Entries from November 2006 ↓

So I was wasting some time yesterday and I came up with this video, it turns out this guy is a cartoonist, it turns out he has a series of them 16 so far and I was just impress.

As for the cartoons themself he has a huge collection which at the time of this writing had 658 strips all online all free, it turns out he is a “huge geek” - from one of the videos and has a lot of cartoons about gaming and computers in general

I’ll recommend him to fix some of those feeds, I’ll really like to have a feed of all the videos and I’ll kill for one with only the cartoons.

I’ll also recommend you to active permalinks  all those default WP URLs are ugly

So I sat down to clean my old RSS reader feeds and of course my new one too.

I found a bunch of crap so I decided to post some videos that are “worth it”

Suits telling the truth
Heads Up!
How an ExtraLife Comic is made
PMS SURVIVAL TIPS
sparklefriends8 (A little creepy at the beggining)

This is the best ad I have seen in some time, and no it’s not a funny joke or some super expensive stuff. It’s just a small word puzzle.

At first I though it wasn’t real but it turns out that this was actually created for a campaign, Lopez Murphy came out third on the 2003 election, 16% seems very good for a new party and just one year out.

Anyway whoever wrote the text in the ad is very clever, as Fan of Don Lapre ask, why in english? I guess because in Spanish it will be so hard to accomplish something like this:)

check out this boing boing post http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/17/patriot_act_makes_it.html

the saddest thing is that this is exactly what “the terrorist” where looking for remember the REAL definition of the word, it seems they have succeeded.

Disclaimer no this will not turn into a diary it’s just that this particular event should be told as one.

Dear diary (hehehe sorry I had to)

I believe it was tuesday went a friend of my mother call me and she said she needed a favor (background detail I’m from Costa Rica and live in Dominican Republic), it turns out her id expired and they ask her to bring two Costaricans to prove that the id is her, this is the kind of thing that needs it’s own post ummm I can write an entire blog about burocratic BS…

So I get to the embassy at 8:30 am and she is already there and we are waiting for the consul and the other witness, they arrive almost together so we went up all together talking.

We sit on the waiting room and my mother’s friend introduces us, so the witness asks what you do, and I reply I’m a software engineer I work at X and do Y,Z,etc. while I’m talking I notice the guy gets really interested (I though he was an economist or something) and I wasn’t really sure if it was anything other then a filler conversation. On the other hand the consul is still listening ones she realized I know about computers she did what all mortals do, hey I have a problem with my machine ….

The economists says I’m a software consultant, and I said to myself see that’s why you shouldn’t say things like “and then you plug the Java Sockets API into the RAM chips and the CPU will be overclocked at 4Gigabytes of storage”, I have a friend who loves to say stuff like that so mere mortal will go “ohhhhh”. Then the consul comes by look my skype is not working I let him (the consultant) know that I’m more interested in him then her (consul) and ask her to give me just a minute.
I’m sitting at the consul’s desk, the problem with skype was a weird tooltip on her spanish version, or at least that’s the best I could find.

I got the consultant’s number the guy is really interested in having me as a contact maybe he will never give me a job because I don’t do .net, but as one scene in this great movie says: (this is not exact, and since the movie is in spanish… by the way there is a copy of it in english

Marcos and Juan are in front of a lot of argentinan pesos (I believe it was the equivalent of 1 million dollars (fake money of course they are con artist))
Marcos: (takes a pack of bills) will you sleep with a guy for 10000 lucas (lucas = pesos in argentina’s popular culture)
Juan: No
Marcos: (takes another pack of bills) will you give him a blow job for 20000 lucas
Juan: No, are you crazy??
Marcos: (taking 2 packs) how about sleeping with him for 40000?
Juan : No, I won’t
Marcos: (taking a bunch of them) 100000 lucas
small pause….
Juan: NO
Marcos: (taking half the money) 1 million lucas
big pause…
Marcos: See it’s not that they aren’t enough faggets in the world it’s just that there isn’t enough money to pay them all.
So this huge quote means that I do .net

Back to the issue, all the paper work is done I say good bye to them all I have a paper folded in 4
2 halfs of blank 2 with numbers, one of the filled says to me small country’s embasy in another small country, cheap maintenance deal and lots of referals, the other filled one says to me international contact and a possible way home…

all this made me realize something that some people had told me but I never experience it myself

“you have to be out on the street”

by the end of the day I had only one blank and I spend 9 hours at work, what will happen if I didn’t?

First of all this all comes from Larry Wall, yes the guy that made perl. In one of his many books, he said this.

“We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.” — LarryWall, ProgrammingPerl (1st edition), OreillyAndAssociates
quote stolen from here

Now the concept in question is defined by Larry as follows

Laziness

The quality that makes you go to
great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write
labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document
what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.
Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book.
See also impatience and hubris. (p.609)

I agree 100% here, programmers are lazy, my rule of thumb is that if you have to do something twice the second one will be a script or program, or if the task is so huge and repetitive I won’t wait until the first manual run.

Now what’s this about good vs bad, it’s a two side story. Good lazy is what Larry defined, nothing more,Bad lazy on the other hand is divided in 2

1. People that don’t understand the laziness virtue
2. Lazy people that think that’s a good thing.

From those #1 is the most problematic since they think that by being lazy (not doing anything for example) they are following Larry’s path, this kind of people is the one you have to turn your back and run, this is the kind that goes to the net downloads some code, doesn’t understands it and asks you to “help them” modify it to do something else (which most of the time is homework), they may be hope for some of them but beware they can be very time consuming always know went to stop trying to safe them.

But #2 is the worst being lazy is the best thing you could be, just because after your done being lazy you haven’t accomplish anything and your X amount of hours older

So why I wrote this? well I got quoted by warchief and for some reason people keep misquoting me on this so here is a reference.

Anyway stop your bad lazy reading stuff on the internet and go do something that express your good laziness.

for the impacient ones download it from here

Why?
Ok so after almost killing myself over bonobo I got this stable. if you read my previous post on this I didn’t found anything I really liked. While developing this I came across 2 very nice programs, although I have too say they both suffer from the “way too many features problem”, to be fair wp-tray and desktop drapes

Features
wallpaper thingy (please please someone give me a good name for it) will very very simple following the UNIX tradition (do something and be great at it), what is this something

• impress you with new wallpapers, therefore the default is random from a dir.
• and it will let you configure many aspects of this (change interval,wp dir, icon to show, and maybe go back to the one before)
• and that’s it. unless you have a very good addition.
• Provides a CLI and a gnome-applet interface with the same code thanks MVC

Instalation
download, untar, sudo make install, then add key to gconf as the README file says.

Usage
Please check the README file, but it’s very simple set your wallpaper dir.

1. As an applet, right click the a panel then “add to Panel” look for wallpaper thingy, then add, after that everytime you click the icon (or 60 secs pass*) you will get a new wallpaper
2. As a cli script, run wp_thingy.py script (no params)

* this will be configurable, if you can’t wait go to wp_thingy.py:34 and change it or delete line 36 so it will never autorefresh

Wanna help?

• Here is what you can do, check the trunk and send me some patches for all the TODO
• give me some feedback (please do not post at trac.)
• run time wp_thingy.py and send me that together with the size/structure of your wallpaper dir to see if the algoritm can be optimized.
• tell everyone about it

the guys at webfaction updated their control panel to the latest TG

If you have an older installation the best way to upgrade will be to make a backup of your existing turbogears project, delete your current app from the panel and then add the new one.

Just go to “Applications” submenu set Turbogears (1.0b1) then link it on the “websites” submenu, wait a min so the server will refresh, while at it copy your app back to your $HOME/webapps/appdir and your done.IMO webfaction is the best thing out there for shared TG hosting their servers are reliable and their support is great, it’s a very nice service even as a testing/temporary environment.

check out their hosting plans and if your interesting sign up

if you really find this “article” interesting then give me some credit

keep up the good work guys, specially Remi

You got to hear this.

A little background this is a small part of FLOSS weekly, on the interview Chris Dibona, Leo Laporte and Jeremy Allison, now Jeremy is of Samba and they are talking about smb2 which is the new file transfer networking protocol for Vista (the thing under \\ and map drives,etc.

yes you hear it right 1500 packets to delete a file, and all of it just to BEEEEEP Samba.

here is a link to the full episode

http://www.twit.tv/floww14

PS: sorry I forgot to post this went It was relevant

In response to trackback

So you watch it I was totally impress by that video but I didn’t want to make it public because I can’t locate my publicist friend, I see this model as a very nice thing.

I believe the best part of the documentary is the challenge that is ahead of everyone of how those ads will still sell and not be intrusive.