I have seen a pattern lately and I want to be sure it’s not just a coincidence.
About a year ago a friend of mine announced she was leaving to study a masters in Spain. Something is business as that’s what she studied. After that a dear friend of mine moved over to USA to work, then another business friend went to Spain, and another friend moved over to Argentina. I know someone that is planning on leaving to Australia and another for Canada. I know at least 3 more people that already left to USA. Yesterday yet another friend told me she was going to Spain for yet another master in business, and she is probably going to get married to her boyfriend and he is going to go with her. she also told me she knows a lot of people from our university are doing that too; and no, she doesn’t knows the first two that are already in Spain. Another ex-coworker is going to Spain soon although the time is not business as she is on IT. And I just read the girlfriend of the guy in Argentina is going to Spain.
That makes it at least 15 people I know that are doing i. Now what I find interesting is that all of them share the following. They where great students, they are great people, they excel at their work, and they are not thinking of coming back. They all belong to either IT or business administration, and it seems that business is going to Spain and IT to USA. Now what puzzles me is why? And I think it’s because they have reach the top in here. Not the top as in they are the big boss of their company or CEO, the top as there is nothing better to do than the boring day to day go nowhere maintenance of systems. (note both people and software systems). I’m almost certain most of them are not leaving because of the money, they know they will expend much more money and they won’t win that much, and some of them know how hard moving to another country can be. But I think they are just looking to get out of the loop.
WinMerge is wonderful for those souls that are still trap developing in windows.
Their “main” site is currently down but you can check it out later at winmerge.org.
Meld is another great app which I found ones I moved 100% to linux.
I really like them both but there is one feature that WinMerge has that I haven’t been able to reproduce in Meld. WinMerge has keyboard shortcuts for everything, so you do something like alt-down, alt left (can’t recall the exact commands) and that will go to the next diff and replace the right file with the left file. In Meld you have (or at least as far as I know) to do the same but with the mouse which makes it slower.
A smaller thing is that WinMerge is faster and I believe it’s both because it’s more mature and because it’s C++ while meld is python+GTK .
And of course Meld gets extra points for the cool effect to reflect changes.
I have been wanting to post about a couple of small apps, that I have been using. Which I think rock but not many people know them. So in no particular order here is the first .
InfraRecorder is what I dream of having for all those years I was using windows, ever since Nero crapped out it’s own UI, I think it was nero 5 or 6 when they redoit to make it idiot proved, which in most cases ruins the experience for the “advanced users”.
InfraRecorder is simple and usefull, the website is very ugly (default wordpress install) and the UI too but who wants a flashy UI if all you need is to burn a CD? Infra has 3 or 4 tabs each with 3 or 4 “links” you click. It was everything you will ever need; burn data, mp3 (with a plugin due to copyright), burn ISO, copy disk-to-disk and delete re-writables.
A warning: If you are trying to burn a CD with a DVD burner (always?) it gives you a dialog, which the first time I read confused me, it’s really asking you if you want to burn a CD or DVD and if you choose the wrong one it will ruin your disk.
This is something very cool, someone named Peter has been working on a driver for X to support multi touch, some of you may be saying 2006 call it want’s it’s really cool multitouch screen back, but let me tell you why this is different.
We don’t need gesture support in X. Gestures depend a lot on the context. A gesture in one context can mean something different in a different context. And the only thing that knows the context is the application. This is very similar to a button press. Pressing a mouse button can mean a zillion different things, depending where and when it happens. That’s why all X does is relay the button press to a client application, which then does the right thing.
Which in short means the X server will just send an event to the client, remember that in X terms the client is the Desktop Environment (gnome,kde,enlightenment) or the window manager (fluxbox,w3m, etc.).
To your multi-touch driver all this doesn’t matter. It sends blob events, the server takes care of the rest. You’re guaranteed to be able to interact with any X application. X doesn’t care about the hardware. You can use your DiamondTouch, your FTIR table or - if you can afford one - your MS Surface table.
which means that ANY application can work with multi-touch, in fact ones GTK gets support for BlobEvents all your program has to do is support one more event and process it.
Even better you can use the mouse and keyboard and multitouch all together as MPX is just another driver!
Full article here which is the cool part which is the reason why I’m not liking the video from here, so go read the artcle and watch it in action.
Just a quick note on a great interview. I really like Moore, I have to agree that sometimes he has a very narrow point of view, and a very cruel way of saying it, but he is right. As for the “introductory” piece by Dr whatever, that was just a low blow by CNN. Come on really how you introduce someone questioning his crediability. Anyway here is the video
UPDATE: here is the promised point-to-point response
I have added the subscribe to comments plugin (anyone could tell me if it’s working?), upgraded to wordpress 2.2.1 and I have a new theme which is supposed to be very nice to edit.
The Hindu proxy is a mecanish for tunneling connections over networks which have gone thru a certified stupid security (CSS) clearance which esencially blocks the normal networking tools, like ssh, telnet, http, et all.
1. Overview of operations
When a capable human being needs to access a resource block by a policy implemented by the CSS, he/she needs to connect to a hindu proxy in order to accomplish a task, such as running cat on a file.
The luser connect to any chat service which is pre-connected to the hindu proxy, and sends a hi request.
The hindu proxy replies with a random phrase which normally means hi.
The luser being should write a request for the server with the server, protocol, user and pass, which must be pass in clear text.
The process above needs to be repeated until the luser receives a valid ack.
The luser should send a series of shell commands which must be sequential and can’t be chained together, to which he must be sure won’t fail to be parsed by whatever shell environment the hindu proxy connected to, ways to determine the actual shell are left to the implementer and will vary from vendor to vendor.
The hindu proxy will have a buffer of 1 command which may not be longer than the current lenght of his chat window, overflows will be ignored or interpret as carriage returns.
The hindu proxy will copy&paste the request from the chat into the shell, the actual method is implementation dependant, as well as the handling of errors and overflows.
The hindu proxy will wait a random ammount of time for a response from the real server, after which it will send the response “it’s not working”
If the above timeout is never reach the hindu proxy will utilize the above copy@paste rutine to send the results back to the luser
2. Error handling
All errors reported by the server may or may not be proxied back to the luser
All errors reported by the hundi proxy may or may not be proxied back to the luser
All errors reported by the IM system may or may not be proxied back to the luser
3. The copy&paste protocol
The hindu proxy may implement several ways of transfering data, the recommended implementation is to relay the operation to the underliying operating system, although must implementations today utilze the “read,switchwindow,type” protocol
4. Security considerations
This protocol is vulnerable to the following:
- someone reading you IM window
- someone reading the hindu’s IM window
- the hindu leaving his workstation unlock
- anyone with access to the hindu workstation as the log files have read access to everyone by default
- Any sniffing software
In case you didn’t notice that was a joke, as per warchief request there is an editable version here
There are time when being ovidient bytes you in the ass.
For example the shell and rm, yes you know where I’m going. It turns out that the following command inside a makefile @rm -rf $(PREFIX)/bin/deluge does something really extrange. And yes it’s all my fault because I force it twice.
For some reason the r flag went to $(PREFIX)/bin and deleted everything, which I’m stil confused as to why.
ohh yes and $(PREFIX) was set to /usr, lovely isn’t it?
any ideas of how can I restore those files? I assume if I get the basic binaries for installing .deb it will show me the broken packages (read: all packages) then I could reinstall them all?
update: So I got a liveCD and reinstalled my / keeping intact the home, this is one of the things I love about unix, even my windows positions where intact all I had to do was use the same username.
