La Naturaleza del Software

New look, same blog

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 20:00:00 -0300

The blog has a new look, and there’s something else new: from now on the posts will be in English too. I’m translating the back catalog with the help of AI, so my apologies in advance.

This is how I write these days: I write the draft entirely myself, with no help from AI. I use AI to research, to fix grammar and spelling, and to translate.

I’ll be reviewing the translations too, but they will be mostly machine-generated text, so bear with me. You can always open a PR against the blog’s repo to propose changes, or open an issue. The address is: https://github.com/lnds/lnds-blog

Stop believing everything a random guy on Twitter (X) says

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:00:00 -0300

Gil Gerard, an eighties actor who starred in the sci-fi series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, realized how much potential there was in exploiting a large fan base. It was already happening with Star Trek conventions, and he suggested to his colleague and co-star Erin Gray that she book him at sci-fi conventions in exchange for a 10% cut.

Erin Gray and Gil Gerard, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979).

The weekend I never had

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:14:55 -0400

This week I canceled two services I was subscribed to. I usually have annual subscriptions to services like Dropbox or Microsoft 365. That last one I signed up for several years ago while my kids were in school, and the truth is I kept it out of inertia.

These days you don’t just feel like canceling these services because of how expensive they’ve gotten, but also because you no longer need them. In my case, everything these services gave me I now replace with Claude. I’m tempted to say that the only software-as-a-service subscription I need is Claude.

Simple programming with kaikai

Thu, 21 May 2026 10:00:00 -0300

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.” — Edsger Dijkstra

In the previous post I covered the method: how to build a complete compiler in a month while life goes on. But I deliberately didn’t talk about the language. The reason was very simple: the month wasn’t up yet. Today is the day.

I set out to build, in one month and using AI, a complete compiler for a language I’ve been designing for more than 10 years. Was the experiment a success? I think so, but there are nuances and lessons that I’ll leave for the next post. Sorry for telling you the whole story in installments, but first things first, and right now I want to introduce the language.

The method matters more than the model

Sun, 17 May 2026 10:00:00 -0300

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, defined AGI as the stage where the use of AI has a massive impact on world GDP. For Altman, success is the arrival of the first one-person unicorn: a company run by a single individual and valued at a billion dollars.

Both views are narrow, typical of CEOs thinking about money and about pleasing investors. What about the contribution to humanity? Or to knowledge? Or to curing cancer? Nothing.

I humbly decided to run an experiment and set a different goal, one that’s more useful to me at least. I was also spurred on by a conversation with Pedro Burón about how much AI amplifies you as a software developer.

The goal I set is more specific, and confined to the world of software engineering: can a single person do the work of a team of 5 to 10 engineers, a year or two’s worth of it, in just one month?

To make it concrete I set out to build a compiler for a language I’ve been designing for years (a spiritual heir to Ogú). And the compiler doesn’t just have to run: it has to generate native code, be fast, and compile over 90% of the language, in one month. It’s an experiment along the lines of what I described in Fake it till you make it, when I put together a transpiler for Ogú in 60 hours, but more ambitious this time. And the result is almost ready. The target is May 21, but you can already see it and start trying it out: the links are at kaikai-lang.org.

But this post isn’t about the language or its compiler. It’s about the method that let me do this alongside my day job, while one of my sons was getting married and I was teaching at the university. To tell the whole story I have to talk about the methods for developing with AI that have been settling out over these past months. Get comfortable, this is a long one.

Your agents need a boss

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0300

You probably think you’ll install Claude, the AI will solve all your problems, and you’ll finally have time to work on raising your Elo on chess.com.

But no, “sweetie”, that’s not how it works.

AI doesn’t solve your problems, you solve problems with AI. And this simple distinction is lost on a lot of people. Especially on some clueless executives who promise their bosses spectacular productivity gains. Or the promise of doing more with fewer people.

Advanced procrastination

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0300

There’s a form of procrastination that is especially treacherous because it disguises itself as work. It’s not sitting around watching Netflix. It’s not scrolling Bluesky. It’s spending three hours configuring the task management system that’s going to help you be productive.

You’ve surely done it. I’ve practiced it for decades, and I’m afraid I’ve just reached its most sophisticated form.

It’s what I call “advanced procrastination”.

Time passes either way, whether you configure or not. Photo by John Hult on Unsplash.

Building my own agent

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0300

A little over a month ago I wrote about the power of agents. In that post I described how I was experimenting with OpenClaw, an open source agent that promised to be “the AI that actually does things”. I also talked about the mastery it takes to orchestrate these tools, the digital divide they create, and the security risks they carry.

Update: I stopped using OpenClaw and decided to build my own agent.

Kimun: measuring the quality of AI-generated code

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 10:00:00 -0300

“You can’t control what you can’t measure.” – Tom DeMarco

There’s an old fear in our profession. It isn’t new, but AI amplified it: how do I know the code I’m generating is any good?

It’s a legitimate question. When you ask an AI agent to write you a function, a complete module or even an entire project, you’re delegating decisions you used to make line by line. And yes, the result may compile, pass the tests and even look elegant. But is it maintainable? Is it too complex? Does it have hidden duplication? Will you understand it in six months?

The answer can’t be an act of faith. It has to be a measurement.

The power of agents

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:30:00 -0300

As I write this, I have two Claude agents working on a personal open source project. One is reviewing vulnerabilities and architecture problems. The other is writing a couple of new features. And yes, there’s a third agent helping me structure and proofread this post.

It’s not science fiction. It’s Wednesday.

It sounds like privilege. And it is. But stick around, because this story doesn’t end where you think.

I’ve been using Claude Code for months, and one thing becomes obvious over time: the quality of the output depends directly on your mastery as an orchestrator. Asking the AI for things isn’t enough. You have to know what to ask for, how to structure the context, and when to step in.

Ralph Wiggum and the end of software engineering

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 08:00:00 -0300

“Me fail English? That’s unpossible!” — Ralph Wiggum

Ralph Wiggum is the son of Springfield’s police chief in the animated series The Simpsons. I’m telling you in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 35 years (or never turned on a TV tuned to Canal 13 in Chile).

Little Ralph is, let’s say, a special kid. His naivety borders on the absurd, but every now and then he drops a line that reveals an unexpected truth. “Me fail English? That’s unpossible!” is one of his most famous: the sentence proves exactly what it denies.

Judgment and taste

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:00:00 -0300

“Those 10,000 hours you spent becoming a great programmer aren’t useless at all. They’re what give you the two things that actually matter now: judgment and taste.” — Obie Fernandez

I’m sure that, like me, you’ve shipped code to production that you didn’t fully understand.

If you’re a programmer in 2026 and you say this has never happened to you, either you’re lying or you’re not using the tools available. The question isn’t whether we use AI to generate code. The question is whether we understand what we’re deploying.

Toys

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 10:00:00 -0300

A few years ago I started a tradition: around this time of year I post photos of toys I’ve been collecting and that keep me company in my workspace.

The idea is for us to share in the comments those fun accessories that keep us company all year long.

This Christmas my family surprised me with this beautiful AT-AT, which I’ll have to make room for on my desk.

You don't have to impress anyone

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 11:00:00 -0300

I don’t know if this happened to you in college: sometimes you had an exam and the professor told you that during it you could use all your notes and even bring whatever books you wanted.

It happened to me. I had an epic exam that I walked into in the morning and must have walked out of some 8 or 9 hours later. It was on design with microprocessors. They gave us three insane designs. I think we even had to write the microcode, but I don’t remember the details. Despite that torture, that course was one of my favorites.

The technical interview in the AI era

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 11:00:00 -0300

The Argentine rock band Los Enanitos Verdes have a song that says “adding up time isn’t adding up love”, and the same applies to work experience. Having worked for many years doesn’t make you “senior”.

What makes you a senior developer is gaining relevant experiences, ones that have made you grow as a professional. I know plenty of people who have accumulated time, but not experience.

That’s why a job interview shouldn’t consist only of going over the résumé and asking questions. You have to see whether a “juggler knows how to juggle”, as I wrote in 2010.

Agentic programming and the plotter style

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 10:00:00 -0300

Jorge Castaño, in his newsletter “Vivir del Software”, puts forward two interesting concepts: “spec-driven development” and “parallel programming”. I found the proposal interesting, but reading it closely, it seemed to me that both concepts fall under the umbrella of what I call the plotter style.

To me, parallel programming with AI agents is, in essence, a way of making the plotter style more efficient. It’s doing what people who plan before coding have always done, but with an orchestra of AIs performing the scores they wrote, to follow Castaño’s metaphor.

Maps or compasses

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:31:00 -0300

When I posted on LinkedIn that I didn’t believe in “prompt engineering”, a debate broke out. One person even took it upon himself to explain to me the importance of the various branches of software engineering, because surely I considered those useless too. As if my skepticism about this neologism amounted to dismissing decades of accumulated knowledge in our discipline.

That’s what happens on social media: from a single post, which may have its flaws, someone forms a mistaken idea of what you say and, worse, of who you are. So instead of continuing to argue with trolls and pedants, I’m going to try to explain myself better.

Captive science: the Timnit Gebru case and censorship in Big Tech

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 22:06:55 -0300

“Have you ever heard of someone getting ‘feedback’ on a paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR? Or does it just happen to people like me who are constantly dehumanized?”

— Timnit Gebru, in an internal email to Google Brain, November 2020

On December 2, 2020, while the tech industry was celebrating the advances of GPT-3 and the boom in massive language models, a tweet set off a crisis that revealed just how far Big Tech had come to control AI research. Timnit Gebru, an Ethiopian researcher out of Stanford and co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, announced she had been fired. The reason: daring to question the headlong race toward ever-larger models.

Software engineering as a technology

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 10:00:00 -0400

“Software engineering: not just process but technology.” That’s how Bertrand Meyer predicted in 2010 what programming would look like a decade later.

Fifteen years on, that prediction resonates with an irony Meyer probably didn’t anticipate. You know how it goes: better not to make predictions, or, if we want to be safe, follow Alan Kay’s advice: rather than predict it, invent it.

The original vision

In that presentation, Meyer talked about transforming software engineering from a set of practices and methodologies into a technology in its own right. His vision included integrated verification, ubiquitous web interfaces, pervasive concurrency.

The end of artisanal software

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 10:00:00 -0400

Recently a colleague described a certain company by saying its development process was “very artisanal”, and it wasn’t a compliment.

The artisanal paradox

It’s curious how the same word can carry such opposite connotations. When we buy artisanal beer or artisanal furniture, we pay extra, because we expect superior quality, premium as they say these days.

Artisanal implies care, attention to detail, superior quality. Every piece is unique, made with dedication by expert hands.

Agent Code, Claude Code

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 09:10:03 -0400

The word agent has become fashionable in the tech-AI underworld. But the truth is that it often gets slapped on tools that aren’t really artificial intelligence agents at all.

The definition of an agent is an old one: an entity that perceives its environment, acts autonomously to meet the goals or objectives it is given, learns, and improves its performance.

Today there are AI services on offer called agents that are really just orchestrators and executors of workflows. Building an agent that lives up to the definition is still a major challenge.

20 years

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 08:36:43 -0400

This blog turns 20 today.

On August 1, 2005, I published the first official post of La Naturaleza del Software (The Nature of Software).

It was the blog boom. Social networks were still a few years away from showing up and ruining our digital lives.

There aren’t many of us left in Chile who still keep a personal blog. And if I’m not mistaken, along with Alejandro Barros’s, this is one of the oldest blogs in our country.

Trust the process

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 18:38:58 -0400

There’s a paradox many of us have noticed: a couple of years ago the end of programmers was announced, but it turns out that the people now spending the most on AI are these very professionals.

Will programming disappear?

The short answer is no. The long answer is this: programming is not coding. Coding agents, like the ones I’ve mentioned, help you with only one part of the development process.

For a few tokens more

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 09:10:15 -0400

At my current job several of my colleagues use Cursor. I downloaded it but never got around to installing it.

I abandoned Visual Studio Code a long time ago and I wasn’t going back to a clone just to bring AI into my workflow. As I already told you, I was using Neovim, and I didn’t want to move from there, but the plugins didn’t convince me, and neither did the idea of a copilot writing code for me. I tried Avante for a while, and that’s when I configured it to use the API keys for ChatGPT and Claude.

To vibe or not to vibe, that is the question

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 08:13:42 -0400

Last year I taught an online workshop at a bootcamp on advanced algorithms and data structures.

It was three classes, and in one of them I talked about streaming algorithms. When I say “streaming” you surely think of something like Netflix or YouTube, but no, what I talked about was back pressure techniques, sketching algorithms, that kind of thing.

But I couldn’t leave my students without showing them how video streaming is done, so I wrote a simple program in Go that did “video streaming”, and showed it to them. That program was the seed of a personal project.

In the beginning was the command line

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 18:46:02 -0400

In his essay “In the Beginning… Was the Command Line” (1999), Neal Stephenson argues that the GUI is a layer of abstractions wedged between humans and the way computers actually operate.

One GUI that’s very popular among programmers is the IDE, the Integrated Development Environment, as we call it. It exists because programming kept getting more and more complicated. Especially with the rise of frameworks, and worse, with enterprise development patterns. A classic example is an enterprise Java application.

What we've forgotten about the internet

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 10:18:42 -0300

I got up today fully in the mood to write. Almost four months have gone by since the last entry on this blog.

So I headed to the terrace to sit down and write, and the first problem was that our table was taken up by soil, flowerpots and succulents my wife is getting ready. OK, no room, I’ll set up somewhere else.

After making coffee and procrastinating on Twitter for a while, only to end up reading something about Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, I remember that my idea was to catch up on the blog, so I open the lid of my laptop.

Margaret Hamilton, the first SRE

Sun, 24 Jul 2022 12:37:33 -0400

A few weeks ago I was a guest on the podcast “Había una vez un Algoritmo” (“Once Upon an Algorithm”), hosted by Camilo Chacón Sartori ( you can listen to the interview at this link: https://algoritmo.buzzsprout.com/758831/10810042).

During the interview Camilo asked me about a figure from the computing world whom I admire. And after weighing several alternatives, I expressed my growing admiration for Margaret Hamilton.

I found it curious that Camilo said he didn’t know much about her, but the truth is that almost certainly anyone who knows something about Margaret Hamilton knows it because of this photograph:

Interoperability and security

Mon, 16 May 2022 15:55:20 -0400

In his talk for “El Congreso del Futuro”, Chile’s annual science and ideas conference, the renowned expert Bruce Schneier gives us six lessons on cybersecurity:

Most software is poorly written and insecure. And the main reason behind this is economic. Nobody invests the time or resources to write quality software.
The internet was never designed with security in mind. The internet was an experiment, a network for academic and research purposes, which, thanks to the push of a few Silicon Valley entrepreneurs at the end of the last century, became the platform where much of today’s e-commerce and social networks developed. But in its beginnings nobody considered that it would be used for these purposes, and so it lacked a lot of security infrastructure. That has improved over time, but there’s still a way to go.
The extensibility of systems enables new attacks. Software is extensible, and we often allow that extensibility in order to gain future flexibility; the flip side of this property is that it can be used to exploit vulnerabilities.
Complexity makes attack easier than defense. Software is ever more complex and interconnected, and those complexities only keep growing. The attack surface, the number of exposed points that can fail or be used to attack us, increases every day.
There are new vulnerabilities in the interconnections. And this is what I’m going to talk about in detail in this article. But it’s obvious that in a more interconnected and complex world the job of defending those interconnections grows.
Attacks keep getting better, easier and faster. Today it’s possible to automate these attacks, even to outsource them. There are more and more cybercriminals with better tools for carrying them out.

For a couple of years now I’ve been teaching a course on web and mobile application security for a cybersecurity master’s program. Along with teaching the classics of the subject, I explain to my students some principles that have shaped modern software development. In some cases, these fundamentals have had consequences that turn into vulnerabilities we need to understand, or at least be aware of, so we can take the proper precautions.

Nomads

Sun, 24 Apr 2022 11:35:58 -0400

We thought the pandemic and the lockdowns were taking us into a dystopian world, but the experience made us realize that being locked up for two or more hours in a car or on the subway, and spending more time at the office than with our families, was the real dystopia.

I remember that years ago a colleague, or maybe a manager where I worked, said it was important to look after the work climate and keep a harmonious environment because, after all, we spent more time at work than in our own homes.

Con artists

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 12:22:16 -0300

The pleasure Hermann Göring must have felt contemplating the painting “Christ and the Adulteress”, by Johannes Vermeer, can only be compared to the chill he must have felt handing over the nearly two million guilders he paid for it (almost seven million of today’s dollars).

We don’t know whether he ever hung the painting in some hall or office, or whether he got to show it to the Führer himself. Maybe he meant to give it to him, or sell it to him. The fact is that the work was hidden in a salt mine in Austria.

Developers, developers, developers...

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 19:30:44 -0300

Even though it became a meme, and we all laughed at him, it looks like Ballmer was right. We need more and more developers. More and more, and that need doesn’t look like it will drop for many years, despite the heroic claims of the Low Code and No Code fans, and the recent developments in automatic programming using AI.

Let’s do an exercise. Suppose a developer writes, on average, between 20 and 100 useful lines of code a day, depending on the programming language, of course. The truth is they read and edit (add and delete) probably more lines than that. But let’s set an average value, say 60 lines of useful code, and then penalize that average down to 40, because not every day is that “productive”.

Plasticity

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 12:20:00 -0300

Have you heard the old saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Well, it’s not true. Of course you can learn, and a lot.

I, at least, have learned tons this year, and from people much younger than me.

My father used to say that we are always learning, that even at the moment of our death we learn about one of the greatest mysteries of our existence.

55

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 11:02:07 -0300

Over the years I’ve come to understand that when I’ve let go, when I’ve stopped chasing ambitious plans, when I stop desperately searching for something, that’s when I get what I really need and want.

I’ve learned that if you give, you get much more back. It sounds like I’m writing one of those motivational spiels people post on their Facebook or Instagram walls, but it’s what I feel right now.

Books of the month: October 2021

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 11:41:10 -0300

We continue with the log of the books I’ve read this year, this time covering the month of October. Here goes the list. I’ve been thinking of publishing a list of recommended books at the end of the year, so stay tuned.

October 2021 reading

Machines Like Me - Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is, supposedly, one of the most important British writers since 1945, according to The Times. If so, it doesn’t show in this novel. Honestly one of the most uneven things I’ve read in a while. I felt almost cheated. Because there’s an interesting promise. It’s a kind of alternate history in which Alan Turing hasn’t died and artificial intelligence gets developed many decades earlier, so that by 1982 intelligent androids already exist.

FOMO

Thu, 04 Nov 2021 12:01:26 -0300

Dune’s AI-free world

“We learned a negative thing from computers, that the setting of guidelines belongs to humans, not to machines.”

“Eventually humans became little more than decisionless robots themselves, left without an understanding of their natural existence.”

– Quotes taken from “Legends of Dune: The Butlerian Jihad”, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

It’s an interesting coincidence in timing: the release of the new film version of Dune and the launch of the Metaverse by Facebook (or Meta).

The principles of agile

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 10:08:07 -0300

The principles of lust
Are burnt in your mind
Do what you want
Do it until you find Love
– Enigma

When we start adopting agile, the usual thing is to focus on the four values, you know, the ones that say:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That’s all very well, but I’ve seen organizations that claim to adopt agile without respecting those values. The classic example is the violation of the first value: instead of encouraging interaction between individuals, teams are told to adopt SCRUM and use JIRA, imposing a process and a tool.

Books of the month: August and September

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 11:12:07 -0300

I’ve been struggling to write on this blog. I think I need to organize my time and carve out room to publish my notes and ideas, and we’re working on that. Meanwhile, to keep the muscle in shape, here’s the update on my monthly reading, which I promised to log in this journal. If you want to go through all the previous books, you can find them at this link to the category: https://lnds.net/en/category/books-of-the-month/.

How to learn to program in a new language

Sun, 05 Sep 2021 11:25:13 -0300

I recently came across this tweet:

JavaScript is difficult to learn but easy to master.

Python is easy to learn but difficult to master.

That's the tweet.
— Michael Asiedu (@MichaelAsiedu_) September 4, 2021

(JavaScript is difficult to learn but easy to master. Python is easy to learn but difficult to master)

And to a certain extent it’s quite true. At least as far as Python goes.

It turns out Python has a very simple syntax and can be learned in a few hours, but there are loads of details you only pick up over the years.

Sixteen years

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 19:33:19 -0400

What were you up to when you were sixteen?

In some countries, at sixteen you can already get a driver’s license, or even vote, and you can even be held criminally responsible. Most likely you were finishing high school.

Sixteen is a very important number for systems programmers. We use it as a base for writing numbers because it makes the translation to binary easier. Sixteen is the atomic number of sulfur. It’s used to set the number of participants in many sports tournaments. The last king of France before the Revolution was the sixteenth Louis. Sixteen is the number of hours we spend awake each day.

Books of the month: June and July

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 11:58:04 -0400

I was remembering today that blogs were originally something like digital diaries, or personal logbooks. The term comes from WebLog, that is, a log on the web, later shortened into the neologism Blog. So since this is my personal log, it makes a lot of sense to keep up this record of the books I’ve read.

Of course, the cadence I originally promised was one post a month with my reading for the period, which I’ve had a hard time keeping up: that’s two posts in a row now that hold the lists for two months. Oh well, something to improve, just like how often I write for this log.

I remember when all this was fields

Sun, 11 Jul 2021 13:16:56 -0400

"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards" -- Soren Kierkegaard

Several interesting things have happened at Cornershop, as I’m sure many of you already know. The other day, in the relevant Slack channel, we got word of a particular milestone for Chile, and along with the congratulations one coworker’s comment was: “I remember when all this was fields” :smile:.

The funny thing is that when I read it I was literally out in the fields.

Books of the month: April and May

Sun, 30 May 2021 11:58:12 -0400

I committed to keeping this log of the books I read each month, and I skipped April, so let’s catch up with this post.

Writing these reviews helps me synthesize and remember what I’ve read. You can read to learn, or to have a good time, but also, at least in my case, to teach. This year I’m teaching undergraduates for the first time, so I picked several of these books to keep my knowledge current in cybersecurity and software engineering, which is mainly what I’ve been teaching. So here’s the list.

Equilibrium and software entropy

Sun, 16 May 2021 10:49:02 -0400

This is the second article in this series, where I’m digging into the concept of software entropy.

To keep going I picked a very simple exercise, taken from Project Euler. That site has a list of problems meant to be solved in any programming language you like. We’ll take number one, which says:

“If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Let's talk about software entropy

Sat, 08 May 2021 12:37:49 -0400

There’s an important problem in software engineering that I’ve devoted part of my time to for at least the last four or five years. It’s an idea, or an intuition, that for now we’ll call “software entropy”. And to get the conversation going, I’ll show you some tweets and memes:

Explaining legacy code to new employees pic.twitter.com/pfXnNK5FMI
— Jen Gentleman 🌺 (@JenMsft) April 2, 2021

Maintaining the monolith. pic.twitter.com/cmnogXqh6n
— Allen Holub. https://linkedIn.com/in/allenholub (@allenholub) April 4, 2021

Books of the month: March 2021

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 20:10:32 -0300

As promised, at the end of each month I’ll post the books I read during the period. So without further ado, here are the books for March 2021.

The Murderbot Diaries

It’s actually 4 books:

- All Systems Red
- Artificial Condition
- Rogue Protocol
- Exit Strategy

They’re short, easy reads (novellas) that are part of this series by the writer Martha Wells. It’s a saga in a cyberpunk/space style.

Why and how to manage knowledge

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 12:04:23 -0300

There’s a story, probably apocryphal¹, that says Frederick II of Prussia, having been told of the virtues of the potato, the tuber brought over from the Americas, orders his subjects to plant them and feed on them. The people obey their emperor’s order, but when they eat the plants they get sick. That’s when the ruler realizes the mistake and decides to help them by explaining how the potato is supposed to be eaten.

iPad is my copilot

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 14:00:44 -0300

Until recently I thought of the iPad as a tool for consuming content more than as something that helped my productivity. It’s cool to own an iPad, but it’s still an expensive gadget to use only for consuming content from the web. Despite the sound and the image quality, I wasn’t comfortable with the use I was giving it. On the other hand, I’ve owned a few earlier iPad models with the idea of using them at work or when I was studying, to take notes and all that. Even as a tool for drafting my blog posts.

Books of the month: January and February 2021

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 12:17:22 -0300

Reading is very important to me. I read a lot, and about all sorts of things. Like many readers, I also buy books that end up sitting there gathering dust, or taking up space on my Kindle. For years I’ve used Good Reads to keep track of the books I read, and I rate them while I’m at it, but I’m terrible at writing reviews of them, which I should do, since that’s the whole idea of the app, which also works as a social network.

The breadth of your knowledge, the depth of your ignorance

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 10:14:09 -0300

As we know, There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

– Donald Rumsfeld

I don’t know if there was ever some glorious era when it was possible to know everything about computing. Maybe a few noble founding fathers of our discipline, like Turing or von Neumann, had that privilege, but even then I doubt it.

Goodbye Stranger

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 09:31:34 -0300

It was an early morning yesterday
I was up before the dawn
And I really have enjoyed my stay
But I must be moving on
– “Goodbye Stranger”, Supertramp

Friday was my last day of work at Previred. It was twelve years, which means I was part of that organization for more than half of its life.

I had never stayed that long in a job. The years went by so fast, and I was having so much fun with what I was doing, that I didn’t notice.

The complexity your boss ignores

Sun, 04 Oct 2020 09:48:32 -0300

There is a very fitting metaphor for what happens in many companies when it comes to the view held by those who run them. People talk about the “Iceberg Effect”.

We know that when we look at an iceberg we only see one part, the part above the surface, which is barely a tenth of the real size of the block of ice.

Ernest Hemingway, the famous American writer, coined the concept of the Iceberg Theory, also known as the Theory of Omission¹.

If it's Chilean, is it good?

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 09:40:23 -0400

During this pandemic I’ve made a series of purchases to improve my work setup at home. Fortunately I have the space and the means to invest in the ergonomics of my little “digital factory”. So I started investing in assorted gadgets and accessories.

Over time I realized that buying outside Chile was faster and safer for me. The delays and the uncertainty in product deliveries, along with some unpleasant moments, pushed me down that road. Even on cost, including the higher price of fast shipping, it works out better. It seems the only thing Chilean retail is good at is charging you.

Twenty-nine years of Linux

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 09:17:18 -0400

Linux turns twenty-nine today.

Strictly speaking there are two Linux celebrations. The one on August 25 marks Linus Torvalds’s original announcement on the comp.os.minix newsgroup:

Hello everybody out there using minix –
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them 🙂
Linus
PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

The second celebration is October 5, when he made the first public release of the code.

Best practices for managing your code

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 07:49:55 -0400

Keeping communication flowing is one of the biggest challenges when we work on a team, or on an open source project. One thing that helps is maintaining a set of standards, or common practices, that make communication and shared understanding easier.

For years now, open source communities have adopted a set of very simple but powerful practices that help them manage their code better.

Among these there are a few that I think every kind of development team should adopt.

Fifteen

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 14:18:49 -0400

Without my noticing, this blog turned fifteen.

That’s a long time. Apart from Alejandro Barros’s blog, which started earlier, I don’t know of another Chilean blog this old (if anyone knows of one, let me know).

Despite the irregular schedule, this blog is still alive, still gets visited and linked to, and has a healthy and loyal audience.

I’ve written so many things on this blog that putting together an anthology is hard. Not counting this one, there are 1024 posts (a round number :wink:), but I’ll try to recommend a couple of articles per year:

Schrödinger's cruelty

Sun, 19 Jul 2020 13:56:54 -0400

A while ago I ran into this funny post on Twitter, from the Richard Feynman tribute account:

Meanwhile, inside the box, Schrödinger's cat plans its revenge. pic.twitter.com/DTmjuaCTCH
— Prof. Feynman (@ProfFeynman) July 17, 2020

(Meanwhile, inside the box, Schrödinger’s cat plots its revenge)

If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t understand why Schrödinger’s Cat has become a pop culture meme, let me explain what it’s about.

In a moment of wicked creativity, after a long exchange of letters with Albert Einstein, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed the famous thought experiment that bears his name.

Diversity in software development: we're in bad shape!

Sun, 31 May 2020 11:20:51 -0400

On May 27 the popular site StackOverflow published the results of its 2020 survey of software developers.

StackOverflow is a very popular site in the software development world. For those who don’t know it, it’s an open question-and-answer forum, built in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, two famous and influential IT bloggers.

The original idea was to create a question-and-answer site for software developers that used a reputation and recognition mechanism to determine the best answer. Over time the site became a heavily used reference for developers all over the world, who turn to it to find answers to their most common problems.

Let's get to work

Sat, 23 May 2020 11:43:22 -0400

In these days of pandemic, remote work and quarantine, besides changing a number of habits, we’ve been spending a lot more time with our families. That’s the bright side of this whole situation.

One of those shared activities is watching TV. It used to be very rare for us to turn on the TV at home to watch a cable channel, but these days, besides keeping up with the news, we look for a bit of distraction.

Fog of war

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 09:34:14 -0400

“The military machine, the Army and all belonging to it, is in fact simple, and appears on this account easy to manage. But let us reflect that no part of it is in one piece, that it is composed entirely of individuals, each of which keeps up its own friction in all directions.” – Karl Von Clausewitz

The historian and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz always felt revulsion that a people’s militia, the French revolutionary army, had defeated the armed forces of the German monarchy. That feeling ran so deep that when Napoleon’s invasion of Russia came, he opposed the official Prussian position of supporting France and resigned from the army. He then made his way clandestinely to Saint Petersburg to offer his services to Tsar Alexander I, hoping to free Prussia from French domination.

Usability, security and paranoia

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 08:38:01 -0400

Zoom and risk management in times of pandemic

Selective enthusiasm

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 08:35:24 -0300

Do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you won’t do it well anyway. – Brian Kernighan

Unix is the most successful operating system in history. Some variant of Unix runs on almost every device that connects to the internet today.

Indeed, if you use an Android phone, you’re running on top of the Linux kernel; if your phone is an iPhone, you’re using iOS, which is built on an XNU kernel. Both belong to the Unix family.

Leap day

Sat, 29 Feb 2020 19:55:47 -0300

“Remember tonight… for it is the beginning of always” – Dante

February twenty-ninth. Every four years we add this special day so we can adjust our calendars and make sure the seasons start when they’re supposed to.

It’s almost certain that more than one computer system has failed for mishandling this date.

Time is, in many ways, a mere convention. The Earth’s orbit around the sun doesn’t take 365 days, nor does a day take 24 hours. They could be any arbitrary value. We find comfort in having these conventions. Months and days keep us in order.

The fifteenth year

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 13:56:06 -0300

Two Steps Back
One Leap Forward
– Earthrise, Haken

The fourteenth year didn’t end very well. I’m not going to get into details now. What for?

I suppose it was the same for many of you. There are lessons to take in calmly. Some processes are still playing out.

It hits hard when a social fabric that was already frayed finally comes apart completely. Because you realize that the net holding all of us up is not only gone, it was hanging by weak threads all along. What can you do?

The end of agile (XII)

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 08:25:11 -0300

(You can listen to the soundtrack of this article at this link)

“A good drummer listens as much as he plays.”
— Indian proverb

As I told you before, in the second half of the nineties my friends and I went back to rehearsing as a band. At that time I invested in a drum kit and every so often bought an issue of Modern Drummer magazine. Unlike today, when you can find thousands of tutorials on YouTube, back then you turned to written material to learn new techniques or improve as an amateur musician.

The end of agile (XI)

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 08:25:11 -0300

(to listen to the soundtrack of this post click on this link)

“Mission First
People Always”
— US Air Force Mantra

CBGB OMFUG was a club located at 315 Bowery, between 1st and 2nd Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in New York, that became the epicenter of punk and new wave in the early eighties. Talking Heads, The Ramones and Blondie all made their debut at CBGB.

In his book “How Music Works” David Byrne, musician and founder of Talking Heads, says he saw CBGB as a self-organizing system. “An emergent entity governed by a few rules that Hilly Kristal established at the beginning, rules that allowed a whole scene to emerge in New York in the late 70s”.

The end of agile (X)

Sun, 16 Jun 2019 08:25:11 -0300

(to listen to the soundtrack of this post click on this link)

Spirit with a vision
Is a dream with a mission
– Rush

In February 2011 we had put into production one of the most ambitious projects my team had taken on up to that point.

We met the deadline, although technically the system wasn’t finished. As I explained before, if we commit to a date our focus is on meeting the deadline. Management is aimed at hitting that milestone first; if that requires cutting scope, then scope gets cut. Another important measure is risk management: keeping everyone informed of the impediments that stand in the way of the date and taking steps to mitigate them. So once the go-live milestone was met, a later stage of continuous improvement began, to stabilize the system and cover as many of the requirements in the original scope as possible.

The end of agile (IX)

Tue, 21 May 2019 08:25:11 -0300

(To listen to the soundtrack of this post click here)

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Find out what it means to me
— Aretha Franklin

Rock and pop have always had great female voices. My favorites range from the soul of Aretha Franklin to the avant-garde Björk, by way of the Wilson sisters (Heart) and the punk attitude of Hayley Williams (Paramore) and Shirley Manson (Garbage). From my youth I’d single out the wonderful Cyndi Lauper and Pat Benatar. And of course Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac. And a list like this can’t leave out two great singers who left us very young: Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse.

The end of agile (VIII)

Sun, 21 Apr 2019 08:25:11 -0300

Part 8: Heavy metal

(To listen to the soundtrack of this post click here)

Thunder, thunder, thunder, thunder
I was caught
In the middle of a railroad track
— AC/DC

I remember my wife once asked me to talk to our son about the music he was listening to. Apparently she had caught Matías watching a Slipknot video, and well, I doubt the imagery was pleasant, and it must have left her a bit rattled.

The end of agile (VII)

Sun, 14 Apr 2019 08:25:11 -0300

(To listen to this post’s soundtrack click here)

When all the little ants are marching
Red and black antennae waving
They all do it the same
They all do it the same way
— Dave Mathews Band

The first song by the Dave Mathews Band that I remember hearing is a live version of “Ants Marching”. I liked it so much that I used it in the soundtrack of a family video I made of our summer vacation in 2004.

The end of agile (VI)

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 08:25:11 -0300

(To listen to this post’s soundtrack, click this link)

“How the hell did I get to this point? What am I doing here in this stairwell in a client’s building, arguing with this guy on the phone, taking his insults? It’s time I told him to go to hell!”

Wake Up!

I’ll give you a dose but it’ll never come close to the
Rage built up inside of me
— Rage Against the Machine

The end of agile (V)

Sun, 31 Mar 2019 08:25:11 -0300

(To listen to this post’s soundtrack, click this link)

I’m going to Wichita
Far from this opera for evermore
I’m gonna work the straw
Make the sweat drip out of every pore
— The White Stripes

When I was in school I was in a band that played Latin rock. We played parties and events in Chuquicamata and Calama, the mining towns of northern Chile. Several years later every member of the group was in Santiago, so we got together for a few months to rehearse, in a garage or a little storage room, I don’t quite remember, at the house of our second guitarist’s father.

The end of agile (IV)

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 08:25:11 -0300

(To listen to this post’s soundtrack, click this link)

“Hold the line, love isn’t always on time” – Toto

Love doesn’t always show up when you want it to. Sometimes you try so hard to find it that you end up pushing it away, or you let it go by without noticing. I remember that in early 1998 a friend, a psychologist, with whom I learned to read Tarot, told me I had to stop being so anxious about being single, to stop looking so desperately for company, that it would come when I stopped looking.

The soundtrack of The end of agile

Fri, 22 Mar 2019 08:25:11 -0300

Thanks to everyone who has sent me comments and liked the last three posts, a series I’ve titled “The End of Agile”.

It’s the most personal series I’ve ever written, and to write it I’ve gone back to the musical moments of the years the story covers. It isn’t necessarily the music that was in fashion at the time. Sometimes it’s the music I was listening to back then, sometimes it was music that was in fashion, sometimes it’s music that reflects how I felt in those periods, or it may simply be that the songs have some connection.

The end of agile (III)

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 08:25:11 -0300

Part 3: Funk/Acid Jazz

(To listen to this post’s soundtrack, click this link)

Of this virtual insanity, we’re livin’ in
Has got to change, yeah
Things, will never be the same
– Jamiroquai

When you get divorced, your friends’ wives, or partners, kind of feel sorry for you. They probably sense that the balance of the universe is off and that it’s their duty to fix it, so what they do is introduce you to their friends. That’s the normal thing. But one friend’s wife did something better, I think, something I’ll always be grateful for: she taught me to dance merengue.

The end of agile (II)

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 08:25:11 -0300

(to listen to this post’s soundtrack, click this link)

By now you should’ve somehow
Realized what you gotta do
– Noel Gallagher

1998 didn’t start well. The third Oasis album had been a flop. Sure, it’s very hard to top Definitely Maybe and “What’s the Story (Morning Glory)”.

That’s the problem with shooting stars: they struggle to repeat one hit after another, and they have to accept that things stop going well.

I had been dating a cheerful, brilliant engineer who, unfortunately, never let me take our relationship any further. In early 1998 I was alone again, this time in a small apartment on Miguel Claro, in Providencia, Santiago, listening to britpop and grunge, staring at the ceiling, or chatting on IRC.

The end of agile

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 08:25:11 -0300

Come as you are, as you were
– Kurt Cobain

I remember the day Kurt Cobain died. I heard about his death on the radio; I was with some friends and partners from the company where I worked.

It was April 1994, and we were working on a project for the Chilean internal revenue service. I liked Nirvana, the whole grunge scene in general, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, etc. That afternoon the news hit us hard, because Cobain was not only an independent rock star, he was also a young guy about our age.

In the court of the Crimson King

Sun, 27 Jan 2019 08:25:11 -0300

King Crimson was formed in London on November 30, 1968, and held its first rehearsal on January 14, 1969, fifty years ago now. The band was the heir to Giles, Giles and Fripp, a group that played pop with an eccentric style and high musical complexity. Originally they were a trio made up of the brothers Michael Giles on drums and Peter Giles on bass, together with guitarist Robert Fripp. In time they wanted to expand their sound and brought in Ian McDonald on keyboards, who in turn brought in Peter Sinfield as lyricist.

Moving forward

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 08:25:11 -0300

Every morning, when I wake again under the pall of the sky, I feel that for me it is New Year’s Day. That is why I hate these New Year’s Days with a fixed date, which turn life and the human spirit into a commercial concern, with its consumption and its balance sheet and its forecast of expenses and income for the old and new management. -- Gramsci

I am writing this from one of my favorite spots in my house, surrounded by trees and plants, on New Year’s morning, two thousand nineteen.

What is a computer?

Sun, 09 Dec 2018 08:25:11 -0300

On the golden record traveling aboard the Voyager spacecraft there is a music section that opens with the piece Harmonices Mundi, composed by Laurie Spiegel¹.

Besides being a composer, Spiegel was a programmer, and she developed software for composing music, such as Music Mouse, a program for algorithmic musical composition.

On YouTube you can still find her 1980 album The Expanding Universe.

Although Spiegel has developed software and algorithms for composing music, she aims to use technology in music as a means of furthering her art and not as an end in itself.

52

Sun, 11 Nov 2018 08:25:11 -0300

I was born in ‘67
The year of Sgt. Pepper
And are you experienced

As time goes by I find it easier and easier to accept Turing’s idea that there is no great difference between us and machines. Or, to put it another way, the gap between machines and us keeps getting smaller. And you realize this as you grow old. Because, just as with machines, time does its part, and you suffer the same deterioration any artifact goes through.

Correcting errors

Sun, 21 Oct 2018 08:25:11 -0300

In Spain they use the word “ordenador” for computers, following the French custom, which began using the term “ordinateur” in the 1960s. But the use of that word is an inconsistency, as Antonio Vaquero Sanchez argued in an article in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in 1997¹:

What does ordinateur mean? One should not rise to the bait of those who defend the use of the word “ordenador” because it performs “ordenaciones” (sorting operations). It can do more, far more, than sort sortable elements. Accepting that name for that reason would be like accepting that the whole be named after just one of its parts. Nor is the argument based on the sense of “orden” as “instruction” valid. Ordinateur is defined in French as “... qui émite ordres”. In short, the one who gives orders, not the one who receives them. Therefore the use of the word “ordenador” is a semantic error. I am not the one saying it. The French themselves say so. […] The reply

Zeros and ones

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 08:25:11 -0300

Legend has it that Theseus promised his father, King Aegeus of Athens, that if he succeeded in his feat of killing the Minotaur, his ship would return flying white sails instead of the traditional black ones. The son of Aegeus, lost for many years, wanted to free his city from the infamous tribute to King Minos of Crete, which forced them to send seven young men and seven maidens to be sacrificed to the monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull.

#NoToBurnout

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 08:25:11 -0300

Working long hours, working overtime, even when they try to sell it to you as something “cool” and innovative, is neither. It is not agile and it is not transformation; it is the exact opposite of lean.

Burnout

\[1\]

is the physical, mental or emotional exhaustion caused by overexertion or stress. But it is more than being stressed or overworked. This phenomenon makes the things we once loved about our work or our life lose their meaning. It generally shows up as a feeling that there is no support, no help to get out of that situation.

#SecurityChallenge

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 08:25:11 -0300

In the following article my friend Cristián Rojas, a cybersecurity expert, invites us to change and take responsibility for security, in what he calls a #SecurityChallenge. I invite you to read it, share it and follow his advice:

#SecurityChallenge

Author: Cristián Rojas, MSc., ISO27K1 LI, CSSLP

Once again, thanks for the invitation to write an article for LNDS.

A few weeks ago Eduardo and I met to talk about how little interest cybersecurity generated in the IT community and in the press. Not even two days went by before a string of events began: the Banco de Chile incidents and the leak of credit card numbers, which, added to other cybersecurity events such as EQUIFAX USA and WannaCry, have generated fear. A fear that has awakened the interest of the community and of society in the subject.

Credit card fraud

Sun, 29 Jul 2018 08:25:11 -0300

Credit cards were born in an analog, practically disconnected era, and that makes them far more vulnerable today.

But they have always been vulnerable.

In the old days you paid by credit card in person: you walked into the store, the clerk examined your card, checked that it wasn’t on a list of expired cards, and placed it on a curious machine like this one¹:

Then they wrote the amount of the sale on a special carbonless paper form and laid it on top of the card, like this:

Process loss

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 08:25:11 -0300

When we work in a group we are always influencing one another, for better or for worse. Together we can achieve things that seemed impossible; other times we fail miserably. Either way, every group exhibits what students of social behavior call “process loss”.

This concept is similar to the consequences of the laws of thermodynamics. That is, just as it’s impossible to have one hundred percent efficiency in a physical system, the same goes for a group of people: the group’s performance is always less than the sum of the individual performances.

Agile and complexity

Sun, 08 Jul 2018 08:25:11 -0300

When to use agile methodologies

Among the strangest claims I’ve heard about agile, one is that agile methodologies are no good for complex projects.

The odd thing about that claim is that agile methodologies seem to be, according to the experience of many users, the ones that deal best with complexity.

There are two possible reasons that could explain that kind of claim. The first is that people tend to confuse complex with complicated. The second is the inability to deal with what is complex.

Antiagile

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 08:25:11 -0300

The problem with the word agility

The concept of agility has been causing trouble ever since the Middle Ages. Consider what Saint Thomas Aquinas says in his “Prayer for ordering one’s own life”¹.

“Lord, my God, help me to be obedient without talking back, poor without complaining, chaste without corruption, patient without grumbling, humble without pretense, cheerful without excess, mature without heaviness, agile without being careless, fearful without despair, truthful without duplicity; that when I do good I not claim it as my own merit; that when I correct my neighbor I not do it from a position of superiority, but build him up by word and example without pretending.”

Books

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Books published by the author.

Antifragility

Sat, 26 May 2018 08:25:11 -0300

A few years ago I heard someone who held a senior position in technology declare that their highest aspiration was to be able to sleep soundly, secure in the knowledge that every process and system was running without problems.

I don’t agree with that; I think it’s a futile ambition. It’s the same thing that happens with people who only want to be happy. Those aspirations strike me as childish, and they keep you from growing, from developing. But in the world of business, and of the technology that supports the business, that outlook can even be counterproductive.

Who is responsible for quality?

Sun, 06 May 2018 08:25:11 -0300

A misconception we constantly have to deal with, and one that is unfortunately lodged in the subconscious of many developers, is the idea that quality is the exclusive responsibility of the QA area, and not of the programmers.

Why is an idea as wrong as this one so widespread? It goes so far that, when there’s an error in production, every finger points at quality control and not at the people responsible for introducing the bugs in the first place.

The power of automation

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 08:25:11 -0300

I’m going to share with you a small infographic put together by my quality team:

What this chart shows is that without automation a tester can run 80 test cases a day, according to our team’s measurements. On one project in particular we have 6,840 test cases, which means it would take that person 4 months to complete the process. At the time this infographic was made, 2,650 test cases had been automated, and those can be run by one tester in a day and a half.

Julia: a myth come true?

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 08:25:11 -0300

Julia is one of those unexpected arrivals on the programming language scene that is worth exploring. That’s why this time I’ve called in a “guest villain” to show us what it’s all about. Camilo Chacón (@cchaconsartori) has been kind enough to write this article about the Julia language exclusively for La Naturaleza del Software. Enjoy.

Julia: a myth come true?

by Camilo Chacón

Those of us who have spent years developing in different programming languages know the common belief that a language as dynamic and flexible as Python, and at the same time as fast and efficient as C++, is very unlikely to exist. But what if that were just a myth?

Time flies

Sun, 25 Mar 2018 08:25:11 -0300

But after a while
You realize time flies
– Porcupine Tree

My youngest daughter, who is an excellent illustrator, has a pretty healthy habit that I don’t have. When she sits down to draw she sets a timer on her phone, so an alarm goes off once the time she has set herself as a limit for the activity is up. That way, when she stops, she rests, taking care of her eyes and her hands.

We work the black seam together

Sat, 17 Mar 2018 08:25:11 -0300

This place has changed for good
Your economic theory said it would

I’m writing this with a certain reluctance. Because I have to explain the part that, to me, is the most disappointing thing about blockchain, or at least about the original implementation that comes with BitCoin: the famous proof of work.

On top of that, I’m already bored with the subject, because what I see, rather than a serious analysis of the constraints and advantages of an interesting technology, is a fanaticism that tries to use blockchain for everything and in the most ridiculous ways possible. So let’s get this bitter pill over with and stop talking about blockchain on this blog for a good while.

To the Bone

Sun, 28 Jan 2018 08:25:11 -0300

“Once we’ve made sense of our world,
we wanna go fuck up everybody else’s
because his or her truth doesn’t match mine.
But this is the problem.
Truth is individual calculation.
Which means because we all have different perspectives,
there isn't one singular truth, is there?”
– Steven Wilson in “To the bone”

For Steven Wilson, the meaning of many of the songs on his fifth album, “To The Bone”, has to do with truth, conceived as something that can be manipulated and filtered to mean whatever suits us best, whether you are a politician, a terrorist or simply someone trying to convince themselves that their relationship is fine, even though it isn’t.

The Chain

Sat, 06 Jan 2018 08:25:11 -0300

“Chain, keep us together
Running in the shadows
Chain, keep us together
Running in the shadows

The Chain has the distinction of being the only Fleetwood Mac song credited to all the members active during the recording of an album, and the reason for this is a curious one.

In 1977 the band had its best-known and most successful lineup. It went like this: Mick Fleetwood on drums, John McVie on bass, Christine McVie on vocals and keyboards, the great Stevie Nicks on vocals, of course, and Lindsey Buckingham on guitars and vocals.

How to beat Santa Claus

Mon, 25 Dec 2017 08:25:11 -0300

Nobody beats Santa Claus at logistics, also known as Papá Noel, or Viejito Pascuero in Chile. I mean, who else could deliver presents to every child in the world in one night? Sure, he has twenty-four hours to do it, but even so, to cover each time zone he has barely sixty minutes to land on every house, drop off the presents and take off again.

The trick is that Santa Claus uses magic, so there is little we can do about it. Until we reach that level of technological development we won’t be able to beat him.

The problem with lying

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 08:25:11 -0300

“Lie, lie, something will always stick” – Goebbels

In Chile people lie, a lot and shamelessly, with no consequences. We all know it, and we let it slide. The problem with accepting lies, just like that, is that the cost is absorbed by all of us as a society.

Whenever I think about lying I go back to Samuel Clemens, the American writer known as Mark Twain. Reflecting on his work “Huckleberry Finn”, Joaquín Mª Aguirre Romero says:

Architecture and orchestration

Sun, 10 Dec 2017 08:25:11 -0300

In his extraordinary, and very entertaining, book “How Music Works”¹, David Byrne asks, in one of its chapters, about the role architecture plays in the shape music takes. Or put another way, to what degree the architecture of the place where music is performed influences the structure of the music itself.

The stage at CBGB, the club where Talking Heads started their career

The basic laws of human stupidity

Sun, 26 Nov 2017 08:25:11 -0300

“Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain” – Friedrich von Schiller

How often do we run into stupid acts in our daily lives? It happened to me with a package that was supposed to arrive by mail on November 4. The parcel, which came from abroad, had been in the country for two days, and it was impossible to speed up the delivery. Finally, on the afternoon of the 13th, the package arrived at our house. But the most ridiculous part was that on November 25 I got an email from Correos de Chile, the national postal service, informing me that my package had been delivered on the 14th!

51

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 08:25:11 -0300

“Once we´ve made sense of our world
We wanna go fuck up everybody else’s
Because his or her truth doesn’t match mine
But this is the problem
Truth is individual calculation
Which means because we all have different perspectives
There isn’t just singular truth, is there?”
-- To the Bone, Steven Wilson

What is truth?

Several years ago I attended some philosophy talks where the speaker (Ricardo Espinoza Lolas) talked about the four truths that we Westerners accept.

Mamma Mia, here I go again

Sat, 28 Oct 2017 08:25:11 -0300

Sweden, the land of Volvo, Electrolux, H&M, Ericsson, Bluetooth and, of course, ABBA.

In the seventies, ABBA was the best-selling band on the planet. Legend has it that ABBA accounted for a sizable chunk of Sweden’s GDP, which is highly unlikely, because Sweden was already a very prosperous country back then.

Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid shot to world fame in 1974, after winning the Eurovision Song Contest with the smash hit Waterloo. In this video you can watch their Eurovision performance, in a very glam style, which was all the rage at the time:

I round, you round

Sun, 22 Oct 2017 08:25:11 -0300

You say either and I say either,
You say neither and I say neither
Either, either Neither, neither
Let’s call the whole thing off.
You like potato and I like potahto
You like tomato and I like tomahto
Potato, potahto, Tomato, tomahto.
Let’s call the whole thing off

The problem

In October 2017 the Central Bank of Chile announced that the 1 and 5 peso coins will go out of circulation. The reason is that the cost of producing them exceeds their value.

Given this, the suggestion is that cash transactions be rounded, so that when an amount to pay ends in 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1 the final digit becomes 0. Otherwise, that is, when it ends in 6, 7, 8 or 9, the amount goes to the next ten.

Snow goose

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 08:25:11 -0300

Camel

Camel is a great English progressive rock band, founded in 1971 by Andrew Latimer. Its original lineup, besides Latimer on guitar, had Andy Ward on drums, Doug Ferguson on bass and Peter Bardens on keyboards. It was in 1974, with their second album, Mirage, that they won critical recognition, and a moderate success that even took them on tour through the western United States. It is a group that blends elements of jazz, classical and baroque music, along with electronic touches.

Shake it off

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 08:25:11 -0300

About her song “Shake it off”, Taylor Swift said:

“I’ve learned a pretty tough lesson that people can say whatever they want about us at any time, and we cannot control that. The only thing we can control is our reaction to that.”

The young singer elaborated, in a later interview, that she had tackled the subject before, but from more of a victim’s perspective, in a song titled “Mean”, and that she decided to take things with humor, which in my opinion shows remarkable growth as a person for someone so young. Of course, Swift’s exposure is very different from that of a normal young person, a millennial, as we have labeled every member of her generation, stereotyping them along the way, often for the worse.

When the heart rules the mind

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 08:25:11 -0300

Mother protect me,
protect me from myself

If you put together Steve Howe, former guitarist of Yes and Asia, with Steve Hackett, former guitarist of Genesis, nothing can go wrong, right? I mean, they are two of the best guitarists in English progressive rock. Add John Mover, former drummer of Marillion, Phil Spalding (who among others worked with Mike Oldfield) and, up front, singer Max Bacon (ex Nightwing and Bronz); with all that talent together the product should be exceptional. In theory, at least.

Red Barchetta

Sun, 24 Sep 2017 08:25:11 -0300

My uncle has a country place
That no one knows about
He says it used to be a farm
Before the Motor Law

Red Barchetta is the second song on the 1981 album “Moving Pictures” by the Canadian band Rush. It tells a science fiction story, set in a future world where cars are apparently banned.

Legend has it that Neil Peart simply adapted a short story by the writer Richard S. Foster titled “A Nice Morning Drive”, published in Road and Track magazine in 1973. Peart tried to contact the author, but Road and Track no longer had Foster’s contact details, so he added this line at the end of the lyrics on the album: “Inspired by ‘A Nice Morning Drive’ by Richard S. Foster”.

Exclusive content on Patreon

Sun, 03 Sep 2017 08:25:11 -0300

As I told you a while ago, this blog is sponsored through the Patreon platform. You can get there through our profile at: https://www.patreon.com/lnds.

On that platform you will find exclusive articles that only patrons can access. I hope to count on you. The list of exclusive articles will keep growing, and I will also include previews of my next book.

Occam's razor

Tue, 29 Aug 2017 08:25:11 -0300

Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson

The story of Porcupine Tree is a curious one. It was born in 1987 as a kind of elaborate joke (a hoax band) created by Steven Wilson and Malcolm Stock.

Steven Wilson, creator of Porcupine Tree

The two friends made up a detailed backstory for a supposed psychedelic band from the seventies, which they called Porcupine Tree.

The account included colorful anecdotes about events, appearances at rock festivals and, of course, stints in prison. Once Wilson had his own studio gear he recorded several hours of music, in order to supply “evidence” of the band’s existence.

Limitations

Sun, 13 Aug 2017 08:25:11 -0300

A reference to an opinion column by Carlos Franz in the Chilean newspaper La Segunda shows up in my Facebook timeline.

The title is “eñe” (the letter ñ) and it starts like this:

A year (año) is not the same as an anus (ano). Although some years do turn out to be like the anus, it’s better not to confuse that indispensable part of the body with a cycle of the Earth around the sun. Good spelling serves, among other things, to avoid silly or dangerous mix-ups like that one. It also serves to help us understand each other better in writing and to maintain the history, identity and unity of our language.

Modern times

Sun, 06 Aug 2017 08:25:11 -0300

There are companies, or rather, to be more precise, there are managers, executives, business owners, who hear about “Digital Transformation” at some seminar and go straight to their head of IT (CIO, CTO, Finance Manager (yes, that still happens)) and demand that a Digital Transformation strategy be put in place.

– And what is that?
– No idea, but we want it now!

And without delay they turn to the big-name consultancies, or the large three-letter companies, which show up with their armadas of specialists, experts in best practices, to offer the blessings of digital transformation (read: product sales and billable consulting hours).

Twelve years

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 08:25:11 -0300

Today La Naturaleza del Software turns twelve. It’s incredible that I still have the motivation to write, given that thousands of blogs were born in 2005 and very few of them are left.

But here we are, alive and kicking, after twelve years. To celebrate, I’ll leave you a selection of twelve articles, one per year. I hope you enjoy them, and I hope to keep at this for twelve more years:

The 300 million dollar button

Sun, 23 Jul 2017 08:25:11 -0300

Sometimes we engineers are so focused on functionality that we don’t bother with usability. Let me see if I can explain:
we put the focus on defining the use case, we concentrate on giving users what they ask for, but not what they need.

But do we ever observe how users actually use our system? I have several stories about how we came to realize that our users were doing manual work to fit their input to our systems, work that wouldn’t have been necessary if they had described to us how the information really arrived, instead of asking for an ideal format of how it was supposedly meant to arrive.

Close to the edge, down by the river

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 08:25:11 -0300

The history of rock is full of anecdotes about clashing egos between artists, like when Jimi Hendrix stole the guitar-burning act from Pete Townshend at the 1967 Monterey Festival. There’s another one involving Yes and Deep Purple.

The story takes place at the tenth edition of the National Jazz & Blues Festival in Plumpton, England, in August 1970. The organizers had decided Deep Purple would close the show, which annoyed Yes, who wanted to close the event themselves. So the band led by Jon Anderson decided to arrive late, forcing the organizers to ask Deep Purple to play their set earlier.

Programming is a visual art

Sun, 02 Jul 2017 08:25:11 -0300

The video below, along with the beautiful fractal image that accompanies this post, are visualizations of the source code of a system my team has been working on since 2015. It’s the sum of six repositories, corresponding to six microservices, that interact with each other to make up a larger system.

Visualization of code produced by my team

Walking with dromedaries

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 08:25:11 -0300

“A dromedary is a horse designed by a committee”
– ancient Mentat aphorism, predating the Butlerian Jihad

“There’s never enough time to do something right, but there’s always enough time to do it over”
– Anonymous, quoted by Melvin Conway

My most memorable encounter with Conway’s Law, and the moment its depth really sank in, was a couple of years ago, when an architecture decision was shaped by the organization of the datacenter where we host our applications. You heard that right: we had to modify the deployment architecture of our system because of how the datacenter’s services were organized.

Rock and roll is a risk

Sat, 17 Jun 2017 08:25:11 -0300

Rock and Roll is a risk
You Risk Being Ridiculed\

Brendan, in Sing Street

There’s a scene in Sing Street where the older brother tells the protagonist that rock is about taking risks, even the risk of being ridiculed. There are thousands of cover bands, he tells him, everybody starts cover bands, and in every one of them there’s a middle-aged man who regrets never having had the balls to write his own song.

Pour some syntactic sugar on me

Sat, 10 Jun 2017 08:25:11 -0300

December 31, 1984 was a date that changed forever the life of Rick Allen, the drummer of Def Leppard. In a car accident, the “Thunder God”, as his fans call him, lost his left arm.

For a brilliant young drummer the amputation meant the end of his career, but encouraged by his bandmates and with the help of Jeff Rich (the drummer of Status Quo), Allen worked on designing an electronic kit, and with it he made his debut in 1986 at the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington.

Fake it till you make it

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 08:25:11 -0300

Although the phrase “fake it 'til you make it” is used as a term associated with self-help, I am going to take it more literally to explain what I just did.

Some 5 years ago I declared on this blog my intention to build a new programming language. In fact its GitHub repository goes back even further.

I named the language Ogú, after the character created by Themo Lobos, the Chilean cartoonist: the likable caveman who is Mampato’s friend. I also told you how I met the illustrator’s daughter to get permission to use an image of Ogú as the project’s mascot.

Vectors

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 08:25:11 -0300

Steely Dan and the perfection of sound

During the 1970s and part of the 1980s, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the founders of Steely Dan, besides being recognized as great musicians and songwriters, became famous for their excessive perfectionism.

It is said, though I have found no evidence, that on one of their albums they apologized for the quality of the recording, which did not meet their high standards. This obsession showed, for example, in the production of the album Gaucho, for which they ended up working with 42 different musicians to produce the band’s seventh album.

50 years

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 08:25:11 -0300

“Here I am because I came, because I came here I am, and if I hadn’t come I wouldn’t be where I am”

So much happens in half a century, it’s staggering, it’s impossible to remember it all

Experiencing the beauty of watching your daughter be born. Looking death in the face and sticking your tongue out at it, scared shitless, mind you. Watching the old ones go, and feeling rage at the loss of the youngest. Loving, losing love and finding it again. Loving again, without fear and without expecting anything, and getting infinite affection back.

Every company is a software company, or will be

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 08:25:11 -0300

In a column titled “Why Software Is Eating the World”, published in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, Marc Andreessen argues that more and more industries and businesses are run on software.

Just to take one example, consider Amazon and Alibaba, the two largest retail companies in the world. In 2015 Alibaba’s CEO, Jack Ma, said:

“If you want 10,000 new customers you have to build a new warehouse and this and that. For me: two servers.”

A profession for men only

Sat, 23 Jul 2016 08:25:11 -0300

I heard about a young woman whose father forbade her to study computer engineering because it is a “career for men only”. Unfortunately, this mistaken perception is still lodged in the minds of many people and, worse still, in the minds of many of my colleagues.

Look at this chart, taken from Bob Martin’s blog (Uncle Bob), which shows the share of women in different fields, including computing.

What happened to women’s participation in computing?

How to get the weather report

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 08:25:11 -0300

This article wraps up the description of the second challenge in this series of nine.

Remember that the challenge [consists of building an application that gets the weather for different cities, using the OpenWeatherMap.org API. We built a program that receives a list of cities through the command line. This program runs a query against the OpenWeatherMap.org site to get the weather report for each of the cities. The result is sorted in descending order, from the highest to the lowest temperature. The program displays the following information for each city: the name, the current temperature, the maximum and the minimum, plus the weather conditions. Finally, the program must report the time spent downloading the information. If the -p parameter is passed, the program runs the query “in parallel” for each city.

Light intensity showers

Tue, 31 May 2016 08:25:11 -0300

The original plan, well, the modified version of the original plan, was to implement each of the 9 challenges in a month. But the truth is I’ve had a pretty busy start to the year and the time I can devote to this project has suffered. I published the first part of this challenge on March 31, so it has taken me [two months to complete the challenge!

The actual hours spent solving the problem aren’t that many; the difficulty lies in finding the dedication to sit down, research and write the code. I hope to get back to my publishing pace in the coming challenges.

Weather report

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 08:25:11 -0300

Jaco Pastorius is one of those musicians who leaves a deep impression on you when you hear him. In particular, you will never perceive the sound of the bass the same way after listening to him. [His style has influenced greats of rock and jazz, such as the great Flea[ of Red Hot Chili Peppers, or Geddy Lee of Rush, who puts Jaco at the very top of the mountain.

*“Sometimes a little bit of his fairy dust might rub off on you when you pretend to play like he does.”

Embarrassing bugs

Sat, 05 Mar 2016 08:25:11 -0300

The word bug, literally an insect, used to denote a computer error, has its origin in the discovery of a moth by the operators of the Mark II, an event reported by the famous Grace Hopper.

The photograph below is a page from the operations logbook of the Harvard Mark II. Hopper’s note mentions the “first actual case of bug being found”, which shows that the term bug is much older; Thomas Alva Edison himself used the word bug to talk about mechanical failures in his inventions.

Beyond Hello World

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 08:25:11 -0300

Ever since Kernighan & Ritchie published “The C Programming Language”, it has been almost mandatory for every introduction to a new programming language to start with the famous “Hello World”. A very simple program that goes more or less like this:

main() {
 printf("hello, world\n");
}

This tradition is fine for a beginner, but it is also useful for checking that we have installed the compiler and/or the environment of the language we want to learn.

Those strange new languages

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 08:25:11 -0300

If I like love songs
and I like those strange new hairdos,
I don’t want to criticize anymore,
I just want to be a nurse.
– Charly García

I always wondered what Charly meant by “I just want to be a nurse” (a line from the song “Esos raros peinados nuevos”, “Those strange new hairdos”). It turns out there is an interesting anecdote behind it.

The story goes that Charly once saw a guy snorting an outrageous amount of cocaine. He warns him to stop, that he’s going to end up on the other side, and the guy carried on as if nothing. It was a sure thing that he was about to overdose. But no, he had an epileptic seizure, which, together with his jaw locked up from all the lines he had done, made it impossible to straighten it. Charly gave him a few good punches until he broke his jaw, straightened out his tongue and saved his life. That is the origin of the Nurse. Some time later, Charly would play a supporting role in the film “Lo Que Vendrá”, for which the New York critics gave him the award for best supporting actor. His role was that of the nurse

Principles and algorithms of concurrency

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 08:25:11 -0300

“Sharing is bad… At least in concurrent programming 😜” -- Tweet from November 13, 2015

About 10 years ago I suffered through a project that involved biometric devices and security cameras talking to each other. “How long will this project take?” my partners asked. “About six weeks”, I answered naively. In the end it took me several months, headaches and bad moments.

The main problems had to do with a set of libraries and APIs that had serious issues handling concurrency.

Revelations

Thu, 01 Oct 2015 08:25:11 -0300

The Revelation of Kleisli, to shew unto his servants things which they must shortly understand; and he signified it by sending his avatar unto his servant Eduardo.

Who bare record of the word of Turing and of Church, and of all things that he saw and learned.

Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this revelation, and keep those things which are written therein: for the run time is at hand.

And the winner is ...

Sun, 27 Sep 2015 08:25:11 -0300

The two weeks I gave to solve the Programmers' Day challenge are up. Seven contestants entered:

- Daniel Martinez @edmt with a solution in Ruby.

- Pedro Guerrero @pedroguerrero with his solution in Python.

- Jano González @janogonzalez with another solution in Ruby.

- Mario Fuentes @mariofuentes with a solution in Go.

- Dardo de Leon @dardodeleon with a solution in PHP.

- Christian @christiaclx with another solution in Python.

- Javier Novoa @jstitch with another solution in Python.

OK, on to the evaluation.

Phase 1: Execution.

Each program is run with the following parameters: 1000, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2009, 2014, 2015, 2022.

Happy Programmers' Day

Sun, 13 Sep 2015 08:25:11 -0300

The idea of celebrating Programmers’ Day came from Valentin Balt and Michael Cherviakov, two Russian programmers, around 2002, who got it officially recognized by the Russian government in 2009. On September 11, 2009 the president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, signed the decree that made the celebration official.

Programmers’ Day falls on day 256 of the year. The number was chosen because it is the number of values that can be represented in an 8-bit byte, a figure every programmer recognizes, and of course it is less than 365, the number of days in a year.

Talk at DevConChile 2015

Mon, 07 Sep 2015 08:25:11 -0300

Here is the video of the talk I gave on Friday, September 4 at DevConChile 2015.

YouTube / StartUpChile Corfo

How much longer will this damn project last?

Sun, 09 Aug 2015 08:25:11 -0300

You have surely faced a project that seems like it will never end, eternal, one that is already wearing you down beyond what’s possible. How much longer will it last? you ask yourself. You are not going to like the answer, but it may shed some light on how to deal with what’s left of it.

The mediocrity principle

In 1969 the mathematician and astrophysicist John Richard Gott was standing in front of the Berlin Wall. Like so many of his contemporaries, he wondered how much longer this division between the two Germanys would last.

Ten years

Sat, 01 Aug 2015 08:25:11 -0300

This blog turns ten today. Some say blogs were born in 2005 and died in 2006 with the arrival of Facebook and the social media boom.

The truth is that by 2008 many Chilean bloggers had already quit. In Chile, out of the “Cambrian blogging explosion” of 2005, and in particular in the phylum of personal tech blogs, I think the only survivors are Alejandro Barros, whose blog turned ten in June, and me. Although I admit that Alejandro has kept up a more regular publishing schedule.

Fear of change

Tue, 28 Jul 2015 08:25:11 -0300

I don’t like going down stairs. Let me be more precise: I don’t like going down stairs fast.

When I was a kid I tumbled down a staircase, and it was painful and traumatic. I remember going to the doctor, and for some reason I remember seeing my black eyes for days. Since then I don’t dare go down stairs fast, even less if they have no handrail.

“Fear is the enemy of speed”. Only when we overcome fear can we go faster.

Fear

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 08:25:11 -0300

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Last week in Santiago, Chile, the mass hysteria caused by a rumor spread over WhatsApp and Twitter overwhelmed a large share of the city’s gas stations.

Fear of a fuel shortage shook a big part of the upper middle class. They had already forgotten that the earthquake of February 2010 showed that gas stations could keep supplying for several days without being refilled.

The spirit of radio

Sun, 21 Jun 2015 08:25:11 -0300

Memories of my father

This is a piece I wrote a few years ago. It seemed like a good idea to revisit it to celebrate Father’s Day.

The Spirit of Radio

Begin the day with a friendly voice
A companion unobtrusive

As a teenager I had a small FM radio station. Its range was no more than two hundred meters. It was one of my favorite hobbies. I remember that my cousin, who came to live with us for a while during his internship at Chuquicamata, would park my old man’s Subaru at the corner and listen on the radio to the mixes I did with some friends. I know other friends of mine did the same. When was this? Probably 1982 or 1983. I would have been about 16.

Results vs. process

Sat, 13 Jun 2015 08:25:11 -0300

I remember a soccer match between two national teams. One of them had a coach who showed up in an elegant suit, the way European managers usually do. The other coach wore a tracksuit.

Their coaching styles were different too. While the first one stayed on the bench for the whole match, the second spent almost all of it shouting and giving orders from the touchline.

As a spectacle, the team of the coach in the tracksuit played better: a flashier style, always on the attack, “jogo bonito”, as the Brazilians say.

Everything that's wrong

Sun, 31 May 2015 08:25:11 -0300

This week I had two conversations with moments I could call revealing, if it weren’t for the fact that they reflect things I have always known, that many of you know, and that we have talked about many times in this space.

The first was with one of our technology vendors. During the conversation he told me: “I’m going to speak in more technical terms because I know you’re comfortable with technology”.

Diversity

Tue, 24 Mar 2015 08:25:11 -0300

In January of this year, at CES, Intel announced a US$ 300 million fund to promote diversity in technology.

I’m only going to comment on this with two photographs.

The first one is from around 1940 and shows two of the women who were the original ENIAC programmers:

The second photograph is more interesting, because it really does show gender and racial diversity: we see Grace Hopper with her team working on the UNIVAC I:

I am not Spock

Mon, 02 Mar 2015 08:25:11 -0300

“Change is the essential process of all existence” – Spock

In 1975 the actor Leonard Nimoy published his first autobiography. The book took its title from one of its chapters: “I Am Not Spock”. The phrase comes from an incident at an airport. On running into the actor, a mother tells her daughter that the man in front of them is Spock. The girl didn’t look very convinced, so Nimoy explains that he isn’t really Spock, just the actor who played the character. From that anecdote Nimoy builds a text about how he came to develop the character.

Story of a bug

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 08:25:11 -0300

The following text is this post on Reddit published by user RobotJoe:

Someone gives you a bug. “The light in the conference room on the 26th floor is on. It needs to be off.”

A note on the bug says, “This will take you like 5 minutes. It’s just flipping a switch."

You go to the conference room on 26. The light is on, but there’s no light switch in the room.

So you prepare to install one. But the designer says it would ruin the room’s aesthetic. Plus, the walls are concrete. With the proper tools, you could install the switch. But no one will approve the purchase of the proper tools. Without the proper tools it will take two days. And they want it done now, because they’re afraid that any minute the CEO might decide to go to the 26th floor and happen to walk by the conference room and ask why the hell that light is on.

And now you’re getting emails asking why the light isn’t off yet.

So now you have to stop and send a group email to explain the situation, and several people start up a panicked email chain.

You know if you wait for the problem to be resolved by anyone discussing it in the email chain, it won’t get fixed. The bug has your name on it, and it’s dated today, so you’re the one in trouble if it isn’t resolved. So you go up into the hallway ceiling on 26, find the wires leading to the light, cut and cap them. Finally. Problem solved.

In order to quell the panic in the email thread, you report back how you solved the issue.

You don’t hear anything for a while. When you do, everyone is concerned that now the light can’t be turned on and off. What if the CEO wants to have a meeting in there? So here’s what they ask you to do: They want you to run wires from the light down into the basement. When someone needs the light to be on or off, they’ll contact you, and have you run to the basement and either connect or disconnect the wires.

You protest the ridiculousness of this solution. Your boss says, “Yeah, I know it’s not ideal. But it’s the only solution we have right now."

At this point you realize you have a choice. You could do this. Or you could quit in protest, and find another job. But you realize that once you start that new job, they’re likely to ask you to do something just as idiotic, if not more so.

So you go run the wires from floor 26 down to the basement. When you get to the basement, you see dozens of wires hanging out of the walls, from all the people who have had to do this exact same thing before. (So that’s where the idea came from.) You set up the wires and label them as best you can, with a short apology to whoever has to deal with this next.

When you get back to your desk, you have a message. QA has reopened the bug. It says, “I see light."

You head back up to the conference room on 26. The light is off. You go back to your desk and close the bug, reporting that you checked on it in person.

QA reopens the bug again. “Room still lit” it says. After looking at the unlit bulb one more time, you tell your boss, who suggests you go back down to the basement and check the wires. You protest that you are looking at the light right now and it’s off. “I know, but this way you can tell QA you checked out absolutely everything."

So you sigh and head to the basement. Sure enough, the wires are not connected. The ends are capped. They are not resting on anything that could conduct electricity.

You report back to QA that you checked the wires, which are not connected, and that you looked at the bulb, which was unlit.

“I didn’t mean the bulb,” says QA. “The bug is about light in the room. There’s still too much light. Shouldn’t you close the blinds?"

You respond that the blinds don’t fall under your control, and that the bug specifies the light being turned off.

Not believing you, QA sends out a group email asking if the blinds are covered by the bug.

Some time passes before you hear from anyone. Finally someone from the email chain calls you.

“Theoretically,” they ask, “could someone participating in a meeting in the conference room on 26 open or close the blinds by themselves if it was too bright or too dark?"

Yes they could, you reply.

“Like, an ordinary person? They wouldn’t need you to do it?"

Yes, an ordinary person. No, they wouldn’t need you. Anyone can do it.

“Great. Excellent. Then we’ll leave that for now. I’ll schedule a stand-up meeting about the blinds issue."

So the bug is closed. Now, the CEO, possibly having caught wind of all the discussion and furtive activity surrounding the conference room on 26, wants to have a meeting there. You get several panicked emails that they need the light on.

You go to the basement, connect the wires, and return to your desk, to find 32 new messages in your inbox. “Something’s wrong—the light’s not on!” “There’s a problem — no light!” “Are you getting these emails?” and so on.

The 32nd email says, “Nevermind—the light’s on."

This process is repeated more or less exactly when it’s time to turn the light off again.

But if there’s any good news, it’s this: after the meeting, everyone forgets that there even is a conference room on 26, so you never have to do anything about it again.

Control

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 08:25:11 -0300

featured_image: “https://d2dspjyoh5c79p.cloudfront.net/eee339f2-86e1-11e4-ac78-df956de308ae-aa9f18b7"

“If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.”
– Mario Andretti

Add controls, one after another, in a long chain, so that everything comes out without errors, and all you will achieve is making things slower.

Agile is flexibility plus speed. You can be fast and flexible and still keep control; the trick is not to overdo the controls, to work incrementally and to accept a degree of uncertainty. Accept that you can’t control everything, accept the possibility of failure.

Headaches

Sat, 22 Nov 2014 08:25:11 -0300

What I’m about to tell you is the plain truth. I haven’t made anything up and I have decided not to change the names, because nobody here is innocent.

A few days ago I decided to buy something in the US and import it through ChileBox, the Miami mailbox service from Chilexpress. Everything was going fairly well: the item arrived in Miami and I was notified by email that I had to enter the invoice in the system, along with the product’s FOB value, so it could be shipped as soon as possible.

Invoice, motherfucker!

Sun, 16 Nov 2014 08:25:11 -0300

“Revenue solves all known problems” -- Eric Schmidt

Like it or not, you live in a market society, but even if you lived in the biggest communist society of the contemporary world, China, you would still have to get someone to pay your invoices. Because there is an unavoidable reality: our society is so complex that you have to get someone to pay for your work. The only alternative is to become a self-sufficient hermit. If you pull it off, let me know, but let’s see what happens when you interact with the rest of society.

48

Tue, 11 Nov 2014 08:25:11 -0300

Today I turn forty-eight; the good news is that in hexadecimal I can say it’s only thirty. It doesn’t really matter, it’s just a geek joke, I have no problem with my age.

This birthday in particular has been wonderful, because I’m just back from an extraordinary vacation with my family in a magical place, but the magic didn’t come so much from the place as from the experience of being kids again.

Educator

Sat, 25 Oct 2014 08:25:11 -0300

I admire my brother. If there is one word that defines him, it is Educator. When he discovered his vocation, a process I was lucky enough to watch, I thought a school classroom would be too small for him.

Our father told us on his deathbed that the inheritance he was leaving us was our education. For him, that was the most important legacy you can leave your children.

My father was an educator too. He was one at every moment, even when he had to stop being one formally. That was his essence. Just like my brother, you could define my dad with the same word: Educator.

The world

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 08:25:11 -0300

The earth is flat and rests on the backs of four elephants: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. The elephants in turn stand on the shell of the turtle called Chaos, which swims peacefully in the Sea of the Unknown.

When my grandchildren ask me what the world is like I will tell them that story; I will tell them that this is how the world really is. I can’t tell it to my children anymore because I already ruined their view of things by giving them a good education.

V.U.C.A.

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 08:25:11 -0300

This weekend I talked with my kids, with whom I share a passion for writing, about how little I have written lately. Then Matías, my oldest son, told me what he is doing: writing a set number of words every day, about anything, but writing. What he does is meet a daily quota.

So I’m going to start doing that: write, write, write every day. It’s the only way I’m going to fall back in love with this thing I like so much. I think what happened to me is something my daughter Javiera pointed out: after publishing my book I was left with a feeling of having to live up to expectations, which are really only my own. An unnecessary self-imposed demand that takes all the charm out of having a blog.

A set of recurring conversations

Sun, 07 Sep 2014 08:25:11 -0300

How easy our role as managers would be if we could install leadership skills in our brains the same way we install a new piece of software on our computer.

Exactly six years ago I was handed one of the most important challenges of my professional life: building a team from scratch.

I had managed teams before, but I had never had to build one from the ground up. It has been an enriching and extraordinary experience. I have been lucky enough to work with great people.

The road less traveled

Fri, 01 Aug 2014 08:25:11 -0300

This blog turns nine. Without your noticing, the kids grow up. Like my oldest son, who at the beginning of this year took flight and now lives his independent adult life. My son, whose birthday is August 1, same as this blog.

Joseph Campbell tells us, in the story of the quest for the Holy Grail, that the knights of the Round Table decide to enter the forest at those places where there was no path. Of course: it makes no sense to look for the marvelous or for adventure along the road everyone has traveled.

Prosa

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 08:25:11 -0300

For the last two months I’ve been working on a secret personal project: building a “blog server” in the spirit of Medium.

The fruit of that work is Prosa, my own content publishing platform, one that meets my needs.

This blog turns nine on August 1; from that date on it will be published using Prosa. That day I will also publish the source code of this tool. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, you can read some of the reasons why I decided to write “Prosa” over there.

Reasons

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 08:25:11 -0300

After programming, writing is one of the things I like doing most. For eight years I’ve been publishing the blog “La Naturaleza Del Software”. Lately the writing frequency on that blog had been dropping, which may seem quite natural, since writing blogs isn’t a very popular activity these days. There are great “bloggers” whose blogs are practically abandoned.

But the truth is that my case wasn’t only about lack of motivation, or shortage of time. The problem had to do with the tool for publishing posts.

The project nobody wants

Tue, 10 Jun 2014 08:25:11 -0300

You’ve surely had to face one, or you’re in the middle of one: the “proyecto cacho”, as we say in Chile, the thankless mess of a project that lands on you. In this 5-minute video, Liliana Reyes shows us how to deal with the situation:

Lightning Talk: Liliana Reyes - Trabajar en un proyecto cacho from continuum on Vimeo.

Technology and age

Mon, 19 May 2014 08:25:11 -0300

Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, reflected on our reactions to technology:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

FLISOL SCL 2014

Sun, 27 Apr 2014 08:25:11 -0300

Yesterday I had the pleasure of giving a talk to some of the attendees of the FLISOL 2014 event held in Santiago, this time at the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana.

It was a very pleasant time in which we talked about La Naturaleza del Software (The Nature of Software). I want to thank the organizers and the attendees.

Here are the slides from the talk:

The Web is not the internet, and other brief historical notes

Sun, 27 Apr 2014 08:25:11 -0300

Watching on Twitter how some people reminisce about their experience with the web on the occasion of its “25th birthday”, I set out to clear up a couple of things.

First, a lot of people, including some who should know better, especially given the positions they hold, confuse the World Wide Web with the Internet.

The Internet is much older than the Web. The Internet is a set of interconnected networks characterized by their use of the TCP/IP protocol.

If you don't know

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 08:25:11 -0300

In Spain there is a river called the Tajo that runs through the city of Toledo. There is also another one called the Tejo. A poet decided to share a poem about the river Tejo, and at a festival he recited it:

-A orillas del río Tejo, la prenda de mis amores... (On the banks of the river Tejo, the darling of my heart...)

A Galician interrupts him and says:

2014, the year of SSL/TLS? (guest villain)

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 08:25:11 -0300

This year has started with a series of alerts and discoveries of vulnerabilities affecting the network’s security infrastructure. Since it’s a very important and timely topic, I’ve invited my friend Cristián Rojas to give us his opinion as a security expert. This is his contribution:

2014, the year of SSL/TLS?

by Cristián Rojas

Let me start by thanking Eduardo for letting me step in once again as guest villain on his blog, this time over an issue that has the computing community as a whole pretty worried.

Comments

Wed, 26 Mar 2014 08:25:11 -0300

By now it should be clear to you that my last post was pretty “cathartic”...

Or however you say it. What happened is that I was annoyed by an argument, by two arguments actually, that reached the same ending. Anyway, I’m also partly to blame for never learning the lesson... In short, in the end, to control my anger I followed the advice of one of my favorite philosophers, Emile Cioran:

“Writing is an extraordinary relief. And so is publishing. This will seem ridiculous to you, and yet it is very true.

Respect

Thu, 20 Mar 2014 08:25:11 -0300

One of the things that annoys me most is when people with a “liberal arts background”, that is, who never studied anything related to hard sciences, math or engineering, treat us engineers, computer people or scientists as if we were robots, or flat-out “inhuman”.

The biggest insult is that false split between “sciences” and “humanities”. We the little nerds, the more introverted ones, the ones fascinated by science and rationality, are regarded as autistic robots who spend all day thinking about code, or mathematical equations, algorithms or heuristics, detached from humanity, incapable of feeling or empathizing with “the sorrows, joys or fears of the people”.

Sex, pianos and wireless networks

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 08:25:11 -0300

A scandalous actress

A young woman, riding her horse, heads into the forest. For a few moments we lose sight of her. Through the branches and foliage of the trees we see her reappear, running naked to dive into a river.

Then the camera shows us that the young woman’s clothes are on the horse’s back. The animal grazes calmly until a mare peeks out from behind a wooden fence a few meters away in a clearing. The horse whinnies and runs toward the mare, abandoning our protagonist.

I'm back!

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 08:25:11 -0300

After reading Jeff Atwood, on the occasion of his blog’s ten years, I was left mulling over the last year of La Naturaleza del Software.

Turning eight was an important milestone, one that even got me to compile and publish a book. But apart from that, the truth is that the last year was pretty “lazy” by this blog’s standards.

That worried me, of course, but it was this reflection of Atwood’s that shook me:

Garbage collection

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 08:25:11 -0300

“I achieved every IT person’s dream: getting out of IT”.

I’m told that line was heard from a professional more or less my age. Apparently he is very happy with his current job and somewhat annoyed at having wasted so much time on computing.

“I want to fall back in love with computing :/”, says a tweet a young woman posted a couple of days ago, which showed up in my timeline.

Vaccines

Sat, 18 Jan 2014 08:25:11 -0300

My youngest daughter was about a year old when she grabbed a thermometer, bit it, and swallowed the contents. It was a regrettable lapse on our part that left that dangerous object within her reach.

Luckily my wife noticed right away, called me at work, and we rushed to see her pediatrician. The doctor ordered X-rays, which showed the little beads of metal making their way through her intestinal tract. We were very scared and the doctor was baffled, since he wasn’t sure what to do in a case like this.

Turing's pardon

Tue, 24 Dec 2013 08:25:11 -0300

Today, December 24, her “august and magnanimous majesty,” Queen Elizabeth II of England, has issued a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing, who was convicted in 1952 on charges of gross indecency under an English law from 1885. In essence, the father of computing was convicted for being homosexual.

Two years later, depressed at having been subjected to chemical castration, which left him impotent, made his breasts grow, and caused other physical ailments, Turing decided to kill himself by biting an apple poisoned with cyanide.

Monday, Monday

Tue, 26 Nov 2013 08:25:11 -0300

I didn’t feel like writing about CyberMonday, but it seems to have become the thing to do. Several people have already written about it, and although some of the opinions are interesting, a number of others are very lightweight, despite coming from sources that ought to dig deeper. So I am going to write something about this “homegrown festival of electronic consumerism,” a true tradition :).

Oh Monday morning, Monday morning couldn’t guarantee That Monday evening you would still be here with me

Big O notation

Sat, 23 Nov 2013 08:25:11 -0300

A guessing game

Imagine the following game: “one player thinks of a number between 1 and 1,000, and the other has to try to guess it by asking the first player questions that can only be answered with a Yes or a No.”

One way to do it is to ask about each number in sequence: “is it 1?”, answer: “No”. “Is it 2?”, “No”. “Is it 3”, “No”. etc.

News

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 08:25:11 -0300

I wanted to share several pieces of good news with you, friends. First, as I write this post my first ebook, “La Naturaleza Del Software - volumen 1” (in Spanish), has been out for 12 days, is closing in on 400 downloads and sits at #1 among the internet computing bestsellers for Kindle books in Spanish.

(http://amzn.to/17bKPdO)

Of course I am very happy and proud. I know several of you have helped reach this milestone, and I thank you very much. For those who haven’t bought it yet, let me tell you that until next Friday, November 22, 2013, the book is at a special sale price, almost a third of its original price. You can get it on Amazon here.

Satisfaction

Mon, 11 Nov 2013 08:25:11 -0300

We live in times when people do not know how to appreciate nature, what they have, the wonder of life. This morning someone in my Twitter timeline wrote the following:

Yesterday I went to a tourist spot where people were frantically taking pictures of themselves for “face”—contemplating the natural beauty was an afterthought – @juque https://twitter.com/juque/status/399876149959876608
Ayer fui a un lugar turístico donde la gente estaba desquiciada tomándose fotos para el "face"—contemplar la belleza natural era accesorio

A brief and absurd history of programming languages

Wed, 06 Nov 2013 08:25:11 -0300

The Spanish version of this post is a partial translation of this article, written by James Iry. A taste of the original:

1936 - Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them.

1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. His lambda calculus is ignored because it is insufficiently C-like. This criticism occurs in spite of the fact that C has not yet been invented.

Anthology 2011-2013

Wed, 06 Nov 2013 08:25:11 -0300

In 2011 I put together an anthology of several posts published in the first years of this blog. Now, with my ebook just out (it contains a selection/edit of 32 articles from the blog’s first seven years), I decided to write this list of what I consider the best articles of the last three years, to complement that first anthology. This anthology also includes posts written on Akarrú, my other blog.

Since the previous anthology was done in May 2011, I am going to include posts from the latter part of 2011. Here we go:

Don Francisco and cognitive dissonance

Wed, 06 Nov 2013 08:25:11 -0300

Don Francisco

When I was a kid there wasn’t much to watch on television, and Sábados Gigantes (that’s what it was called back then), the Chilean variety show, ruled the weekend screen.

Its game shows were popular, all of them copies of American programs, though many of us didn’t know it (which explains the nickname "Guatón Copión", the copycat fatso, given to Don Francisco by the comedian Fernando Alarcón, with his character Pepito TV, who was in charge of entertaining us on Sundays).

Turing... Alan Turing

Wed, 06 Nov 2013 08:25:11 -0300

You may not know this, but Alan Turing and Ian Fleming (the author of the novels about Bond, James Bond) worked together.

During the Second World War Alan Turing led the Hut 8 group at Bletchley Park, the headquarters of the
Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). Hut 8 was in charge of breaking the secret codes created with the Enigma machines used by the German navy. This famous machine had an encryption mechanism that was considered impenetrable at the time.

La Naturaleza del Software: the book

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 08:25:11 -0300

For several years now one of my “dreams” has been to publish books, not one but several, which is pretty ambitious really :). In part, much of what I have written on this blog has been preparation for that, and now I feel ready to take that step.

For some time I have been exploring new media for spreading my ideas. One of the first has been the regular chat we hold with my friends Marco and Ubaldo on El Test Acido. There, the conversation in front of the webcam, with several of you joining in, has been an enriching and entertaining experience.

StartechConf 2013

Sat, 26 Oct 2013 08:25:11 -0300

This year I took part in StartechConf 2013, a real honor for me, I have to say. Not only did I get to give my presentation, I also got to meet several people I have shared with on my Twitter timeline, make new friends and hang out with the speakers, such as “Sensei Jano Gonzalez”(@janogonzalez).

The truth is I felt very happy during these two days of the conference. I had a great time and I thank the organizers for letting me take part.

The hackers of October 5: 25 years

Fri, 04 Oct 2013 08:25:11 -0300

It’s a funny thing, but it turns out that now every Chilean who lived through those days voted No, so I don’t know what’s so special about this story that I published a few years ago. At least last year it was remembered by the students of the computer science department at the Universidad de Chile, as this photo from that event shows, where we see the two protagonists of the story below, MAZ and REM:

Energy

Sun, 29 Sep 2013 08:25:11 -0300

A few days ago I was talking with a datacenter services provider here in Chile. He told me that unfortunately it is not possible to have Tier-4 certified datacenters in our country. The reason, in simple terms: we have only one “electrical highway” supplying power to the computing centers. To reach the highest level of datacenter certification, the power has to come from two sources that are independent of each other.

Mars needs women

Sun, 08 Sep 2013 08:25:11 -0300

“Men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” “vive la différence!” At the end of the day, every debate about gender equity and women’s participation in working life ends up drifting into the classic stereotypes that sell millions of books and make second-rate psychologists rich.

My alma mater recently set up a priority admission program for gender equity. The idea is to add extra places reserved for women. We will have to see what effect a measure like this has. I don’t want to argue about it; I assume its timing was thought through and that steps will be taken to evaluate its success.

Moving

Tue, 03 Sep 2013 08:25:11 -0300

Spring arrives, and with it renewal, nature’s renewal. People start getting ready for this season, which in Chile coincides with the national holidays. A time of ramadas (the open-air fiesta stalls), of flowers, folk songs, of memories, some of them very hard ones. But it seems everything ends up fixed with a glass of chicha, or of good red wine.

In this season of change it occurred to me to change hosts, servers, and I took the chance to move this blog to a new home. That is not all I had to migrate: I also helped a friend move his system, which was hosted on my old server, somewhere else.

It can't be done!

Thu, 08 Aug 2013 08:25:11 -0300

It can’t be done! How many times have we heard that phrase? That damned phrase!

Your development is ready, the people in sales or in process management are happy, testing was a success, everything is on schedule, and when you go to systems to start negotiating a date for going to production you run into the famous “it can’t be done!”…

When the rebel forces need the Jedi, all the Jedi do is raise objections. Help me, Obi-Wan! No! comes the unexpected answer.

Eight years

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 08:25:11 -0300

Just like that, without my noticing, this blog has turned eight, or 2 to the power of 3, for fans of binary math.

That is quite a while, and not common. There are few of us persistent bloggers left. It is true that lately I have been writing less often, but we are still here, and what matters is that many of you, my reader friends, are still here too, keeping me company. Thank you very much for your patience.

Roles and functions

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 08:25:11 -0300

This is one of my favorite photographs, a fairly famous one, showing the workers who were building the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, enjoying their lunch on one of the building’s beams.

There are many similar photos from that era, showing these construction workers going about their jobs without a care among the beams of those enormous steel structures, with none of the safety gear we take for granted today.

Structure

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 08:25:11 -0300

I remember that back when I was a student I came across a book by Niklaus Wirth titled Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs.

How simple the world of computing looks from the perspective of that title, but we have evolved a lot in the years since. We are at a stage in the development of computing that is centered on service. The wheel has turned and we are back at the point where it all began, only this time the wheel sits at a higher level. Computing started out as a service, controlled by a few for a few. Now computing is a service for the many, self-managed. Anyone can build a service, or at least the potential is there for anyone using the cloud to develop their own innovations.

Utility, beauty and firmness

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 08:25:11 -0300

Architect comes from the Greek arkhitekton: arkhi is chief and tekton is builder. The architect was the chief of the builders.

Besides Phidias, the famous Greek architect, what we have kept from antiquity is the work of Vitruvius, a Roman architect, engineer and writer, who wrote a treatise called “The Ten Books on Architecture”, which for centuries was the only material architects had to build on. This book was fundamental in the Renaissance and had a great influence on Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. It is in this treatise that Vitruvius establishes the three essential characteristics of every structure: “utilitas, venustas and firmitas” (utility, beauty and firmness).

Form and function

Sun, 12 May 2013 08:25:11 -0300

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of
all things physical and metaphysical,of all things human and all things superhuman —of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul— that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.
– Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered”

For the architect Louis Sullivan, an admirer of American rationalist thinkers like Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and Melville, there was a single aesthetic creed, with one simple rule “that permits no exceptions”: “form ever follows function”.

Defining the problem

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 08:25:11 -0300

“Architecture is a product of an activity called design, and there is no design without a problem. A problem definition is an explicit, written statement of a problem: the gap between the current state and the desired state”
– James O. Coplien Lean Architecture: for Agile Software Development

I like this definition of a problem: “the gap between the current state and the desired state”. What we do when we solve a problem is change a situation, usually an annoying one. Or satisfy a need.

Expectations

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 08:25:11 -0300

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology - not the other way around.”

Use cases

Let me tell you what a friend of mine thought about use cases. She’s Argentine, and it shows the moment she opens her mouth. She once told me about a typical exchange with one of her programmers: “Che! So I ask him how on earth an invoice could have a due date earlier than its issue date, and you know what the idiot answers? That the situation wasn’t covered in the use case! You know what you can do with your use cases?! I told him…”

We are not cooks!

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 08:25:11 -0300

This post is long, I mean looooong, because it has ambition, and it means to say many important things. As Chef Antoine of New Orleans says (quoted by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month):

“Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you”

If I were you I would find myself a good couch and a quiet moment to read this, which at times can get pretty dense, but I think it’s worth it. At least I decided to take the proper time to write it, calmly, reflectively, the way it should be done when we consider the things we do important.

Tools

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 08:25:11 -0300

My father, like any good electronics man, had a lot of interesting tools, some of them dangerous, as my brother and I discovered very painfully. Other tools were intriguing, strange, and complicated. Pliers, screwdrivers, voltmeters or testers, oscilloscopes or plain soldering irons, boards for mounting circuits, a pair of magnifying glasses with a visor and a loupe that were good for inspecting circuits, or for dressing up as an alien. But the best one, my favorite, was that “paralyzing dart launcher used in the clone wars of the 25th century in the hills of Chuquicamata”: the piston desoldering pump. Here is a photo of the closest thing I could find to that wonderful futuristic device, futuristic at least for an 11-year-old boy in 1977 (now you’ll understand why I liked Super 8 so much )

The road to innovation

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 08:25:11 -0300

Adrian Cockcroft is the “cloud architect” at Netflix. Yes, cloud architect. What the hell is that? I’ll explain some other time. What matters is that he writes a very interesting blog, on which almost everything I’m going to write today is based.

In December 2011 he wrote a post titled “How Netflix gets out of the way of innovation”, which I suggest you read. It is actually the “script” of a talk about Netflix’s culture.

Playing your cards right

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:25:11 -0300

I like Netflix. I don’t like TV, meaning today’s broadcast television. I stopped watching it a long time ago, and I used to be a real TV junkie, but its reality shows and its awful newscasts wore me out years back. I grew up in the seventies, when television meant, at least in Chile, Yankee series like Star Trek, The Six Million Dollar Man, Bonanza, and “Tardes de Cine”, the afternoon movie slot, with Abbott and Costello or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis pictures, and every now and then some horror classic, like The Mummy with Boris Karloff, or Dracula with Bela Lugosi. I even remember watching Hitchcock’s Psycho on Televisión Nacional one summer night when I was about thirteen or fourteen. So the movies I saw weren’t that bad :wink: At least back when television was public, for real.

Difference

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 08:25:11 -0300

I’ve had people love me and had people hate me, and while I prefer the love by a wide margin, I kind of prefer either to indifference. Because I’m not about making indifference; I’m about making a difference.

– Ron Jeffries, one of the founders of eXtreme Programming.

Four bare-minimum things

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 08:25:11 -0300

There are an endless pile of tools engineers are fond of using in their development process, but there are only four that they really need:

Editor

Compiler

Version control

Bug tracking

– Michael “Rands” Lopp

Everyone who develops software for a living has some kind of editor or integrated development environment (IDE) and a compiler available.

The incredible thing is that version control and a bug tracking tool are missing at many companies whose business is developing software.

New style

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 08:25:11 -0300

New year, new style and a change of publishing platform.

Starting today this blog will use octopress as its content generation platform.

Another novelty this year is that all the content is available in this github repository, under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.

It’s not just about having a backup; it is also a way to preserve and spread the content of this blog. With all the “source code” of my content from these years available, you can help me improve it and spread it. If you have used github you know that if you find a “bug” (an error) in my posts you can get the source, fix it directly on github and let me know through a “pull request”. That’s the magic of github, and we can use it to improve the quality of the content.

The Elop effect

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 08:25:11 -0300

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
– Sun Tzu

The chart shows the revenue of the smartphone divisions of three big companies, from the first quarter of 2009 to the fourth quarter of 2010. Which one is Nokia?

Madmen and wheels

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 08:25:11 -0300

It was a day of pouring rain, and Marcos gets a flat tire right in front of an insane asylum. He pulls over, gets out, shelters from the rain as best he can and starts removing the lug nuts that hold the wheel. He leaves them carefully on the ground in a little pile. He takes the wheel to the trunk of the car to swap it for the spare, and when he comes back he accidentally kicks the lug nuts, with such bad luck that they roll away and drop down the storm drain.

Sayings, madmen and trains

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 08:25:11 -0300

I learned the principles of agile (and of the best process for developing software) many years ago from the popular saying that goes: “you have to kill the lice one at a time, before the lice kill you.”

The art of managing projects starts from simple things, from knowing what you want and steering efforts and resources toward that goal: Direction+Organization+Method. But we don’t always have all the resources, or all the pieces, or there simply isn’t enough time to reach the goal. That is when you need to apply the principle of the sub-optimization of the parts for the sake of the whole, also known as the principle of the madman and the flat tire.

The best software development process

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Forget agile and the manifestos, the best process for developing software is very simple.

Understand the problem. At this point it’s good to talk to the user, and listen.
Write down somewhere what needs to be done.
Sit down and code the solution.
Ship to production.
Fix the bugs quickly and go back to step 4.
If it works, find another problem to solve.

This process gets better if you don’t ask the users for too many opinions and you have programmers who can actually program. :wink:

Caine's Arcade

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 08:25:11 -0300

I found out about this wonderful story via Pensamientos Ágiles.

They say a child needs only his imagination, and maybe a cardboard box, to be happy, and in this case Caine shows us that this gift can bring joy to a lot of people.

{% vimeo 40000072 %}

The story appeared on Reddit and had a big impact, as you can see in the video. There is currently an initiative to fund a scholarship for Caine and other kids as imaginative as he is, which so far has raised more than 200,000 dollars:

A trust model

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 12:25:11 -0300

“They don’t trust us”, “they don’t believe us!” are phrases you hear frequently when a working, service or business relationship is starting out.

Trust is something that takes time and effort to build, but it can be lost very quickly. How valuable it would be to have a model that lets us assess and improve the degree of trust with our clients and users.

There is a trust model that divides this concept into four dimensions that can be brought together in a simple equation:

The Theseus paradox and other ideas about change

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 12:25:11 -0300

“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and strong timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
– Plutarch, quoted from Wikipedia

Is your boss a functional programmer?

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 12:25:11 -0300

Your boss, and mine, without being IT people, programmers or software engineers, are probably better functional programmers than you are. Of course, because they most likely use one of the most popular functional languages in existence: Excel.

Yes, Excel, the thing so many of your non-IT colleagues use, supports the functional paradigm perfectly well.

First, in Excel you have values, numbers or sometimes text, that you put in cells. For example, you can put the value 2 in cell A1 and the value 3 in cell A2.

Disclosure: you can't just go and do it

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 08:25:11 -0300

The following post is by a notable “guest villain”: the security expert, and beer guru ;-), Cristián Rojas.

This piece was born from a conversation with Cristián on El Test Acido, which, given the format of the show, we couldn’t take any deeper. That’s why I asked Cristián to develop the subject in an article that I now share with you.

Disclosure: you can’t just go and do it

By Cristián Rojas

Turtles and frogs

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Alan Kay creates Smalltalk and invents the term “object oriented.” When asked what that means he replies, “Smalltalk programs are just objects.” When asked what objects are made of he replies, “objects.” When asked again he says “look, it’s all objects all the way down. Until you reach turtles.” – A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages, James Iry

In Hindu cosmology the “Universe was a closed entity, contained in the coils of Seshu, the black cobra. At the bottom of everything there was a sea of milk completely surrounded by that serpent. An enormous turtle swam in the milky ocean, and on its shell stood four elephants (one at each cardinal point). In turn, those elephants held the Earth on their backs. At its center rose a great central mountain, around which a gigantic fire revolved, bringing about day and night. Seshu, with an upper coil, contained the vault of heaven.”[^1]

The ruins of Troy and other journalistic errors

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 12:25:11 -0300

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers” – Thomas Jefferson

A piece published today in La Tercera, page 66, trends section, informs us that the walls of Troy were 8 meters high and 4 meters long. 4 meters long? That really was a miniature city! Surely the writer of the piece was trying to express the width of the walls.

46

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Thirty years ago my father, at great sacrifice, bought me a ZX-81 computer, and that’s how it all began.

Actually it wasn’t quite like that. A few months earlier I had started learning to program these things in a workshop at my school, but clearly my dad noticed how much these machines interested me.

One of the charms of the old computers of the late 70s and early 80s was that they came with nothing but a BASIC interpreter, so for a good while you had no choice but to start learning to program. Fortunately they came with manuals you could learn from, and from there on it was up to your imagination.

The emperor's nose

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 12:25:11 -0300

For many years, one question troubled the subjects of the Empire. Everyone wanted to know the length of the Emperor’s nose. Of course, being caught observing the Emperor’s face up close, or worse still, holding a ruler near him, would be a provocation and a most serious offense, punished immediately by death.

But many were curious, to the point that a group of wise men gathered to find a method for obtaining the answer, and this is how they did it. Questionnaires were printed and sent in bundles to the village chiefs, who distributed them among the peasants. Literacy was high enough for most of them to be able to answer the single question, which was, of course, “how long do you think the Emperor’s nose is?”

Are some journalists antisocial?

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:25:11 -0300

Yesterday our esteemed Francotirador surprised us with this piece on the Radio Bio Bio site: Study explains why engineers, programmers and scientists are antisocial.

I asked my Twitter timeline what they thought of the article, and that set off a very interesting and intense debate.

Part of yesterday’s discussion on Twitter

Many people didn’t like it, obviously, because after all many of us completely disagree with the stereotype that engineers, programmers and scientists are asocial people, and we are even less going to agree with being called antisocial¹.

Bad speling

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 08:25:11 -0300

I think of myself as a person with good spelling. Sure, I make mistakes, several of them on this blog, and when I spot them I fix them quickly before anyone else sees them and “trolls” me for it. Because it’s embarrassing (that’s how you spell it, right?).

Grammar is another matter. If spelling makes you suffer, imagine the suffering of not being sure whether a sentence is correctly written. The third problem is style, but that one, well, that one can be solved, because you can learn a lot about style by reading others and by writing a lot (heaps, tons, with blood, sweat and tears). If you want to be good at something you have to practice. But you have to start at some point.

The 3 Rs

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 08:25:11 -0300

At the parents’ meeting for my youngest daughter’s class, the teacher told us about the values model they are working on with the children at the school. She talked about the 3 Rs: Responsibility, Repair and Reconciliation. The idea is that when a child makes a mistake, they must take responsibility, step forward and admit that they were wrong, or that they did something they shouldn’t have, such as picking on a classmate. The second thing is that they must repair the harm done. And if it affects another person, as in a fight, they must reconcile, with one apologizing and the other sincerely accepting the apology.

Kill it early

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Do you know the best way to kill a crocodile? While it’s still in the egg.

“My general philosophy is, “Kill it early and save your money.”
There’s this huge myth in IT that we’ve got more failures than other
industries. The problem is we’ve defined “failure” as “not finishing
despite all adversity.” Most other industries don’t do this and will
kill a project early if it is obviously not going to make it. We’ll
ram a project through no matter what, even if it’s obvious that it’ll
fail miserably. In IT, we’ve missed the idea that we can just avoid
projects or kill them early and avoid spending all that cash.”

WAT

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Enjoy:
link to the video

/Via Destroy All Software

Which side do you want your child on?

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Unfortunately the stupidity of anti-vaccination is showing up in our country, and the worst part is that it gets coverage on broadcast TV, with all the consequences that brings: the spread of a lie. Vaccines do not cause autism!

But Penn & Teller explain it better:

Vaccines do not cause autism; there is no evidence proving any kind of relationship between thimerosal and autism. It is all based on a fraudulent study carried out by Andrew Wakefield.

A fundamental duality in software engineering

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 12:25:11 -0300

We have a function such that:

for 0, it returns 0
for 1, it returns 1
for 2, it returns 4
for 3, it returns 9
for 4, it returns 16
for 5, it returns 25

What is the value for 6?

Many of you will say the value is 36, which would be valid if the function were

f(x) = x^2

But if I tell you that the value for 6 is 34, what happens to what you assumed?

Mastery

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:25:11 -0300

“The greater the master, the more purely his person disappears behind the work.” – Martin Heidegger

Dehydrated brains

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 12:25:11 -0300

In November 2011, backed by the conclusions of a group of scientists who, in 3 years of research, could not find conclusive evidence, the European Union banned drink producers from claiming that “water can prevent dehydration”.¹

Yes, just as you read it: in Europe a bottled water producer cannot include in its advertising the claim that “water hydrates”, or prevents dehydration, to be more precise.

Let’s think for a moment. Hydro comes from the Greek² ὑδρο-, hydros, which means.… wait a minute!.… WATER!!

Where are the Jetsons?

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 12:25:11 -0300

The Jetsons turned 50. It was on September 23, 1962 that the first episode of the futuristic animated series aired, on the ABC network.

The surprising thing is that The Jetsons only aired for one season; they were a television flop in their day. Until 1985 there were only 24 episodes of The Jetsons!

Keep reading on akarrú

The fight that matters now

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 12:25:11 -0300

“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition” – a quote given to me by the ICCI students at UTEM

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama said:

“We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.”¹

With this comment Barack Obama² reinforces an error that was put to rest years ago and that is causing a public health disaster not only in the United States, but in many countries where parents are no longer vaccinating their children.

Thank you!

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 12:25:11 -0300

On Thursday, September 6, I gave a talk at the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana to the students of the Civil Engineering in Computer Science program. The talk is called “Creators of Universes”.

The talk was motivational in nature, and reflects several of the ideas laid out in earlier posts, in particular these three articles. One of the things I liked most about the content of the talk is that I talk about my team, those wonderful people who work with me at my job, of whom I am proud, and about the way they contribute to fulfilling our vision of service.

Fending for yourself

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 12:25:11 -0300

The truth is I don’t remember how I came to know Enzo Abbagliati. Even though we have friends in common we had never crossed paths in person; the truth is I knew him as a blogger before I knew him in person. I have to admit I’ve learned many things from Enzo, important things, like the fact that Springfield has two libraries, which matters to all of us who care about looking after our heritage and defending the public library. As part of this blog’s anniversary, @cadaunante honors me with this extraordinary article that invites us to reflect:

The ritual

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 12:25:11 -0300

I’m lucky, because for this anniversary I’ve had the chance to bring together great Chilean bloggers, but this is the first time a “celebrity” writes on this blog.

Well, for me at least Franco Catrin is a celebrity, the kind that appears on television, because he really has been on TV, on the fondly remembered show TvNauta. Franco is a reference for many Chilean developers, and it is an honor that he agreed to take part with this post, quite a timely one at that:

Empathy and the Linux desktop

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 08:25:11 -0300

In answering the question of what killed the Linux desktop? Miguel de Icaza proposes two dimensions: (a) things change too fast, breaking both open source and proprietary software, (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions.

Miguel de Icaza’s claim is a loaded one, because it declares dead something that some question was ever alive, and that for others is still not a settled matter. But the truth is that many developers who ran Linux as their desktop have switched to Mac OSX. Why?

Critical thinking

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Today on social media some people took as true the story published by the site ElDeforma.com: Samsung pays Apple $1 billion fine in nickels.

Publimetro in Colombia published it and then had to apologize; other outlets edited their content so that the mistake wouldn’t show so much.

The copy-pasting of this story is impressive. You only have to look on Google to see how the media don’t bother to verify anything and publish this “news” without the slightest shame.

To the good IT people

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 08:25:11 -0300

It is a pleasure for me to include the following post as part of this blog’s anniversary, because I am a great admirer of Aldrin Martoq’s style. I think he has a great talent for writing and should do more of it, which confirms an observation of mine that good IT people are good communicators too, and that is precisely what this new “guest villain” talks to us about:

To the good IT people

by aldrinmartoq

Neil Armstrong

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 12:25:11 -0300

Neil Armstrong 1930-2012

I was a kid of 6 or 7 when my father would screen films for us about the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. He had an old film projector, with copies of newsreels about the 1962 World Cup and the NASA briefing films on the space program, which he got from the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano de Cultura in Chuquicamata. He also had some LIFE magazines about the space race, and a series of books the same magazine published in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Is it a good idea to publish the electoral roll?

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 12:25:11 -0300

It turns out the Chilean electoral roll has been published, in compliance with article 32 of Law 18,556 (the Constitutional Organic Law on the Electoral Registration System and the Electoral Service).

Since the latest amendments to this law mean that every Chilean over 18 must be automatically registered in the electoral rolls, the roll will immediately contain the RUT (Chile’s national ID number), full name, address and sex of all of them. Article 32 says:

From open government to service government

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 22:25:11 -0300

Marcos Malamud is one of those friends I found by writing this blog. Through his comments I got to know him and his work on management systems, and we also had the chance to share a memorable episode of El Test Acido. For me it is a great satisfaction that he accepted this invitation as a guest villain and that he is giving us this excellent post. Enjoy:

From open government to service government

By Marcos Malamud (@mismatica – www.mismatica.com)

Be awesome

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 22:25:11 -0300

It was this piece in Wired Enterprise, about the Curiosity robot and the software patch they had to apply to it, that got me thinking about some lessons NASA can teach us.

It turns out the launch date for these missions is set by the moment when Mars and Earth are closest. It’s obvious: launching the spacecraft at that moment saves fuel, which is the most expensive item of the whole mission. So everything has to be ready to match that date; otherwise the launch can be postponed for several more years.

It's LNDS's birthday!

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 22:25:11 -0300

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.

Data as democratic artifacts

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 12:25:11 -0300

Álvaro Graves is another of the guests who accepted my invitation to write during this month of the blog’s seventh anniversary. Álvaro has spent several years contributing to the Manzana Mecánica team. He has also become one of our national experts in the field of OpenData, advising various bodies on the subject. Álvaro is currently working on his PhD in Cognitive Science in the United States. He has given us this interesting post on the importance of having open data and how its availability could positively affect our democracies:

About NO, the movie

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 22:25:11 -0300

This week sees the release of NO, the movie, which tells the story of the campaign that managed to win the plebiscite of October 5, 1988. A few years ago I published this story, and taking advantage of the occasion, and given that we are also celebrating 7 years of this blog, it seemed like a good idea to republish this post, which tells the story of two young men who took part in that historic day. So here it is, republished:

Preventing novice attacks (guest post)

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 22:25:11 -0300

During this anniversary month we will have contributions from several friends who have kindly agreed to send their pieces to this blog. We start with this interesting and very useful article written by Daniel Molina Wegener (@damowe), software architect, great programmer, and author of coder.cl.

Thanks, Daniel! I leave you to enjoy this excellent post (I, for one, am going to go over this site and apply some of this advice):

Seventh anniversary

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:25:11 -0300

After several false starts, on August 1, 2005 I published the first post on this blog.

Today this space turns seven!

So we will celebrate these seven years with the participation of several friends who have agreed to contribute some articles, which I will be publishing over the next few days. To all of them, my thanks in advance for being willing.

We will also revisit some old texts, and of course there will be new topics to share.

The feat of Anonymous

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 22:25:11 -0300

The defacement of a sushi bar in Puente Alto, one of the high points of Anoymous’s #OpChile2012 operation yesterday, July 30:

What is the political message behind this?

Thank you, Themo

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 08:25:11 -0300

A few months ago I met Ada, the daughter of Themo Lobos, the great Chilean cartoonist. We met one midday in the cafeteria of a university where she teaches. The reason for our meeting was to ask permission to use the image of Ogú as the mascot for an open source project I wanted to start.

I never met Themo; the closest I got to him was this contact with Ada. Themo’s generosity surprised me. He understood the idea of the project perfectly and “gave” me one of his “monitos”, his little cartoon characters, to be used as the first logo of Ogu, that programming language I am developing (if any of you feel like helping me, we can finish it soon).

The value of values

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 08:25:11 -0300

“Las juventudes cacarearon bastante y no convencen ni por solo un instante
pidieron comprensión, amor y paz
con frases hechas muchos años atrás.”
– La Voz de los 80, Los Prisioneros

Here’s an exercise for tomorrow, when you get back to work: look at your company’s values, read them, explore what they mean. Ask your coworkers what they mean, or your bosses. Or maybe something more basic: go find your company’s values. They should be in some document, or in a nice frame hanging in a human resources office, right?

A silent war

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 22:25:11 -0300

I’m a GitHub fan (as you can see for yourselves), but I also really like what they do at Atlassian. For years I have used Jira and pushed my colleagues to use it. I use both companies’ tools personally and at work.

Personally I keep some public and private repositories on Github, and I never considered using Bitbucket, Atlassian’s option. Basically because to me Bitbucket was a Mercurial-based repository, and I’m not very fond of that DVCS. As Scott Chacon says, Mercurial feels like a Git Lite.

The Majorana (quasi)particle

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 22:25:11 -0300

The discovery of the Higgs boson, the misnamed God Particle, has gotten a lot of attention.

But a few months ago an effect was confirmed that brings us back to one of this blog’s favorite characters: Ettore Majorana.

You remember the story of Majorana, right? No?

Fine, for all you kids with attention deficit, here it goes again (in summary mode):

Ettore Majorana was a young and brilliant Italian physicist, a disciple of Enrico Fermi, considered one of the most brilliant physicists of his time, admired by everyone, who vanished mysteriously on March 25, 1938, when he boarded a ship and was never heard from again. His ideas were so far ahead of their time that only some 20 years later did Nobel laureate Richard Feynmann rediscover and reformulate several of his ideas, so that the rest of the scientific community could understand them. Legend has it that he was seen in Argentina in the 50s, where he supposedly worked as a humble engineer. There are more mysterious details, which I wrote about in this post, so go and read it carefully. I’ll wait for you here.

PHP

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 22:25:11 -0300

If all you have is a hammer...

Source: flickr by Ian Baker

The magnitude of problems (apropos of #librossiniva)

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 08:25:11 -0300

“A million dollars, a billion, a trillion, whatever. It doesn’t matter as long as we do something about the problem”¹, but how do you solve the problem if you don’t know its magnitude?

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Godwin’s law about debates on the Internet, the one that says:

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one”²

The corollary was supplied by Richard Sexton:

Invitation: Cloud computing in Chile: security and legal aspects in the cloud

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Here is the invitation to the second of the cloud computing panels we are organizing with the DCC (the Computer Science Department) of the Universidad de Chile.

This Friday the 13th at 12 noon in the DCC Auditorium, third floor, Avenida Blanco Encalada 2120, Third Floor, Santiago/Chile.

The Computer Science Department of the Universidad de Chile and its alumni community, with the support of INTEL, invite you to take part in the second discussion panel

Lies

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Mentira

Tu vida siempre ha sido una mentira
Una vulgar y estúpida mentira
Jugué a ganar y solo he conseguido
Ser un juguete más de tus Mentira

B. Richard

If you’re Argentine and you like eighties pop, you’ll think this song is by Valeria Lynch, but that’s a lie. It’s by Buddy Richard, “the best Chilean singer-songwriter of all time” (that’s a lie too). Actually, his name isn’t Buddy Richard (the lies keep coming), it’s Ricardo Toro, and he’s from Graneros (at least Graneros is in Chile, I hope (does anybody know Graneros?)).

Flame and MD5

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 08:25:11 -0300

In 2005 I wrote a proof of concept where I used a well-known MD5 vulnerability discovered by Xiaoyun Wang in 2004¹ to fool any system that validates a file’s digital signature using MD5. Later Peter Selinger developed an improvement on my scheme that automates the process even further.

My proof of concept lets two different programs (a “good” one and an “evil” one) have the same MD5 signature. For my scheme to work a third program, an extractor, is required. Selinger, however, improved my scheme by eliminating that third program. In essence, what Selinger does is create a “schizophrenic program” that contains both personalities of the program (the good one and the evil one).

The Turing enigma

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 08:25:11 -0300

The father of computing was gay. The hacker who broke the Nazis’ secret codes was tried and convicted on the basis of prejudice and intolerance. The mathematical genius died when he was just 41 years old, and whether he was driven to suicide or it was an accident is an open question once again.

His death has traditionally been considered a suicide, although his mother long maintained that it was an accident. The field is wide open for conspiracy theories: after all, Turing held many military secrets; after all, his death was convenient.

Universal machine

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Yesterday’s paper ran the headline “Computer failure paralyzes the Metro and leaves 37 thousand people without service.” The riders’ anger is understandable, I was affected myself. I am not going to talk about this failure, since I don’t know the details. It could be anything from a programming error to a cut communication line, but whatever it was, the incident reflects the high degree of dependence our society has on computers.

Right and wrong

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 08:25:11 -0300

In the play Breaking the Code, written by the British playwright Hugh Whitemore about the life of Alan Turing, there is a scene depicting the interview Dillwyn Knox gives him before recruiting him to the Bletchley Park team to break the Enigma codes.

In that scene Knox asks him to explain his theoretical work in mathematics in simple terms. Turing answers:

“It’s a technical paper in mathematical logic, but it’s also about the difficulty of telling right from wrong. People think — most people think — that in mathematics we always know what is right and what is wrong. Not so. Not any more. It’s a problem that’s occupied mathematicians for forty or fifty years. How can you tell right from wrong?”

A Turing machine made of Legos

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 22:25:11 -0300

Thanks to a tip from @utaladriz, here is a video of a Turing machine built out of Legos

http://www.legoturingmachine.org/

Chess players

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 22:25:11 -0300

Chess was one of Alan Turing’s passions. In fact he shared the hobby with Shannon and John von Neumann, and the challenge of the game has been on the minds of many of the great pioneers of computing.

The history of chess played by a machine goes way back. The famous case is the Mechanical Turk, a machine dressed up as a Turk that is said to have beaten even Napoleon Bonaparte. In reality there was no mechanism at all: it was operated from the inside by the Austrian chess champion Johann Allgaier.

The father of computing

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 08:25:11 -0300

One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, “My little computer said such a funny thing this morning.” -- Alan Turing

I can’t help thinking of Alan Turing’s words when I look at this photograph:

Turing Ladies in The Park

‘One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, “My little computer said such a funny thing this morning.”’

Turing week

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 22:25:11 -0300

Next Saturday, June 23, marks 100 years since the birth of Alan Turing. At La Naturaleza del Software (The Nature of Software) we will celebrate with a marathon of 7 posts starting tomorrow, but by way of invitation I leave you this video where we see the great British actor Derek Jacobi playing Turing, explaining his great contribution to mathematics. I also leave you a video and a text written by Eduardo Galeano about this genius of the twentieth century. I’ll be waiting for you.

The world is concurrent...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 22:25:11 -0300

"The world is concurrent
Things in the world don't share data
Things communicate with messages
Things fail"
– Joe Armstrong

Invitation

Tue, 29 May 2012 22:25:11 -0300

Tomorrow I will be at the talk and panel on Cloud Computing that we organized with the Department of Computer Science of the Universidad de Chile. See you there! :)

Here is the invitation: http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/node/1109

Cloud Computing in Chile: a conceptual framework for the cloud

Speakers:

Juan Carlos Barroux, Eduardo Díaz, Bárbara Poblete and Carlos Regonesi

Date:

May 30, 2012 - 14:00 - 16:00

Room:

DCC Auditorium

Organized by:

DCC

The Department of Computer Science of the Universidad de Chile and its alumni community, with the support of INTEL Chile, invite you to take part in the first discussion panel "Cloud Computing in Chile: a conceptual framework for the cloud".

Two out of three: the CAP theorem

Fri, 25 May 2012 08:25:11 -0300

My friend ISA wants her potatoes. She is talking about a problem she had trying to buy items for an online game with her credit card. It is a common problem. What we all expect is that if the money has been charged to our credit card, the product we bought shows up, all the more so when it is a virtual item (after all, it is just moving bytes from one record to another, right?).

Do you know Pin Pon?

Sat, 19 May 2012 08:25:11 -0300

[If] you think there’s some sophisticated recipe for success, then I think you are doomed. You’re making it too complicated.
– Brad Bird

Ah! How do you make things happen? Or as they say up in the Untied States: How to get things done.

We also talk about how to make a project succeed. “Real Artists Ship”, Steve Jobs used to say. “The ideas are good, but the execution often fails”, I’ve heard people say.

Everything is software

Fri, 18 May 2012 08:25:11 -0300

As we saw, Leibniz argues that nature must obey simple, beautiful and elegant laws, that is, comprehensible laws; otherwise science is not possible. The philosophical problem is knowing what we mean by simple laws. The simplicity of the equations that describe them? And what about all the prior knowledge you need in order to understand those equations?

Gregory Chaitin proposes an answer from the point of view of Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT).

Learning to program

Fri, 18 May 2012 08:25:11 -0300

According to a recent study, software engineering is the most lucrative and enviable career of 2012: Software Engineering 2012’s Top Job. The employment rate for IT professionals is the highest worldwide. And yet...

Motivation

A few days ago I heard a young first-year engineering student talking about her introduction to computing course, and frankly the comment was not encouraging. For her, programming is not much fun; having to tell the computer step by step what it has to do to implement a simple algorithm is a real drag.

What should we teach new developers?

Fri, 18 May 2012 08:25:11 -0300

The Spanish version of this post is my translation of an article published by Bjarne Stroustrup in Communications of the ACM in January 2010. Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of the C++ language. Here is a short excerpt of the original.

What should we teach new software developers? Why?

by Bjarne Stroustrup.

Published in Communications of the ACM (original text)
Vol. 53 No. 1, Pages 40-42
10.1145/1629175.1629192

Computer science must be at the center of software systems development. If it is not, we must rely on individual experience and rules of thumb, ending up with less capable, less reliable systems, developed and maintained at unnecessarily high cost. We need changes in education to allow for improvements of industrial practice.

What is programming?

Wed, 09 May 2012 08:25:11 -0300

“If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.” -- Alan Kay

Program, CTM!

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 08:25:11 -0300

You’ll say: “Eduardo, you obviously love writing, that must be your true passion.” And the truth is you’re not that far off: I like writing, and preparing these posts is one of the most fun things I do, but no, I have a greater passion than writing: programming. It really is what I like most. I don’t think I’m a great programmer, but I think I’m above average, and the best part is that I keep learning, every day.

On the intelligence of the Coyote

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 08:25:11 -0300

The laws of “Coyotics” (Part I)

1) The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “beep, beep.”
2) No outside force can harm the Coyote, only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products. Trains and trucks were the exception from time to time.
3) The Coyote could stop anytime, if he were not a fanatic.
(Repeat: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” – George Santayana)

About speed hashing

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 22:25:11 -0300

A few days ago Jeff Atwood, author of the famous blog Coding Horror, mentioned my 2005 work on MD5 collisions:

Eduardo Diaz has described a scheme by which two programs could be packed into two archives with identical MD5 hash. A special “extractor” program turn one archive into a “good” program and the other into an “evil” one.

Besides being honored by the mention, and blowing my own horn :), there are two things I’d like to say about that post.

The strange case of Ettore Majorana

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 22:25:11 -0300

In 2006, on the centenary of the birth of the great Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, the Electronic Journal of Theoretical Physics established a prize in memory of the Sicilian scientist. The Majorana Medal is an annual prize for researchers who show great creativity, critical sense and mathematical rigor in theoretical physics.

The Majorana Medal

His little-known story would make a plot for a novel. A true genius: according to Enrico Fermi his intelligence was comparable to that of Newton or Galileo.

The best text editor in the whole wide world

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Yesterday I went to see some talks by the dynamic languages group. My main interest was the presentation by my friend Aldrin Martoq and his project (or projects), of worldwide impact, Brayatan Azicalao (for the ladies).

I really liked the atmosphere of the meetup, and it’s nice to see that there are plenty of hackers getting together in our country to share knowledge. Most of the attendees are quite a bit younger than me, so there’s a generation gap that I suspect is around 15 years, which is very interesting. I can’t help thinking about what I was up to at the age of the people who go to these meetups, that is, what I was doing fifteen years ago. I suppose I had that same attitude, and I’m sure that if meetups had existed back then I would have gone to several. All we had were the #irc parties, but those are other stories that can’t be told during family viewing hours.

A lunch in Lafayette Square

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 08:25:11 -0300

In December 1942, the exact date is impossible to pin down, three men met for lunch at the restaurant of the Hay-Adams hotel in Lafayette Square, Washington D.C. They were not three politicians, or generals worried about the course of World War II. They were three geniuses thinking about the future.

Each of them had already made a great contribution to science. Although we don’t know what they talked about at that meeting, that afternoon they probably laid the foundations for the development of the modern digital computer, and for everything that came afterward and that we know as information technology. The three men who met for lunch in Lafayette Square were none other than the founding fathers of computing: Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and John von Neumann.

Entropy

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:25:11 -0300

“We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat-death of equilibrium and sameness... This heat-death in physics has a counterpart in the ethics of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe. In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system... Like the Red Queen, we cannot stay where we are without running as fast as we can.”
–Norbert Wiener, mathematician, coined the term cybernetics

Shoal

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:25:11 -0300

“With the instinct of a herd, of a shoal, we are more than 6 or 8 capitalists” – Iván Fuentes

Atorvastatin

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 22:25:11 -0300

It turns out my cholesterol is very high, in fact at a level that puts my health at risk. I need to change my eating habits and leave my sedentary life behind.

It’s no good getting scares and feeling anxious, with mysterious headaches or sensations of chest pain. After all, at 46 and sedentary, the odds of a heart attack or a major stroke are high.

Don’t worry, nothing serious has happened to me yet, but I have to lose weight and bring my cholesterol down to normal ranges. So that’s it. I don’t know why, but I wanted to tell you; after all, this blog is an important part of my life. In a way, writing keeps me sane; it has helped me get through depression and stress, so I suppose that telling you what I’m doing commits me a little more to starting the regimen I have to follow.

Philoctetes

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Of all the Greek warriors who set out for the Trojan War, Philoctetes stood out not only for his bravery, but for the marvelous inheritance he carried: the bow and arrows of Hercules himself.

But this brave warrior suffered a terrible mishap on his way to Troy. During a stop along the way he is bitten on the foot by a snake. The wound is not fatal, but it causes him pain and gives off an unbearable smell. Philoctetes’ moaning and screaming, plus the stench of his wound, lead his companions, egged on by Ulysses (Odysseus), to abandon him on the island of Lemnos.

Harry Potter and the mystery of the lost hour

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 22:25:11 -0300

In the old days you wrote down the time of a meeting in a paper planner: “9:30, March 12, coordination meeting...”, the clocks changed, you adjusted your watch, and that was that. The ink didn’t erase and rewrite itself by magic, leaving 10:30 on the page, at least not in our muggle world.

But there is more and more technological magic in our world; Ms. J.K. Rowling got us used to paintings that move and interactive news. Now our calendars move by magic: if the time changes, our digital calendars adjust themselves and nobody misses an appointment or shows up late. The magic works.

Adele

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 22:25:11 -0300

“Don't ask whether you can do something, ask how to do it.”
– Adele Goldberg

On the occasion of Women’s Day.

What is the truth?

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:25:11 -0300

This post is born of a concern that came out of a discussion with Matias Asun, executive director of Greenpeace Chile. In his column in El Mostrador today, along with laying out his position on the energy debate in our country, which is what his role calls for, he slips in a statement that left me intrigued:

“Currently in Japan only two of the 54 reactors are operating, and it is possible that even those will stop running in the short term.”

Origins

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 22:25:11 -0300

The first programming language I learned was Basic, back around 1981, on a Sinclair ZX81. Do you know what Dijkstra said about Basic? Dijkstra said: “The teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery”.

You’ll understand my concern when I found out that one of the people I admire most thought that way. Was my mind mutilated forever?

But then there’s another of the great heroes of our field, Alan Kay, who said: “arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras” (to which someone replied “and in microkays”).

Quality, correctness and elegance: an interview with Dijkstra

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 22:25:11 -0300

Here is this video with an interview with Edsger Dijkstra (1972 Turing Award, who died in August 2002).

Reading is healing

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:25:11 -0300

A wonderful film, and a great tribute to the great Buster Keaton:

Via Cadaunadas.

Read, please read.

Leap year!

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 22:25:11 -0300

February 29, 2012: a validation process refused to work properly today at my job. Essentially the bug was this: a program had to check against a date 10 years back. The solution the programmer implemented was simply to subtract 10 from the year. So, to compute a date 10 years earlier, it just subtracts 10 from the year, and gets the imaginary date: February 29, 2002.

Odd as it may seem, leap years tend to cause trouble for programmers.

Uhura

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Uhura comes from the Swahili word uhuru, which means freedom. In the futuristic world of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, humanity has moved past the prejudices of racism, sexism and xenophobia. That’s why, when he created the crew of the starship Enterprise, he filled it with people of different nationalities, such as a Russian navigator, a clear message at the height of the Cold War.

NBC executives, however, objected to his hiring Nichelle Nichols, the actress who played Uhura, as a permanent cast member of the hit science fiction series; they were afraid of upsetting the affiliates in the Deep South states.

Security and opportunity

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 08:25:11 -0300

In 2005 I published a proof of concept showing how vulnerable MD5 is when used as a “digital signature”; in 2007 Peter Selinger, building on my work, created a mechanism to automate the process of generating fake signatures. In 2009 I noted that the vulnerability was still there. And here we are in 2012, and MD5 is still available and still being used to generate keys and as an electronic signature mechanism. It is even still recommended by government institutions as a way to verify file integrity. In fact there are many more uses of this algorithm in different protocols running in various production environments in our country.

The isolated man

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 08:25:11 -0300

“The isolated man does not develop any intellectual power. It is necessary for him to be immersed in an environment... He may then perhaps do a little research of his own and make a very few discoveries... the search for new techniques must be regarded as carried out by the human community as a whole, rather than by individuals.” -- Alan Turing

The lord of the files

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:25:11 -0300

This is a translation of the Wired article about GitHub titled “The Lord of The Files: How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More)”, published on February 21. The “code” for this article was published by Wired on GitHub itself, with permission to remix and translate it under a creative commons license. My translation is available on a branch in my GitHub account. I’m grateful in advance for any comments to improve this translation, since it still needs a lot of work.

On security

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:25:11 -0300

A few weeks ago I was having lunch with my boss, and we talked about IT security. When they came over with the machine to pay by debit card, I asked him whether he was sure the machine they handed him belonged to the banking network. How did he know it wasn’t a fake machine, capturing and cloning his card? I think I ruined his life :smile:, now he can’t use his debit card without that doubt.

Revolution!

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:25:11 -0300

I don’t know about you, but this Jean Michel Jarre track strikes me as very fitting for these times:

Here’s another version, in London:

The ballad of John Henry (recycled)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Legend has it that John Henry was a freed Black slave, a man of incredible strength, who went to work building the railroad after the American Civil War. He was the best worker on the line, the strongest and the fastest.

One day a machine arrives, a steam drill, brought in to bore

a tunnel, a machine able to replace the whole crew of workers. John Henry, to defend his job and his fellow workers’ jobs, proposes a challenge to the foreman: he will race the machine at drilling through the mountain.

The power of the machine

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Although the cotton picker was invented around 1850, it wasn’t until 1943 that it became useful enough to be put to work on farms.

Only in the early 1950s did the machine start to be introduced in the southern United States, and it quickly destroyed the market for the one thing vast numbers of Black workers in the South had to offer: their labor.

All this set off a migration of thousands of African Americans to the more industrialized cities of the North, such as Detroit, Chicago and New York, but also to other centers in the South that needed labor for their factories, such as Atlanta and Birmingham. This is the moment when the real emancipation of Black Americans, and their struggle for their rights, begins.

Resistance is futile

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:25:11 -0300

I finally bought myself a macbook, and I’m writing this note on it. This may surprise a few people, and somebody will surely throw a post from a few years back in my face, but as Unamuno says, only the man who says nothing never contradicts himself.

You can put lipstick on a pig…

We are irrational beings. In the end these gadgets seduce you, and when you see everyone at conferences, and all your friends, using macbooks, you start to doubt your sanity. There is a trick to all this: it’s a viral effect, studied and planned by that great designer, Steve Jobs. He’s laughing at us from his grave; he finally got control of our heads.

Concept album

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Intro

Time is a gypsy caravan Steals away in the night

In 1997 Rush was a successful band, and its drummer, Neil Peart, was considered the best in the world, by his peers and by the critics alike. But that year his only daughter, 19 years old, died in a car accident; ten months later his wife, who never got over the loss, died of cancer. A grieving Neil told his bandmates he had decided to take a break, to reflect, he didn’t know for how long, got on his motorcycle and took to the road. The band’s future was uncertain.

Frustration

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 08:25:11 -0300

Frustration is the feeling that comes up when we don’t get what we want, when we fall short of our expectations.

Having this feeling is not a problem. The problem doesn’t come from the pain or the frustration we go through; the problem is our attitude toward those feelings.

Low tolerance for frustration, the great problem of our age of permanent pursuit of “success”.

Tolerating frustration means facing our problems and limitations, in spite of the annoyance and discomfort they cause us.

Year's end

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 08:25:11 -0300

2011 was a hard year. But personally I had some satisfactions, and achievements that let me come out with a positive balance. A year being hard doesn’t make it a bad year.

We live in a time when people don’t reflect much, so the clarification matters. The trouble with the digital age is that it has led people to think in binary, 0 or 1. The year is good or bad. We computer people are partly to blame for that: on facebook, people are friends or not, like or not, +1 or nothing. I invite you to see life as it really is, a continuous reality, not discrete, not digital. With highs and lows, with states, with variables, with contradictions and few certainties.

Simplexifying

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:25:11 -0300

One of the advantages of publishing Ogu at this stage is that it lets me test my design against readers and potential users. I’ve received comments on the blog and in private that have allowed me to enrich it and pin down some problems in the syntax.

The main problem lies in the ambiguity of declarations: until now the grammar allowed the optional use of the reserved words 'def', 'var' and 'val'.

Ogu's type system (1)

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 08:25:11 -0300

It’s time to look at more details of the Ogu programming language. We’ll start with its type system; this article is an introduction to the subject.

Ogu is a language with static type declarations, although it implements type inference. Let’s look at some examples:

i : Int = 0

j := i // j is of type Int

s : String = "un string"

t := s

Ogu has “syntactic saccharin” to support tuples

Compilers

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Compilers is now an elective course for computer engineering at the school where I studied¹. Back when I was a student I believe it was required, and I think it should be a required course.

I don’t know why the University of Chile decided to make this course optional, nor do I know how many people take it each semester. I’ve also heard that enrollment in computer science has dropped; I hope some academic can confirm that for me.

Java must die

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method” – Walter Benjamin

“‘Ta muy malo el corralero, y allá en el potrero como viejo está. Hay que ayudarlo a que muera para que no sufra más.” – Sergio Sauvalle (a Chilean folk song about an old horse that has to be put down)

That seems to have been the slogan for the last two or three years: Java, as a programming language, must give way to more modern languages.

A bill of rights for social network users

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:25:11 -0300

In March of this year, in the wake of the Google and Facebook incidents late last year, which showed how these companies, and probably many more, do not respect their users’ privacy, a group of panelists at the SXSW conference in the United States drafted a document they called the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights.

This bill of rights hasn’t gotten much attention, as far as I know, but it is interesting, and important. I think we users of social networks should push for the creation of a document like this one, with real legal weight, don’t you think? Here is how the document opens, and I look forward to your opinions.

Gödel

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:25:11 -0300

by Igor Kramer:

Gödel from Igor Kramer on Vimeo.

Talk: Semantic Web and Linked Data with Alvaro Graves

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Watch live streaming video from eltestacido at livestream.com

Vint Cerf

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:25:11 -0300

In 1963 Joseph Licklider wrote his famous memorandum. Remember it? No? Well, I told the story in this post. His idea was to create the “intergalactic computer network”; he was the man with the dream. Leonard Kleinrock, the kid who wanted a capacitor to build the radio shown on the back cover of a Superman comic (the story is here), gave us the mathematical theory for building a network based on packet switching; he was the man with the theory. Then Lawrence Roberts led the team that built ARPANET, the network that preceded the internet.

The answer

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:25:11 -0300

They say that toward the end of his days Kurt Gödel was trying to prove the existence of God by means of an ontological argument. In 1960 he wrote down in his notes his philosophical viewpoints; for him the world had to be rational. I suppose he wouldn’t have accepted the current findings of the cognitive sciences. It’s also said that he was a shy man who lived in some anguish… I wonder: what would Gödel’s answer have been to the problem we posed on Sunday?

Challenge

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 08:25:11 -0300

In case you can’t make it out, the board says:

“If you choose an answer to this question at random, what is the chance you will be correct?
A) 25%
B) 50%
C) 60%
D) 25%"

Let’s see how you do, no cheating, and no googling.

Reading comprehension

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 08:25:11 -0300

It turns out the waterfall model is perhaps one of the biggest reading comprehension failures in the entire history of software engineering. In 1970 Winston Royce wrote a paper in which, unfortunately, he used the words “grandiose approach” to refer to the following figure:

Winston Royce actually wrote this paper to criticize this model, but it ended up being cited over and over by the “scientific” community as a classic, established model.

Talk: The Tao of NoSQL

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Here’s the video of the talk we gave this afternoon at the Colegio de Ingenieros with my friend Ubaldo Taladriz. Link: video on livestream

Ubaldo’s PowerPoint presentation:
Getting Started with Neo4j_es

Watch live streaming video from eltestacido at livestream.com

StartechConf 2011

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 08:25:11 -0300

I came away very happy from StartechConf 2011. I have to congratulate its organizing team.

with @stefsull and @garazi

It was 2 very intense days of high-quality talks, and the guests were top-notch. We’re talking about speakers who are extremely well known on the worldwide development conference circuit.

I think everyone who attended learned a lot. Some of you, dear readers (those using modern browsers), will notice that I picked up a bit of CSS3 after the excellent talks by the couple formed by Stephanie Sullivan Rewis (@stefsull on Twitter) and her husband Greg Rewis (@garazi on Twitter).

More magic with Kinect

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 08:25:11 -0300

HoloDesk

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 08:25:11 -0300

An interesting project from Microsoft Research, using Kinect technology:

Imagined causes

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 08:25:11 -0300

There is a kind of logical fallacy called post hoc, from the Latin “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (“after this, therefore because of this”), which is a problem of false causality. It stems from the principle of causality, that every effect must have a cause, and that the cause precedes the effect: “since the rooster crows before dawn every day, the rooster makes the sun come up”.

Now, sampling bias, like the one we went over in our previous article, suffers from this kind of fallacy. If we see the wind blow and then the branches and leaves of the trees move, it is safe to conclude that the wind caused that movement; that reasoning seems safe. The problem is that not every relation of precedence between events in time determines causality. In physical phenomena the real causes can eventually be found, because experiments can be repeated, but in social theories, or even in theological ramblings, falling into the post hoc fallacy is very common.

The security mirage

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 08:25:11 -0300

My friend Marco Zúñiga told me about this video of Bruce Schneier’s talk on the security mirage, and I highly recommend it. Notice that he talks about many of the cognitive biases we’ve discussed here before (below the video I’ve left links to the articles where we’ve talked about those biases).

Bruce Schneier and the security mirage, TED talk, October 2010:

Some articles where we’ve talked about the cognitive biases Bruce Schneier mentions in his talk:

Since forever...

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Charles Babbage, creator of the Analytical Engine of 1833

“On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

– Charles Babbage, 1792-1871

Salads and algorithms

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 08:25:11 -0300

A few years ago, probably inspired by Ratatouille, I took up cooking. My wife says I don’t cook badly, but I turn out to be a rather expensive “chef”, and a messy one (something to work on). Still, I’ve learned to make a few dishes and experimented with others. It’s a pleasant and relaxing activity, maybe because it has something in common with programming an efficient algorithm.

Some of the simplest and most fun dishes to learn to cook are salads, even better if they come with a dressing. Yesterday, Saturday afternoon, my older daughter, my wife and I improvised a delicious green apple and tuna salad. The recipe is at the end of this post; the interesting part was the process we used to put together this particular salad.

DMR

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie

“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.” - Dennis Ritchie

C is the mother tongue of every programming language that matters today. If we were linguists, C would be like Proto-Indo-European, the theoretical language that gave rise to Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Germanic, Latin, and from there the Romance languages...

I know a lot of programming languages, and I’ve written thousands of lines of code in everything from assembler to Groovy, but my native language is C, even though I learned Ratfor and Pascal first. Not long ago, at work, I wrote a little C program that turned a 4-hour process into a task of seconds. It’s not that C is fast in itself; the thing is that C taught me to program with discipline, because you have to be very orderly to write well in this language, because you’re very close to the platform. That’s where its power comes from.

Creators of universes

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 08:25:11 -0300

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity
can be created in the form of computer programs.

– Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason

The problems with a plebiscite

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence – Napoleon Bonaparte

Enzo Abbagliati (@cadaunante) is quite right in his critique, “the plebiscite that wasn’t”. Enthusiasm is no excuse for doing things badly, least of all if you want a citizens’ movement to earn some degree of legitimacy.

Years ago I took part in one of the official vote-counting processes, during the presidential election that Eduardo Frei won, and there I got a firsthand feel for the technological and logistical difficulties of running a vote, and that was with a team led by friends who were already experts in this kind of thing.

Steve Jobs

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, creators of Apple Computers

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
– Steve Jobs

Data, data, data...

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 08:25:11 -0300

In 1980 IBM introduced these storage devices, holding roughly 2.5 gigabytes:

If I remember correctly, I saw a “refrigerator” much like these in the CEC server room at the School of Engineering when I was a student.

By 1987 this more compact little model had the astonishing capacity of 7.5 gigabytes:

Today, just 24 years later, we have devices like this one:

With a capacity of 1 terabyte, about 134 times the capacity of that last one, in the palm of your hand.

Happy Dieciocho! Time to dance cueca!

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Poetry, calligrams and the beauty of code

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Reading a paragraph of text requires a linear pass from left to right. That is because of how our writing system is built; if we were in the Middle East the direction would be the opposite, right to left. Reading is linear, one-dimensional. Unlike spoken communication, for example, which has 2 or maybe more dimensions. When we talk we don’t just use speech; there is body language, the gestures that go with what we say, the limbic response, and so on.

A full life

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“I am of the air, like every mortal, of the great terrible flight, and I am here passing through on my way to the stars, g.rojas.great”
– Felipe Camiroaga on Twitter, quoting the poet Gonzalo Rojas

Over the last few hours there was an unusual spike in visits to this blog. The reason is this 2008 post, which carries a picture of Luciano Bello, the character created by the TV host Felipe Camiroaga; it is probably what comes up when you search for the image on Google. That is an indirect reflection of the impact this news has had in our country. A good person, and probably company for a lot of people.

Protection and empowerment

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“The role of progressive government is to maximize our freedom—and protection and empowerment do just that. Protection is there to guarantee freedom from harm, from want, from fear. Empowerment is there to maximize freedom to achieve your goals.”

– George Lakoff, The Political Mind, pages 47 and 48.

Notes:

(*) SEC, which Lakoff mentions in this passage as part of government empowerment: Securities and Exchange Commission, the US agency whose mission is to enforce the laws that regulate the securities industry in the United States. It is like our Superintendencia de Valores y Seguros (SVS) in Chile

Framing

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

We human beings are cognitive misers: we try to think as little as possible. That’s not something I came up with, it is what many cognitive psychologists argue. One of the mental shortcuts we use is framing.

Framing is a schema of interpretation, a collection of anecdotes and stereotypes we rely on to understand or respond to different events. As we grow up we develop a series of emotional mental filters, which we later use to make sense of the world we live in. These mental filters take the form of simple narratives.

The problem with reason

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Chile’s national coat of arms carries the phrase “Por la Razón o la Fuerza” (“By reason or by force”). This phrase, added during the government of José Joaquín Prieto, established the primacy of Reason in collective life. If reason is violated, if the law is violated, it can be restored through the use of force.

When we talk about Reason, we are talking about a concept that originated during the Age of Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries). Essentially the concept of Reason as laid out by the great philosophers and politicians of that time, a concept that was the basis for founding the republics and democracies of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Reason, George Lakoff tells us¹, was assumed to be:

Experimenting

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

When we looked at the strategy paradox we found that big plans can produce a big disaster, or a big success. Mediocre plans produce mediocre results. They say that “a bad plan is always better than no plan”, so in the face of uncertainty a measure and react kind of strategy looks like a reasonable alternative, and probably a more successful one.

Now, in many situations measurements don’t tell us what we want to know. For example, when we are planning an advertising campaign. The CFO of a major international company once lamented that they had spent 400 million dollars on a brand positioning campaign, not for any particular product, just for the brand. The question was how effective that spending had been. He couldn’t tell whether the payoff had been 400 million or zero. The CFO was not saying the advertising spend had been ineffective, only that he had no idea how effective it had been. It was entirely possible that if they hadn’t spent a cent their performance as a company would have been the same, but it was also possible that without spending those millions they would have faced a disaster.

A citizens' response to violence

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

In this video Emiliano Salinas reflects on the 4 levels of civil response to violence. The step a citizenry takes when, instead of seeing itself as a victim of its situation, it becomes responsible and engaged, and takes the future of its country into its own hands.

The first level is denial and apathy, the state of not acknowledging that there are problems. The citizenry has to be moved to the second level, which is recognition, and out of it fear arises in many people. Fear is better, because it moves citizens to do something. But fear can shut people up in their homes. So it is necessary to shake people up and take them to the third level, action. Now, for many people acting requires courage, rage. “I can’t take this situation anymore, let’s do something!”, and then violence will emerge. Faced with violence, what has to be done is to move to the fourth level, that of non-violent, coordinated, peaceful action, which does not mean passivity; it requires determination.

A world run by algorithms

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

On May 6, 2010 at 2:45 PM New York time there was a stock market crash that sent the Dow Jones index down 900 points (a 9% drop), and it recovered completely a few minutes later. This phenomenon was named the 2010 Flash Crash

There are over 2,000 particle physicists currently working on Wall Street. What they do is model the behavior of the markets in algorithms that trade stocks in a matter of microseconds. To give you an idea, it takes us 500,000 microseconds to click a mouse. So in algorithm terms, if you take a couple of seconds you are a loser.

Listening

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

In the movie Super 8 a young man working at a gas station is listening to music on his Walkman. He has his back to the street. When the sheriff walks in he has to tap him to get a reaction. There is a bit of dialogue, where the kid explains what the Walkman is, and the sheriff makes an annoyed remark that this is how the trouble starts: put up with kids with speakers in their ears, and other problems will follow. The old man leaves the store, the kid puts his headphones back on and goes back to his own thing, paying no attention to the outside. This is a monster movie, and of course, while the kid is listening to his Walkman, the poor sheriff is attacked by the movie’s mysterious monster. A lot happens out there, and only after the power goes out does the kid realize that something happened.

Planners and searchers

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“A planner thinks he already knows the answer. He thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A searcher admits he doesn’t know the answer in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors... and he hopes to find the answer to individual problems by trial and error... A planner believes that outsiders know enough to impose a solution. A searcher believes that insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that many solutions must come from within.”
– William Easterly

Measure and react

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Measure and react: that is basically the strategy of the famous fashion chain Zara. Rather than trying to predict what people will be wearing next week, at Zara they simply accept that they have no idea. The strategy is to observe what people are wearing in different cities and from that generate a series of ideas that might work. They prepare a few sample garments, send them to the stores and watch what sells and what doesn’t. What doesn’t sell gets dropped, inventory is kept low, and the successful products go into mass production and are quickly distributed to the whole chain (thanks to spectacular logistics).

Priorities

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

If you had to pick and prioritize the world’s main problems, what would your list be? What would you solve first?
That is what Bjorn Lomborg invites us to think about in this TED talk:

In light of the previous articles, on common sense, predictions and planning, what do you think?

The strategy paradox

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” – Alan Kay

The story of Betamax versus VHS is well known. Sony focused on picture quality, and developed a closed format. Matsushita, on the other hand, developed a lower-quality technology with VHS, but one that allowed longer recordings, long enough to record entire movies. On top of that the standard was open, which let multiple manufacturers compete at building devices, and that drove prices down. When the video rental market exploded, VHS held a slight lead, and through a process of cumulative advantage it ended up winning.

Sixth anniversary

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:25:11 -0300

On August 1, 2005 this site/blog began its “official broadcasts”, so it’s our anniversary: we turn six.

I am very happy and proud to keep this space going. Very few blogs from that era are still around; sadly, many quite interesting ones gradually “went dark” as their authors migrated to Twitter, where their ideas get lost in the noise of a tide of digital babble.

So I think this blog is one of a kind, and it keeps evolving, which surprises even me as its author. Over this past year its content has grown beyond what I expected, along with its two sister blogs and my foray into webcasting.

The halo of Saint Matthew

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 08:25:11 -0300

For several years Fortune magazine saw Enron as “America’s most innovative company”, right up to its spectacular bankruptcy in 2001. A very similar case is La Polar, the retail chain, in Chile. In April 2010 Pablo Alcalde presented “La Polar’s successful strategy” at the eClass seminar run by La Tercera / UAI (here is the video).

It is very interesting to listen to some of Alcalde’s words, especially in light of what we now know, and also from the perspective of everything we have covered in this series of articles:

Experts, foxes and hedgehogs

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 08:25:11 -0300

At the end of 2007 BusinessWeek published the forecast of 54 economists for the following year, under the title “A Slower But Steady Economy” ¹. One disastrous year later, and without so much as blinking, it published the new forecast for 2009, under the title: “A Slower But Steady Economy”².

In our era economists inspire the same degree of respect the oracles of Delphi did among the Greeks: whatever they say, however vague it sounds, is listened to by the highest authorities and decision makers. But nobody seems to care that these predictions are systematically wrong.

Predictions

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:25:11 -0300

If we’re bad at explaining the past, how are we at predicting the future?

We love predictions. Every year we read technology predictions written by experts from important firms like Gartner and others. Important think tanks and publications make predictions about economic and political events, and newspapers even quote fortune-tellers, astrologers and numerologists who foretell the events of the year. These last seem to have very poor results, but are an astrologer’s predictions any better than those of a prestigious market research firm? The truth is nobody knows, because nobody bothers to audit the results.

Necessary conditions

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Security in human systems we’re told will always, always last -- Sting, History Teach us Nothing

In all the previous articles the central idea was to show that much of what we call common sense is some form of circular reasoning, that many common-sense explanations are wrong, and that this is shown when they are confronted with experiments or facts derived from the real study of the behavior of human groups.

The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because it has the attributes of the Mona Lisa. A few people are capable of promoting a trend, or setting a fashion. Many common-sense explanations may well be true, but what they really do is tell us that what happened happened, and not something else. Since these explanations can only be built once the outcome is known, we are never sure whether they are really explanations or simple descriptions.

Influences

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:25:11 -0300

We saw that the success of a work as important as the Mona Lisa is probably due to an accidental reason. Maybe if the 1911 theft had never been carried out, the most famous art object in the world today would be a different one. We can’t know. So we cannot explain the success of the Mona Lisa in terms of its own attributes. We can reason, circularly, that the Mona Lisa is the most important work of art in the world because it has the attributes of the Mona Lisa.

On how to scratch your ear

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Sometimes we just love scratching our left ear with our right hand, purely to complicate things

That happens a lot in the design and data modeling stages. A simple problem, after going through analysis and design, can end up like this:

Ah, how beautiful these generic models are, with traceability, access controls and profiles, an orgy of tables and relations (could it be that this business of “foreign relations” awakens some unspeakable fantasy in systems analysts?)

Circular reasoning

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 08:25:11 -0300

The Mona Lisa, the most famous and important portrait in the history of world art. The perfect painting, the greatest work of art, the fruit of the brilliant Leonardo. And yet for centuries it was an obscure piece of art hanging in the private residences of the French kings. Even after the French Revolution, once it had moved to the Louvre, it didn’t draw much attention from art critics.

It was the famous theft of 1911, carried out by Vincenzo Perugia at the urging of the art dealer Eduardo Valfierno, that cemented this painting’s universal fame. Even Apollinaire and Picasso were accused of the theft. For weeks people started visiting the Louvre to gaze at the empty space the theft had left. Slowly the Mona Lisa began to turn into the most valuable object in Western art.

Intuition

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 08:25:11 -0300

In the last few articles we have not only been questioning common sense, we have also seen that we are not very rational when it comes to making decisions (1 and 2).

If common sense is so bad at dealing with complex social phenomena, why isn’t this limitation more evident? After all, in the physical world we use a lot of our intuition to solve problems every day, as when we catch a ball or a flying disc.

Irrational decisions

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 08:25:11 -0300

In the United States, taxis offer in their payment system the option of leaving a tip of 15%, 20% or 25%. I don’t have confirmation, but I suspect that with the introduction of this system the average tip has gone up to 20%. The reason this happens is a phenomenon that has to do with what we talked about in the previous article.

At the end of Dan Ariely’s video we are shown several cases of this manipulation of preferences. This kind of manipulation can happen when there is asymmetric dominance of attributes. Let’s look at an example. Suppose we have to choose between 2 products. Product A is a high-quality but expensive camera. Product B is a low-quality but cheaper camera. Under these conditions the decision is hard. But if we introduce a third camera, C1, that is clearly more expensive than camera A, then the decision gets easier, and people tend to choose camera A. On the other hand, if a third camera C1 is introduced that has the same price as B but lower quality, then people tend to choose camera B. The diagram below shows this situation:

Special people

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 08:25:11 -0300

One of the central premises of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point” is that a few well-connected people can spread ideas, set fashions, or influence the behavior of many people. In essence the argument is that there are a few influencers who are capable of dictating the behavior of the many. Gladwell calls this the law of the few: in every phenomenon of “social contagion” there are a few special people who determine whether ideas go viral. Gladwell classifies them as “connectors”, “mavens” and “salesmen”. Connectors would be people with the gift of connecting the world, the ones with the ability to connect easily with lots of other people, the ones who can easily make many friends. These people have a social network of over a hundred people. Mavens would be the people we turn to for new information, the ones who accumulate information and trade it in some way. Besides having knowledge, they have the social and communication skills to spread it. Salesmen, or persuaders, are the ones with powerful negotiation skills. Somehow they get everyone else to want to reach an agreement with them.

What is an architecture?

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Last Thursday, June 30, at the Colegio de Ingenieros de Chile (Chile’s professional association of engineers), my friend Juan Carlos Barroux @jbarroux gave the talk “What is an architecture?”.
The talk was organized by the DCC8090 group.

We took the chance to record the talk for El Test Acido, and Juan Carlos has published his talk under a Creative Commons license. Here are the video and the slides. If you’re interested in future talks, I suggest following @dcc8090 on Twitter, and our group on Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/dcc8090/

Defaults

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 08:25:11 -0300

The chart below shows the consent rate for organ donation in 11 European countries:

What stands out is that we have practically two sharply defined groups, two clear extremes: the first 4 countries with very low rates, and the other extreme where practically the entire population has consented to donate their organs when they die.

But what explains the difference between one extreme and the other?

Consider countries 4 and 5. Here they are in more detail:

The paradox of common sense

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:25:11 -0300

In 1941 the U.S. Army reported a large number of desertions at the embarkation points in New York. The research division was asked to study what was going on. The man in charge was the sociologist Samuel A. Stouffer. After a quick study he discovered that when soldiers were sent home to say goodbye, they went dressed as civilians. The recommendation was to send them home wearing their uniforms. The desertion rate dropped immediately after the measure was applied¹.

What is legitimate

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 08:25:11 -0300

What is legitimate? What is right? What is morally acceptable? What behavior will we tolerate as a society?

Nobody, of course, would dream of suggesting that a woman who is raped should marry the man who abused her. We would find that repugnant, and yet there are societies that have established that:

“When a man finds a young virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and has sexual relations with her, and they are discovered, then the man who commits this act shall give the young woman’s father a sum of money, and she shall be his wife.”

MIT's hacker culture

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:25:11 -0300

On my recent trip to Boston I took the chance to slip away to see Cambridge and walk around two of the most prestigious universities in the world, Harvard and MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). And although everybody told me to go see Harvard, the more famous one, what really impressed me was the MIT campus.

The photo I took with my camera doesn’t convey the size of the Great Dome. It’s enormous, and to give you an idea I’m going to turn to the photos of one of the most ingenious “hacks” ever pulled off at that university. Take a look at these pictures:

Responsible

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Responsible: “Obliged to answer for something or for someone”.

The suffix ‘able’, like ‘ible’, turns a verb into an adjective that denotes “the capacity or possibility of”. So from irritate comes irritable, capable of being irritated, or variable, which comes from vary and means having the capacity to vary, to change. And so responsible comes from respond, that is, capable of responding.

When a leader says that nobody has the responsibility, we have a serious problem. Because part of leadership is establishing responsibilities. This person is in charge, and therefore responsible: the one who must answer for what happens, the one who must know what is going on in order to report it to the leader.

Do we have to wear a costume to get closer?

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 08:25:11 -0300

via ser pensador

The art of Don Hsi-Yun Yang

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Try this:

curl http://www.de.ioccc.org/2000/dhyang.c > dhyang.c

cat dhyang.c

cc dhyang.c -o saitou 

./saitou > aku.c

cat aku.c 

cc aku.c -o soku 

./soku > soku.c 

cat soku.c 

cc soku.c -o zan 

./zan > zan.c 

cat zan.c 

cc zan.c -o aku 

./aku | diff - aku.c

There is more art of this kind at http://uguu.org/omoikane.html

Plan CEIBAL

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 18:25:11 -0300

via

Before arguing about GMOs

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Learn a little about what genes are:

There is radiation everywhere

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Even when you sleep next to someone you are exposed to 0.05 microsieverts of radiation.

This chart, put together by Randall Munroe, the author of XKCD, explains the radiation scale and gives us some perspective on these measurements.

Original image.

Don't insist on English!

Sun, 29 May 2011 08:25:11 -0300

What if the key to solving a problem lies in the way we think, and the way we think is given by the language we use?

Another way to look at it

Sat, 28 May 2011 08:25:11 -0300

I offer you this reflection by Hans Rosling, another perspective on the energy problem:

(At this link you can watch the video with subtitles)

Progress, I think they used to call it...

A model of trust

Sun, 22 May 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Trust can be visualized with this equation

T = (C + R + I) / S

Where the terms are:

T: Trust, which is the result.
C: Credibility, which comes from credentials, or knowledge, plus honesty.
R: Reliability, dependability, knowing that promises are kept.
I: Intimacy, which touches the emotions; it is feeling connected to the other person, it is openness, transparency.
S, Self orientation or Selfishness, the focus on your own goals at the expense of the goals of the relationship.

Kinect used for sign language recognition

Sun, 22 May 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Video:

Other projects at: http://professeurs.esiea.fr/wassner/

Time is not money

Wed, 18 May 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Time is more valuable than gold.

While gold can fluctuate, time is always scarce.

Don’t waste time, you can’t get it back. Maybe you have no money today, but perhaps tomorrow you will. This moment, though: can you get it back?

Time is the most valuable natural resource. Let’s not waste it.

A free weekend

Mon, 16 May 2011 08:25:11 -0300

This weekend I’ve been trying out the latest versions of two popular Linux distributions, Fedora 15 Beta and Ubuntu 11.04. I was handed a Fedora 15 USB stick at the RedHat Summit, so I gave it a chance this weekend.

Installing these operating systems is dead simple. A while ago I had to restore my notebook to its factory configuration with Windows 7 and the experience was unpleasant: four hours later it was still installing drivers and patches, and the truth is the system still isn’t running the way I once managed to have it.

Red Hat JBoss Summit 2011

Wed, 04 May 2011 08:25:11 -0300

This week I have the chance to attend the RedHat Summit and JBoss World Event in Boston. I plan to cover some interesting topics from this event on the blog, so my more techie readers should stay tuned.

Update

Red Hat launches its PaaS, Platform as a Service, just today. It’s called** OpenShift**

Anthology

Sun, 01 May 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Anthology

Over almost 6 years I have written close to 1,000 articles on this blog. Since new readers come along every so often, I decided to publish this anthology of the posts I like best. I took the chance to revisit them and make a few corrections. They are sorted by year of publication, with a cap of 6 per year :confused:, I hope you enjoy them.

2005

The legend of the space pen, sometimes the most effective solutions are the simplest ones.

Life cycle

Sun, 01 May 2011 08:25:11 -0300

It is December, and after a board meeting the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) calls the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) into his office. The CEO has reported that this year the company billed 120 million dollars. Intrigued, a board member asks what the average monthly revenue was. Since the report did not include that figure, the CEO tasks the CTO with working on it, so that next year’s report will include this new indicator.

The spirit of the drums

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 08:25:11 -0300

What better way to celebrate the spirit of the African talking drums than with this video that brings together two jazz greats: Omar Hakim and Bobby McFerrin:

Talking drums

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning.”
– Claude Shannon

When I was a teenager I was given a bombo legüero, a big Argentine folk drum that I still have. It’s called legüero because they say that, under the right conditions, its sound can be heard a league away (between 4 and 5 kilometers).

Two men and a universal machine

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 08:25:11 -0300

The universal machine

Alan Turing, the father of computing

In 1936 a young man of 24, Alan Turing, decided to reformulate certain results of mathematical logic by expressing the statements of theorems in terms of algorithms that could be interpreted by a theoretical machine. An algorithm is “a prescribed set of well-defined, ordered and finite instructions or rules that makes it possible to carry out an activity through successive steps that leave no doubt for whoever has to carry out that activity.” What Turing wanted was to study the limits of machines that performed automatic calculations. It was a time when the foundations of what computers would be were being laid. The elements needed to build these machines were already available, and Turing wanted to see how powerful these machines were. How far these machines would be able to help us solve complex problems. Turing described a theoretical machine that manipulates the symbols written on a long tape according to a table of rules. The Turing machine consists of a head that can read and/or write on an infinite paper tape. The machine can perform only the following operations: move the head to the right, move the head to the left, read the contents of a cell on the tape, erase the contents of a cell, and write on the tape.

Buggy nights

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 08:25:11 -0300

One small typo and you can lose a lot of time, and even money, or who knows, lives.

It so happens that I decided to optimize a certain little program that was taking about 10 minutes to load a file of some 50,000 records, which is a lot for the kind of operation involved (the data just had to be inserted into two tables). I decided to change the code to use a typical pattern for processing files in batch mode, but since I was in a hurry I was careless and the process ended up with a horrible running time (it was at the one-hour mark when I killed it). And even staring at the code I couldn’t see the problem. So I left it for later and only got to review it that night. The fix was as simple as moving an insertion into a list inside an if, and with that the running time dropped to 26 seconds(!).

The story of Lucifer

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“
\[\...\]
But on top of that the devil becomes the perfect excuse. If a priest has committed pederasty, it’s because the devil stuck his tail in; the abused teenager is nothing but a servant of Satan who has committed the terrible sin of tempting his confessor, or spiritual guide. And these are not things I’m making up, they are things that some Princes of the Church say.”

Mathematics and truth

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Emilio Lledó, professor of the History of Philosophy and member of the Royal Spanish Academy, also champions mathematics as a light to shine on a world of manipulated information. "This science is a constant struggle with the truth because in it, in its exactness, there is no room for lying ideas". Lledó recalls its etymology: from the Greek máthema, to learn. And not only to learn, but to experience. And not only to experience, but to deduce. And not only to deduce, but to prove. And not only to prove, but to be in contact with what is true. "And all this", he laments, "cannot be very fashionable in a universe that tends toward falsehood".

The energy efficiency paradox

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 08:25:11 -0300

In 1865 the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that the technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal use led to an increase in the consumption of that mineral. Jevons argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological improvements would not bring about a reduction in fuel consumption.

The Jevons paradox, or the Jevons effect, says that as the technology that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used gets better, consumption of that resource is most likely to go up, not down.

Stone soup

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Three soldiers were on their way home from a long war. After several days on the road, the sight of a village gladdened their hearts: they hoped to taste a hot meal at last.

The townspeople shut themselves up in their houses; war and looting had taught them to hide what little they had.
All the soldiers got was a big pot and some water.

They set up in the middle of the village, lit a fire and dropped three stones into the pot.

Time as a parameter

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Right now in Chile, setting up a meeting, with technology of course, is chaos.

A friend and I arrange a lunch meeting for 13:00. He sends the invitation for 13:00 from his Android phone, synced with Google Calendar. Through an intricate web of transactions it reaches my company, which runs Microsoft Exchange, and from there, through a BES server, my Blackberry. The result of all this interoperability choreography? On my phone’s calendar the meeting is set for 14:00, in Outlook on my office PC for 13:00, and the oddest part is that, for some reason, my friend gets an automatic email confirming that the meeting has been accepted and scheduled for 17:00!!

Hubris

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Hubris, one of the three virtues of a programmer. But why, if this society considers hubris a sin?

A while back I wrote on akarrú about Areté, pride as the ancients understood it. I am going to transcribe it here:

We live in a mediocre age, but it has always been that way, hasn’t it?

Achilles says:

“The same lot falls to the one who holds back and the one who fights hard. The coward and the brave man are held in the same honor.
The idler dies just the same as the man of many deeds.
I have gained nothing from the pains I have suffered in my heart”.

Trust and anarchy

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Direct interaction with the user, building trust, anarchy: the keys to this talk by Fred George on infoq, which I recommend: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Leaner-Programmer-Anarchy

For entirely accidental reasons, I am in the middle of a process of anarchy with one of my teams. There is no “project manager” in charge of this team of 4 developers. Right now they report directly to me, but they are literally working without a manager.

We commit many of the heresies Fred George proposes, and not because we are ultra-modern and experimenting with lean or post-agile methodologies. We simply have to get the work done. And the interesting part: I have observed that trust in this team’s ability has gone up, mainly among our internal customers.

The great barrier

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure. If you don’t fail, it’s because you haven’t even tried to do anything.”

Popups and online payments in Chile

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:25:11 -0300

There must be a reason, though technically I can’t see it, why payment integration on Chilean sites is done with popups. I don’t know whose idea it was, but it is a very bad one. On many payment sites you have to reconfigure the browser so it allows the site’s popup windows.

Why are popups still being used? Not just for payments, but also to give users “important notices”. Why do they keep using popups, when most modern browsers already block these contraptions?

Learn to program

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 08:25:11 -0300

A while ago a regular commenter on this blog asked me what the fundamental knowledge a good programmer must have would be. To answer that question I decided to create a blog. I started with the basics, teaching how to program. For anyone interested, here is the address of my programming course: aprende a programar (in Spanish).

On the properties of unicorn horn

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Years ago, when my friend Maz and I managed to develop world-class biometric technology, certified to high international standards, and after receiving an innovation award from the national industry, we knew the next step was to get the core technology of our solution to stop depending on foreign products. On the hardware side we figured there was little we could do, so we went after the development of biometric identification algorithms. We were no longer in a position to keep doing the research ourselves, so we turned to academia.
And with the support of Reuna (Chile’s academic network) we managed to raise a state fund for the development of biometric algorithms. Nobody from the big universities was interested, and the work was done with regional universities. It was when the amount became known (close to a million dollars) that our academic friends at the Universidad de Chile and the Católica started calling us. We even gave talks and classes at their invitation (it seems the ability to land funding gives off a certain kind of pheromone).

Radiation

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 08:25:11 -0300

These days there has been a lot of news about the nuclear accident in Japan that mentions certain radiation measurements. For example, at one point a peak above 8,227 microsieverts was measured at the plant, and the limit is 500 microsieverts.

But what does that mean? The news tells us that doses thousands or millions of times higher than allowed were emitted, without explaining what those limits are or what they mean for health. And even though the explanation is within everyone’s reach, the media seem too lazy to investigate and explain, or maybe there is no interest in putting things in perspective (thinking like a conspiracy nut, maybe keeping the public alarmed is good business for someone).

Insanity

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. – Albert Einstein*

The perfect energy source

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Nuclear fusion is probably the ideal form of energy: no toxic waste, no CO2 emissions, no radiation or radioactive waste. It is the mechanism that powers the stars, and very few fusion plants would probably be needed to supply the whole world’s energy. Who knows. But when? We have been trying to generate fusion energy for more than 50 years. When we will have this perfect energy source is what this TED video is about:

Do it

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:25:11 -0300

The other day I watched Ricardo Baeza’s talk and at one point he gives some advice that has served him well in his career, such as “don’t make plans, don’t project yourselves… if I had imagined what I was going to do with my life I wouldn’t be here right now… because when you project yourself you do it onto something smaller, because you think that way you’ll make it. Because you don’t dare set yourself a very big goal, because what happens if I don’t reach that goal, will I be frustrated? No”.

Galeano on Alan Turing

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:25:11 -0300

This video is part of a talk Eduardo Galeano gave in Los Angeles in June 2009; the text below is taken from his book Mirrors:

by Eduardo Galeano (via the Argentine Pirate Party)

For not being macho, a real macho, a man with hair on his chest, Alan Turing was condemned. He squealed, he squawked, he stuttered. He wore an old necktie as a belt. He slept little and went days without shaving, and he would run across cities from one end to the other while working out complicated mathematical formulas in his head.

Between the Earth and the Moon

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 08:25:11 -0300

This video is interesting because it shows an estimation error that seems to be quite common, and that may have its origin in the education we receive.

In the video people are handed 2 balls and asked to represent the relative distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Aphorisms

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Language is the most precious and at the same time the most dangerous good that has been given to man. – Hölderlin

Man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he reflects. – Hölderlin

My mission is to kill time, and time’s is to kill me in turn. One feels at ease among murderers – Cioran

Skepticism is the intoxication of the dead end. – Cioran

Golden rule: leave an incomplete image of yourself. – Cioran

The lost art of democratic debate

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 08:25:11 -0300

It seems to me that one of our problems as a country is that we have lost the ability to debate. Debate seems to have been reduced to gathering as many Twitter followers as possible in order to impose an idea, or, if that space is not enough, people set up their own social network where those who think alike publish long essays proving how wrong everyone else is. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the energy debate. It worries me (and I’m not the only one) that decisions are being made (or not made) based on perceptions, without any rational basis or grounding, without debating what the consequences and the best alternatives are.

Understanding

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“In mathematics, you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.”
– John von Neumann

(something that could also apply to certain aspects of life)

Numerical deceptions (revisited)

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 08:25:11 -0300

This article was originally published in 2009, but it is worth revisiting in light of the discussions about energy consumption and an upcoming post I will write about saving energy.

“The figures don’t lie”, “the numbers speak for themselves”. How often do we hear these expressions? The truth is that it is not always so. Many times we are being deceived with figures, because they are presented in disguise, or with very poor analysis.

On protecting our personal data

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:25:11 -0300

The personal data of every Chilean fits comfortably on a USB stick. Today, a standard laptop can process all of that data without any sophisticated software tools.

Information is the most valuable resource companies have today, and the need to get data about people creates strong pressure to collect as much information as possible. I have often seen information requested “just in case it’s needed later on”. The problem is that once the information is collected it sits in a database, which is normally accessible to a lot of people inside the company, who can export it to external media and release it easily. One example is the WikiLeaks leaks: even though the communication channels are encrypted and highly secure, in the end the information was accessible to thousands of people around the world, which made its release easy.

Don't you get bored of blogging?

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Not that anyone has asked me the question, but I bring it up because of this post by Fred Wilson: Do You Ever Get Bored Of Blogging?:

“The truth is I never get bored of writing. It is something that came relatively late in life for me.… It’s a hobby, something I do to entertain and educate myself and I enjoy it very much. I love putting the puzzle that are my thoughts together every day.”

The Sugar King

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 08:25:11 -0300

They say that before he died the Sugar King thought of a story about Confucius and decided to leave his entire fortune to educate the poorest people of his country. The tale was recorded in the papers he left behind, and “told the story of a charitable traveler who took pity on the poverty of the inhabitants of an island and gave them fish. Seeing this gesture, the Chinese philosopher said he had done wrong, because with his gift they would eat for a day, but had he taught them to fish they would have food every day.”

The media and social control

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

The following text is the “10 Strategies of Media Manipulation” by the celebrated linguist and intellectual Noam Chomsky:

1. The strategy of distraction

The primary element of social control is the strategy of distraction, which consists of diverting the public’s attention from important problems and from the changes decided by the political and economic elites, through the technique of a flood or deluge of continuous distractions and insignificant information. The strategy of distraction is equally indispensable for keeping the public from taking an interest in essential knowledge in the areas of science, economics, psychology, neurobiology and cybernetics. “Keep the public’s attention distracted, away from the real social problems, captivated by matters of no real importance. Keep the public busy, busy, busy, with no time to think; back to the farm like the other animals (quote from the text ‘Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars’)”.

The battles of the Nile

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

There have been 3 important battles on the Nile. The first in 47 BC, when Julius Caesar backed Cleopatra against her Ptolemy siblings. The second in Napoleon’s time, between the fleets of England and France in Aboukir Bay. And yesterday’s battle, between the Egyptian people and the forces of the dictator Mubarak:

Important background:

What is energy?

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

What is energy? Ask any educated adult around you, and write down the answers. Even someone with a scientific background may not have a very clear one. It is the capacity to do work, would be the most formal answer you are likely to get.

The question is far from idle, because after all, important decisions are being debated right now, such as how to keep our country’s energy matrix supplied. Whether we should invest in nuclear plants, or whether we should use non-conventional renewable forms of energy. And when I hear that pompous term I wonder whether the people who came up with it have any idea what the hell energy is, given that they need to tack on the inadequate and redundant adjective “renewable”.

Facts that support the theory of evolution

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Here is a video that subtitles one of the excellent programs from the Cassiopeia project, in this case about facts that support the theory of evolution:

New problematic sayings

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

A new, extended edition of problematic sayings:

Every problem has a solution; if not, it isn’t a problem...

In life there are no problems, only solutions we haven’t found yet.

In practice, a problem is only what intelligence can solve. Hermann Keyerling

Emergency Principle: if you keep calm when everyone else is losing their head, you clearly haven’t grasped the problem.

I know of no better motivation than problems.

Facing it, always facing it, is the way to solve the problem. Face it!. *Joseph Conrad*

Anachronistic dialogues

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 18:25:11 -0300

Today the newspaper El País published this polytheistic dialogue between Umberto Eco and Javier Marías. It must have been a fascinating encounter between these two old thinkers. Talking about the internet was inevitable:

Umberto Eco. The Internet is the return of Gutenberg. If McLuhan were alive he would have to change his theories. With the Internet it is an alphabetic civilization. They will write badly, they will read in a hurry, but if they don’t know the alphabet they are left out. Today’s parents watched television, they didn’t read, but their children have to read on the Internet, and quickly. It is a new phenomenon.

The applied periodic table

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Here is something I didn’t know about, and it has been published since 2005: a periodic table of the elements organized around their applications.

The idea is to put in each cell of the table an illustration showing everyday objects where that chemical element is used:

For example, here is Copper (Cu):

And here are Aluminum (Al), Silicon (Si) and Phosphorus (P):

The table is available for free. You can download it from here. It was published by the British chemical and pharmaceutical industry, and the sponsors include British Petroleum (ouch).

Linux is not free software

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Another recycled text, from November 2006, which I am including in this summer series of articles rescued from the LNDS archives. This one is actually the translation of a text by Linus Torvalds that matters because it clears up a lot about Linux’s relationship with the free software movement. The important thing is that Linus has always protected his rights over Linux, and in a pretty blunt and direct way.

Linus Torvalds and the FSF

Knuth answers all questions

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Another article, this time a translation of a Knuth talk that I published in 2006. By the way, Knuth recently received an award in Spain, according to this story in El País.

Knuth answers all questions

We all have our personal heroes, representative men, especially from the field we work in.

One of my oldest personal heroes is the professor and programmer Donald Knuth.

Author of the famous Art of Computer Programming, and a great programmer. Creator of Metafont and TeX, used by thousands of scientists today to publish their papers.

Parnas's ethics

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

A post related to the story of Stanislav Petrov is this other one, which I wrote in 2009 and which I am adding to this series of recycled summer articles:

Ask Parnas

In 1985 Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, which came to be known as Star Wars, after George Lucas’s films.

Essentially, SDI was a shield made up of a network of satellites to detect missile launches and a series of anti-missile weapons, with high-energy lasers, in charge of destroying those missiles in space before they reached American territory (all of it over our heads, of course).

The man who saved the world by not doing what he was supposed to

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

As usual during the summer I recycle a few articles. This time it is a post from September 2008, with the story of Stanislav Petrov:

The man who saved the world because he didn’t do what he was supposed to do

It was September 26, 1983. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty in the secret bunker outside Moscow that monitored the Soviet satellite early warning system when the alarms went off shortly after midnight. One of the satellites was reporting that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles at Russia.

Beware the stylist

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“Don’t ask the barber whether he thinks you need a haircut,” Chato advises us, a reflection that grew out of some conversation with patent lawyers. Well, it’s true that we can regard many practitioners of the law as the cause of most evils, but let’s not get carried away either.

Carlos wrote a nice post, but the ideas he slips in are dangerous.

“El profesor no tiene la cabeza en enseñar, porque el doctor no sale de su casa para sanar” (“The teacher’s mind isn’t on teaching, because the doctor doesn’t leave his house to heal”), sang Jorge González in the 1980s. Governments ask the teachers’ unions what the best way to improve education is. The teachers’ unions answer that raising their salaries is an excellent measure, but that evaluating teachers and demanding excellence from them would be disastrous for the students. That professional associations exist is not the problem. The problem is that you cannot assume they will look after the common good, because they only look after the interests of their own.

Zig zag

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

There have been several contributions to the zig-zag challenge. If you haven’t read it yet and feel like taking the test, then before going any further read the challenge and try to solve it.

The most concise solution I know of is on the Rosetta Code site. It is written in the J language and goes like this:

 ($ [: /:@; <@|.`</.@i.)@,~ 5

Incredible, isn’t it? In this case it is the solution for a 5 x 5 matrix. There is an explanation of that code here, but before you set off trying to understand it, let’s see what some readers answered, and then I’ll show you my solution.

A harder test

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Given how well a simple test did, I’m going to rerun a challenge I posted 2 years ago. Answers are welcome (that time only one answer came in, and it was wrong :()

Produce a zig-zag array.

A zig-zag array is a square array of the first N2 integers, where the numbers run from lowest to highest, laid out in a zig-zag along the anti-diagonals of the matrix (see the figure).

The woman with the best physicist in the world

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Einstein and his wife

The memorandum

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

Washington 25, D.C. April 23, 1963

Memorandum

For: Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network From: J. C. R. Licklider
Subject: Topics for Discussion at the Forthcoming Meeting

That is how one of the most interesting, and probably one of the most influential, documents in the history of technology begins: the famous Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network, by Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider.

When I read this memorandum(1) I found a use case that describes the need for distributed operating systems, for defining “languages” that allow interoperability between different systems, RPC, remote process execution, the description of a service-oriented architecture, integration between multiple programming languages (a Fortran program can call routines written in Algol that live on another machine somewhere on the network), the description of virtual machines (in the sense of the JVM, or .Net’s CLR), libraries loaded dynamically at run time (DLLs, .so), the concept of the mashup!, the concept of cloud computing (which node of the network runs a task is transparent to the user) and no end of other elements, some of which we are only now developing. Please read it; here it is.

Perspective

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 08:25:11 -0300

“Perspective is worth 80 IQ points”
– Alan Kay

Alan Kay originally meant to go into biology; it was almost by accident that he ended up in computing. In one of his talks a few years ago, Kay admitted that if he wanted to go back to microbiology it would take him a long time to catch up, given the incredible progress that discipline has made over the years. The same, he says, is not true of computer science, which strikes him as stagnant.

To improve my mind: Isaac Asimov in 1988

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Curiously, many of the ideas Isaac Asimov lays out in this video are the same ones Ken Robinson puts forward in his book The Element. Mind you, Asimov is talking about the web in 1988. Yes, there was an internet in 1988, but it was nothing like the web, and very few people had access to it. Still, it was obvious it had to evolve into what Asimov describes.

Metaphors

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Dr. House: Nothing matters. We’re all just cockroaches, wildebeests dying on the riverbank. Nothing we do has any lasting meaning.

Evan Greer: And you think I’m miserable?

Dr. House: If you’re unhappy on the plane, jump out of it.

Evan Greer: I want to, but... I can’t.

Dr. House: That’s the problem with metaphors. They need interpretation... Jumping out of the plane is stupid.

Evan Greer: But what if I’m not in a plane? What if I’m just in a place I don’t want to be?

So what happened with Facebook?

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

I’ve been asked in several places what I think about the fact that Facebook did not accept any Chilean students as interns.

Let’s see what the news story says (taken from El Dinámo):

“The social networking giant was offering 12 weeks in California and almost US$ 6,000. Fifty students applied to an offer made especially for our country. Nobody managed to meet the requirements.”

Let’s see what happened.

First, this offer was channeled through the Ministry of Economy, which posted the notice on its website on August 23 of this year. Fifty students responded. The call for applications is here.

How to hire jugglers

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Consider the following fictional interview

“Circus Manager: How long have you been juggling?

Candidate: Oh, about six years.

Manager: Can you handle three balls, four balls, and five balls?

Candidate: Yes, yes, and yes.

Manager: Do you work with flaming objects?

Candidate: Sure.

Manager: …knives, axes, open cigar boxes, floppy hats?

Candidate: I can juggle anything.

Manager: Do you have a line in funny patter that goes with your juggling?

Merry Christmas

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Navidad, the Spanish word for Christmas, means birth. What we celebrate, in essence, is that: the emergence of new life.
This is my Christmas gift for this year, one of the videos from Symphony of Science, The Unbroken Thread:

Standard Christmas greeting with legal disclaimer

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Since Christmas is coming, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to update the blog these days, allow me to send my greeting early by recycling this standard greeting

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you!

Legal Disclaimer

Please accept my wishes without this implying any obligation or commitment whatsoever, implicit or explicit. The Merry Christmas wishes I am sending do not imply and must not be construed as religious proselytizing, each recipient of this greeting being absolutely free to enjoy said date under the practices and traditions of the religion they profess, or under the secular practices they wish, or under the religion or secular practices of others or, at their option, to engage in no religious or secular practice at all.
The wishes of happiness and prosperity for the New Year are made assuming the calendar generally accepted in the Western hemisphere, but do not imply ignorance of the existence of other calendars or of the cultures that sustain them, which since pre-Hispanic times have made our country great (which does not necessarily imply that our country is greater than other countries in the region or elsewhere in the world, which I say particularly for our Argentine, Bolivian, North American and Norwegian colleagues. Said countries have been listed in alphabetical order, which implies no preference or animosity whatsoever. The expression North American does not entail ignorance of the several countries in North America).

A simple test

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

If you have to hire software developers (we used to call them programmers, but sadly the term has lost some of its prestige), then I suggest you add this simple test to your hiring process:

“Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.

Viva la revolución

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“Wikileaks has not been a revolution, as I’ve heard people say... I’m sorry, but this may be many things, but a revolution it is not.”

“People in revolutions do a lot of things, they do almost everything... but one thing is certain: people in “revolutions” don’t stay quietly at home when they find out, with written proof, that they are being pushed around.”

“But what the internet gives us, it also takes away... Thanks to the internet we know about all these shady deals, but it is also the internet’s fault that we sit there in a stupor in front of the computer screen doing nothing else, except complaining... me first of all.”

Satisfaction

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

There are two important things you have to do in this life: give thanks and give recognition.

Last night at work I had the chance to recognize several of my collaborators, and I also received a recognition from my company, which made me very happy.

For a couple of years we have taken on important projects. That is why doing our job well matters so much, considering security and compliance with quality standards and regulations; and of course trying to make as few mistakes as possible, because if we got it wrong we would affect millions of Chilean workers.

The Chilean way

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

President Piñera has said that this rescue was done “a la chilena”, the Chilean way, and by that he means to give the phrase a positive sense. That seems fine to me, and I endorse the president’s intent. “The Chilean way” should mean doing things right.

But let’s not forget that these miners were trapped for 70 days because things at that mine were done “the Chilean way”.

Let’s work to change, in a positive direction, but let’s not forget, as we have been doing. That is what evolving means.

The crisis of capitalism

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

One last video, to wrap up this series of three. It also belongs to the RSAnimate series, and it is a talk by David Harvey where he explains the origin and the crisis of capitalism. By the way, for those who believe Chile is on solid ground, think about the level of wages and the heavy debt (bank and department store credit cards) that our middle class carries:

At the risk of...

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

this filling up with comments from creationists, or from religious fanatics, here is this video

(via @fabiomb, taken from thislink)

Tearing down the education myth

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“There are 3 kinds of people in the world: those who are immovable, those who are movable, and those who move” - Benjamin Franklin

Video translated by Verónica Vera.

It's all in your head

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Do you think Apple makes the best computers in the world?

Wrong. There is nothing special about them. I think they’re bad, but I’m not right either. It is a matter of cultural implantation in our brain; brand positioning, the marketing people call it.

And there is scientific proof, entertainingly explained on that wonderful blog called Tercera Cultura, where they go over the results of an experiment to measure this brand positioning thing:

New life in arsenic?

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Since I grew up in Chuquicamata, the copper mining town in northern Chile, at a time when pollution was pretty high, mainly from the fumes coming out of the copper smelter’s smokestacks, I was always told that I had been exposed to arsenic contamination, at least for the first 18 years of my life.

So you could say I am an arsenic-tolerant life form :smile:

During my time at the Escuela de Injeniería (the engineering school; yes, it’s spelled with a J), I met Don José Tohá Castellá, who was researching biofilter technology for cleaning up pollution, which ended up as an invention called the Tohá System, used to decontaminate water.

Wikileaks and the triumph of the internet's ideals

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“The more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves.”
\[\...\]
“I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free internet — or unrestricted internet access is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.” – Barack Obama in a speech in China (video).

Teaching math with computers

Sun, 05 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Illegal activities

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 18:25:11 -0300

Although Wikileaks has been running since 2006, the recent events around the leak of diplomatic cables from American embassies have brought it not only more publicity, but also more technical problems, and a serious threat to the viability of the project.

There are three aspects of the infrastructure behind Wikileaks whose vulnerabilities you could see coming, and I am going to look at them to try to understand how this organization of seasoned hackers managed to put itself in such a risky position.

Tips for using cloud computing

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 18:25:11 -0300

The World Privacy Forum, whose report I covered earlier, has published a set of tips on how to use cloud services, for consumers as well as for government and business.

Tips for consumers of cloud services

Read the Terms of Service before placing any information in the cloud. If you don’t understand the Terms of Service, consider using a different cloud provider.
Don’t put anything in the cloud you would not want the government or a private litigant to see.
Pay close attention if the cloud provider reserves rights to use, disclose, or make public your information.
Read the privacy policy before placing your information in the cloud. If you don’t understand the policy, consider using a different provider.
When you remove your data from the cloud provider, does the cloud provider still retain rights to your information? If so, consider whether that makes a difference to you.
Will the cloud provider give advance notice of any change of terms in the terms of service or privacy policy?

There are also tips for business and government on cloud services, but we’re not going to translate those here. Let the bureaucrats do some work :wink:

Discipline and precision

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

When the Japanese decide to march...

Journalism?

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“WikiLeaks has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined.”

“That’s not something I say as a way of saying how successful we are - rather, that shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media. How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It’s disgraceful.”

Anxiety

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Which buttons are the most worn out in your office elevator?

(Inspired by something I read on Twitter today)

Turnout

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

There are 887 software development companies listed in the Chile Proveedores registry, the Chilean government’s supplier registry.

The tender for the framework agreement for software development requires participating vendors to be registered in Chile Proveedores, and it is being called a success with a turnout of 82 companies, that is, less than 10%.

I don’t know whether that is a success or not, and I say it with no intention of being ironic. To me it doesn’t look like one, but the truth is I’m not sure. How do you measure success based on turnout? What do you compare it against?

Sweet revenge

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Tell me you wouldn’t love to do this:

In fact, I think every time we get an unwelcome call we should answer in a similar way, don’t you?

Virtues and flaws

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

There were several answers to Friday’s question about the three virtues of a programmer according to Larry Wall: laziness, impatience and hubris (or pride).

One answer came straight to my inbox:

“Laziness? We rely on what we already know... We say we’ll knock it out in a couple of days when it takes us a month to program. Impatience? We don’t go to sleep until we see a subroutine do what we want it to do. Function, library, class... Nooo, let the subroutine do it. Pride? I wrote this program and nothing else compares to it... And if something does, it has bugs, so don’t compare it and don’t belittle it. You wish you had a programmer like me.”

The three great virtues of a programmer

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.”
– Larry Wall, creator of Perl.

“We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.”

Why would laziness, impatience and hubris (or pride) be the three virtues of a programmer?

An ideology of violation

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

One of the goals of this blog is to cast doubt on the ideas going around, especially in tech circles. This text is by Jaron Lanier, and it raises an important ethical question, particularly for those of us who are interested in security. The text is Jaron Lanier’s; the links and notes are mine.

An Ideology of Violation

by Jaron Lanier

All those nontechnical, ignorant, innocent people out there are going about their lives thinking that they are safe, when in actuality they are terribly vulnerable to those who are smarter than they are. Therefore, we smartest technical people ought to invent ways to attack the innocents, and publicize our results so that everyone is alerted to the dangers of our superior powers. After all, a clever evil person might come along.

Trust

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

(via)

Forty-four

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

It’s my 44th birthday. I think I’ll remember this 2010, and I suppose many of you will too, as a very special year, hectic and full of emotions that took us along like a roller coaster.

But I’m happy to have completed another trip around the sun, and thankful to everyone who reads me, and to those who have joined this space recently.

As is tradition, I’m leaving you a gift. This time it’s this remarkable video of Eric Woolfson playing a medley of Alan Parsons Project songs on the piano.

The zombie as a device

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“In 2006 nobody in Chile had heard of facebook, and very few used the internet. In 2008 it exploded; in less than two years most people had joined the social network. The technological capacity to create a world of zombies is in place. Thousands of hours online can lead us to a new kind of zombie, the gadget zombie, the device zombie, permanently connected to the computer, the zombie who believes he is part of something important, but is really only there to feed the servers that data-mine his behavior, to be redirected to consume new products.” (a world of zombies, on akarrú)

The Pinocchio paradox and the origin of computing

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

If Pinocchio says his nose will grow, and it doesn’t, he’d be lying. But when Pinocchio lies his nose grows, and if his nose grows then he’d be telling the truth. So what the hell is supposed to happen after Pinocchio says that sentence?

This is a restatement of the old Liar’s Paradox. The interesting thing is that this paradox plays a fundamental role in the solution of an important problem in mathematical logic, and along the way in the development of modern computing (and without that there would be no computers, no web, no blog, no twitter, and we wouldn’t be telling this story).

A wretched technical detail

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“The health of democracies, whatever their type and degree, depends on one wretched technical detail: the electoral procedure. Everything else is secondary.”
– José Ortega y Gasset

The RAE's secret plans

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 08:25:11 -0300

A secret document from the RAE (the Royal Spanish Academy) about the spelling reform has leaked. Given how important and serious it is, I’ve taken the liberty of transcribing the PDF making the rounds on twitter (via @mwaisbluth).

Here it is, in Spanish, the only language it works in:

REFORMA ORTOGRÁFICA

La Real Academia de la Lengua dará a conocer próximamente la reforma modelo 2000 de la ortografía española que tiene como objetivo unificar el español como lengua universal de los hispanoparlantes. Me han mandado, con carácter exclusivo, un documento reservado que revela cómo se llevará a cabo dicha reforma. Será, pues, una enmienda paulatina, que entrará en vigor poco a poco, para evitar confusiones.

Transculturation

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 18:25:11 -0300

Indeed, Halloween is a clear example of transculturation. Just look at this remarkable example of an American kid dressed up as a rescued Chilean miner (Fénix 2 capsule included):

Barbarians and gentlemen

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

The English have a saying: “rugby is a game for barbarians played by gentlemen, while football is a game for gentlemen played by barbarians”.

When it comes to programming languages, it seems to me that Java is like rugby, and C# is the equivalent of football.

For their part, the English who play cricket claim that “cricket is a game for gentlemen played by gentlemen”.

So which one is the cricket of programming languages?

The end of conversation

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

iPhones, iPods, iPads and other similar devices are highly regressive. They take us back to the world of passive consumption, like television. I’m surprised Clay Shirky hasn’t said anything yet (maybe he has and I just haven’t heard).

All that cognitive surplus out there is going to evaporate because of these devices, and Apple will be the main culprit.

And if I can’t convince you, let me quote Scott Adams:

Another interesting phenomenon of the iPhone and iPad era is that we are being transformed from producers of content into consumers. With my BlackBerry, I probably created as much data as I consumed. It was easy to thumb-type long explanations, directions, and even jokes and observations. With my iPhone, I try to avoid creating any message that are over one sentence long. But I use the iPhone browser to consume information a hundred times more than I did with the BlackBerry.

La Naturaleza del Software on Facebook

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

For many people Facebook has become the front door to the Internet. As of a couple of weeks ago this blog has a space on Facebook: we have our own page.

If you use Facebook, I invite you to join at this address: http://www.facebook.com/pages/La-Naturaleza-del-Software/152157384823078 I think this is a very good way to get to know all of you who visit this blog, in a slightly more personal way.

Defining a project

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

In essence, defining a project means asking yourself three basic questions: What? What for? and How?

The problem is that a lot of very smart people focus on the how, probably because they trust their own abilities, and play down or forget the first two questions.

Intelligence is the poor relation of understanding.

And yet, we failed

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Amid all the celebration over the rescue of the 33 Atacama miners, a historical image comes to mind. When a victorious Roman general entered Rome in triumph, leading the victory parade, he was accompanied in his chariot by a loyal slave, who held a laurel wreath over his head and kept whispering in his ear: “Look behind you. Remember that you are only a mortal” (Respice pos te! Hominem te memento!)

Doubt, certainty and indecision

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision” – Bertrand Russell

Reflections

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“The first patent system to protect ownership of inventions was created, almost four centuries ago, by Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon liked to say: «Knowledge is power», and ever since it has been clear that he was not wrong. Universal science has little that is universal about it; it is objectively confined within the borders of the advanced nations. Latin America does not apply the results of scientific research to its own benefit, for the simple reason that it has none, and so it condemns itself to suffer the technology of the powerful, which punishes and displaces natural raw materials. Latin America has so far been unable to create a technology of its own to sustain and defend its own development. The mere transplanting of the technology of the advanced countries not only implies cultural subordination and, ultimately, economic subordination as well, but also, after four and a half centuries of experience in multiplying oases of imported modernism in the middle of the deserts of backwardness and ignorance, it can fairly be said that it does not solve any of the problems of underdevelopment either... It is in the north, of course, where the electronic models are designed and the programming languages are created that Latin America imports”
– Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, 1971, pp. 406-407

Where did you go to school?

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“…And even the rich cry. The graduate of a British school in La Dehesa will tend to hide where he really comes from when, at the public university, he faces the kids from the Latino, the Rubén Darío or the San Juan, never mind the heavyweights from the Lastarria or the Nacional, who eat anyone alive. And he’ll say he went to “a small school in Lo Barnechea” rather than own up to his roots in front of people who despise privilege. As must have happened with the MAPU crowd in the 60s, when they said they had gone to “a school run by priests” rather than admit they were from the Verbo Divino or Saint George.”

How to estimate software

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

A guide to estimating percentage complete and remaining time.

By James Iry, from here

I haven’t looked at the problem. Completed: 0%. Time estimate: about 2 weeks.

I’ve looked at the problem. Completed: 50%. Time estimate: about 2 more weeks.

And so it goes, at 90% and at 99%, always about 2 more weeks, until the developer spots another problem that seems more interesting. Completed: 100%. Time estimate: 0 more weeks.

The limits of free speech

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“In the end, freedom of expression is one of the foundations of the democratic system. With limited freedom of expression we get less public debate of ideas and less oversight of power. We can always come up with reasons to limit it. To protect the people from heresy, to protect our children, to protect the nation, the homeland or the race. Not long ago Jesus was even given a legal address at a law office on Paseo Ahumada in Santiago in order to block the screening of a film. Freedom of expression means allowing the publication of precisely those things we don’t like. Faced with the problems that come with freedom of expression, the answer should be more freedom of expression, not limiting it.”

Simulation and science

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Can someone explain to me how Tecnologías de la Información (Information Technology) can be abbreviated TIC? Just like that, with a C at the end. Well, the academics at the DCC, where I studied, have taken to abbreviating it that way, instead of TI (see here). But fine, that’s a minor detail, of little importance (though worrying).

I’m more worried by Claudio Gutierrez’s claim: “Those who work in simulation know that solving a complex problem doesn’t require much theory.” (taken from The End of Science).

An unusual engineer

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“It may be the warriors that get the glory, but it’s the engineers that build society” – B’lanna Torres, ST:Voyager 7.10

Enzo Abbagliati was kind enough to invite me to write for the third anniversary of his blog, cadaunadas, and the result was this short post, somewhat Orwellian, a reflection on cyberspace invading everyday life.

What I liked was that Enzo introduces me as an “unusual engineer”. He leaves the definition open, though I have my suspicions about what he means. I liked it because it means that what I’m trying to do on this and the other blog has an impact outside the tech world.

Sintel

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Good, now that I have a bit of your attention on the state of free software in Chile, let me tell you about a couple of cases that may bring a little understanding to the subject.

I want to talk about 2 projects that owe their existence to this powerful idea of free software, and through these examples I want to figure out the secret behind the success of a free software project, or one based on free software. My aim is to find the fundamentals that make these projects work. I’m convinced that a lot of people who talk about free software have no idea what they’re talking about, and so they create wrong expectations and ideas, which, badly applied, can be disastrous.

What counts is action, not words!

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Life of Brian is an inexhaustible source of illustrations. This clip, for example, reminds me a lot of a mailing list about promoting free software:

Ser and estar

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“Soy feliz” (“I am happy”), some people say. To the people I know and love I say “you can’t be happy”, and the reason is very simple: happiness is a state. You can estar happy (be in that state), but you can’t ser happy (be it, as a trait).

And yet we say “estoy enamorado” (“I’m in love”). We have no trouble admitting that love is temporary, but we won’t admit it of happiness.

What is cloud computing? (The presentation)

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 08:25:11 -0300

This is the "prezi" I put together for my friends on the DCC8090 mailing list, with whom I shared this presentation. I’m taking the chance to share it with you too.

What is cloud computing? on Prezi

Appendix: the GobForge-CL analysis

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Alejandro Fuentes, from CSOL, was kind enough to comment on my previous post, and he says something I liked a lot:

[…]On the other hand, trying to measure or extrapolate the “state of free software in Chile” has the same methodological value as trying to establish the “state of Chilean painting” by counting the pictures in a museum.[…]

He’s right, but I think he misread my intent, or I picked the wrong title.

Self-education, according to Isaac Asimov

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 18:25:11 -0300

Asimov, in an interview, around 1988:

via

The state of open source in Chile: the ChileForge community

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“Talk is cheap, show me the code,” says Linus Torvalds.

Marco Zúñiga recently threw down a challenge, an acid test for the Chilean open source community. The idea is to put what Linus Torvalds says to the test: whether these communities actually move from talk to action.

As it happens, a few weeks ago I decided to look into the open source repositories we have in this country, mainly prompted by a curious incident involving the ChileForge site (more background here). So I decided to check what had become of this community, and set about analyzing the ChileForge repository. Below I share the result with you. I think it is a good piece of evidence to bring to the debate on the viability of open source in Chile, or at least, for those interested in collecting that dinner from Marco, now you’ll know where not to look ;)

Happy Bicentennial!

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Today’s doodle is really pretty; it is the work of Bernardita Jimenez, a young Chilean.

As is tradition on this blog, we celebrate with a robot cueca, Chile’s national dance:

Happy Bicentennial!

Isn't it funny?

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 18:25:11 -0300

Over at Manzana Mecánica they mention a report on the international landscape of open source software in 2010. Nice study, a bit long. When I started leafing through it, a series of charts like this one caught my eye:

What do those charts mean? (there are several in the report)

The horizontal axis is the information society development index, and the vertical axis is the open source software (OSS) development index. The quadrants are marked off too; the idea is to show us the magic quadrant (top right), which is supposedly the best.

What are we Chileans like?

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:25:11 -0300

Hector Veliz Meza, in What do we Chileans think we are like?

“What do we Chileans think we are like? Are we generous, or do we think we are generous? Is there concrete proof showing that we are generous, given that donations to the Teletón, the annual charity telethon, represent only a fragmented and isolated reality? Are we cultured, educated and well prepared, or do we think we are? Might we not be getting confused, so that when we are asked what we are like we answer with what we think we are or how we would like to be?”

False consensus

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 18:25:11 -0300

“People tend to think that those who don’t think the way they do have something wrong with them.” Not a very extraordinary observation, but no less interesting for that.

Social psychologists talk about a cognitive bias called “false consensus”, which consists of people’s tendency to see “their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances while viewing alternative responses as uncommon, deviant, or inappropriate”.

The Gift

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 18:25:11 -0300

I hadn’t come across this short, “The Gift”, which took part in the Philips Parallel Lines Films contest. The contest required every short to have only 5 preset lines of dialogue: “What is that?” – “It’s a unicorn.” – “Never seen one up close before.” – “Beautiful.” – “Get away. Get away.” – “I’m sorry.”

Enjoy

Carl Erik Rinsch's The Gift from microCHANNEL on Vimeo.

It's not the code, stupid!

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:25:11 -0300

When I say that I know a mission-critical system, one that supports one of the highest-traffic sites in Latin America, that moves a lot of money, and that runs on Windows and SQL Server 2008, a lot of people who swear they’re technology experts look at me funny. Of course: Microsoft supposedly makes nothing but garbage that’s good for nothing, and nobody puts mission-critical systems on Windows. Except that’s only half the story, because that same site has, as its front end, an open source Java application server, running on RedHat Linux, with Apache as the base platform. That’s when the look of surprise gets bigger. There are others, more “expert” still, who are puzzled that everything I’m describing isn’t running on an Oracle stack.

A kid and technology

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 08:25:11 -0300

By D3NE (*)

I have to admit that when my father asked me to write something for his blog’s anniversary, he caught me completely off guard. Not because writing is hard for me or because I didn’t want to, but because I had no idea what I could write that would have anything to do with what he usually publishes here. You have to keep in mind that I tend to write about epic battles and exaggerated feats of fantasy, and that most of my documents are awash in romantic or nostalgic feelings, so having to produce something for a techno-philosophical blog was an idea that refused to fit in my head.

Education in freedom

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:25:11 -0300

“Day after day, children are denied the right to be children. The world treats poor children as if they were garbage. The world treats rich children as if they were money. And those in the middle, the ones who are neither poor nor rich, the world keeps tightly tied to the leg of the television set, so that from very early on they accept a captive life as their destiny.” -- Eduardo Galeano

They want to censor us

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:25:11 -0300

Taken from the website of the Senate of the Republic of Chile:

Website administrators could be held liable for offenses committed over the Internet …*

The bill, which was sent to the Constitution Committee for study, amends current legislation by establishing that “those who disseminate over the Internet content or expressions offensive to the honor and reputation of a person shall be civilly liable for the damages they cause”.

It likewise provides that in cases where the actual author of such an act cannot be determined, “liability shall fall on the administrators of the respective sites”.

What happens when you stage a blackout

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:25:11 -0300

This image is wonderful:

because it refutes a post I published the very day this photo was taken: people can go from clicktivism to real activism. Social networks can be used to mobilize people to protest and demonstrate peacefully when they disagree with something. My regards to those who demonstrated; you shut me up. I take my hat off. When someone is convinced that something is wrong, and acts to change it, I find that brave and noble.

Digital inactivism

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 08:25:11 -0300

People used to take to the streets to protest, chain themselves to a door, occupy an embassy, or make signs, or march through the streets to stop a coal-fired power plant from being built.

Now we tweet.

33 miners

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:25:11 -0300

“We are fine in the shelter, the 33 of us”

33 miners have survived for 17 days more than 680 meters underground. That message, so simple, tied to the end of a probe, has been one of the most joyful pieces of news I have ever witnessed, as far as I can remember.

Good for the viejos, the “old men”, as miners are known here. I was born in mining country; my old man, though he wasn’t a miner, sometimes had to go into the mine at Chuqui too. I’m thinking of him right now, and of so many other “viejos” I have known.

No comment

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:25:11 -0300

P versus NP

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:25:11 -0300

The P versus NP problem is considered the most important open problem in computer science. In fact the Clay Institute includes it among the 7 “millennium problems”, which are the most important open mathematical problems according to that institute.

The prize for solving any one of these problems is one million dollars. The Clay Institute’s description of the P versus NP problem goes more or less like this:

Suppose that you are organizing housing accommodations for a group of four hundred university students. Space is limited and only one hundred of the students will receive places in the dormitory. To complicate matters, the Dean has provided you with a list of pairs of incompatible students, and requested that no pair from this list appear in your final choice.

When you are certain you know

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:25:11 -0300

You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.

Alan Perlis, epigram 116

Debugging stories

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 08:25:11 -0300

The best debugger for a program is the mind. Although the ear helps too.

Once a programmer friend of mine had a problem with two stored procedures. They were almost identical; the only difference was the source they pulled their information from, the algorithm was the same. The first returned its answer extremely fast, and the other took forever. The programmer brought a copy of the database to his PC and started debugging. When I sat down to help him I noticed something: when he ran the troubled procedure the computer got noisy. “Why is your computer making noise?” “Because the fan kicks in.” “Yes, but there’s something else.” Sure enough, the disk was making noise too, because it started spinning more than normal. With the faster stored procedure there was no noise at all and the disk barely moved. That noise put us on the right track: the problem was in the main table used by the second procedure, which was the main change between one and the other. At first we thought it had more data, but no, what was happening was that it was missing an index. That was the first time I debugged by ear.

Software everywhere: the Internet of Things in post-bicentennial Chile

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:25:11 -0300

By Luis Ramírez (*)

What is the future of the Internet? I am convinced that the semantic web is just a way of deepening (improving?) how we relate to existing data. The Cloud? More of the same. In my opinion, what will truly amount to a significant innovation is taking the Internet out of traditional devices and embedding it in unconventional ones. During this decade we will see the rise of this second Internet, where anything at all becomes a “Smart Object” able to communicate with the network at any time and from any place. That, more than anything else, is where I believe the future of the Internet lies.

Quality control

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:25:11 -0300

A good tip for managing the QA team: if the number of bugs grows over time, ask the QA team to stop testing.

(By the way, this kind of strategy has also been applied by former education ministers when it comes to running international tests of education quality in our country)

Flow state

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 08:25:11 -0300

The flow state is that mental state we reach when we manage to balance intellectual challenges against our skills, and we feel we’ve entered a kind of path where we are unstoppable (the flow channel), and we get our goals and assigned tasks done.

It can be charted like this:

In this chart the horizontal axis holds our skills, and the vertical axis the level of the challenges we face.

Fake Plastic Rock

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:25:11 -0300

When I was a teenager I played drums in a band we put together with my school friends. It was a beautiful time. We spent whole days practicing in my room, which was conveniently far from the rest of the house :wink:

Regular readers of this blog must find it odd that several days have gone by without a post. The reason is quite simple: vacation. But I’m back, although I plan to spend the last days of my vacation with my kids forming a new band, though this time it’s a plastic band, with fake instruments and canned music in the form of a video game, because I’ve caught the Rock Band 2 bug and I’m playing like a man possessed.

Glee, losers and copyright

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:25:11 -0300

Thanks to Rock Band and Glee, I can say that when it comes to musical taste, my kids and I have quite a lot in common, with one big exception: I never could stomach Madonna. But on Journey, there are no two opinions in my family.

Glee is a pretty entertaining TV series, popular with young people, where the heroes are the kids of the Glee Club, a bunch of losers, hence the L on the forehead, who have the guts to sing and make it as a choir.

The best gift for our children

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 08:25:11 -0300

My father, who sadly died very young, at 39, told my siblings and me that the greatest inheritance he was leaving us was our education. Sure enough, he didn’t leave us much in the way of property, but he did leave us education and culture, and I try to honor that legacy.

Education is the best gift for our children on this Children’s Day.

But giving them an education is not just sending our kids to school to learn. That matters, but it also means caring about what they learn; it means giving them culture and values, teaching them to tolerate frustration, to overcome adversity, to look past the superficial; it means learning to share, and above all helping them understand.

It's my problem

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Taking ownership, of what you are and of what you have to do. That is basic, and yet you see so little of it.

In education, my wife, who is a teacher, always complains about those teachers who push away the “problem child”, the restless one, the one who is slow to learn, to the point of expelling him from school instead of taking on the job of educating him and solving that kid’s problem.

How to disappoint your boss

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 08:25:11 -0300

After all, it’s only a private cloud…

What we know

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 08:25:11 -0300

You think you have tested everything, and you still feel insecure and don’t want to go to production, because you don’t know what other bugs are still in the system, what situations you didn’t cover.

You want more time, to make sure everything will go well, but even so you will never know everything, because there will be mistakes you don’t yet know you have made, and there is no way to find out until you have shipped your software to production so users and your customers can try it.

The ENIAC programmers

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 08:25:11 -0300

The photograph shows two of the six original women programmers of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer:

The six original ENIAC programmers were: Kay Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence and Ruth Teitelbaum.

The ENIAC was developed during World War II to help with ballistics calculations, although its main use was in computing the parameters for the first hydrogen bomb. Construction began in 1943, it was formally accepted by the U.S. Army in July 1946, and it ran continuously until 11:45 pm on October 2, 1955.

We're doing it wrong

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 08:25:11 -0300

The following diagram is the model of a computer taught to every student of computer engineering or computer science:

]

The problem is that this model was fine some 40 years ago, but it has nothing to do with modern computer architectures.

In an interesting analysis Poul-Henning Kamp shows how an algorithm that has been considered efficient for 47 years, and has even been analyzed by great luminaries like Donald Knuth, can be optimized by an order of magnitude if you take into account the effects of the architecture it runs on.

Five years

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Today La Naturaleza del Software (LNDS) turns 5. In that time I have written more than 900 entries, averaging 4 posts a week (*).

I have started this new year with a change of platform and look. Today begins a month of celebration of our fifth anniversary. We will have some guests and, for the first time, there will be at least one post every day. We are going to recycle the best of what we have published in this time.

Like tears in rain

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“All those… moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.” – Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Recently an article of mine was linked to, but not directly. Instead it was done with a link generated by bit.ly, a “URL shortener”. I have talked before about the problem with these services(*). Now, thinking it over, I have realized that these URL shorteners are introducing a bibliographic problem, and not a minor one.

The problem with tinyurl and similar services (recycled)

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Funnily enough, not long ago on a mailing list I’m part of I asked people to use TinyUrl, forgetting what I wrote a while back about the problems with this service, a subject that has resurfaced these days and that could turn into a serious security problem. Here it goes, recycled and with a few improvements, my post from December 27, 2007:

The problem with tinyurl and similar services

This post was sitting in my drafts, and I’ve now finished it in response to a question from FT via twitter,

Bill Gates's pancakes

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:25:11 -0300

The sorting problem is one of the basic topics in every programmer’s training. But perhaps this well-known problem holds the key to understanding how the evolution of life works. How? That is a story involving none other than Bill Gates, but before telling it let’s review this classic computing problem.

How do we sort a series of data? It is such a basic task that we almost take it for granted. It even comes built into our languages and operating systems, or as a standard function in every spreadsheet program.

Logical and reasonable

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Something being logical does not mean it is reasonable, and the reverse does not hold either. Many people confuse the logical with the reasonable. It is a fairly common mistake.

One of the things we cannot forgive Gene Roddenberry and Mr. Spock for is the meaning they give to the word logic.

The problem is that when Mr. Spock says “that would not be logical”, what he really means is “that would not be reasonable”. This is one more example of how television, even quality television, ruins people’s education.

Distributed version control

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 08:25:11 -0300

My previous note on version control was well received, and I got comments from people who are not software developers, which is good. I insist that version control is a tool with applications outside the programming world.

But last time we talked about centralized systems, like Subversion (SVN) or CVS, the most popular ones. This time I want to invite you to try distributed version control systems, or DVCS.

If your mind has not been damaged by systems like Subversion or CVS, you will have no trouble adopting these systems, and I suggest you explore the two most popular ones today, Mercurial (hg) and Git.http://git-scm.com/.

Version control systems

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Image via Wikipedia

Did you ever use SCCS? No? How about RCS? Not that either? Bah, you are all very young. But you do use a version control system, right?

These days it is rare for a developer not to use a version control system like CVS or Subversion (also known as SVN).

What I can’t figure out is why everybody doesn’t use one!

You see, lots of people write a Word file, “boringreportfortheauditor.doc”, and start working on it. If they are smart, and experienced, before making a change they make a copy and start working on “boringreportfortheauditor-version-2.doc”, and then on “boringreportfortheauditor-version-3.doc” and on it goes, and the folder fills up with files like “auditorreport4.doc”, auditor-report-final.doc", “report-for-the-auditor-reviewed-by-my-boss.doc”, “report-oops-i-got-the-deadlines-wrong.doc” and so on. The working folder is a disaster, if they use a folder at all, and don’t have it all scattered across the desktop (LNDS readers don’t do that, of course).

Lessons from the fashion world

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 08:25:11 -0300

The chart below shows 2007 sales, in billions of dollars, for several industries. The main difference among them is the degree of intellectual property protection. On the left are the ones with very low, or almost no, intellectual property protection, and on the right the industries with a high degree of intellectual property protection:

The chart is part of the talk Johanna Blakley gave at TEDxUSC this year.

The talk is brilliant, and when it gets to this chart it draws applause. After all, fashion is built on imitation, a point that La Valentina complements very well (synchronicity again; the emphasis is mine):

What is cloud computing

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Image via Wikipedia

If you are interested you can see the presentation.

We have talked quite a bit about cloud computing on this blog, but I don’t think we have ever pinned down what this computing in the cloud business actually means.

Having a clear definition of what the term means is important for making decisions. There is a video that was suggested to me, which is pretty good as an introduction, but we need something more precise from a technical point of view.

Simplicity

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

It’s super simple…

The great principles of computing

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

What is information?

What is computation?

What can we know through computing?

What can we not know?

These questions were once of interest only to computing specialists, but they are now the concern of people in every field of science, engineering and even politics (except in Chile, of course).

Computing is the science of information processes. Information processes have been discovered in the deep structures of all these fields.

Being the protagonist

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

According to a poll, among people under 30 the feeling that the Chilean national team is going to do well is much stronger than among us, the older ones.
Maybe it’s because we got used to sporting disappointments.

I’m not a soccer fan, but it moves me to see the national team playing this kind of match. Anyone who has watched La Roja play while abroad will understand me. I don’t know why, but that experience changed me, for the better. It made me love my country more.

The ministers' magic bracelets

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

A couple of years ago we were complaining about a minister’s digital illiteracy. Now it seems we are facing something worse. I read this gem on Luis Ramirez’s blog:

Doesn’t it worry you that our authorities fall for this kind of ignorance?

And before anyone comes at me with the pseudoscientific explanation of the properties of the 7 frequencies in the hologram of the famous little bracelet, allow me to transcribe this explanation, taken from this post on the pseudoscientific foundations of this magic gadget:

Linus Torvalds on Git

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

It’s been a while since I wrote more technical articles, so I’m going to pick up some topics I’d like to dig into (which is an excuse to learn new things). And one topic that has interested me, for a couple of years at least, is the development of DVCSs, distributed version control systems. On this subject I’m more or less convinced that Git is the way to go, but before explaining why, I want to leave you with this video of Linus Torvalds talking about this DVCS. The video is also very interesting because you rarely get to see Linus presenting, and expressing his opinions live with as much force as he does in writing.

Dictatorships, the internet and iPod liberalism

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Evgeny Morozov used to think that technology and new media would help his native Belarus become more democratic. But when he ran into reality he quit the NGO he worked for and started researching an unpopular thesis: the internet is not the great tool for fighting tyrannical governments, and on the contrary, it helps dictatorships be more effective.

That is a heresy, and I have a weakness for heresies.

Remember the famous Twitter revolution in Iran? For a dictatorship, allowing social networks is a great opportunity to gather intelligence. The KGB used to torture people to find out who belonged to an organization, or how they coordinated. Now there’s no need, it’s all on Facebook! Who needs security agents and torturers?

Do you want to be a heretic?

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“Heretics look at the status quo and say, ‘This will not stand. I can’t abide this status quo. I am willing to stand up and be counted and move things forward.’”
Instead of sitting still, following the rules, like a sheep, you have to stand up and say, “Not me! Don’t count on me anymore, I want this to change.” What you need is a few people who look at the rules, see that they make no sense, and discover that they need to be connected. And creating a way to connect with each other, that is leadership.
That is creating a tribe.
That is what Seth Godin talks about in this interesting TED talk (available with Spanish subtitles):

Being a professional

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Today everyone is celebrating Chile’s win over Honduras, you can hear Chilean vuvuzelas in the streets, and the joy is justified. We’re happy, and good for us, it’s nice to see so many cheerful people in the streets, on the subway, and especially at work.

Bielsa’s trick is no trick at all. It’s simply doing his job well and demanding from his players the same thing he does: acting like a professional.

The Turing machine explained by Turing himself

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

I leave you with this clip from the film Breaking the Code, in which the English actor Derek Jacobi plays Turing:

Transparency or blunder?

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

The Consejo para la Transparencia (Chile’s Transparency Council) has informed the Electoral Service (SERVEL) that, for the sake of transparency, it can no longer sell personal data, but must hand it over free of charge to anyone who asks for it.

Source: http://www.elmostrador.cl/opinion/2010/06/09/la-traicion-del-consejo-de-la-transparencia/

The state of personal data handling in Chile is pretty bad, and with this the Transparency Council has made it even worse.

Personal data cannot be passed around like this. The big problem we have in Chile is the existence of a single identifier, the RUT (the national ID number), which makes it possible to identify people and cross-reference their information. Add to that the fact that it can now be completed with people’s home addresses (a field present in the electoral roll database). With that and a bit of business intelligence you can learn a lot about people, far more than they want. This is a profound mistake.

Leibniz and the simplicity of the laws of nature

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Sans les mathématiques on ne pénètre point au fond de la philosophie. Sans la philosophie on ne pénètre point au fond des mathématiques.
Sans les deux on ne pénètre au fond de rien.
– Leibniz

(Without mathematics we cannot get to the bottom of philosophy. Without philosophy we cannot get to the bottom of mathematics. Without both we cannot get to the bottom of anything.)

Guided by the mathematician Gregory Chaitin, we will venture into the ideas on complexity of the great philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. This article is based on Chaitin’s talk titled “Leibniz, Complexity and Incompleteness”.

The simple, the complex and the complicated

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

When we say something is complex we mean to suggest that it is the inevitable result of combining its elements, and that this implies no fault or failure, as when we say “a recipe is complex”.

Complicated, on the other hand, is what we call something that is very hard to understand, solve or explain, for example “a complicated court case”.

Look at this image:

This is undoubtedly a complex image. In case you don’t know it, this is the famous Mandelbrot set, a fractal, a geometric figure with the peculiar property of self-similarity: if we zoomed in on some parts of the image we would get images as beautiful and complex as this one. You can check what I’m saying by watching this video on youtube, which explores the Mandelbrot set.

Is .Net more secure than Java?

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:25:11 -0300

A recent study by Veracode states that “the vulnerability density (average flaws per megabyte of code analyzed) for .Net was 27.2 and for Java the overall density was 30.0.”

OK, the difference may be within the sampling error, but the study includes an interesting table that classifies the flaws:

Most of the problems in .Net and Java are in cross-site scripting, especially with the older controls. Things seem to get better with ASP MVC.

Vision of the future

Sun, 30 May 2010 08:25:11 -0300

This video from Microsoft Labs is very interesting (thanks to Maz for sharing it)

On processes

Thu, 27 May 2010 18:25:11 -0300

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

– The First Law of Mentat, quoted by Paul Atreides to Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

Stop the clock, squash the bug

Thu, 27 May 2010 08:25:11 -0300

If this blog were what I once meant it to be, I would want it to look like Word Aligned, and to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I translated an article from that extraordinary blog into Spanish. I hope you enjoy it (even the less technical among you). (*)

Stop the clock, squash the bug¹

By Thomas Guest (Word Aligned)

Which clock is the best?

Alan Kay

Wed, 26 May 2010 08:25:11 -0300

On May 17, 2010 Alan Kay turned 70, and his friends gave him a book of essays, written by friends of his and by people who have worked with him in different fields. Alan Kay is a true polymath, an artist in the sense described by Leon Battista Alberti: "… the artist in this social context must not be a mere craftsman, but an intellectual trained in every discipline and every field."

James Randi, a lesson in skepticism

Sun, 23 May 2010 18:25:11 -0300

Several years ago I saw this James Randi documentary, and I liked it a lot. It’s called Más Allá de la Ciencia (Beyond Science), and it shows very well what James Randi does. I invite you to watch it now that it’s available on youtube:

Remember this when you read or watch news about psychics searching for the people missing after the earthquake, for example.

Martin Gardner

Sun, 23 May 2010 18:25:11 -0300

Martin Gardner died yesterday at the age of 96. For those who don’t know him, Gardner was a great science popularizer, famous for his column on recreational mathematics published in Scientific American.

His main contribution was his lifelong fight against pseudoscientific fraud. James Randi pays him a heartfelt tribute on his blog. He is without doubt a great loss for science outreach and for the skeptical movement.

I leave you with a video, an episode of “The Nature of Things” (the TV show that inspired the name of this blog), where David Suzuki shows us Gardner’s world, and his importance for the popularization of science, mathematics and rational thinking:

Science and Buddhism

Sun, 23 May 2010 08:25:11 -0300

While looking for pictures of Tibetan monks to go with the story I published today on akarrú, I came across the site Science For Monks, an initiative promoted by the Dalai Lama to teach science to Tibetan monks.

The program continues the line the Dalai Lama started with his dialogue with modern scientists. I remember Francisco Varela’s book “Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying”, which collects one of the early conferences debating Buddhism and science. One of the things that struck me most was that the Dalai Lama was asked whether a soul could be reincarnated in a machine, and he answered that if the machine was capable of hosting consciousness, Buddhism did not rule out the possibility.

Being an engineer

Thu, 20 May 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Software doesn’t obey the laws of physics, so I’m not sure it makes sense to talk about software engineering as such. Still, software as pure code isn’t much use: it has to run on a technological infrastructure, the hardware. So at that moment, when a system gets deployed, the programmer, the software developer, gives way to the systems engineer.

When we worry about deployment problems, when we fight to bring latency down, when we face the fallacies of distributed computing, when we try to cheat the limits of Amdahl’s Law, or take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud, at that moment we are being pure engineers.

Intelligence, education and understanding

Thu, 20 May 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Ask anyone why we have summer and winter and they will probably(*) answer, fully convinced, that it happens because the Earth has an elliptical orbit, so in summer it is closer to the sun and in winter it is farther away. The worst part is that this is probably what they were taught in school!

If that happens, ask that person to explain why it is winter in one hemisphere while, at the same time, it is summer in the other. TILT!

Understanding

Thu, 20 May 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Let’s see if this makes the tension between understanding and intelligence any clearer:

Via the brilliant Alberto Montt.

What matters is reaching understanding before it is too late.

Wireless power

Mon, 10 May 2010 08:25:11 -0300

How long until this is available?:

We are all connected

Sun, 09 May 2010 08:25:11 -0300

“It’s all really there. The inconceivable nature of nature” – Richard Feynman

I leave you with this music video, which samples the voices of Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye (more videos at: http://www.symphonyofscience.com./:

Worse is better

Fri, 07 May 2010 08:25:11 -0300

In 1989 Richard P. Gabriel introduced the concept of Worse is Better, or the New Jersey style, a philosophy of software design in which simplicity of the interface, and above all of the implementation, matters more than any other property (including correctness, consistency and completeness).

The concept was introduced as a section of a talk Gabriel gave at a Lisp conference, and you can read it here: The Rise of Worse is Better

Use the source, Luke

Tue, 04 May 2010 08:25:11 -0300

If you watch the film Revolution OS, there is a moment when Linus Torvalds presents an award to the FSF, represented by Richard Stallman.

On receiving the award, Stallman opens with a very ironic remark: that this is like Han Solo giving an award to the Rebel Alliance. Then he carries on with his usual speech while Linus plays with his daughters, not paying much attention.

That scene is very revealing.

Answers to software engineering students

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Let’s recall what Dijkstra tells us about software engineering:

As economics is known as “The Miserable Science”, software engineering should be known as “The Doomed Discipline”, doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter “How to program if you cannot.”

Software maintenance

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Dijkstra used to laugh at the phrase software maintenance, as if software were something that wears out, rusts, or corrodes.

The truth is that Dijkstra is right about that. Software can’t be maintained, because it isn’t something you build.

The whole construction metaphor for software, with its architects, builders and construction processes, or the idea that it is something manufactured, and therefore packaged, assembled and distributed, is limiting.

Software is not a rigid physical thing that has to submit to the laws of physics, and therefore to traditional engineering.

Apple's moral role

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:25:11 -0300

We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone.

That’s the answer Steve Jobs gave Matthew Browing, an iPhone user who told him he was worried about Apple’s tendency to decide what content goes on the iPhone.

The full story at techcrunch.

What if we make it more fun?

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 08:25:11 -0300

The video says it all:

For an analysis of persuasive design and the Fun Theory I suggest reading this article at manzana mecánica (though I’m not sure that will be more fun).

When open really means closed

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:25:11 -0300

In 2009 Andreas Constantinou questioned the notion of open source in his article “Open is the new closed”, analyzing in detail a fact we’ve discussed before: releasing the code isn’t enough; control over how an open software product is developed is as important as, or more important than, having the source code.

The word open comes across as something positive. The same thing happens with it as with the word transparency: both are pretty words that signal good intentions. Everyone promises openness, transparency; they even set up commissions and publish a page on their website with transparent information, but deep down what we all expect when people talk about transparency isn’t delivered. The word itself becomes meaningless and we feel cheated.

The power of an algorithm

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:25:11 -0300

An algorithm is a finite set of well-defined, ordered instructions that let you carry out an activity through sequential, successive steps until you reach a result. As Seth Godin says: “Each instruction is simple and repeatable. It’s important to understand that the instructions work on all similar problems, not just one. Algorithms don’t care a bit if you believe in them or not. They either work or they don’t.”

For example, Darwin, through the theory of evolution, set out an algorithm, simple but powerful.

A new blog

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Yesterday I started writing a new blog.

The reason is quite simple: there are many topics I’d like to write about that I feel can’t go in La Naturaleza del Software (The Nature of Software), because they stray too far from what we discuss here. So, reusing a domain that wasn’t getting much use, I’ve created Akarrú. I’ll be waiting for you there.

Of course LNDS will keep being updated, as always.

1 of 5,000 or 5,000 of 1 (batch and transactional)

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 08:25:11 -0300

It’s easy to fool yourself when trying to optimize. What seems logical, and even numerically plausible, can blow up in our faces when we analyze it in detail, especially when we put it to the test in practice.

It’s typical for some expert to advise us to use a certain technique because in theory it’s more optimal. Novices tend to apply these proposals without questioning them much. We older hands tend to trust experience, and experience usually proves us right.

Programming 10 years from now

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 08:25:11 -0300

According to Bertrand Meyer, ten years from now:

We will still be using object-oriented languages
Professional programming will be much more rigorous
Verification will be built into the development process
Every program will have a web interface
Concurrency will be everywhere
We will have more confidence in the assessment of objectives
Software engineering will be not just a process, but a technology

Taken from Bertrand Meyer’s presentation “How you will be programming in 10 years”

A video you can't miss

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 08:25:11 -0300

This clip is a stop-motion animation made by Bang-yao Liu, a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlb-QLkjbZU

(Be sure to watch the making of)

Earth Hour and other nonsense

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 08:25:11 -0300

A month has now passed since the earthquake.

We keep hearing strange conspiracy theories, and prophecies of more terrible catastrophes to come.

People look for signs. For example, that today is Saturday, just like the day of the earthquake! How curious, some say, when in fact that happens in almost every non-leap year: since February normally has 28 days, the days of the week line up in March, so it’s normal for March 27 and February 27 to both be Saturdays, just as it’s normal that if there was a new moon on the day of the earthquake, there’s one today too, given that the moon has a rotation and revolution cycle of 28 days.

Women in tech, Ada Lovelace Day 2010

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 08:25:11 -0300

March 24 is Ada Lovelace Day, which is a day for blogging about the contribution of women in technology.

The spirit of Ada Lovelace Day is to promote and recognize the outstanding work of our female colleagues in the field.

Last year my tribute went to María Cecilia Rivara.

This year my recognition goes to Marcela Larenas and Paulina Lopez, and through them to a special group of talented colleagues who work at REUNA.

Me and my big mouth...

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:25:11 -0300

At my job there are disaster recovery plans and contingency sites, and they get tested at least a couple of times a year, all duly audited because there are government requirements and, stronger still, requirements from the foreign institutions that own the company. It’s not work anyone likes doing, but when an incident like an earthquake hits, the truth is it helps a lot, and it lets our IT people stay pretty calm in that moment. In the last earthquake everything went fine.

The internet in Chile in the face of the emergency

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:25:11 -0300

The design principles of the internet protocols assume that the network infrastructure is inherently unreliable, and dynamic in terms of availability and nodes. To reduce the complexity of the network, the intelligence is left at the edges (the network is a world of ends).

The IP protocol doesn’t guarantee a quality of service; it offers its “best effort” to deliver the information. And it works quite well, thanks to the concept of packet switching, the idea of Leonard Kleinrock (the little 6-year-old boy who wanted to buy a variable capacitor).

The state of the internet

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:25:11 -0300

An interesting video I came across through J.C. Camus’s blog, about the state of the Internet:

Note: remember that Americans, unlike the rest of the civilized world, have the bad habit of calling a thousand million a billion, and a million million a trillion. Yes, it’s a mess, but if the video were in scientific notation I don’t think it would make things any simpler. Anyway. They’re still very impressive figures, and nobody is capable of picturing them properly, so go ahead and be impressed:

Disaster recovery plan

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:25:11 -0300

I heard on the radio that ONEMI, Chile’s national emergency office, has satellite phones in the main cities, but that the batteries were dead, or there were no spare batteries.

On the Juan Fernández islands a 12-year-old girl rang a gong, 80 centimeters in diameter, to warn the island’s inhabitants that the tsunami was coming. Yes, the Juan Fernández tsunami warning system is a gong 80 cm in diameter!

It would seem our country’s disaster recovery plan is something like this famous cartoon:

Earthquake

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:06:47 +0000

The early hours of Saturday, February 27, 2010 were among the most intense moments I’ve ever lived through. I’ve been through several earthquakes already, mainly the one in 1985. This one felt much stronger to me, and it seems it actually is. I’m only now getting connected to the internet; until now all communication, and the few tweets, went through movistar’s 3G network, which, for all that I complain about its service, has worked flawlessly this time, above all because it let me get in touch immediately with my loved ones, and above all with my wife, who is in the Coquimbo region right now.
I just hope to have the whole family together soon, so I can rest easy.
Thanks to those who have sent messages, and to my family and friends who have asked through social networks. Greetings to everyone, we’re fine.

A good idea

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Philip Tellis, a Yahoo engineer, has proposed a very interesting idea: use 404 error pages (the page-not-found error) for a worthy purpose: publishing information about missing children.

It’s actually easy to implement; the problem is where to get the information. Tellis uses the API of the site http://www.missingkidsmap.com/ to implement this feature, but that site shows information about missing children in the US, Canada and Great Britain.

Where do we have that information available in Chile? I’d like to implement this service, but I don’t know where to get data on missing children in Chile or Latin America. So if anyone knows where to get it, I’d be grateful. I hope to implement this idea on this site in the next few days, and to show how to do it.

The nature of Avatar, part two: where are we headed?

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Andy Serkis is an expert in the art of “performance capture” (also known as Motion Capture, or Mocap), the digital capture of an acting performance. Not only has he helped the technicians at WETA develop the motion capture technique, he took that technique to the state of the art with his performance as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings.

So much so that several critics suggested Serkis be nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor for the role, and Sir Peter Jackson (yes, he’s a Sir now) backed the idea, arguing that the only detail that set it apart from a “normal performance” was that the makeup was applied digitally in post-production.

The nature of Avatar, part one: where am I?

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:25:11 -0300

I had to talk about Avatar. Although I went to see it the day after it opened, I hadn’t had time to write anything about this movie; besides, it’s something I promised my son.

Now that I can make a little time, I’m going to write a couple of things about Avatar. I’ve decided to come at it from several angles, so I’ll probably write more than one article.

What follows is not film criticism. It’s technology; it’s my view as a software developer of Avatar and what it proposes. These little articles assume you’ve already seen Avatar, and if you haven’t, go see it, preferably in 3D.

Can I trust you? (Ethics as a new level of competitive advantage)

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:25:11 -0300

The twentieth-century economy ran on the following standard: sell more, to generate more profit, “grow”, and then the crash.

Quoting Umair Haque:

“It’s not about having more, it’s about doing things better. It’s not about protecting exports, squeezing buyers and suppliers, price-discriminating against the less powerful, and programming consumers to buy, buy, buy.
It’s about authentically making people, communities, and society better off.
It’s not about caring less, but about caring more.
It’s not about cruelty. It’s about caring.”

Radical novelties

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Plenty of people love to draw analogies (or isomorphisms, as Pepe Flores calls them) to explain new concepts or ideas. But that way of thinking always fails when we come up against concepts that are “radical novelties”.

On that subject I want to share this text by Dijkstra, where he explains it much better:

The usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday’s vocabulary. We do so, because we try to get away with the concepts we are familiar with and that have acquired their meanings in our past experience. Of course, the words and the concepts don’t quite fit because our future differs from our past, but then we stretch them a little bit. Linguists are quite familiar with the phenomenon that the meanings of words evolve over time, but also know that this is a slow and gradual process.

Haiti's tragedy

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Earthquake aside, Haiti’s tragedy goes back much further.

On the left Haiti, on the right the Dominican Republic:

The doomed discipline

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 08:25:11 -0300

I think one of the best arguments against the notion of a software crisis was given, indirectly, by Edsger W. Dijkstra, in his 1988 talk “ON THE CRUELTY OF REALLY TEACHING COMPUTING SCIENCE”

A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name “Software Engineering”. As economics is known as “The Miserable Science”, software engineering should be known as “The Doomed Discipline”, doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter “How to program if you cannot.”.

The new reading primer

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:25:11 -0300

via

What debt are you talking about?

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:25:11 -0300

Can you imagine having to add a new bedroom, and a jacuzzi in the bathroom, to every apartment in a 24-story building, all over a single weekend, and with the tenants inside?

A few months ago I talked with a former teaching assistant in software engineering at a traditional university. He showed me an exam in which the students were asked to comment on the Chaos Report’s claim about the high failure rate of software projects. What kind of nonsense were you teaching your students?! was my sarcastic comment.

Dancing with entropy

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:25:11 -0300

2009 is ending, a very intense year for me personally.

Looking back, I can’t help reflecting that this year in particular, and my life in general, has been a dance with entropy.

In the words of Seth Godin:

It’s far easier to mix up a Rubik’s cube than to solve one.

People are often paid to enforce compliance. The job is to ensure that everything is in its place, that errors are zero, that things are delivered on time and as expected. The random event is a problem, something to be feared and extinguished.

False efficiency

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:25:11 -0300

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”.

– Peter Drucker

Twitter anthology 2009

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Christmas is here, and I usually leave you a present. This time I’m leaving a list of some of my Twitter posts, several of them chosen based on favstar’s selection (thanks to the followers who picked them):

“Gone with the Wind”, Twitter version: “Tomorrow is another day”, “frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”, the end. http://twitter.com/lnds/status/6927774475

The difference between users and dolphins is that the latter can be trained to perform the required activities http://twitter.com/lnds/status/1765292402

Privacy according to Google

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 08:25:11 -0300

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” -- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

To be more precise, this is what he said:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

Technical debt

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 08:25:11 -0300

At work I’m facing a heavy workload because of the following factors:

A long-running development project (almost 2 years).
a mini project to rewrite a small system, under pressure to meet tight regulatory deadlines.
changes to a core system that is the foundation of our operations.
the total rewrite of a system.

Case 1 has its own team, an external one, and despite being big and very important, it is under control. The second is an unexpected change, imposed by an outside authority; we have to do it, no way around it. Cases 3 and 4 are products of technical debt.

Personal motivation

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:25:11 -0300

A traveler came upon three men working in a quarry, breaking stones. He walked up to the first one and asked:

– Excuse me, my good man, what are you doing?

– Can’t you see? I break stones. I have to earn my day’s pay.

Then he walked up to the second man and asked:

– Excuse me, what are you doing?

– Easy. I’m cutting stone to build a beautiful, solid wall.

Programming as an art (Part V, the last one)

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Computer programming as an art

By Donald Knuth, 1974

(Read parts I, II, III and IV)

Less facilities: more enjoyment

One rather curious thing I’ve noticed about aesthetic satisfaction is that our pleasure is significantly enhanced when we accomplish something with limited tools.

Providing beautiful tools

Please, give us tools that are a pleasure to use, especially for our routine assignments, instead of providing something we have to fight with. Please, give us tools that encourage us to write better programs, by enhancing our pleasure when we do so.

Programming as an art (Part IV)

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Computer programming as an art

By Donald Knuth, 1974

(Read parts I, II, and III)

Works of art

When I speak about computer programming as an art, I am thinking primarily of it as an art form, in an aesthetic sense. The chief goal of my work as educator and author is to help people learn how to write beautiful programs.

Taste and style

\[...\]
it is most important for us all to remember that there is no one “best” style; everybody has his own preferences, and it is a mistake to try to force people into an unnatural mold.

Programming as an art (Part III)

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Computer programming as an art

By Donald Knuth, 1974

(Read parts I, and II)

Science and art

Our discussion indicates that computer programming is by now both a science and an art, and that the two aspects nicely complement each other. Apparently most authors who examine such a question come to this same conclusion, that their subject is both a science and an art, whatever their subject is
\[...\]

Excerpt from Donald Knuth’s 1974 Turing Award lecture, Computer Programming as an Art.

Programming as an art (Part II)

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Computer programming as an art

By Donald Knuth

(read the first part)

Science versus art

It seems to me that if the authors I studied were writing today, they would agree with the following characterization: Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don’t fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it. Since the notion of an algorithm or a computer program provides us with an extremely useful test for the depth of our knowledge about any given subject, the process of going from an art to a science means that we learn how to automate something.

Programming as an art (Part I)

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Computer programming as an art

By Donald Knuth

CACM, December 1974

Knuth opens his Turing Award lecture by recalling that when Communications of the ACM began publication in 1959, the ACM Editorial Board described the purpose of its periodicals with the remark that

“a transition of programming from an art to a disciplined science must be effected.”

From there he notes, with some irony, that the field did manage to become a science, simply by deciding to call itself “computer science”, and that the remark implies there is something undesirable about an activity being classed as an “art”. Meanwhile he had spent more than 12 years working on a series of books called “The Art of Computer Programming”, and people kept asking him why he chose that title.

Chrome, the OS in the cloud

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:25:11 -0300

The metro pollutes

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:53:27 +0000

One of the most polluted and polluting places in Santiago, Chile has to be its metro. Not that it’s dirty; the Metro’s pollution is visual and acoustic.

One of the great modern problems is info pollution, and the metro is full of information pollution.

Signage nobody understands.

On top of the annoying noise the metro already makes by itself, every time a car opens there is a voice giving orders to the worker automatons getting on or off, dictating rules of behavior to them. Confusing messages, badly written and dictatorial. Not to mention the pseudo police who guard the corridors and make sure you don’t cross the yellow line.

Uruguay, Uruguay

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:00:41 +0000

The level of realism is impressive. They could perfectly well make a very good science fiction movie, one of those blockbusters with giant robots and explosions.

Yes, there may be companies in Chile capable of making similar videos, but I have never seen them. In advertising there are some interesting things, but I would like to see a Chilean ad company make a video like this one, just for the pleasure of doing it, and leave me with my jaw on the floor. But I don’t know if that is going to happen.

Dreystadt's techniques

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:49:52 +0000

World War II is full of stories of women who went to work in the roles of the men who were off fighting. This is one of them.

In 1940 Germany was the leading country in optics, with factories like Carl Zeissin Jena and Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar. There was nothing better outside Germany, and this was crucial for developing optical instruments used, for example, in precision bombing. That is why the German army considered optics one of its strategic resources.

I Robot (43 years)

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:32:45 +0000

This year my birthday found me buried in work. Barely any time to write anything. I hope that passes soon, because there is still a lot to write about.

I’ve turned into a corporate robot.

So here is this year’s present: this time it’s I Robot, performed live by the great AP in Madrid.

I am a robot….

Google versus the doctors

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:15:38 +0000

I didn’t know, or at least wasn’t aware, that too much paracetamol can damage the liver, until I read it on Twitter. I did a Google search and, sure enough, it’s true. Ever since, I keep insisting at home that nobody overdo the paracetamol when they have a headache.

In 2006 English doctors ran a study in which they took 26 cases from the New England Journal of Medicine and searched Google for the symptoms. Comparing the search engine’s results with the medical journal’s, they got a correct diagnosis in 58% of the cases (I’d like to know what a doctor’s diagnosis rate is, to compare them).

The nature of software, according to Octavio Paz

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:01:57 +0000

“The revelation of our condition is, likewise, the creation of ourselves. As we have seen, that revelation can come in many forms and may even receive no verbal formulation at all. But even then it implies a creation of the very thing it reveals: man. Our original condition is, in essence, something that is always making itself”

That is how Octavio Paz opens the chapter “Inspiration” in his book “The Bow and the Lyre”, and I turn

The seductions of computing

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:05:44 +0000

Ricardo Galli (the creator of Meneame) recently gave a very interesting talk called the seductions of computing". I recommend watching the video, it’s quite good, and then reading this companion note on his blog.

For the young people wondering what the value of studying computing is, I hope this video inspires you.

Paradox

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:05:34 +0000

The bad part is that there are some skeptics who want to go looking for solutions like this one:

Taken from la pulga snob.

Coding conventions

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:23:44 +0000

Some conventions add nothing. What matters is being consistent, and if you adopt a coding convention, sticking to it, but without overdoing it. There is no perfect convention.

Taken from Geek and Poke

Eolas strikes again

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:47:00 +0000

Back in 2005 I told you about the Eolas case:

Eolas stands for “Embedded Objects Linked Across Systems”. But in Gaelic it means wisdom.

The guys at Eolas have held a patent since 1994 that covers embedding objects in internet browsers.

According to Eolas’s technology page, the patent covers “web browsers that support popular technologies such as ActiveX components, Java applets and browser plug-ins”.

Of course, once they had the patent they went after the biggest fish, taking on Microsoft first and winning some 500 million dollars…

Forgive them, for they know not what they do...

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 22:55:44 +0000

Apparently the line from the Gospel of Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”, is a liberal invention, and American conservatives have decided to fix this by removing this kind of liberal phrase from the Bible: the Conservative Bible project.

The whole thing is insane. For example, it seems the current translations of the gospels are riddled with socialist terms:

For example, the conservative term “volunteer” is mentioned only once in the ESV (English Standard Version), yet the socialist word “comrade” is used three times, “laborer(s)” is used 13 times, “labored” 15 times, and “fellow” (as in “fellow worker”) is used 55 times.

The adventures of the first programmer

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:25:50 +0000

Sydney Padua answered the call of Ada Lovelace Day with a cartoon, which she later turned into a series (in progress) titled The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.

I translated the first comic, The Origin, into Spanish for the dcc8090 blog, La Cajita Feliz. Here’s the link, enjoy.

If only 1%...

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:45:32 +0000

A musician bought a quarter-page ad in a magazine with a circulation of one million copies:

“He had bought a quarter-page advertisement in the back of a magazine with a circulation of one million people.”

He pressed 10,000 copies of his CD, bought 10,000 padded envelopes and mailing labels, turned his garage into a shipping center, and kept repeating that if only one percent of the readers bought it, that would be 10,000 copies. And that was just one percent. The issue came out, the ad was there, everything worked. Over the following weeks he got four orders. Total CDs sold: FOUR.

The art of programming

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:21:45 +0000

(In my opinion there are programming languages that let you be more expressive ;)

The art of programming

I don’t understand your code. What are those lines for?
They express my inner feelings

Programmers are artists.

Taken from Geek and Poke.

The problem with parallelizing 3

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Although many people throw around the acronym FUD, not many know that it was Gene Amdahl who coined this famous acronym:

“FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.”

In 1975 Gene Amdahl coined the acronym to describe the practices IBM used to try to block the success of Amdahl Corporation, the company he founded, whose product was IBM-compatible computers. A coercive maneuver to keep customers from fleeing to the competition.

The problem with parallelizing 2

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:25:11 -0300

In one hour a car has covered half the distance between two cities that are 120 km apart. No matter how fast the car drives the rest of the way, its average speed will always be below 120 km/h (only at infinite speed could it reach 120 km/h).

That example helps to understand Amdahl’s law, which I presented earlier.

But suppose a car has already been traveling for a while at less than 120 km/h. Given enough time and distance to travel, the car’s average speed can eventually reach 120 km/h, no matter how slowly it has been going.

Philosophy and The Matrix

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:06:54 +0000

An interesting documentary for getting into philosophy by way of the movie The Matrix:

Filosofía en Matrix from Vajra on Vimeo.

The problem with parallelizing

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:25:11 -0300

How do we increase the performance of our systems?

The answer starts with defining how we measure the performance of our systems in the first place. We have already seen that a bad definition of the performance measure can lead us into deep errors of judgment (remember the problem with kilometers per liter of gasoline?).

Something similar happens with the performance gains of our computing systems now that multicore processors are available. For a while now we have been told that the trick to improving the performance of our systems is to increase the number of processors and embrace parallelism in the design of the software we build.

What is agility?

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Agility is defined by the following vector equation:

Agility = Flexibility + Speed

Managing momentum

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 13:50:07 +0000

Why roadmaps, Gantt charts, planning, wireframes, documentation, specifications and all those abstractions we produce to explain what we are going to build are nothing but obstacles (or excuses) to avoid actually starting to build what we were asked for.
That is what this talk by Jason Fried, of 37Signals, is about:

The art of not reading

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:39:46 +0000

“To read what is good you must not read what is bad, because life is short and time and energy are limited.”

“That is why it is so important to know the art of not reading. It consists in not reading whatever happens to occupy the general public at the moment, such as political and ecclesiastical pamphlets, novels, poetry and so on, some of which go through several editions.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

IT: transparency and information, toward open government

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:51:39 +0000

One thing that worries me is our politicians’ lack of vision when it comes to information technology.

Through @utaladriz on Twitter I found out about data.gov; I admit I hadn’t been following the Obama administration’s IT proposals.

Digging into the subject I got to the origin of all this: a memorandum President Obama sent on the first day of his term, titled “Transparency and Open Government”.

The memo is very short. It sets out the need to ensure the public trust and to establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration to strengthen democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Numerical deceptions

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 08:25:11 -0300

“Figures don’t lie”, “the numbers speak for themselves”. How often do we hear these expressions? The truth is that it isn’t always so. Many times we are being fooled with figures, because they are presented in disguise, or with very poor analysis.

Seth Godin puts it in this arithmetic challenge:

Let’s say your goal is to reduce gasoline consumption. And let’s say there are only two kinds of cars in the world. Half of them are Suburbans that get 10 miles to the gallon and half are Priuses (hybrid cars) that get 50. If we assume that all the cars drive the same number of miles, which would be a better investment:

Notes and neurons

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:23:45 +0000

Is our response to music “hard-wired” into our nervous system? Or is it a cultural response, and therefore learned? This was a debate at the World Science Festival, held in New York in June of this year, and Bobby McFerrin took part in it with this impressive demonstration:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

A matter of evolution

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:25:11 -0300

“Talk is cheap, show me the code” – Linus Torvalds

I don’t talk much about my job on this blog, it’s a personal policy, but I will mention that a few months ago I had the chance to implement a mission-critical service in which every component is backed by open source products, from the operating system (RedHat) and the middleware (JBoss) to the database (Postgres).

I think we did a good job with the help of our technology vendors, and along the way we laid the foundations of the basic service infrastructure (SOA) for our company, which will guide our future development over the coming years.

Telling stories

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:49:20 +0000

If your only contribution to this life has been writing a document, then your contribution to this life is close to zero. If your contribution was criticizing a document, your contribution tends to zero from the left.

To write documents you only have to follow an algorithm, and the fun part of algorithms is inventing them, discovering them and implementing them. There’s a reason we leave running them to automata: executing them is boring.

An anniversary gift

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 01:53:28 +0000

Since it’s our anniversary, let’s open the presents.

This is a brilliant talk by Seth Godin, which I hope you enjoy. It is my anniversary gift to everyone who reads this blog, especially to all of you who are in the software business:

The Academy

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 08:25:11 -0300

In the third part of Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan.”, Jonathan Swift describes the extraordinary flying island of Laputa and the continent of Balnibarbi, which lies under its rule.

The flying island was home to the ruling class, nobles who spent their time lost in mathematical or musical speculations. Bored, and despised by the inhabitants of Laputa, Gulliver decides to go down and see the continent of Balnibarbi and its metropolis, Lagado, guided by the lord Munodi.

Four years

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:25:11 -0300

If you remember the early days of the Chilean comedian Bombo Fica, he would walk on stage with a bombo legüero, a traditional bass drum, supposedly to give a lecture on the instrument, and he would end up talking about anything else, all of it funny, of course. A guy dressed in white, lecturing on the properties of the bombo legüero. That was funny! Or at least I thought so.

Motivating

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:19:37 +0000

There are great speeches, the kind that motivate entire nations, like Churchill’s address to the House of Commons in May 1940, the source of that famous line: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

I really like the one Kennedy gave at Rice University in 1962, the famous speech where he says “We choose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Because they are hard...

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:26:12 +0000

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”

John Kennedy

Today, July 20, 2009, marks 40 years since man’s first step on the moon.

Brute force

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:19:13 +0000

You have to be pretty dense to attempt a brute force attack on SHA-256. When Leo Prieto tries to play down the scope of this Friday’s break-in at the Betazeta sites, he is really just sinking his feet deeper into the mud, and handing more arguments to those who justify this attack.

Before going on, I want to say that I condemn these defacements and attacks on websites, like what happened to BetaZeta this weekend. /* Fayerwayer, for that matter, has been pretty sarcastic when this happens to others, but let’s leave that controversy there. */

The stupid interface is the most usable

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:50:53 +0000

“.. every decade since the ’80s, billions of dollars and gazillions of man-hours have been invested in this fundamental error, to end routinely in disaster. It’s as though the automotive industry had a large ongoing research program searching for the perpetual-motion engine.
The error is that control interfaces must not be intelligent. Briefly, intelligent user interfaces should be limited to applications in which the user does not expect to control the behavior of the product. If the product is used as a tool, its interface should be as unintelligent as possible. Stupid is predictable; predictable is learnable; learnable is usable”

What is Google Chrome OS really after?

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:09:17 +0000

The announcement of Google Chrome OS, more than a direct attack on Microsoft, is the first stage of a strategy that, if it goes well, could be the most serious threat Redmond has faced so far.

Although, according to their FAQs, the first market for Google Chrome OS will be netbooks, the truth is that developing this market will let it build enough momentum to set out to conquer a more interesting one: corporate PCs.

Distributed system

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:30:36 +0000

“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable”
– Leslie Lamport

Atheist summer camp

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:25:11 -0300

Via Boing Boing, I learn that Richard Dawkins is funding a summer youth camp for kids aged 8 to 17, with the idea of teaching them critical thinking.

Along with the traditional activities of canoeing and swimming, the kids who take part in the five-day camp in Somerset will learn about rational skepticism, moral philosophy, ethics and evolution. They will also be taught how to debunk phenomena such as crop circles and telepathy. The post explains that:

Culture is technology

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:53:34 +0000

Culture (C), at a given instant t, is the integral of technology (T) applied to society (S):

With all due respect, this equation is what Kevin Kelly doesn’t get.

Thanks to @cadaunante we have a translation of what Kelly says:

“Technology has become our culture,… …our culture technology.

Technology is no longer outside, no longer alien, no longer at the periphery. It is at the center of our lives. “Technology is the campfire around which we gather,” says musician/artist Laurie Anderson. For many decades high tech was marginal in presence. Then suddenly–blink–it is everywhere and all-important.”

The sower

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:31:04 +0000

A man is not complete until he is a father, says an old Japanese proverb.

Being a father is not begetting, it is much more than that. Being a father is sowing, and I think that is the lesson in fatherhood I learned from my father-in-law, Pedro Venegas Yañez, who left us this Sunday at the age of 96.

El Tata (Grandpa), as we fondly called him, used to recite the following poem well into his old age, and I want to share it with you:

Ethics, "The case of the hackers"

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:25:11 -0300

A nice document has reached me, “80 cases for the study of ethics”, put together by the Center for Applied Ethics at Duoc UC ¹, a Chilean professional institute, a center concerned with the “formation of human capital”. Human Capital!

Number 24 in this selection is the one that interests me, “The case of the hackers”. It opens with the following nonsense:

“In the mid-70s, in Silicon Valley, a group of hackers and enthusiasts of the nascent field of computing used software passed from hand to hand, that is, they used it without caring who owned it. At first there was no problem, but when companies or organizations that profited from producing software began to appear, difficulties started to arise. This was an obstacle to their professional fulfillment, and from then on they began to see that the solution lay in organizing as a community to seek the common good. Bill Gates, by means of a letter to consumers and buyers of operating systems, wanted to point out to the community of hackers and enthusiasts that they were devaluing the salary of everyone involved in developing projects that were affected by the improper use of copies. Besides, there was a theft; even if it was of something intangible like software, it is a theft all the same.”

Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistris

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:12:45 +0000

Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould were invited in 1978 to a symposium on adaptation at the Royal Society of London. The idea was for them to present their dissenting position on the subject. It was Jay Gould who ended up presenting their critique of the “adaptationist programme”, in one of the most influential papers in the field ¹.

At the end of the talks, the work of these two researchers was fiercely attacked by the symposium’s own moderator!, who demanded that they admit they were wrong and that their criticism had no scientific basis whatsoever².

The story of the cow

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:18:22 +0000

When I was told this one I liked it quite a bit. Many of you have surely heard this story, but it never hurts to keep a backup:

The cow

“The story goes that an old master wished to teach one of his disciples why so many people live tied to a life of mediocrity and never manage to overcome the obstacles that keep them from succeeding. For the master, however, the most important lesson the young disciple could learn was to see what happens when we finally free ourselves from those ties and begin to use our true potential.

Project Natal: Artificial Reality III

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:51:32 +0000

A thousand years ago I saw a demo of augmented reality in which a young woman interacted with a dog on a screen. In fact, I own a 1990 book called Artificial Reality II, written by Myron W. Krueger, who coined the term to name the immersive experience in an interactive environment (to set it apart from virtual reality).

That book shows, and explains the workings of, things like these:

Ask Parnas

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:25:11 -0300

In 1985 Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, which came to be known as Star Wars, after the George Lucas movies.

Essentially, SDI consisted of a shield made up of a network of satellites to detect missile launches and a series of anti-missile weapons, with high-energy lasers, in charge of destroying those missiles in space before they reached American territory (all of it over our heads, of course).

Freedom is the right to choose

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:42:49 +0000

There are people you never get to meet, but whom you learn about because you had the chance to read their story, and their contribution, and that manages to leave a deep impression on you.

That is the case of Carlos Carreño Lemee, a teacher at the Liceo Balmaceda, a public high school in Concepción, who did beautiful work building the computer lab for his school. I am not going to tell you his story, since Christian tells it very well; I invite you to read it.

The ballad of John Henry

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:59:28 +0000

Legend has it that John Henry was a freed black slave, a man of incredible strength who, after the American Civil War, went to work building the railroad. He was the best worker on the line, the strongest and the fastest.

One day a machine arrives, a steam drill, brought in to bore

a tunnel, a machine capable of replacing the whole crew of workers. To defend his job, and his companions’ jobs, John Henry proposes a challenge to the foreman: he will race the machine, drilling through the mountain.

The wealth of the ignorant

Sun, 31 May 2009 13:34:28 +0000

Ignorance kills.

The ignorant man always ends up badly. He suffers. He doesn’t know how to defend himself, ends up poor and goes hungry.

There are all kinds of ignorant people. The ignorant man is not only “one who has no knowledge of something”; he is also the one who doesn’t understand what is happening to him.

When the ignorant man suffers, all he knows how to do is scream, cry, grumble or demand help from the authorities, because he doesn’t know what to do to get out of his miserable situation.

Masters of information

Sat, 30 May 2009 12:13:16 +0000

I don’t know why, but when I saw this interview I thought of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf:

“The information was correct, but the interpretations were not. I did my duty up to the last minute.”

The system or you

Fri, 29 May 2009 20:08:25 +0000

Patricia gets up at 5 in the morning, Monday through Friday, to make it before 8 to her job at a call center. She sits down at her workstation, turns on her computer, puts on the headset with earphones and microphone, and connects to the system.

For the next 8 hours a system will tell her whom to call, what to say, how to respond to each situation.

One day Patricia calls me. I take the call, and my answer throws her off a bit: “yes, tell the CEO of xxxx that I am aware he can’t sleep because I fell behind on my payments”.

Doomsday machines (interlude)

Tue, 26 May 2009 20:53:24 +0000

We have already seen one position, at one of the extremes, on what to do about the threats technology poses to our society.

In 2006 I wrote this article, which I have decided to touch up and adapt to my current series on the challenges technology imposes on us. I think it is appropriate to publish it now, as a sort of bridge toward the other extreme proposal on what to do in these scenarios where technology may overtake us.

A bomber's manifesto

Sun, 24 May 2009 08:25:11 -0300

On April 24, 1995, the New York Times received a letter from the terrorist known as the Unabomber, stating that he would “desist from terrorism” if that paper or the Washington Post published his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future”.

Up to that point, the FBI had not identified the Unabomber. This terrorist began his attacks in 1978. Over that period he sent 16 bombs to universities and airlines, and that modus operandi gave rise to the name that made him famous (“UNiversity and Airline BOMber”).

The new Luddite challenge

Fri, 22 May 2009 08:25:11 -0300

This is the introduction to a series of articles I want to write about an interesting, and important, dilemma we face. What follows is an excerpt from a text whose author I will reveal in the second article of this series.

The new Luddite challenge

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

Your ID number, please

Tue, 19 May 2009 08:25:11 -0300

“...and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark. .. or the number...” – Revelation 13:17

The other Saturday, as I was walking into a school, the guard asked me for my RUT, Chile’s national ID number. To walk into a school!

At the pharmacy I ask for paracetamol. They offer it to me at a “sale price” of CLP 990. I accept. “Your RUT, please”, says the clerk. “I’m not giving you my RUT”, I answer. “Then it’s CLP 1,440”.

La Naturaleza del Software in Chinese?

Thu, 14 May 2009 22:37:23 +0000

Going through this site’s visits as reported by whos.among.us, I discovered a surprising visit from the Far East. If the geolocation systems aren’t wrong, I had a visitor from Dalian, in the Liaoning region of China.

One thing is certain: this person didn’t understand what my blog said and needed to translate it into simplified Chinese using Google, and what they saw was more or less this:

Extraordinary!

Dalian is a heavily industrialized city in Liaoning province, on the Liaodong peninsula, with more than 6 million inhabitants, and it’s huge!

Managing identity in software

Thu, 14 May 2009 13:59:45 +0000

Identity management on the net is a topic I’ve covered in this space before, but I think it is necessary and urgent to come back to it, given certain current events. That’s why I’m starting a series of articles on the problem of identity management, and I’m kicking it off with this article recycled from July 2007.

“The Internet was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to.”

Users and dolphins

Mon, 11 May 2009 14:37:19 +0000

Users are like dolphins: we know they’re intelligent, but we can’t communicate effectively with them yet.

The value of Star Trek

Thu, 07 May 2009 21:38:30 +0000

Whoopi Goldberg says she identified with the character of Uhura in Star Trek. She recalls telling her family: “I just saw a black woman on television; and she ain’t no maid!”

Nichelle Nichols, the actress who played Uhura, had decided to leave the show after the first season, but it was Martin Luther King himself who asked her not to, because she represented a positive role model for black women. NASA itself asked her to take part in campaigns to encourage African Americans to join the agency.

Recursion

Tue, 05 May 2009 23:40:59 +0000

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
– anonymous

Recursion: see recursion.
– definition

Try unzipping this zip file (here’s a tip on how to build one of these recursive zips).

Does anyone remember the Klenzo package? Recursive too.

Dubó posts another recursive (if somewhat dizzying) example of recursion.

In Spanish the correct term is “recurrencia”, not “recursividad”.

@hdur reminds me of the Royal baking powder can:

Engineering arrogance

Sat, 02 May 2009 12:38:42 +0000

The other day someone told me that studying engineering is harder than studying medicine.
I made a mental note and listened to his arguments. Truth is, I wasn’t very convinced.
I’ve never studied medicine, so I can’t claim anything ;)

“Ah, but you’ll agree that journalism is the easiest profession to study!”, I’ve been told.

Really? Try keeping up a blog, and then we’ll talk!

Every profession is a challenge for whoever decides to study it. Engineering was hard for me, and there are also times when I think biology is a branch of computing, but that doesn’t qualify me to rank computer engineering above biology.

Swine flu: that's all, that's all folks

Fri, 01 May 2009 08:25:11 -0300

I have to say something about Guido Girardi, the Chilean senator. This time his math didn’t fail him. What he said is logical, and I quote:

“it is key that we have five million doses for at least five million people, because this influenza, if it is that contagious, can easily infect two or three million people in Chile, and if it kills five percent, in the event that it affects two million, we could easily have 100 thousand dead”.

The rhythm of deciding

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0000

When we have to decide, we come face to face with fear, and fear paralyzes.

Marcela Infante writes, very bravely in my opinion, about what it means to be afraid:

“I was so afraid that I packed everything into a backpack. I was so afraid that I zipped the backpack shut, but the fears kept following me, because, of course, I was carrying them stuck to my back. Nobody can carry this for long, I told myself one fine day, but before doing anything about it I went on being afraid. A fear I could feel below my navel. I was so afraid that I wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I was so afraid that I sank into a bar, serving beer with lots of foam to a bunch of strangers. I dozed off at a yellow-bus stop at Román Díaz and Providencia. I was so afraid that I froze in a strange way.”

The Morse code challenge

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:07:10 +0000

This is the second challenge I’m publishing. Let’s hope it gets more participation than the previous one (just one answer).

Today is the anniversary of Samuel Morse’s birth, so the challenge has 2 parts.

The first part is the simplest: write a function that takes a string of dots and dashes and prints the corresponding letters.

If the function is called CodigoMorse(), then the result of

CodigoMorse("~~.. .~~ ~~. .~~ - .– .-. .- .-.. . .. .- …... …—..-.-..-.-..") = “La naturaleza del software”.

Deciding

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 08:52:00 +0000

A niece of mine, an adult but very young, was forbidden by her father to eat foods that might carry listeria: cheese, ham, cold cuts in general. I suppose with this swine flu business they’ll end up going kosher. It’s fine to worry about your kids, but some parents overdo it and don’t let them grow up.

As you grow up you have to learn not to always obey your parents, because 8 out of 10 of their pieces of advice are right and 2 are completely wrong, but if we don’t take the risk of disobeying them we’ll never know the deep wisdom the years gave them, and which we haven’t acquired yet (that’s called experience). Being wrong is a right. If they love you, they will accept your failures and won’t lecture you with the “we told you so” I find so obnoxious.

Ethics and freedom in free software

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 13:00:47 +0000

Today FLISOL is taking place at several locations around Chile. I like this event, and I think it embodies the social spirit that should matter in the development of computing.

I’ve used free software and open source software for years. Recently we rolled out a mission-critical service at my job using nothing but open source products.

I have no qualms about using open software, and none about using proprietary software either (or “privativo”, as it should be called in Spanish to be grammatically correct).

Computing as a social science

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:25:11 -0300

In the latest issue of CACM I read the testimony of Michael Buckley, a computer science professor at the University at Buffalo, who, in his article “Computing as Social Science”, wonders how to get young people excited about choosing computer science.

“With each new freshman class I worry that fewer students are choosing a career in computer science, and it’s no stretch of the imagination to think it’s an image problem. Not only are we not getting the word out to high schools, but I believe we’re losing students in the first year of college as well. And it’s because we don’t offer students the idea that computer science is social, relevant, important, and caring, and thus we lose their interest.”

I am not going to fix your PC!

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 12:24:18 +0000

The problem MAZ describes is eternal:

In the middle of a good barbecue, the fatal question shows up: “Hey Maz. Since you’re here and you’re a computer guy, couldn’t you take a look at the home computer? It’s been a bit slow.” Horror.

So much so that there’s even a HOWTO on how to get yourself a computer guy who will fix your PC forever:

In this document we will see what a sucker is, that is, someone who buys, installs or fixes a computer for a relative, acquaintance or friend without charging, and who from that moment on becomes a slave devoted to maintaining for life the machine of the person he helped (in theory, just that once) out of kindness. On top of that, the machine runs Windows (almost always) and is a cradle of problems, headaches and wasted time.

Don't give up

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 11:06:49 +0000

This week my queen, my wife, my love had her birthday.

The other day, while we were in the car, Peter Gabriel’s Don’t give up came on. I told her about the video, and about part of the lyrics, and about how I felt she was my support in the same sense the song describes.

In hard times, having your partner and your kids at your side can be the great support that helps you get through.

The effect of multitasking

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:48:15 +0000

If you want to be effective with your time, then give up multitasking, right now!

Plenty of people say they can do many things at once, and they’re really just fooling themselves. The problem with multitasking is the constant context switching, which in the long run makes everything take you longer.

Try the following exercise, proposed by Jon Cook, which I’ve translated and adapted from this post by Clarke Ching. It won’t take you more than 3 minutes.

Traceability

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:41:42 +0000

Want to know what traceability means in computing?

An explanation with practical examples:

Discount Prescription: agreements with doctors or medical centers signed by one of the big chains. Under this scheme, the doctor prescribes a product and sends the patient to buy it at the stores of a specific chain, since there the patient will get a discount on the purchase.

The doctor, or the health center, whose barcode is printed on the prescription, receives a commission when that recommendation turns into a sale.

Crisis, collusion and the Rules of Acquisition

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:08:02 +0000

It seems fitting right now to recall one of the “more interesting” races of characters from the Star Trek series. I mean the Ferengi, a bunch of greedy, cowardly hypercapitalists, famous for their “Rules of Acquisition”.

It’s good to know what the Rules of Acquisition say, because I have a suspicion that the Ferengi have established a colony on our planet, and they seem to operate behind the fronts of pharmacy chains, supermarkets and stock exchanges.

The laws of "Systemantics"

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:00:42 +0000

By John Gall (*)

The Primal Scenario or Basic Datum of Experience: Systems in general work poorly or not at all. (Complicated systems seldom exceed five percent efficiency.)
The Fundamental Theorem: New systems generate new problems.
The Law of Conservation of Anergy: The total amount of anergy in the universe is constant. (“Anergy” = ‘human energy’)
Laws of Growth: Systems tend to grow, and as they grow, they encroach.
The Generalized Uncertainty Principle: Systems display antics. (Complicated systems produce unexpected outcomes. The total behavior of large systems cannot be predicted.)

Love

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:22:21 +0000

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. \ —Iris Murdoch

In the photo, Milton Glaser

A question

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:54:56 +0000

This is what I mean when I say that ignorance only knows how to perpetuate itself.

Cartoon by MEL, which we found thanks to this post on Magonia.

The curse of Funes

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:26:34 +0000

“I alone have more memories than all men have had since the world has been the world”
– Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious”

Forgetting no longer exists, and that is something politicians are going to have to start understanding.

What the UDI is doing (the UDI being a Chilean right-wing party) is pathetic, truly pathetic in this day and age.

Deleting content from their site because it could compromise them right now, when the pharmacy chains are the villains of the story.

Women in tech: Ada Lovelace Day

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an initiative that seeks to highlight the role of women in technology, and just as we had pledged, here is my contribution to the occasion.

Ada Lovelace was the first programmer. Today you’ll be able to read a lot about this extraordinary woman, her contribution to history, and about many important women in our field, like Grace Hopper, or Adele Goldberg, or Barbara Liskov. I invite you to read about them.

Why I don't use Apple products

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:26:26 +0000

Every time I look at those beautiful Apple products, there’s a part of me that prudently reminds me that buying them is not a good idea, and the feeling passes.

(Image taken from geek and poke)

What are we talking about?

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Christofer Hoff asks whether someone has redefined the terms “open” and “interoperable” without telling him, prompted by the following statement:

Singing the vcloud API standard song is very astute. It reassures all people already on board and climbing on board the VMware bandwagon that VMware is open and not looking to lock them in. Even if Microsoft doesn't join in this standardisation effort with a whole heart, it doesn't matter so long as VMware gets enough critical mass.

How to design an API

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:25:11 -0300

OK, we’ve talked about APIs, about what they are not, but not much about what they really are, and how much they matter in software development.

And so nobody can say all we do is criticize, let’s contribute a few ideas on how to write an API.

Before going on, I should say that for me REST interfaces, or APIs in the Web 2.0 sense, that is, the APIs that let you build mashups, for example, are not strictly an API, but that distinction is mostly semantic.

An API is not open source

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 08:25:11 -0300

In a note on Micronauta I read this claim: “the total triumph of open source, a trend in which the release of APIs we are seeing these days is a fundamental link.” That sentence summarizes a text in English that says:

Open Source wins. Open Source solutions and platforms will push proprietary systems to the brink simply because of the rate at which they adapt to change and innovation. Pay attention to the Big Media attempt to monetize this Open Source principle through the proliferation of news APIs, but don’t expect it to succeed unless these APIs give developers and end-users more freedom.

And what are we going to do when it happens in Chile?

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:35:41 +0000

In Spain: “..The Ministry of Culture, favoring the private interests of the cultural industry’s lobbies, has forced an agreement between the collecting societies and some ADSL operators, Redtel (Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange and Ono), to prevent the free exchange of information and democratic access to culture, currently within reach of every user of the net. "

And when that happens in Chile, are you going to let your ISP filter your P2P traffic so it can tell the record labels, or worse, the SCD (Chile’s music rights society), whether you’re downloading pirated music or movies? What are we going to do when a conservative politician decides to filter adult content, or content that criticizes some people’s religious beliefs? Or when they tell us that to have a blog we have to go through editorial control by duly accredited professional journalists?

It's the education, stupid! (*)

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:09:37 +0000

The anecdote Christian tells is very enlightening:

Let me tell you a little anecdote: some time ago, a friend’s teenage daughter asked to use our family PC for a school assignment, since she didn’t have one at home.
Aware of that, I offered to show her how to use it, but the girl brushed off my offer by turning on the computer and launching Word, Firefox and ——— - surreptitiously - Messenger before I could even point her to them.
I went back to my own business, but soon I heard her calling from the next room. On my way over I smiled, wondering what had stopped her. Did she not know how to set up the printer? Had she lost track of the line spacing option?… nothing of the sort:
“Hey, Christian,” she asked me, with the document still blank, “how do you write an introduction?”…

The importance of forgetting

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 23:32:24 +0000

Apparently privacy isn’t dead, it’s just a bit confused.

One of the main threats to privacy is the web’s terrible capacity to remember.

As Bruce Schneier says, in one of the clearest reflections on the problem we’re going to face:

Society works precisely because conversation is ephemeral; because people forget, and because people don’t have to justify every word they utter.

So the key, it seems, is forgetting.

Like what Google is doing by giving up on keeping historical logs for its Google Latitude service. The police can’t ask Google to hand over the information needed to determine whether a person took part in a political rally in a given public square.

Language is a living thing, but...

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:58:30 +0000

A commenter writes to me, in response to one of the first posts I ever wrote (2005), about the word sindicación, the Spanish calque of “syndication”:

“adhocracia isn’t in the dictionary (RAE) either”.

I could have deleted it, but I left it, because I don’t know what the person intended.

Clearly it’s someone who has read other posts of mine about adhocracy, and apparently wants to reproach me for using that neologism while complaining about the use of sindicación.

The dream of electric sheep

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:37:50 +0000

Scott Draves is an artist, the best kind of artist there is, because Scott Draves is a programmer.

Here is a sample of his art:

The images and videos in this post are art generated by Scott Draves’s work. They are “the product of an evolutionary algorithm running in a cyborg mind made up of more than 60,000 computers and people”.

In 1990 Draves presented, in his doctoral thesis, an efficient metaprogramming mechanism that makes it possible to create computer graphics through an ad hoc programming language. That was a first step toward more sophisticated projects, like the Flame algorithm, which you’ve probably seen in a media player visualizer, or his most ambitious project, the dreams of the electric sheep, which we can see in this video, or moving painting:

Nothing

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Today Seth Godin writes:

“The only thing worse than starting something and failing... is not starting something”

There are many things I’ve done that I regret, but at least I have something to regret! Of course there are many things I’ve failed at, but I learned a lot, and then there are the things that have brought me great joy and satisfaction.

I have experience.

Plenty of people go through this life without even having tried to do anything.

What matters is what consumers say

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:28:00 +0000

Go visit the Skittles website, www.skittles.com. This famous candy brand has pulled its own content from its site and replaced it with the content its consumers generate on the internet: on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Wikipedia.

If you go to the product description you’ll see that it shows the Wikipedia content! (it’s a copy, not a redirect).

In the words of David Berkowitz:

This is the message Skittles is sending: what consumers say about the brand is more important than what the brand has to say to consumers.

WolframAlpha?

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 13:08:16 +0000

Stephen Wolfram has stirred up a lot of anticipation by promising “a new paradigm for using computers and the web”.

From what his announcement lets on, he promises to bring together the power behind Mathematica, the advances in search engines, and natural language, to get at information that is immediately computable:

“…armed with Mathematica and NKS I realized there’s another way: explicitly implement methods and models, as algorithms, and explicitly curate all data so that it is immediately computable.”

Latency (still recycling)

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:25:11 -0300

“I don’t know what I want, but I want it now!”
– Luca Prodan, late singer and leader of Sumo

“Bandwidth problems can be cured with money. Latency problems are harder because the speed of light is fixed. (You can’t bribe God)” -- Anonymous ¹

When we measure the performance of a web application, the technical factor that most affects what the user perceives is latency.

To apply the words of the great Luca Prodan: the user doesn’t know what he wants, but he wants it delivered promptly.

The eight fallacies of distributed computing (recycled)

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 08:25:11 -0300

By Peter Deutsch

Essentially everyone, when they first build a distributed application, makes the following eight assumptions. All prove to be false in the long run and all cause big trouble and painful learning experiences.

The network is reliable
Latency is zero
Bandwidth is infinite
The network is secure
Topology doesn’t change
There is one administrator
Transport cost is zero
The network is homogeneous

Privacy and confidentiality in the cloud

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Here’s a recent report (February 23) on the risks to privacy and confidentiality posed by cloud computing.

The report, published by the World Privacy Forum, identifies a series of issues to consider in the context of cloud services.

For example, that in certain cases it could be illegal to hand data over to a cloud service provider (in the United States), or that placing certain information in the cloud may lower the legal barriers the authorities would face to get at confidential personal information.

The risks of the cloud

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:29:00 +0000

In their study on the economics of the cloud, the Berkeley researchers don’t forget to mention Richard Stallman, who considers cloud computing a trap for the user:

It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign. Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true. [1]

Don’t the recent incidents, like the change in Facebook’s terms of service and the recent GMail outage, show that Richard Stallman is right, and that this whole cloud computing thing is stupidity?

Popular science

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 08:13:11 +0000

I liked this cartoon, from la pulga esnob, which explains very well what goes on with a lot of popular science journalism:

(I recommend la pulga esnob, it’s very good)

Escalating communications

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:44:06 +0000

One of the problems we face these days, especially in the workplace, is that we have many communication media at our disposal, with different bandwidths, and we don’t know how to use them properly.

The main problem is that we don’t know how to escalate communications.

Some media are bad for arguing, mainly because of the misuse we can make of the communication channel. Discussions can get inflamed, to the point of causing us physical (bodily) reactions.

For the initiated only

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:46:33 +0000

“Thanks, Ricardo”: http://www.ricardodiaz.org/archives/2009/02/noticias.html!

Cloud computing, according to the Berkeley RAD Lab

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:25:11 -0300

An interesting paper written by the Berkeley RAD Lab was published recently, and it has already drawn comments on O´Reilly Radar and from Nicholas Carr.

The text introduces a practical definition of what Cloud Computing means, and from there goes on to an interesting analysis of the Cloud Computing business.

Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS). The datacenter hardware and software is what we will call a Cloud. When a Cloud is made available in a pay-as-you-go manner to the general public, we call it a Public Cloud; the service being sold is Utility Computing. We use the term Private Cloud to refer to internal datacenters of a business or other organization, not made available to the general public. Thus, Cloud Computing is the sum of SaaS and Utility Computing, but does not include Private Clouds.

Against ignorance

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:25:11 -0300

That’s why ignorance is so fond of expanding into any empty space available.

Vacation. I like camping with my family. We’ve gone to the same place three years in a row, near a lake, “zero technology”, well, almost zero technology (I need matches to light the campfire ;)

Twice a copy of LUN (a Chilean tabloid) falls into my hands. What a stupid newspaper!

I read a story about a girl who dies because she refuses to open her mouth, “traumatized” by a bad experience with the dentist. I doubt the story. It seems too stupid, hard to believe. Was it verified? And if it were true, I’m overwhelmed by the ignorance of those parents who let their daughter die of this.

Please don't turn Marx into a false prophet

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:56:48 +0000

It seems Marx is being quoted in Spain as if he were a regular Nostradamus. The truth is that texts he never wrote are being made up, as MalaPrensa reports.

Since our politicians in Chile are very good at plagiarizing, especially from the Spanish, I’ve decided to copy this fake Karl Marx text:

The owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more goods, houses, expensive technology, pushing them to take on more and more expensive debts until the debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to the bankruptcy of the banks, which will have to be nationalized.

Unlinking

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:03:33 +0000

According to the RAE:

desvincular (to unlink).

1. tr. To annul a link, freeing what was bound by it, especially property.

In programming

When we have a data structure like the following:

class Link 
{ 
 T data; 
 Link prior; 
 Link next; 
}

then unlinking would be the following:

void desvincular(Link link) 
{ 
 link.prior = null; 
 link.next = null; 
}

In Chile

On the TV news, “desvincular” means something else. It’s a euphemism for dismissing, terminating, firing, leaving someone without a job.

Goodbye, Pin Pón

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Last November I took my 6-year-old daughter to meet Pin Pón. She knew the song that appears in Shrek, but she knew nothing about the character her father used to watch on TV when he was even younger than she is.

As you’ll see, Pin Pón could still captivate the little ones of the 21st century, with an ecological message, and a pretty entertaining one (for the kids and their parents, of course).

Stupid programmer exception

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:22:38 +0000

There are times when a stack trace can be boiled down to just this:

**2009**-02-05 22:30:59 "Stupid programmer exception" 
(TID:0xebc981e0, sys_thread_t:0x26bb0, state:CW) prio=5 
at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method).... 
at java.lang.Object.wait(Object.java:424) ..... 
.... 
at StupidProgram.main(StupidProgram.java:33)

Change programmer and try again :p

(no, it’s not dedicated to anyone I’m working with at the moment, fortunately)

The copyright on silence

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 08:25:11 -0300

Francotirador publishes a recent Juanelo strip, along with a reference to a news story from 2002 about a lawsuit brought against the English composer Mike Batt for including a piece of 1 minute of silence on his album.

Batt was accused of plagiarizing John Cage’s work 4´33´´.

The lawsuit wasn’t filed by John Cage, of course, but by the lawyers in charge of the John Cage Trust, since the American composer had died in 1992.

Digital tattoos

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:25:11 -0300

The generation coming up now is the first with the ability to publicly record anything they want to record. Wonderful as that is, it gives me pause. This coming generation will be the first that has to chew on this issue, and frankly I don’t envy them. There are a few things (come on, we all have them) that I might have written about, or felt passionately about, at 18 that I don’t want publicly available at 35, or 50. Much of our growth as people and as thinkers comes from trying out new ideas and making some mistakes. For many of us, that growth is preserved only in our memories or those of the people close to us, in letters, and in journals stacked in a garage. What we publish digitally, I think, is like a tattoo: it sticks, publicly, forever. There is a reason many of us are discouraged from getting tattoos until we reach adulthood. The tattoo of our favorite cartoon character may be awesome at 19, but not so much later on. I hope the web encourages a great deal of public thought and expression. It is also on us to be aware of the public nature and the longevity of what we put out there, considering that what we leave behind stays with us as the equivalent of a digital tattoo we thought we wanted, but actually didn’t.

Creativity changes the game

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 08:49:39 +0000

Creativity loves a problem, but it hates a lousy audience.

If everyone around you is sure the economy is tanking, that the end is near, that time is up and the company is headed for the tubes, it’s almost impossible to find a creative solution.

Creativity changes the game, whatever game is being played.
“We’re going to run out of cash by the end of the year,” is accurate unless you count creativity into the equation.

This is a crime

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:08:04 +0000

Taken from EMOL.COM:

SANTIAGO.- Since January 20 the Stasi search engine (stasi.felipebarriga.cl) has been available to all internet users, making it possible to find the phone number, address, national ID number and other data of millions of Chileans.
Its creator, Felipe Barriga (23), a Computer Engineering student at Universidad Federico Santa María, explained that he got the database from the site fayerwayer.com in May of last year…
…

As for possible legal problems, the engineering student said he is not afraid, because the data available on the web page is public.
“Data such as names, RUT (national ID number) and voter registration are sold, and there is also a lot of information that can be obtained that is more interesting, for example at banks, where just by giving the RUT you can ask for the payment slips for loans and cards,” said Felipe Barriga.

A program for teaching math

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 08:25:11 -0300

My friend Pepe Flores once said “journalists are born scientists who had their wings clipped by fifth-grade math” (*). That line deserves deeper thought, because you really have to ask what goes on in fifth grade that so many talents are lost, drifting over to the dark side :wink:.

Jokes aside, something seems to happen in our education that leaves a lot of people scared of math for life. I agree with Pepe, and I’ve heard others say it too, that fifth grade is a critical point. Which is a shame, because mathematics is an important part of our culture.

TEC

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:18:50 +0000

TEC is an acronym that stands for Traumatismo Encefalo Craneano, that is, traumatic brain injury.

Traumatic brain injury (TEC) is possibly one of the most frequent clinical conditions a physician has to face. Within the pediatric population it is very common, and the great majority are minor TECs that do not require medical attention.

Except in the Enlaces project (the Chilean Ministry of Education’s school technology program), where TEC means Tecnologías para una Educación de Calidad, Technologies for Quality Education (see this example of its use).

Digital inactivism

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:52:50 +0000

The second law of thermodynamics states that for every closed system, the “internal chaos” (or the interactions of the system’s internal components) will inevitably reach a point of “equilibrium”, where the system turns into a “lukewarm mass”, since there are no transfers of heat (energy).

To be more precise, when the system reaches its maximum entropy, the internal transfers of energy end, taking the system to a permanent equilibrium (or a “continuous lethargy”, of “non-life”, which looks a lot like “death”).

The Obameter

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:24:49 +0000

Via the Malaprensa blog I found out about this site, where they will be tracking a compilation of 500 promises made by Barack Obama, which will be rated as kept, compromise, broken, stalled, in the works and no action.

It would be good to set up something similar in our country, when the next president takes office, don’t you think?

See:

Politifact: The Obameter

Snobbery

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 08:47:55 +0000

The Real Academia Española defines “esnob” (snob) as follows:

esnob.
(From Eng. snob).

n. A person who affectedly imitates the manners, opinions, etc., of those they consider distinguished. Also used as adj.

Indeed. A snob, for example, starts holding forth on the films of Woody Allen without ever having seen one of his movies, simply because they’ve heard critics or intellectuals cite the New York director.

The same thing happens in technology, as Jens Hardings comments, regarding the use of certain terms by those who are “supposed to be specialists”:

The first systems analyst

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:25:11 -0300

I don’t know if you knew this, but the first systems analyst, and programmer, was a woman: Countess Ada Lovelace, daughter of the famous English poet Lord Byron.

She studied the designs of the machine Charles Babbage wanted to build, the famous Analytical Engine. She understood Babbage’s device so well that she could articulate the promise of this new machine much better than its inventor. She realized that it was what we would call today a general-purpose computer, capable of “developing and tabulating any function whatever… the engine may be described as being the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity”.

With a Little Help from My Friends, innovation and free software

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:25:11 -0300

I think the first time I heard this song it was Joe Cocker’s version, the one you can see in this video on Youtube.

The song is by the Beatles, by Lennon and McCartney of course, and originally it’s sung by Ringo Starr. Still, for many people, me included, Cocker’s version is the better one, but that’s a matter of taste.

Cocker’s version is an innovation, with several changes from the original: a 6/8 time signature, a different key, a longer instrumental introduction, and several different chords. Despite these changes, it is still a different version of the Beatles’ original work; it isn’t considered a new creation. In popular music this is called a cover. A cover is something allowed in popular music, and it shouldn’t be confused with plagiarism (in fact, some have tried to defend their plagiarism after the fact by arguing that they were really just doing a version, or a cover).

A wooden leg on the fire

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:05:57 +0000

Years ago I read an anecdote by the famous American journalist and revolutionary John Reed, about a discussion he took part in as a young man.

Among those debating intensely was an old and passionate socialist worker, a crippled man with a wooden leg.

It was a very cold night, but the discussion had been heated and very interesting. Since it had dragged on, and the temperature kept dropping, everyone had agreed that the meeting would end as soon as the fire keeping them warm went out.

The programmer and global warming

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:21:41 +0000

Via a note by Luis Ramirez I landed on this article, which shows the impact on energy use, and therefore on global warming, of Google and other IT companies.

It’s estimated that a Google search consumes half of what it takes to boil a kettle of water. Or that keeping an avatar in Second Life, according to Nicholas Carr’s calculation, costs 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, that is, the average consumption of a Brazilian.

Sheldon's hug

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:13:28 +0000

this is why I like Big Bang Theory so much:

The scene, more or less:

[00:05]
Penny: Merry Christmas.
Leonard: Merry Christmas.
Penny: How’s your leg?
Leonard: Very good, thanks for asking.

[00:11]
Sheldon: Ah, good, Penny, you’re here to exchange gifts.
Sheldon: You’ll be pleased to know I’m prepared for whatever you have to offer.
Penny: Okay, here.

[00:28]
Sheldon: I should note I’m having some digestive distress, so, if I excuse myself abruptly, don’t be alarmed.

On having goals

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:47:07 +0000

Having goals is a pain in the neck. […]
The thing about goals is that living without them is a lot more fun, in the short run.
It seems to me, though, that the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact… those people have goals.

Seth Godin

You have to have goals, and something Godin doesn’t say is that goals must be known, otherwise how can you certify that they were met?

What do you need my Twitter password for?

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:25:11 -0300

I’d been meaning to write about this problem for a while, but reading this post today on Manzana Mecánica made up my mind.

It’s true that a sociological (or ethological) explanation of user behavior is very interesting, but there are other technical and even ethical aspects that I find missing from almost all the analyses of these cases.

First, this is a serious problem, because we are training users to believe it’s fine to hand over their emails, passwords and contact lists on any site. This is taking advantage of herd behavior, as Mig makes very clear.

MD5: the vulnerabilities are still there

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:25:11 -0300

In 2005 I wrote a proof of concept exploiting the vulnerability in MD5 (Busindre has explained my proof of concept much better than I did, in Spanish). In fact the proof of concept took the ideas laid out by Dan Kaminsky in his now fairly famous paper MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Someday.

A few days ago a group of European researchers published another, equally interesting proof of concept, in a paper ironically titled: MD5 considered harmful today.

The plagiarism of Fernando Ubiergo

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:39:11 +0000

Two years ago we learned of the Mago de Oz plagiarism incident involving a song by Fernando Ubiergo, and I had the idea (I’m not sure it was a good one) of publishing a comparison of the lyrics of the two songs (something that is apparently illegal in Chile).

Now Mago de Oz’s crude defenders won’t stop grinning, and will make hay with this.

Because what happened in Antofagasta to the President of the SCD, Chile’s music copyright collecting society (an institution that must disappear), was ugly. So much so that he himself has decided to publish a statement on his official site:

Free software, a new technological Transantiago?

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:51:58 +0000

What if artificial intelligences were already emerging?

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 19:13:47 +0000

“To a skilled botmaster, the whole world is a Turing Test.”

I’m a science fiction fan, but I must confess I had never read a story by Cory Doctorow.
I think I’ve fallen behind in this field, and never got past Dan Simmons.

Although Doctorow is not a complete stranger to me, I haven’t actually read much of him. I know something of his contribution to the debate on intellectual property, and of his appearances in xkcd (especially in 239), but my main reference for this author is his role as editor and creator of Boing Boing, a blog so entertaining it gets overwhelming.

Christmas greeting (with legal disclaimer)

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:25:11 -0300

Merry Christmas to all of you!

Legal Disclaimer

Please accept my wishes without this implying any obligation or commitment whatsoever, implicit or explicit.
The Merry Christmas wishes I am sending do not imply, nor should they be understood as, religious proselytizing, each of the recipients of this greeting being absolutely free to enjoy said date under the practices and traditions of the religion they profess, or under the secular practices they wish, or under the religion or secular practices of others or, at their option, to engage in no religious or secular practice whatsoever.
The wishes for happiness and prosperity for the New Year are made assuming the calendar generally accepted in the Western hemisphere, but do not imply ignorance of the existence of other calendars or of the cultures that sustain them, which since pre-Hispanic times have made our country great (which does not necessarily imply that our country is greater than other countries in the region or in other parts of the world, which I say particularly for our Argentine, Bolivian, North American and Norwegian colleagues.
Said countries have been listed in alphabetical order, which does not imply any preference or animosity. The expression North American does not entail ignorance of the several countries in North America).
This greeting is made without distinction, exclusion or preference based on race, color, sex, age, marital status, union membership, religion, political opinion, nationality, national extraction or social origin, or any other consideration that could be understood as offensive or discriminatory.
By accepting this greeting, its terms shall also be accepted, indivisibly.
In any case, this greeting is subject to clarification or even withdrawal ipso iure by the undersigned, in whole or in part, without any prior notification or notice.
Likewise, this greeting is freely transferable, provided its original text is not altered and, in any case, without any further liability for the undersigned.
In the same way, this greeting implies no commitment or obligation whatsoever on the part of the undersigned to implement or assist in the fulfillment of the wishes each person may have, nor may it be understood as a form of participation, inducement or concealment, should anyone have wishes that are contrary to or prohibited by law and these come to pass.
This greeting shall have a term of one year and shall not be renewable, and shall therefore expire by operation of law on Christmas of the year 2009.
Likewise, it implies no guarantee whatsoever that the wishes and congratulations will actually come true, it being made clear that past happiness fluctuates, so nothing guarantees it will be repeated in the future.
It is emphasized that this Christmas greeting is granted out of mere liberality and does not constitute a precedent obliging its repetition in future years, whatever the circumstances in which the greeter and the greetee may find themselves. It should likewise be noted that any greetings that may be extended during the year, for birthdays or saints’ days, are made with no intent to novate the Christmas greeting, which remains unaltered throughout the Roman calendar year or whichever may replace it in the future.

Some tips from Alan Parsons for developing software

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:03:16 +0000

It’s not that Alan Parsons has decided to change trades. What happened is that, by one of those odd detours, starting from a post on El Francotirador I ended up at this article containing 10 recommendations from this famous sound engineer and music producer.

Reading them, I realized that some of them have a parallel in software development, and they fit quite well.

So here are Alan Parsons’s tips, in bold, with my comments and adaptations below.

Wasted effort

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:48:43 +0000

The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly: I’d rather use them to mimic something better.
– Edsger W. Dijkstra

From COPYRIGHT to COPY & PASTE

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 10:07:00 +0000

From COPYRIGHT to COPY & PASTE (*)

By Eduardo Rodriguez:

There is great concern in the media industry today because the Internet has become a platform for copying content: books, music, movies, and so on. A large part of the problem, in my opinion, is that the industry has not recognized that the world changed, and that businesses have to adapt to this new scenario.

Until a few years ago, the media delivered all kinds of content for us to consume without our being able to keep a copy of that material. Except for print media, which left us a copy of what was published (of varying quality, depending on the type of paper), the rest of the media, such as radio, TV and film, gave us an intangible reproduction.

A geek's guide to hiring geeks

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:13:00 +0000

Imagine for a moment that these four geeks are all IT people. Which one would you hire?

OK, the characters of The Big Bang Theory are caricatures, because nobody is that geeky, right?

But fine, let’s play along. The idea of this post is to be a kind of illustrated guide to my previous post.

Let’s look at the first candidate: Rajesh Koothrappali.

There is a reason for me to identify with Rajesh, and it’s fairly obvious to regular readers of this blog: the number 42 on his cap. The first time I saw him wear it I couldn’t help smiling. I assume everybody gets the joke of that cap, right?

Beware of the self-absorbed

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 08:25:11 -0300

At a recent dinner, one of the guests, a manager at a company, asked me why people who work in IT are so “special”, and above all so self-absorbed (another word used at the table was autistic, but for reasons I’ll keep to myself, and out of respect, I prefer not to use that term).

I ventured an answer, which really just leaned on the cliché that IT people are like that. The truth is I wasn’t satisfied with what I said at that table, because later I came to the conclusion that this manager probably has a problem with how she selects her team.

Does it make sense to talk about software architecture?

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 18:47:08 +0000

The entry on Software Architecture in the Spanish Wikipedia strikes me as far too pretentious:

In the early days of computing, programming was considered an art and was practiced as such, because of the difficulty it posed for most people, but over time general forms and guidelines have been discovered and developed, on the basis of which problems can be solved. These have been given the name Software Architecture because, like the blueprints of a building or construction, they indicate the structure, functioning and interaction between the parts of the software.

Is software development in crisis because of multicore processors?

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:25:11 -0300

Our industry loves to invent crises for itself, which gets tiresome, but I understand it, because crises are good for business.

Here’s a tip: when you read an article that opens with an alarmist claim, assume there is someone behind it who wants to create an artificial crisis, in order to make a lot of money developing some technology that will solve a problem we probably don’t have.

That’s the case with the supposed crisis in software development brought on by the rise of multicore processors. Apparently there is no capacity to develop programs that take advantage of these new architectures. It is said that:

The best way to kill a crocodile

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:57:38 +0000

“The best way to kill a crocodile is while it’s still in the egg…” – if anyone knows where this saying comes from, I’d be grateful if you let me know

42 years

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:02:34 +0000

Well, the day has come, and I have just turned 42. We all know that 42 is a very important number, so I’m happy to celebrate it, and to share it with you.

One of the things that makes me proud of having this blog is running into a comment like this one:

Things we will never see on TV:
The millions of young people who study, do well in school, have friends, but on the weekend get wasted drinking or smoke marijuana.
Do you know any?
I, for one, was one of them, until I discovered something I was passionate about and could put all my abilities to work.
Why does that happen? In my case it was a symptom that doing your duty (work, studies) is not the same as inner well-being.
Out of that came my need to stop using weekend partying as a cognitive lubricant [1] and swap it for using my critical capacity, poured into my blogs, to build alternative paths more in line with how people evolve.

Is the cloud the new computer?

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:12:55 +0000

What does the cloud let us do that we couldn’t do before?

Nicholas Carr wonders whether we might be missing something in this debate over the cloud computing business, and the example he gives is a very good one:

In late 2007, the New York Times faced a challenge. It wanted to make available over the web its entire archive of articles, 11 million in all, dating back to 1851. It had already scanned all the articles, producing a huge, four-terabyte pile of images in TIFF format. […] the Times needed to translate that four-terabyte pile of TIFFs into more web-friendly PDF files.

Web 2.0 and cloud computing

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:58:48 +0000

We can consider Tim O’Reilly an authority on cloud computing. His analysis of open source and cloud computing is very interesting because, in a way, it anticipates a counterargument to Macleod’s fears:

Despite all the possibilities for lock-in that we see with Web 2.0 and cloud computing, I believe that the benefits of openness and interoperability will eventually prevail, and we’ll see a system made up of cooperating programs that aren’t all owned by the same company, an internet platform, that, like Linux on the commodity PC architecture, is assembled from the work of thousands.

The power law of cloud computing

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:21:52 +0000

In the future we won’t need all our programs and data to live on our own computers. They will be floating in a vast, interconnected nebula of servers and databases, and will be accessible over the Internet.

Ideally that cloud of servers would be spread across a multitude of providers, indistinguishable from one another. Ideally we would be able to choose who takes charge of running our infrastructure. Ideally we would be free to choose the provider or providers of our cloud computing service.

What is the cloud?

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:15:22 +0000

William Gibson, the famous science fiction writer, author of Neuromancer and of the concept of cyberspace, has put it rather well:

“Clouds are numinous,” Gibson says. “But the cloud’s main usefulness lies in its vagueness, like cyberspace - a word which is also useful for its vagueness. Or perhaps,” he adds, “people are thinking of thought balloons in comics.”

Tomorrow we continue exploring the debate over cloud computing…

The debate over the cloud computing business (I)

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:43:34 +0000

There is an interesting debate going on about the future of the software industry. What will happen with the cloud computing business?

It all starts with a post by Hugh Macleod, who raises a very valid question: if this cloud computing business takes off, and everybody goes crazy and starts hosting their applications in the cloud, isn’t there a chance that a monopoly will emerge, and out of it the biggest company that has ever existed? A company that would make Google and Microsoft look like dwarfs!

The hackers of October 5

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 08:25:11 -0300

It was October 5, 1988, twenty years ago! Thousands of young people my age took part, one way or another, in that great historic moment. Some of us, like me, just by showing up at the polls and voting NO.

But there was technological activism back then too. This is the story of a group of computer geeks fighting with what they knew how to do, with computers and technology, to make sure that plebiscite was not manipulated by the dictatorship. The story as told by MAZ and REM, two hackers fighting for the return of democracy, two of my best friends.

The man who saved the world by not doing what he was supposed to do

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:25:11 -0300

It was September 26, 1983. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty at the secret bunker outside Moscow that monitored the Soviet satellite early-warning system, when the alarms went off shortly after midnight. One of the satellites was reporting that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles at Russia.

Tensions between the two countries were running high. The alarm coincided with the start of some provocative NATO military exercises, and came barely three weeks after the Russians had shot down a South Korean civilian airliner that had strayed into Soviet airspace.

The robustness principle

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:59:27 +0000

In 1981 one of the most important documents of the internet was published, the famous RFC 793, which defines the TCP protocol, the main protocol of the internet and the basis of most of the protocols used on the net.

In this document Jon Postel writes what has come to be known as the Robustness Principle, or Postel’s Law:

TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

Mersenne, a Sunday diversion for nerds

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 08:25:11 -0300

We nerds have always been around. Antiquity had several, like Euclid, who instead of joining his friends for a stroll around the Lighthouse (the place to be in Alexandria), preferred to stay in solving geometry theorems.

Or Archimedes, a geek who went running naked through the streets shouting Eureka! when he discovered the principle that let triremes float (though the principle for sinking them had already been discovered by the Romans).

Other sources say he was running happily because with that discovery he had won some venture capital put up by the King of Syracuse.

The difference between the CPU and the GPU

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:05:40 +0000

This MythBusters video makes it perfectly clear: the importance of the GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit.

CPU vs GPU from Juan Diez on Vimeo.

Disgraceful

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 19:08:51 +0000

I read on Kriptópolis that the American company Premier Elections Solutions (*) admits it has a critical programming error in its electronic voting system, one that would cause thousands of cast votes to be lost in the counting process, and that this error has been there for at least 10 years!

The error makes votes disappear before they are counted, and it occurs in the process of transferring them from the memory cards to the central tally. Apparently, in a matter of milliseconds, votes not yet counted end up permanently discarded when new ones arrive at the central count.

On TIC

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:35:37 +0000

TIC: A convulsive movement, frequently repeated, produced by the involuntary contraction of one or more muscles

Source: RAE

That is the only thing you will read on this blog about TICs (the Spanish acronym for ICT).

When people talk about spasms in the context of IT, I honestly don’t understand what they mean.

Why does Google's calculator fail?

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 06:58:37 +0000

I have a suspicion about the possible cause of the Google calculator failure. Try this C program:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>

int main()
{
 char* a = "399999999999999";
 char* b = "399999999999998";
 float da = atof(a);
 float db = atof(b);

 printf("da = %f, db = %f\n", da, db); // to see how the numbers are stored
 printf("%s - %s = %f\n", a, b, da-db);

 a = "500000000000002";
 b = "500000000000001";
 da = atof(a);
 db = atof(b);

 printf("da = %f, db = %f\n", da, db);

 printf("%s - %s = %f\n", a, b, da-db);
}

When you run this program you’ll get the following output:

Don't panic

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:48:49 +0000

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has overtaken the Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard source of all knowledge and wisdom, for two important reasons. First, it is slightly cheaper, and second, inscribed on the cover in large friendly letters, it bears the words: DON’T PANIC.
– The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

The problem with pork exports to Korea is a delicate matter. On this, Senator Girardi is right: the government must invest in a control system of its own to measure the amount of dioxins in the food we export. Not so much because this is a real threat, but because there are international standards that affect our exports.

The anatomy of the web

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:27:42 +0000

I’m continuing my reading of the book Cómo Funciona la Web (How the Web Works), published by the Centro de Investigación de la Web (Center for Web Research) at the Universidad de Chile.

This time I’m going to focus on the part of the book written by Ricardo Baeza, “La Anatomía de la Web” (The Anatomy of the Web), a very good chapter with lots of interesting information and statistics, especially where it describes the structure of the Chilean web.

Zig zag (a challenge)

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:46:19 +0000

This time I’m going to propose a challenge. I’m thinking mainly of young programmers who would like to take part in events like the ONI (or the IOI). If this has any success, I’ll propose another challenge.

The challenge is the following:

Produce a zig-zag array.

A zig-zag array is a square array of the first N2 integers, where the numbers run from lowest to highest, laid out in a zig-zag along the anti-diagonals of the matrix (see the figure).

The ceramics lesson

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:20:01 +0000

On the first day of class, the ceramics teacher announced that he would divide the class into two groups. Everyone on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, and everyone on the right solely on its quality. Grading would be a very simple process: at the end of the course he would bring in a bathroom scale and weigh the work of the “quantity” group, fifty pounds of pots for an “A”, forty pounds for a “B”, and so on. Those in the “quality” group, on the other hand, needed to produce only one pot, though it had to be a perfect one, to get an “A”.

Moral of the story

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 01:17:24 +0000

Well, it seems there’s a semi official translation of XKCD into Spanish (as they speak it in Ezpaña, “ostias, tío” and all), but it’s appreciated, because it saves us work down the road. Here’s the strip about linux that I posted the other day, in a more suitable format:

Pigs and dioxins

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:25:11 -0300

If I show you this chart and tell you it represents the rise in the breast cancer mortality rate in Chile, how would you react?

And if I add that dioxins cause breast and prostate cancer, then you’ll probably panic, given the latest news, and swear never to eat another pork chop in your life.

But you shouldn’t react that way, because this is a very bad chart. In fact you should at least ask for some labels on it, so we know what we’re talking about.

Talking with the ONI winners

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 20:00:42 +0000

To prepare a piece Fayerwayer asked me for, I put a few questions to the kids who won the final stage of the Olimpiada Nacional de Informática (ONI, Chile’s National Olympiad in Informatics).

These are their answers, and I’m sharing them with you so you can get to know these kids a little better. (photographs courtesy of the ONI on Flickr)

What is your name, your age, what grade are you in, and at what school and in what city do you study?

Do you know whether your bank's web address is the address of your bank's website?

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:08:43 +0000

A novice user probably won’t know how to answer this question, but if you’re a more advanced user you’ll tell me that you checked your browser’s address bar, that you made sure not to follow a link you got by email, or that you took the precaution of typing the address your bank gave you, character by character, very carefully.

What’s more! They gave you a little gadget, which they told you is synchronized with a supercalifragilistic mechanism that only one of your bank’s servers can reach, and which guarantees that, should anyone manage to guess your password, the magic little number this device gives you keeps anyone else from getting into the bank’s website pretending to be you.

Those who do not understand Unix...

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:54:37 +0000

“Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly”

Henry Spencer, the geek who saved Usenet, and author of regex and of The Ten Commandments for C Programmers.

(No, he’s not Shawn’s dad from Psych)

The Higgs boson and the end of the world

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:40:25 +0000

The world ends this year (again).

Well, we’ve already talked about the end of the world at the hands of technology. But this new “threat” is quite interesting.

The cause would be the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator built so far. The LHC is the most important project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

CERN is where the Web was born, a project proposed by Tim Berners-Lee in order to share researchers’ work around the world over the internet, but that’s another story.

42

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 23:41:22 +0000

This year I turn 42, and 42 is an “extraordinary number”. As everyone knows (or should know), 42 is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything.

So I’m going to allow myself a bit of apophenia during the months left until my birthday, just because it’s fun, not because I’m going crazy or surrendering to innumeracy, so don’t worry.

Because it turns out that 42 Turing Awards have been given out, because Alan Turing himself died at 42, because 42 is probably the key to understanding the distribution of prime numbers, and because the 8 digits of PI starting at position 242,422 are 42 42 42 42, and of course because 42 is one of the numbers.

One computer per child, the Romanian case

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:36:15 +0000

View image

A new study, backed by fairly respectable credentials, “proves” that home computers for children have negative effects on their education, and that large-scale efforts to give computer access to disadvantaged children are of questionable value unless attention is paid to how parents control the use of the computer.

The story goes like this: in 2005 the Romanian government decided to hand out a voucher so that low-income children and teenagers could buy a computer for the home. As part of the program, the Romanian government made more than 500 educational packages available to those interested, which were to be installed at no cost by the retailers selling the computers.

A world of ends

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:25:11 -0300

It seems we never learn, and people keep insisting on trying to control the internet, as if it were a thing that can be owned.

Maybe it’s worth remembering what Searls and Weinberger told us a few years ago about the Internet:

The Internet cannot be owned, not even by the companies through whose “pipes” it flows, because it is an agreement, not a thing. The Internet is not only in the public domain, it is a public domain.

Who's up for buying the .chile TLD?

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:26:00 +0000

As Ben Laurie says, the most useless of organizations, ICANN, has come up with a new way to keep making money, a new cash cow, by allowing thousands of new TLDs to be registered.

The biggest expansion of the Internet in 40 years

Nice soundbite for the press release from ICANN, which will be copied word for word by the sheep in the press, who don’t understand technology and are incapable of digging a little deeper, because the truth is that the internet doesn’t expand one millimeter with this measure. Only ICANN’s deep pockets do (and those of anyone shrewd enough to buy a TLD).

Visualizing the evolution of software

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:30:00 +0000

The code_swarm project sets out to visualize, through an animation, the evolution of open source projects. The following video, for the Python language, is an example:

code_swarm - Python via Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

This other video shows the evolution of the Apache web server:

Other projects:

Eclipse (which required high definition), and PostgreSQL

The source code of the code swarm project is open source and is available on Google Code.

The first National Informatics Olympiad

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:57:00 +0000

In September 2005 I wrote for the first time about the IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics), and later I commented on my doubts about Chile’s participation in IOI 2006.

The truth is that Chile’s participation in this international event has always been semi-official (and pretty murky, in my opinion).

But that’s history now. At last we’re going to have a proper national informatics olympiad, which will let us pick the team that will represent us in Egypt at IOI 2008. Thanks to the efforts of brothers Israel and Cristobal Leiva, who have mobilized organizations and secured the official support of the Ministry of Education, this year for the first time we’ll have this event the way it should be.

Transforming a country with a small laptop

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:52:37 +0000

_Through the initiative launched on December 14, 2006 by the Office of the President of the Republic, called the Educational Connectivity Project of Basic Computing for Online Learning (CEIBAL), the Uruguayan government, in a historic decision, takes on the challenge of handing out laptop computers free of charge to all the boys and girls in primary education (1st to 6th grade) and their respective teachers in public schools across the whole country. – _CEIBAL en la Sociedad del Siglo XXI

Poisoned apples

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:51:41 +0000

In 1986 the first personal computer labs opened at the University of Chile’s school of engineering.
One of the labs had some attractive Apple Macs, the other a larger number of PCs.
Of course there were more PCs than Macs, because the latter were more expensive. But guess which machines got the most attention.

Still, over time I ended up using the PCs much more than the Macs. The main reason was that, apart from drawing or laying out text in pretty fonts, it was very hard to write programs on the Mac. There was a Pascal for the Mac environment, but it was pretty limited. On the PCs I learned to use Turbo Pascal and took my first steps in C. There was more software available on the PCs. They weren’t as glamorous as the Macs, but for a born programmer like me, there was far more freedom on those old DOS PCs than on the Mac.

Crashing and falling

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:44:11 +0000

Today I saw a piece on 24 Horas about the danger of badly adjusted child car seats.

In the video a doctor explains that if a car crashes at 40 km/h, a child without a seat belt (or without a car seat) will be thrown forward, and the impact will be equivalent to a free fall from a 4-story building. The doctor then says that if the speed goes up to 80 km/h, the impact is as if the child fell from an 8-story building.

BlogPower 2008

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:47:00 +0000

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending BlogPower 2. The event was brilliantly organized, entertaining and very informative.

Brilliant, too, was Fernando Paulsen’s presentation, with his view of how Barack Obama will make history not so much for the color of his skin as for his use of electronic media. Consider that Obama raised some 200 million dollars in campaign support over the internet. People are already used to buying things online, so backing a campaign with money over the internet was the natural next step, and Obama was the first to capitalize on it.

Version 2.0

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:41:00 +0000

This is version 2.0 of an old joke about the internet:

The caption reads: “On Facebook, 273 people know I’m a dog. The rest can only see my limited profile”

Flipping a coin

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:24:18 +0000

The model behind the air quality forecasting system has an error rate of 50%.

In the words of our dear minister Vidal:

“The predictive model has to be fixed; if it fails, it has to be fixed,” and he added, “let’s be frank, a mistake was made here, and the reason for the mistake is a forecasting system with far too wide a margin, on the order of 50 percent. What Intendente Erazo has said is that we need a predictive model that is much more predictive and not almost random, because 50 percent is almost heads or tails.”

Where do people find the time?

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:25:11 -0300

This is the video of Clay Shirky’s talk, whose transcript I translated recently. The presentation comes in 2 parts. I’ve included the translation of the transcript at the end to make it easier to read along with the video; now we just need someone to put their cognitive surplus to work subtitling the video :wink:

Translated transcript:

By Clay Shirky

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

The senators' information

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 20:38:22 +0000

The site CIPER Chile has published our senators’ asset declarations, something the Senate has refused to do. This information is public; it’s just that to get it you have to go to Valparaíso and request it. So CIPER Chile’s move shows that if our authorities don’t want transparency, society can build that transparency itself.

But the journalists at CIPER surprise me with their lack of grasp of some very basic computing concepts. They decided to black out certain data in the declarations, such as car license plates and part of the address of the declared properties, yet they don’t black out more important codes, like the property’s ROL (the tax roll number) or people’s RUT (the national ID number).

A society that has an internet is a different kind of society

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:20:15 +0000

…the effects of the internet are now becoming broadly social enough that there is a general awareness that the internet isn’t a decoration on contemporary society, but a challenge to it. A society that has an internet is a different kind of society, in the same way that a society that has a printing press was a different kind of society. We’re living through the largest increase in human expressive capability in history.

Killer Tux

Wed, 28 May 2008 16:28:41 +0000

Linux fans will enjoy this video:

Via Tecnologías Libres, thanks to Marcelo Letelier for sending me the link.

Gin, television, and social surplus

Wed, 28 May 2008 08:25:11 -0300

I don’t know whether Jung is right and synchronicity exists, but my head sometimes connects topics that seem to have no causal relationship. It happened to me today, and it’s so interesting that it moved me to translate an article, which I’m sharing with you.

It goes like this. Going through my feed reader I had read a father’s plea on the net, and I made a note to think about an answer later. Then I ran into micronauta’s indignant reply to Collyer’s critique of the supposed homo technotronicus, a rather prejudiced and idiotic piece, I must say. So I made a note that I had to respond to that too.

Linus's Law

Mon, 26 May 2008 23:05:53 +0000

I’m battling my blog’s spam filter, and I’ve realized it has been hiding several interesting comments from me.

One of the ones I rescued was sent by Micronauta, and since he writes one of my favorite blogs, I think he deserves a featured reply (and I’m taking the chance to apologize to him for not having published his comment).

Let’s see, the comment is on my article about the flaw in Debian, found by Luciano Bello :wink: I have to confess I wasn’t satisfied with the very short, pseudo-humorous note I wrote, and I think at some point I’ll write about the lessons that case leaves us, but let’s get to Ignacio’s comment.

Technological scatterbrains

Sun, 25 May 2008 08:25:11 -0300

Mastering the basics of IT (information technology) is a first step toward ensuring the social, professional and cultural survival of anyone who intends to get ahead in the 21st century.

That’s why the statements of our authorities, confessing their ignorance on these matters, worry us and scandalize us.

But mastering the computer, browsing the internet, having a Facebook profile, or using Google is not enough. We have to remember that without a basic culture, without an adequate level of education, the internet becomes just another medium, as empty as the traditional media or even worse.

One PlayStation per child

Thu, 22 May 2008 11:59:41 +0000

President Bachelet announces:

In March 2009, we will give a computer to the boys and girls from the most vulnerable 40 percent of the population who enter seventh grade that year and who are in the top 30 percent of their class by grade average. We are talking about more than 30 thousand personal computers, which the students will take home and use with their siblings, families and friends.

Which shows they haven’t understood a thing, and the one computer per child campaign will probably have to refocus its message to make it clear that this is not about prizes for effort, it’s about handing out educational tools, so that we reduce the number of technological illiterates in our country (illiterates who are hurting us as a country).

Randy Pausch's last lecture

Tue, 20 May 2008 00:29:52 +0000

Randy Pausch is a virtual reality pioneer, a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and the founder of the Alice project, one of the most interesting educational computing projects out there. He has consulted for Disney and for Google on human-computer interface design.

Randy has received two awards from the ACM for his work in computing education.

Although I knew the Alice project, I didn’t know much about Randy Pausch until I saw the link at Kimniekan to a talk Pausch gave on the famous Oprah Winfrey show in the United States. The original lecture Randy gave in September 2007 at CMU is longer, but the message is the same.

Luciano Bello finds security flaw in the Debian (Ubuntu) operating system

Fri, 16 May 2008 08:25:11 -0300

Now that I have your attention, dear reader, let me tell you that this is not about the Luciano Bello in the photo, who, despite his attempts to look intelligent, I don’t think works in computing.

No, the Luciano Bello in question is an Argentine hacker who took the time to read the code of Debian’s OpenSSL implementation and found a pretty serious flaw (Debian is the base of the Ubuntu distribution) and others.

Automatic voter registration and the protection of our digital identity

Thu, 15 May 2008 20:07:11 +0000

I heard on the radio that the UDI (Chile’s main right-wing party) opposes automatic voter registration and voluntary voting. The government, of course, criticizes this stance.

Personally, I’m in favor of automatic voter registration. If at 18 you are automatically registered for military service, why isn’t the same done with the right to vote?

That said, I believe voting should be voluntary. Voting is a right, and you should be free to choose whether to exercise that right or not.

A guide for the anxious technological illiterate

Mon, 12 May 2008 22:10:07 +0000

It’s all wrong! Now even the people who run Fayerwayer are getting lost about what happened, judging by what they’ve been saying on radio and television.

To keep the ideas from scattering and mistakes from being made, I’m going to list a few points I think you should be clear on, so you don’t end up losing your marbles and go from technological illiterates to digital ignoramuses. ;)

People are talking about a hack of government sites. That is not what happened! What happened is that a commenter posted some addresses from which the data of several million Chileans could be downloaded.
Many lawyers and “experts” say the worst that can happen is that people get more spam and unsolicited ads, or get bothered with phone calls at inconvenient hours. The truth is that the information from DEMRE (the office that runs the university admission test) includes socioeconomic data.
A few years ago a gang of thieves used a similar list to classify their victims.
The leaked information is enough to put together a fake digital identity, even to forge contracts, obtain certificates, and so on.
A while ago the people at seguridad informática published a proof of concept of what can be done with this kind of lost information. I suggest you look at it (the example obtains the data of President Bachelet’s daughter).
The database of SERVEL, the electoral service, can be bought, but it is so widely distributed that it isn’t worth buying; it’s easy to get on IRC or on some warez site. There are many databases that have been circulating for years! I’ve seen databases containing checking account numbers, and even the passwords for bank websites. Some time ago a database of Transbank customers leaked; fortunately it seems only one person got access to that information.
They say this isn’t serious because the information is public. Gentlemen, your address, your phone number, even your RUT (the national ID number) is private data! The law isn’t clear about this, but why should just anyone get to know my phone number or where I live? The fact that you can access people’s information through services like DICOM (the credit bureau) or others doesn’t mean that’s right!
NO, Microsoft has nothing to do with this case.

The digital Chernobyl

The minister's digital illiteracy

Sun, 11 May 2008 08:25:11 -0300

Admitting ignorance can be a good thing. We appreciate it when someone tells us in time that they are ignorant, because that timely honesty lets us make a decision.

For example, if the person appointed as our children’s history teacher admits his ignorance of the subject, we would thank him, as long as the admission came before he took the job. But if we find out afterward, when a year of our children’s education has been lost, that honesty is of no use and earns no gratitude; on the contrary, it makes us deeply indignant. (This situation is not as hypothetical as it sounds; it happens all the time in our country’s schools.)

Data recovered from Columbia's hard drive

Thu, 08 May 2008 17:40:57 +0000

Although I’ve never had to use their services (fortunately), I’ve heard good things about Kepler, a Chilean company that specializes in data recovery, particularly from damaged hard drives.

Well, it turns out that a company doing the same kind of work in the United States (OnTrackDataRecovery) has recovered the information from a hard drive that survived among the debris of the space shuttle Columbia.

If you remember, in February 2003 Columbia disintegrated on reentry, the result of damage to its heat shield during launch. NASA’s second space shuttle tragedy.

Developing in the clouds

Wed, 07 May 2008 22:18:45 +0000

Yesterday I got my account for Google App Engine. I have a couple of ideas I’d like to build, but for now the plan is to investigate, observe, and learn from others.

I’m building a prototype, but it’s going to take a while; unfortunately I can only give it my free time, and that is in pretty short supply. If you’re interested in joining the project, please write to me or leave a comment. The idea is to put together some niche Web 2.0 application, social, of course.
Requirements: know Python, or have graphic design skills (or have a lot of money to invest ;)

Rescuing OLPC

Sun, 04 May 2008 11:52:36 +0000

Richard Stallman has decided to adopt an XO laptop and move to it as his permanent work platform, because apparently the XO is the only laptop that runs a BIOS based on free software.

But Stallman writes about the controversies that have arisen inside OLPC after Negroponte said that OLPC has failed because it used open source software. What’s more, he has criticized a supposedly fundamentalist stance among the open source advocates inside OLPC.

30 years of SPAM

Thu, 01 May 2008 20:40:04 +0000

SPAM turns 30 today, May 1.
The date comes from the fact that the first known SPAM was sent on May 1, 1978.

The first spam was sent using SNDMSG, a program that had limited room for entering the TO and CC addresses, as well as the Subject. Since the person who sent it was not trained in the use of SNDMSG, he started typing addresses, overflowed the area for recipients and ended up typing many addresses into the body of the message, so many of the recipients never actually got the message.

Dr. Horacio Croxatto and the morning-after pill

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:06:47 +0000

A letter sent to El Mercurio by Dr. Horacio Croxatto and Professor María Elena Ortiz of the Chilean Institute of Reproductive Medicine. I am copying it here because El Mercurio’s blogs tend to suffer from amnesia:

Dear Editor:

Following the ruling of the Constitutional Court (TC) on the so-called "morning-after pill", we feel bound to denounce that recital thirty-two of that ruling misuses our text, published (page 833) as part of chapter 27 of the book "Selección de temas de Ginecoobstetricia II". (eds) E. Guzmán, A.B. Lalonde. Editorial Publimpacto, Santiago, 2007. For your information and that of your readers, we transcribe both paragraphs below:

The little Asian Beatles fan

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:31:53 +0000

Here is a video of this little guy, a Beatles fanatic:

Via D3NE

OLPC's losses

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:13:00 +0000

The OLPC project has lost two major technical figures, Walter Bender and Ivan Krstic.
You will surely remember Krstic, since I once posted a video of his talk presenting the project at GOOGLE, and in another post I wrote about his work deploying OLPC in Peru.

Walter Bender was kind enough to answer a question of mine about OLPC’s situation in Cuba.

Walter was Director of Content, and president of OLPC.

Ivan was the project’s director of security, and the main creator of BitFROST.

Fingerprints are personal data

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:26:47 +0000

The fact that fingerprints, or really fingerprint impressions, are not secret does not change the fact that they are personal data.

This clarification is necessary because Michael Chertoff, the US Secretary of Homeland Security, has said that fingerprints are not personal data, and as Schneier says, it is because he confuses secret data with personal data.

Don’t you get confused.

Augmented reality

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:24:27 +0000

“Augmented reality consists of a set of devices that add virtual information to the physical information that already exists. This is the main difference from virtual reality, since it does not replace physical reality but overlays computer data on the real world.” (according to Wikipedia)

Yesterday I showed you the work of GLED and its product IVEO.

But what is this augmented reality thing good for? (besides games, of course).

Well, this BMW demonstration is an excellent example of what the technology can do:

IVEO: augmented reality (from Valparaíso)

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:15:39 +0000

After reading the note about a contest organized by USM and Microsoft (which explains several things ;), I discovered this interesting project. It is called IVEO, an augmented reality application. I invite you to watch this video to understand what it is about:

This is the first product from GLED, a company formed by young computer engineering students at the Universidad Federico Santa María. Very interesting work. Oh, and you can download the software and the cards to try it out, from the GLED site.

Charlton Heston

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 11:01:59 +0000

“Soylent Green is people!”

For many people Charlton Heston is probably synonymous with epic or biblical movies (Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments).

For others he is a stubborn old reactionary who refuses to keep talking to Michael Moore in a famous documentary. That image may be somewhat unfair, and incomplete, since Heston was a civil rights activist in the 60s, an opponent of the Vietnam War, and a supporter of gun control after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, although in the end he switched his affiliation from Democrat to Republican, probably as a consequence of his defense of the right to bear arms. As always, we cannot judge a person by just one of the things they did in life.
They say Marilyn Manson thought Moore went too far, and that he had needlessly demonized Heston with the interview that appears in Bowling for Columbine.

The other gap

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:28:35 +0000

Until 1999 the Chilean constitution said that all men are equal; since that date it says that “men and women” are equal before the law (law 19.611).

I consider technology one of the great engines of cultural change, and whenever I discuss these matters I always pick the contraceptive pill as my example.

If you ask a group of people which great technological changes they think have changed society, the answers will include the printing press, television, writing, the wheel, and of course the internet. But they rarely name the contraceptive pill, or contraceptive methods in general. I do not know if it is machismo, but people tend to forget the impact of this technology.

The minister's fingerprint

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:00:43 +0000

Although I no longer work in biometrics, I would like to comment on this political hack that took place in Germany.

It goes more or less like this: the Computer Chaos Club, the famous German hackers’ club (about whom it would be a good idea to write something one of these days), published in its magazine a plastic film with the fingerprint pattern of the German interior minister. With it you can build a rubber fingerprint and stand in for the minister in any biometric system that verifies his fingerprint. What’s more, the complete procedure is described on this CCC page, where they explain how to make fake fingerprints from the trace left on a glass (what is technically called a latent print).

Potpourri

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:19:19 +0000

This is a quick note about several things:

What good news about the technological neutrality bill being approved in the Senate’s transport and telecommunications committee. That does not mean it is law yet.
I do not know if it happens to you, but this kind of news always throws me off, because it is badly reported. You are always left wondering: “did law X get passed?”, “but wait, hadn’t they passed it already?”, and the worst part is that when the law is finally enacted, nobody reports it! (or it gets reduced to a note in a corner). It also happens that a law that was taken as passed ends up rejected, or goes to a joint committee, or ends up as something completely different. Oh well.

Microsoft's open source labs

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:29:55 +0000

Recently Port 25, the website of Microsoft’s open source community (yes, there are people at Microsoft who work with the open source world), published photos of their labs.

For those who did not know about this, here are several interesting details about these OSS Labs.
1.- The OSS labs were created several years ago to work on interoperability.
2.- The people working in these labs come from the FLOSS world, and their job is to evangelize inside Microsoft about how open source operates or works. (Officially, Microsoft always says open source, not free software. I think it is to stay out of trouble with Ballmer.)
3.- Lately they have worked with Mozilla, Apache, Eclipse and PHP (Zend), providing access to internal information and technical support, and taking part in joint seminars.

The return of the pregnant man

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:34:55 +0000

A few days ago I noticed a jump in visits to this blog, and from the most unexpected source: a High School Musical forum!

The reason: a kid posted the fake news story about a supposed pregnant man. The surprising part is that apparently some TV channel, in I do not know which country, aired this news item, again.

And since then the visits have gone up and there has been no shortage of naive comments. Even though I put a clarifying line at the top of the article, there are still people who read nothing, and some have gone as far as coming up with strange theories about a woman who supposedly changed sex and is now pregnant (!?).

Oh oh OOXML

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:21:17 +0000

Sorry for going on about this OOXML business, but I want to share a thought on the whole matter of approving (or not) the DIS 29500 (OOXML) standard.

First, I think there is a lot of talk and little understanding, and those who ought to understand are not doing so.

The technical arguments against adoption have been falling away during the standard’s review process. We know that complaining about the length of the documents is a truly irrelevant myth. In the end only one argument is left standing that I consider valid: “what do we need another standard for?”

Quality, usability and freedom

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:47:40 +0000

I installed my first Linux distro in 1993. I do not remember the details very well, but one of my friends who still worked at the DCC (the University of Chile’s computer science department) handed me some floppies with Linux so I could install it on my PC. After installing and configuring it properly, the first thing I did was get and install X. Apart from running Xeyes, my goal was to emulate the multi-window environment of the Sun workstations I used at the university. In the end, all I wanted was multiple instances of Xterm.

God doesn't want standards

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 08:25:11 -0300

This whole OOXML episode is not a drama. It is actually a comedy, because the absurd is one of the springs that feed comedy, and sometimes very funny things come out of the absurd.

The recent comment by Juque leads to an absurdity, though I suspect its author did not mean it to, because either he does not understand the moral of the Tower of Babel myth, or he has come up with a bad argument for criticizing the sad position of Liuba Dombrovskaia.

Arthur Clarke

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:07:40 +0000

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

Arthur Clarke, the last of the “Big Three”¹, died today at 90 in Sri Lanka, where he had made his home many years ago.

Besides being a science fiction writer and futurist, Arthur Clarke was an inventor and one of the main champions of the geostationary satellite. In fact, the orbit of a geostationary satellite is called the “Clarke Orbit”.

2001

Volunteer to help OLPC in Peru

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:30:08 +0000

While Uruguay announces the purchase of 200,000 more laptops for the CEIBAL project, in Peru the group FuenteLibre.org is inviting anyone who wants to volunteer to support the OLPC project in that country.

Since I know there are people in Peru who read this blog, let me point out to anyone interested that you can sign up as a volunteer by following these steps:

Create a new volunteer ticket at:
http://meta.fuentelibre.org/trac/newticket/
Send an email with some information about yourself, where you are from, what you do, and so on, plus a phone number where you can be reached, to:
voluntario@laptop.org

The unchanging principles of software development

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:44:11 +0000

You’re going to read that code yourself 10 to 100 times for every time you write it, so it’s worth taking the trouble to make it readable. You’re going to modify it five times after you write it the first time, so it makes sense to make it easy to change. And because you can’t predict the future, it doesn’t make any sense to build a lot of stuff you don’t need right away. These are unchanging principles of software development, and nothing about applying the words ‘scripting’ or ‘model driven’ or whatever the programming metaphor du jour happens to be changes any of that.

Laptops for Peruvian schoolchildren will be distributed starting March 10

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:54:48 +0000

via El Comercio

Thirty schools in the department of Huancavelica will be the first to benefit from the ambitious One Laptop per Child program, which gets under way on March 10, when a first batch of 2,200 laptops starts its journey to that region.

The machines will be taken to the local education management units (UGEL) located in the provinces or districts of the 24 departments selected for the first stage. “The laptops will be handed to the schoolchildren through the teachers of the 569 rural schools that benefit,” said Óscar Becerra, director general of Educational Technologies at the Ministry of Education.

Epigrams in programming

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:25:11 -0300

Alan Perlis was the first person to receive the Turing Award, in 1966. He was a man of great humor and a pioneer in the development of programming languages, especially through his contribution to ALGOL.

His epigrams in programming are famous. They were published in 1982 in the journal of SIGPLAN (the special interest group on programming languages) of the ACM, they are part of the folklore of our profession, and they get quoted all the time in papers, blogs and articles.

The reasonable man

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:43:14 +0000

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
– George Bernard Shaw

"Chile, a curious and shy country" ( :D )

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:32:06 +0000

The future has many names.
For the weak it is the unattainable.
For the fearful, the unknown.
For the brave it is opportunity.
– Victor Hugo (via Kimniekan)

I wanted to write something about the way our authorities react to the opinion of Nicholas Negroponte, who said that ours is a curious and shy country.

Says Didier de Saint Pierre, director of the Enlaces project, the Education Ministry’s school technology program:

“The aim of running pilot projects with one computer per student is to measure what happened to the students who were exposed to this technology versus students in equivalent conditions who had no access, to see whether there were improvements in learning, before we rush into a mass rollout”.

Java or .NET?

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:03:15 +0000

Almost a year ago I had to revisit something I built back in 2002, for a company I worked at about 4 years ago. It was an interesting side gig ($$$) but I had little time to do it, so I had to make some decisions, which I summed up in a reply on a private mailing list.

I decided to share that reply with you, freshen it up a bit, and use this post to get going again after vacation, and also to answer a question raised at antiteóricos.

I thought Linux was secure

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:42:12 +0000

I don’t know whether the comment _I thought Linux was secure, taken on its own, is innocent or provocative.
But there must be users who will be surprised to find out that Linux can indeed be seriously attacked, and its security compromised.

What happened is that a group of British crackers used the vmsplice exploit to gain access to the root account on several Claranet servers in Great Britain.

It’s actually quite simple: lots of people surely have access to a shared server (shared hosting), and from their accounts they run the code and gain root privileges.

Blogging with your feet

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:31:57 +0000

An interesting reflection from Enrique Dans:

“You don’t blog with your head, you blog with your feet”

“I don’t mean, obviously, that you should type with your lower limbs - you’d leave the keyboard in a sorry state - but that a blog cannot be built on how much its author knows, has in his head and decides to share on a web page. That, however vast and broad the knowledge, runs out in a short time, and you start sliding into the dynamic of “what the hell do I write about today?”, into “writing out of obligation” and into seeing it as an uncomfortable burden, feelings that are invariably the prelude to a blog’s death by starvation. You blog with your feet, with what you walk through every day, with the news and sites you go over, with the experiences you live through. That “diary” component is fundamental, and inherent to the original nature of blogging. And you link, of course, to everything that helped give you the inspiration.”

vmsplice, an exploit to get root on Linux

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 13:54:36 +0000

Via Kriptópolis:

As many of you already know, a serious vulnerability has been discovered in the Linux kernel (2.6.x - 2.6.24.1) that lets a user with local access obtain root privileges by running a simple exploit.

Kriptópolis has more details, and a link to where the exploit source can be downloaded.

With this you can build a pretty destructive virus that attacks machines with this bug, something we discussed earlier.

Although the bug was quickly fixed (something common in the FOSS world), the problem, once again, is that users don’t keep their systems patched, and besides there are non-expert users who won’t know how to patch their kernel.

Five cuts!

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:25:57 +0000

Five cuts to the undersea cables in Asia. Isn’t that a bit much?
What are the odds of that happening?

More than 90% of the world’s data traffic travels over undersea cables, compared with the traffic carried by satellites, less than 10%.

Source: El Mundo

The Linux community

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:42:24 +0000

Linus Torvalds is asked:

How is the Linux community? Is the open source project still going strong?

It’s never been cohesive - in many ways it’s misleading to call it a community. Some are involved due to the ideology, most are involved because there’s some area they are using or interested in and they don’t necessarily care about anyone else. But it turns out there are enough shared (interests). Everybody wants some of the same things: stability, performance.

No OLPC in Brazil

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 11:17:00 +0000

According to various sources, the Brazilian government has postponed the tender to acquire 150,000 XO laptops developed by the OLPC foundation.

“In an unexpected decision, the Brazilian government canceled the tender for the purchase of 150,000 laptops aimed at low-income children as part of the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) program, promoted by the American scientist Nicholas Negroponte in coordination with multinationals in the computing business.

As is well known, the program, which seeks to bring poor children into the “digital age” through the purchase of machines at an average price of 100 dollars, is being rolled out in several Latin American countries, Peru included.

Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:12:55 +0000

According to an official Microsoft press release, they are making an offer to buy Yahoo for a total of 46 billion dollars, at 31 dollars per share (that would be 62 percent above the current share price).

I don't like captchas, but...

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:45:00 +0000

Regular readers of this blog know that I don’t like captchas, but the truth is I’m fed up with spam comments. A good deal of time gets wasted managing them, and I’m tired of the whole thing.

So we are going to turn captchas on, using the Movable Type default, and I hope you don’t get one as hideous as this one.

Incidentally, I turned the captcha on by accident a few months ago and I think it worked, though I suspect too well, because comments dropped to nearly 0 :(

Linux security

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:47:01 +0000

Via Kriptópolis:

Linux is not bulletproof, and your desktop is not safe simply because it runs Linux. Let good sense be your guide. For most of us, that means running the desktop behind a firewall and regularly applying security patches. For others, additional defensive measures may be in order.

When it comes to Linux security this is well worth remembering, because there is always some congressman going around saying there are no viruses on Linux.

Alphabet soup (or photo soup)

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 12:39:31 +0000

Carlos ChaTo Castillo tells us:

Once every few months, Yahoo! holds a “Hack Day”, a day when any team of Yahoo!s can submit a “hack”, a simple program that uses Yahoo! technologies or data, to a worldwide or regional competition. PhotoSoup was our Barcelona team’s entry last year for the European Hack Day, and we won the “coolest hack” award ;-)

Carlos is Chilean, studied at the engineering school of the Universidad de Chile (where else?) and currently works at Yahoo Barcelona. You probably remember him for his site tejedores de la web, and he is a founding partner and technology director at Newtenberg.

Goodbye Holocene, welcome Anthropocene

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:57:44 +0000

Let’s see, how do I explain this piece of news.

The geological history of the Earth has been divided into four great periods, which are in turn divided into sub-periods and eras, spanning cycles of millions of years of geological activity. For those interested, there is the usual introduction on Wikipedia.

One of these divisions is the one that began 10,000 years ago, the Holocene, which started with the end of the last ice age and runs up to the present day.

Piracy is bad

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:58:31 +0000

(For those still living in the past, this spot aired in episode 3 of the second season of The IT Crowd)

Software engineering and the pyramids

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:10:48 +0000

“If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”

Alan Kay in an interview for Queue magazine, to which the interviewer replies

The mystery of the pyramids

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:57:44 +0000

How the pyramids were built would be no mystery at all if the engineers of the time had left proper documentation.

All for a variable capacitor

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:25:11 -0300

This photograph shows Leonard Kleinrock next to IMP1, the Interface Message Processor, one of the packet switching nodes used in ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet.

“The story goes that little Len Kleinrock got hold of a Superman comic book, in which he found instructions for building a “crystal radio”. All the boy needed was one of his dad’s used razor blades, a bit of graphite (from a pencil), an empty toilet paper roll and some wire, all of which was already at home. He even managed to get some old headphones, but he was missing a “variable capacitor”. To get one he talked his mother into traveling to downtown Manhattan, to a radio and electronics store.

Chess

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:25:11 -0300

Bobby Fischer, a chess legend, died today. An interesting figure, with a life that would make a novel or a good movie.

Chess has become a completely solved problem from the computational point of view. In 1997 Deep Blue defeated Kasparov and proved that it is possible to build a machine that beats the best player of this sport.

The history of chess played by a machine goes back a long way. Famous is the story of the mechanical Turk, a machine in the shape of a Turk that is said to have defeated even Napoleon Bonaparte. In reality there was no mechanism at all: it was operated from the inside by the Austrian chess champion Johann Allgaier.

What was that about Galicians?

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:37:19 +0000

It turns out that, building on the ideas of Johnny Chung Lee, a group of Galician teachers built an electronic whiteboard using a Wii remote and a projector. As shown in the video:

The instructions for pulling this off are here (in Galician).

This strikes me as a good deal cheaper than any similar technology available on the market.

La Célula, or the eternal return of pyramid schemes

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:30:12 +0000

Today a coworker told me about the game of “la célula” (the cell), a pyramid scheme that is apparently spreading across the country from Concepción. It coincides with this post on the blog Antiteóricos, where they warn us about this scam.

Because it is a scam, even if they dress it up as a game. In fact it is a crime in many countries, such as the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Malaysia, Norway and several more, according to this Wikipedia article.

Network effect

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:36:48 +0000

Bob Metcalfe is one of my favorite entrepreneurs, and I think his ideas about how to start technology businesses are among the best I have read. Metcalfe is one of the creators of Ethernet, the technology used in local area networks. If your computer is connected to the network by a cable, it does so through an Ethernet card. That’s how important this gentleman is.

Ethernet, also known as IEEE 802.3, is the standard that prevailed at the end of the 80s as the way to connect computers to a LAN. Few people today remember Token Ring, for example, despite how ingenious its design was.

LaTeX

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:23:10 +0000

I find it funny when people rail against Microsoft from a PC running Windows XP. If Linux solves all their problems, why don’t they install it?

There is a lot of posturing around free software, and also a lot of ignorance when people talk about technology.

A recent example of these ignorance-laden arguments is the one that proposes LaTeX as an alternative to the OOXML format.

Well, as a fan of Knuth, and of Leslie Lamport too (above all for his work in distributed computing), I feel a certain duty to explain a bit of what this LaTeX thing is about and why it is not an alternative to OOXML, and while we’re at it, to see if we can bring a little “culture” to the debate.

ChileCompra and transparency

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 13:46:06 +0000

The truth always comes out.

The case of Pablo Ortiz, former head of the technology division at Chilecompra, the Chilean government’s procurement portal, would be almost laughable if the matter weren’t so serious. Because Ortiz had to issue a reference letter for Sonda-Iconstruye so they could submit it in the Panamá Compra tender, a tender in which he himself appeared on the org chart of the competitors.

I mean. How clumsy can you be?! Did he think nobody would ever find out he was bidding in Panama?

Fortran

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:25:11 -0300

I learned Fortran at the Universidad de Chile, as a freshman. The course was normally taught with Ratfor, and the following year they switched to Pascal, but I, for reasons I can’t remember, ended up with Fortran.

Used to programming in Basic, I didn’t find it hard to learn this venerable programming language. Today I read a write-up that actually shows a Fortran far more modern than the one I got, Watfor-77.

Goodbye, Netscape

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 09:32:39 +0000

Today they announced that Netscape is being discontinued.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, I think somebody at the DCC handed me a tar file (Willy, or Edo Rodriguez?), but I remember installing a browser on a Sun, running it, and after an eternity downloading a web page with a picture of the Mona Lisa on it.

Late ‘92? March of ‘93?

That was the first time I ever browsed the web. A few years later Andreessen, the author of Mosaic, creates Netscape, gets filthy rich, and well, you know everything that happened after that.

The problem with tinyurl and similar services

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 08:25:11 -0300

This post was sitting in my drafts, and I’ve now finished it as an answer to a question from FT via twitter,

If someday TinyURL or Dev.cl stop providing their service... do all the short URLs ever created die?

The short answer is Yes.

Incidentally, when I tried to shorten the url of this post, dev.cl gave me back the url http://dev.cl/.

Now the fun answer:

Although short urls have several uses and advantages, and even work for compressing images :wink: the truth is there are several problems:

WPEG, the best compression algorithm

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 08:25:11 -0300

(This is a humor piece)

WPEG

WPEG is not actually a programming language; it is a file compression algorithm, far superior in all respects to any existing file compression algorithm.

The compression program uploads your file to a web server, then gives the URL to http://tinyurl.com/ to provide a short URL linking to it. The part of the URL after “http://tinyurl.com/” is returned as the compressed file. This is an ASCII string.

The magic of innovating

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 08:15:42 +0000

I want to show you a couple of innovations by the researcher Johnny Chung Lee, a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University.

I discovered the first innovation through a post on
Botón Turbo.. Unfortunately that blog didn’t quite understand what is going on, so let me explain it before showing you the video.

In this case Chung Lee writes a program in C# and uses the Wii controller as an input device connected to his laptop, running Windows. At no point has he written code that runs on the Nintendo console. Everything happens on the laptop, and what gets used is the WiiMote. The main feature of this innovation is that it uses the Wii controller backwards: it moves the infrared sensor instead of the WiiMote.

Let's see... how do I explain this?

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:03:07 +0000

No, if you use a 32-bit operating system you can’t use more than 4 GiB of RAM.

Period.

With 32 bits you can only reach 2 to the 32nd possible addresses. There are mechanisms proposed for accessing addresses above 4 GiB, but they have their problems. (When the world was young and we used the 286, there was a little trick for using memory by segments, but that really was a headache, something similar to what PAE does).
In any case, this is “virtual access” to more than 4GiB, achieved with 4 additional bits of indirection; at any given moment, the CPU only accesses 4GiB.

Be correct or be daring

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:58:44 +0000

My brother’s farewell speech to his students reminds us of the importance of taking risks.

It’s a speech that invites us to reflect on the difference between doing what is correct and doing what is right. A challenge to many people’s ethics is what I read in these words. At the core of the speech, Ricardo recalls this anecdote about General Grouchy and Napoleon:

When Napoleon managed to escape from the island of Elba, in 1815, he immediately began to receive popular support, which allowed him to assemble a great army that soon frightened the faint-hearted monarch Louis XVIII, who fled Paris, leaving the way clear for Emperor Bonaparte’s army. His army grew and grew and soon became a threat to the various European monarchies. The other countries, gathered at the Congress of Vienna, immediately declared Napoleon’s government illegal and sent armies to stop him. The emperor’s tactic was clear: he had to deal an effective, precise blow to the army of Prussia and then, on the road to Belgium, to the army of England. But he had to do it cleanly and directly, without letting them join up, for their combined forces would outnumber him and he would not be able to defeat them. No sooner said than done: Napoleon attacked the Prussians fiercely and forced them to retreat. Now he had to go against the English, but he needed to make sure the Prussians would not come back and attack him from the rear. Napoleon looked at his generals. Whom would he entrust with the mission of finishing off the Prussians and thus securing his triumph over Europe?

The mysterious disappearance of Ettore Majorana

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 08:25:11 -0300

I heard about Ettore Majorana on the Chilean TV interview show Una Belleza Nueva, hosted by Cristián Warnken.

At the end of the interesting interview with the French physicist Etienne Klein, Warnken asks him to comment on one of the characters described in his book: Il était 7 fois la révolution. That was when I first heard about Majorana, and the mystery of his disappearance.

His story would make a plot for a novel (and it seems someone has already written it). On the web I found this interesting account of Majorana’s mysterious disappearance. A true genius: according to Enrico Fermi his intelligence was comparable to that of Newton or Galileo.

Monumental error (or when MCMXXLLI = 1980)

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:29:06 +0000

Can you tell me which Roman numeral they were trying to put at the foot of this monument?

The photo was taken by Hernán Cabrera, a fellow DCC classmate from the 80-90 crowd, on December 13, 2007.

It’s the Monument to Aviation in Providencia. Yes, this one, which those of us from Santiago know quite well:

I say they were trying to write 1981.

UPDATE

I’m informed:

“The monument to CHILEAN AVIATION, designed by René Orellana and Beatriz Silva, was inaugurated in 1980…” … “… an extension of Parque Balmaceda, with which it is often confused. In this area we find the monument to aviation erected in 1980 by the then Commander in Chief of the Air Force, General Mathei, from which it got its name.”

Technopaths

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:41:07 +0000

Micah Sanders has an extraordinary power. Micah Sanders is a technopath.

In the world of superheroes, technopathy is:

“The ability to manipulate technology. It manifests as a special form of electrical manipulation that allows physical interaction with machines, or some special form of extrasensory perception that allows a mental interface with computers.”

For those who haven’t heard yet, Micah Sanders is one of the characters in the TV series Heroes. To give you an idea, Micah can reconfigure his cell phone to turn it into a GPS-style tracking device and use it to find a person in danger (as long as that person also has a cell phone).

The triumph of the Classmate

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 09:19:45 +0000

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, and the video that comes with it, is quite negative and critical of the OLPC project.

It’s true that the OLPC has not had the success that was expected. According to the article, a big reason is that the project has faced strong opposition from Microsoft and above all from Intel, who by aggressively promoting the Classmate have slowed adoption of the laptop.

The OLPC foundation said at one point that countries like Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, Libya and Thailand were each buying a million units, but over time we’ve realized it didn’t go as announced, and in the end the only country buying the laptop is Uruguay, with just 100,000 units.

Digital natives??

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 08:25:11 -0300

“Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born” – Alan Kay

Talking about digital natives and digital immigrants is back in fashion.
It was already stupid in 2001, but oh well, it has turned out to be a persistent meme. Cultural garbage, on the same level as astrology or numerology. Pure social pseudoscience.

On this subject I suggest reading The myth of the digital natives, by Adolfo Estalella, from which I pull a few paragraphs that seem very relevant to me.

Time

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:07:23 +0000

It’s my birthday. 41 years old, phew…

Twelve years ago, to celebrate my birthday, I went to this Alan Parsons concert in Santiago (where this video comes from). What remains of that show is this video of Time, a song that reminds us that the one thing we can’t stop is the passage of time.

The great part is finding more Alan Parsons videos, a side effect of preparing a post. The cool thing about this version of Sirius is that it was the first time AP played live, and with many of the original members (except Eric Woolfson, of course), a gift for fans like me:

SimCity for the OLPC

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:26:17 +0000

Electronic Arts has decided to donate the original (“classic”) version of SimCity to the One Laptop Per Child project.

John Gilmore took care of registering the project properly and requesting a GIT repository for it. The announcement was posted today, a couple of hours ago, on the OLPC development list

SimCity for the OLPC will go by the name Micropolis, which was the game’s original name. The goal, of course, is to turn the original program into a python script that integrates with the Sugar interface. The game will be released under the GNU GPL license.

Barbie as an identity validator

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 09:30:13 +0000

Here’s a solution for anxious parents. But it’s also an interesting example of how to authenticate the identity of counterparties (though that part is more technical).

For its free virtual world for preteens, barbiegirls.com, Mattel has developed an authentication mechanism that uses one of its toys.

The site lets girls “chat” with their friends through Secret B Chat, with the restriction that it only lets girls talk to friends they actually know (in the real world, that is).

Android and the Google phone

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:45:29 +0000

Google will not release a cell phone.

Nope, Google wouldn’t do anything as prosaic as the old folks at Apple.

Since they’re smarter and more innovative than anyone, they chose to create an open mobile phone platform: ANDROID

On top of that, to ensure the commercial success of this model, they formed an alliance with other very influential companies in the mobile business (giants like NTT Docomo, Telefonica, Motorola, LG, Samsung, Sprint Nextel, Intel, Qualcomm, China Mobile, etc). The Open Handset Alliance is born.

The CEIBAL project - measuring the impact of the OLPC on education

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 21:55:32 +0000

The CEIBAL project (Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Linea, or Educational Connectivity of Basic Computing for Online Learning) is Uruguay’s experience built on the OLPC.

They have recently published some very interesting conclusions about the pilot they are running.

Here is the presentation of those conclusions.

The important parts:

Computers don’t generate activity on their own.
The activity is guided by the teacher.
The impact in the first 3 grades is doubtful.
The kids don’t spend all their time glued to the computer.

My biggest contribution to computer security

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 08:25:11 -0300

I write this article with pride and with worry. Pride at the impact my work had, and worry because, well, you’ll see why.

In 2005 I wrote an article on codeproject where I showed a practical scheme that exploited one of the vulnerabilities found at the time in the MD5 algorithm. The article gained notoriety when it was featured on Slashdot and on Kriptópolis.

My original article is in English and there is a (very brief) summary on this very blog.

Precision

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 18:43:11 +0000

This note was “prompted” by some comments on my previous post about the Excel 2007 bug. The first is a link to a discussion on Kriptópolis about the numeric precision of javascript. The second asks whether I knew that Visual Basic rounds down.

The truth is I don’t know how Visual Basic rounds, because fortunately I’ve never had to program in that language ;).

But what surprises me is reading other comments that show an ignorance about the precision of computers that is astonishing in IT professionals.

Rounding errors

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 23:07:20 +0000

Although the Excel 2007 bug has gotten a lot of coverage, it is not the first rounding error in history, nor the most catastrophic. And although we don’t yet know what consequences this new Excel bug may have, at least nobody has died from it so far.

But during the first Gulf War there was an error of similar origin that cost the lives of 28 American soldiers.

The Excel bug and the error that killed the soldiers have the same origin.

Giga or gibi bytes?

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 23:56:12 +0000

If I run the df command on my current notebook, it tells me I have 141+8.1 giga

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on c: 141G 62G 80G 44% /cygdrive/c d: 8.1G 6.1G 2.0G 76% /cygdrive/d

That adds up to 149.1 gigabytes, quite a bit less than the 160GB stated in my machine’s specs.

But the truth is that hard drive manufacturers use the prefix giga correctly: it means 10 to the 9th power, a billion, or in figures 1,000,000,000.

Goodbye, Chuquicamata

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 08:25:11 -0300

Dear Francisca:

My daughter, I was born last century, in a town that no longer exists.

How can I tell you the sorrow I feel right now?

The town where I was born, where my parents raised me, where my dad is buried, is gone.

You won’t get to see it. You didn’t get to know it the way your older brothers and your mother did. Very little is left, and as of yesterday it is a ghost town, like so many others in the north of our country.

Employment and the Boletín Comercial

Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:09:06 +0000

A lot of people visit this blog because of some news I’ve posted about the rules that govern the Boletín Comercial, Chile’s registry of unpaid debts. I’ve mentioned before that I worked at that institution, and I know what a drama it is for many people to land on this list of delinquent debtors.

If you take on an obligation you should honor it, but unfortunately this instrument, conceived in the mid 20th century to protect merchants, has become a source of many abuses.

Commitments, clarifications and the freedom of information

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:28:04 +0000

A letter has been made public, sent by several faculty members of the DCC, the computer science department at the Universidad de Chile, where I had the privilege of studying.

The group of academics who signed it is a distinguished one, and the letter demolishes the argument of those who say that everyone complaining about the Microsoft-Government agreement is ignorant and doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

I support the intent of the letter, and I agree with it. What’s more, the letter’s appendix is very enlightening about the government’s commitments. If I were Microsoft I would demand an explanation from the government, which commits itself and then says publicly that this agreement implies no commitment at all.

Lol Catz

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 08:25:11 -0300

Eric Nakagawa was out of work when, last January, he came across this photo, with a strange caption full of spelling and grammar mistakes:

With a friend he started the site I Can Has Cheesburger, something like “can I have my cheeseburger?”. Before long the visits started coming, the lolcat phenomenon took off, and Nakagawa had his new job.

Today his site gets more than 200,000 visits a day, and the advertising revenue is “enough to pay all my bills,” says the former programmer.

A lifetime of programming

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 22:34:06 +0000

I’ve been programming for 26 years, and I identify completely with Jeff Atwood’s comment:

For many programmers, our introduction to programming was our dad forcing us to write our own games. Instead of the shiny new Atari 2600 game console I wanted, I got a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a computer instead. That’s not exactly what I had in mind at the time, of course, but that fateful decision launched a career that spans thirty years.

Does the operating system matter?

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:35:16 +0000

The Skype outage reminded me of a question that a chief financial officer (CFO) sent to the brilliant Kode Vicious.

It’s the typical question a non-technical person would ask, and the curiosity is legitimate: does the operating system you use to implement a solution matter? Here is an excerpt of KV’s answer for you to consider, dedicated to the finance managers and the technology managers of my beloved country:

Does the operating system matter?

The CFO, who signs as “Tired of Zealots”, explains that every time a project starts in his organization a small but loud group pushes him to pick an open source operating system, and gets straight to the point:

Standards, standards...

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 09:20:42 +0000

Right now there is an intense debate about how Chile should vote on the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard.

Yesterday there was a meeting at the INN (Chile’s national standards institute) where the critics of adopting this standard were able to present their point of view.

Personally, I have become convinced that adopting OOXML as a standard would be terrible, for technical and commercial reasons. In the end it only perpetuates the lock-in to one specific vendor: Microsoft.

Free code?

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:12:45 +0000

José Antonio Barriga kicks off his blog with a confusing title, Microsoft and Free Code" (“Microsoft y el Código Libre”). I have to confess that I always have trouble referring to FLOSS. I often talk about free software, about open source, or about open code, and sometimes I use the terms interchangeably, even though I’m well aware that they are not the same thing. But Barriga outdoes me: ingeniously, he mixes the two terms and creates “free code” ?!

The InterNerd

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 20:27:47 +0000

This is a small reflection, of no importance, really.

I remember when some friends used to make fun of me because I used the “internerd,” but now even they have blogs, and some spend hours glued to the screen reading, chatting, or using Skype.

I miss those days, the days of the internerd …

Time is money

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 23:21:20 +0000

“Linux is Free if Your Time is Worthless” (a line attributed to Jamie Zawinski)

When Larry Ellison says that the savings on licenses are no more than 10% of the total cost of ownership of software, I tend to believe him.

But if the cost of the license is 10%, you have to add another percentage for the time you can spend trying to make the software usable.

Here is an interesting example. John Loiacono, a senior executive at Adobe, tells on his blog the story of Eric Vreeland who, fed up with the incompatibilities and problems of a lot of open and free software, decided to invest the 2,500 dollars for the Creative Suite Master Collection, which includes 12 Adobe products, such as Photoshop, Premiere and Illustrator.

Why does software fail?

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:16:35 +0000

I was reading Christian’s interesting note on the problems OOXML causes, and I found a comment that caught my attention:

it seems as if Microsoft had gotten users used to programs failing, a lot, and that this is normal.

The truth is that, like anything made by man, software is not free of errors. But it seems that the quality of software, compared with other human constructions, is terrible. Some will say that in Microsoft’s case it is even worse.

The 2007 hurricane names

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 03:54:45 +0000

In this blog’s traffic stats, the post where I described the “algorithm for naming hurricanes” is one of the most popular.

I get a lot of visits from people who live in the Caribbean and North America, and I appreciate it. Many want to know how hurricanes get their names.

I hear that Dean is about to reach the highest category.

The name tells me we are looking at the fourth tropical storm of this year, although this is the first hurricane of the season.

Free software is no threat

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 08:25:11 -0300

“Open source is not something to be feared. Open source is something to be explained. Open source wins not because it’s open and not because it’s free. Open source wins only when it’s better” – Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle

Oracle is opening a number of IT positions in our country, which is excellent news. Its CEO, the famous Larry Ellison, has shared his ideas on open source and free software several times, but I want to highlight this interview, from which I took the quote at the top.

We're all wallowing in the same mud...

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 23:59:29 +0000

Reading is one thing; understanding what you read is another.

Since I have several alerts set up for the OLPC, one caught my attention that talked about criticism of the OLPC on AtinaChile. But the truth is that, as almost always happens to me with Atina Chile, I once again found a copy-paste job, and one put together in a way that gives the impression they didn’t understand the idea of the original article, or that somewhere in the copying and pasting they forgot the heart of it.

The commercial motivations of Linus Torvalds

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 08:25:11 -0300

An interesting interview with Linus Torvalds in Linux World, with statements very much in Linus’s style:

“...I also think that the change to the GPLv2 (from my original “no money” License) was important, because the commercial interests were actually very important from the very beginning, even if they were much smaller initially.”

“The commercial distributions were what drove a lot of the nice installers, and pushed people to improve usability etcetera, and I think commercial users of Linux have been very important in actually improving the product. I think all the technical people who have been involved have been hugely important, but I think that the kind of commercial use that you can get with the GPLv2 is also important – you need a balance between pure technology, and the kinds of pressures you get from users through the market.”

An elephant

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 21:24:05 +0000

“An elephant is a mouse with an operating system”

Donald Knuth

Which open source are you talking about?

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:15:47 +0000

It turns out there are companies that treat free software as just one more marketing term, and have little interest in actually distributing their source code.

But the cases of BitTorrent and MySQL are surprising, given how representative these projects are.

It turns out BitTorrent has not published the source code of the protocol since it acquired uTorrent. In fact, when version 6 of BitTorrent was released, in July 2007, a note surprised developers: “Sorry, source code for BitTorrent 6.0, like the source code for uTorrent, will not be released. However, versions 5 and earlier were of course released under open source licenses, and remain available for you to modify and redistribute subject to the terms of their respective licenses.”

Impulsive reasoning

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 09:17:01 +0000

If you don’t know that Desdemona is a character in a major Shakespeare play, you run the risk of being called uncultured; still, not knowing it doesn’t cause any great problems. Now, if you don’t understand what you read, then your problem is more serious. That is what’s called functional illiteracy, a very widespread problem in our country according to some studies.

If you don’t know what the number pi means, then you are in the same position as someone who doesn’t know the works of the English Bard. But if you can’t work out the area of your terrace, then you are in danger of buying more tiles than you need, or of having a contractor overcharge you for the job of sprucing up your garden.

The senator's innumeracy

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 10:36:17 +0000

Today I heard Senator Girardi on the news:

“A glass of chocolate milk contains 400 milligrams of salt, the recommended daily limit is 2 grams, which means children are consuming 4 times the recommended amount!”

It had been a long time since I heard so many numerical errors in one sentence.

But he also has a strange notion of how a mixture works: for the senator, if a glass of milk has 40 grams of sugar, it immediately becomes 40% pure sugar!

Goodbye, Chuquicamata

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 22:08:58 +0000

Dear Francisca:

My daughter, I was born last century, in a town that no longer exists.

How can I tell you the sorrow I feel right now?

The town where I was born, where my parents raised me, where my dad is buried, is gone.

You won’t be able to see it. You never got to know it the way your older siblings and your mother did. Very little is left now, and since yesterday it has become a ghost town, like so many others in the north of our country.

Justice

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 12:29:59 +0000

More than a year ago I told you about the violent robbery my daughter’s class went through. At a camp near Valparaíso, 60 teenagers plus a few adults were robbed: the ninth-grade students and their teachers.

It turns out the robbers were arrested, and I can tell you they have been convicted, with sentences of between 13 and 15 years in prison. We are used to reading about the blunders of our judicial system, but in our case justice was done. All I can say is that we parents were committed from the very first moment, and the school backed the prosecutors’ work by bringing in a lawyer as a private complainant, which made the case stronger.

WiFi in danger?

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 08:25:11 -0300

Please read this excellent article by @micronauta: http://blog.canal.cl/2010/07/wi-fi-podria-degradarse-en-chile-por.html

Changes

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 08:25:11 -0300

After almost 5 years on MovableType this blog has changed its technology and its look. So I hope you like the new design, and apologies for any trouble the change may cause.

We will be resuming “transmissions” shortly. Thank you for reading this blog, and if you have comments or pointers about the new look I will appreciate them.

Microsoft joins open source

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 21:24:18 +0000

Today is a historic day.

Microsoft has decided to submit its permissive and shared source licenses to the OSI for approval.

A bit of history

The OSI, the Open Source Initiative, is an organization born in 1997, after the publication of Eric Raymond’s famous essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Netscape’s decision to publish its source code.

Back then a group of influential figures from the open software developer communities decided it was time to leave behind the confrontational, moralizing attitude associated with free software, as put forward by the groups around the FSF. So they decided to promote a more pragmatic, business-oriented view, in line with what had moved Netscape to release its code. From this group came the label Open Source, to mark their position and set it apart from Free Software, the term used by the Free Software Foundation.

Identity metasystems

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 08:25:55 +0000

]

“The Internet was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to.”

Since the ability to identify people is not built into the internet, everyone who offers a service on the internet has to solve the problem of handling identity in some way. As the web grows, the need to identify becomes more pressing, and we keep running into different kinds of identity verification, each one created and adapted for different needs. Millions of people have learned to accept that whatever a website asks of them is the “normal way” of doing business online. They have been trained to type their names, passwords and personally identifying information into any input form that shows up on their screen.

Obama knows computer science

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 08:25:11 -0300

By the way, the question is an interesting one:
“What is the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers?”
You surely wouldn’t pick bubble sort. On that, President Obama is absolutely right.
But what is the answer to this question? The answer is in the next post.

The practice of programming

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 08:25:11 -0300

I once heard that Knuth had this on his business card:

“Donald Knuth - Programmer”

But over time he had to change it, because putting “Programmer” as your “profession” on a business card was not well regarded. These days my colleagues put anything on their business cards, from Systems Analyst to Information Architect, and of course Software Engineer along the way.

It seems that saying you are a programmer is something shameful, when programming is the best thing a person can devote themselves to.

Lessons from Ratatouille

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 08:25:11 -0300

Rats was what we engineers call a project on fire. It was an important film for Pixar, since it was the first project of the “post-Disney” era, and so it had to have all the makings of a hit. And although the work of Jan Pinkava, its director, was of high artistic quality, Pixar’s executives considered the story “very flat.”

Steve Jobs decided to do something. First he moved the release of Cars from November 2005 to May 2006, and Pinkava’s team was ordered to strengthen the story and get the audience to care about what happens to the characters.

Can Cuba get the OLPC? The OLPC's official position

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:42:26 +0000

Or Syria, Iran, Iraq, etc.?

You know what? The issue worried me, because a comment by Carlos got me thinking, and the problem of the embargo on Cuba is no small thing. But there are ways around it, through triangulation, and I’m preparing a special article about that.

One of the advantages of our era is that we can ask the sources directly (something journalists used to do, and bloggers ignore completely), so I wrote to Walter Bender.

The case of Jamie Cansdale

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 13:52:18 +0000

Jamie Cansdale is a hacker who created a very useful product for developers on the Microsoft .Net platform. It’s TestDriven.Net, a product that lets you organize and manage unit tests from inside Visual Studio, something much appreciated by programmers who follow agile development methodologies.

Building this product earned him recognition from the community and from Microsoft itself as an MVP (Most Valuable Professional), a distinction created to reward the most valuable professionals using Microsoft development tools.

Transantiago: Sonda sues and gets countersued

Thu, 10 May 2007 09:17:58 +0000

SONDA had to inform the Superintendencia de Valores y Seguros (Chile’s securities regulator) by letter (download the letter as a PDF), as the law requires, about the status of its lawsuit against Roberto Sone and TIMM for 5,000 UF (Chile’s inflation-indexed unit) in consequential damages and CLP 5 billion in moral damages.

This is the letter (obtained exclusively by LNDS ;):

As the letter states, Roberto Sone and TIMM have in turn countersued for CLP 12.95 billion and US$390 million, for use of confidential information and violation of intellectual and industrial property.

XO, energy, the environment and the myth of Moore's Law

Wed, 02 May 2007 22:11:16 +0000

Walter Bender , president of the OLPC foundation, writes on the OLPC news list:

“By concentrating on low-cost, low-power, long-life, and field repair, we have achieved what many assume costs extra (and many corporations would ordinarily charge more for): XO is the most environmentally friendly laptop ever made. At one point we had heard from very knowledgeable manufacturers that it would cost us at least US $20 extra just to meet the EU environmental requirements. This was not true. In fact, if every laptop and desktop user in the world switched to an XO right now, about 85 terawatt-hours of energy could be saved. The energy-bill savings alone could fund the outright purchase of 50-million XO laptops. In addition, 50M barrels of oil could saved, which is an additional US $500M in carbon-offset dollars, yearly.”

Mark Shuttleworth and OLPC

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 18:31:13 +0000

Mark Shuttleworth recently gave an interview to the Austrian site derStandard. For those who don’t know him, Mark Shuttleworth is a South African millionaire who funds Ubuntu, one of the most popular linux distributions.

In 1999, Shuttleworth shot to fame (he was 26) after selling his company Thawte to the giant Verisign for 525 million dollars. In 2002 he paid for his ticket aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, becoming the second space tourist. Then he decided it would be good to share part of his fortune with the rest of us and created the Ubuntu Foundation, with an initial capital of 10 million dollars.

The laws of identity 2

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:18:55 +0000

The problem

“The Internet was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to.”

A patchwork of identity “one-offs”

Since this essential capability is missing, everyone offering an Internet service has had to come up with a workaround. It is fair to say that today’s Internet, absent a native identity layer, is based on a patchwork of identity one-offs.

Criminalization of the Internet

People have begun to use the Internet to manage and exchange things of progressively greater real-world value. This has not gone unnoticed by a criminal fringe that understands the ad hoc and vulnerable nature of the identity patchwork—and how to subvert it.

The laws of identity 1

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 09:58:48 +0000

A few weeks ago I got in touch with Kim Cameron to ask him to authorize a translation of his Laws of Identity. For those not familiar with the subject, Kim’s work has been to research the problems of handling identity on the internet. I quote:

“The Internet was built without a way to know who and what you are connecting to. This limits what we can do with it and exposes us to growing dangers. If we do nothing, we will face rapidly proliferating episodes of theft and deception that will cumulatively erode public trust in the Internet.”

23 measures for Transantiago

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 15:18:28 +0000

I haven’t commented on Transantiago, Santiago’s new public transit system, mainly because I’m not a user of the system, so I can’t say how good or bad it really is. But I know there are many people who feel affected. The president has announced 23 measures, which I copy below. Reading them, it’s clear to me that many should have been in place from the start. If the system wasn’t ready, why did she force Transantiago to launch in February? The only thing I can think of is that it was done so it would finally start running once and for all; delaying it further would have meant the project never happened.

Does Google copy websites?

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 11:00:01 +0000

I kept thinking about the claim by Carlos that Google copies a website’s content to get the relevant information that lets it create the “magic” of finding the relevant sites.

Let’s analyze whether the claim is true, because it’s not clear to me that Google can do with books or videos the same thing it does with web pages. Regardless of the legal dispute, I’m going to explore this, because the consequences are interesting.

Software maintenance

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 07:00:34 +0000

Unlike music and books, which stay unchanged over time, very little software doesn’t change over time. It’s quite likely that, as time goes by, software gains value.

Indeed, through continuous improvements, customizations, maintenance and new features, programs become more valuable to their users.

The mechanisms for calculating depreciation of tangibles and intangibles assume that goods lose value through use over time. However, well-maintained software in active use will tend to gain value.

The intellectual property value of software

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 20:38:02 +0000

Clearly value and cost are not the same thing, and yet in the software industry, when people talk about the value of software they only consider the cost of producing it, and very little is said about the benefits obtained from using it.

When it comes to appraising our products, we software developers let economists, lawyers, distributors and others define how much our product is worth.

An interesting article written by Gio Wiederhold and published in the September 2006 issue of Communications of the ACM [1] discusses this important matter.

Notes on cyber-socialism I

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 21:40:06 +0000

Have you ever wondered why, despite the attack on the Twin Towers, the world economy didn’t collapse?

Like an idea from a James Bond villain, or something out of the mind of Dr. Evil, Bin Laden’s plan was ambitious. The attack on the Twin Towers, apart from showing us once again that reality beats fiction, turned out to be a symbolic act more than an effective one.

The American economy didn’t collapse. On the contrary, it came out of the recession it was in, and there were even unexpected effects worldwide.

The Nobel Prize in computing

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 21:07:23 +0000

It’s true, there is no Nobel Prize in computing, despite what La Tercera has reported (thanks Claudio , since I don’t read La Tercera, I would never have found out :)

Legend has it that Nobel hated mathematics, or considered it a sterile science, which is why this prize explicitly does not exist for mathematics; mathematicians aspire to the Fields Medal.

In computing there are several prizes. Probably the most prestigious is awarded by the ACM, the famous Turing Award.

Bella Vista

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 10:18:36 +0000

My office is on Avenida Los Conquistadores. For a reason I can’t quite grasp, streets in Santiago change names every so often. So this Avenida Los Conquistadores becomes BellaVista as it approaches Plaza Italia, the most important spot in Santiago.

Sure, because Plaza Italia is to Santiago’s people what the Plaza de Cibeles or the Puerta del Sol is to Madrid’s. When there’s a sports victory or a political event to celebrate, the crowds gather at Plaza Italia.

Software plagiarism

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 08:25:11 -0300

I read the following paragraph on a well-known blog:

“When a programmer writes a block of code he is creating a recipe for achieving a specific result. There is a limited number of paths to the same place, some faster and more elegant than others. They say perfect code is code to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be removed. If we consider the very nature of programming languages, the more perfect that code is, the more likely it is that another programmer with the same purpose and the same talent will reach the same conclusion. This is not considered theft, unless the length of the match is statistically implausible. In literature and in art, that kind of coincidence is practically impossible. An immortal monkey typing endlessly on a typewriter may end up signing a Hamlet but, for now, no writer is known to have that much time.”¹

Creators, users and abusers

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:23:41 +0000

Someone left me a rather passionate comment defending Mago de Oz. I suppose this matter will get settled among the parties involved. In any case, it’s the last time I publish an anonymous comment; it would be nice if people at least left their name.

Anyway, what catches my attention is how some people mix things up. In a debate someone says:

“Fernando Ubiergo has always been closer to the ideology of the SGAE than to that of free culture”

The Mago de Oz plagiarism

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 20:19:34 +0000

It’s unbelievable. Compare for yourselves:

‘PARA ELLA’ (1989) Mago de Oz

CUANDO AGOSTO ERA 21′ (1978) FERNANDO UBIERGO

Se escondía en los viejos pilares de la escuela para esconder al niño que pronto iba a llegarfue difícil esconder en un pobre delantal los tres meses, de más Y se fue a ver al cura que le dijo era pecado y luego a un abogado le habló de lo ilegal mientras el profe de ciencias le hablaba de la inconsciencia de la juventud actual Los que juzgan sin sentido el amor y el dolor y en el vientre más latidos que su pobre corazón

The video of Saddam Hussein's hanging

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 12:26:15 +0000

Since I know some search engine may have brought you here, be warned: I don’t have the video of Saddam’s death. I know where I could find it, but I’m not interested.

As Marco says

“We can all argue in public about whether or not we agree with the death penalty, whether it is justice on one hand or society’s revenge on the other. But everyone will hide their face so as not to confess the shame of having to reveal the “private vice” of desperately hunting for a link where they can watch the fatal moment, anonymously and pleasurably, behind a keyboard, hopefully at the highest resolution possible, ideally with audio. There is not much difference from the Jacobin mob that stoned and insulted those condemned to the guillotine on the way to the Place de la Concorde, or the bourgeois dressed up in a Phrygian cap who paid fortunes for a place on the balconies. The differences disappear at the moment of cheering and applauding as the heads roll into the basket.”

Ways to cut a computer's boot time

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 08:01:29 +0000

“Computers take too long to boot up, and it doesn’t make sense to me. Mine takes around 30 seconds; it is double or triple that for some of my friends’ computers that I have used. Why can’t a computer turn on and off in an instant just like a TV? 99% of boots, my computer is doing the exact same thing. Then I get to Windows XP with maybe 50 to 75 megs of stuff in memory. My computer should be smart enough to just load that junk into memory and go with it. You could put this data right at the very start of the hard drive. Whenever you do something with the computer that actually changes what happens during boot, it could go through the real booting process and save the results. Doing this would also give you instant restarts. You just hit your restart button, the computer reloads the memory image, and you can be working again. Or am I wrong? Why haven’t companies made it a priority to have ‘instant on’ desktops and laptops?”

Why do computers take so long to boot?

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 02:50:50 +0000

It’s a good question. An anonymous Slashdot reader asks:

Why Do Computers Take So Long to Boot Up?

In English the startup process is called bootstrapping.

“Bootstrap is the English term for a loop made of leather or sturdy cloth attached to the back of tall boots. Pulling hard on the bootstrap lets you get the boot onto your foot.”

The term is old, and comes from the days when you needed a small program that could load bigger programs into the computer’s memory from cards or a paper tape. I have a childhood memory of my father showing me a computer terminal into which he fed one of these punched tapes, like the one in the picture.

Maputhungun, the Mapuche oral tradition

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:15:10 +0000

Warning, this post is dangerous, because at the end I’m going to explain a mechanism for “usurping” the Mapuche language.

Letter from the Mapuche people to Bill Gates

The statements by Aucán Huilcamán, Werkén (spokesman) of the Consejo de Todas las Tierras, are unbelievable:

“I am not against the internet, I am defending a collective right that belongs to us as a people, as a culture, and it is the speakers who should make the decision on whether or not we want Mapudungún to be on the Internet.”

The first Chilean web entrepreneur

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 08:25:11 -0300

“When King Arthur’s knights decided to set out in search of the Holy Grail, they gathered at the edge of the forest and agreed to enter through those places that had no marked path; the bravest chose the thickest, darkest spot as their starting point.” Safe, well-traveled roads offer no challenges, and it is challenges that make you grow, create, innovate.

“The Chalice was never found, but for centuries people spoke of the feats of King Arthur’s knights in their quest”
If you fail in your venture, better that your failure be a magnificent one!

Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistris

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 09:53:46 +0000

Thus spoke Zarathustra:

Now, dear disciples, I go on my way alone. You too, go your own way, alone. That is my will. My advice, truly, is that you get away from me and avoid me; better still, that you be ashamed of me, because who knows whether I have deceived you. The man of knowledge must not only know how to love his enemies, he must also hate his friends. One repays a teacher badly by always remaining his disciple. Why don’t you pluck the leaves from my crown? You venerate me; but what if one fine day your veneration comes crashing down? Take care that my statue does not crush you! You say you believe in Zarathustra; but what does that matter to Zarathustra? You are my believers, but what do all believers matter? You found me before you had gone looking for yourselves. That is what happens to all believers; that is why their faith is worth so little. Now I command you to lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I be among you again. Then I will seek my lost sheep with different eyes, my brothers; and then I will love you with a different love.

Linus Torvalds the pragmatist

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 20:14:29 +0000

There is a very telling sequence in the documentary Revolution OS. Stallman is “thanking” the audience for the first “Linus Torvalds Award”, and he delivers one of his clever lines: it’s “like giving the Han Solo award to the Rebel Alliance.”

This whole controversy is a waste of energy.

Stallman has insisted on talking about “GNU plus Linux”. I think it’s better to say Linux plus GNU, the same way we can say Linux plus Apache; we even have the famous acronym: LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql PHP).

Linus Torvalds and the GPL v3

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:25:11 -0300

For days I’ve had this translation of Linus Torvalds’s position on the GPL V3 sitting around, and now I’ve finished it, so here goes another translation job: The English original is at: http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/9/25/161

Date, Mon, 25 Sep 2006 09:50:20 -0700 (PDT) From Linus Torvalds Subject: Re: GPLv3 Position Statement

On Mon, 25 Sep 2006, Michiel de Boer wrote:

I support the current draft of the GPL version 3 and am very dissapointed it will not be adopted as is. IMHO, Linux has the power and influence to move mountains in the software industry, and shouldn’t shy away from the opportunity to take moral responsibility when it arises.

Rereading Nietzsche

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 11:03:40 +0000

I’m rereading Zarathustra. What a great writer Nietzsche is. As Vicente Huidobro said, “what matters is not Nietzsche’s truth, but Nietzsche’s Nietzscheness”.

“Rebellion is the mark of the slave”

Of course: the free man has no need for rebellion.

Khalil Gibran put it another way, in The Prophet:

And an orator said, Speak to us of Freedom. And he answered:

At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom, Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them. Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff. And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfilment.

Being free

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 08:47:51 +0000

“Responsibility arises from the commitment we take on by being loyal to other people, to the task we’ve been entrusted with. But this presupposes a certain measure of freedom. Only someone who was free to take on the commitment is responsible.” (*)

Today my youngest daughter turns 5. Yesterday we threw her a birthday party and she was the happiest girl in the world.

And me with a headache that barely let me stay awake. Seeing her happy comforted me through the pain. I’ll probably have to go to the dentist, and work up the courage to finally have my wisdom teeth pulled, which must be to blame for this awful pain.

Software as a tool

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 16:57:01 +0000

To enable means “to make someone or something skilled, fit or able for a particular thing”.

Tools enable.

Personally, I can’t “drive a nail” without a hammer, although I’ve seen people use their bare fists to do it. The hammer enables me with a capacity my hand doesn’t have (and doesn’t pretend to have :wink:

Same with scissors: although I can cut paper with my fingers, I probably won’t be able to cut a piece of cloth so easily, and besides, the cut will come out better with this tool.

Kandinsky and the functional argument

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 19:22:00 +0000

When you first approach a work of abstract art, like this beautiful painting by Kandinsky, the first thing you usually ask yourself is “what is this?”, or also what did the painter mean to express?.

Some approach it naively, some reject this kind of art.

Others give up on the questions and devote themselves to appreciating it aesthetically.

For Kandinsky a work of art was effective if it arose from an inner need of the artist and if the artist’s original impulse is evoked in the viewer through the artwork and its reception.

Hot rods

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 19:27:40 +0000

Hot Rods are hand-built cars, usually made from some old car (usually a Ford). The original idea was to improve the car’s performance by reducing its weight (removing the roof, the windshield, etc.), lowering it, swapping or tuning the engine, fitting wider wheels, and of course painting it in loud colors.

There’s a whole subculture around this “art”, and it’s reaching our country, mainly thanks to the popularity of several cable shows.

Jefferson's letter (2)

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 22:17:20 +0000

Thomas Jefferson, like every human being, had contradictions, some of which have been harshly criticized by his fellow citizens. How is it possible that the man who “wrote all men are created equal” owned slaves, and was a racist on top of that. For those interested in Jefferson’s contradictions, this article (it’s in English) can be very educational.

To me, many of his ideas look very similar to those held by the English proto-socialists Isaiah Berlin tells us about in “The Sense of Reality” (Editorial Taurus, Alfaguara 1998). In the end Jefferson aspired to the end of the regulating or interventionist state and aspired to absolute freedom for citizens. He can hardly be branded a hard-line capitalist, which is how Galli’s article presents him. Jefferson’s political ideas are not very deep; John Adams and James Madison tried several times to tell him that his efforts in political philosophy were superficial and suffered from a very juvenile naivety (see The Contradictions of Thomas Jefferson)

Jefferson's letter (1)

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:22:57 +0000

Ricardo Galli has published an article called Los empresarios y la “propiedad intelectual” (Businessmen and “intellectual property”). Some elements of his argument are wrong, and I’m taking the liberty of setting the record straight in this article. I’m not accusing Ricardo Galli of anything, because he probably doesn’t know he’s mistaken, but it so happens that the story of Thomas Jefferson’s letter, used so many times as an argument, has to be reexamined in light of its context and of how it came to be written.

Humanware?

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 08:25:11 -0300

Is Fundación Chile sending SPAM?

I got an email that supposedly comes from Fundación Chile, though it’s actually sent by imacom, with an “invitation” to a seminar on HumanWare.

Besides the fact that I don’t like SPAM, and that I hope this time the people at imacom really do remove me from their lists, I want to take the opportunity to save you CLP 320,000 (550 dollars), which is what the seminar costs.

Windows in Mapudungun released

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 13:44:17 +0000

If you have Windows XP, you can download the Mapudungun localization (Mapudungun is the language of the Mapuche people) here.

I don’t use Windows XP, so if anyone can download it and tell me how well it works, that would be welcome.

When you visit Microsoft’s download site, you read:

Windows® XP Mapudungun Peniewün kütxün Descripción rápida Kewün peniewün kütxün (LIP) Windows XP Professional gealu ka Windows XP Home Edition wüli kiñe pünekelu peniewün lof lef merkazogealu kam inayelelu.

Digital Maoism 3

Sat, 28 Oct 2006 20:51:28 +0000

Here is the third and final part of my translation of Jaron Lanier’s article Digital Maoism.

Digital Maoism

(continuation and conclusion, published in The Edge on May 30, 2006)

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.

Please fix me!

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 11:06:12 +0000

This is the cry for help of a machine in trouble: Please Fix me!

It’s Friday, time to relax and laugh before we carry on with the translation of Lanier’s brainy essay. I leave you this photo of a device asking to be fixed.

It’s a Handkey reader that one of our customers reported as failing. This is a machine with feelings.

Here’s another picture:

Have a good start to your weekend.

Digital Maoism 2

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:06:47 +0000

We continue the translation of Jaron Lanier’s essay on what he calls “Digital Maoism”. In the first part Lanier tells us the story of his Wikipedia biography. It’s ironic how the creator of virtual reality fell into an alternate reality, where he was systematically listed as a film director. Today the Wikipedia article is fixed, so at least he got something out of this essay.

In this part Lanier introduces the concepts of the hive mind and meta-aggregation, and criticizes the value of sites like Digg, Reddit, Meneame, Fresqui or BlogMemes.

Digital Maoism

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 17:32:54 +0000

Jaron Lanier is one of the pioneers in biometrics and other fields I work in. I once read that after reading William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, Lanier had the idea of putting the notions of cyberspace into practice, and creating the concept of “Virtual Reality”.

Lanier recently wrote a controversial essay: Digital Maoism in The Edge. The essay is long but quite interesting and provocative.

We’re going to try to translate it, or at least some fragments. Here is the first part, which is entertaining and has to do with my previous post about WikiPediaMan. I hope you enjoy it.

How to improve software developers' performance

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 12:15:15 +0000

Here is one way to raise the productivity of the programming team.

This is developing in Java with Java in your veins.

:smile:

original source, an IBM ad on the second page of this issue of SD Times: http://www.sdtimes.com/download/images/SDTimes160.pdf

Solving problems (1)

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 21:21:13 +0000

How do you tackle problems?

It seems a lot of people are unable to tackle problems, unable to solve them. That is the call to inaction:

“If the problem has a solution, worrying is no use, and if the problem has no solution, worrying is no use.”

(See Problematic sayings)

Some problems are so thorny that any solution can have bad consequences. For example, President Bachelet’s decision on Chile’s vote at the UN. The president decided to abstain. Did she dodge the problem? If she voted in favor she would be criticized, if she voted against she would be criticized, and for this abstention she will be criticized.

Problematic sayings

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:46:36 +0000

In life there are no problems, only solutions we haven’t found yet.

Having problems is a way of getting better every day. Dare to face them!

Emergency Principle: if you keep calm while everyone else is losing their heads, you clearly haven’t grasped the problem.

I know of no better motivation than problems.

The problems don’t matter, the solution does.

The solution is in the problem.

If the problem has a solution, worrying is no use, and if the problem has no solution, worrying is no use.

WikiPediaMan, or the rise of the new pseudo-intellectual pedant

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 08:25:11 -0300

“I distrust the man of a single book”
– attributed to Thomas Aquinas

Forgive me if I quote the author of Tom Sawyer from memory, but it’s good to exercise your memory, to hold on to old phrases and quotes read in good books. Something that is being lost.

A while ago someone argued against me using the WikiPedia as a source. It isn’t the first time it has happened; last year, when we were discussing the ULPN project, the Spanish Wikipedia’s definition of computer was used to suggest that what was actually being built was a device.

Ten commandments for the Klingon programmer

Sat, 07 Oct 2006 11:08:39 +0000

Defensive programming? Never! Klingon programs are always on the offensive. Yes, offensive programming is the best way to do it.
Specifications are for the weak and the timid.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert unless you have read it in the original Klingon.
What is all this about “releasing” software? Klingons do not release software. Our software “escapes”, leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.

How much will it cost to get off the Boletín Comercial?

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 00:08:23 +0000

For many Chilean debtors, September 11 of this year brought good news, which has had little press coverage and whose implications have hardly been explained.

The government amended Decree 950, which regulates the Boletín Comercial, Chile’s registry of unpaid debts, run by the Santiago Chamber of Commerce.

The amendment establishes that if a debtor pays what he owes, or clears a bounced check or protested note, he won’t have to pay extra money to disappear from the Boletín Comercial’s database, which many stores and financial institutions use to assess the risk of giving someone credit.

Not so Smarty

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 20:24:38 +0000

Ricardo Galli is right: if you use Smarty, the performance hit is high. I’ve read here and there that Smarty is efficient, but you surely have to be a guru at it to get what was promised.

In the case of Blogmemes, 80% of a page’s rendering time goes to Smarty, and I’m talking about server time only. This is a problem I’ve put off for lack of time, and because blogmemes’ traffic doesn’t justify it. It affects the user experience all the same, and maybe it’s time to roll up our sleeves and dig in.

Knuth and paper

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 22:25:18 +0000

Don’t think I’ve forgotten the problem of paper use. What happened is that I ran into Knuth’s lecture and couldn’t resist translating it and publishing it.

But I also remembered a peculiar fact about Knuth, which is that he doesn’t use email. The explanation is on his website, in one of the frequently asked questions.

For example, the image that goes with this post is one of Knuth’s answers to a questionnaire that was sent to him and published in Free Software Magazine.

Knuth answers all questions

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:25:11 -0300

We all have our personal heroes, representative men, especially from the field we work in.

One of my oldest personal heroes is the professor and programmer Donald Knuth.

Author of the famous Art of Computer Programming, and a great programmer. Creator of Metafont and TeX, used by thousands of scientists today to publish their papers.

Donald Knuth is professor emeritus at Stanford University, and probably the oldest geek in existence. For example, the version numbers of TeX approach the transcendental number Pi: the first version was 3, the second 3.1, the third 3.14, and so on. He also has the habit of paying 2.56 dollars for every error found in his books (because “256 cents is one hexadecimal dollar”).

Paper will take anything

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 13:03:39 +0000

Of all the uses of paper, this one seems the strangest. The RSStroom Reader is “a toilet paper dispenser that hands you paper printed with random posts from RSS, so that before using the paper you can read a little and be up to date on everything.” That’s how it is described by “Mardito’s blog: Los Links del Día”

The truth is that this is a fictitious product, created by a blogger with a lot of imagination.

Less paper?

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 22:25:35 +0000

In prehistoric times 60% of the Earth’s land surface was covered by forests; today that is down to 30% and still shrinking.

A million pages not printed saves 85 pulp-producing trees.

Producing a ton of paper takes roughly 1,400 liters of oil.

Americans use so much paper in a year that you could build a paper wall 3.6 meters high from New York to California.

(source: http://www.lisashea.com/lisabase/aboutme/paperusage.html)))

The truth is that paper use has gone up as a result of the use of IT.

Graceful degradation

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:10:55 +0000

After reading the excellent article by Francotirador about promoting Firefox, it seems to me that besides promoting its use we need to wake up Chile’s web service providers. They need to realize that there are a lot of users on other, different browsers.

A while ago I tried to pay my electricity and water bills on a popular site that offers that service, using Firefox, and I simply couldn’t. The javascript didn’t work.

Chile at IOI 2006

Sat, 02 Sep 2006 17:36:39 +0000

Regarding the news about Chile’s participation in the IOI, here is a message I received from Arturo Cepeda, Chairman of IOI2006, whom I asked about it. The reason I asked was that, in spite of the news story, our country’s team doesn’t show up with any medal in the official medal table.

The reason is clear from Mr. Cepeda’s reply. It isn’t exactly what the El Mercurio piece says, but we should be proud of our team’s participation all the same.

Time

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 21:45:23 +0000

Ricardo leaves me a note about this blog’s anniversary. Carlos asks me what’s going on, since I haven’t written in a while.

My answer to both is that work has been very intense these last few weeks, and I’m also reorganizing how I use my time.

As they say, a blog is like a shark: it has to keep moving, or it dies.

But this blog won’t die, least of all now that Jens Hardings sends me this news story about Chile’s participation in the IOI 2006, which apparently has to be taken with a grain of salt because, as almost always, the journalists didn’t do their job properly. But we’ll look at that over the weekend (hint: check the official IOI site).

Windows in Quechua

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:29:12 +0000

The headline in La Razón:

“Windows in Quechua dazzles the ruling party. The president of the Constituent Assembly and the Foreign Minister were at the Microsoft launch yesterday, in Sucre. The multinational has a plan to promote native languages; it will train 900 teachers.”

Contrast that with the Chilean attitude toward Mapudungun.

Mapuche communities reject Microsoft’s proposal

The idea of producing a Windows operating system in Mapudungun has stirred up strong opposition among groups and representatives of the Mapuche world. The main voice against the system has been the werken (spokesman) and current presidential candidate Aucan Huilcaman, who said that the existence of this program damages indigenous sovereignty, since it was arranged behind the backs of the Mapuche communities.

Dante was wrong, Limbo doesn't exist

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 08:25:11 -0300

Was it a trick of Virgil’s? Remember that Dante descended into Hell, passed through Limbo, then spent time in Purgatory, and his beloved Beatrice guided him to Paradise.

The image that goes with this post is one of the beautiful drawings Doré made to illustrate the Divine Comedy. It shows Dante, Virgil and several figures from antiquity, such as Homer, Horace and Ovid.

But now it turns out the Vatican announces that Limbo doesn’t exist.

Eppur si muove

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 08:25:11 -0300

It turns out astronomers are no different from the rest of the users: “once the system is stable they bring in new requirements, and changes have to be made”.

I’m talking about the recent reclassification of Pluto, under which this celestial body stops being a planet and becomes a “dwarf planet”.

The reason is that the new definition requires a planet to have a gravitational field strong enough to clear the neighborhood around its orbit of other celestial bodies.

Motivation

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 21:37:38 +0000

It’s been a long time since I wrote on this blog, almost two months now. The thing is, we aren’t always motivated, or we have problems, or we simply don’t have the time.

According to the RAE, the Spanish language academy, motivation is “a preparatory mental rehearsal of an action, to encourage oneself or others to carry it out with interest and diligence”.

Without motivation, it’s very hard to do anything well, or with interest. So motivation matters a great deal if we are to “function” as people.

Investing in open source

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 13:41:03 +0000

“There is NO business model for open source. There is only one business model: sell for more than it cost you”

The words belong to Bill Roth, currently a vice president at BEA, who used to run OpenOffice back when he worked at SUN. A veteran open source developer, and a member of the original GCC team.

According to Roth, the open source community can’t sustain itself without heavy investment. Though the payoff will be big if companies invest in communities like the Apache Foundation, for example.

Watching the net for terrorists

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 07:21:31 +0000

Bruce Schneier posts on his blog the proof of why the mass data analysis used by the NSA (the US National Security Agency) is useless for detecting terrorists.

Floyd Rudmin, a professor at a Norwegian university, applies the mathematics of conditional probability, known as Bayes’ Theorem, to demonstrate that the NSA’s surveillance cannot successfully detect terrorists unless both the percentage of terrorists in the population and the accuracy rate of their identification are far higher than they are. The surveillance is, however, useful for monitoring political opposition and stymieing the activities of those who do not believe the government’s propaganda.

Errázuriz and González

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 17:03:39 +0000

The article ran in El Mostrador, Errázuriz and González: Chile’s dilemma, and it’s about how discrimination reaches all the way to the internet.

I don’t know if you remember Citizen Pérez, a study that tested how willing members of congress were to answer, by email, the questions sent in by an ordinary citizen, Citizen Pérez.

As is publicly known, a 2001 UNDP study on new technologies included an inquiry from a fictitious citizen called Juan Pérez, who emailed questions to members of the lower house to check how far the people’s representatives had taken up technology, and how well they listened and connected with citizens through new tools. This time the researchers added variables to the exercise and made the task more complex, turning Juan Pérez into two people, now called Pedro González and José Errázuriz. The names were no accident: they were meant to tie each surname to the social and cultural meanings it carries.

My brother

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 13:45:30 +0000

Today is my brother’s birthday. As always, my mother takes care of letting us know a week in advance. I don’t know if I’m too scatterbrained to bother with those details, or if deep down, like every brother, I enjoy fighting with him? Because my brother and I have very different views of the world. He is a man of Faith, I am not. He’s the cheerful one, I’m the pessimist. But he’s my brother, and I love him very much.

Inamible

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 11:48:54 +0000

You never know what lost gems you might stumble on while browsing the blogosphere, and it turns out I found a short story by the Chilean writer Baldomero Lillo that reflects how things were done, and are still done. I decided to copy it into this space and share it with those who didn’t know it, and for those who remember it, here it is:

Original source: http://www.ciudadseva.com/textos/cuentos/esp/lillo/inamible.htm

Inamible

by Baldomero Lillo

OLPC in Spain

Tue, 04 Jul 2006 11:27:53 +0000

The newspaper El País publishes an interview with Jim Gettys, vice president of the OLPC initiative. Here are a few of the questions; the article is on the El País website.

Question. What’s revolutionary about the laptop?

Answer. The idea of the personal computer for children. That every child has their own and learns with it, not only at school. That it doesn’t stay in the classroom.

Q. Do you have buyers yet?

Why I don't like being a victim

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 20:00:46 +0000

At the risk of getting myself into another mess, I have to say that this crime victims’ movement bothers me.

This morning I heard on the news that Gonzalo Fuenzalida was at Parque Arauco, the Santiago shopping mall, when the robbery of the Barros jewelry store took place, and that out of fear he decided to stop shopping and go home.

It turns out I was also walking into Parque Arauco at that hour, right in front of that very jewelry store. I saw the police running 50 centimeters from me, chasing the thieves; I even think I saw the brave officer who foiled the robbery. All very cinematic. I thought about taking pictures with my phone, but I thought better of it and didn’t; it struck me as morbid. And you know what? After the scare, I kept on shopping.

The requirements for Windows Vista

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 15:43:41 +0000

ArsTechnica has just published a piece on the requirements for Windows Vista.

For those who are interested, here’s a summary:

An 800 MHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and a DirectX 9.0-compatible graphics card.

However, OEM machines that want to carry the “Vista Premium” sticker must meet these specs:

HD Audio support that passes the High Fidelity tests defined by Microsoft’s labs.
Support for Direct3D 9 and DXGI (Direct3D 10 is mandatory by June 1, 2008).

Simple ways to avoid spam

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 22:09:57 +0000

Since my brother complains about the spam he gets, I decided to write up these brief tips for dealing with the plague of our times, SPAM.

Don’t use email.

This is the classic solution I call DON’T RAISE YOUR ARM. It comes from that story about the patient who tells the doctor:

Doctor, my arm hurts when I raise it. - Then don’t raise your arm, the doctor replies.

The truth is that if we used other email systems we wouldn’t have these problems, but history isn’t always progress, and the mail solution used on the internet today is built on a system that relied on trust among its users. When protocols like SMTP or POP were created, nobody gave much thought to the Internet being used commercially.

Pirates of Silicon Valley

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 12:20:56 +0000

I think I must be one of the few who remember when Bill Gates was seen as a hero, a young entrepreneur capable of bringing a giant like IBM to its knees.

Yes, back in the early 80s Bill Gates wasn’t the monster he is now. And in those days IBM were the bad guys.
Businessmen in collars, ties, fine suits and cufflinks. Bill Gates was a young nerd with bad breath who wore the same clothes every day, obsessed with taking his company to the top.

Sharing is good

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:46:32 +0000

I liked the short write-up at ameba. Above all the idea that blogmemes is a blog of blogs. (Although right now it looks like a video blog).

More and more I see it as a group blog rather than a social bookmarking site. There are two reasons to see it that way. The system is designed to promote debate, not childish bickering. And second, the system lets you write your own texts, and there are no limits on content. There’s no censorship either, although as administrator I’ve had to delete a few memes for being inappropriate.

The mark of the beast

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 12:16:03 +0000

A good way to get visits to your blog is to write about the end of the world. Today is 6/6/6, or June 6, 2006, a fateful date for many.

Ridiculous, if we consider that this happens every 100 years. But even giving Revelation some credit, 666 is the mark of The Beast, not a date. In fact, it isn’t The Beast, or the devil, but a different character: the second beast.

Something is rotten in Denmark

Tue, 30 May 2006 17:10:50 +0000

The meneame-fresqui controversy has gotten pretty ugly. But I have to say that this time I think Ricardo Galli has every reason to be ticked off.

Reading this post and the comment by Javier Perez (who is also a BlogMemes user), it seems that at Fresqui things haven’t been as transparent as they look.

It’s hard to judge without knowing the people involved, but Ricardo Galli, as insufferable as he can be, has a level of credibility that comes from his involvement in the FSF. Alex and I have exchanged a few very friendly emails, and I even offered to help with development for Fresqui, which was kindly declined.

Privacy

Sun, 28 May 2006 22:55:12 +0000

It’s been almost a month since I last wrote. But don’t suffer, I’m not going to ditch the blog. It so happens that life in the real world matters, especially if you have a salary to earn and work to do.

And plenty has happened these days. In the real world, my country is preoccupied with the high school student movement.

The people who robbed the camp my daughter was at have been arrested (see violence)

Violence

Fri, 05 May 2006 16:25:58 +0000

The truth is this year has brought me some bitter moments, like the crash.

A few days ago the class of my oldest daughter, Javiera (14), was violently robbed while camping near Valparaíso. My daughter in particular was threatened with guns and knives. The experience is quite traumatic, and forgive me for not going into much detail, but I’m in no mood to feed anyone’s morbid curiosity.

The truth is that violence is far too widespread in our society. Beyond the criminals, who act with ever greater violence, violence has spread among the rest of us too. Some say this actually happens because criminals often act while on drugs. It may be that drugs amplify it, and partly cloud the criminal’s mind, but that doesn’t justify it. The truth is I want the people who attacked my daughter and her classmates to get the punishment they deserve.

Oh no! Now it's La Tercera

Mon, 01 May 2006 13:42:24 +0000

I’ve been reading Guaquil, who writes on his blog about the third iteration of the website of La Tercera, the Chilean daily. I congratulate them, and I want to make clear that my criticism isn’t personal, since I don’t know them, nor is it aimed at their professional quality, which I consider remarkable, given that La Tercera’s site is a good site. But I’m afraid functional decisions have been made that hurt its usability.

Marxist Linuxists!!

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 18:35:26 +0000

For a good laugh, dedicated to all of you who use Linux, you Marxist-Leninists!! (oops, I use Linux too)

Via Fresqui

Originally published in English: http://shelleytherepublican.com/2006/04/linux-european-threat-to-our-computers.html

(The comments are mine and are in bold)

Linux is the cancer of America

By Shelley The Republican Shelley Goodman Iowa City, Iowa, United States

Like most things that are worth owning, Computers are an American invention. […]

I assume America includes those of us who live south of the Rio Grande. Iowa must be lovely

Books

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 22:02:57 +0000

Today is World Book and Copyright Day, and Ricardo has thrown me a challenge (a meme?), which consists of recommending a book.

Hard, mostly because I’ve read so much and it’s tough to choose. I don’t think this will be enough, so we’re going to create a specific category for recommending books.

Between science and myth

When a friend gave me “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, I had spent many years reading nothing but technology books and science fiction. It was while visiting his house, snooping around his library, that I found this book. That was how I first read Joseph Campbell. I had heard something about the book, since George Lucas mentions it as one of the most important influences on the creation of his Star Wars trilogy. The richness of mythology, the value of myths and of rites in our society are condensed in this small book, which is a foretaste of Campbell’s great work, “The Masks of God”, my second recommendation. This is a thick work, in 4 volumes, that explores mythology along two dimensions, the historical and the geographical.

The doomsday machines (2)

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 10:25:42 +0000

When I published my first article on the doomsday machines, it was an excuse to talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI).

I’ve received good comments, some on the blog and others in private. So thanks to everyone.

We’re going to continue with the subject, but I warn you that this is a looooong series.

For lack of time this post will be a short one, but it’s fundamental for what follows, and if I take a while to publish, be patient: one has to work to pay for the blog’s hosting.

The doomsday machines

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 08:25:11 -0300

I read with astonishment a post by my brother about a chain letter that announces the end of the world for this June 6 of this year (6/6/6).

Apart from being an interesting numerical coincidence, what reasons are there to think the world has to end?

The end, courtesy of technology

The truth is that the end of the world has been announced many times, and not only by religious fanatics.

Users or creators?

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 11:09:20 +0000

Many of you may know the Atina Chile movement. Well, they have launched a campaign called “Let’s Teach Wikipedia in Chile’s Schools”.

It’s a good initiative, but I’m afraid kids will only be taught to use Wikipedia, and I don’t know whether they’ll be taught to contribute to Wikipedia, which is the most important and valuable part.

I don’t know that for a fact; I’m only passing judgment based on what I read in the piece, and above all on this other piece: http://www.atinachile.cl/node/10075

A discussion about free software

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 09:50:55 +0000

Carlos sent me a comment on my previous article, “Forgive me, Saint Ignucius”.

That post grew out of a comment, in the context of the clone wars, but since I respect Carlos a lot, and since we both decided it would be interesting to debate free software, I’m going to publish his email first; later, probably this weekend, I’ll write up a reply.

A note for those not used to reading email threads: when Carlos wants to quote me, he prefixes the line with the ‘>’ sign.

Forgive me, Saint Ignucius!!!!

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 16:47:16 +0000

Juanjo Marín left me this comment:

“The FSF is the recognized point of reference for determining what free software is. I think you are contradicting yourself by supporting free software on the one hand and loathing the ideology behind it, which basically consists of defending the freedoms it implies.

P.S.: If you think Richard Stallman is not a suitable representative to speak about Free Software, get that looked at. If you don’t like him, fine, but you have no right to dismiss his importance within free software.”

An email from Ricardo Galli

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 12:14:25 +0000

I got this email from Ricardo Galli. You be the judge.

—–Original Message—–

From: Ricardo Galli [– removed –]

Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2006 10:16 AM

To: – removed –

Subject: Security problems in Blogmemes

Hi Eduardo, I see that on blogmemes they keep finding ever more “pleasant” words for me. Especially on the subject of the attack on menéame, where they haven’t held back one bit.

Well, I wasted 15 minutes looking at the Blogmemes code (version 0.4.2.21) and found very serious security problems and bugs (many more than menéame had). Above all SQL injection, due to the lack of validation of the GET or POST variables.

A css hack

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 10:27:48 +0000

This tip may be useful for designers: I just wrote up, over at métodos, a hack to get around an Internet Explorer bug. It turns out IE doesn’t support the min-height attribute, which makes a lot of divs “fall apart” in Internet Explorer.

That was the case with Blogmemes, which had this problem on several pages. With this simple hack it’s solved, and with that we squash a little bug that had been bothering us for a while.

The sex life of the giant squid

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 15:50:58 +0000

The famous security expert Bruce Schneier has developed an obsession with giant squid. In a recent article, he tells us about the strange sexual habits of the giant squid. The truth is I wouldn’t want to be a male of this species.

Intelligence as capital

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 02:14:04 +0000

The debate between copyright and copyleft gets more absurd every day. In the eagerness to defend us from evil copyright, its mirror image has been created and promoted. In the end all polarization only creates more problems. That urge toward dualism in man, which we removed from our transcendent beliefs only to leave it in our mundane ones, leads us into these eternal struggles between good and evil.

Google alerts always surprises me with interesting articles, and this time I ran into this one, which I’ll reproduce here (I don’t think its author will mind). The original was found at this address: http://www.acam.es/noticias_detalle.php?id=1397.

Wifi in Chile grew 120% in 2005

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 19:54:27 +0000

Public Internet connection spots, or hotspots, in Chile grew 120% during 2005, reaching 678 connection points across the country, according to the Wi-Fi map compiled by the Center for Digital Economy Studies of the Santiago Chamber of Commerce (CCS).

Public Wi-Fi access reaches 678 points

Source: Santiago Chamber of Commerce

Checking your email from a café, confirming a hotel reservation from the airport or the bus terminal, sitting down to work on your computer in a metro station, a park or the university courtyard, is an increasingly common practice in our country. According to the Wi-Fi map compiled by the CCS Center for Digital Economy Studies, the number of public hotspots registered in Chile reached 678 in 2005, of which 49% are located in the Metropolitan Region and “light up” 0.13% of the capital’s surface area.

An interview with the creators of BloGalaxia

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:57:39 +0000

When you visit blogalaxia.com you come away surprised. It’s an extraordinarily well-made site, useful, addictive, and I think it’s going to become the mandatory reference point of the Spanish-speaking (or Spanish-writing?) blogosphere.

Behind blogalaxia are two young Peruvian entrepreneurs who have some interesting ideas about web 2.0, which they shared with me in a recent interview. I invite you to meet the creators of BloGalaxia.

The interview

This interview was done by email. I have to thank Javier and Bruno for their kindness in taking the time to answer my questionnaire.

10 years of cyberspace independence

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 12:43:29 +0000

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Freedom

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 09:42:32 +0000

Ricardo offers a reflection on freedom, prompted by the ruckus between blogmemes and meneame.

He’s a philosopher, and this is a subject that has been debated for centuries. Are we human beings free?

The question matters, because it defines the limits of ethics. Aristotle asks it, and says we’re free only up to a point. Sterner ones, like Spinoza, argue that since we are part of the essence of God, freedom lies in accepting his will, which means that deep down we can’t be free in the everyday sense of the word.

Pay it no mind

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 21:26:48 +0000

They say Facundo Cabral once said:

“in general people are good, there are a few jerks, but most people are good

The truth is I already explained that blogmemes and meneame have different design philosophies.

Menéame has positive and negative voting. Blogmemes has only positive voting.

Menéame has karma. Blogmemes has free will :)

The meneame community frowns on self-promotion. I don’t frown on it, but I don’t know what the blogmemes community will think.

Blogmemes and meneame, two different systems

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 08:25:11 -0300

A new release of akarru went out today.
Lots of bugs fixed.

However, anyone who visits blogmemes will see that we have new features that are not in this release of akarrú. The thing is, the new features have to do with FeedBurner, and they are tightly tied to blogmemes data. We’re going to make that support more generic and fold it in later.

A bit of Blogmemes history

You can read the history of Meneame on Ricardo Galli’s blog, and it’s really interesting, because he has documented his process for us.
It’s interesting to me because I didn’t know Ricardo, and I didn’t know about his project while he was coding it.

My five (weird?) habits

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 10:09:11 +0000

As if crashing my car hadn’t been enough, now I’ve been infected with this meme by Carlos.

Well, here are my 5 weird habits:

Buying notebooks and planners and never using them. I’m always buying some notebook to take notes in, and I never get past the third page. In the end my kids, or my wife, end up using them.
Programming on Tritón cookies and coffee. They’re the best for staying focused :) and the worst for heartburn :(

Accident

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 15:39:45 +0000

Your life can change in a second. One moment you’re driving down the highway and the next you’re flipped over, not really understanding what happened.

Yesterday I had a car accident. Fortunately I was alone and nobody got hurt. I only got a couple of scratches and I’m a little sore.

You’ll understand that this will keep me offline for a while. You have to reflect on these things, why they happen, and learn from them. For now I need to rest.

Free software as ideology

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 12:25:11 -0300

I’ve been asked to clarify my position, as if everything I’ve written in my time as a blogger weren’t enough.

Since I’ve always wanted to write at length about my view of libre software, and about how it is in danger, I’m going to lay out my position in a series of articles. Let’s see if it stops being dismissed as nonsense. Of course at the end I’ll answer Ricardo Galli, but I like to keep you in suspense :)

Free software is an ideology

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 12:25:11 -0300

Free software is Stallman’s ideology, period.

The publication of GPL3 confirms it.

It’s curious how, in the name of freedom, freedom has to be restricted, and GPL3 is exactly that, a way of restricting my freedom. Personally, I published Akarru under GPL2, but having to publish my private keys, or limit the field of use of my applications, as GPL3 proposes, doesn’t sit well with me.

I’m reminded of the famous hippie slogan from the sixties: “it is forbidden to forbid”. GPL3 is not only ridiculous, it unmasks what we all suspected, that Stallman is really Stalinman.

The root of all evil

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 13:40:39 +0000

You can consider this post an intermezzo.
I think many of the arguments about free software grow out of the legal side of copyright, or copyleft. The truth is that none of these arguments would exist if it weren’t for those sinister characters who fill our heads with repugnant ideas and are always looking for ways to stir up lawsuits. I mean lawyers.

That’s why I’m leaving you this excerpt from Gulliver’s Travels, so you can have a little fun (I hope I don’t get sued :)

1.3 billion mouths to feed

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 06:06:27 +0000

This is something I’ve been mulling over for a looooong time, and it actually started when I saw an episode of the show The Nature of Things (from which I plagiarized the name of this blog).

That TV show laid out the consequences of an idea the Chinese government had: increasing the amount of protein the Chinese eat. Doing it with meat is, of course, extremely expensive, so the proposal was to give every Chinese person a couple of eggs a week.

An interview with the founder of Digg.com

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 19:26:52 +0000

Since I’m very interested in this subject, for obvious reasons, I decided to translate the interview with Kevin Rose, founder of digg.com.

Interview with Kevin Rose

You can read the original interview (in English) on Jonathan Cohen’s site, Philoneist.

It opens like this:

What is “important news” and can the internet public be relied on to “digg” it?

Important news is news that is relevant to a specific community. Rather than having those editorial decisions made by a very limited number of people, digg lets the community decide. We believe in the wisdom of crowds.

Influence, popularity and relevance

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 15:10:19 +0000

I’ve been wrapped up in 2 problems:

The first is the problem of promoting posts on blogmemes to the top of the queue.
The other problem is how to encourage user participation.

The first problem has to do with relevance, and the second has to do with **influence **and popularity.

Let me explain. A story published on blogmemes has to be interesting to be on the front page. But it’s not enough for it to be interesting in itself. Blogmemes is a democratic system, so what matters is the degree of active and passive user participation with the story. So an article’s popularity is not enough. The right concept for ordering the stories on the front page has to do with relevance.

New akarru release

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 11:50:00 +0000

Today we published release 0.2.1.19 of akarru. You can get it from sourceforge

Changes in this version

version 0.2.1.19

From now on, version numbering will work as follows:

X.x.M.D

Where X is the major version number and x the minor version number, always incremental. M is the month and D the day the distribution was created.

This version includes several bug fixes. Some new things:

primitive trackback discovery
the folksonomy now shows only the top 100 tags
user statistics (stats.php)
influence and popularity
experimental meme promotion algorithm
promote_queue script, runnable by the admin
several DB changes to improve performance

The OLPC specifications

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 13:35:34 +0000

Carlos tells us about a meeting of the OLPC design team.

Interesting. I’m going to read it carefully and, above all, take a look at the project wiki.

For the skeptics: the project is still alive and kicking.

The new standard icon

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 08:54:24 +0000

Working with the Feedburner APIs: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/developers I discovered that the icon firefox uses has become a standard.

This is good, because now we’ll all know where the feeds are. While I’m at it, here’s a gift: if you want this cool icon to show up in the firefox bar, you need to add this code:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="{#url_feeds#}" />

where you must replace {#url_feed#} with the address your feed comes from.

New BlogMemes, new design, new engine

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 17:12:23 +0000

Well, after several weeks of writing code, remembering how to program in PHP, and thanks to the help of Radu, Parinas, Shezzo and Huasonic, we have a new, more complete blogmemes.

I want to thank everyone who has helped me, reported bugs and suggested improvements.

Later on we’ll add new features, which we hope you’ll like. For now, I think the addition of tags is an interesting innovation.

The source code will be published on sourceforge during the coming week. At that point I’ll write about some of the things I learned, and I hope to write a critique of PHP and mysql that I hope will be useful to the developers who read me.

Negroponte, Flores and OLPC

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 11:08:00 +0000

I quote Fernando Flores: _

“I have no doubt, regardless of whether his computer succeeds, that two things are clear: first, the people working with him, highly respected in the academic world; and second, that it is going to produce a disruptive innovation. Today only 50 million laptops are sold in the world, and Negroponte thinks that by 2008 it will be 150 million, three times as many.” “We have to keep monitoring this because it is going to have effects in Chile. For now we have to invent projects and prepare for what would happen if every child in a working-class school had a computer. What phenomena would occur? What challenge does it pose for teachers?”

Microsoft donates 25,000 dollars to Creative Commons

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 10:56:51 +0000

It’s true, Microsoft sent a 25,000 dollar check to the Creative Commons organization. Lessig himself points it out on his blog.

I hope this year brings more news as good as this.

Optimists always see the glass half full, though of course they don’t tell you what it’s full of….

Protection against the latest Windows vulnerability

Fri, 30 Dec 2005 10:47:19 +0000

Some people say the best protection against the many vulnerabilities in Windows is not to use Windows. That’s like this old joke:

Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I raise my arms. Doctor: Then don’t raise your arms.

Since a lot of people use Windows (most people, actually), I’m going to give you a recipe against the latest Windows vulnerability.

The WMF file vulnerability

Files with the WMF extension are graphics files; in Office they’re used a lot in the famous clip art. These files contain instructions, and it was reported that it’s possible to execute code in privileged mode on machines running Windows 2003 and Windows XP. This would make it possible to install spyware, trojans, viruses, etc.

Gifts

Tue, 27 Dec 2005 18:55:04 +0000

The truth is I didn’t post a Christmas greeting because I was hoping to publish something more important; unfortunately it isn’t ready yet. But an unexpected gift dropped in thanks to blogmemes, and it’s this image of Herschel’s Christmas Tree. It sits in the constellation Monoceros (the unicorn), about 2,600 light-years from Earth.

Thanks to blogmemes I found out about NeoFronteras, which had this image, one of the satisfactions of this kind of project.

Argentina, Negroponte and the 300-peso computer

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 20:22:53 +0000

3 Argentine pesos make 1 dollar, hence the title. This is an interview with Negroponte in the newspaper Página 12. One interesting fact, the countries that will get the laptop first are:

In South America, Brazil and Argentina. In Africa, Egypt and Nigeria. And also India, China and Thailand.

Inherit the wind

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 14:39:16 +0000

Intelligent design is the new incarnation of fundamentalist creationism, which explains the origin of species according to the literal interpretation of the book of Genesis.

For years in the United States, fundamentalist groups have opposed the theory of evolution because they consider it false and contrary to the teachings of God. A judge ruled that teaching this doctrine is illegal in Pennsylvania. At least there’s now one less state that will carry on with this nonsense.

What is Web 2.0

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 11:11:48 +0000

What is Web 2.0

by Tim O’Reilly

The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web had been overhyped, when in fact bubbles and the shakeouts that follow them seem to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts usually mark the point at which a rising technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real winners show their strength, and everyone begins to understand what separates the one from the other.

The fun of programming

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 12:47:18 +0000

I’m very excited about blog memes; I’ve already lined up help from a designer friend to put together a logo. I’ve fixed several bugs in the original diggclone script, and I’m thinking about a substantial change within the next few days. The spare time I have to devote to this project is scarce, but those moments are very rewarding for an old programmer like me.

I like that we’re getting mentioned on some international blogs, and in connection with Yahoo’s purchase of del.icio.us.

Blog memes

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 14:03:49 +0000

This is a new project we’ve started at AmericaEscribe. For those who don’t know, AmericaEscribe is an aggregator of Latin American blogs. For now, that project’s sources are hand-picked at the discretion of a group of volunteer editors.

However, to make things more democratic, and because a good social bookmarking site in Spanish is badly needed, we’ve created BlogMemes.com, a clone of the famous Digg.com, but aimed at a more general scope.

We invite you to contribute the stories that interest you. To avoid spam, the site requires you to register first.

Verba Pública

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 19:54:02 +0000

I was reading a post by Jens Harding about good and bad habits in blogs. I call that “meta-blogging”. Writing about what’s going on in the blogosphere is one thing, and talking about how to blog is another, and as Jens says, that’s aimed at an audience that’s only just getting into blogs.

Personally, when I meta-blog, or write about the universe of blogs, I file my posts under the Blogosfera category.

Can you wipe the slate clean with a blog?

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 17:11:59 +0000

Carlos has decided to close Cazuela de Pingüino and reincarnate his blog as “El Diablo está en los detalles” (The Devil Is in the Details).

Over time many bloggers realize they want more expressive and creative freedom with their sites, and the need for a domain and a server of their own comes up spontaneously. At the end of the day, when you get into this blogging thing you want to experiment and not be limited by the blog service, however good it may be.

The Eolas case

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 17:11:59 +0000

Eolas stands for “Embedded Objects Linked Across Systems”. But in Gaelic it means wisdom.

The guys at Eolas have held a patentsince 1994 that covers embedding objects in internet browsers.

According to Eolas’s technology page, the patent covers “web browsers that support popular technologies such as ActiveX components, Java applets and browser plug-ins”.

Of course, once they had the patent they went after the biggest fish, taking on Microsoft first and winning some 500 million dollars, a story Francotirador covers at length.

Google's golden rules of management

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 14:33:46 +0000

In a recent Newsweek article, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, writes about the guidelines the company uses to manage itself. Strongly inspired by the ideas of Peter Drucker, Google’s main concern is its knowledge workers.

At Google, we think business guru Peter Drucker understood well how to manage the new generation of “knowledge workers”. After all, Drucker invented the term in 1959. He said that knowledge workers believe they are paid to be effective, not to work 9 to 5, and that the smartest businesses will have to clear away everything that gets in their workers’ way. Those that succeed in attracting the best will secure “the single biggest factor for competitive advantage in the next 25 years.”

The web application paradigm

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 10:12:47 +0000

The idea that you should only build web applications, and that this is the modern way to solve every need a company has, is causing more problems than it solves. It’s a paradigm you should try to avoid.

I’ve seen data-entry applications with forms of 100 fields to fill in, with two or three tabs pointing to pages with even more fields. After painfully typing in these forms, users press the submit button and their requests end up in Limbo, or wherever it is they go these days.

Good experiences with Nuestro PC

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 12:07:37 +0000

In mission accomplished, Francotirador tells, with understandable emotion, how Marcelo is weighing the purchase of a computer from the Nuestro PC plan.

What I like most about this campaign is the name, **Nuestro **PC (“Our PC”), an altruistic, communal name. Contrast it with the name of the other campaign, Mi Primer PC (“My First PC”), which sounds more selfish and aspirational.

I hadn’t read about the subject in a while, but it must be a source of pride for the guys who rallied behind the campaign to read mentions like the one published in La Segunda. Interestingly, according to the story, many users are going for the advanced version.

PInvoke.Net: Web 2.0 is for programmers too

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 14:44:23 +0000

What exactly is a Web 2.0 application?

There are plenty of ideas about what it is and what it isn’t, but I think PInvoke.Net is a great example of what a Web 2.0 application should be. In this case it’s a service aimed at programmers.

What is PInvoke.Net?

The definition of what it is can be found on its own site:

PINVOKE.NET attempts to reduce the difficulty of calling Win32 functionality (APIs) or other kinds of unmanaged code from applications written in managed code (in languages such as C# and VB .NET). Defining a function’s signatures in order to use PInvoke (also known as Declare statements in VB) is an error-prone process that can introduce extremely subtle bugs. The rules are complex, and if you make a mistake you will probably corrupt memory.

Ten reasons to love Microsoft

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 13:18:26 +0000

As the bolero goes, “Recuerda que tan solo se odia lo que es querido…” (you only hate what you have loved). Well, the guys at downloadsquadpublished a list of 10 reasons to love Microsoft (in English). The best part is the reminder of that failed project called BoB , led by Bill Gates’s girlfriend, Melinda French, now his wife . If anyone has the time to translate it, please send a trackback.

A hawk in penguin's clothing

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 09:00:31 +0000

Lockheed Martin selected RedHawk Linux from the company Concurrent for the THAAD tactical defense missile program. Concurrent’s real-time system will support the mission-critical testing of the defensive missiles.

Well, here’s one way to make money with open source: sell to the defense industry.

I don’t like it, but as far as I know the GPL doesn’t prevent this use.

Goodbye, John Vlissides

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 17:41:32 +0000

John Vlissides is probably one of the great inspirations behind modern software development.
After a long fight with cancer, he died on Thursday, November 24.

Vlissides is known mainly as a member of the famous “Gang of Four”, authors of the famous book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”, a bedside book for many of us, and the ones who defined design patterns, a great step forward for software development.

Challenging Einstein

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 11:01:55 +0000

“Einstein was wrong!”

The line belongs to Steven Bryant, an American businessman who, while preparing to go back to college and get a PhD in physics, claims he found serious problems in Einstein’s original papers.

With his own site, RelativityChallenge.com, and promotion through Google Ads, this gentleman has made quite a bit of noise with his theory, with which he aims to eliminate “the problems” of the theory of relativity, such as time dilation and the impossibility of traveling faster than light.

Social bookmarking and traffic

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 09:04:27 +0000

Social bookmarking is when people on the net use some service to keep their personal collection of links and share them with others. Users can also take other people’s links and add them to their own, or subscribe to other people’s lists.

This kind of service started with del.icio.us. It gave birth to a new term, folksonomy, a blend of folk (of the people, popular) and taxonomy. What happens is that in social bookmarking services you can categorize entries using labels, or tags. These tags build up taxonomies that let you classify topics based on the popularity they reach in these services.

Pointless fights

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 10:37:59 +0000

The truth is I’m not going to fight with Francotirador, for reasons that will become clearer further down.
I’m only going to argue one point, which is strictly technical; the rest is Christian’s opinion and he’s entitled to it.

The point is that the definition of computer and device is wrong, and citing Wikipedia only adds more confusion. If lacking a hard disk makes something a device, then what does Christian have to say about these machines? With a capacity of 2 terabytes, and no hard disk. What are they? Enlighten me, because with my 20 years as a computer engineer all I can say is that they’re notebooks, but who am I and who is CES to argue with a mouse.cl.

Setting things straight

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:12:45 +0000

I don’t know why Francotirador got upset when I told him he was a skeptic about the OLPC project, when his latest post proves it.

The truth is I’m perfectly clear on his position. Christian doesn’t believe the project will work because he doesn’t believe Negroponte.

OK, fine, but that doesn’t entitle him to insinuate that I’m one of Negroponte’s acolytes, writing things like:

..no Eduardo, unfortunately Negroponte doesn’t have answers for everything…

Using the blog to study

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 12:32:41 +0000

My oldest son posted the material for a biology test on his blog, and got a ton of visits from his classmates, along with the corresponding thanks from the ones who didn’t have the notes.

He told me that copying the material into his blog doubled as studying (nice excuse :).

Every generation uses the technology it has at hand. I remember that a couple of years ago the new thing was using cell phones to store cheat sheets or pass answers during tests; now many schools ban cell phones during tests.

Priorities or laziness?

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 11:53:12 +0000

Over at the blog an interesting discussion has broken out about how much of a priority OLPC should be. I’m not going to reproduce the discussion; I suggest you read it.

I just want to say that, in general, the negative, drag-everyone-down attitudes in our country come from the fact that we don’t believe in ourselves. Examples get mentioned, like the biology labs gathering dust.

The argument is that there are other priorities ahead of buying OLPC laptops, so it’s better to watch this project from the sidelines and not spend a peso on it, because first we have to feed the children before handing them a laptop.

Salamander legs

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 08:25:11 -0300

My maternal grandmother, who died recently, suffered from Alzheimer’s. When I learned she had it I got worried, because I assumed it was a genetic condition and that I therefore stood a chance of ending up with the same thing. The same happened to me with cancer, since my father and my paternal grandmother both died of it at around 40. I now know that statistically there is a 1 percent chance that I will develop that cancer, but I also know that the type of cancer in question is treatable today, and has a very good prognosis if it’s diagnosed in time, so I have to get my health checked fairly regularly. The bad part is that the exam is rather unpleasant. But in the case of Alzheimer’s the probability isn’t clear. The truth is that my grandmother’s daughters have a 50% chance of developing Alzheimer’s, but they must also carry certain mutations on chromosomes 1, 14 and 21. For me and my siblings the odds drop to 25%.

Mobility

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 08:11:28 +0000

I feel like Martin Fowler when he tells how he wrote a post on the way to Singapore. Because the neat thing about this post is that it’s being written on the way from Santiago to Valparaíso, and it will be posted via modem over GPRS, something Fowler can’t do. Of course, he’s flying business class on a jumbo, and I’m on a plain Tur Bus coach.

Mobile broadband

I have to say the cellular network is pretty good in general, and mobile broadband is quite decent and already reasonably priced. I connect using that Nokia marvel, the 6230, and the link between my notebook and the phone is Bluetooth. How cool is that :)

We have a prototype

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 18:15:10 +0000

I had already told you that on November 16 the ULPN project would be launched at WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) in Tunis. (Where internet governance was also discussed). In the Chilean delegation of the magnificent seven there was no official from the Ministry of Education, though there was one from Subtel (how interesting that we can follow the movements of our government officials). The rest are staff from the permanent mission in Geneva.

Jobs offered OS X for free to the ULPN project

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:49:04 +0000

A note before the news: please remember that this is an educational project, not the development of a cheaper notebook. The project is for the children, so please read the project’s FAQ before weighing in.

Jobs and Gates get involved

Steve Jobs offered Apple’s OS X operating system at no cost to the 100-dollar laptop project (ULPN).

But the offer was declined, because they want a 100% open source project, and they are already working with Red Hat. Meanwhile, last week Negroponte talked with Bill Gates and Craig Mundie (Microsoft’s CTO). They are looking at what kind of involvement they will have with the project.

Legal guide for Chilean bloggers

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 18:12:28 +0000

After the successful workshop on bloggers’ rights, the people at Derechos Digitales have published their legal guide for bloggers. It applies to Chilean law, just in case.

There’s one question I still have: if the blog isn’t hosted on Chilean territory, which laws apply?

How much is our democracy worth?

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 20:09:30 +0000

I just found out that close to 50% of the Chilean population eligible to vote doesn’t.

You can read a deeper reflection on my brother’s site. Since I’m the square one, I’m going to put up numbers.

“In the recent municipal elections, 4,565,000 people refrained from casting a valid vote (unregistered, registered who didn’t vote, spoiled and blank ballots), representing close to 44% of the total electoral universe, estimated at 10,500,000.”

Checking the results

Since I’m politically incorrect, I’m going to run the analysis on our favorite senator.

Crypto-biometrics

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 17:49:35 +0000

The marriage of biometrics and cryptography has taken a new step with the publication of the paper Fuzzy Vault for Fingerprints by U. Uludag, S. Pankanti and A. Jain of the Michigan State University Biometrics Research Group.

Essentially, the algorithm hides a 128-bit key in a new structure, the fuzzy vault, a virtual vault that doesn’t contain the key itself but the coefficients of a polynomial, which can only be reconstructed by acquiring the fingerprint minutiae.

The eight fallacies of distributed computing

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 14:03:06 +0000

By Peter Deutsch

The network is reliable
Latency is zero
Bandwidth is infinite
The network is secure
Topology doesn’t change
There is one administrator
Transport cost is zero
The network is homogeneous

Birthday

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 13:03:00 +0000

I turn 39 today. It’s been a good year overall, with its ups and downs, but with some rewards too.

I’m going to publish a post to be read 1 year from now. That’s the neat thing about some blogs: they let you set the future date on which the post will be published. We’ll read it when I’m 40.

There must be some 17,660,633 people having a birthday along with me!!

Everyone can win

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 12:47:22 +0000

The interesting thing about Web 2.0 is that we users have won back part of the power we had before Web 1.0. I mean, in particular, that blogs, wikis and all the other ways of publishing content let everyone contribute content for every taste.

But the other interesting thing is that those who publish can earn some of the money. Google’s business model is interesting because it lets you receive part of the earnings from its advertising system.

Linux/lupper

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 20:56:55 +0000

Well, the new Linux worm is exploiting the XML-RPC vulnerabilities that have been known for quite a while.

It affects sites running Drupal, WordPress, Xoops and, in general, almost anything with PHP and an unpatched XML-RPC.

The best way to check whether you’re infected is to look for the file /tmp/lupii, as well as a listening UDP port 7222, where the worm opens a back door…

Via Kriptópolis.

A historical note: the first known internet worm was created by Robert Morris in 1988 and affected Unix systems.

Legal aspects of blogging

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 10:18:40 +0000

Can you get into trouble for blogging? Of course you can.

I quote the EFF’s legal guide for bloggers:

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don’t want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that’s under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office. The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you’re doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn’t help - in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven’t yet decided how it applies to bloggers.

Tropically tolerant

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 07:27:11 +0000

No, the title has nothing to do with what you’re thinking.

This is a story I read in the August 2005 issue of Spectrum magazine: The African Hacker

The African hacker

Hermann Chinery-Hesse is the chief of the tribe. I mean Soft Tribe, a software development company in Ghana, a country whose democracy was restored about 5 years ago. Like many countries in Africa, it has plenty of basic infrastructure problems. Electricity, for example, goes out very often, and internet access is expensive.

Reply to Francotirador

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 19:34:51 +0000

Francotirador, Christian Leal, replies to my latest post about ULPN.

I pointed to Francotirador as a skeptic. There’s nothing wrong with being a skeptic, and it’s healthy for a society to have skeptics, but I think skepticism in Chilean society gets applied where it doesn’t belong, and sometimes with little basis.

In fact, I think there are too many skeptics in Chilean society, and the worst part is that they are skeptics with neither the grounds nor the knowledge to be so (that’s not Christian’s case).

ULPN 3

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 20:21:18 +0000

To wrap up this series on Un Laptop Por Niño, let’s see what Zuckerman has to tell us about the OLPC’s software, and how Alan Kay and Seymour Papert are collaborating on this project (what do the skeptics have to say about that? And what will Minister Bitar and Mr. Hugo Martínez think of it?

Software

The people at Red Hat are working on a special distribution for the laptop. They are also working on the graphical interface together with Seymour Papert and Alan Kay!! The development team has 18 people, including students of Kay’s at MIT.

ULPN 2

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 19:18:15 +0000

On the prototype, Zuckerman tells us, work is actively under way, and there is a demo scheduled for November 16 at WSIS. He got to see a sort of mockup in Negroponte’s office.

The system is designed to work in 3 modes: laptop mode, book mode and game mode.

The design seems to be still under discussion, but what Zuckerman saw looks a lot like the following image:

The prototype would be the size of a large book, with a rigid rubber bumper around the edges that can be folded out to form a stand. A non-trivial problem is the “hinges”, which have to allow some 340 degrees of freedom between the keyboard and the screen. According to Negroponte this part costs about 5 dollars, and it has a fairly complex mechanism to allow the rotation. The interesting part will be getting the cost of this part down to cents.

ULPN

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 18:46:47 +0000

This article is about a gadget that doesn’t exist, one we shouldn’t waste a single neuron on, according to our government. So going on with this is a waste of time, and I suggest you stop reading.

But if you believe the technological and intellectual gap can be narrowed, I invite you to keep reading about Un Laptop Por Niño.

Negroponte calls his project OLPC - One Laptop Per Child. A name that captures the real meaning of this project, a meaning that seems to be lost on the director of Enlaces, Hugo Martínez:

Artificial artificial intelligence

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 08:25:11 -0300

There is a famous story about a robot shaped like a Turk that played chess in the late 18th century¹. The truth is that behind the robot there was a person who was actually doing the playing.

That idea is what inspires the name of Amazon’s new project:

Amazon Mechanical Turk: Artifical Artifical Inteligence

The idea is that Amazon will pay for tasks that only humans can perform, the so-called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks).

Singularity, Microsoft's new operating system

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 12:00:56 +0000

Microsoft Research has published the details of its new operating system under development, called Singularity, designed from the ground up and using C# as the implementation language. The emphasis is on stability rather than performance.

Two observations. First, it’s good that they care about operating system stability. There’s no denying that Microsoft’s operating systems are more stable than they used to be; they earned the bad reputation, but you can see a conscious effort to care about security and quality. The second observation is that the name is really bad. To me, at least, it brings a black hole to mind.

Does it matter whether software is open?

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 08:25:11 -0300

This post started as a reply to an interesting comment by Jens Hardings on his blog Hombros de Gigantes, about whether Microsoft understands open source.

I think Microsoft is realizing that software development is evolving the way Tim O'Reilly describes in his article What is Web 2.0.

A question for the non-technical people who read my blog: do you care what operating system this site runs on? Do you care how Google finds the information you need?

Firefox, the memory-eating monster

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 10:06:57 +0000

Firefox uses a lot more memory than Internet Explorer. In my case IE takes about 25 MB when I start it pointed at this site, while Firefox takes about 37 MB, and that’s nearly constant. I should say that both browsers have almost the same number of plugins on my machine; IE even has more toolbars and add-ons than Firefox.

But the worst part is that you can end up like Red Guy after two days of browsing with Firefox: look at this image of his memory usage. Firefox doesn’t release memory. Let’s hope it gets better with time, because I’m starting to lose my illusions.

Sometimes I feel like getting the hell out of my country

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 21:33:02 +0000

What are our leaders, a bunch of lazy, irresponsible idiots?

Or what?

Do people get the governments they deserve? I think that saying is false, an excuse to lull us to sleep.

Chile will not buy the 100-dollar laptops.

And here I was, having listened with satisfaction to the people from the Cámara Nacional de Comercio telling how they had arranged Negroponte’s meeting with these !"#!"%#/!"#%/!

Let me remind you that financing this campaign costs us nothing, but since the people who work in government only show up to warm their seats, let me remind you how: 2 days of school subsidy.

New papers on MD5 collisions

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 20:40:25 +0000

The paper “Collision-Resistant usage of MD5 and SHA-1 via Message Preprocessing,” by Szydlo and Yin, presented at the NIST Hash Workshop, matters for practical reasons.

According to Niels Ferguson, the big problem is that MD5 is still used all over the place, and switching algorithms takes a long time. Steve Bellovin points out that it takes a year to get the change through the IETF and five to seven years for it to be adopted.
We already know that Microsoft, at least, has decided that MD5 must not be used in its internal development.

Windows Live Beta

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 20:30:25 +0000

When Netscape shipped its browser and Microsoft wasn’t paying much attention to the internet, Bill Gates suddenly swung the helm around and it was goodbye Netscape.

Although I think Microsoft doesn’t understand Google, don’t underestimate what could happen with Windows Live Beta. Microsoft controls millions of desktop PCs for a reason.

The internet is killing newspapers

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 08:25:11 -0300

Media Daily News reports that 2005 will go down as one of the worst years for newspapers in history, and 2006 doesn’t look promising. Online content keeps generating more readers and more ad money, although it only accounts for 5% of newspapers’ total revenue.

Discussion on Slashdot

Reflection

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 09:55:31 +0000

For believers, November 1 is a day of reflection.
For us pagans, it’s a day to remember our ancestors.

Taking advantage of the quiet, I invite you to read Jorge Drexler, from his album ECO, a song that for me sums up why I went into technology:

Mi Guitarra y Vos

Que viva la ciencia, que viva la poesía
¡qué viva siento mi lengua cuando tu lengua está sobre la lengua mía!
el agua está en el barro, el barro en el ladrillo,
el ladrillo está en la pared y en la pared tu fotografía
es cierto que no hay arte sin emoción, y que no hay precisión sin artesanía
como tampoco hay guitarras sin tecnología

Folksonomies

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 18:15:33 +0000

Taxonomies are those arbitrary classifications you find in science, and in other fields.

But Web 2.0 has created this neologism, the folksonomy. Just as folklore denotes popular wisdom, the word folksonomy denotes the way the people classify things.

Something very natural for bloggers is to classify their writing into categories, and technorati turns them into TAGs, which are labels for grouping the topics explored by thousands of bloggers around the world.

Versions and variations

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 16:26:34 +0000

The concept of Web 2.0 is probably nothing more than a move to create a new bubble. Carlota Perez tells us that these phenomena are not only nothing new, but positive. At least for those interested in raising seed capital, the Harvard researcher’s article may be a good guide.

Either way, there are things changing on the web, and in that sense we can indeed talk about a web 2.0. At least the name has the kind of designation we’ve gotten users used to, and that the business majors turned into a marketing tool.

Epigraph

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 11:24:17 +0000

There is a gateway to the imagination that you have to enter before you are conscious, and the keys to the gate are symbols. You can pass ideas through the gate… But those ideas must take the form of symbols.

Frank Herbert

Microbes are being assimilated!!

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 20:05:31 +0000

Bacteria are being assimilated by nanotechnology scientists.

For the first time, a microbe and a machine have been combined. This technological feat, pulled off by scientists at the University of Nebraska, let them create a bacterium coated in gold and silver that can sense humidity. This first “CellBorg” is a proof of concept for what could become an array of devices able to sense dangerous gases or other hazardous substances.

Web 2.0 and the next generations of software

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 15:30:32 +0000

Tim O’Reilly must be reading me :wink:.

In his article What Is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software he lays out, in a deeper and more elaborate way, what I sketched in my previous article, the Google way.

By comparing the cases of Netscape and Google, Tim O’Reilly clarifies the path taken by Google, and by all the new applications to come, in the so-called Web 2.0

The first nanocar

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 13:25:51 +0000

Scientists at Rice University developed the world’s first nanocar.

The vehicle is about 3-4 nanometers wide. By contrast, a human hair has a diameter of 80,000 nanometers.

The car consists of a molecule containing the chassis, with axles and spherical wheels of pure carbon. A full article will be published soon in the specialized journal Nano Letters.

The researchers’ idea is to emulate similar structures that exist in biology, such as hemoglobin, which carries oxygen through the bloodstream to the cells.

Google sued by American publishers

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 23:46:07 +0000

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) announced today a lawsuit against Google over its plan to copy and distribute copyrighted works without their owners’ permission. The suit seeks a court declaration that Google is in the wrong when it scans copyright-protected books, and that copyright owners must authorize Google to do so.

The suit was filed by the biggest American publishers: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons. .

Wilma!!

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 21:14:17 +0000

Now it’s Hurricane Wilma. The name tells us there have been 21 tropical storms and/or hurricanes, since hurricane names start with 21 letters of the alphabet, alternating men’s and women’s names, and this year’s were already predefined, as I explained earlier.

If Wilma is the last name on this year’s list, what will the next hurricane be called?

Well, after Wilma come Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc. That is, they carry on with the letters of the Greek alphabet.

The 10 mistakes bloggers make

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 15:04:43 +0000

Jakob Nielsen publishes his guide to the ten usability mistakes in weblogs

An interesting matter that’s worth reading. Here they are, summarized and with my comments.

1. Not including the author’s biography.

According to Nielsen this is a matter of trust. You’d like to know the credentials of the author of the blog you’re reading. Totally agree.

2. Not posting the author’s photo.

Well, I’m going to have to retouch some little photo of mine, now where did I leave Photoshop….

The Google way

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 08:25:11 -0300

Suppose I build a program, a database of drinks.
The software contains thousands of cocktail “recipes”, and one of the product’s innovative tricks is that you enter the liquor you have in your bar and the program suggests drinks you could make with what you have (okay, now I’m thirsty).

I can do several things with this product.

Put the “Coctelera” program on a CD-ROM and sell it through traditional channels, get paid licenses for it, deal with a big distributor and get filthy rich off the thousands of copies I’ll sell. This is the Microsoft model, closed, proprietary (or “privative”, as some say). I call it the traditional model of selling software.

Enough with Arturito

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 22:29:27 +0000

That’s enough, we’ve spent too much time on the subject.
So from now on there will be no more talk of Arturito on this blog, and we’ll devote ourselves only to real robots, like self-replicating robots.

And to highlighting the real inventors in Chile:
A schoolboy was the king of the USM Inventions Contest

Still, I want to say that it bugs me that yesterday Fernando Paulsen said on Última Mirada, the late-night newscast, that “he who laughs last laughs best”, insinuating that if the treasure is discovered on Juan Fernández then it’s proven that the robot works. Which, as I’ve already said, is a reasoning error, besides the fact that it’s been shown to us that the treasure will very probably never be dug up (read: The fall of “The Great Scam”).

Arturito discredited

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 04:00:44 +0000

Well, thanks to Eduardo Escárez we got a first-hand account, and he confirmed what we suspected.

The nice thing about blogs is that they publish before traditional media, since the article in El Mercurio only came out today. Perhaps the advantage is that the journalist gets to transcribe a recording, while the blogger gives his opinion from memory.

But the result is the same.

Good bye Arturito.05

The talk about Arturito

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 19:39:17 +0000

Manuel Salinas, an engineer at the company Wagner Seguridad, will explain how the robot works next Wednesday, October 12, at 6 p.m. in the Salón de Honor of the Casa Central of Universidad Santa María.
source: USM

If anyone goes, could you tell me how the robot works?

A very good blog that talks about this is this one.

A serious flaw in the Windows registry

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 01:41:54 +0000

Sometimes you run into problems bigger than you imagine.

While looking into a flaw reported at Secunia in August, I never suspected the problem was more serious than I thought.

Essentially, the flaw lets you write an entry (key) in the registry that is not visible to tools like Microsoft RegEdit.

As the image shows, I was able to create a hidden entry in the registry:

It turns out that under Optional there is a key whose name consists of 256 X’s in a row.

Nielsen and Office 12

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 13:18:25 +0000

Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, publishes in his newsletter his impressions of the new Office 12 interface.

But the title is provocative, R.I.P WYSIWYG, implying that the Mac-style interface is already dead, and that the new Office brings us a new paradigm, the Results-Oriented User Interface.

Nielsen says:

Much as I have criticized Microsoft for its thousands of buried features, the company actually has a good usability team and was well aware of the problems. Basically, it tried to retrofit usability onto an overly complicated foundation and failed. Microsoft has now finally realized that enough is enough: The company is parting ways with the old UI and going for something completely new.

A reasoning error

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 21:44:41 +0000

My thanks to Carlos and to my namesake Eduardo for mentioning my previous post on their blogs: The fabulous robot Arturito.

I just read the brilliant post “What if Arturito were a lie?”, which I recommend you read before going on.

Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

Eduardo goes through some exercises to try to explain the pseudoscience displayed by Arturito’s creators. However, he makes a reasoning error at the end, one that many have made these days.
Believing that if the treasure is found on Juan Fernández, then the robot must be given credibility.

About the IOI

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 17:05:09 +0000

I received a comment from one of the mothers of the Cuban team that took part in the IOI.

For those who didn’t read it, the post is called: Cuba, the best in computing

The IOI 2006 will be held in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico. According to the rules Chile could not compete, but it could join as an observer.

In other words, we have 2 years to prepare our computing olympic team. We’re cooking something up along these lines, so I hope to have good news for you.

The fabulous robot Arturito

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 14:37:37 +0000

“Its inventor, Manuel Salinas Encina, has said he was doing a graduate degree in Economics in Cologne, Germany, when he found a book with “the unfinished formulas of the American physicist Robert Oppenheimer”, the same man who led the Manhattan Project, which culminated in the explosion of the Hiroshima bomb. They were about atomic fission.

The formulas obsessed him. After 10 years he managed to solve them. He came back to develop applications, one of which was the ultra-famous robot. He built it together with the security company Wagner, headed by his friend and schoolmate, former detective Gabriel Vargas.

Myrmecology with Google Earth

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 14:38:17 +0000

Myrmecology, the study of ants, has taken a technological leap thanks to Google Earth.
In fact, myrmecologists are so grateful to Google Earth that one researcher named a new species found in Madagascar Proceratium Google.

The interesting part is that you can now add to Google Earth a complete georeference of the world’s ants. This database is provided by AntWeb, and below I explain how you can add it to your Google Earth, if the subject interests you:

Microsoft's indifference

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 20:27:37 +0000

That seems to be the way Microsoft deals with its security problems.

Since June there has been a known vulnerability, discovered by Secunia, that allows spoofing and phishing using JavaScript. This outline sums up the vulnerability.

The user visits a malicious site
The user follows a trusted link
Meanwhile, a malicious website opens a popup window in front of the browser, posing as a window from the trusted site.

SpreadFirefox security compromised again

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 17:47:33 +0000

The SpreadFirefox site has been compromised, for the second time, and will be down until October 15. The problem is that the user database is compromised. According to the message sent to registered users, the site stores passwords in MD5. I assume that by now you already know that this is something you should not try at home; if not, read this post!!

Part of the message sent by SpreadFirefox:

“We will notify you again when the site is back up with instructions on how to change your password. (Note: We do use MD5 hashing on the passwords, but MD5 cannot protect all passwords against off-line dictionary style attacks.)”

Reverse Turing tests and accessibility

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 17:54:15 +0000

Reverse Turing tests, or CAPTCHAs, have become an unpleasant practice that I hope disappears soon.

The truth is that several CAPTCHAs have made me feel like a complete idiot, to the point where I wonder whether my problem is my astigmatism, or whether I’m simply incapable of recognizing images.

At Factor Humano there is a very thorough article on CAPTCHAs from the accessibility point of view: http://www.webstudio.cl/blog/captchas-y-accesibilidad/.

There are other ways to fight spam. If what worries you is security, CAPTCHAs are not for that, as I explained earlier.

Cancelable biometrics

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 18:11:39 +0000

Good biometric practice must ensure that:

1.- The sample can be captured only once; this is called cancelable biometrics. An advance in this area was developed by the people at IBM.

2.- The database must store the biometric features securely. This is achieved with cryptography and many well-known techniques for preventing tampering (unauthorized alteration).

3.- A live biometric sample is being captured. Today we have sensors that can sense live fingerprints, read the pulse, temperature, and so on.

Latency, a forgotten factor

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 17:28:53 +0000

“I don’t know what I want, but I want it now!”
– Luca Prodan, Sumo

When we measure the performance of a Web application, the technical aspect that most affects user perception is latency.

To paraphrase the epigraph, the user doesn’t know what they want, but they want it delivered promptly.

To understand the concepts of performance evaluation, let’s define the following variables:

Bandwidth: amount of data that can be sent over the network in one second.
Throughput: amount of work the server can do in a period of time.
Contention: competition for resources; it happens when more than 1 client is accessing the server.
Latency: time to perform a simple operation assuming there is no contention [1]. The effective response time as measured by the client.

Latency is a function of bandwidth and throughput, leaving contention aside:

A Flash interface for Google Earth and MS Virtual Earth

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 20:30:57 +0000

Impressive: http://www.flashearth.com/. The author is a great Flash developer.
It seems it still has problems on Linux, but they are working on getting it to run with the Flash plugin for Linux (hopefully).

Which browser is the most secure?

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 19:32:59 +0000

How do we judge browsers in a more objective way?

Fortunately, Secunia can help us. The following charts show the number of flaws and the percentage of reported problems that were fixed, for Internet Explorer 6, Firefox, and Opera. (These charts may change over time)

The future of videoconferencing.

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:23:37 +0000

As part of the iGrid 2005 conference, a group of researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Keio University in Tokyo demonstrated the transmission of a videoconference in SHD (Super High Definition) 4k format over optical fiber between San Diego and Tokyo (some 15,000 kilometers.

The SHD 4k format has 4,000 pixels per horizontal scan line, which is 4 times more than the format used by HDTV (High Definition TV) and 24 times the standard NTSC television format.

The treasure of Juan Fernández

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 23:24:39 +0000

I had been wanting to open a section on innumeracy for a while, and the news of the supposed discovery of the treasure of the Juan Fernández islands gives me the chance to do it.

There are 2 important topics to go over here: the first is credibility, and the second is the innumeracy some tabloids displayed in publishing this story.

Credibility

Supposedly a robot detected the presence of precious stones and gold over a certain area of the island. I heard the lawyer for the company that built the robot Arturito (Chile’s name for R2-D2) on television, and he said the robot detected the gold in an area of volcanic rock, where it is impossible for there to be gold.

Failure?

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:00:08 +0000

“We still have a homeland, citizens” Manuel Rodriguez

It might look as if Francotirador were flogging himself, but he isn’t. The MPPCPDV campaign may not gather the 25,000 signatures, but it shows how important adhocracy in action can be.

The first Chilean Smart Mob was created out of this reaction to the government program, and Christian Leal is aware of his role as a leader and opinion shaper within the Chilean blogosphere.

It is not a failure at all, and I think they should keep going. I’m eager to read the proposal they put together for the government. These kids are true social entrepreneurs, and all of us older folks owe them respect.

A laptop for every schoolchild

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 16:16:22 +0000

Here is the email my friend and business partner Marco Antonio Zúñiga is circulating

Let’s build a different Chile NOW ….

Argentina is setting us an example, even without having the resources (see the end of this email for the Argentine case).

In Chile it is only a matter of will.

IN CHILE IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF WILL.

“Campaign:”
A LAPTOP FOR EVERY CHILEAN CHILD IN SUBSIDIZED OR MUNICIPAL SCHOOLS.

Hurricane names

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:00:49 +0000

The algorithm for naming hurricanes is very simple: every year the World Meteorological Organization publishes the Tropical Cyclone Programme[PDF, 246 Kb].

This report contains the list of names that will be used during the year.

For example, this year, after Katrina, came: Lee, Maria, Nate,
Ophelia, Philippe and now Rita.

As you can see, hurricane names are not always women’s names; they alternate.

Image of Hurricane Rita provided by NASA

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/hurricane_2005.html

To read about the scientific debates on climate change I recommend visiting RealClimate (via CDP)
The rest of the post has the list of hurricane names, for those interested…

Houston, you have a problem!

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 14:40:49 +0000

This time Houston is the one in trouble:

The US space agency NASA decided yesterday to close the control center located in the Texas city of Houston ahead of the imminent arrival of the powerful Hurricane Rita in the region.

More info on Hurricane Rita

Three category 5 hurricanes this season. Do people still think it isn’t an effect of global warming? I’m no expert, but it makes you think…

By the way, Bruce Schneier tells us about a report that explains “how terrorists might use hurricanes”.

Good for Argentina, bad for Chile

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 14:40:30 +0000

Intel will develop software in Argentina The American company will set up a software development center in the city of Córdoba, on the grounds of the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN), which will join the network of Intel centers operating in the United States, China and Russia *.

More details:

The world’s largest microprocessor maker signed an agreement with the Argentine government to open a development center in 2006.

** MIT backs the third world: hundred-dollar laptops for Argentina **

Security is a process

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 02:35:59 +0000

An interesting comment on my article http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/HackingMd5.asp from Erik Westermann {dispatches}

What follows is a free translation of the comment (the original can be read here:http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/HackingMd5.asp#xx1231841xx

I think the intent is to demonstrate a very specific type of attack that exploits the inherent trust in the MD5 hash. It is a kind of semi-social engineering attack.

The attack shown in the article illustrates how the distributor-author-etc can distribute a “good” application and then start distributing a harmful application by exploiting the trust placed in the MD5 hash of the “good” application. Still, this is a very specific scenario, and it uses predefined vectors; nevertheless it helps reinforce a fundamental truth about security.

Cyberarchaeology is born

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:06:47 +0000

After finding, with Google Earth, the remains of an ancient Roman villa near Parma in Italy, the enthusiastic Luca Mori has founded cyberarchaeology, putting up his site: cyberarchaeologist.net

Firefox less secure than Internet Explorer?

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:06:47 +0000

Symantec raises the question with its report that Firefox has more vulnerabilities than IE.

According to the report, in the first half of 2005 Firefox had 25 vulnerabilities confirmed by Mozilla. Meanwhile IE had only 13.

But this is no news to those who read me; I’ve been talking about Firefox’s vulnerabilities for a while.

Consider the following:

The figures reported by Symantec are the vulnerabilities acknowledged by the vendors (Mozilla and Microsoft). We know nothing about the unacknowledged vulnerabilities. There is clearly a stronger tendency to attack Internet Explorer, but that tendency will shift over time as Firefox becomes more popular. The problem is that programmers don’t treat security as a priority.

Is DRM doomed to fail?

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:43:03 +0000

DRM, Digital Rights Management, has reached another milestone with the recent creation of the MovieLabs consortium.

The idea is to develop technology to protect the film industry.

Ed Felten published a comment, picked up by Boing Boing, in which he considers this initiative dumb and doomed to fail.

The truth is that the argument is rather flimsy, because the example of the auto industry and the perpetual motion machine seems arbitrary, and the conclusions illogical.

Who watches the watchmen?

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 15:11:34 +0000

No, this post has nothing to do with Alan Moore’s famous comic.

Over these years a flourishing PC security industry has sprung up. The operating system isn’t enough; you have to install antispyware, antivirus, firewalls, and so on.

These new WATCHMEN are present on almost every personal computer, protecting our work, and sometimes getting in its way.

Millions of users put their trust in these products. But how secure are they?

Do they read me in Redmond? :)

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:51:24 +0000

My thanks for the flattering mention on Kriptópolis of my previous post: Exploiting MD5 collisions.

But I learn from that same site that Microsoft has decided to abandon the hash functions under attack, and even the DES cryptographic function. More details here: http://www.kriptopolis.org/node/1126 and here:http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1859751,00.asp.

Could they have read me in Redmond? :)

As you know, I wrote a couple of articles on CodeProject. The first, Good Bye MD5, has been up for less than a month and has already had close to 20,000 reads, with an interesting debate to boot.
My second article, “Exploiting MD5 collisions”, in which I show how to exploit the attack on MD5 to disrupt software distribution systems, is at close to 2,000 reads in less than 48 hours.

Exploiting MD5 collisions

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 15:03:20 +0000

I wrote a C# program to demonstrate how the collisions found in MD5 can be exploited to create 2 files with the same hash value.

This image shows the proof of concept:

First we generate 2 binary files for distribution, using a harmless program (good.exe) and a dangerous one (evil.exe).

The MD5 value of both files is the same. Then an extractor program pulls out different versions of the program, depending on which distribution file it is given. In the first case we see the harmless program being extracted from good.bin, and it runs without problems. In the second case, the user extracts our harmful program from evil.bin. Since the user trusts that the file has not been altered, because its MD5 hash is the right one, they run a program that in this case can do a lot of damage, like formatting the disk.

Free software and the Age of Aquarius

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 08:50:11 -0300

Free software is an option, not an obligation, but declaring it one of the pillars for building an Aquarian utopia strikes me as too much. Please read this article: La Alternativa Mundial Acuario, especially point 7.

I shouldn’t have written about this kind of lunacy, but the problem is that open source gets talked about so much that it is turning into a kind of religion, which I consider dangerous.

The true nature of free software needs to be made clear.
It is not a means of lifting underdeveloped nations out of poverty, nor a catalyst for internet adoption, nor is it the end of viruses, or the solution to every problem in computing.

Katrina and the waves

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 08:50:11 -0300

Katrina and the waves. The name of this eighties band sounds today like a strange premonition, one of life’s little curiosities.

But the truth is that Hurricane Katrina has made waves.

I recently wrote that there are no natural disasters, that they are instead consequences of policy. And I also talked about global warming.

Reading the post, it actually looks as if I were drawing a direct link between global warming and Hurricane Katrina.
That was not my intention. As Carlos rightly points out, we cannot establish a direct link and say that Hurricane Katrina has anything to do with global warming. Although we can’t rule it out either.

Natural disasters

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 08:50:11 -0300

There are no natural disasters. The effects of Katrina or of other natural phenomena become disasters when they affect humanity. To nature, our constructions are insignificant.

Disasters of this kind are cultural, or they are the foreseeable result of the consequences of political decisions.

Unfortunately, those who make the decisions follow their own agendas and don’t consider the consequences of the climate change we are suffering. Despite the Kyoto agreement, greenhouse gas emissions have increased in Europe. The New Orleans tragedy is not the first, nor will it be the last. The problem is that things will get worse.

Lars Armstrong accused of doping 6 years later!

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 18:50:11 -0300

The news story says Armstrong allegedly used banned drugs in the 1999 Tour de France.

As Bruce Schneier rightly points out, the extraordinary part is that the sample was taken in 1999, and the analysis done in 2005!!

Will athletes have to store their own urine samples for years to protect themselves from future investigations and tests!???

Kazaa ruled illegal

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 08:50:11 -0300

Will the ruling against Kazaa set off a domino effect across every P2P application used to share files?

The truth is that the problem can shift from the provider, like Kazaa, to the users of the program.

Copyright exists, and we must respect it; piracy is wrong. Whether those rights carry a price or not is another matter. Many of us believe it is good to protect intellectual property rights, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we should charge exorbitant sums of money for them, just a fair price for our work. I prefer to think that a user of my programs values them, and the price I set depends on the value it brings the user plus the effort. But that’s one criterion.

Linux in retreat

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 08:50:11 -0300

This article on silicon tells how Unilever is backing out of its project to migrate everything to Linux. According to Unilever’s CIO: “the cost benefits originally used to justify the risk of the migration are no longer there.”

The idea was to migrate its Unix servers to Linux on Itanium, and then migrate SAP to run on Linux.

Unilever has an 800 million euro infrastructure, and the project projected savings of 63 million. In any case they will make changes, but on a much smaller scale.

Secure programming

Sun, 04 Sep 2005 08:50:11 -0300

I’m reading a Microsoft ad in the Communications of the ACM, August 2005 issue.

The ad goes more or less like this:

Can you spot the security Hole

This is the Source Code in DCOM that led the Blaster Worm

HRESULT GetMachineName(WCHAR *pwszPath) { WCHAR wszMachineName[N+1]; LPWSTR pwszServerName = wszMachineName; while (*pwszPath != L'\\') *pwszServerName++ = *pwszPath++; .... }

The ad offers resources and information to academics who teach in computer science departments, so that they bring security into their courses.

Fast out of the gate

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 23:50:11 -0300

Is MPPCDV running out of air on us?
Could it be behaving like the 10Mega plan from VTR?
I look at the number and it seems stalled.
Flores offers to talk to the president.

Beyond publishing banners and logos, and writing, I don’t think there is much more on offer.

In fact Jens Hardings put his finger on the main problem with MPPCDV: there is no concrete alternative inside the community, no matter how much altruism we put in. More details in this post.

PHP security

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 23:25:11 -0300

Is PHP secure?

If you search Secunia, you’ll find that PHP has some 1,800 security alerts reported to date.
Compare that with Perl’s 1,400 alerts, ASP’s 526, Java’s 236, against 9 for J2EE and 9 for ASP.Net!

We can’t say it has a good track record.

In fact the most recent alarms have to do with XML-RPC support in PHP, which has left many blog engines and other CMSs vulnerable, such as Drupal, mediawiki and Wordpress.

Cuba, the best at computing

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 22:25:11 -0300

The IOI was held in Poland this year (Chile, of course, did not take part).

If anyone sees President Lagos, tell him the minister of education deserves another slap on the wrist :)

In any case, I think putting together a good team for the 2006 IOI (which will be in Merida (Merida the white), Yucatán) is worth more than learning Mandarin, than the MPPCPDV campaign (with all due respect, and being a supporter of it myself), or than expressing hatred of internet explorer...

Bandwidth????

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 18:25:11 -0300

To narrow the digital divide you have to educate users.

You know how much your cell phone plan costs, because they tell you that for X pesos you can talk for Y minutes. Easy.

If I use X kilowatt-hours of electricity they will cost Y pesos, and you get it.

Same with water, gas, the phone, even cable: if I pay CLP 16,000 or something like that, I get 50-some channels, 24 hours a day for 1 month.

Google is evil (at least for now)

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

Two stories of alleged abuse by google:

The first is about a person who put up his small email forwarding site, and google refused to include it in searches because his site supposedly promoted pornography, nudism. He made his case, but now google refuses to fix the problem.

The second story affects one of the most entertaining sites I’ve visited: realmeme. Remember the post I wrote about whether google is evil or good? It was based on realmeme and its evil index :smile:.

New version of the Linux kernel released

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

Official announcement from Linus http://kerneltrap.org/node/5600

Wake up, linux people!!!
Time to try it out.

Education and servility

Sun, 28 Aug 2005 18:25:11 -0300

I’m rereading Fernando Savater, specifically El valor de educar (The Value of Educating), where he mentions that:

According to Jaime Balmes’s well-known dictum, the art of teaching how to learn consists of building factories, not warehouses.

But how much is education and how much is instruction? I’m afraid there is a feeling that development comes from training more technicians, for which all we need are instructors, not educators.

Things aren’t as simple as the Castalia blog puts it, in the sense that we should question the existence of the humanities-and-science high schools (an outdated and inappropriate classification, since as far as I know scientists are human too).

Thoughts on MPPCPDV

Sun, 28 Aug 2005 18:25:11 -0300

One of the characteristics of adhocracy is that it is reactive, not proactive. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, it just is. It is born as a reaction to something the community feels is out of line.

The way adhocracy shows itself is that groups of affected people get activated, speak out, and when the goal is achieved, the movement disappears.

Adhocracy exists because democracy has been discredited. People don’t trust the authorities.

Cool, naive or just plain stupid?

Sun, 28 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

I don’t know if publishing your exact GPS location is cool. I, for one, think it’s risky.

For example, the site https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWorldWide has a list of users with their physical address.

I’m not going to get into the paranoia of publishing my physical address and the fear of a visit from a burglar or a serial killer :).

The problem is that a hacker can do social engineering with that information. If you care about security, you shouldn’t publish these things, no matter how cool it is.

Tool of objective truth

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 18:25:11 -0300

Three years ago now, when the google api came out, I wrote a program I called TOOTD6, based on TOOT: Tool Of Objective Truth, a game that used the google api to determine objective truth, based on the number of times a term (or a phrase) shows up referenced in google.

The world wasn’t ready for TOOTD6, but now I think it has a chance :)

For now it’s Windows only, but as soon as I finish getting Ubuntu properly installed, I promise to compile a version for the linux crowd.

The "powered by" problem

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

It’s a tradition among those of us who use open source products, for example, to leave the typical logo with the phrase “powered by”.

That’s fine as an acknowledgment to the product’s developers, but it’s also information a bad hacker can use to attack us.

The reason is obvious. If, say, my site reads powered by drupal, then as a bad hacker all I have to do is look up Drupal’s vulnerabilities.

Using one-way hashes

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 22:25:11 -0300

I wrote about this subject on codeproject, and I’m going to start writing about the same thing on this blog, but in plain Spanish (in “Christian”, as my grandma used to say).

The reason is that there are many bad implementations and applications of cryptography, and since a lot of the documentation is in English, many programmers don’t have easy access to these subjects (learn English, kids).

The crisis in hash functions

Self-replicating robots

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 10:25:11 -0300

They’re simple, but this is seminal work that opens the door to robots that can reproduce.
The folks at Cornell University created self-replicating robots.

Read it at http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/May05/selfrep.ws.html

An impressive video of how the robot replicates itself can be seen here:http://mae2.wdg.us/ccsl/research/selfrep/video/4x4ht4a.mpg

By the way, there’s a contest for Chilean high school students:http://www.ingenieria.cl/concursoderobotica/bases2.swf

A thought on MPPC

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 22:25:11 -0300

Fernando Flores has spoken out about the MPPC campaign.

On that, I have to say the ugly part isn’t which operating system the PC in question comes with, or even the hardware. That’s irrelevant. The ugly part is that the sponsorship goes to the same people as always and not to the small business owners, who sell better quality PCs at lower prices.

(There used to be a comment here about the sponsorship. Thanks to Paolo Colonello for clarifying that the government only gave its endorsement, not sponsorship, so I apologize for the comment)

Google: good or evil?

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 22:25:11 -0300

The image shows how the perception that google is evil went up right when Google launched its IPO.

I find the analysis of memes used at Realmeme interesting. A few years ago I wrote some programs that used the Google API to calculate popularity between memes, but it hadn’t occurred to me to plot it over time. I’ll see if it can be done, and in whatever time I have left I promise to spruce up the program and make it available to anyone interested.

Democratization of the internet?

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 18:25:11 -0300

A long time ago, before the earth had cooled, we could set up our own servers, plug them into the network, and there we were, publishing our content on the internet. It could be a gopher, an ftp, a BBS, or a newsgroup.

Berners-Lee gave us the web as a gift, and the innovators ruined everything. The bubble burst and we all got soaked :)

A quote from Flores’s blog:

Looks like they're starting to stop laughing...

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:25:11 -0300

The Space Elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing. – Arthur Clarke

Fernando Flores writes about the space elevator and credits Arthur Clarke with the idea. In fact the thing is so old that back in 1895 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was already writing about it.

What’s more, the Russian genius went as far as arguing that escaping the Earth is a matter of survival for humanity. His famous line:

The expansion of the digital divide 2

Sat, 20 Aug 2005 18:25:11 -0300

The law of the expansion of the digital divide is as follows:

Vt = H x Dt

Where Vt is the speed at which the divide expands, H is a constant (to be determined) and Dt is the size of the divide.

Don’t take it too seriously. I’m just abusing Hubble’s law, applying it as a way to highlight the fact that the divide keeps getting bigger over time.

Being absolutely and knowingly non-rigorous, I’m going to amuse myself speculating with this law.

The expansion of the digital divide 1

Sat, 20 Aug 2005 10:25:11 -0300

The famous Hubble’s Law states that the speed at which galaxies move away from each other is proportional to their distance.

Something similar happens with the so-called digital divide.

Let me reason through a few simple examples.

Ringtones for cell phones are becoming popular these days (a ringtone costs between 1 and 3 dollars on average, and maybe more if it’s polyphonic). Most people are moving from the old cell phone, with no way to change the ringtone, to buying phones with monophonic ringtones, but the more privileged have access to phones with polyphonic ringtones. And some of us, "luckier" still, can use an MP3 of our favorite artist instead of little tunes synthesized in MIDI.
Meanwhile some of us can get cell phones with a 128 MB MMC memory card, and we can download MP3s and send them over bluetooth to our phones, or thanks to USB adapters we can use the MMC as a removable disk, without paying the carriers a single peso for it (they fleece us somewhere else, of course).

Integrate or develop?

Sat, 20 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

“Our role is to deliver tools, not to set up a software development center in Chile”

I am a software developer, not an integrator.
Every time I read integrate, I read technological slavery.

Must we always be the subordinates of North American technology?

Goodbye, SHA-1

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 22:25:11 -0300

Schneier gives more details on Wang’s attack on the SHA-1 algorithm.

We are clearly facing a crisis in hash functions.

Wang’s result shows they can get to an attack of complexity 2^63. The problem is that we are already able to attack problems of complexity 2^64.

The papers can be read here:

“Efficient Collision Search Attacks on SHA-0”

“Finding Collisions in the Full SHA-1Collision Search Attacks on SHA1”

Gulp.

Adhocracy 2

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 18:25:11 -0300

I’m picking up the comments from Francotirador and from Carlos.

As Godo would say in his sarcastic tone, it’s good for the ego to know people are reading you :).

It’s true that we have to change the somebody has to into we have to. But since a blog is a historical record, I won’t change it in the original; I’ll fix the mistake in this post instead.

I’m not talking about going out to protest with our laptops in front of La Moneda, the presidential palace, because I don’t think that’s the smartest way to get attention.

Adhocracy

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

The Mi Primer PC, Pero de Verdad campaign (“My First PC, For Real”) is an example of what Howard Rheingold calls adhocracy: a spontaneous organization of the internet community to fight for a specific goal. This organization will probably disappear as soon as the problem is solved (when the government receives the letter, for example).

The concept of Smart Mobs applies fully here:

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive.

Currency conversion

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

These things are so obvious, yet nobody talks about them: google has had a currency converter for quite some time.

If you want to know how many Chilean pesos 10 dollars are, search google for

10 USD in CLP

And you will have the answer, or you can type the url directly:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=10+USD+in+CLP&btnG=Search

the important part is the value q=10+USD+in+CLP.

The currency codes are the ones defined by ISO. If you are interested, here is a table of codes:

The inflation of the blogosphere

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

With a mix of concern and sympathy I read about blog-based startup ventures, such as Hipertextual, whom I wish all the luck in the world.

As Stephen Jay Gould tells us in his book Wonderful Life, the Precambrian saw one of the most extraordinary explosions of life on record. Life seems to have explored every viable design. Yet, in an event that is still not fully explained, 90% of life forms went extinct.

About MPPC

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

Mundo OS has the interview with the undersecretary of economy on this subject, see the interview.

At Cazuela de Pingüino you can read what the creators of the program left unsaid.

Microsoft patents

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

I read on FayerWayer that Apple is losing rights over the Ipod software to Microsoft, which claims to hold an earlier patent.

Well, in case you didn’t know, Microsoft has been publishing patents in Chile for a long time, as you can see in the Diario Oficial (the government gazette) for June, July and August 2005

A google search turns up only a few results. Unfortunately there is no free access to the full content of the Diario Oficial, but if you read the summaries, in the “Patentes de Invención” (invention patents) section you will notice Microsoft showing up. The reason? USA patents are not valid in Chile.
It is truly surprising.

A useful program

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

For making flash presentations, or tutorials, the best thing I have seen is WINK.

It lets you record on-screen interaction to create a flash animation.

Making money with Google

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

It’s true, all of us who put adsense on our pages want to make a lot of money.
But you have to admit that a site in Spanish has less of a chance than one in English.

So here is a suggestion: write content in English. In my case, the difference in revenue between my English site and this one is 2 and up to 4 times.

Try it, maybe your revenue will improve.

Credibility on the web

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

Speaking of the case of the pregnant man, over at Cazuela de Pinguino, Carlos writes about the reaction of the Diario Austral de Temuco.

The phenomenon is interesting enough that there are researchers working on the subject:
Stanford Web Credibility Project.

There is an interesting paper, published at SIGCHI, The Elements of Computer Credibility. You have to be an ACM member to download it, but those of us interested in the subject can get in touch by email.

Don't compromise your site's security

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 18:25:11 -0300

This image is real, from a site heavily visited by java developers around the world:

Not only that: when I asked it to send me my password, it sent me the original one.

Basic security principles:

1.- Never give hints. Whether the username is wrong or the password is wrong, return the same error message. This is no place to be too friendly, because it compromises the site’s security.

My first PC

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 18:25:11 -0300

You know what we’re going to do tonight, Pinky ...?

Well, a picture is worth a thousand words...

The Chilean government has launched a campaign called Mi Primer PC (My First PC).

The project is described at this link:

http://www.economia.cl/economiafinal.nsf/0/EC130E5FD9CB1A52842570520054B628?OpenDocument&1.1&sem

(I hope you can open it)

There are so many criticisms to be made, but this article in La Nación has put them quite well.

The cost of a domain in Latin America

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

Compare this with what a .com, .net, .org, .us or .info domain can cost you, which can be as low as US$ 3.95!!

Costs per TLD, for 1 year.
.ar, Argentina: Not available .bo, Bolivia: US$ 35 .br, Brazil, US$ 14 .cl, Chile: US$ 17.5 (you must register for 2 years the first time .ec, Ecuador, US$ 35 for Ecuadorians, US$ 50 for foreigners .mx, Mexico, US$ 35 .ni, Nicaragua, US$ 50 .pe, Peru: US$ 35 .py, Paraguay: US$ 28 .uy, Uruguay, US$ 25

Need a transgenic mouse?

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 10:25:11 -0300

If you need a real transgenic mouse, don’t hesitate to order one from http://www.polygene.ch/.

If you find these things creepy, then take a look at the mouse request form at PolyGene:http://www.polygene.ch/quote_request.php.

The pregnant man and the transgenic mouse

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

IMPORTANT NOTE: This article is from 2005 and is about an art installation. You probably want to know about the case of Thomas Beatie, a trans man who has decided to get pregnant; that is not covered here. I suggest you see this article from the newspaper El Mundo, if that is what you are interested in.

The following article was published in *2005:*

You can read about the world’s first pregnant man on the site of RYT Hospital, where they are so advanced in biotechnology that, in their search for a cure for Alzheimer’s, they accidentally created a transgenic mouse with human intelligence: clyven.

Give credit to the creators

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 22:25:11 -0300

I don’t know how much Senator Fernando Flores paid to have his site built, but it doesn’t sit right with me that Blue Company puts in the footer: Site developed by blue company, when it is obvious they grabbed Drupal and installed it.

I give them credit for the graphic design, but at least give Drupal its credit. I think the right thing would be to put “site developed by Blue Company, supporting software Drupal”, or something along the lines of “empowered by drupal”.

The certification paradox

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 21:25:11 -0300

I’ll start with a real-life story

A young guy asked me which certification program would be a good one to take, and I told him to go for the DCE, for the simple reason that besides the training it is a showcase for getting noticed by potential employers. In fact, after earning his third star he was contacted about a good job and he is switching for a better salary :smile: Happy ending.

The legend of the space pen

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 20:25:11 -0300

There is a myth that says that during the space race, the Americans faced the dilemma of creating a pen capable of writing in a vacuum. So NASA invested 1.5 million dollars to develop the space pen. The Russians faced the same dilemma, and solved it by using graphite pencils.

This is the original text that circulated by email back around 1999:

During the space race back in the 1960's, NASA was faced with a major problem. The astronaut needed a pen that would write in the vacuum of space. NASA went to work. At a cost of $1.5 million they developed the “Astronaut Pen”. Some of you may remember. It enjoyed minor success on the commercial market.

The blogosphere doubles every 5 months

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 18:25:11 -0300

The blogosphere doubles every 5 months!!! Wow!
Source: http://www.fernandoflores.cl/node/523

It seems growth always looks like this, mysteriously analogous to Moore’s Law.

Could we be looking at a case of Moron’s Law, which tells us that the number of incorrect observations of Moore’s Law doubles every 18 months?

What really matters is the level of activity. According to technorati, 55% of blogs remain active, a statistic that has held steady over a year. 13% are updated weekly.

"Distribuir" is better

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

“Distribuir” is better

In my previous post, Sindicar, I argued that this word does not exist in Spanish as a translation of “syndicate”, and that as a last resort we could use the term Sindicación Web.

Drupal gave me the answer: the right word is DISTRIBUIR (to distribute). No need to invent neologisms or accept anglicisms.

How many lines of code do you write a day?

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

I think the reason many software development projects fail is the separation between architects, analysts and programmers.

I believe this division causes communication problems; the distance between the end user and the programmer is too great.

Agile methodologies promise to improve this. I think the best way is to have a flat development hierarchy. Brooks’s old Chief Programmer Team.

To syndicate, in Spanish

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

Reading the blog of Fernando Flores - Abriendo Juegos, Abriendo Mundos I discovered that they titled the xml feed Sindicalizar.

That made me wonder, so I looked it up in the RAE dictionary, and it turns out sindicalizar is not in the dictionary!!!

What to do with this neologism? Especially since sindicalizar (to unionize) has other connotations in Spanish (or Castilian?).

It looks ugly on Mr. Flores’s site.
So I set out on an investigation.…

Web services or object remoting

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

A while ago I published an article on web services and object remoting at Netveloper. You can read the article there, but I have also decided to keep a copy on this blog.

Read on...

Conceptually, Web Services and Remoting are the same thing: distributed objects. The main difference is the protocol.

With Remoting you can use non-standard protocols. Web Services use SOAP, or RPC-XML, open standards in general, over HTTP.

If you want to publish your services to the web, then you should use Web Services, because your clients may be running a different environment, such as Java, PHP, etc., and what matters is interoperability.

7 tips for using exceptions

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

Here are 7 tips for using exceptions in C#

Don’t use exceptions to control the flow of the application.
Use validation code to avoid unnecessary exceptions.
Use the finally block to make sure resources are released.
Don’t catch exceptions you are not going to handle.
Keep in mind that rethrowing exceptions is expensive. Almost as expensive as the exception that was thrown in the first place.
Preserve as much diagnostic information as possible in your exception handlers. It is useful for debugging.
Use the Performance Monitor to monitor CLR exceptions.

Thanks to Juan Daria Tempesta (DCE instructor) for inspiring this article.

Is open source a good thing?

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 18:25:11 -0300

It seems the silver bullet for closing the digital divide is open source.
Is that what UNCTAD wants us to think?

The issue is a good deal more complex. The UNCTAD expert meeting held last year has a lot to contribute, and it is backed by real experts on the subject, but the problems start when people from outside the field begin debating it and spreading confusion.

Open source is no holy grail. I even think it could turn out to be dangerous for developing nations.
Most likely the divide will stay the same or grow because of open source.

You can't protect software

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 10:25:11 -0300

If you write a program and build some protection mechanism into it, it is always possible to alter the program so that it skips your protection mechanism.

Even if your program is compiled to machine code, and even obfuscated (if you use a virtual machine), with enough time and the right resources it is always possible to break any protection mechanism (a crack).

Developing software is like making a movie

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 08:25:11 -0300

Art+Craft+Logistics

Just as in making a film, when we build software we have a pre-production stage, where we write the script. That is the equivalent of requirements analysis and design.

Then comes production, when the whole crew, guided by the director, shoots the scenes and sequences of the movie. In software development we do the same thing: the project manager coordinates the team of programmers.

In film, post-production follows: editing, choosing or discarding scenes, finishing the special effects, adding the music, and so on. In software we have to test, approve, fix, polish, run the tests, integrate, test in production environments, write the operations manuals, define contingency plans, and so on.