Entries Tagged 'life' ↓

In my daily surfing I found this great article The Dragon In My Garage by the excellent Carl Sagan.

Now based on that we can finally solve the issue of the Guy he listens X-Rays and sees ultrasound. For the ones not familiar with the subject here is a small recap. A while ago Ricardo was reading a book call Blindsight. In it one character (not even a secondary) was able to listen to X-Rays and see ultrasound, thru some implants that made him a Cyborg this develop a Holy war, with a smaller magnitude then the fact that vi kicks emacs ass.

One sides argument was that the only way that could ever be possible is that the implants let him transform the x-rays and ultrasound into something perceivable, for example it will emit a different sound for each length of the x-ray and therefore by relating sounds to lengths he could understand the patterns. But that the actual thing was not possible. The other sides argument was simple; the fact that it is not possible now doesn’t means it can’t be possible in the future. And I think Carl Sagan was on this side

What do you think?

So tomorrow is Independence day in the country where I live, no gringos it’s not 4 of July, and yes the rest of the world has an independence day too, and it’s not the same as yours.

I got two complains about this

• I have to come to”work”

• Why “holidays” are supposed to be free of work? Assuming this is because we’ll use the day to remember that glorious day in the pass where “we” <insert reason here> which in this case is “got rid of our invaders”. but that’s another post….

Going back to #1 in my “work” I get the 4 of July off, is it so I can do #2?, which gives an interesting match of what is actually happening… for some reason it reminded me the background story of Blood Diamond, a little side note, think about which of the last two links you clicked, to find out what I was talking about, you will need it later. History tells that the capitalist “west world” loves diamonds and some people in Africa found it to be a very good way to finance civil war, and the examples of how bad things can get are all over the place.

Now all that is ancient history it happen on the 20th century today people don’t kill each other because of ideals (they just take turns at power), today there is no slavery (just dead end jobs), today there is no mayor displacement of population (just the inability to go anywhere since a plane ticket cost half the salary of a “professional”), they are no external masters (just corporations), and of course people had hope for a better tomorrow (today people are happy with Conformism.

So what all has to do with independence day? Back then in 1844 people had ideals things where going to be done, progress was coming. We as a nation where going to new unexplored places. We where going to try something new and exiting and everything that was done wrong was going to be done right this time (well at least they though so). We will never have a new master, they said, we will not work for them because we are cheaper then manufacturing good on their native countries, our leaders will not make deals to give discounts to foreigners so they come to our country for profit, our national resources will not be exploited anymore, the crucial industries in our country will not be traded by foreigners without our goverment intervention, they will not abuse our women, we will be free. And they did until Apathy took over.

In my one of my firefox tabs today this showed up. Is a small article by the great scifi writter Isaac Asimov, which latter I found out was a great scientist too.

http://www.haverford.edu/writingprogram/Asimov.html

you may also want to check out jj’s post on another one of his great writtings. And of course http://www.asimovonline.com/

lets start with a wikiquote “in computer science, a user interface that allows navigation of objects with a connecting structure”, from Browser, Now most people when saying “browser” they refer to a Web Browser, now the only real difference is that the Web browser is specialized in reading html and anything related to it; therefore a web browser is just a UI to look at data, which if you look at it is the same thing most desktop applications do.

webapps now

Today webapplications are basicallly a db, and a logic layer that translate the db into something the web browser undestands. The best combination of this right now is implemented as xhtml + CSS with javascript async calls that return formatted XML that gets inserted by DOM manipulation into the original xhtml file, of couse the last part is the “heat” webapps are currently getting because today they are finally not slow.

Here are the current problems they have

• session management, the current implementation of this is very hackish
• offline access, most browsers suck at this and they can’t catch most data that is transfer today.
• of course 3D graphics is out of the question, since this is a whole new realm, although what could happen

webapps in the future

browsers are going to grow into more complex platforms the first steps are firefox extensions take something like flock which is a totally different app yet still firefox, or kupu that powers plone’s editor, look at it in action here (warning huge download) look at some of the most interesting extensions like allpeers

Now this is just the beggining lots of browsers are in the making like venice pro Joost, songbird and the democracy player to name a flew.

and many more will come…

So yes green IMO webapps are the future, it’s just that we don’t know what they are going to evolve into.

Elvis and Ivan I’m sorry to say this is stupid I think all I have to say is that I agree with green who posted the same comment to both your blogs.

Anyway this seem to me like a lame excuse because they didn’t had anything better to do, but now it seems a little more then that, Interesting enough the online poll said otherwise.

Ok, this is creppy.

I was at the supermarket the other day and saw “insert pic here” (sorry as my green friend puts it if I had a cell phone you’ll have a pic), but it should be listed here and I could only think about how stupid people can be, why they will buy a cash dispenser from a company that can’t even write a decent vote counting program.

I mean just the fact that it’s written in VB (actually it’s VB for applications (VBA), according to warchief) which is much worse, and even uses Microsoft’s Access as backend…. just ridiculous. Then according to the new video (link below) it has two tables: one that stores the “totals” and another on a per county basis. The best part of it is that if you change the totals table the program doesn’t even complain.

In case you don’t know why I’m scared, it means you haven’t watch HBO’s documentary Hacking Democracy. It was online at google videos but now it’s gone. Anyway, I found a video explaining the “hack” if you are interested (note the quotes), but this is too lame to be called a hack. And now this guys are going to handle my money… Isn’t that great?

• Playing that brand new old game that you love until 6am on a Sunday night …… $0 (in fact I haven’t even played that save game again)
• Be half sleeping/half aware for the rest of the day ………… $0 (jokes and laughs from your coworkers may end up in negative income
• Getting to work 1-2hours late for the rest of the week ……….. at least a month without getting pay for overtime
• Broken biological clock ……………………. $N where N is the ammount of money you will lose for each time you are sleeping instead of making some revenue
• Falling asleep at 9pm the day before your boss^3 and your boss^4 arrive on a 2 day visit to the country…………. $maybe some raise in the future
• Waking up at 12:48am that same day …………………… priceless

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?