I just found Vyatta is using jsbrwsniff 0.5.2 in their open source router. Nice! (BTW, version 0.5.3 has been out for a while)
… even though it was Dec 23rd!
This year my friends and I will not celebrate the New Year all together. This year only a handful of us will be together at the same place: some will be in London, others in Cuenca and a few will be with their family or far away due to work or studies. It was to be the first year since 1995 or 1996 and it was a sad first time.
Fortunately, my friend Ángel had a very good idea: have an early celebration of 2007 New Year’s Eve. Yesterday we dressed like it was Dec 31st, we cooked, had raisins and even weared party favors for the revelry 🙂
Yesterday I bought two tickets for what will arguably be the best concert in Valencia in 2007: Night of the Proms. Tickets are a bit expensive (50 EUR + sale charges, making 55 EUR each), but I’m sure they’ll be worth what they cost.
On March 30th I will enjoy the music of Tears for Fears, Mike Oldfield, John Miles and some others. I will report.
Izquierda: Irlanda – Derecha: España.
Izquierda: "You are a lynx" – Derecha: "Estás hecho un hacha"
Izquierda: todo el mundo capta el significado y lo cojonudo que es usar ese desodorante – Derecha: Ni un 1% de la gente capta eso de Axe – ser un hacha
Cuánto dinero gastado en imagen de marca para que la ignorancia lingüística de un país lo eche todo a perder ðŸ™
The Parable of the Two Programmers is a 1985 tale showing why a lot of programmers (and I’d say people in IT in general) get frustrated with their work.
We are supposed to do our work quick, diligently and perfect at the first try. But then, as we achieve those objectives, outsiders think the work was easy and there’s no merit in it and IT workers not only get no recognition or appreciation, but are even disdained. Do you still wonder why frustration and stress come?
Some people have a lot of things they’d like to do, but I only have one and it looks probably naive to most of you.
Here it goes.
If I be rich, I would set up a foundation to promote Science for the average man (AKA popular science). Making scientific knowledge accessible to the average Joe is of capital importance: make Joe understand what what happens around us and what scientists are doing and maybe 10% of Joes would pursue further knowledge, therefore becoming scientists themselves.
I am particularly interested in Mathematics and Physics, although I do not disdain any subject which could be tested by the Scientific Method. That leaves Psychology, Sociology and the so-called “Social Sciences” out (btw, I’m still trying to find what “science” there is in “social sciences”, no pun intended).
Yesterday I released new versions of two of my open source projects: Javascript Browser Sniffer and XSPF for Ruby.
Version 0.5.1 of jsbrwsniff fixes the detection of Flash Player. It was not working with Flash Player >= 7.0 in Gecko browsers and not working at all in Internet Explorer due to a typo.
Version 0.3 of XSPF for Ruby is able to export XSPF playlists to M3U, SMIL, HTML and SoundBlox. These are minor features, but as a new dependency has been added (Ruby/XSLT), the version number has been upped to 0.3 instead of 0.2.1. I am currently developing the XSPF generator.
I have released a pure-Ruby XML Shareable Playlist Format parser (XSPF). It is available at http://www.elpauer.org/xspf/ under the GPLv2 and the Ruby License
Every 4 to 6 months I have an idea for a new technology or a new application for an existing technology.
The company I work for does not invest in R+D and that annoys me, as I am unable to further develop my ideas without help.
Advised by a business-creation program, 18 months ago I removed some of the ideas I had previously posted here.
Now, after a couple of disappointments due to other companies patenting my ideas years after I had “invented them” -I guess they have discovered those thing independently, I’m not suggesting they have ever copied me-, and a conversation with Agustín Benítez of Fotón Sistemas Inteligentes Ejercicios Resueltos at aKademy 2006, I am reposting those ideas here. I hope they are still useful as prior art.
- Wificast
Use a wifi (a MIMO mesh network) to build your own TV or radio. No licenses needed. It could be integrated in DVB-T set-top-boxes at a very low cost.I started playing with this idea for the first time in late 2003 to replace autoguides and work as a GPS-like device uing low-emitting access points, whenever someone with a wificast-capable device is near the AP, the system is effectively working as a GPS system; read more about it in WifiGas). I even sent an e-mail to Seth Godin and he liked the idea.
Unfortunately, I never applied for this patent (I did not have the money to pay for the fees and expenses associated with a patent) and now News Corporation has made public they will start to use this technology in 2007 in the USA.Read it.
- Cremation DNA
Very simple idea: when someone asks for cremation, store a partially-sequenced DNA. Very useful for post-mortem identification. Read it. - Multiplexing CAS and RAS
Describes how to use base-band codification to improve memory-access times (hardware). Read it. - Snapshot System State Management
Also known as “The Poor Man’s UPS”. Read it.
I actually loved this movie by David Lynch.
The Straight Story tells the real story of Alvin Straight, a 73 years old man with a quiet life in a small country town (Laurens, Iowa). When his brother gets seriously sick, he decides to put away their differences and visit him after many, many years. So, alone, riding his lawnmower and towing a littler trailer, he begins a long journey through hundreds of miles, just to see again his brother, even if it’s the last thing he will ever do… Based on a real story.
There are some very emotional moments, like the dinner with the hitchhiking girl: When my kids were real little, I used to play a game with them. I give each one a small stick, one for each one of them, and say "you break that" and of course they could, that’d be easy. Then I say "tie the sticks in a bundle and try to break that". Of course they couldn’t. Then I’d say " that bundle, that’s family".