EVOL.reverse

• Seems like a new generation of blog tools is comming to life. Techcrunch is running a story about SixApart's new hosted blogging platform called Comet. It will allow WYSIWYG editing, easy uploading of images, audio and video, tags, and so on.. They will start letting users test it on Thursday, June 1.

• Petter Abilla, former amazon.com employee, blogs about his interview & job offer from google, which he declined after perceiving there wouldn’t be any google stock units envolved. Interesting read, especially this brain teaser they made him on an interview:

you are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?

• Tommorow there will be a semminar about academic spin-offs at the University. On another level, of course, will be the international conference on Academic Spin-Offs, to be held in Santiago de Compostela next 15th and 16th June, which seems promising although too expensive for me right now. Funny how the dokuwiki plugin replaces T-i-a-g-o with a link to the plugin author

On music listening, I’m trying to hear new stuff.

Some bands/players I wish to know better:

• Porcupine Tree (after recommendation from Last.fm)
• Opeth (after recommendation from several people).

I’ve recently heard:

• an Woody Allen album but didn’t appreciate much.
• Jim Matheos album “First Impressions” - very nice, just instrumental but calm and relaxing.
• Joe Satriani album “Super Colossal” - extremely nice.
• Jesse Cook album “Free Fall and Nomad” - extremely nice.

Note to self: Listen even to more new stuff.

This week I went karting. My team (Algarvios Racing Team) finished 5th out of 17, not bad. I did the fastest lap from our team (56.492 I think) which was pretty good. I had the luck of starting the race (7th on the starting grid) and the thrill of the start is something I can’t really describe. I passed two guys on the first laps and got 4th for a bit but then we ended up in 5th overall. Great time.

Tomorrow some friends will be participating in the ceremony that is part of being in the last year of the graduation here in Évora. One of them is doing an internship at YDreams, another one at Critical Software, etc. which is pretty cool.

And my MSc work is going well. I’m keeping a research journal for a few months now about it but off-line and in OpenOffice format for now. I found it to be faster and without the many quirks of using something web-based like a Wiki or a blog category.

Techcrunch has an article about Innovate 2006, a conference that went down in Zaragoza, Spain, this week. Dozens of European startup companies showcased their products and services, of which some are web applications. Skype, eBay Europe, Symbian, Six Apart, Netvibes and the list goes on… see the complete list here.

They even summarized the startups they found most interesting which is way cool.

Interesting quotes from the article:

“First, entrepreneurs in Europe are not revered in the same way as the U.S. Many people in Europe consider entrepreneurs to be greedy and arrogant, trying to reach above themselves. That has to change. Entrepreneurs tend to ignore risk/reward ratios, drive economic growth, bring new jobs to a

country. They should be encouraged, not socially chastised”

“Second, the complexity of creating a corporate entity, hiring employees and raising capital needs to be reduced. It’s simply too hard to create a company and get started.”

“Third, taxes must come down, or entrepreneurs will continue to flee to the US and elsewhere.”

There’s algo a blog that seems to have some good reading.

• “Europe Shows Its Stuff: Innovate 2006”

“Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow
So that I can feel the rain”

– Dave Mathews

Via cosmico.net I went over to read the recent second act of the Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate. What follows are some interesting quotes I found inside (actually the post title is one of them also):

Try rebuilding the entire operating system as described in the manual. The whole build, kernel + user-mode drivers and all the user-mode servers (125 compilations in all) takes about 5-10 seconds.

Recently, my Ph.D. student Jorrit Herder, my colleague Herbert Bos, and I wrote a paper entitled Can We Make Operating Systems Reliable and Secure? and submitted it to IEEE Computer magazine, the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society. It was accepted and published in the May 2006 issue. In this paper we argue that for most computer users, reliability is more important than performance and discuss four current research projects striving to improve operating system reliability. Three of them use microkernels.

The problem with distributed algorithms is lack of a common time reference along with possible lost messages and uncertainty as to whether a remote process is dead or merely slow. None of these issues apply to microkernel-based operating systems on a single machine.

When two or more processes can access the same data structures, you have to be very, very careful not to hang yourself. It is exceedingly hard to get this right, even with semaphores, monitors, mutexes, and all that good stuff.

Even the people working on Vista see they have a problem and are moving drivers into user space, precisely what I am advocating.

Actually, MINIX 3 and my research generally is NOT about microkernels. It is about building highly reliable, self-healing, operating systems. I will consider the job finished when no manufacturer anywhere makes a PC with a reset button.

The average user does not care about even more features or squeezing the last drop of performance out of the hardware, but cares a lot about having the computer work flawlessly 100% of the time and never crashing. Ask your grandma.

This is our goal: systems that can detect and repair their own faults.

I was reading through a brief introduction to Donald Knuth in this article and is it just my impression or does he look like Yoda in that picture?

I’ve recently been working a lot on remote ssh consoles. Today I wondered if there was any way to make the connections go faster, after all I have 415 Kbps upstream and the server I’m working on also has good connectivity, there’s no reason for slowness. I then found this article on reusing ssh connections that made me learn a new OpenSSH feature, the ability to reuse the already existing connection to a remote host when I want to open subsequent connections. Here is what the author had to say:

“In the course of a typical day I’m sure we all open a plethora of ssh connections to our servers. I would also wager that most of us have multiple connections open to some systems. While these multiple connections don’t take up any noticeable amount of system resources each of these connections does take up some of your valuable time to establish.”

* “Quick-Tip: Reusing OpenSSH connections to the same host”

A funny thing about this is that since one is using the same connection the “motd” buffer or something gets flooded with “Last login from x.x.x.x” messages. Still haven’t found a way to clean it.

Today I really felt working in pairs really gets work done faster. Speaking with your partner and bouncing ideas off each other really helps visualizing the big picture and move forward quicker.

Yesterday I did some clean-up around my blog, being the Flickr plugin displaying recent photos the most obvious change (the snow is a bit old but nevermind that).

Last sunday Tiago took me geocaching, an entertaining adventure sport for GPS users. What’s interesting in it of course is the opportunity it offers to explore new places, be with nature and have fun. The particular cache we went out searching for was actually hidden in a cave and so we had to crawl into the place to retrieve it, way cool!