Moving downstream

Time to move on...

2010-06-08T23:45:00.000-07:00

So I finally decided to leave Blogger and build something that provides me with a little bit more control over the types of content that I can provide and manage. This blog will not be updated any more. If you want to continue following me, please move to my new spot:

www.movingdownstream.com/blog

Yes, my own domain! Isn't that exciting? What isn't exciting is that I've had it for quite some time now and only now I'm putting it to some use.

Enough about my last post. So long!

BTW: I've imported all posts from this blog into my new blog, so you won't have to ever refer back to this blog.

It's hard to blog when having too much fun

2010-05-18T22:45:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know, it's been another hiatus on my blogging activity. It's not that I don't have anything to say, it's just that the things that I want to talk about would require more time to blog than I have free to think about them. So I decided to just throw things out there and at least I'll get some things out. I apologize in advance for not providing much commentary on any of them. The order is not really important.

1) Average per household food cost for the largest cities in the US

Original article from Bundle

The diagram above is quite interesting, but, at the same time, not necessarily that helpful. Looking at New York numbers is probably the best way to see how misleading the numbers could be. It's all a matter of how big the city is and how diverse the population is. Cheap food can be very cheap and it becomes expensive very rapidly. For example, you can go to McDonald's and spend $4 per person on a reasonably sized meal. At the same time, I can go to Whole Foods and spend $15 on salad and a little bit of starch and protein.

The same thing can be said about groceries. I remember when I was living in Stillwater, OK that I could go to Wal-Mart and spend $30 on my weekly groceries. Today I generally don't spend less than $70. And I'm probably even buying less food than I used to buy (I used to have more time to cook than I have today).

My point is that when you have things that are this different, every time you have a mix of population of multiple different income levels, low income people (that is usually a majority) will pull the average cost down very rapidly. A better metric would be to look at this number as a fraction of the income level. Do New Yorkers spend more of their salary on food, or on buying HDTVs?

2) Arts

Lots of things going on in the arts department here. A day before my birthday Amy and I went to see the world premiere of Amelia. It was a very different opera. The story line was mostly non-linear and there were very few things that I could call a "big aria".

The production was divided into two acts of roughly an hour each, each with three scenes. Between the scenes the curtains would go down but the orchestra kept on playing. No pause for clapping until the end of the acts. The music was quite modern, unusual for opera, but nothing that I can say I had never heard before. But, as I said, very different for an opera.

Later this month we are going to watch Candide. This piece has a little bit more of a personal connection, as I've rehearsed most of it for a future performance that actually never happened before I left the choir. It's much lighter operetta, but with the normal arias, duets, choirs, etc. Let's see how well they do it. It's always a danger to listen to a piece that I know very well, as any small mistakes will drive me crazy.

Finally, the choir I sing with (Seattle Jewish Chorale) is getting ready for our last concert of the season coming up on June 13th. Tickets are available on Brown Paper Tickets and with me if anybody is interested. It's going to be a great concert. I'm very excited about it.

3) Work

Lots of things happening at work. So many that writing them here will bore some people. I'll just say that I've been working late most days (not today, though, as I'm in one of those uninspired days - which gave me time to write this post!) but starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel of my most important project of this year.

Oh, and today I was awarded my first patent! It was one I filed with two other co-workers over 4 years ago. I have other 5 or 6 out there being reviewed. The patent process is very interesting, to put it mildly. I believe that patents are important, but they can be easily misused and that makes me sad. The question that people with way more understanding on the subject that I do have been asking is whether the danger of misuse is worse than the benefits that it provides. I will not even try to answer the question.

And I think that's all I'm going to write about today. There are my topics to cover, like my robot building project, the wedding, Facebook, Twitter, working in South Lake Union, my new gadgets, winemaking, books read, just to name a few, but I'll leave those to my readers' imagination until I decide to be uninspired to work again and write another long-ish post.

One graph to conquer it all

2010-04-19T23:33:00.000-07:00

I received a link from a friend of mine to a very interesting challenge:

Graph Theory II: CONTEST for Geekgold

It's an interesting contest in which people decomposed a board game into a graph and then you need to identify the board game looking at the graph.

This reminded me of an old discussion I had at work. But before I get there I have to remind people that my Ph.D. research was on graph-structured databases, so I have used a lot of graphs in my life. I don't even know how many different graph "frameworks" I have implemented, including a very restricted but highly efficient graph database. I like graphs, but I also learned their limitations.

Back to my story: my old manager once had a vision of how to solve every problem. He thought that if we could build a giant graph that recorded everything and how everything related to everything you could solve all problems. And we had many meeting discussing this vision, which was never implemented, because nobody really believed in it beyond that manager.

This vision had two different problems:

The first one, which is the easiest to explain, is scale. It's very hard to build something that has an arbitrary level of connectivity and allows for queries that could be of any length. If you add to this the need to build something on a large fleet of small and "unreliable" hardware, so requiring redundancy and robustness to failure, you basically would have a very hard time to keep it to any reasonable level of performance. That I have personal experience with, as I did implement a graph structured database that, in order to achieve any meaningful performance characteristics it required (1) to pre-calculate all the "joins" and (2) make them read-only.

The second one is harder without explicit examples, but it's related to the curse of dimensionality: if you add too much to your graph, soon you can't conclude anything from it, because little noise in many dimensions will overwhelm all your signal. Just saying that in the air is hard to convince anybody. New techniques to deal with large datasets with large number of dimensions are more and more successful at identifying "low-hanging fruit" at scale, i.e. whatever has a very large signal compared to the rest of the noise. If you have a lot of data, those algorithms have been able to scale so well, that it's possible to apply them in all the data and find a lot of different "high signal" patterns. It's not that the filters are getting better, it's just that we have been doing a better job at looking at a lot of data at once.

In any way, going back to the board game graph puzzle, it's an interesting challenge. I don't know enough board games to be able to recognize almost any of them, but I had fun just trying to decipher the graphs and relate them to a possible game. Enjoy!

The danger of Twitter sentiment analysis

2010-04-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

So I was reading an article from TechCrunch entitled "Sentiment Is Split On The iPad: People Either Love It, Or Hate Others For Not Shutting Up About It". The subject was funny so I decided to read it. But, when I started to look at their sources I realized they were pretty much just using TweetFeel which is a service that tries to do sentiment analysis on the tiny twitter messages flowing around with the given keyword.

Sentiment analysis is a very hot topic lately and there are lots of interesting results from it. However, it doesn't work that well, because most of the methods are based on keywords around the concept you are looking for and language is not very good at being locally unambiguous. Twitter makes it different:

- It has a positive thing that people can't write much, so they will put their sentiments there and not just make a reference to it in an far away phrase
- It's bad because there is only so much context that can be obtained from 140 characters.

So I decided to use TweetFeel to see what data they were using. They made some references in the article, but I wasn't sold. TweetFeel is quite interesting: it keeps streaming the references to the keyword you enter (in this case "ipad") and highlights it in green if it's considered good and red if it's bad. It also keeps count of good and bad references.

After letting it run for a minute or so I was seeing about the same thing that the TechCrunch article mentioned:

Negative: 37 (52%)
Positive: 34 (48%)

But when I started looking at what was considered positive and negative, I started seeing some very interesting tweets (I don't recommend people clicking on the links):

Free ipad WTF http://j.mp/cQdSbk Risen #thefeelingyouget #TLS 5lko
Free ipad WTF http://sn.im/v8uda #OMGThatsSoTrue Feliz Páscoa #TheFeelingYouGet #HappyBdayKoba j59y

In other words, lots of spam sources that were trying to use common keywords to get people to click on their links hoping it had something to do with the their keyword spam. Moreover, because had the word "WTF" I'm guessing TweetFeel considered that negative. My 1-minute sample is not significant, but if I remove all those spam tweets, here is the new count:

Negative: 26 (43%)
Positive: 34 (57%)

(as I said, this is not statistically significant, so don't take these numbers too seriously)

Anyway, now that I'm talking about the iPad, one might be wondering if I'm planning on buying one. The answer right now is "no". If I looks at how I access the information that I want to access and interact, I don't really think that there is a gap that is worth $500. Although there are some apps on it that I really wished I could access without having one, even if it's just to play around with it for some time (like the Marvel app for reading comics). I just hope that the trend is not for thing to migrate all to the iPad framework and not to also have a web or other computer-based way of accessing it.

Amazon still invaded by medical doctors?

2010-04-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

A long time ago suddenly Amazon started recommending me a lot of medical stuff, like anatomy books, drug dictionaries, etc. Looking at why I was recommended it (which is one of the best features for curious people like me), it was all because I had bought a Palm Pilot (yes, this was a long time ago). Apparently Palm Pilots were very popular among doctors because it had some very useful apps for them to keep track of patients, do quick calculations and get references to drugs.

The interesting thing is that if you think of the statistics of it (and I ask people that claim statistics background to go through this during interviews all the time), it makes sense that you will see something like this if you have a biased population. Let's say that out of customers for product A, 20% are medical doctors and the rest is a random scattering of other types of people. If, just to make it simple, 50% of all medical doctors buy product B, suddenly you will see that 10% of everybody that bought product A also bought product B.

The reason that medical doctors are such an interesting category is that I'm not aware of any other category of people that have such strong counts of specific products they purchase. Engineers don't all buy similar books. Graphic designers also don't. Maybe lawyers might, but I haven't seen any evidence that this is happening.

Anyway, why was this brought to my attention? Well, it's because I added something to my Amazon wedding registry and I received the following recommendation:

A stethoscope? Unfortunately for this type of recommendation I can't see why I was recommended it. It would have been interesting.

Is being recognized always good?

2010-03-16T20:07:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I received an email from a former research colleague that exclaimed that a paper that I co-wrote with him in the past has surpassed 100 citations. The paper, Problems with fitting to the power-law distribution was quite an interesting paper to write. The idea to write it was from the aforementioned colleague, but most of the experiments and statistical background was given by me (that's why I was given the first author position on the paper).

I'm proud of having written it, but every time I read about it I remember one sad thing: this wasn't what my research was about. None of the papers I wrote for my research received any recognition. It's quite an interesting conflict that probably I'll have to live with for the rest of my life. Unless I decide to get back to research and continue my work on feature extraction on graph-structured databases until I find ways to draw better parallels to other people's research results and people can use my proposed ideas.

Anyway, I should be happy for the achievement. 100 citations in 5.5 years is something that very few can claim. Actually Google Scholar claims that the paper has something between 174 and 175 citations. I don't trust the results of Google Scholar, but I have to live with it, as it's the only "free" system that provides some sort of comprehensive view of articles and citations.

Sometimes people need to be careful with statements

2010-03-16T20:04:00.000-07:00

The written language is a powerful thing, but is also a dangerous weapon that can backfire if you don't know your audience very well and don't measure your words correctly. Here is a statement that I received from somebody through email:

"[...] the development is either algorithmic or done in C# [...]"

In other words, this person claimed that no algorithms can be done in C#? Quite a strong statement!

The fall of FriendFeed

2010-02-25T23:56:00.000-08:00

A long time ago, I mentioned in this blog that I really liked the idea of FriendFeed as a hub for people's activities online that was both open and semi-extensible. Unfortunately it was probably a little too complex for most people and it never really caught up with the masses and was eventually acquired by Facebook.

After the acquisition there was a mass exodus from people adding content directly to FriendFeed, but I could still follow must of the people that I liked to follow there, because of the "hub" effect. I couldn't follow the discussions anymore, but there was still something out there to see.

Well, tonight a new nail was added to the FriendFeed coffin: it was down and has been down for at least 45 minutes (I tried to access it 45 minutes ago and it was down and, as far as I can tell, it's still down). I'm getting a great message:

500 Internal Server Error
nginx/0.6.34

Not good at all...

Actually I'm really tired of all this "news push" technologies. I have even stopped reading regularly my RSS readers. I don't access Twitter or Facebook. I at least read my emails, but haven't been very good at replying to them.

So you might ask what I've been doing with all this extra free time on my hands? My blog hasn't been the one receiving all of it, so what is it? To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure. I've been working until reasonably late, dealing with wedding stuff, sometimes playing some video game at night (as "my" PS3 is going to stop being mine on Tuesday).

Other things I've been doing is struggling with OpenEmbedded... I don't even want to start on this one. It has been a very painful process to just get to build a distribution with the developer libraries of OpenCV for my BeagleBoard. It's one of the hard things of working with a reasonably fast moving open source project: the main documentation that are the user discussions all seem to refer to previous versions, because their suggestions don't seem to work for me. And I'm really learning to despise Windows 7. If they call this the best Windows yet, those Microsoft people are keeping their bar quite low to allow for even better OSs in the future.

Why do companies try to fool us?

2010-02-23T22:29:00.000-08:00

I made a purchase online on an online company that seems to partner with bizrate for customer surveys. If you fill the survey, you automatically enter to win $25 on a daily drawing. Because I like to give feedback, I decided to enter all the data. At the end of the survey you are asked to provide your name and email address for the $25 drawing with the following options:

Yes. Enter me to win in the daily cash giveaway and send me bizrate's money saving newsletters!
No Thanks. - but, still enter me in the daily cash giveaway.

The boldface is actually the same they provide on their page. If you only read that you conclude that if you check the first one you will enter to win the prize, while if you check the second one you are forfeiting the option of entering to win $25. But when you read the whole phrase you see that actually the first one you are entering the drawing and signing up for their spam, while the second one you are still entering the drawing and not signing up for their email.

It's so dirty that makes me not want to buy at that company again. I know it's not their fault for this, but it just ruined my complete shopping experience.

But the bad quality of bizrate doesn't end there! After you enter it all it gives you your satisfaction rate compared to the average:

Do you see the problem there? Quite puzzling.

(by the way, "puzzling" seems to be my newest favorite word right now)

But just to end on a positive note, after one month wait I finally received my first printed board shipped from Bangkok through Hong Kong, from an Australian company. It looks exactly how I designed it and the components seem to fit as expected. Now I just need to have courage and do my first surface soldering of a component that requires a magnifying glass to see if it's in the right position (think of a 3mm x 3mm component). So it's going to be lots of fun! I ordered 4 boards so that I could make mistakes and I received 9! I can make lots of mistakes now!

Tracking time

2010-01-04T19:32:00.000-08:00

I was reading this interesting article about people tracking what they do with their lives and was fascinated by this video:

Baby Sleep Tracking.

Somebody spent a whole year tracking the sleep patterns of their newborn baby and generated a visualization of it. Quite interesting to see the pain that many of my friends are going through right now. It would be interesting to see how it is for different philosophies of what to do when babies wake up in the middle of the night. There are lots of them out there!

This reminded me of the time that I spent about two weeks tracking by the minute how I spent my time at work. It's really enlightening! I suddenly realized how much time I spent writing emails and talking to people that dropped by my office. The part that I wasn't able to actually track was the context switching cost.

The problem with this is that some context switching is good: it allows you to relax your brain and when you come back you will see things that you were ignoring before. At the same time, it might produce bad results. I've seen variable naming standards changing because of breaks in coding. I've seen even full system architectures shifting because of the inability to remember all the context when coming back to the code. So some of this loss might be long term, when you have to go and refactor the code to handle this "drift".

In any way, it was a good exercise. I suggest everybody to do things like that from time to time to really understand their days and how to maximize the parts of your day that you actually like.

And here comes 2010! And I feel... old...

2009-12-31T06:53:00.000-08:00

We've reached the end of another cycle around the sun. But this is semi-special again: we are entering the last year of another decade and it has a special psychological significance. We are not in the 2000s any more, were are in the 2010s! Thinking back in the past, I had a completely different expectation of what 2010 was going to be about: not really flying cars or robots helping us on everything we do; but where technology was more part of our surroundings.

Yes, we carry our pocket computers (our phones), but there is still a lot of "old style" things around. Newspapers, magazines and books can be found in every corner, in most people's hands in the bus. The bus also is not as connected as I was envisioning. I can theoretically check status of the buses in Seattle on their tracking website, but not all buses are available and it just doesn't feel like it's something that people believe needs to be there (for example, my bus that I take to work always says "no information available").

Cars also are only timidly more technological. Only the higher-end models have GPS (although I see a good amount of people with "tiny" GPS units glued to their windshield), collision detection, blind spot warning, back-up camera... Driving in 2010 is not really any different from driving in 2000.

Also, I've been observing negative effects of technology. People going around with their lives outside listening to their iPods not paying attention to what is going on, and whether somebody actually needs their attention. I feel bad for bus drivers when they have to make an announcement. Very few people in the bus are actually listening.

Oh, well, that's what progress is about. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. The hope is that when it's bad we are learning and it will eventually turn into something better. As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Progress is always better on the other side of our dreams.

Happy 2010!

Denied at Google - update

2009-12-27T11:05:00.001-08:00

Just to make it even more interesting, I was starting to get "denied" messages on Google Reader (why did I decide to go back to that application anyway?), so I decided to log out and log back in. When I clicked on logout, I get the warning from Firefox saying that the connection is untrusted. Looking at the technical details, things get even more puzzling:

www.google.com uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is only valid for *.s3.amazonaws.com
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)

Now my theory is that I have a misbehaving plugin on my Firefox. The odd thing is that I don't have many plugins installed, so I'm not sure which could be misbehaving. And if I turn one off, it required restarting Firefox, which might make the problems go away anyway.

Oh, well, I guess I'll just have to live with not knowing what happened.

Denied at Google

2009-12-27T10:42:00.000-08:00

How great is it? I'm doing a Google search and receiving this awesome response:

<error>
<code>AccessDenied</code>
<message>Access Denied</message>
<requestid>64283040B63F0895</requestid>
<hostid>
EtXPyF4Ywx5Z4NkV+u0yEa+Nr37ZGjsbmC3no9eMyYNEXQBYlb/0nKgYiFdvUAH+
</hostid>
</error>

Maybe Bing infiltrated my Mac laptop?

Sometimes visualization helps

2009-12-26T11:36:00.000-08:00

So everybody knows that the US health system is broken, right? Well, that makes finding charts to show that it's broken so easy. Look at this one from National Geographic:

Sadly, like most "easy to understand" graphs, it only gives you a way of seeing that there is a problem, but it provides no help in identifying what the problem really is. Where is all this money going if not to improve the general health of the population? Or maybe it's just because the cost of living is higher in the US, so doctors, nurses, and other health care staff get higher salaries and this increases the average cost? But maybe the high cost of living is caused by high medicals costs - and there you have your vicious cycle!

Other factors that probably should be taken into consideration here: how much is this actually due to external factors that make the population "sicker"? Bad nutrition, too much use of cars and other mostly-passive modes of transportation, too much sitting in front of the TV... Maybe the problem is not the left hand side of the graphic, but the right side of it.

Anyway, at least there is a lot of activity right now on trying to understand what is going on and how to improve it. It doesn't mean that it will make it better, but at least without this activity it would never be better.

Multiple failures

2009-12-22T08:52:00.000-08:00

Engineered products generally are built with some level of redundancy or safety multipliers. But failures and accidents still happen, due to the rare chance of multiple rare events happening together (which is usually more likely to occur than people think, and that is what makes the design challenging). For example, an airplane is built to handle being hit by a bird during landing, but if that at the same time causes the pilot to despair and abort the landing accelerating and trying to change course too quickly, then it could cause an accident. In the software world it's the same thing. I've built software that can handle network outages and computer crashes, but when a computer crashes during a network outage that happened during a deployment, then you never know what is going to happen.

Well, but today's story was much less tragic. My alarm is set for 6:15 AM. At 7 AM Amy wakes up and wakes me up saying that it's already 7 AM and I'm still in bed! I try to remember if I had woken up by the alarm, turned it off and went back to bed, but I haven't. Before I explain what happened, I need to explain the setup that I have at home:

- There are two alarm clocks: one that has the alarm, but has no good clock display; and another that has good time display, but terrible alarm
- If I don't turn the alarm off, it goes for one hour and then turns off by itself.
- My alarm clock has three alarm settings: beep, radio (generally set to King FM) and sound (which can play one of 4 soothing sounds, like beach, rain, etc.)
- The alarm clock has a "sync to atomic clock" feature. It tried to auto-sync the time every so often (which also makes it a good alarm clock, as when there is a power outage at home at night, it automatically can find the time when the power is back)

Now to the story:

During the weekend I changed the alarm settings to make a beeping sound instead of the normal music (long story why that). When I reset the alarm on Sunday night I had forgotten of it and it beeped on Monday. So in the morning, with the light off, I thought I had changed it back to radio, but I hadn't:

- FAILURE 1 (human): it was set to "sound", which doesn't really wake anybody up. But there was one piece of the puzzle left: the alarm is supposed to run for an hour and it wasn't running when we woke up!

- FAILURE 2 (engineering): for some unknown reason, my alarm clock decided to readjust itself to about 35 minutes ahead. So the actual sound started playing at 5:40 and at 7 it was already off.

Oh, well, I was still able to get to work in time for my first and only meeting of the day (which is at 10 AM, and I arrived at work at 8:45). Alright, now that I've used my work time to write this story (while I was waiting for some data gathering process to run), it's time for me to get back to it.

Misleading "price promotions"

2009-12-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

One day in my far past I decided that I needed web hosting. After looking around for options, for some reason I'm not too sure of why anymore, I went with Textdrive. I was fairly happy and used it for one project that ended up dying after some time. Then Textdrive was acquired by Joyent. And with it I received a lot of other free products, like file storage, contact and calendar manager, and others.

Joyent continued its merry way acquiring other companies and merging products. One of the few "added" products that I used was Strongspace, a simple file storage solution. It was free and it felt like I was using at least some of the $15 I was spending with hosting every month.

Then they decided to migrate to "Strongspace 2.0", a much better system. And with it they were giving me a promotion:

More for less! Right? Not really. I used to pay $15 for the whole hosting, now they are offering me $4/month for just the file storage. The sad thing is that, as I said, it's the only thing I use. So I have to think about it...

Alright. Late for work. Time to go!

Quick update on my computer

2009-12-11T09:23:00.001-08:00

Not that you reader really care about it, but I just want to confirm that I woke up this morning and my computer was still on! Now it's time for me to get back to work - and I mean this in multiple different ways:

1) At my paying work, I just have a lot of things to do, and things are certainly not moving as quickly as I was hoping, because I think I still don't fully know the answer to what I'm trying to write. So, subconsciously, I don't want to write whatever is in my head right now, because I know that most probably I'll have to rewrite a good part of it.
2) At my robot work, everything stalled too.
a) I finally had Openembedded building, but not yet doing anything useful for me. My next goal was to start writing my first vision software that would only test if there is something orange in sight. I'm still scared about build times.
b) I designed the I2C level translator PCB, but I still haven't had the courage to spend my first $50-70 to get it manufactured. I know that there will be something wrong with it, and I'm just not ready to throw this money and time away on "my education".

At least the wedding stuff is somehow moving.

My computer puzzle: solved! (I hope)

2009-12-11T00:30:00.000-08:00

I think that today I finally figured out what was going on with my desktop. So here is the story:

I have a desktop that was running Windows XP. I bought it to play games (as you can't really play many games on a Mac) and to run the occasional software that either doesn't have a Mac version (e.g. CadSoft's Eagle, or has a much worse Mac version (e.g. Intuit's Quicken).

A lot of the games that I was playing I bought on Steam, which meant that they took a lot of disk space. Moreover, I was starting to be annoyed with the gradual lack of support for drivers and other things for Windows XP. So I decided to take the "hit" and to a double upgrade: (1) Buy Windows 7 and (2) Buy another 2 TB of HD.

Actually it was cheaper to buy two 1 TB HD, so that's what I did. So I now have 3 HDDs on my desktop and Windows 7. And everything seemed to be running ok. Until one day that I woke up in the morning and my computer was off without me turning it off. As I turned it back on, it stopped "mounting" one of the new HDDs! It could recognize it, but it just wasn't there to be used anymore.

I was puzzled, but had to do other things. When I came back to my computer: off again. And this time when I turned it back on it didn't turn itself completely. I had to turn off again and on again and everything seemed to be working for a few hours and it would shut down again (never when I was using it, though).

My first thought that it was some sort of sleep mode, but one piece of evidence that suggested otherwise was that Windows complained that I turned off the computer unexpectedly when it came back. So I dropped that theory.

My next theory was that the power source was too weak for 2 new HDDs. I couldn't figure out how to prove it, so I bought a new bigger power source that arrived today (well, actually yesterday). After installed, I turned the computer back on and everything seemed normal, except that the HDD was still not being added. Tinkering around a little I found that it was simply not being assigned a name and fixed that.

I went out for dinner and when I arrived back the computer was still on! Very exciting! Then I went to watch the Top Chef final episode and when I arrived back to my computer... Surprise! It was off! I cursed it and turned it back on. New surprise: it came back on in the same place it was before! My computer had gone to sleep! Then everything clicked! This is what I think happened:

* By default Windows 7 puts your computer to sleep after 30 minutes in idle.
* However, my old power source did not support sleep mode, so when it would issue the sleep message, it wouldn't sleep exactly, it would just turn off.
* The new power source does support it, so it went to sleep as expected.

I turned off the "sleep in 30 minutes" and not I'm going to sleep myself and see in the morning if my theory is correct.

The conclusion is that maybe I shouldn't have bought a new power supply... It's also debatable whether I should have bought Windows 7. I have to agree that it was great that it automatically recognized my network printer, while for Windows XP it was extremely painful to get it to only half-work (I couldn't get the scanner to work at all and the printer printed every other request). But my video card that has only the latest upgrade for Windows 7, is still showing the same rendering bugs that I was seeing before.

I'll write more about Windows 7 some other day. It's certainly not as "refined" as some people claimed, but it's cleaner and prettier than XP. Also, it doesn't feel any slower than XP. And that's all I can say for now.

New lows - in temperature, that is

2009-12-04T21:12:00.000-08:00

So it's pretty cold here in Seattle right now. The weather forecast is saying that tonight it might hit all the way down somewhere between 16-19F (between -9 and -7 degrees Celsius). In some parts of the country, this is nothing. But considering that the lowest recorded temperature for Seattle today was something like 18F, you can see it's pretty record-breaking.

I'm trying to keep myself warm. I've been staying home for longer lately, trying to think about the many things I have to think about. For example, I just bought a new set of HDs for my desktop and... Now my desktop decides to randomly shut down! How great is that? So I just ordered a new power supply and hope that this is going to solve the problem. That's the only theory I have so far. I just have to wait for it to arrive (probably sometime late this week or early next week) to confirm the theory.

I've also been trying to read things. I actually finished a couple of books:

Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel: quite interesting book. A set of interviews with some famous programmers. Unfortunately I didn't find it organized enough to be able to draw common themes throughout them. Perhaps that they all like to code and solve problems, they seem to have times in their lives that they just focus on getting something done, and times they are just coasting and making sense of what is out there. It was a fun read.

A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin: it's a classic fantasy book (published in 1996). Very deep and convoluted story, but felt a little slow at times. Maybe not slow, but perhaps a little too full of concurrent things that all tie to each other, so require cautious retelling in order to make sense. Great book, nevertheless. Now I have to read the next one: A Clash of Kings.

Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: another classic. This was great that was a pretty short book (I read it in about 7 bus rides). It might have been a little better if I remembered Dante's Inferno, but besides that, it was very imaginative and slightly philosophical. Highly recommended, if you haven't read it yet. It was published in 1976.

Now I finally decided not to wait for the Kindle edition of The Gathering Storm, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. My back hates me for that. It's a big book (760 pages long) and only the first part of 3 of the conclusion of the series (i.e., it book 12 of 14 planned), so... we'll see.

Done with the report about things that are not very useful for other people except for me... Time to get back to thinking about life, FX, the universe and ABN.

Playing chess - Chess With Friends vs. Chess.com

2009-12-03T06:55:00.000-08:00

A co-worker a few weeks ago suggested that now that I'm "sheep" and I have an iPhone, I should get "Chess With Friends" and play chess against him. It's a free application that allows you to play against a specific person or a random person.

Before accepting his "challenge", I decided to download it and try a couple of games to see how my chess is doing. On my first game, I was playing with black and quickly I realized how rusty I was. But, after starting pretty badly, my opponent decided to play badly too and I ended up winning the game.

At this point, I decided to look around and make sure it was a good application. That's when I remembered that I had played with Chess.com before and was slightly impressed with how much they had put into it. And they have an iPhone app. So I installed that app (also free) and started my first game on chess.com (playing with whites) and a second game on Chess with Friends (playing blacks).

The chess.com game was going quite slowly, so I decided to start a second game on chess.com (playing blacks), so playing 3 games at the same time.

One interesting thing about chess.com games is that they give you 3 days to move, or else you automatically lose. Chess With Friends doesn't have that restriction.

Why is this last information important? Well, after 5 days, the second person I was playing against on chess.com simply stopped playing, so I won the game by him giving up. The game was way too early to say who was winning. So I was back to 2 concurrent games. And I wasn't doing so great in any of them.

But then again the guy on Chess With Friends started making more mistakes than I was making and I won the game. On the other hand, the one on chess.com mostly dominated the game from the middle of the game and I ended up giving the game up after 27 moves.

Now comes the summary:

2 games on Chess With Friends, both playing as blacks and I won both games.
2 games on chess.com, one I won because my opponent stopped playing and the other I lost (playing with whites)

My decision then became: do I want to continue on a platform that is a little prettier (the chess.com iPhone app is not that great), with worse players, so easier to win; or do I want to do the chess.com, lose a lot of games (or have players simply disappear from time to time), but potentially learn more?

It's a tough decision... But I guess I made up my mind: and it's not for any of the reasons above. It's because of a very nice feature on chess.com: after you finish a game you can request computer analysis of your game. And then you receive a nice play-by-play analysis of where I made mistakes and what I should have done. The report doesn't look very flattering:

Inaccuracies: 6 = 24.0% of moves
Mistakes: 2 = 8.0% of moves
Blunders: 1 = 4.0% of moves

Yes, I have a lot to learn! Only 64% of my moves were good. But, hey, it's been many years that I haven't played chess. And I did win those Chess With Friends games, so I'm not a complete loser!

Still in existencial crisis, I guess

2009-11-24T23:47:00.000-08:00

So I'm still here and alive. I'm actually doing reasonably well, except for getting quite a nice cold last week and making me REALLY late on a project.

Well, I haven't been posting much, because I don't really know what to post about. I'm in a time in my life where I'm reading a lot, looking around a lot, but not doing much. I just don't really know what I want to do. I've been trying a few projects, but I always seem to find a reason why the project won't work and I stop or postpone it.

For example, tonight I was trying to fix a problem of buying the wrong component for the robot. I actually didn't buy the wrong component, just the wrong packaging for the component, SO8: a very tiny package that is made for surface mounting, so I can't really interact with it myself. Looking at other options, I found out that for what I want, there are no non surface mounting ICs on sale anymore.

But on the plus side, I could solve the problem by just using an n-channel enhancement MOSFET instead. So I went around and chose one that should work to buy. Total cost: components = US$2.50; shipping = US$7.00. Yuck! So I decided to look around for other components I want to buy and remembered that I still wanted a compass and a gyroscope. I went to look through the options and lo and behold: all of them are surface mount only (well, all the reasonable ones).

And then I'm back to where I started: I have to build a board and send it for somebody to manufacture it for me. After a few weeks I might get what I was hoping for and then try to heat the board so that the components would glue to it and test it. Oh, joy!

I'm not even talking about work here! It's kind of sad to see really smart people being afraid of accepting that they are smart and that they can stand behind their early decisions. What happens is that they have to find something that will make them feel better about it. The cost is a lot of disruption on the things they never really tried to understand.

Pricing tricks?

2009-10-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

I was doing my daily time-wasting browsing around the internet when I came across MadWine - as you can guess, an online wine store. There are hundreds of them out there, so the finding itself wasn't that impressive. What actually impressed me is that I decided to click on their Montly Specials and then decided to get everything from $20-$40 and what do I see? US$ 19.99-priced wines! Finally a company that does not use those x.99 price tricks to make it feel like you are buying something cheaper than it actually is. Kudos for MadWine!

5 years at Amazon, 5 years in Seattle

2009-10-18T23:33:00.000-07:00

Time flies... And here we are, 5 years later looking back and trying to decide if it was all worth it. 5 years in a tech company doing software development is a long time. Especially if I add the fact that pretty much I never switched teams (although the team's main focus and even all system it maintains were eventually switched around from under us a couple of times), I become a very unlikely person. It basically puts me in the class of those "old grumpy men" that just stay around to criticize people and tell them stories of things that happened so long ago that it's not really relevant any more.

Every time that I go through those anniversaries, it's good to consider whether it's been worth it. And I can't really say it hasn't. I have built a lot of things and a few cool things. I still don't think I have reached my limit, but from time to time I start wondering if I'm close to it. Especially in the last couple of months that I have been building something that is very likely much more complicated than I had initially thought. The result of it is that it was released already a couple of times and when it starts getting used some major bugs start cropping up that force me to step back and review some of the assumptions that I had made before. After the third time that this happened I was really worried about my ability to actually ever get it right. More than this, my ability to get it right to a level that other people could get it right too (which has been proving to be even more complicated - when other people touch the code it seems to break it more than fix it - thank you extensive test suites that keep things mostly working). But it's so cool... At least I think it's cool!

Anyway, back to abstract thought: Amazon is a fun place to work. The distributed and isolated nature of the systems and organizations sometimes can look very unproductive (lots of people doing similar things all the time), but it fosters a very interesting split:

1) Teams that have strong people with good vision of what they want to do can get their things done
2) Teams that fall behind and become reactive to things that break can just find themselves digging bigger holes and never getting out of it. Some of them don't even realize it.

Fortunately I've always been working in teams that had more of #1 than #2. I have worked with #2 teams and having the knowledge that they exist out there makes me happy to keep myself put and keep moving forward towards what this "vision" is. I could talk about the vision here in this blog, but it's nothing very exciting to external users of the Amazon website, so I'll keep it for myself.

Enough about work, let's talk about Seattle... Seattle is a very interesting city. It's big enough to allow for some culture and activity buzz, but not that big that you are caught on the stress of too many things to do, and higher living costs. Having moved here from Oklahoma, I can't say there is anything that I really miss (maybe being able to find parking anywhere I go). And comparing to Sao Paulo, it's actually even more complicated to compare. What I miss about Sao Paulo is not the city, but the people. And I was never very social - but you don't have to be very social to have lots of friends and lots of options of things to do. In Seattle I have some good friends, but people are much more "reserved". Maybe it's just that I'm surrounded by not-so-social people.

Anyway, all in all, it has been a great experience. I like where I am and I am comfortable with where I'm heading right now. Next year is wedding year, so that will go by probably without many other things going on. Then, if I'm given the opportunity, I'll re-evaluate and see where I should be heading.

Autism in more than 1% of the children population in the US?

2009-10-07T00:05:00.001-07:00

The number that this article from PsychCentral reports is quite scary. And the article probably could have been written in a more positive way: it talks nothing about what the root causes are and how to prevent it. It's only talking about the fact that it needs to be addressed by health care to take care of those kids and analyzed as for the impact that this will have in the economy when those children arrive at the workforce.

So I went out looking for articles talking about the possible sources for autism spectrum disorder. I'm not a medical doctor, so I'm certainly not the best person to rate these articles, but I found one that was quite complete-looking:

Autism Spectrum Disorders from The Environmental Illness Resource

There are lots of references out there, and many from not-so-impartial sources, like nutrition websites (that sell food supplements) that claim that it's because people don't do a complete detox before having kids; or genetics labs that keep pounding on the evidence of a genetic link to chance of developing autism (in many ways, everything is genetic, but genetics can't explain a 10-fold increase in number of autistic kids in a period of less than 10 years!); or some immunology magazines that keep repeating that there is no proof that there is a connection between autism and vaccination (there was a huge controversy about that some years ago because of a research that suggested that there was a connection).

In other words, people still don't know. It's probably somehow related to the immune system, but if it's a cause or just a correlation is hard to tell. Again, I'm still not sure how something like this could cause such a huge spike in the number of cases. But who am I to know those things?

There are bad spam message subjects...

2009-10-05T19:32:00.000-07:00

Lately for some reason my almost spam-free Yahoo email was found by some "Canadian Pharmacy" mass mailer. They are all quite "harmless" and easy to identify, so I haven't been too bothered about them (except for feeling puzzled by the fact that they found my email address). Today, though, I receive an email with this subject:

"Learn where you will DIE!"

For the Canadian Pharmacy... Why?

The "Winter" Olympics - how sad is the aftermath

2009-10-03T08:30:00.000-07:00

So Rio de Janeiro won the Olympic nomination for 2016, how exciting! I hope the investments that will be generated to prepare for the event (two years after the World Cup, so a lot of investments being done) will be put in good use and not just mostly diverted to the pockets of few.

But I'm not here to talk about Rio, I'm here to say how appalled I am with the aftermath of Chicago losing the nomination. News agencies and blogs are "on fire" blaming it all on Obama, which is a very sad reaction. There are so many that I'm not even sure how to summarize their views, so I'll just paste some links (some of them are talking about other people criticizing):

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

And then a few that blame Bush:

[1] [2]

The reality is much more complicated than those "specialized political reporters" can relate to, and that's what makes all this whole process ridiculous. Anyway, I guess I'm now one of those people complaining!

PS: I tried to add Snap shots on this blog just so that you could just roll over those links and have an idea what they are about without clicking on them. The problem is that this solution is a little intrusive, so I'm not sure how long I'll keep it around.

The unlikely day

2009-09-30T09:19:00.000-07:00

Today I was "late" to work (later than usual - I try to get in before 8:30, but I arrived and it was almost 9) because school started at UW and, besides being normally late to catch my bus, the first bus that went through my stop was so full that the bus driver didn't even stop. And then the bus that I eventually caught stopped way more than usual. On my way in I saw an probabilistically unlikely event:

The building I work on has 11 floors (American way of counting, meaning that the ground floor is counted in these 11). 7 people got into the elevator and pressed: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11. 7 different floors for 7 people. How likely is that? Let statistics answer the question:

Model 1: all floors have the same likelihood to be selected (1/10):

10/10*9/10*8/10*7/10*6/10*5/10*4/10 = 6.0%

Model 2: the first two floors have half the chance of being selected (because many people that work on those floors walk up the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator)

18/18*16/18*14/18*12/18*10/18*8/18*6/18 = 3.8%

Model 3: the same as model 2 but taking note of the fact that nobody chose floors 2 or 3 (which I think is a little bit of a stretch to consider, but it makes the number pretty small, which enhances the point)

16/18*14/18*12/18*10/18*8/18*6/18*4/18 = 0.8%

So statistics says it's not very likely, but it doesn't seem as rare as my intuition says (maybe except for model 3, but that was added "arbitrarily"). Maybe it's because I have this policy that if somebody presses the floor just above or below me I'll just use the stairs for the difference. However, this time I was the first one to enter the elevator, so I wasn't able to make that decision.

Anyway, I probably should get back to work here. To add to the unlikeliness of today, I'm doing a third blog post is less than 24 hours. Quite odd indeed.

The strange way dreams tell us things

2009-09-30T06:53:00.000-07:00

Last night I had a very odd dream that was a perfect example of how dreams sometimes are very good at distilling down what happened in the near past (generally in the previous day, sometimes it can extend further than that depending on how important those things are to your mental cataloging system). Before I go and talk about the dream, I'll talk about what I believe dreams are:

(note: this is not really my idea, but it's also not anybody else's idea. It's just a probably incorrectly mix of ideas that exist out there in the literature and interpolation points of my own here and there)

Dreams are a way of our brain to reclassify information in order to fit more things in less space (thus, using less energy). Every input we receive is somehow stored in a very close-to-raw state (where inputs include our thoughts at the time, feelings, etc. not only from our "externally-facing" sensors). Then we dream and those thoughts are mixed with the concepts that they are related to to strengthen those connections and weaken the parts that are not very interesting in the raw memory itself. And it's all made into a "partially believable" story in order to keep us asleep and not let signs of unexpected danger (something being amiss) wake us up.

So dreams show us two things: (1) What we have stored from the previous days and (2) the dimensions in which we are storing this experience.

Onto the dream:

In last night's dream I was at a friend's place (actually something that was supposed to be more like his mother's place) having a party with many other people. Then suddenly this friend "turned evil" and locked everybody in some rooms and left us there for a long time. I felt betrayed because for some reason I had invited most of the people that were in that party, but oddly nobody else thought it was a bad thing.

After some time the doors were opened and I went to talk with this friend and he was handling it all in a very friendly and fatalistic way saying something like: "That's how it's supposed to be, I can't help it"

And that's when I woke up. It makes so much more sense now! Alright, onto work!

A new year

2009-09-29T23:27:00.000-07:00

So here I am back from the whole Jewish New Year experience. It's certainly my favorite holiday in the Jewish calendar, but I'm not really sure why as I generally don't do what I'm supposed to: contact people that I may have wronged during the previous year (generally by either taking a long time to reply to their emails, or not writing emails when I should have) and be sorry for it. What I end up doing is just thinking of my year in a much more abstract level, trying to identify what I shouldn't have done and be sorry for that.

Many things happened this year. Certainly the biggest one is that I decided to get engaged (even though many of my friends and family already consider me married). But there were other smaller things that happened (and I've blogged about many of them in the past). Here are most of them in no particular order:

* I bought a house. It's been so long that I almost forgot that this was still this last Jewish year.
* I joined a Jewish choir, which has been an interesting experience
* I have decided to start working on a robotics project with a co-worker, which made me remember a lot of my undergrad education (actually it reminded me that I've forgotten a lot of it). It's still pretty early in the project, but just going through the state of the technology today has been quite exciting. I'll probably post more about this in the future when I have more to write about. Right now most of the things that I have done have been more in the "experimentation" realm and a little boring for the rest of the world.
* My older sister and her husband moved to Australia where they are enjoying their time amid sand storms and economic downturns.
* Work has been quite "exciting". Management changes, lots of hiring activity, a lot of time spent on future planning, and a lot more still to come (in all those areas, maybe except for hiring - we only have one position left).
* Trips? Not too many. Went to New York about a few weeks ago, drove around the Olympic Peninsula earlier in the year, hiked up Mount Si, and certainly a few others.
* Cooking? A lot of different things, including making Cheddar and Brie (the Brie didn't work so well, the Cheddar was ok, it had a strange sharp taste to it), I've subscribed to many cooking magazines but lately have been having more fun mostly inventing my own recipes.

There must be other things I should list here, but I'll stop now. I feel like if I try to be complete I'll never finish my post. I probably need to go to bed right now and continue my recovery from the 10+ hours of mostly standing that I did yesterday (Monday, actually).

Cheers! And I'm sorry for not communicating much. I need to learn how to just let go of the hundreds of things that I want to read/think and do something. Consider that my resolution for this year (although there isn't such a thing as an year resolution in the Jewish tradition, just an yearly reset of all your promises).

US Healthcare Reform

2009-09-23T00:05:00.000-07:00

You might think that it's odd that I'll be posting about the US Healthcare Reform, huh? Well, maybe you won't find it that odd when you realize that I'm not really going to be posting anything useful about it. It's a very complicated topic that I will make strong claims that I don't really understand much to comment. I'll just say that the US Healthcare is completely broken and needs a reform. How to reform it is a completely different subject.

But to lighten the mood a little, and to give you the reason why I decided to post this, here is how much people are investing on trying to get their ideas out about this topic:

Protect Insurance Companies PSA

PS: I need to change the template of my blog. It really annoys me that this template is way too narrow for me to paste good images or videos. I'll figure something out sometime soon (eventually when I decide to use this blog more often again)

Recommendations - so easy to be wrong

2009-09-22T21:41:00.000-07:00

I was looking at a small part of an interesting talk that happened in the JVM language summit, aboute the .NET reactive framework and then my eyes decided to look around at the "noise" in the page and I realized a very odd recommendation (highlighted in red):

Maradona in India? Huh?

It just shows how easy it is to get recommendations wrong. Probably it's a talk that has attracted soccer-enjoying people, like Europeans or South Americans, that are over 30 years old (to maybe still have a positive connection to the name "Maradona") and then suddenly there you have a recommendation. So right, but so wrong. Just tells you more about the few people that watched the talk than anything what the talk is about. Some people might claim that this is a sign of a good recommendations engine, I'll be ashamed of it.

Time keeps me away from my blog

2009-09-05T09:14:00.001-07:00

I know I haven't been posting much lately. Life has been quite hectic, with a lot of things to think about, and not much time to figure out what to write here. Right now, for instance, I'm getting ready to leave to go to PAX. I'm not that excited about it, unfortunately, because it's going to be a zoo. They are completely sold out and, considering that last year was already a big chaos to do anything there and they weren't sold out, I'm not very hopeful I'll be able to actually try much. But we'll see...

Anyway, I'll get back to this in the near future. Let me get going not to arrive there way too long after the mobs of people.

Weird email

2009-07-26T06:47:00.001-07:00

I just received a very weird email from somebody I don't know, sent to about 10 people, among which I know about 3 of them, asking urgently, with lots of capital letters, that he needs the email address from some other person I never heard before. This is what makes this strange:

The double randomness: a person I don't know asking for another person that I don't know
The fact that I know some of the people on the recipient list: and it's relevant. The person is asking for the contact of a researcher and the people that I know on the recipient list are all researchers
A web search can answer his question: why is he asking randomly if he could have found the answer by himself
The person that asked identified himself as a researcher from Iran. Maybe they don't have very reliable web access there with all the government trying to hide their internal problems...

Am I going to help? I don't think so. I wished I had the courage to do it, but unfortunately the web is too "dangerous" for you to be nice with a random person. There are too many things that can go wrong.

The weird new Yahoo! home page

2009-07-25T06:42:00.000-07:00

I was looking at the interesting concept that Yahoo! is trying out with their home page: an aggregator of favorite pages. You can add new pages and when you hover over them you might get a preview before you actually click on it to navigate out to this page. In a way, it's a personalized portal with the websites you want to have.

I think it's a cool idea in general. Finally somebody big is giving up on being insular and accepting that it's much more beneficial to accept that other sites might have better content than you and try to use that to your benefit. The way Yahoo is trying to benefit with that is two ways:

1) The straight-forward of just being there to show you lots of ads. And it's very annoying! When you hover to get a preview, half of the preview pop-up panel is an ad.
2) The less direct of knowing what people want and being able to work to offer more of what they want. That can be done through providing suggestions of other things they might be interested, or simply a better experience on the preview pane (I'll talk about this below).

I've been quite disappointed with Yahoo lately. Haven't been able to see them moving forward on any of their main services and just adding more ads here and there. But I think this time they have something more interesting than just an ad farm. But it's certainly far from perfect (and final, as it's still just a sneak preview right now):

A) As I mentioned before, the size of the ads sometimes is a little too big and hides important space to get content.
B) They need to code their preview specifically for each website you want to add. Some already work, like gmail and Facebook. or most of Yahoo's properties, such as Flickr. But when it's not there, the results can be puzzling. I tried FriendFeed and it gave me very strange results from an "ediet" feed:

Ask Raphael: Getting a Tighter Butt- 2 days ago
Ask Raphael: Getting a Tighter Butt- 2 days ago
Ask Raphael: Getting a Tighter Butt- 2 days ago
Ask Raphael: Getting a Tighter Butt- 2 days ago
Ask Raphael: Getting a Tighter Butt- 2 days ago
Ask Raphael: Getting a Tighter Butt- 2 days ago
Ask Raphael: Getting a Tighter Butt- 2 days ago
Ask Raphael: Getting a Tighter Butt- 2 days ago
Ask Raphael: Getting a Tighter Butt- 2 days ago
Ask Raphael: Getting a Tighter Butt- 2 days ago

Twitter is also strange, as it seems to integrate with reading other people's feeds, one person at a time, and not the aggregation of the people you follow. At least the default is not looking at ediet, but the Twitter Blog.

C) It is making an assumption that you can fit the experience on a single page with a flat list of websites to look at, one at a time. A lot of what I look at today is through RSS readers and for that experience what saves me time is that the reader software aggregates each piece of the data on the feeds and display them chronologically, which simplifies the number of clicks that I have to do to read what is going on.

In any way, I think it's a good step forward from Yahoo, but it's not the final solution to what I would call a "personalized portal". Make it cleaner, less colorful, with less intrusive ads and allowing a mixed set of experiences and I might even consider using it.

And the plans were set in motion

2009-07-18T23:41:00.001-07:00

I've been meaning to send an email in some time, and I guess I finally did it today. All triggered by my sister now having a resident visa to stay in Australia for longer and even maybe work there.

I know I haven't been writing on my blog much. It's just that I haven't had that much to talk about. I'm working on a big project right now that has been pretty exciting (and a lot of work), but nothing that would fit in this blog. Let's just say that eventually it will very likely become much more like a programming language than anything that I really should be working on. But I guess I can't consider myself a "real" software developer until I've becomes dissatisfied with my programming language options and decided to create a new one.

Today it was Bite of Seattle day. Lots of sun, some food, walking around and staying outside. Over the years I think I learned not to have very high expectations about the event, as it's 70% just like any other festival (same vendors, same location), so I actually was able to have fun this year. Just aim low and everything that you get is good. Including an odd discussion with a guy working for Ocean Spray claiming that cranberries were going to have the same fate as bananas. Cranberries also were bred not to produce any seeds so once there is some disease that affects the current cranberry bushes, it's all over. You can't get some seeds and start again in a cleaner environment. I had never thought of that (and had completely forgotten about this "evolution" about the bananas until he mentioned it).

Alright. I think it's time for me to go on with my evening and rest a little.

Me? I'm still around

2009-07-05T16:55:00.001-07:00

I need to apologize for my lack of useful posts lately. I'm going through another endless period of being busy thinking too much about things and not doing that many different things. Probably the only interesting that I can post is that last weekend I went to a wedding in Southern California and stopped at Los Angeles to meet with a friend from high school. He moved to the US for college and stayed around.

The interesting thing about meeting him is that he keeps in touch with a lot of our old high school friends, unlike me. In certain ways, it's because they are his last friends when he left Brazil. But probably the main reason is that I'm just not the type of person to keep track of all my friends and figure out what is going on with everybody. I did do some of it for some time, but it's just too much time spent doing something and not thinking about things. All that time was deprioritized.

The highlight of the trip was going to The Getty Center. It's a great museum, both as the location and architecture of the grounds and the collection. The good thing is that we arrived there early enough that it wasn't too hot yet, and the crowds hadn't yet made it too hard to appreciate the exhibits. The bad thing is that I had to leave reasonably early to go to the wedding, so we didn't have much time to actually walk around that much. I probably was only able to see something like 10-20% of everything.

The less interesting thing that I can write is that yesterday we had the second installment of "4th of Pizza", the every-3-year pizza-on-the-grill party. This time the pizza didn't work as well. I made the dough and rolled it out way too early and didn't have space to put it in the fridge. The result is that it was all gluey and deformed when people tried to cook it on the grill. Quite messy! But it was all gone anyway. I've made 4 recipes of pizza dough (what was supposed to be good for 8 large pizzas) for about 20 people and I think it wasn't quite enough. People didn't have the opportunity to try to make dessert pizzas.

Now back to my programming language creation task.

When working at Amazon is shameful

2009-07-05T16:43:00.000-07:00

Working for a very large company that you use is sometimes problematic. I've mentioned before that sometimes I have trouble enjoying other websites because of the things I work on. But the biggest problem is when the problem is not what I'm working on, but when where I'm working at looks bad. Today's example is:

It's even sold by Amazon (not a third-party merchant mistake - those happen quite often too)! Anyway, at least it's more fun to find those things than to realize that my current project is evolving into a complete language specification, which is driving me crazy.

Flood

2009-06-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

After reading Earth II, by Stephen Baxter on Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, I had to get his latest book, Flood. And today I finished reading it.

Like many of Baxter's books, this is another extrapolation on scientific theories to push humanity to the limits of society. Interesting read, if not a little on the sad side. I think talking about anything else about the book will spoil it somehow. It wasn't my favorite of Baxter's books (probably that would still be something on the Manifold series, probably Manifold: Time, but that's debatable. Like many other things, it's hard to me to talk about my favorites, as it would somehow mean that I would prefer reading it again than reading something new.

Anyway, if you like the genre, I recommend it. If you like romances or adventure with happy endings, you probably should stay away from this 490-page tome.

Starting to know people?

2009-06-12T22:09:00.000-07:00

It's odd when I'm reading an article on a "popular" blog and suddenly I realize I know the people the person is talking about. Here is today's example:

Bye, bye Bay Area: Oberoi back in Seattle with stealthy startup

I used to work with both these guys! Actually I saw them at the U. District on Wednesday. They were walking around and I was inside a bus going home. Unfortunately I couldn't talk to them...

Sure, it's a little cheating that I'm looking at a Seattle tech news blog, but it's interesting anyway. From time to time I start to ask myself if I should take the time and start writing and replying to emails again... Get to know people again and not rely on talking to "hubs" to know what is going on. Then I realize how many things I want to do and I hide again.

Oh, well... Welcome back Gaurav and good luck!

Google square is funny (a.k.a. depressing)

2009-06-03T22:56:00.000-07:00

So Google finally launched their "answer" to Wolfram|Alpha, Google Squared. It's basically a search engine that the results of the search are shown in a table in which you can actually try to extract "structured" information from. Pretty cool in concept. Is it cool on implementation too? Well, first I decided to stay away from their "suggested pre-canned searches" on the home page and chose things that are more "dear to my heart":

Adidas shoes

Out of their 10 top results, only 5 are Adidas shoes. There is one Nike shoe and some things I can't really tell what they are. It auto-suggests showing "brand", "color" and "condition" but it can only identify the brand of two things, color of two things (both wrong) and no conditions.

Ok, so maybe it's a bad example, what about something a little bit less popular:

Brazilian trees

Only 4 results, two from Wikipedia and one mostly wrong. It's interesting how it is able to combine results from multiple websites. Not too bad, but quite limited. Only 4 types of trees in Brazil? Where one of them is called "species"?

The third one is the charm, right?

French composers

Out of the 7 first results, 4 are French composers. The funny part of this is the choice of "date of death" and "year of death" and they don't match most of the time! More than this, in some cases the year contains the full date of death.

Good try, Google, but you need to try harder.

Non-scientific first impressions of Bing

2009-05-31T23:47:00.000-07:00

So Bing is out, so I decided to give it a quick try before I quit for the evening. So I ran the last 3 searches that I did (only one of them was actually an all-web search, but I ran all of them anyway), and the results were quite interesting. They reminded me of the company that is behind this:

1. scalaz (the only web search): Bing thought I misspelled "scalar" and returned only "scalar" query results. There was a small link that I could press to return only "scalaz" results, which when I clicked worked ok.
2. java posse: The first hit was the website I was looking for. However, when you look at the "special internal links" you see "January", "February", etc. What are they? Links to some months of the show (it's actually a blog), but it doesn't contain the year, so not that useful. Also it doesn't contain all the months, just a random select few.
3. snooth cork'd: Again it tried to rewrite my query and use "smooth cork'd", which was quite odd. What I was trying to get is a traffic comparison between both wine organizer/social network sites. The best answer that I found? Wolfram|Alpha!

As you can see, there is an underlying common pattern here: more than Google, Bing tries to predict what you really want and, consequently, will get more things wrong. That's why Microsoft Office is so annoying sometimes. Maybe it's the same engineers that now moved to Bing! :-)

Some other day I'll spend more time on this analysis and find Bing's strengths.

I love website bugs!

2009-05-30T07:51:00.000-07:00

Sorry, a little software development joy. I was browsing around food links that I read on this article and when looking at ethnicgrocer.com and decided to look at what they think French Pantry Essentials should look like, I received the following message:

Server Error in '/' Application.
(...)
Parser Error Message: The server block is not well formed.
(...)
Line 7: <%@ userAgent = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_USER_AGENT") userAgent = lcase(userAgent) if Instr(userAgent, "googlebot") then Response.redirect("http://www.myethnicworld.com/") %>

You can see the full page here. Look also at the source code. In the bottom you will see the stack trace and a very useful warning message:



Should I be the person seeing this? I really don't know why this is still the default behavior on web servers. It should be aware of the client and just dump debugging information if you have some sort of cookie set. Enough of seeing other people's code out there!

Repeating today's buzzwords

2009-05-29T00:03:00.001-07:00

Today is the day of two new big service promises, but no deliveries: Microsoft's Bing and Google's Wave. Bing will apparently release next week for people to see, so maybe it's a better promise. Wave is supposed to only release later in the year, so I have to control my skepticism. But, on the other hand, the Wave presentation had so much more information than the Bing presentation that it's easier to be more excited about the former.

What are my personal impressions? Wave looks confusing, but maybe as an engine it might work. I'm concerned about the use of a "fake participant" on a conversation to do integration with external data sources. Sounds like a weird architecture (especially because it seems to work differently from a normal person). Identity is also a little interesting to discuss. But it's too early to tell.

Bing? That one is even harder to gauge. It seems like people that had access to it are excited about it. By only having access to a silly video and some screen shots, I can't see it. If Wave looked confusing, Bing looks even worse. The same interface for a lot of different use cases is generally a bad sign. I'll try to spend some time playing with it next week when it launches and then I'll give a real summary of my impressions.

I'll have to add that lately I have been trying to reduce my reliance on web search and I'm trying to focus on tools that are better for what I'm looking for. For example, if I'm looking for a website, I go to delicious or Twine. If I'm looking for a product, I first look for review sites and then the product. If I'm looking for a person or place, I go to Wikipedia.

But there are a few use cases I still need to fall back to web search. This is mainly important at work. For example, code samples, documentation, error codes, all of them are generally very hard to start with a specialized web site. Another annoying thing is that the integration of web search in my browser is easy. All other integrations are a little clunkier, which makes me sometimes use web search simply due to convenience.

Anyway, I'll continue keeping this goal in mind and see what it teaches me.

Web 2.0 maps... Should we really care?

2009-05-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

I came across this on FriendFeed today:

From Dot.com to Dot.gone - Web 2.0 Start-ups That Have Vanished

An image with Web 2.0 company logos that were active in 2006 and then annotated with which have gone out of business and which have been bought by other companies. In other words, it actually has one case of success (being acquired) and two of failure (going out of business and still being around - ok, some do have this odd plan of making money and being around, but this map doesn't identify the ones that are actually profitable right now).

I thought that the most interesting and telling thing of this map is that I probably only recognize about a quarter of them. Certainly I'm not in the target audience for most of those websites, but 25% seems a little low for companies that are hoping to get somewhere.

Shorts for the day

2009-05-13T06:48:00.000-07:00

Life has been pretty tiring as of late. There was a big launch on Monday evening and that made me stay up pretty late and last night when I finally was able to sleep some I had dreams about co-workers mocking me for not hiring some candidate. Quite a joy.

Launch, you say? What launch? I didn't see anything different! Well, that's how it works for us back-end people. And this was one of our most visible launches, so it's out there somewhere. Just don't get confused by it.

Another thing that I wanted to mention is that I've been reading Halting State by Charles Stross and there was one thing that I found funny. At some part of the book they were trying to track transactions that happened at a specific time to see what happened with something and one of the characters say: "Good luck grepping through those logs. It's almost a million entries a minute!" And they promptly drop the plan. A million log entries a minute for a bounded time range? That's really not that hard... Or maybe I'm just spoiled.

Back from Mount Si

2009-05-10T20:37:00.001-07:00

Today I finally went to what is supposed to be Seattle's most popular hike, Mount Si. Unfortunately I think its popularity comes only from the proximity to Seattle (about 45-minute drive) and the good condition of the trail itself, but not really how nice the hike is. It's an 8-mile roundtrip hike where you hike up for 4 miles straight (gaining about 3500 feet, about 1 km) and then down for 4 miles back. There are pretty much no views in the middle of the way. If you don't make it to the top, you don't see anything beyond trees and some rare wildlife. But is the view from the top worth it? Oh, yes! It's amazing. If you get a clear day (which we didn't quite), you can see all the way to the Olympic Mountains.

Conclusion: did I enjoy it? Yes! Would I do it again? I don't think so.

Here are some pictures:

This is to show that unfortunately the day wasn't so clear. In this picture you can see the Olympic Mountains in the back and some hazy version of downtown Seattle and downtown Bellevue.

And this is the most interesting wildlife shot of the day (unfortunately not that sharp because it was a little dark from all the trees to take picture of a moving object):

If you can't identify what you are looking at, it's a snake, a Gartersnake to be more exact. Not dangerous at all.

RSS in the news

2009-05-06T23:14:00.000-07:00

There were two interesting articles on RSS published on "almost mainstream" news:

Steve Gillmor's Rest in Peace, RSS

and

Dave Winer's reply RSS is dead? My ass...

The interesting thing is that they approach the subject on two different ways and, of course, get to two different conclusions. I'll let you read the articles and get your own conclusions.

I think both are right, and both are wrong at the same time. On one hand, what Steve Gillmor is saying that what RSS lacks is the community is right. RSS is a one-way street that only supports third-party distributed commenting (by using whatever your reader supports, like Google Reader that supports commenting, sharing with your friends, and flagging news as interesting). And that's certainly a problem, as you lose people adding to your article.

However, I don't think that centralizing everything around a twitter-like approach, or FriendFeed, actually solves the problem. Look at me right now, I'm technically commenting on two articles at the same time and adding my point of view (that has more than 140 characters). That doesn't fit any of the two options.

I really like the concept of real-time that a short messaging system provides, but I also think that there is a need for other streams of information to be added based on your experience of what you like to hear about. So I want both, but I want both to work together as one. And add Facebook to the mix so everything becomes complete. I think of it as multiple dimensions working together:

Friendship: I do care what my friends are up to and worrying about. I don't really matter to get noise from them like "I wished Illustrator would stop crashing". But if you are just a person that from time to time has interesting thoughts to share, I don't care about you getting a free KFC grilled chicken.
Internal growth: for the things I'm passionate about, I want to be able to get in-depth discussions about it. I care to know about what the people that I think have good ideas about the subject are talking about, and, as I find new sources of information, I want to be alerted when these sources provide more information.
Society need: We all need to know what is going on around us in the society. We shouldn't hide from it, just because it seems boring and always the same. If you think something is boring, maybe for those things you just want a count of how many people are talking about it. For new things, you probably want to follow the development of it. So the system would be something like "alert! There is something new going on with..." and then you can select to "follow" the news (and maybe post a question about details you think are missing in the news) or just say "whatever... good to know, but I don't care to get more details"

There is an interaction between everything. My friends might want to make sure I'm following a story that I might have thought it was not interesting enough for my free time and vice-versa. People from my interest group might migrate to becoming my friends. Things that are just news might become part of my "internal growth" interests.

The question that remains is how you can get to it in a distributed manner. Building one big silo that contains all the dimensions is probably not what we want. Depending on my interests, the features that I care about are different. For example, if I care about photography, a good photo cataloging and visualization is needed. If I care about electronics, I need to have access to schematics. If I care about shopping, it would be good to have links to places where I can buy the products or navigate through their features. I don't think anybody can build a website that can handle all those use cases and still make it understandable.

Alerts on news and filtering is also very different than friend activities. For friends you care about dates and locations, and passing ideas. For news you care about classification of alerts and identification of story development. And actually it also has some features of the "interest" case above as different types of news probably require different interfaces to be able to efficiently understand and act on this news.

So what are the underlying elements that need to be combined? I can think of two main things:

1) People: we need a FOAF-like solution to identify people and be able to relate them across pages.
2) Subjects/interests: for you to be able to correctly alert on the things that I care about, you need to understand that I care about that. And as you are providing your interests in a separate website, having those being shared will certainly help.

Anyway, what started with a short discussion about two blog posts, ended up becoming this long article that I probably should spend more time thinking deeper about it. Actually, on the contrary, it smells like another project for me and I don't want to have another one on my list of things to think about and never getting to it (I've been keeping those on Evernote and I've been pretty happy about the experience so far. I just wished they had a Blackberry app)

And what happened with the cheese?

2009-05-05T00:24:00.001-07:00

I just realized I forgot to tell the end of the story of the cheese that I mentioned quite a while ago. So... It's actually done! How did it turn out, you might ask... Well here is a picture:

It feels a little bit like cheddar. It's a little crumblier than usual, and maybe a little on the sharp side. But nobody has fallen sick from eating it and I was happy. I'm not sure how long until I'll try it again, though. Probably I'll go for something different for some time, like brie, or a blue cheese. Then I might try another hard cheese. In any case, it's always very hard to make something that you'll only know if you were able to get it right many months from the day you did the work. At least hard cheese not like wine that you work for many days and then wait. You just have a few hours of work and then a few hours of cheese pressing and that's it. Blue cheeses require a little more constant attention.

But if I really want something that is quite risky to do at home, and requires a lot of attention, I should try to cure some meats... :-)

Impressions from WolframAlpha presentation

2009-04-29T22:24:00.000-07:00

I've watched the Harvard's sneak preview of WolframAlpha if it does about 1/3 of what the presentation actually shows (it's very easy to tailor a presentation to things you know your software can do and hide things it can't), it would be impressive. However, there are some odd things that I'm not sure make much sense. One of the reasons I can't be sure is that the presentation itself was terribly recorded. You can basically hear Wolfram talking and typing on a computer, saying abstractly what he is receiving back, but they don't really show the images.

But in some cases he gives some fishy examples. For instance (as we are talking about fishy things), his question of "How much fish is produced in France?". It starts with useful information and then he says that it's "1/5th of the rate that trash is produced in New York City". Pretty, but why would you waste computing power to show such randomly useless data? It doesn't seem right, unless there is something else that is not being shown, or if it's not doing what it should be doing.

In general I'm eagerly waiting for it. Just thinking that I'll have a free Mathematica to play with, it's already worth it. I'm sure this they can get right! And if it can calculate the number of people that travel by plane from Oklahoma City every day divided by the square root of the average number of years that a French monarch stayed in power between 1224 and 1843, all the better! I always wanted to know that!

Ashamed to be surprised

2009-04-21T23:08:00.001-07:00

This evening I've been trying to do something productive while I wait for some work to "finish its thing" (which won't finish before I'll decide to go to sleep), and came across The United Nation's World Digital Library. It's pretty small right now, with only about 1200 documents from around the world. But that didn't prevent me from finding a map that puzzled me:

Brazil ca. 1875

I'm not sure how accurate it was supposed to be, but I found many things that I don't remember from my Brazilian history classes. There is a very good chance that it's just because I'm not very good at remembering things, but it could be that we just weren't taught this. I remember all the revolutions and all the slavery changes that happened at about that time, but I just don't remember having discussions about how states (or whatever form of local sectioning that was going on back then) were divided and which states existed.

I should do some more research online to try to find where this hole in my education memory is coming from.

Sad about semantics

2009-04-17T19:13:00.000-07:00

On my way back home from work today (a day my bus didn't show up and I had to get a different bus home), I listened to The Semantic Web Gang and I was quite disappointed. It's not that the talk wasn't interesting. It was about ontologies and what it takes to build one, and it's probably one of my favorites in the area. What made me sad was the semi-conclusion that according to people's experience right now, manually building an ontology from scratch is easier than using any semi-automated methods to facilitate the construction. I'm sad about it because I'm learning that the hard way...

The society tries to be a power law

2009-04-16T06:51:00.000-07:00

This was going to be a very long post, but after writing about 20 paragraphs of it, I decided that I should change it to be brief and remove all the references to my previous research (now you understand why it was going to be long).

Going to the point here, people have to be ready for the fact that human nature is to aggregate in a power-law fashion: very few people have a lot of <something> and a lot of people have very little of <something>. Nature (and I use nature in a broad sense here - more like "the physical reality"), although also exhibiting this behavior, acts in may ways to smooth this out. For example, the number of people I can know in my life is limited to the distance they are from me and how long it takes for me to get there.

However, broadcasting and now the web are breaking a lot of those barriers that nature was adding and making it easier for those "inequalities" to happen. Twitter is a huge example of it: it's very easy to follow somebody and you have the tendency to follow who your friends are following and there you have CNNs or Ashton Kutcher with almost a million followers (at the time that I write this, probably much more when you read it). And that gives you power and people need to be ready to handle this unequal power.

The event that triggered this post was the whole Stephen Colbert and the NASA module name. He has so many people that watch his show that pretty much anything he enlists his people to do it's very likely he will be able to get done. So he won the vote for the name of the NASA module. And NASA had to handle it by backing out of the idea to do it and named a treadmill C.O.L.B.E.R.T. instead.

And this morning, to make sure I wrote this (even being late to have breakfast and start my day), I watched this sort-of-interesting interview with Andrew Keen that talks about the same thing (but I think he doesn't really get the core reason for it): the web is dominated and will be dominated by a few players and the rest will be followers. He calls this a feudalism-like system. Interesting...

Alright, now I can start my day.

The joy of a calculator

2009-04-11T09:08:00.000-07:00

It's actually interesting that I feel excited arriving at my home office and seeing a calculator by my computer. Not a simple 4-operation calculator, but my programmable, discontinued, HP 48GX. It reminds me of the time that I actually used it for doing more than just the 4 operations, when I was in undergrad. In graduate school I think I never really had to use it, as most complicated mathematical equations I had to solve I would do it directly on the computer (but there weren't too many of them - most things were conceptual and not numeric).

Different times, being a different person, able to go months sleeping 4 1/2 hours a day (I did some of it during graduate school too, but I think my average went up to something like 5 or 5 1/2 hours), learning and doing lots of different things. I can't say I'm not happy today, but I was a different type of happy then. I had more friends around, more music around, and more different projects that were actually getting done and not just in this design and early implementation phase forever.

Now you might be asking: why do I have a calculator by my computer? Can't computers do it all? Yes! But not while you are playing EVE Online. I'm at a point in the game that I gave up on just going around doing work for other people, and I'm mining and manufacturing goods to sell. So you have to look at things that I can make (i.e., I have all the skills needed and can mine/purchase the raw materials for), calculate how much my cost to make it would be and how much people will pay for it and see how many I have to make to get the ROI for purchasing the blueprints.

They are all reasonably simple calculations. Most products that I've analyzed only make sense to manufacture if you go mine all the raw materials (you can only sell it for more than what the raw materials cost), and I try to stay away from those. But there are a few that seem to make sense. So if I feel like I have enough time, I go mine myself and increase my profit, but if I don't, I can just buy what is needed and I still make a profit.

But why do I do this? Why play a game that the only thing you do is "work" and not get anything new out of it? I probably wouldn't do it if that's all I was going to do for eternity. My hope is to raise enough money to be able to buy a better ship and get back to doing work for other people. I need it not to be destroyed when the mission asks me to do something that takes me to a lair of pirates that kill me in a few seconds - I have lost about a 2 million ISK (the currency in the game) ship in the near past because of it.

Ah, fishing with a calculator...

PS: note that this is also a project that ends up being close to unfinished, as I have only been playing once or twice a week (and maybe coming online once or twice more just to set up my skill training queue), so don't expect me to be "rich" anytime soon.

Nothing like TV to change your mood

2009-04-10T23:11:00.000-07:00

After a very non-productive day (well, that's probably a little too extreme - it was as productive as a 4-hour planning meeting can be), it's interesting how watching some TV can make it all seem trivial. It's our brain being transported to the world of fiction and leaving behind this confusing but mundane existence.

And it all gets better when it's the puzzling end of the second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I won't add any spoilers here, even thought I know that most people won't watch it. It's not that it's a good series, but it seems like at the end of the second season they found something that has some potential of being more than just "let's run from the machines and be lucky". I don't know if they will be able to follow-through with it, but I'm actually happy that they are trying.

This is the news for today. It's the weekend now and I have to start planning on what will be the list of things I will mark as "oh, well... another weekend without doing them". Call me the optimist.

Chag Sameach

2009-04-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

Lots of food, more than normal amount of wine... It should be Passover... Chag Sameach to everybody that actually understands what it's about.

This year, after a lot of confusion, the first seder ended up being in my place with my girlfriend's parents. Small group, lots of reading... It was good and much less confusing than usual. Also the food was pretty good. I've decided to try doing the classics that I've never done before: matzo ball soup and Haroset. But of course I can't really just do simple things, so the matzo ball soup was from scratch including the chicken stock (I started all the prep work last night and was cooking it all morning long, starting at 6:15 AM to about 1 PM); and I've tried to Haroset recipes, a simple one mostly with dates (I've added some nuts to the recipe to make it closer to the consistency I'm used to), and another one with a good amount of spices (also making a few substitutions because Amy doesn't like hazelnuts). It was all good, except for the fact that the soup needed a little bit more salt.

And I also had to work today, which was fun. I've learned the importance of organization and knowing exactly what I had to do, or else I wasn't able to context change very efficiently. But it all worked well. I was able to get about 70% of the things I wanted to do done, which is about average for a normal day. Oh, well... There is always tomorrow.

Twitter, twitter, twitter - there, I said it!

2009-04-03T06:52:00.001-07:00

I was once accused of talking too much about twitter on this blog. I'm not sure I agree with that accusation, but I'll write about it today, because I couldn't let this article go by without posting it here:

BakerTweet, the Arduino-based pastry early warning system

With the growth of twitter use by companies to do direct advertisement to their core clients (clients that are interested in what you are doing, so they follow you explicitly), I shouldn't have been surprised by somebody creating a hardware piece that integrates with the company in more fundamental levels, but I was. My mind still had twitter being this computer thingy that allowed short, but free text messages to go around that were produced by a person.

This company is now proposing the scheduling of static, "soul-less" messages... But I think it's great! Not because of what it's trying to do, but for what it means. Easier direct communication between people. The part of the implementation that I don't enjoy much is that it now loses the human side of being able to get feedback from your customers, which I think is 100 times more powerful than being able to message things out. It creates a sense of power to the customers, and make them want to come back.

Anyway, all is going to be over soon, as Google will take over twitter...

They finally caught up with my idea

2009-03-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

If I don't do it, somebody finally will... Meet Demy - The Digital Recipe Reader

I don't know much about it yet, besides a very short article on engadget, so I won't comment on it yet. But I did sign up to be told when it's available and this is the message that I've received:

Not a good sign. But let's wait and see.

Green Festival, garden, chainsaw, work, babies, eve online... All things!

2009-03-29T09:54:00.000-07:00

I always have a hard time to decide if I should write a title to a post before or after the post itself. In general I try to do it before to restrict the contents of the post, but what it does is that it ends up being out of sync with it. So today I decided to just add everything in the title and see what I can cover in the post. If some things are not mentioned, oh, well... Just know that they are important somehow to my current mental state.

Starting with yesterday: we went to the Green Festival mostly because we've received a free admission by shopping at PCC. It was interesting. There were about 4 types of groups represented: home improvements (solar panels and windows being the most common), green associations (like some sustainable neighborhood groups), organic/natural food sources (with lots of things to try - with an very large amount of teas, actually), and natural clothing/diapers/beauty stuff. There were also a few other things, like the Rachel Corrie Foundation with tasting of Palestinian olive oil and Za'atar (but they weren't there for the food).

In general, the festival wasn't terrible, but it wasn't that exciting either. Maybe it would have been better if we actually watched some of the talks. Just going around the people selling/advertising things you don't really get all that the festival was about.

Then today the day started with family things: talking with my parents, then talking with A's parents and then transformed into working at the garden and cutting down trees with a chainsaw (yes, I still have all my fingers - although it's not that easy to cut a finger with a chainsaw. It's easier to get a tree falling on your head, or things splintering into your eyes, or a chain breaking and flying to your arms, torso or legs. None of those things happened). Now the garden is a little bit more open, has two new trees, a rhubarb plant and I'm US$550 richer (through not being $550 poorer). There is still a lot to do, but we are slowly getting there.

Now going back to the past and considering my two new "projects" (not in many details. More details to go onto the other blog some day): a new recipe organizer project and EVE Online. A and I (where I is not an acronym) have decided to cook more often. What that means is that we plan recipes on the weekend and days each will be cooking. It's been interesting, but I feel like I can make the experience better.

First it still seems that we end up wasting food, because we try to diversify our meals and end up with ingredients that we have to buy in a larger quantity than we need for the recipe and don't use that in another recipe. Maybe if we were more aware of ingredients that would be left over, we could plan meals around those (if we could easily search for recipes by ingredient). Second, I would like to force more variety, especially on vegetables. Having something to make us aware of our imbalance might help on planning. Finally, I want to keep track of what we've tried and how it worked so that we can know what we can suggest to other people.

There are some websites out there with the ability to search by ingredients, to keep track of recipes and nutrition. However, they have two main problems: they are great for the recipes they have, but it's painful if you want to add recipes from different sources, like magazines. Also, in the nutrition side, they focus on calories/protein/carb/fat counting, and I don't think that this is what I want to track. What I want is to track things like grains, fruit, vegetables, etc. I don't mind much those nutrient counts.

Now onto EVE Online... Well, not much I can talk about this one that I haven't mentioned before. I'm still playing. Maybe 15 minutes to 1 hour every day or so. But I've reached the point where I was disappointed last time: one that your enemies get much better than you and you have to keep killing one or two and getting back to fix your ship. Then go back to it and slowly finish it. That's hard to do playing only at most 1 hour at night. So, we'll see...

I guess that's it. I was planning on going to a concert tonight, but spending the afternoon in the garden drained all the energy I had (ignoring the fact that the concert starts in 5 minutes and we finished the garden work for the day only half an hour ago and had to shower...). Now it's time to sit down and rest until dinner time.

Did I cover everything? Almost... I've skipped babies... That's just friends getting to the "having babies" period of their lives. It's exciting!

And that's the end of Battlestar Galactica

2009-03-20T23:09:00.000-07:00

(don't worry, no spoilers here)

So I just came out of the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. I'm glad it's over. It wasn't a bad last episode, but it was a little long. Two hours of scenes that just didn't seem to finish. It's like the director knew that it was the end of it (or sort of - more on this later) and could make us bored. The series was good. Lots of people try to compare it to Babylon 5 as for the depth of the plot, but I think BSG was a little more linear, more focused on developing the characters than the story of old races just wanting to destroy the universe, while other old races don't want it to happen, but don't want to do much either.

In the end they both center around the human race and the evolution of it. That we have cycles, but we get better over time. And of course both of them have spaceships and space battles (although certainly BSG battles were much more intricate). It's actually interesting to watch again "old" series and see how much more effort has been put into realism and even acting.

What makes me sad is that it's not really over. They employ this "leftover energy" to just bank on it. Next month there is a new series starting, Caprica, from the same producers of BSG. It happens chronologically before BSG, which allows them with some opportunity to bring back the characters for a special appearance here and there.

But if this was not enough, they are also advertising for a new movie, Battlestar Galactica: The Plan, which is supposed to show the events of BSG in the eyes of the cylons. Give me a break... Just let it go and move onto new ideas! Don't do like Crusade, the spin-off from Babylon 5 that had some interesting ideas, but just didn't get anywhere and died after 13 episodes. Check the wikipedia page that I've linked above to see some information about the mess that happens in the series, including episode orders and chronological orders...

Alright, now that I was person number 1 million to post about the last episode of BSG, I can go and rest. Weekend ahead!

Blogging and reading and spending my time

2009-03-18T23:20:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's because I'm an engineer, maybe because I have been working for "real" for some time, but one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing is paying attention to how I'm spending my time. Probably I do this to convince myself that I haven't done XYZ because I really didn't have time, and not that I was procrastinating. One of the things that I pay the most attention about is my time spending reading books.

As mentioned in more than one occasion before, because now my commute is much longer than it used to be, I'm now reading much more on the bus, which means that a larger piece of my day is spent on reading things. At the beginning I mostly read books, and was going through them in a rate of almost one a week (until I hit The Time or Our Singing, which was way too long to finish in a week).

But after some time, I felt like I had to spend more time better. So I decided to get a newspaper on my Kindle to read in the commute in the morning and leave the book only for the way back. I mentioned this already in the previous post that it didn't work quite well to do this morning-afternoon division, but I'm still sticking to it. Just going way slower through Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain.

This weekend and early this week, though, I decided to add one more thing to my list of current reads. Something that was bothering me greatly that I had stopped devoting time to reading: scientific papers. But not only this, in the spirit of a previous post I'm actually planning on taking the time to play around with the algorithms, post about them (not on this blog or else I would lose the few visitors I still have to this blog), and maybe even start discussions with the authors. That last part I'm a little afraid to commit to, based on my history of taking months to reply to emails. But at least I think I should start something.

And that should have made me quite energized and excited, right? That's what I thought so, but I still haven't felt it. I'm still a little numb. It feels like I need some sort of big change in something I'm doing. I just don't know which kind of change yet. Maybe I'm spending way too much time looking at shoe sizes and considering how wrong it all is. My orderly brain is shutting down not to thing too much about why such a simple concept can be implemented in such a terrible way. For example:

* Who came up with the idea of making US shoe sizes go to size 13.5 and then wrap back up to 1?
* Why did Mexicans decide that 26 for a shoe size is too big, so some brands simply decided to drop the "2" and call it a number 6? And, yes, there is a second number 6 for kids.
* Why are women's and men's shoe sizes different for the same shoe in US, Australia, UK (although some brands don't make it different), and Japan (although also the difference is not everywhere) - probably there are others too?

I'm writing code that, given a set of locales, it spits out all possible sizes in global order from smallest to largest. Yes, global ordering is not technically possible, but approximate global ordering can be good enough. I thought that this task was going to take about a day and a half to be done, but I've been working on it for about 2 1/2 days now and, although it's close, it's not finished yet. I'm yet to build all possible variations on size combinations.

Alright, I think i've spent enough time on this post already. I should go to bed. For some reason I woke up last night at 5 AM feeling fully refreshed, which was odd considering that I went to bed at almost 2 AM. Maybe that's one of the reasons why I'm feeling extra numb today.

The confusion about taxes

2009-03-16T23:17:00.000-07:00

Before you waste your time reading this, I have to warn you that I'm not an economist. My single class during college on economics for engineers cannot be considered background for what I'm about to discuss here, but I felt like it and, well, that's the beauty of self-publishing.

Anyway, now onto the point: I was reading an article on The New Yorker today:

NOT INSANE by Hendrik Hertzberg

The article discusses in general a controversy on how to give stimulus to the economy. He said that one of the latest suggestions by a group of republicans (that have to be contrary to the government - but that's reserved for a post on politics, which that's not the goal of this one) is to do a "payroll-tax holiday for a couple of years". In other words, not collect tax on salaries for some time, effectively increasing people's salaries.

The author then says that it's not a terrible idea, just not the best one and then suggests considering this later as a substitution for taxing things we don't want people to do, like carbon footprint, or using natural resources, polluting, etc.

It's an interesting thought. Tax what you don't want people to do, and not tax what you want to happen more often. Great alignment of incentives, right? Well, I quickly see four main problems with this:

1) It causes a shift on all finances: you make more money, but your cost of living also increases (as companies are now taxed more to produce things). In other words, automatic inflation. And what happens on a time of inflation spike? Everything that you've saved immediately loses value. You stop trusting savings, which increases the risk of the market and makes investments harder to happen.

2) It makes taxing more subjective: how to tell that my pollution should be taxed more than the other company's pollution? And I'm planting trees. Should I be getting some of my tax back even though it's hard to tell exactly how much a tree is offsetting my carbon footprint? It's very easy to get money out of money. It's all in one unit of measure.

3) Globalization: if you don't make the whole world adopt this, suddenly all your products become pretty much impossible to compete with foreign products. It's already hard because of the cheap labor in countries like China and India, now you add more taxes on the products. You can try to "fix" some of it by raising import taxes, but then you're going against the main conclusions of globalization: the competition and increased market of a globalized world is worth in the long term any cannibalization of local markets.

4) What about the things that are not tied to consuming? What about health care and social security? If you have a taxing plan that allows people to pay less taxes if they are smart, the income of the government will reduce over time instead of increase, which works against the needs for any first world country with populations that will keep aging and needing help. Yea, yea, we are talking about republicans that believe that public health and social security are a waste of government money and that people should be choosing what they want to do with their own health. I did consider this line of thought for a long time, but that goes against people's nature. I don't know how many times I've heard sick people deciding that it was better to just go to a pharmacy and pick up something that does not require prescription and get the wrong thing, just because going to a doctor was too much hassle. That's a sign of a broken system.

Anyway, as I said, who am I to have ideas about this? I'm sure those people that are proposing this had endless discussions with economists that built multiple models of the economy and believe that it does make sense in the medium or long term. It was an interesting article, nevertheless. I'm actually enjoying starting my week reading The New Yorker and skimming through the Wall Street Journal every morning. It's all because the Kindle 2 is a much better device for reading news.

The only problem with this is that I'm reading less books now. It takes me about 1 hour to go through the WSJ, which only leaves about 30-40 minutes of book reading every day. On Mondays that's usually taken by reading The New Yorker. So now I probably need to start reading when I'm at home too. So many things to do... But that should be the topic of another post some other day.

A Sunday

2009-03-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

Today is Sunday. And I'm having a semi-lazy day. Baking bread (that I'm not sure is going to work very well, as it didn't grow that much overnight), watching Tim Berners-Lee's TED talk on Linked Data, and planning on giving EVE Online - Apocrypha a try. I tried EVE Online for some time last year and it was kind of fun. Last week they released their new major expansion that handled some of the things I was annoyed about, like having one skill being learned and when it's done you had to realize it and be online to add a new one to learn. Now there is a queue that apparently lasts for about 24 hours (you can set a list of skills to learn as long as they last one starts in less than 24 hours).

Other things I hope to do today: add one more feature to my "text brain" (if you don't know what it is, don't worry - neither do I, I just created the name), and play around some more with entity extractors (hopefully starting to use some of the APIs to see how they do). I hope the rain stops for a little (and it doesn't start snowing again) so that I can check the level of my oil tank (for the heater). I need more data points to have an idea how much oil I use for heating the house.

Anyway, long day ahead! Hopefully...

A link is required

2009-03-09T00:25:00.001-07:00

I've been reading about Wolfram|Alpha on this article on TechCrunch. The article's author is certainly a little too excited about it (Nova Spivack, the guy behind twine), but I think there is something to his excitement. Most commenters don't get it at all. Every time they hear something about somebody building a product to answer questions on the web, they think that it's a bust. History taught us that it's very likely to be a bust. Why would Wolfram have it different?

This is not the blog to go in details about this, but I think that, like most projects out there, they will only learn by trying. And it's not like other startups that build something like this hoping that they would be bought before they have to actually make it useful, Wolfram is probably a little too big to be going this path. Also, they have a name. Not a huge name outside the scientific community, but it's a brand anyway. So, they need to be careful with what they release. (what a terrible reason to be hopeful about a product, I know...)

But back to a high-level personal opinion: I hope they show us something new and not just flashy answers to the questions they've trained on and nothing else (that people like me can find). I've seen too much of this on [true knowledge] and it drives me crazy. I'll eventually go back to my project on modeling knowledge. I've been away from it for way too long.

That's how violent Brazil is...

2009-03-07T14:49:00.000-08:00

There is this uninteresting article on a man kidnapping an old lady near Brazil's capital (in Portuguese). So, if it's uninteresting, why am I sending a link to it? Well, because I found out about this article due to this Great review of the gun technology on Engadget.

The weekend

2009-03-03T20:00:00.000-08:00

It's already Tuesday and only now I'm going to talk about the weekend, huh? Oh well, at least I convinced myself to post (to try to forget today and force myself to remember more interesting things).

So, last weekend I participated on Microsoft's Puzzle Hunt 12. It was an all-weekend event (which means that it starts at 10 AM on Saturday - I had to be there at 9 AM to set up my computer into the Microsoft network - and ends at 5 PM on Sunday) in which teams are given puzzles to solve and the team that wins is the first one that solves the final one, or the team that solves the most number of puzzles (technically, there were values for puzzles, so some puzzles were worth more than others). There were about 85 teams and my team was ranked 21st, which is not bad at all!

It was my first Puzzle Hunt, so I can't say that I did very well. Most of the puzzles don't really have instructions on what you have to do, just the knowledge that the answer is a word or short noun phrase. So, in order for you to do well, you have to get used to finding the patterns that suggest what kind of puzzle it is and how to solve it. For example, you look scrambled letters and if you see too many odd letters the first thing that should come to your mind is that it's gone through some sort of encryption.

Another important thing to learn is that they love to use pop culture (which I don't know much at all), so you have to look at a clue and quickly tie it to some pop culture reference to figure things out. Let me give an example:

All you have in your puzzle page is two columns of "equations" that one look like this:

26 = Z in W or MW

And the other looks like:

? = FKFFP

First you realize that it has some odd characters, so it must be going through some sort of encryption. Then, you have to realize that "W or MW" is in italics and could mean a name. Then you look at 26 and realize that it's the number of cases in the TV game show "Deal or No Deal". Finally you are able to tell that actually each capital letter is a word that starts with the decrypted letter. So:

Z => C
W => D
M => N

Then you'd have to apply that mapping that you learn on the first column onto the second column and figure out what phrase can be on the second column to fill out the ?s. Finally you reapply the decryption to what you find in the "?" (which were single letters) and find a question. The answer to the question is the answer to the puzzle (or something like that, I quickly realized I wasn't going to be able to answer this puzzle and let more abled people on my team deal with it).

It was certainly interesting. The people that organized it put a lot of work into it, including building a custom Halo level that was a puzzle by itself. Again, tiring (I didn't get any sleep all weekend long), but very interesting. I'll need to be more prepared if I decide to do it again in the future (if my team invites me again, as I was probably the person that answered the least number of puzzles on the whole team).

Another interesting perk that I got out of this experience was being in the Microsoft campus. It's very different in many ways to the Amazon buildings. First, it's a campus and not a spread of buildings around Seattle. Second, it has a lot of "empty space", while things are all quite "cozy" at Amazon. Third, their kitchen is way more well-equipped: with free soda and auto coffee maker (the one that you press a button and it makes coffee for you, instead of the one at work that somebody has to change the filter, put new grounds and brew new coffee). Chairs in the conference room were much more comfortable too (although we were on a VP conference room, so it's probably unfair to compare).

I don't really care about those things. I don't drink soda, I have times that I do drink coffee about once a day or so, but lately I've been buying and taking my own tea, so I don't even drink coffee any more. I like the fact that money that I'm helping Amazon make is not being spent on things that I don't really care to use. It's sort of the same way as living in your house and going to a hotel. The bed in the hotel can be more comfortable than yours, the TV might be bigger, the heater/air conditioning might work better, you have somebody to clean your room and make your bed every day, but it's not really a place you'd want to live. It just was build for a general guest and not for you.

Anyway, I guess that's the sum of my weekend. I've been a little introspective this evening, kind of bummed out because I didn't get much done today at work and ended the day with a 2-hour meeting to talk about plans of things to do that just made me realize that I'm completely confused about priorities and goals of the team. Maybe it's all a puzzle that I haven't figured out how to interpret yet. Next time I'll pay attention to all the words that people say while they are rubbing their nose and see if everything makes more sense this way.

An evening with Izzy

2009-02-26T00:11:00.000-08:00

Sorry, I didn't really mean to call Itzhak Perlman "Izzy", but it sounded more interesting.

So, yes, today finally was the concert I was most excited about this season: Itzhak Perlman recital (well, it was the one I was most excited about because it's probably the only one that I really knew I was getting when I chose what I was going to watch). It was a violin and piano recital with Rohan De Silva at the piano (interesting name for a person born in Sri Lanka).

Well, it was quite amazing. But not life changing. Yes, Itzhak Perlman is funny and knows how to play the violin, but I felt that it was missing some emotional attachment with the public, between the musicians and on the pieces themselves. It really seemed like Mr. Perlman was running everything in auto-pilot and Mr. De Silva was just following along very competently.

Maybe it's all back to my inability to connect very well with music any more, but I was impressed but not moved. I left the concert hall a little disappointed.

One interesting thing, though, was the public. Seattle is a very politicized city, so the most common thing that people were talking about is that Itzhak Perlman played at the inauguration with Yo Yo Ma. I almost said: "so what? Who cares about who is playing at the inauguration? It's not that it's a venue where they present and criticize high art!" Anyway, I didn't...

Other things that I saw (and took notes):

* The huge diversity of people, from old-timers that probably followed Mr. Perlman's carrier since the beginning; to young people wearing jeans and eating protein bars inside the concert hall.
* People that really don't go to concerts, but were trying to impress their dates with a US$75/seat concert with a lot of useless and sometimes incorrect knowledge, like the incorrect way of pronouncing Sri Lanka.
* People amazed by a piano tuner in the intermission verifying and adjusting the tuning of the piano.

Anyway, I didn't want to make it not as exciting, but I am now suffering a little from the trivialization of a good experience by writing it out. Suddenly the things that I wasn't so excited about became so much more important than listening to one of the most important violinists of my lifetime (and my parent's lifetime).

We are what we want other people to see what we are

2009-02-22T16:12:00.001-08:00

Today has been a reasonably slow day for me. I've started the day wrapping up performance reviews (mostly copy-and-pasting what I've written in an offline text document during Friday evening and Saturday) and then just hanging out thinking of how I can spend more money (or not) and what I learned with the process of writing performance reviews.

It's actually interesting to not only look back on your year and think what your accomplishments were, but also looking back on the year for multiple people (I had to review 11 this year). My conclusion from it is that it doesn't matter what you tried to do, it matters what you've delivered to production. In other words, if it's not out there for other people to see and criticize, it's not worth much.

Another example that made me think about it was a blog that I've come across very indirectly while browsing Twitter looking at people that randomly start following me (BTW, she was not the one that added me, but annbkeller:

Bookoftea's Journal: on... yes, tea! An interesting field to write about as there are probably as many tea drinkers as wine drinkers. It's hard to get numbers here, but I'll cite some:

The wine industry in the USA was a 21 billion dollar industry in 2007 [source]
While the tea industry is only a 6.8 billion dollar industry [source]
600 million gallons of wine are sold in the US each year. [source]
While Americans drink 35 billion gallons of iced tea every year (if you consider that tea). [source]
Apparently 90% of the tea consumption in the US comes from iced tea [source], so that means that Americans consume about 6 billion gallons of "non-iced tea" a year!

So it's a lot of tea and not so many people to really cover this.

Anyway, I don't plan on starting a tea review blog. But I'm getting to the conclusion that I have to plan to start something. Maybe I'll just stop reading so much and start writing something. Or maybe coding in the bus to work, working on my hundreds of data mining/structuring projects and blogging about what I think. Or even more easily, make sure that I post comments on people's blogs when I find them interesting, reply to discussions on the FreeBase data modeling mailing list, or just at least send emails to my friends or call them on their birthdays (I missed a very important one last week that I'm still angry with myself because of it).

And I'll rephrase myself to end this post:

It doesn't matter what you intend on doing: If you are not ready to take criticism, there is a red flag right there. Probably your time is better spent doing something else.

Always Welcome

2009-02-21T08:12:00.000-08:00

Since I move to the new house I've been receiving regularly some sort of "welcome to the neighborhood" package with coupons or just advertising. Yesterday I've received another one. A puzzling one. The "introduction" said: "Please accept the enclosed gifts from neighborhood businesses who are anxious to meet you. [...]" Who are they?

Hollywood Video - ok
Ace Hardware - still ok
Dirctv - local?
Vonage - again, neighborhood?
Labels - (a company on Salem, VA that does cheap address labels)
Proactiv - acne product
Sheer cover - makeup
Gerber Life Insurance Company - in White Plains, NY

So out of the 7 ads/coupons that I've received, only two were from local companies. When I see those examples of bad advertising methods is when I realize why Google makes so much money. Their advertising tries to be more meaningful and not just "there is a new address in town, let's flood this person with all we've got - one might stick!". I'm sure something works, or else they wouldn't do it, but I wonder how much more effective it could be.

In general I believe that a world of easier information transfer should just kill those advertising models. What I think should win is something more in the lines of the "Progressive Auto Insurance" model: you need auto insurance, so come to our site and check out your options. One of the options is ours, but you can end up going somewhere else. You get the traffic, the customer-selected information of what they want so that you can better tailor your products to sell more, and you might even get referral money from some companies.

Die, junk mail, die!

Going back in time and realizing that some things were left behind

2009-02-19T21:43:00.000-08:00

For some reason yesterday I decided to listen to some music and realized that I never actually transformed some of my CDs into MP3s, so there I went ripping all CDs that I found that I hadn't ripped before. And among those CDs I found a CD I've received from a cousin with a (not too official) recording from 2001's R.E.M. concert at Rock In Rio.

Of course as I've entered the CD, it didn't recognize any of the tracks so I had to enter all the information manually so that I could find things again after recording the MP3s. So I decided to challenge myself to remember the names of all the songs by only listening to them. It was more challenging than I was hoping (well, I should have imagined that, as I learned a long time ago that I can't trust my memory for anything). I got about 15 out of the 19 without help. These were the ones I couldn't remember the name:

* The Lifting
* Find the River
* At My Most Beautiful

And the only one I was really sad I couldn't remember:

* Pop Song 89

Oh, well... I probably wouldn't have remembered "So. Central Rain" if they hadn't announced the song name before they started playing it.

Now I should be working on performance reviews, but I've lost inspiration after about 15 minutes of it. Inspiration-hunting is time consuming.

Weekend driving

2009-02-17T00:07:00.000-08:00

So this last weekend we went for the first time (well, actually it was the first time for me) to the Olympic Peninsula to relax and have some time away from all the work and home duties. It was nice, but a lot of driving. If you want to know what a lot means, well, here is an approximation of our trip:

It's pretty long, huh? Well, my car left with a little less than 2K miles on its odometer and came back with almost 2.5K. But I was quite happy with its fuel consumption. If I had enough courage, I could probably have done the whole trip in a single tank of gas. But I did put on gas when it was a little less than 1/4 left on the tank, 80 miles from home. On average about 32 miles a gallon, which is pretty impressive for driving in some mountainous roads and a 2.0 turbo engine.

If you are interested in pictures, you can check my SmugMug gallery. I'm impressed with myself for having it up this quickly. I knew that if I didn't put the time to get it out now it probably would take another couple of months until I would have enough energy to do it. And it would have forgotten a lot of details about why I decided to take some of those pictures.

So now I'm back to real life with a lot of things happening at the same time. So it's time to try to get some of those things done.

Finally another book done

2009-02-12T00:18:00.000-08:00

I had convinced myself that I was going to stop to enumerate all the books that I read, but I guess I have to talk about this one. I have to do it because it was probably one of the books I had the hardest time to finish. Not because the story was bad, or it was difficult to read (I have given up reading books because of those reasons before), but it was because this book made me depressed. So before I continue on explaining why, I think I need to introduce the book, huh?

Richard Powers's: The Time of our Singing

It's a great work of literature. A very captivating and feels very realistic. So, is reality what made me depressed? Actually, that's not incorrect. If I sit down with my psychologist (which I don't have) and talk about it, I think I can distill down to three sources for my annoyance:

1) A good part of the story describes the struggle that was being African-American in the early to late 20th century in the US. Lots of things going wrong, lots of hurt people, lots of people with no perspectives of going anywhere in their lives. Not only this, it depicts the "white society"'s disgust towards them. I was never able to understand this type of behavior towards people. Yes, it's natural to be afraid of the people you don't know. It's expected that you should be worried about people that fit your mental profile of being dangerous (like people that walk on the streets with guns), but being disgusted by their presence? Why?
2) The story goes around a family of a physicist and a former singer that have kids that they teach music from very young and music becomes a part of their being. They can think and communicate using music. I think I envied that ability. I've been struggling a lot lately about my relationship with music and the book was making me remember that some time in my life I used to be able to read much more into music than I am right now.
3) The main protagonist of the book is a middle brother, Joseph. His job throughout the book (and hoping I won't spoil much of it by saying this) is to go and be there for for his family. He ends up having no real life of his own (except for things that I won't mention here), never graduating from college, never marrying, never really having the career that he trained all his life for. But he is there for his family and that is what keeps them from completely collapsing. I'm the middle brother and where am I? I don't even reply to emails...

So now you see why I'm very glad that this is over. I've been very stressed at work lately. And arriving to work depressed due to reading this book was not helping at all! Now I need my next book to be something simple and uplifting. Haven't decided what yet. I have until 3 AM tonight to figure it out, as I'll be awake babysitting a process that has to run successfully tonight or else I'll be in big trouble trying to deliver a project by Friday and having the weekend to celebrate.

People with some time in their hands - great!

2009-02-08T23:08:00.000-08:00

So I was randomly watching an episode of Wine Library TV and Gary Vaynerchuk had a visitor that owned Freezer Burns. What is this site? Well, it is a video blog of some person, Gregory Ng, trying frozen meals and providing his review on them. Have you ever seen a wine tasting video (especially from very excited people, like Gary Vaynerchuk)? Well, think of the same thing being applied to frozen food. He even sniffs the food and tries to explain what he is smelling.

All and all, I think it's awesome that somebody is putting the time and providing real information about things for people freely. The frozen food world is much smaller and slower-moving than the wine world, so we probably won't see much competition coming in this line of work. Also, I'm not sure how long he can sustain this show. He is already at episode 54 with only a few months of work. So maybe I should visit the frozen food aisle more often and realize how diverse and changing it is.

I wished more people did things like this. I actually thought of doing a series of side-by-side comparisons of products. Probably I would never make a video blog about it because I'm not very good at talking to people, but I always thought that being able to compare things side-by-side is the best way of deciding what is better for your application. What review places like Consumer Reports is missing is the details of what their rates actually mean. Also, their bandwidth is quite limited and they try to cover a lot of different types of products. In the end, they are always behind on the latest versions of things (especially consumer electronics that change very quickly), so by not knowing what they actually think is important, you can't extrapolate their ratings to the newer models.

Other review places, like Amazon, provide reviews that vary too much on completeness and objectivity. Yes, everything is subjective, but if you don't know what a same person thinks about their experience in all the products you are considering buying, it's hard to make a very well informed decision.

So, go Gregory Ng!

The music of random harmony

2009-02-07T20:40:00.000-08:00

So, as I mentioned on my previous post, this morning I had a choir presentation during the morning services at Congregation Beth Shalom. It went alright. We sang a few pieces in place of the Rabbi's sermon. But this was not the interesting thing of the event (at least for me). On preparation for the day, the person that was organizing the event said: "One of the hidden goals for this event is to make people realize how nice it is when the congregation harmonizes with the cantor. So, you choir singers, harmonize!"

Before I explain what happened I have to point out that very few people in the choir actually have any background in formal music theory. But most had experience singing and think that they can sing well. So, what was the result: people did their best to harmonize with the music by themselves. Even when they didn't know the melody at all.

Oh, I'm to blame for it too! I actually do that all the time during services. It's a fun experiment but I usually do it quietly, mostly singing to myself. This time people were doing it loudly enough to rival the cantor. And I stayed back and tried to listen to what was coming out of it. It was awesome! There were interesting rules to it: people were looking for thirds and fifths, playing around with basic counterpoint rules, like working with contrary and oblique motion, and sometimes just enjoying the bottom of their range (especially Basses).

What was interesting was the combination of it all: a wall of sound that was mostly harmonious, but generally purposeless. I wished I had good enough music ability and memory to write things down. It would have been an interesting study of harmony and the ability for humans to perceive chords.

I was briefly talking to one of the singers after services. I mentioned to him my observation and he said that part of it was based on people's musical background on their interpretation of the harmony. That some people might be thinking of a minor chord while other people would be thinking of a major chord.

I didn't hear any of this type of confusion. Mostly what I heard was people mixing scale modifications. Like some people using the harmonic minor, while other people doing a plain minor scale, or a melodic minor scale. Added to general mistakes from people without enough singing knowledge/experience, that's where the dissonance would come from. As I said, the actual problem was that there was no purpose to the counterpoint. Each person was doing their own and you just got all the notes all the time, instead of movement.

Anyway, I've spent way too much time trying to convey this experience in words. Maybe one day I'll put enough time on my music studies to be able to transcribe what I heard and make people listen to it and get their own conclusions. Now it's time for me to move onto something else. I'll hopefully find out what before it's too late.

New changes - giving DISQUS a try

2009-02-07T19:09:00.000-08:00

I decided to enable DISQUS on my blog. It's not that it will make much difference in general as I have very few people that actually comment on my posts, but I decided that it was worth the test. Hopefully it's something that works. Today, after my choir "concert" this morning (it was a short participation during Shabbat morning services at Beth Shalom - more on this on another post), nothing really worked out for the rest of the day. I tried to go back to my research project, but my computer decided to become unstable and froze a couple of times. I should be coding on my Mac and not on my Windows box...

Anyway, I think right now I should start thinking about dinner. Then I'll come back and post about the choir event this morning.

Another concert evening...

2009-02-05T23:09:00.000-08:00

It's interesting that most times that I come back from a Seattle Symphony concert I get kind of introspective, thinking about life and what my priorities are. But what worries me the most is not that this happens on my way back home and when I try to sleep, but that it happens during the concert and I completely space out. It's like I've lost the ability to keep enough of an attention span to watch a concert! Shouldn't surprise me, as "modern life" is just like that: you need to keep busy because there are too many things to do, too many things to learn. But is this that life we should be living?

Well, I won't try to answer this question here. It's probably not a question that can be easily answered. There are lots of factors involved, like the cost of success and the benefit of it. It goes back to the fact that most of the cheap hotel/motel business in the US is owned by Indians, Mexicans and Middle Easterns. It's hard work and they can do it, so they take the business. It's that simple. So if you want quality of life you automatically close some of your options in life.

Maybe having less options is good, though. Completely changing subjects here, I decided some time ago to move around on RSS readers (My last post on the subject) and moved away from online readers to using RSSOwl. There are some interesting features about it and I was starting not to miss being able to read the same stream anywhere I was until today when it decided to do a database cleanup and... Lost most of my feeds for some reason. And now I have to subscribe to everything again! I guess I'm going back to online readers. At least their bugs are less destructive (at least as far as I know). If I had less options at least I would spend less time adapting to a new reader and moving all my feeds from one reader to another (well, this time I don't have to as I've lost 90% of them).

House depreciation in Seattle

2009-02-03T22:49:00.001-08:00

I came across this odd map posted by Zillow:

Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA MSA - Map of Real Estate Market Year over Year Home Price Appreciation

The areas are not that interesting, besides saying that Bellevue got hit with over 13% depreciation, which is pretty big (and my house is in the tip of the area that only was down 0-11%). What I found interesting is the ranges:

<0% (appreciation)
0-11%
11%-13%
>13%

Note the 2 percentage point range of the blue region. Seems too arbitrary... Fishy...

Causality and statistics

2009-02-02T22:47:00.000-08:00

One of the first things that people learn when they start taking statistics seriously is that most of the statistical studies out there are completely meaningless (or as some people might put it, 87.2% +- 0.5% of them - sorry, couldn't resist). The reason they are meaningless is that they try to conclude causality without actually having any methodology to do so. The example that triggered me to think about it was on a Brazilian newspaper:

Ficar muito tempo na frente da TV e do computador aumenta depressão - Staying for too long in front of the TV or computer increases depression. The problem with this story is that there is certainly a causality that goes on the other way: people that are depressed have the tendency of isolating themselves from social contact and end up staying in front of their TV and computers more often.

Then they try to prove causality by using time as a causal agent: they look at adolescents that watch too much TV or stay too much in front of their computers and then check how many of them end up more depressed. Then they start trying to explain it by saying that if they interact more with people it makes them less likely to be depressed. However, if they are already spending too much time in front of computers and TV when they are young, maybe it's because they don't have engaged parents that provide them with more things to do. And that could be very well be a much more important source for depression (lack of stability at home) and watching too much TV and staying too long at the computer are just a measurable side-effect.

Actually, those types of news are what make me depressed. And I read them because I read things on the internet. If I didn't spend this much time on the internet I wouldn't be depressed. So there you have the causal connection!

Google is harmful problem

2009-02-02T13:58:00.000-08:00

Just as an update on the post that I've written a few days ago: it was apparently a glitch on all Google's results:

Oops! Google glitch highlights users' dependence

It does point out that the more people only use one system, the more dangerous it will be if this system starts having problems. And amazingly enough, it's very easy for software systems to have problems (it tends to have more "moving parts" than non-software systems - although I always find bogus the idea of being able to explain software engineering using terms from mechanical or civil engineering).

Anyway, I won't say much more than what the article already says. Errors happen and Google was there to fix the error as quickly as they could.

A month of spam

2009-02-01T07:24:00.000-08:00

So my month of analyzing how well the spam detectors for gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail work. The results are a little hard to interpret, but they are interesting anyway. Before you look a the table, here is some nomenclature:

True negatives: Email that I've received on that account that was not classified as spam and was not spam
True positives: Email that I've received on that account that was correctly classified as spam
False positives:Email that was classified as spam but were not spam
False negatives:Email that was spam but was not classified as spam

Provider	True negatives	True positives	False positives	False negatives
Gmail	251	555	6	2
Yahoo	72	71	1	31
Hotmail	20	25	1	2

So, what is the conclusion? Well, first that Yahoo's spam classifier isn't very good in catching spam. About 1/3 of the spam that I've received ended up on my inbox. And only one real email ended up in the spam folder (which is statistically the same as gmail or hotmail). Gmail seems to do a very good job at classifying spam, but it does seem to err more on throwing things on my spam folder than letting spam pass into my inbox, and that does annoy me a lot. As you can see, it's the account I use the most and receive the most amount of spam. If I don't check spam for a couple of days sometimes it's hard to sift through 70 spam emails to find one non-spam there. Unfortunately I don't have much to talk about hotmail because that account is mostly dead.

Other things we can say about this? Well, we can look at any date trends on spam. Do they happen more often on weekdays or weekends? (unfortunately my data is not split by time - the date on the email many times doesn't make much sense and I haven't checked my emails often enough to annotate time) Let's look only at gmail where there was enough data to make it interesting:

Sunday	56
Monday	94
Tuesday	70
Wednesday	76
Thursday	106
Friday	87
Saturday	66

Or as a graph:

I wished there was much there to show. Probably I'll need to look for longer than a month to get a better trend there. Look at the raw data day-by-day in the month for gmail:

Two of the spikes you see are Mondays and one is Thursday. The interesting trend that I've seen right now is that it seems like I'm getting significantly less spam in the last few days. Let's see if this trend continues.

Well, I guess that's it. It was fun! I should do things like this more often. Now it's time to start my day.

The danger of algorithms

2009-01-31T11:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's very easy to make algorithms that have very odd side-effect. Especially when doing data analysis and classification. I remember when I used to work on classification the amount of crazy things that my algorithm did, like calling a "3 Person Extra-Comfortable Couch - Mango" a Mango (the fruit). So this picture posted by newobj was great:

First time I tried it was already fixed, so probably didn't last very long. But it's easy to see why Google could classify itself as a harmful site: it dynamically links to all sorts of different places, including harmful sites. It's reasonable to believe that if a site has a very low proportion of harmful things, but still has some it might be classified as harmful. So, if they don't remember to filter out content-less search engines they will always end up saying that Google or any other search engine, is dangerous to you.

Maybe the solution is to just stop using them and only work on controlled sources like Wikipedia or Mahalo or Twine or any of the other million of sites and products out there that try to provide you with the ability to discover things in a more human-controlled fashion.

I do believe that that's part of the future of the web (and you can claim that since the early stages of Yahoo it has been the past of the web too): a sea of information with personalized filters. The personalized filter is aware of your social network (i.e., it trusts information approved by your friends more than the information approved by complete strangers) and your current state (I'm on my cellphone in a city I've never been before searching for "gas station" should be very straight-forward what to return). Little by little hardware and software are converging there.

And there I went in a complete tangent from my original post. Probably I just don't want to do what I need to do: work. But today is my only real chance. Tomorrow I have a superbowl party which will consume most of the day.

Magic Berry tasting and everything else is just that - everything else

2009-01-27T23:26:00.001-08:00

So today I was able to participate on an interesting event: Magic Berry Tasting (also known as Miracle Fruit). It's a little berry that basically turn all acidic things sweet. So you can eat a lemon and it tastes like an orange. Very interesting experience. Not life-changing, but interesting nevertheless. In my opinion, the weirdest things that I've tried were:

Lemon: as I've mentioned, it tastes like orange
Guiness (yes the beer): it loses all its sour components and has some hints of chocolate and coffee.

As I said, in general it wasn't life-changing. Most things just tasted more ripe, sweeter and without the normal after-tastes. Quite worth the experience, though.

And now I have to get back to life. I've been having problems finishing a project at work. I have most things done, I just don't seem to like the way I did them, so I'm slowly rewriting everything instead of just walking away. And this has been driving me crazy. And this week is quite busy with a lot of evening events, which always makes it harder.

Oh, and I received a curious link today that I'm still not sure what to do about it. It's about a set of challenges launched by one of the most important molecular gastronomy blogs, Khymos: TGRWT (They Go Really Well Together). Somebody comes up with two odd ingredients and people have to suggest recipes that bring those ingredients together. This month's challenge is Malt & Soy Sauce, which is a very curious combination.

The month is almost over, so I won't try to do anything about it. I'll wait until next month and consider it. Probably I should start challenging my culinary abilities more often. Prove to myself once more tha I don't really know how to cook. I just know how to fake well. :-)

My life in pictures

2009-01-24T08:13:00.000-08:00

Sorry, the title is not really right. I just wanted to post a couple of pictures to represent last's post. First with small things that remind me that I now own a house and have to care for it... My first damage:

Snow fell on it and it couldn't handle the weight. Not that I really liked it, but it was a good example of what is to own a house.

Now for my cheese. Before waxing:

After waxing:

More on this in 3 months when I'll give it a try. Hopefully I've waxed it enough so that it won't become a blue cheese.

No new books this week

2009-01-24T00:10:00.000-08:00

This is the first week I haven't finished a book this year. Quite amazing! Part of the reason is that I'm reading Richard Powers's "The Time of our Singing", which is a 600+ page book. That will take me some time. I've also been reading the news in the morning and listening to more podcasts. The most interesting one that I've read was:

Daniel Tunkelang talks about Endeca, Search, and ‘Reconsidering Relevance’ from Talis's Nodalities.

It's an interesting interview that discusses things that I can relate more than the usual discussions about SaaS and linked data. As this is not my technical blog, I won't get much into why I found this interesting. Eventually I'll write some notes about it.

Things at work have been a little stressful lately. And it's not really because of work itself, but mostly because I have been a little unfocused. Maybe it's the new house, maybe it's because I'll have visitors in town this weekend, maybe it's because the cleaning people killed my lucky bamboo this week, or maybe it's just the moon, I don't know. I just hope it will go away soon.

What else can I talk about my week here? Well, last weekend I decided to finally do an actual hard cheese. I chose one of the easier ones to start with: cheddar. Last Saturday to Sunday I did the whole preparing the curds, cutting them, heating, and pressing. This week it was drying and today I applied cheese wax to seal it from mold and let it age for at least a couple of months. The trick now is that, without any experience, when will I decide to open it?

Also in two months I should open one of my bottles of plum wine to try. I tried a little when it came out of the clearing up process and it was alright... Won't win any prizes. I've been thinking of starting a new batch of something, but I'm not sure what yet. It's not that hard, it's just such delayed gratification and moderate risk that is tough to be very excited about it. And I think I do need some excitement in my life right now. Just too many things to be worried about that I feel I don't have full control over. Like my poor lucky bamboo.

Fun bus experience to start the day

2009-01-19T08:57:00.000-08:00

I was running a little late today (too many things to do this morning and I was only able to do 1/3 of them) and got to the bus stop about a minute after my bus (74) was supposed to show up. Another person that takes the same bus as I do was at the stop too, so I thought I was safe. A minute after that the bus that comes after my bus (75, and does not take me to work) arrives. We ask the bus driver if our bus is late and he doesn't know and says that some buses are not running today (it's Martin Luther King day). So we take the 75 that should take us to a hub where many buses that go to downtown stop. I was convinced that my bus was a little early and that's why we both missed it.

So we get to the other stop and stand there and wait for the next bus to get to downtown. Two show up that take the slow route and I decide not to take them (the other confused person that took the 75 with me go onto one of those buses). Then, after about 10 minutes waiting the 74 shows up! It was late and not early and it takes a slower route to this hub. So I end up getting to work about 5 minutes later than usual.

With all this experience what I learned is something dangerous: I can be a little late, get the 75 and still be able to catch the 74 later in the bus line. The only trick about it is that usually the 74 is full at the time it gets to the hub (not today because of the holiday), so it's not something I would want to do every day, but good (or bad) to know that I have this option.

Oh, and you might be asking: if it's a holiday, what are you doing going to work? Well, in order to "help" businesses, the US government does not impose any holidays onto companies. So companies pick and choose what holidays to give to their employees. Amazon didn't choose MLK as one of these holidays. And it's not that unusual for this holiday to be one of the ones that are ignored by companies.

Two more books for the year

2009-01-15T19:27:00.000-08:00

I'm quickly running out of books to read, I guess. Last week I decided to read something completely random, which ended up being Jim Butcher's Storm Front. Why this book? Well, I was reading on random things, which ended up taking me to an old series that died some time ago, The Dresden Files. Which reminded me that it actually came from a book series. I kind of enjoyed the TV series (although I wasn't very sad when it was gone), so I decided to read the first book of the series. It was mildly entertaining, but probably not enough for me to read more on the series.

That was last week. This week I decided to start reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. I just finished it on my ride back home today. The book makes very interesting points on why people become successful. The core concept is that everything counts. You can't become successful just based on intelligence, or school, or social background, or cultural background, or luck. You become successful because of the combination of some or all those factors.

I won't get more into the book, as I won't be able to do justice to all the things that he talks about. What is a little depressing about the book is that it sort of shows that unless you focused on something from early on in your life, you'll very likely never be successful. That means that "moving downstream" is not likely going to be a success story. Oh, well...

An Excel guy playing with Apple's Numbers

2009-01-10T00:13:00.000-08:00

I've done a lot of Excel in my life, and still do. I can't say I'm very proud of it, but I have to admit that it's one of the most powerful tools that "normal people" seem to use.

Well, so Apple decided that one of their big Macworld Expo keynote announcement was their new version of iWork, their Office competitor. So I decided to give it a try and see what I thought of it.

As expected, installation is easy and startup is straight-forward. It starts with template choices, which was a surprise for me. I know that pretty much all the office suites have templates, but I think I have repeatedly tried to use them and never found any template that was really helpful to me, so I gave up on them a long time ago. Well, Numbers still has them. And they look pretty with odd things like Home Inventory, Baby Record and even Garden Journal.

But I kept to my normal experience and chose a blank file.

The next thing I notice is that by default it is highlighting the top row and the leftmost column, as if to notice that they should be used in a special way. Excel offers that also, but it's not the default behavior.

Another thing that struck me at first was the ability to add tables to a table. Not only a simple table, but a pre-formatted table, like a checklist or one that already contains the sum calculation in the bottom. And it can go into the same sheet, embedded under the current table.

I found that concept very interesting. Many times I did want to have one sheet, but multiple different pieces of information with different formatting. Many times I wished Excel had this feature and you didn't have to keep adding new sheets or putting everything in long set of columns.

I didn't spend too much time using it, so the only other thing I have to say is that it does have a lot less options than Excel. This could be a very good thing though. People never know even 20% of what Excel can do for them. And when they do, many end up spending a lot of time trying to understand how to do it. For example, what the parameters of v-lookup mean, how to get pivot tables correct, and so on. I can't tell yet if they've removed too much stuff from it to be useless.

I'll continue giving it a try. I have another 29 days left.

And I might eventually look at the other things you get on the suite, like Keynote and Pages, and post something about them. Now it's time to follow X's suggestion and go to sleep. It's barely 12:30, so that's certainly better to check if his way of coping with it works for me too.

8 years in the US

2009-01-09T00:34:00.000-08:00

This would have been a much better subject for my 400th post, huh? Well, unfortunately I'm not sure I have much insightful to talk about this one. Most of it has been the theme of this blog: "moving downstream". Just going with the flow, towards the path of least resistance. Yes, you might find a waterfall here and there. But the path seems never to really branch out. Only other paths join in and become one big way... downstream.

It's probably a little too late also to have deep thoughts about this. Lately I've been busy and stressed. Lots of things just don't seem right. Projects are just not complete, ideas flow around and don't get much attention, and new things keep piling up on top of the incomplete things.

For example, I've set up my office here. I have both my computers on, chair, but it's missing my printer, there are still some stacks of papers that I haven't figured out where I'm going to store them, things are inside my drawers, but still wrapped up. It's mostly functional, but just not finished. I have 5 email drafts that I can't seem to finish and send them to friend. Projects at work are almost at the same state. And my mind keeps trying to convince me to do something new. Probably is some escapist need to keep me away from my weaknesses.

At least I'm blogging and being able to finish my posts. So, changing subjects back to the original intent of the post, thanks US for the last 8 years. They were comfortable.

Spam day today, huh?

2009-01-08T19:16:00.000-08:00

This month I decided to aggregate some statistics about spam detection on all my mailing systems (i.e. how many false positives/negatives I get on Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail). So I'm building this spreadsheet with how many spam messages I get a day on each of those services. With this amount of visibility, it's interesting to see some odd patterns. Like, for example, today I received so far roughly double the average spam I receive a day (which is around 17 messages - today I'm at 33 and the day is not over yet).

What have I found so far besides that? Well, I can't really tell. I receive way too much spam on my gmail account and very little on my other accounts. So I don't have any statistically significant numbers on the other accounts. Current numbers are:

Gmail:
True positives: 159
False positives: 1
False negatives: 0

Hotmail:
True positives: 3
False positives: 0
False negatives: 1

Yahoo:
True positives: 25
False positives: 0
False negatives: 1

If I was not statistically inclined, I would say that, as I was expecting, gmail seems to err on the side of classifying things are spam when they are not spam, which was the biggest problems on early spam detection systems (which had a much higher false positive number than the 0.6% that I'm seeing here). Hotmail and Yahoo learned with this bad experience and decided to miss more spam messages in order for people to be able to use the "empty" button to get rid of all their spam messages without having to go through each of them.

But, as I am "statistically inclined", I'm not going to conclude anything yet and just wait until I have more evidence.

Oh, yes, and this is my 400th post. Interesting number. This blog has been alive for 4 years and 3 months, approximately. My previous blog that lived for 3 years and 8 months had 1,049 posts. Just a small difference, huh?

Half an hour is a long time!

2009-01-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

Warning: this is probably going to be a very boring post about routine change.

Since the move, almost two weeks ago, I had to change my morning schedule. My bus ride is longer, so in order to get to work at about the same time as before (between 8 and 8:30 AM) now I have to leave half hour earlier. I decided not to wake up 30 minutes earlier (which is good as lately I haven't been able to convince me to go to bed before 1:30 AM), so I end up having 30 minutes less at home in the morning (which are now spent in the bus). It's odd how hard it's been for me to adapt to it!

In the past, my morning routine used to be:

Wake up
Check emails
Check favorite blogs
Read news
Shower
Have breakfast
Reply to one or two emails (only the time-sensitive ones, usually from my family)
Read more news
Leave for the bus listening to a podcast
Listen to podcast in the bus (except for towards the end of some weeks that I ran out of podcasts to listen to and I would either listen to music or an audiobook)

Now my routine (if a week of doing something can be called a routine) has been:

Wake up
Check emails
Shower
Have breakfast
Check favorite blogs
Leave for the bus listening to a podcast
Sit on the bus reading a book

It's a lot of things that were cut out of my morning. When I get back home, I do try to check news, but that makes my evening way longer and less productive (that's part of the reason why I haven't been able to force myself to go to bed before 1:30 AM - I have to feel like I did something productive at home). I tried to read the news on the bus using my Kindle yesterday and today, but it's just not the same thing. "Normal" news have been quite boring for some time. The economy, and Obama setting up his people, and now the Israel-Gaza conflict (which is depressing, not boring at all). And I miss the ability to navigate through news to get more information on things that seemed interesting to me.

Well, I probably need to revisit my plans. Maybe I'll reconsider setting my alarm to wake me up earlier. Or maybe buy a tablet PC with a 3G wireless card so that I can do my news reading with browsing on the bus (no, not an iPhone, or equivalent - the screen is too small for my taste). Or maybe I just need to get used to it and reorganize my evening around it. I've been arriving home earlier (because there are no good buses to get me home that leave work after 6:20 pm)...

Anyway, I said this was going to be a boring post. I'm not sure why I wrote it... And now that I did it, I can't convince myself not to publish it. Oh, well, maybe this will force me to post something better soon to compensate for my personal ramblings. Now onto work!

The first book of 2009

2009-01-02T23:59:00.000-08:00

It's kind of cheating to say that I've finished my first book in 2009 today, considering that I've read most of it in 2008 (actually I read 80% of it this week - the joy of longer bus rides), but, well, I'll add to the list anyway.

So, to the book: Firstborn

It's actually the third and last book of the "A Time Odyssey" series, and I thought it was the most interesting of them. Events happen in a much more exciting pace. I bought the series when I heard that Arthur C. Clarke passed away. I was in the bus going to work and bought all the books on my Kindle. Later I found out that I had already bought the hardcover version of the books... Oh, well..

It was a good series. Not Arthur C. Clarke's or Stephen Baxter's best, but quite good anyway. I'm not sure how much I can say without spoiling it for people, but the whole idea of it is this fight with a race of highly advanced beings that seem to not really care about other life forms in the universe. There is no real interaction with this race, just a struggle for the human race to keep alive.

What is next on my list? Well, I'm still reading João Ubaldo Ribeiro's "Viva o povo brasileiro", a 600+-page tome of Brazilian literature. Tough and rewarding read. It's actually interesting to read it and realize how much different it is to read works of literature in Portuguese to English. Not that I'm calling "Firstborn" a work of great literary depth - it wasn't meant to be that way. I'm not drawing the comparison to it, but to the more general English-language literature, like Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing.

In any way, the Brazilian/Portuguese literature that I miss is much more psychological and, in many ways, metaphorical. Time goes by slowly as the author takes time on the characters' reactions to what is going on more than the event itself. Sometimes you can't even really tell what is going on as it's so small compared to the world inside the mind of the protagonist that draws relationships to other events on their lives or world events and, more disturbingly, keeps replacing the current events to things in their past in a form of "internal metaphor" that you have to keep following in order to understand the book. As I said, tough but rewarding.

And I think that's the main things I have on my list right now. I did buy Malcom Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success, but I'm not sure I want to read it right now. We'll see what surprises I'll find once I finish unpacking and organizing my books back onto my shelves.

Happy new year

2009-01-01T08:50:00.000-08:00

It's 2009. Kind of shocking how quickly all those years in this new decade/century/millennium are going. But, well, many things have happened on those years, so it's not that I'm just realizing that I haven't accomplished anything. But I'm not sure I can say the same thing about last year.

Anyway, let's start with the obvious: Happy New Year to all my readers. There aren't many of you out there, I know, but it's not what is important.

So, what are my plans for this blog for this new year? I'm actually not so sure yet. I still have plans of keeping a personal (this) and a technical blog separate. But maybe I'll finally work on my homepage and migrate both blogs there. It's been on my plans for the last year, but didn't get even close to doing anything about it. I think most of it is because I want too many things on that homepage. Things like:

Research interest/links to my papers: not that hard as I have stopped writing papers some time ago
Technical interest/links to my project designs/alpha implementations: this is a little trickier, because I'm not sure how many of my projects I actually really have a consumable design or implementation. But that's where my other blog would be linked
Aggregation of my pictures: that right now are mostly on SmugMug
This blog
A twitter-like feed of interesting links: It's what I'm trying to accomplish with the FriendFeed side bar, but the current way I find hard to really navigate

It's a good amount of things and integration with things. Especially when getting to my projects up somewhere and running.

Anyway, I also know that a good part of this year is going to be devoted to the new house. The list of things that might need some work is getting long. I'm planning on not starting on anything until I have enough experience with the house and weed out things I want changed not because they are unusable, but because I'm used to something different from my previous houses/apartments. But I'm sure that there will still be a lot of things to do. And right now my goal should be finishing setting up my office, which right now is a sea of boxes with a small island of my chair and a small part of my desk, where I'm sitting and writing this post. It's actually quite impressive how many books and magazines I've collected in the last 8 years. I came to the US with pretty much no books. But now I have a Kindle and the speed of my book collection growth might slow down a little. Hopefully.

Alright, time to start the work today. Happy new year again and wishes to a wonderful year, full of accomplishments, to everybody.

Economic crisis or just newspapers doing what they like most: create fear?

2008-12-28T22:36:00.000-08:00

I was reading this article on BBC today: Chinese warned off lavish gifts. It talks about how the Chinese government said it's forbidding Chinese officials to buy expensive gifts for Chinese new year. They claim that this is because of the difficult state of the Chinese economy due to the world crisis.

If you stop reading the article at this point, like most people do, they will end up with the idea that the Chinese government is really worried about the state of the Chinese economy and is telling people not to spend too much money. Then, if you read further you find:

[...] Each year too the Communist Party exhorts its officials to avoid conspicuous consumption. [...]

Which might be the only actual note that the Chinese government sent. The same it sends every year. But then reporters took this as being a sign of impending doom. If Chinese officials are asked not to spend all their bribery money on their "friends", it means that something really bad is going on. With all the things that the economy is doing, that has to be the cause! And people should be warned of it. No more parties, no more happy Chinese. No more happy Chinese, worst quality at the Wal-Mart stores. Lower quality on Wal-Mart, lower quality on most US households (because people won't stop buying - it's so inexpensive). Lower quality of products in US households, higher chance of accidents. More accidents, more medical bills. More medical bills, more unhappy citizens. More unhappy citizens, more stories to put in the newspaper. So it must be true! Q.E.D.

Living in the new house, and tired

2008-12-27T23:15:00.001-08:00

So my life has been centered on the big move lately. Nights were spent putting things in boxes, except for when my father was in town. Not that I could do much more, as we had a freak snow storm in Seattle that kept us stuck at home for days. But now everything is much better.

Anyway, back to the move: it was supposed to happen on Friday, but got postponed on Friday morning by the moving people because they couldn't get their trucks out because of the snow. But we had everything ready. The bed was in pieces, all clothes were packed. So we decided to just take the air mattress and move anyway. And I was working on Friday, which worked out ok, because once we got to the house we didn't have anything else to do. So I was able to get good work done in the evening and this morning.

The house is doing well. As I start to live in it I end up finding a lot of small things that could be improved, but it's how it goes. It feels kind of odd that I now can do things with the house and when I see blogs that point to gadgets for the house, I can actually pay attention to them. Very time-consuming and potentially harmful to the wallet. But I have been good so far in trying to organize things and prioritize.

Tomorrow is finally going to be the real moving date (I hope), so it's waking up early and going to the old house, making sure everything is ready to go, being bored waiting for them to pack their truck, come to this house and direct traffic to make sure I don't have to haul furniture around the house once the movers are gone.

After that it's putting everything in the right places and start to plan the new year's party that will happen here on Wednesday. Mostly I have to have the kitchen ready enough to cook and then start to think of what I'm going to cook this year. The theme is "something new", so it has to be something I haven't tried before.

Oh, there was one problem with the house because of the snow: it had an awning in the back that didn't survive the weight of the snow and collapsed. Fortunately it didn't damage anything too much on its way down. I just will probably need a new cover of some sorts in the back to protect my grill when it arrives tomorrow.

Alright, enough about this. Time to go to sleep as I probably will have a long day ahead. Moving is very painful.

The great things of 24h chat support

2008-12-18T00:19:00.000-08:00

So I've had my problems with Quicken for some time. Tonight I was feeling "lucky" and decided to contact their 24 hour chat support and see if I could get it to work. The short story is that it's now working again! The longer story is that it took almost 30 minutes and I was the one that actually found the solution to the problem (as a variation to a step that the support person kept asking me to repeat in different contexts). The program even crashed once while we were going through the steps. But the important thing is that it's working now and I would never have been able to get it to work if it had one of the "classic" support systems that would only be open during business hours. I'm rarely in front of my home computer during business hours!

Now it's done and I can drop again Mint.com and Microsoft Money.

Adding things

2008-12-17T06:26:00.000-08:00

So I finally decided to try and understand Blogger's plugins and make my blog a little more of a destination for people to see what is going on with me. So I've added a feed view of FriendFeed. So now people can see every time I post on this blog by looking on the right side of the blog, instead of having to look at the main column. Brilliant, isn't it?

Actually my FriendFeed contains much more than this blog. It contains my Twitter, delicious, Google Reader (which I don't use any more), LibraryThing (which I also don't use - I use Shelfari and I've just added a widget to show what I'm reading), LinkedIn, Facebook and Netflix (which I also don't use any more). So you can see what I'm doing in many different angles, isn't it weird?

Distracted

2008-12-16T23:39:00.001-08:00

Today was getting poor day and after that I was working from home (not to have to take a bus downtown and waste an hour commuting, as I didn't have any meetings scheduled today). But it wasn't a very productive day. The whole day I was thinking about what happened and the plans for the next few days (my father is arriving tomorrow evening and staying until Saturday morning) and next few months in the new house. So... No in-depth shoe size analysis for me. Just a lot of random thoughts and observation about the most important concept of all statistical analyzes: if you don't have a model, you can't analyze anything meaningful. I can look at things and calculate averages, do general clustering and find patterns, but without a model I can't tell if what I'm looking at is meaningful.

It all goes back to my inability to assert things to people in a way that they will accept and act on it. I trust people too much and I don't trust myself enough. So, when multiple people ask for something, even when I know it shouldn't work, I decide to go ahead with it and get to the same conclusion the practical way.

So, that's where I am. The rest of the week is going to be mostly dead with my father's visit and some meetings (Wednesday and Thursday are my days full of meetings - it's great that they are concentrated this way, unless I hope to get anything accomplished those two days in particular, and Friday is my closing date and key collection). But we keep on moving forward. I have started working on a model (which is now on a paper that was invaded by information on the contractor that is fixing the roof at the new house) and that's what I'll have to make sure to settle on before I move back to analysis. Then I'll do the thing that I got at Amazon to do: analyze the Amazon catalog for patterns. In this case, figure out how to train my model and validate that it correctly represents shoe sizing.

Can't quite explain what my thoughts are, but I'll say that it's a very interesting problem. What makes it very complex is the fact that there are multiple ways of explaining to a user the size of a shoe. There are multiple size standards (including some that are very similar, like US Men's and US Women's, which are off by 1.5 or 2, depending on who you ask), with sometimes non-fully-deterministic translations between the sizes. There are also shoe width information, with multiple standards. And these "standards" are not exact. Some brands or product lines run smaller or larger than the actual number that they say, which is technically another size feature.

So, with all those features, how can you make sense of the size? That's the question that I'm trying to answer in the next couple of weeks.

Huh, Microsoft Money, what do you mean?

2008-12-14T22:06:00.000-08:00

I've been using Quicken for about 4 years to organize my finances. I chose Quicken because I had no choice, as I had a Mac and all online options were kind of ugly. I was happy with it until last year when it decided to be unable to sync with my WaMu checking account (note that it was able to synchronize with my WaMu savings account that uses the same user name and password). I kept using it for some time until I decided to plan better my finances in preparation to buy a house. Then I got really annoyed by it and decided to try other options.

Oh, I have to note before I continue that I have since moved my Quicken to the Windows version because it had way more features, looked nicer and was the same price.

I haven't had that much time to try around, but I've tried the famous Mint.com, which was pleasant, but certainly had less features and was slower to edit than Quicken. However, it was able to sync with my WaMu without a problem. I tried Quicken Online too, which had even less features than Mint.com and also was able to sync with WaMu.

Then, this evening, I decided to just accept it and install a trial version of Microsoft Money. The installation was very quick and setting up the accounts (except for my Charles Schwab account, which requires calling their support service, apparently) was very easy. But then, when it takes me to the account home page I see that I have one huge expense type: transfers/credit card payments! Huh? If the credit card is listed on their system, isn't counting credit card payments causing all my expenses to be counted twice (one month apart from each other)?

If you go to the reports section, it's the same thing. And you have to turn on "advanced reports" to be able to hide this class of expenses, which is very puzzling. There is probably some sort of configuration that I have to enter to make this stop showing, but it's odd that this seems to be the default behavior for this popular financial management software. I'll dig a little more into it and find out if maybe I'm missing something quite obvious. Until then... Huh?

Driving to the gym

2008-12-13T16:19:00.000-08:00

I always thought it was funny to drive to the gym. You are "lazy" to go exercise. But now I see how it would make more sense:

Gym Car Concept Sounds Both Healthy and Extremely Dangerous

Now they just need to add a shower inside the car and it would make it perfect! :-)

Great spam

2008-12-12T12:09:00.000-08:00

I received a great spam message today:

from: Yahoo/Msn Lottery Incoporation
reply-to: eventmanager_verificationboard@live.com
to: undisclosed-recipients
date: Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 9:19 AM
subject: Windows Live Lottery Have Chosen You Has A Winner

And it came to my gmail account, which makes the mix even more interesting. And, yes, gmail did recognize it a Spam. Gmail is generally pretty good at identifying spam. It's just too aggressive sometimes. About one "non-spam" email a week ends up in my spam folder. It's been a long time I haven't seen any spam in my inbox.

Friends, old games and gmail

2008-12-10T23:40:00.001-08:00

This is a post done by request from my best friend, who went through a great ordeal to send me one of the games we used to play a lot a long time ago: X-COM UFO Defense. Great turn-based strategy game! So it's time to take a step back in time and remember the games that "defined my computer gamer experience". The list below is not in any particular order. And it could be much longer than this, but I decided to keep it simple, so that I might still be able to get some sleep tonight:

X-COM series
Maniac Mansion
Indiana Jones The Last Crusade & Fate of Atlantis
Monkey Island series
Leisure Suit Larry series (well, I think I've only started playing pretty late in the series, something like 5 or 6)
Loom
Myst
Test Drive series
Planetfall (I really disliked that game because I was never able to get very far on it, but it was probably one of the first games that I've played on my 8086)
SimCity
SimEarth
SimAnt
Flight Simulator
Lakers versus Celtics
Battle Chess
Lemmings series
Prince of Persia (they just come out with a new of this series, amazing!)
Sam and Max
Space Quest (also didn't play too many of the series)
The Adventures of Willy Beamish
Elvira & Elvira 2
Budokan
Indy 500
Vette!
Stunts
Syndicate
Out of this world
Wolfenstein 3D
Doom
Dune

Writing this list made me realize how much free time I used to have... And there are tons of games that I remember playing them, but couldn't figure out the name any more. And these are all computer games. I could try to list old game boy, NES, SNES, SEGA Master System... Oh, so much time... I'm so old!

And what about gmail? Well, it's the second day in a row that I receive a message from somebody saying that they tried to send me something on my gmail and it bounced. So the ended up sending it to my yahoo account and it all worked. Go figure how evil Google wants to be.

Ok! enough about forcing my memory and time to go to sleep. It's been a very busy week so far and it's just the beginning. I'm looking forward to the weekend when it's supposed to be below freezing and snowing. The joys of winter.