Entries from March 2007 ↓

Because we like it.

Programmers love to be “in the edge”. I love to do that; on my gentoo system I’m constantly doing emerge -u world, and in ubuntu I’m always clicking the little orange icon. Now i’m fine with it if it affects me… but we live in a bigger world.

I remember one of the mottos of servers administration is “DO NOT UPGRADE”. Why? Simple. you don’t need it because what’s there now it’s working; and this is why you see production systems running OS versions from 2-3 or more years ago, and eventually they do upgrade but sysadmins know it’s a problem and try to avoid it.

Now if your working with other people you need to think before upgrading and more important ASK before doing it so you don’t break everyone’s code.

The reason I’m blogging  about this is that it has happen twice in the past month, ironically with the same platform. Without going into the details of why I disagree with your upgrade it’s a matter of form rather then the fact itself. In both cases I have had the same two answers:

1. because it’s better
2. because I had that installed (one admit it the other left it implicit)

When confronted for a explanation of #1 both gave a fussy reason, mostly linked to all the hype around how great it’s performance is, now in both cases this was premature optimization because the system hasn’t been run ones. No really neither system is in production and it needs at least 2 months of work before it can even hope to.

So what piss me off was #2 your imposing on me your “in the edge” without looking at the consequences in the last case. I’m100% sure the overall project lost at least 10 hours of productivity because of this, this is because they are all newbie, so think about the first time you ran some code compiled for JVM 1,x,y and ran it on JVM 1,x,w and you will see how it adds up correctly. Add to that having to re-target all your tools to run on top of the new JVM, or you forgot about your tomcat instance? yes you did since your email says classpath.

Now I’m fine from you running the kernel off Andrew Morton tree, compiling everything by hard (using -o9 if you still think that’s good), that’s fine I do it on some of MY stuff. but I do not expect everyone to keep up, and you shouldn’t too.

Some random quotes from some random friends (you know who you are), from

Why to Not Not Start a Startup

“The adult response to “that’s a stupid idea,” is simply to look the other person in the eye and say “Really? Why do you think so?””

“If you don’t think you’re smart enough to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. Enterprise software companies aren’t technology companies, they’re sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort.”

“make something great and not worry too much about making money.”

“Not having a cofounder is a real problem.”

“Find something that’s missing in your own life, and supply that need—no matter how specific to you it seems. Steve Wozniak built himself a computer; who knew so many other people would want them?”

“A lot of people look at the ever-increasing number of startups and think “this can’t continue.” Implicit in their thinking is a fallacy: that there is some limit on the number of startups there could be. But this is false.”

“9. Family to support

This one is real. I wouldn’t advise anyone with a family to start a startup. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, just that I don’t want to take responsibility for advising it.”

“ Like a lot of people that age, I valued freedom most of all. I was reluctant to do anything that required a commitment of more than a few months. ”

“If you start a startup that succeeds, it’s going to consume at least three or four years. (If it fails, you’ll be done a lot quicker.) So you shouldn’t do it if you’re not ready for commitments on that scale. Be aware, though, that if you get a regular job, you’ll probably end up working there for as long as a startup would take, and you’ll find you have much less spare time than you might expect. So if you’re ready to clip on that ID badge and go to that orientation session, you may also be ready to start that startup.”

“12. Need for structure

I’m told there are people who need structure in their lives. This seems to be a nice way of saying they need someone to tell them what to do. I believe such people exist. There’s plenty of empirical evidence: armies, religious cults, and so on. They may even be the majority.

If you’re one of these people, you probably shouldn’t start a startup. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even go to work for one. In a good startup, you don’t get told what to do very much. There may be one person whose job title is CEO, but till the company has about twelve people no one should be telling anyone what to do. That’s too inefficient. Each person should just do what they need to without anyone telling them.”

“Perhaps some people are deterred from starting startups because they don’t like the uncertainty.”

“One reason people who’ve been out in the world for a year or two make better founders than people straight from college is that they know what they’re avoiding. If their startup fails, they’ll have to get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.”

“And since most of what big companies do is boring,”

“At first it may seem cool to get paid for doing easy stuff, after paying to do hard stuff in college. But that wears off after a few months. Eventually it gets demoralizing to work on dumb stuff, even if it’s easy and you get paid a lot.”

“And that’s not the worst of it. The thing that really sucks about having a regular job is the expectation that you’re supposed to be there at certain times. Even Google is afflicted with this, apparently. And what this means, as everyone who’s had a regular job can tell you, is that there are going to be times when you have absolutely no desire to work on anything, and you’re going to have to go to work anyway and sit in front of your screen and pretend to. To someone who likes work, as most good hackers do, this is torture.”

“If you’re a founder, what you want to do most of the time is work.”

“A significant number of would-be startup founders are probably dissuaded from doing it by their parents. ”

“16. A job is the default

This leads us to the last and probably most powerful reason people get regular jobs: it’s the default thing to do. Defaults are enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any conscious choice.“

Currently I have several ways to watch a TV program

1. Wait for 7 days until the new episode is out, then watch it being cut by ads at the most crucial moments.
2. Wait for it to be air and then download the torrent, which will take at least 2-3 days more based on the length of my queue, given my super fat pipe of 512/128 kbps.
3. Ask someone to burn me a CD, or transfer the file from laptop to laptop, or desktop, whatever.
4. Wait for the season to be over and go to a friends house to get ALL the episodes and then waste a weekend watching them.
5. Wait for the DVD to come out and buy it online, then wait for it to be ship.
6. Wait until they pass it on local TV.

As you can see they are ordered by how much time passes in between when it’s becomes public to the time I can watch it. Also according to the maffia only the first and last two are legal, which is fine by me but here is a list of situations that although not legal in all countries are valid by human logic.

You miss the time for #1

This is the most normal thing that happens to be I just forgot about time, and in this country there is no tivo and no one in the world has VCRs anymore, and if I did I’ll probably forgot to program it to record, assuming someone ever learned how to record with one of those.

After this happens and to be compliant with the maffia you have to wait for #5 and #6, now DVD are better this day they are only out SIX! months after the season ends! and for local TV well I’ll probably have forgotten about the series by the time they get it.

so what can I do to watch that episode without missing the whole series?

Someone just told you about this cool TV series that he is watching and it’s at episode 12 out of 20

You can start watching it at episode 13 I mean it won’t matter if you have no idea how that blond girl is or why the killer wants to take over the powers of the others.

Or you could you sit in front of your friend so he will narrate the first 12 episodes, I’m sure he will do a great job at giving you every detail the original 12 hours he spend watching it had.

You want to watch a 1995 TV series because back then you missed a lot of episodes

Here maybe #6 will help you but they are probably translated by some horribly localized (not for your country) dialect of your native language.

You want to watch something from the BBC or other channel that is not on your cable provider

Sit and wait for the DVD that will never come out.

Two programs you love have the same schedule

In their infinite wisdom the marketing teams of both companies decide their best programs should be schedule at the same time so they will take out audience from their competitors.

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Now lets forget about “legal” for a minute.There is this new show in NBC it’s call The Black Donnellys. I watch the first episode and I told the story to JJ, later that day green IM me saying he wants to watch it. So I downloaded the episode so they both could see it. Conclusion I watch it legally and now I’m going to get them two more viewers for their next episode. why is that bad?Another example shows from the BBC like hustle that I love to watch and no channel transmits it where I live, by the way why o why the only give 6 episodes a year!!

Or showtime which last time I check was block for viewers outside of USA.

And of course Comedy Central which is the channel that I miss the most. And I get all the standup from a torrent.

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So please if you have anything to do with TV production could you go to the maffia and tell them to stop killing your audience and start finding ways of making you win money on the new market?

A nice video my cousing send me the other day.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3014637678488153340

I know a LOT of people have said the same thing before, but jobs has a great way of talking. Ohh by the way it has spanish subtitles if you care about it…

Hi

If your reading this is probably because of a link on my gtalk and/or msn account, just to make that clear this is my blog, the link is for the ones that do not know what a blog is; yes I like to do that a lot. Anyway I have you here to see if I can score a reader so let me tell you what this is about. we’ll actually that is what the about page is supposed to be for.

First I have to clarify why write in English and it’s basically a two part thing

• I have always said that technology’s language is English specially if we are talking about computers. I believe this is because of three things: in English making up new words is really easy, second USA has been in the peek of tech in the last century and this one is more of a consequence, by the time books are translated to spanish they are probably obsolete.
• With both my interest in software and my day job (in software) lately I have been thinking in english more then spanish.

what I normally talk about? in no particular order, well that’s what tags are for here are the more populated ones so far

• life, this is basically some reflection about something that happen it could be news or a conversation that got me thinking articles here are normally not programming related
• work, this is a two fold one is my current work
• work in air quotes, over here some stuff that should really not happen it’s my own personal version of dailyWTF, which recently was renamed to Worst Then Failure
• any name that sounds like a product (trac,TurboGears,xgl,gentoo,ubuntu,wordpress,etc.) those are normally code or usage of the program
• all the other are small things but may be worth it, just check out the archive.

So yes it sounds a bit too technical but there is no point in blogging about my dog, for those of you I got two suggestions: learning tech stuff won’t hurt you in fact it will help you in your carrier, a veterinarian that know how to hack perl is a very good assert for someone that knows what perl is. Second I’m working on an idea for a less centric community blog but I’m waiting for someone to come up with a name for it.

In general this place is good for knowing what I’m up to, in fact if you read carefully you can figure out what I’m working on, also do not expect a lot of post if you want crap just add digg to your feeds. Ahhh yes very important since your new here let me introduce you to the magic of RSS you first need an RSSreader i highly recommend google reader then you need to add the feed, after that your done. The beauty of RSS is that you get personal notifications of new stuff but without spam so it’s better then email, and you also don’t have to see the crappy layouts people use, (like this site) all you get is the content, also it’s better then just going to sites because it will stack up until you either read or delete the items, so you can pile up several articles and read them when you want. I can only tell you how RSS is good for me but you have to try it to see why it has because the application that I use the most. and yes those little orange icons ALL webpages have today are links to the feeds.

lastbutnotleastalittledisclaimerifyoucanreadthisitmeansyourgettingwhat itsays

sopleasetakethecontentbywhatitisgrammarisoverrated… so yea I better write then think the correct way, if your not comfortable with that sue me, that is why this is my blog. I have always hated having to stop and think if foo was spell correctly, now I know you have valid points but think of the keyboard it was made to be messy so it will slow you down. I consider the same for grammar.

oh by the way PR stands for public relationships. read: buzzword for talking to people, almost forgot if you do have a blog leave me a link

Check out this interesting post Immutability doesn’t guarantee thread safety I guess we all have to worry about thread even corrupting our data (even more then before).

I just came across this yesterday, it seems to be a Ubuntu packed with a LOT of extra software, it has everything you will possibly need for watching videos, programming, downloading stuff and all the timewasting taks you normally do this seems like a great candidate for showing Linux to new people.

take a look at Ubuntu Ultimate

I just found out today that our BeerHouse was worth less then the ground it was build on. I guess this means we need a new place to take our default: clause.

More important now I have no idea how to see the waitress I like again, crap … ohh well so is life.

if anyone knows of they move or something please let me know in the comments.

I read this small post from FuManChu, in case you don’t know him he is the guy that gave us cherrypy3.0 I’m not sure if he was directing that to someone I know it wasn’t me :p But It got me thinking….

I guess my answer will be

You’re writting a program that will work forever, and I want to be homeless for the rest of my life.

by the way thanks Robert for CP3. TG2 will not be possible without it.

miniature-earth
Best Solar-Power Commercial Ever?

hate machine

in my language

crazy surfers
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Influences