EVOL.reverse

I’ve been trying out Quod Libet and I’m really liking it so far. It supports regular expressions for searching your music collection and has a bunch of nice plugins, for example, Alarm Clock / Lullaby, which allows you to start or stop playback at configurable times (great for waking up in the morning with loud music!).

Via Lifehacker, I’ve read about JS-Kit and found it great! With a single line of code dropped into any of your webpages you get a complete comments system (dynamic with thread support), such a simple and useful idea. The guys who did it didn’t even bother to put Google Ads in the page (at least yet).

Also via Lifehacker, I tested Searchmash, which offers web, images, video, blog and Wikipedia search results all on one dynamic page with modules that expand and collapse and which apparently is being run by Google whose intention was to test if users would be impartial if they didn’t know it was really Google behind the screen. And while we’re at it, I recommended seeing this video called Google Behind the Screen which is, and I quote “smart, stylish documentary that examines Google”. It’s a 352mg file, you’ve been warned!

Enjoy.

There are songs that… you just don’t have words to say how much you like them. The problem is when you realize if you show it to another person, the odds are, the person will not like the music as much as you do at the first hearing. Most of the times, not even after listening to it several times1)..

Liking a music is intrinsically connected with your state of mind, your present mood, what you associate that music with (e.g. an occasion, a girlfriend, a moment, ..) and surely many other things.

I thought on writing this post while listening to Sleeping Beauty from ‘A Perfect Circle’. So, at least if you understand this and by knowing I felt this way about this music, hopefully you will listen to it and see if you appreciate it as much as I do. Enjoy.

It’s not what you do, it’s who you are that counts.

I’m now also cross-posting to Advogato. I did some test posts before I could put this to work and that resulted in some empty posts on the advogato recent-log page. Sorry guys!

Ana’s Msc. presentation went great. Today was really the best one from the several rehearsals I saw. She got the degree and also was congratulated by several teachers and colleagues. Nice moment to be there.

08h00 - After sleeping 5 hours there we were, heading towards Redondo. Me and Ana were invited to give a talk at a local high school about the Computer Engineering course.

After a general introduction, I talked about what professional opportunities exist nowadays. Some of my university colleagues are now at YDreams, Siemens, IBM, Edisoft, etc.. and so I tryed to pass the message that, at least in IT, the job opportunities aren’t as bad as in other areas. I then talked about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and other famous people in the IT industry. I finished by saying that if they follow this course they also have the opportunity to start a company with less money that in other industries. Other speakers included a biologist and a constructions engineer, but as we talked later with the professor that invites us, the kids were really thrilled in the end with computer engineering!

11h00 - Heading towards Évora for Ana’s masters pre-presentation, the one that counts is only tomorrow.

12h00 - She did great and had a lot of attendees too. Congratulations!

18h00 - Kung-Fu Training.

23h30 - Totally tired.

Whenever I visit my Msc advisor I always leave stunned by the agility (or is it dark magic?) he has on using the Linux console in all its virtues (sed, awk, sort, shell scripting, make, emacs, vim, etc..). I can imagine other stunning activities besides watching someone using the console but I doubt any can boost your productivity like mastering these babbies.

When I began thinking about distributed computing more seriously for my Msc work I looked at it as being an old idea. Almost as old as computers itself.. I thought. Boy, was I wrong..

Distributed computing is known to have began around 1970 with the emergence of PCs and computer networks (mainly ethernet and the Internet). As PCs were slower than the mainframes the way to scale was to buy more of them. Also, the trend toward cheaper machines made the idea of having many PCs a feasible replacement for a single mainframe. We can think of it was the parallel machine of the poor..

Although there is some controversy about what is considered to be the first computer, the difference between it and the appearance of distributed computing will always be significant. I choosed to consider the first computer the first fully programmable mechanical device by Charles Babbage that goes back to 1837. In this case, that makes a difference of 133 years, which in human history is not much but in terms of computers is a lifetime.

Demystified..

I mean, if Donald Knuth got distracted while writing “The Art of Computer Programming” and spent ten years working on his typesetting system LaTeX, how will I be able to complete my MSc thesis without getting distracted?

A wonderful post about time-travelling, Infinity and parallel universes.