Alejandro Barros is one of the few persistent bloggers from the crop that came up in 2005. His blog is one of the most important on technology in Latin America, and he has been kind enough to join this gang of “guest villains” who drop by to salute this blog’s anniversary. Thank you very much, Alejandro!

It’s LNDS’s birthday

By Alejandro Barros

www.alejandrobarros.com

A few days ago I received a welcome invitation to write a few lines for the seventh anniversary of Eduardo Díaz’s blog – La Naturaleza del Software (@lnds), an invitation I am grateful for and honored by.

I want to start by congratulating Eduardo on his perseverance in this business of writing and keeping up a blog, which is proven by how long he has been at it and by the more than 1,000 posts published. I say this from up close, since in my case it is something I enjoy a lot and to which I have also devoted many hours. I wonder: has Eduardo, with his permanent quest for metrics and algorithms, calculated the number of man-hours spent producing content (finding information, analyzing it, writing and reviewing the material before publishing) for his blog? And that is without counting the time that goes into building templates and improving the site. I leave that task to you, since I estimated it a while back and you could build several complex programs with it.

Going through Eduardo’s blog, what surprises you is his capacity to produce new entries (he even has days with two!), starting with very short posts like the one that opened his blog, “You can’t protect software”, back on August 1, 2005. Let me tell you, Eduardo, we started almost simultaneously; mine dates from June 23 of the same year. And as if one blog weren’t enough, Eduardo has two more, Akarru and La sombra de Dijkstra. How do you like that!

Eduardo and I have several things in common: engineering school, the world of technology, but above all a taste for ICTs ;-) and for taking on highly complex subjects in clear and easy language, probably keeping in mind that a good percentage of the Chilean population doesn’t understand what it reads.

Eduardo and I have a healthy and constructive argument going about ICTs, or should I say information technologies, given that I am a guest in his virtual space and, as the saying goes, when in Rome do as the Romans do. Another of the arguments we have had is more related to Eduardo’s optimism about the results of technology projects, which, starting from a post of mine, “How IT projects behave: they owe us! “, produced a reply from Eduardo with heavy artillery, What debt are you talking about?. When I read it I was tempted to write a comment along the lines of “touched a nerve, touched a nerve…”, but I preferred to let Eduardo carry on with his mistake!

On another occasion, without agreeing on it beforehand, we ran a relay to analyze the lack of seriousness and the improvisation of our authorities in changing the daylight saving date, Eduardo with his well documented post from late March 2011, “Time as a parameter”, which included an unfortunate tweet from the Minister of Public Works on the matter. I had addressed the subject in the post “The time change requires a deeper evaluation” from the same period. Well, Eduardo took that seriously and did the evaluation, showing fairly compelling evidence.

In all this time I have read many of his posts, but I clearly go with his tribute to Alan Turing, “The father of computing”, which I find remarkable.

Having read some of @lnds’s posts, I will venture to recommend him a couple of books. First, in connection with his entry “Atheist summer camp” from July 2009 and his taste for algorithms, I will venture to suggest a book for him to analyze and then post about: The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore. Or, to keep up his fondness for cryptography, I think a good choice is “The Code Book” by Simon Singh, a very entertaining and pleasant book on the evolution of cryptography from the dawn of humanity, when messages were tattooed on the scalp and the hair was left to grow back (there was more time for sending messages), up to today with quantum cryptography.

Many congratulations, and onward with your blogomania (or whatever this disease we suffer from is called)

☺

Alejandro Barros
another incorrigible blogger!