Everything in life serves a purpose and this blog is no exception. It has however completely fulfilled its purpose and I have nothing more to add, except wishing a very happy life to everyone who visited it and hopefully found something interesting inside. Thank you all for sharing bits and pieces of my life and myself. It was helpful for me to express things I couldn't otherwise but I truly feel the time has come to end it.
Whatever you do, always be hopeful. Hope can set you free. Don't ever let fear hold you prisoner.
As for me, I will find my S. and be happy. Some day.
I hope.
Saturday, July 30, 2005
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
A lazy and shameful day. I don't know what got into me all day but I just wandered around the house feeling completely knackered and moody. Still managed to finish some database translation tidbits I had lying around and sent them upstream. I currently have one batch of text backlogged due by the end of the month.
Read the first couple of stories from Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction and thoroughly enjoyed them. The first was Greg Bear's "Blood Music" which is stunning considering nanotechnology wasn't even coined as a term when it was wrote and published and Gene Wolfe's "A Cabin on the Coast". This one actually got me thinking "what the f*ck?!" just after I finished it. Gardner Dozois' preface is very good (even if it's not one of his famous summations) and Robert Silverberg also contributes with a rather interesting foreword. This book looks like a must have, really.
In other news, Opeth have officially released one track of their upcoming album, Ghost Reveries on sale next August 30th. The track is called "The Grand Conjuration", pretty much rocks my boat, and you can check it out for yourself the Opeth Listening Lounge (registration required). Highly recommended.
Read the first couple of stories from Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction and thoroughly enjoyed them. The first was Greg Bear's "Blood Music" which is stunning considering nanotechnology wasn't even coined as a term when it was wrote and published and Gene Wolfe's "A Cabin on the Coast". This one actually got me thinking "what the f*ck?!" just after I finished it. Gardner Dozois' preface is very good (even if it's not one of his famous summations) and Robert Silverberg also contributes with a rather interesting foreword. This book looks like a must have, really.
In other news, Opeth have officially released one track of their upcoming album, Ghost Reveries on sale next August 30th. The track is called "The Grand Conjuration", pretty much rocks my boat, and you can check it out for yourself the Opeth Listening Lounge (registration required). Highly recommended.
Monday, July 18, 2005
Long and somewhat tiring day which got me pretty much knackered by the end of it. Up bright and early to wander off to Lisbon as planned for the FM 2006 presentation and press conference with Miles Jacobson and finally the opportunity to meet the man himself, in flesh and bone. Turned out to be quite a pleasant time in many different ways. He's just way accessible, completely down-to-earth type guy and his presentation was flawless. He showed a few screenshots to the assembled press and then played a beta build for a few minutes to show off some of the new features. The few new stuff he actually unveiled was very very pleasant and according to him there's still 20+ new features to be known in the near future. He asked the press not to disclose anything until the press release is out by the end of the week, so I'm refraining from talking any further about it here aswell.
After a few interviews, we went downstairs - awesome hotel by the way, right in the heart of Lisbon - to have lunch and had to chance to get to know Miles a bit better. Turns out he's an alternative music fan (oh, rings some bells) but we didn't talk much more about that. Some points of view were discussed, we had the chance to point out some things that need to be done concerning our work for the game and generally we spent some good time with him. I hope to meet him again when I travel to London by the end of October to attend a couple of Dream Theater shows and hopefully get together with the folks at the office up there aswell. Interesting times ahead.
Picked up my Amazon order from the post office and it turns out that the postman *really* messed up the package origin in the note he left. Amazon packages contain some publicity of their services nowadays and one of those is something like "NEW Home & Garden, Top brands low price". So he just went on and wrote down that the package originated from "New Home". Right...
Found an interesting - and somewhat depressing, when it comes to Nirvana - interview with Dave Grohl via Blabbermouth.
After a few interviews, we went downstairs - awesome hotel by the way, right in the heart of Lisbon - to have lunch and had to chance to get to know Miles a bit better. Turns out he's an alternative music fan (oh, rings some bells) but we didn't talk much more about that. Some points of view were discussed, we had the chance to point out some things that need to be done concerning our work for the game and generally we spent some good time with him. I hope to meet him again when I travel to London by the end of October to attend a couple of Dream Theater shows and hopefully get together with the folks at the office up there aswell. Interesting times ahead.
Picked up my Amazon order from the post office and it turns out that the postman *really* messed up the package origin in the note he left. Amazon packages contain some publicity of their services nowadays and one of those is something like "NEW Home & Garden, Top brands low price". So he just went on and wrote down that the package originated from "New Home". Right...
Found an interesting - and somewhat depressing, when it comes to Nirvana - interview with Dave Grohl via Blabbermouth.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Apparently I'm on a translation spree and in consequence I've wrapped up the bits and pieces due next Sunday. So I'm a whole week ahead of schedule which is nice and comforting.
Found a really neat article about Dream Theater at Mike Portnoy's Forum. I've mirrored the article scan kindly provided by mabrown over at the forum so if you're a hard core DT fan like me, I strongly suggest you take a look at it.
Tomorrow morning I'll be in Lisbon at some hotel for the Football Manager 2006 Portuguese presentation. Sports Interactive's managing director, Miles Jacobson, will be here talking about the game and answering questions from the press. I'll finally get to meet the guy - we only spoke through IRC a few years back - and it would be nice to have lunch with him, if the opportunity presents itself - something I strongly doubt, anyway. Don't tell anyone, but working for SI as a programmer within a couple of years is one of my dream jobs ;)
Apparently the latest order from Amazon is already in the post-office waiting for me. The warning in my inbox says something about the package coming from Germany but I'm used to the weird tendency the postmen around here have to mess up things like that. I'm not waiting for anything from Germany, so it must really be the Amazon order. Which, if you're wondering, includes Arthur C. Clarke's and Stephen Baxter's Sunstorm (Book 2 of a A Time Odyssey, of which I thoroughly enjoyed volume one), No Way Out DVD and Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction, a compilation of compilations, namely of the Year's Best SF edited by Gardner Dozois.
Oh and I completely lost my head and just had to order this. It's just too cool.
Found a really neat article about Dream Theater at Mike Portnoy's Forum. I've mirrored the article scan kindly provided by mabrown over at the forum so if you're a hard core DT fan like me, I strongly suggest you take a look at it.
Tomorrow morning I'll be in Lisbon at some hotel for the Football Manager 2006 Portuguese presentation. Sports Interactive's managing director, Miles Jacobson, will be here talking about the game and answering questions from the press. I'll finally get to meet the guy - we only spoke through IRC a few years back - and it would be nice to have lunch with him, if the opportunity presents itself - something I strongly doubt, anyway. Don't tell anyone, but working for SI as a programmer within a couple of years is one of my dream jobs ;)
Apparently the latest order from Amazon is already in the post-office waiting for me. The warning in my inbox says something about the package coming from Germany but I'm used to the weird tendency the postmen around here have to mess up things like that. I'm not waiting for anything from Germany, so it must really be the Amazon order. Which, if you're wondering, includes Arthur C. Clarke's and Stephen Baxter's Sunstorm (Book 2 of a A Time Odyssey, of which I thoroughly enjoyed volume one), No Way Out DVD and Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction, a compilation of compilations, namely of the Year's Best SF edited by Gardner Dozois.
Oh and I completely lost my head and just had to order this. It's just too cool.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
An atypically productive Saturday in contrast with the usual lazyness that invariably attacks me on these occasions.
Met tomorrow's deadline for the fourth batch of FM 2006's translation work. Granted it was not too much as SI is keeping it sensible and partitioned but it was a good advance nonetheless which let me breathe a little more and do other stuff while I'm at it. There are two more internal deadlines set for next Sunday and the Sunday after that which I expect to meet easily, if nothing goes terribly wrong in the mean time.
Other than that, I finally took the time to learn some more about the wonders of Ajax, Ruby on Rails, XMLHttpRequest and other assorted web goodies. Apparently I've been pretty much missing the ongoing web application revolution that got full steam in the beginning of this year, largely thanks to - you guessed it - Google with stuff like GMail, Google Maps or Google Suggest. Here's a quick glance at some of the info I gathered on these subjects today:
Well, that's pretty much it for now.
Met tomorrow's deadline for the fourth batch of FM 2006's translation work. Granted it was not too much as SI is keeping it sensible and partitioned but it was a good advance nonetheless which let me breathe a little more and do other stuff while I'm at it. There are two more internal deadlines set for next Sunday and the Sunday after that which I expect to meet easily, if nothing goes terribly wrong in the mean time.
Other than that, I finally took the time to learn some more about the wonders of Ajax, Ruby on Rails, XMLHttpRequest and other assorted web goodies. Apparently I've been pretty much missing the ongoing web application revolution that got full steam in the beginning of this year, largely thanks to - you guessed it - Google with stuff like GMail, Google Maps or Google Suggest. Here's a quick glance at some of the info I gathered on these subjects today:
- Apparently it was Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path, who coined the term Ajax, back in February, as a shorthand (according to him) for "Asynchronous JavaScript+CSS+DOM+XMLHttpRequest" or else the rather accepted moniker of "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". The main idea behind the Ajax group of technologies seems to be adding another layer to the usual client-server exchange during a web session - the Ajax engine. This speeds up communication because it transforms synchronous into asynchronous communication allowing for a page to be treated not as a single monolithic entity spat out by the server but rather a patchwork of different elements which can be asynchronously sent back and forth between server and client - by means of XmlHttpRequest. This reduces the amount of information on the wire, allowing for near instant feedback to the user and so ultimately allowing for a much snappier user interface. The communication between the server and the client (the Ajax layer in particular) is done using XML. Funky!
- Ruby on Rails is a framework for building web based applications lightning fast. Found a nice couple of introductions to the subject which are pretty much jaw-dropping (at least for me that have been building web apps the hard way for a few years now) here, here and here. Wikipedia also provides valuable info on this, Ajax and more related stuff. Better yet, Seeing is Believing!.
- Other items of interest I found today are Mapping Google, Ten Essential Development Practices (via Tao of Mac), The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams and Six Design Lessons From the Apple Store, these last two being also by Jesse James Garrett, whom I mentioned earlier on, but which I haven't read yet.
- If you prefer Python over Ruby but want to retain the easiness on creating web apps which I've mentioned before using Rails, then there seems to be a worthy alternative in the form of Django. Apparently the major drawback when compared to Rails is that it doesn't include its own tiny webserver and instead relies on Apache's Mod_Python. I'll be giving this a shot over the next few days.
Well, that's pretty much it for now.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Call me Nat Friedman's groupie if you will, but I just can't help myself from linking to his blog entry today yet again. I've been reading blogs for quite a while and I've come across a lot of good ones but this single post is probably the most funny, well written and Fight Club-esque one I've ever laid my eyes on. Truly priceless. Here's an excerpt:
After three hours of drilling, before he could affix the temporary plastic cap, I took a break to stretch my legs and use the bathroom. Three hours in the dentist chair is a long time. The bathroom had a mirror. Should I look? Can I look? I did.
And oh, the horror.
What did Nat see in the mirror of the dentist's bathroom? Check it out for yourself.
After three hours of drilling, before he could affix the temporary plastic cap, I took a break to stretch my legs and use the bathroom. Three hours in the dentist chair is a long time. The bathroom had a mirror. Should I look? Can I look? I did.
And oh, the horror.
What did Nat see in the mirror of the dentist's bathroom? Check it out for yourself.
Sunday, July 10, 2005
As of lately, I've been increasingly finding myself doing air drums to Iron Maiden songs. The obvious conclusion I've reached in less than a couple of minutes and I guess you will agree, is that in a previous incarnation I was a drummer playing in a Maiden cover band. This also means that I've been having so much fun listening to these mammoths of heavy metal, even if I'm twenty years or so too late. As it is, I've decided to have a stab at compiling my current Iron Maiden Best Of compilation tape. I had lots of fun with this earlier today and, for what it's worth, here's the playlist I've arrived at:
1. The Ides of March
2. Wrathchild
3. Where Eagles Dare
4. Revelations
5. The Trooper
6. Remember Tomorrow
7. Children of the Damned
8. Aces High
9. The Wicker Man
10. Ghost of the Navigator
11. Phantom of the Opera
12. The Number of the Beast
13. Hallowed Be Thy Name
14. Fear of the Dark
15. Iron Maiden
It's designed to fit in a CD so it clocks in at roughly 77 minutes and obviously leaves out a huge list of amazing tracks.
By doing this I've reached a few conclusions and learnt a bit more about myself, music wise. First, it's obvious that this compilation reflects my current taste and degree of knowledge concerning Maiden's catalogue. The fact that I got hooked into them during the current tour where they're only playing songs from the first four albums (the Eddie Rips Up Europe tour) has played a very important role in this compilation and that's probably why you see songs like "Where Eagles Dare", "Revelations", "Remember Tomorrow" or "Wrathchild". On the other hand, there are a few which are absolutely mandatory: "Phantom of the Opera", "Hallowed Be Thy Name", "The Trooper" or even "Fear of the Dark". Finally, it became obvious that the really hard thing is to pick up any 15 songs from the band's catalogue and arriving with a weak best of. It's all just so good. Up the irons!
On another front, one thing that's always disgusted me are employers who judge potential employees primarily by their grades at University. For me this is just plain stupid and wrong. What should really matter, if we are to build a great future for our species and actually think about evolving strongly and confidently, is the motivation and sheer brilliance of everyone involved. That said, it's good and refreshing to see companies like the renewed Novell, who's taking a huge interest in the open source movement - coincidence? - looking out for people who've done "cool" things and are motivated to hack on interest projects, of which the Hula project is definitely an instance. From Nat's journal entry today:
"If you think you're a hot-shot Ajax/DHTML developer, and you also think of yourself as a hacker, then we're interested in talking to you.
New hires into the Hula team will pitch in on the calendar interface, and help us write a web mail interface to rival GMail. If you're interested, drop me a line. Include something cool you've done to get the conversation started."
This is the spirit I identify myself with. Hopefully one of these days I'll be in a position where I can apply for these nifty jobs.
1. The Ides of March
2. Wrathchild
3. Where Eagles Dare
4. Revelations
5. The Trooper
6. Remember Tomorrow
7. Children of the Damned
8. Aces High
9. The Wicker Man
10. Ghost of the Navigator
11. Phantom of the Opera
12. The Number of the Beast
13. Hallowed Be Thy Name
14. Fear of the Dark
15. Iron Maiden
It's designed to fit in a CD so it clocks in at roughly 77 minutes and obviously leaves out a huge list of amazing tracks.
By doing this I've reached a few conclusions and learnt a bit more about myself, music wise. First, it's obvious that this compilation reflects my current taste and degree of knowledge concerning Maiden's catalogue. The fact that I got hooked into them during the current tour where they're only playing songs from the first four albums (the Eddie Rips Up Europe tour) has played a very important role in this compilation and that's probably why you see songs like "Where Eagles Dare", "Revelations", "Remember Tomorrow" or "Wrathchild". On the other hand, there are a few which are absolutely mandatory: "Phantom of the Opera", "Hallowed Be Thy Name", "The Trooper" or even "Fear of the Dark". Finally, it became obvious that the really hard thing is to pick up any 15 songs from the band's catalogue and arriving with a weak best of. It's all just so good. Up the irons!
On another front, one thing that's always disgusted me are employers who judge potential employees primarily by their grades at University. For me this is just plain stupid and wrong. What should really matter, if we are to build a great future for our species and actually think about evolving strongly and confidently, is the motivation and sheer brilliance of everyone involved. That said, it's good and refreshing to see companies like the renewed Novell, who's taking a huge interest in the open source movement - coincidence? - looking out for people who've done "cool" things and are motivated to hack on interest projects, of which the Hula project is definitely an instance. From Nat's journal entry today:
"If you think you're a hot-shot Ajax/DHTML developer, and you also think of yourself as a hacker, then we're interested in talking to you.
New hires into the Hula team will pitch in on the calendar interface, and help us write a web mail interface to rival GMail. If you're interested, drop me a line. Include something cool you've done to get the conversation started."
This is the spirit I identify myself with. Hopefully one of these days I'll be in a position where I can apply for these nifty jobs.
Thursday, July 07, 2005
It's a sad state of affairs in the world nowadays. I'm kind of at a loss of words when it comes to these terrorists attacks, it just never ends and we're simply sucked into a void and mindless war where we play no part whatsoever. We're just bystanders with a varying degree of guilt or innocence.
My thoughts go out to those who perished in this stupid way and to the hundreds who got injured. Maybe I'm just naïve but I don't understand why people insist in making this world uglier than it could be.
Fortunately, as far as I know, none of my acquaintances in London were caught in the attacks, but I'm still to hear from one of them.
Despite all this sickness, the world doesn't stop and so I spent the better part of the day working on the translation. Finished my part of the third batch and sent it upstream. Downstream promptly came another batch and some new match events to translate. Work ensues...
My thoughts go out to those who perished in this stupid way and to the hundreds who got injured. Maybe I'm just naïve but I don't understand why people insist in making this world uglier than it could be.
Fortunately, as far as I know, none of my acquaintances in London were caught in the attacks, but I'm still to hear from one of them.
Despite all this sickness, the world doesn't stop and so I spent the better part of the day working on the translation. Finished my part of the third batch and sent it upstream. Downstream promptly came another batch and some new match events to translate. Work ensues...
Update: There's really not much left to say about the London bombings but I just felt like quoting a good friend of mine from his travel log:
"Why do we keep killing people to tell people that killing people is wrong?"
This perfectly sums up my feelings about these issues.
(By the way, if you're reading this, mate, I've been following your log very closely and some minor hiccups aside I'm thrilled to learn you're having the time of your life. My best to you and Tea!)
So tonight I went out with a few of my friends to catch the midnight session of War of the Worlds. In the end, I can't really say I was disappointed. For starters, I never was a Spielberg die-hard fan. I mean, I respect him a lot, I don't actively dislike his films and I even digged a few of them. But somehow, in my book, he's never been in the same league as other directors. On the other hand, I walked in already not expecting much both from the little I saw in magazines and on previews and also by negative feedback from people I know who had already seen it. The cast is quite good, with Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning and Tim Robbins and, well, Morgan Freeman as a narrator (even if for only a couple of minutes during the beginning and the ending) is always a plus. The special effects also looked quite good to me but only in terms of eye-candy, not in terms of making me believe that was really happening.
And that's basically my gripe with the movie: I didn't find it believable and from some point on I just didn't care anymore. To hell with the fate of humanity, I mean, it just became a big yawn for me halfway into it. Not even the sudden appearance of my very favourite Tim Robbins could lighten it up for me. The plot is shallow and it has nothing to do whatsoever with Wells' 1898 novel except that, well, it's also aliens attacking the Earth and they happen to walk around in tripods aswell. But that's about it. For me, the main difference between the original and this screening is that the former is believable and creepy and the latter really isn't. Not the worst movie I've ever seen (far from it) but definitely not one of the best. This however got me curious to see the 1953 version of the film which judging from online reviewing at large seems to be a wee bit better.
On other news, spent some time tinkering with NFS, trying to turn one of the spare machines into an MP3 server for the house only to figure out that it doesn't really work very well over the wireless network. Whereas using plain old ethernet cabling, it works just fine. Which sucks, because everyone here who could possibly make use of the system is pretty much on wireless mode, myself included. And cables, well, they tend to be a thing of the past. I'll give it a try later on with SMB but I guess the problem doesn't lie in the network filesystem anyway.
The translation for FM2006 is going smoothly. Sports Interactive has broken things in different and periodic batches this time around so we've been calmly setting our own deadlines and things have been working out. Tomorrow I'll deliver my part of the third batch and the fourth (plus new match events) should be sitting in my inbox any minute now. Spoke to Woodg today and it seems he's taking my interest in helping to develop the new online translation system by testing it. According to him, testers will be paid for it, so I'm not complaining. The former system sucked so let's see what this new one brings us...
One final note for the quick face lift on this blog. I was kinda tired of the old one (ain't that the usual reason for changing things around?) so I just threw in another Blogger stock template. While I'm not hoping you actually like it, at least I hope it's easy on your eyes ;)
And that's basically my gripe with the movie: I didn't find it believable and from some point on I just didn't care anymore. To hell with the fate of humanity, I mean, it just became a big yawn for me halfway into it. Not even the sudden appearance of my very favourite Tim Robbins could lighten it up for me. The plot is shallow and it has nothing to do whatsoever with Wells' 1898 novel except that, well, it's also aliens attacking the Earth and they happen to walk around in tripods aswell. But that's about it. For me, the main difference between the original and this screening is that the former is believable and creepy and the latter really isn't. Not the worst movie I've ever seen (far from it) but definitely not one of the best. This however got me curious to see the 1953 version of the film which judging from online reviewing at large seems to be a wee bit better.
On other news, spent some time tinkering with NFS, trying to turn one of the spare machines into an MP3 server for the house only to figure out that it doesn't really work very well over the wireless network. Whereas using plain old ethernet cabling, it works just fine. Which sucks, because everyone here who could possibly make use of the system is pretty much on wireless mode, myself included. And cables, well, they tend to be a thing of the past. I'll give it a try later on with SMB but I guess the problem doesn't lie in the network filesystem anyway.
The translation for FM2006 is going smoothly. Sports Interactive has broken things in different and periodic batches this time around so we've been calmly setting our own deadlines and things have been working out. Tomorrow I'll deliver my part of the third batch and the fourth (plus new match events) should be sitting in my inbox any minute now. Spoke to Woodg today and it seems he's taking my interest in helping to develop the new online translation system by testing it. According to him, testers will be paid for it, so I'm not complaining. The former system sucked so let's see what this new one brings us...
One final note for the quick face lift on this blog. I was kinda tired of the old one (ain't that the usual reason for changing things around?) so I just threw in another Blogger stock template. While I'm not hoping you actually like it, at least I hope it's easy on your eyes ;)
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