant, and I kept saying 'you mean XMLHttpRequest ?', so for me there's no AJAX thing, theres XMLHttpRequest, and there's no 2.0 thing, there's a bunch of new aproaches to web interfaces, application architecture, and yes, also a new way of doing web sites where the user is also the producer: a more social approach.
Amongst other reasons, I didnt get ajax because I was doing a firefox extension, so I had studied the APIs firefox provides, I didn't learn jQuery or prototype, where there's more a sense of 'AJAX'. Well, actually I did understood what they meant, but wanted to remain as much engineer and as least 'marketinian' as I could.
Hype makes economic bubbles, engineering never did any harm, it only delivers (hopefully)good technology.

regards

The world is opening !

2007-04-03T02:03:00.000-07:00

Companies used to be the ones who worried most about their "competitive advantage".
But since open-source, the "competitive advantage" is no more the source code BUT the knowledge of their technical staff.

The code is everywhere. OpenSourced code is available for everything. The new breed of programmers do not "code" anymore. They integrate code from different places. "Being lazy is a good property for a programmer", so lazy that he doesn't want to code anymore. He wants to integrate pieces to work together. The work is no more writing new code (of course things will always advance, we need smart coders !) but the average programmer only needs to integrate opensourced codes.
This might be behind mashups.
Eric Schmidt already talked about this. No more coding. Stuff is already done (see http://khloud.wordpress.com/2006/11/22/google-ceo-don%E2%80%99t-bet-against-the-internet/)

companies that opensourced lately:

AllPeers
FaceBook
Sun (java, solaris)

many more that I dont remember. Pleas leave comments with companies that are opensourcing.

Internet is a shit ?

2007-03-21T04:42:00.000-07:00

I've been in http://internetisshit.org/

What this guy is saying is that there's too much people writing shit to the internet, like everyone has a blog, and they put their shitty images to flickr, and their crappy videos to YouTube... so he says the Internet is a shit, because most of content is crap.

"Give an infinite number of monkeys typewriters and they'll produce the works of Shakespeare.Unfortunately, I feel like I'm reading all the books where they didn't. I can't wait for the day when the internet makes me rejoice in its possibilities again. But right now, it's shit."

Ok, for me thats the shitty part of internet 1.0, internet 2.0 means that if you gather those infinite number of monkeys with typewriters, and then you gather an infinite number of people reading that shit _and_ classifying the shit as "Very Shitty", "Not that shitty", "Not shitty at all", "Quite Interesting", "Good", "Brilliant" and "Shakespeare",

then you end up with lots of shakespeare quality level content, that has been classified and is easily accessible for everyone... thats _NOT_ thanks to the monkeys, that's thanks to all the people that are classifying the massive amount of shit the monkeys do. SO maybe the value is in classification, and coordination, and also the monkeys should take a part of it :)

ten tips to start a startup

2007-03-16T05:34:00.000-07:00

Tip 1:

Dont read all the tips that you have on the web on how to grow a startup. Also dont read all the tips on how _not_ to grow a startup.

tip 2:

well... read some of them... but onece you're conviced that they're only confirming that you're on the right track, then LEAVE_THEM_BEHIND and stop reading ycombinator RSS or slashdot.

BTW, here are some good articles:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2007/02/internet_people_how_to_make_su.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/03/entrepreneurial_proverbs.html

and

http://simon.incutio.com/notes/2006/summit/schachter.txt

(the last one's good)

elias

World domination ?!?! WTF

2007-02-28T03:49:00.000-08:00

Hi !

I've been reading some posts and interviews to entrepreneurs lately, and one thing that I dont understand is the question "And what are your plans for world domination?".
Ok I get its a joke, but for example, dont-be-evil would be a corporate motto _totally_opposite_ to dominating the world. Domination is bad. "What are your plans for liberating the world from evil?" would be a much better question, maybe not that funny, though :P

http://www.google.es/search?q=plans+startup+%22world+domination%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.debian:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

Convergence

2007-02-28T03:38:00.000-08:00

I'm tired of those bullshit-bingo marketing-crap like "Voice and Data Convergence", "Fixed-Mobile Convergence", IMS...

FME+IMS+NGN= Bullshit Bingo !!!
(you win a piece of shit if you use the three acronyms in the same sentence)

everything is actually converging, I'm more left-inclined politically (which traditionally has been called being "socialist") and one of my best friends is very righty, I have muslim,jew,christian,buddhists,hinduists friends, and they all expect the same from life,

If you look at the future, everyone aims at the same objectives for the world.
If you keep arguing about how has the world been in the past and who had reason and who was the best, then you are condemned to be angry and sad for the rest of your life.

elias

This new bubble 2.0

2007-02-28T03:20:00.000-08:00

This whole web 2.0 thing is a bubble, no doubt, but this bubble is not bursting, it is going to fly, elevate towards the universe, bearing the earth with it, and elevating the world into a more social place where human race will develop and improve.

hahaha, ok, U caught me, geeky poetry doesn't sound so good :P

excuse me for being so hippy, my parents were hippies and I cant help myself

NDA ?? what NDA ?

2007-02-27T19:29:00.000-08:00

some time ago, I read a blog from someone from Mozilla who did know a very important thing, but was unable to disclose it until some day, so he wrote the message and posted an MD5 of the message so that he could claim he knew it in the future. I'm doing the same today, here it goes:

0eb1f2890bdaf2601909b73a1321465c -

geeks of the world, break it !

elias

Apple for the masses ?

2007-02-27T19:22:00.000-08:00

I dont own an Apple, though I like them. Once I asked my boss to buy me one, then he and another boss also wanted one, after 1 month I told him I no more wanted the Apple.

Apple works much better than PC/Linux, and for sure than Windows also. A friend of mine (Scott) once sent me this pic:

Ok, I have a dual-core pentium, with 2gigs or RAM with linux, and when I have 10/20 tabs open in ffox, it starts to go like crazy, burning CPU and memory consumption increases a lot. my friend’s computer may have 1 or 1.5 Gigs (speculating… )
I Think apple has always been the best for designers, and now also for programmers (freeBSD and so..). But anyway, it is a little bit elitist, there’s no way that in near future everyone can own an Apple, and I belive more in social-revolution than in good-companies, so I think eventually PCs will get better and cheaper, and linux is actually getting better and more reliable.

So by now I will remain with “the people”, who can’t afford a MacBookPro (or whatever its calld ) and who like programming and open standards, even if I can’t have 153 tabs open in firefox. it will eventually get better, I bet on that.

Furthermore, I know that Aqua interface is cute, and cocoa is cool also (ei, I dont have a mac, dont blame me if I mis-spell the names or whatever ) but I like being so frenzy on the new release of Beryl for linux, and I this feeling that invades me and connects me to all the other human-beings (or geeks ) that also are very amazed on what Beryl can bring to Linux.

thats it

Elias

I know the Internet !

2007-02-27T19:21:00.001-08:00

Once my boss toldme that he had a friend that one day came to him saying “I think I already know the whole of the internet, the other day I came across the page that I had begun with”. Its clear that it was a joke, dont know if my boss joke or his friends joke.

I actually thought that something similar happens to me. From time to time, maybe following similar link paths on similar subjects, I come across a page I’ve actually been before (throught a completely different path), this might have something to do with the “clustering coefficient” of the internet, pages on similar topics must link one-another and thus must be clustered, son once u enter a cluster, sooner or later you will be in a page you’ve already been (one day u where “navigating the same/similar cluster”.

Today I found a very interesting book (I thought I came across it for first time), and when I wanted to post it in del.icio.us, I found it already was on my bookmarks, so it seems that del.icio.us will help-me track my “how-much-of-the-internet-I-have-already-navigated”

I would be great to have statistics on del.icio.us showing you how much of the internet you already know

of course, silly my-first-home-page pages shouldt count !!!

and also would be nice to have a sense of the Internet clusters and clustering coefficients (I’ve learnt this “clustering coefficient” term in “Six Degrees” by Duncan J.Watts).

elias

my explanation to the web 2.0 bubble

2007-02-27T19:14:00.000-08:00

If someone asks me why do I think the 2.0 is not a bubble, I would tell him:

Investors need to learn where to put their money, otherwise we're lost. If u get enough hype, u can get investors for whatever you whant (that's what they call marketing).
SO in the web 1.0, there were these wealthy post-industrial moguls, that had their empire throught selling oil or manufacturing (shitty) things. When they saw the Internet (1.0) they thought "I'm the most clever of the rich, I'm investing in this revolution so I'll get richer than my friends". So they invested lots of cash into the 1.0, and the geeks all-over-the-world got a chance to get that cash. So after the 1.0 hangover, we had all these old riches without money, and all the geeks with lots of money to invest.
So at the 2.0, the investors are former 1.0 geeks, who are far more smarter, and care a bit more about the money (they don't invest in pets.com even if its social :P). So now the investors are the former geeks, who know how to run a technology business...

SO: the 2.0 is NOT a bubble, its the WORLD REVOLUTION !!!

elias baixas

My own response to Fermi's Paradox

2007-02-27T19:09:00.000-08:00

Hello, the other day I was reading slashdot and came across this new:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/19/1515205&from=rss

The Fermi paradox says that if extraterrestrial civilizations exist, at least one of them should have colonized the entire galaxy by now. But since there is no evidence of this, humankind must be the only intelligent life in the galaxy. The Space Review has an article on how the Fermi paradox can be applied to human civilization. It says that, like the extraterrestrials, humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct.

So today I came with my own response to Fermi’s paradox:

As the technology and science knowledge of extraterrestrial civilizations advance, they feel eager to conquer the rest of the universe, but at some point in that way to the universe, they advance in science enough to know how does their brain work, and they realize that being eager to conquer the world is an impulse originated by their desire of power, which ultimately only gives pleasure because some neurotransmitters activate when “power” is achieved. So before they can even go and conquer the universe, they discover a drug which gives that same pleasure, but without conquering the universe, just eating a pill, so then they eat the pill, and dont want to conquer anything, because they are happy, and after that, they discover that disappearing is not such a bad option, so they decide to just disappear, so that’s why there’s no evidence of extraterrestrial life, it’s better to have drugs and disappear.

That’s the ULTIMATE ANSWER to Life, the Universe and Everything
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Answer_to_Life,_the_Universe,_and_Everything

and NOT 42

now you know what the life means, it’s just a self-replicating organism that when it will arrive to the point to think that disappearing is not such a bad option, we will disappear. Actually, that’s why in Spain, people have so few children
(see http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/new-ideas/why-is-it-that-immigrants-have-so-many-children.html )

Elias