Looking for something fulfilling

Lately I have to admit that I have been feeling less and less fulfilled. It's like I don't produce anything new, I can't really interest myself on anything that makes me excited. Here were some trials:

1) Gardening: it's hard to feel fulfilled gardening still technically during winter
2) Stock trading: after playing around for a while, I just gave up on finding any companies that I think are doing anything exciting (and have shares being sold publicly) and keeping track on non-interesting companies was just boring. They all feel the same to me.
3) Music: I tried to go back to listening and playing some (only keyboard, didn't have the courage to take out my clarinet yet), but didn't quite work. It's been some time that music stopped touching me as much as it used to.
4) Electronics: my never-ending (and never moving-forward) recipe reader project... Quite disappointing to keep figuring out that I need more parts and not having time to go and buy the parts (or having to order in bulk online paying more for shipping than the part itself). I also have my plan for an interactive news visualizer, but that's way more complicated...
5) Work: I don't want to talk about work... It was a depressing week.
6) Reading: I'm actually reading a very interesting book right now, Alan Campbell's Scar Night. But there is a limit on how much I can read every day... And I don't really feel like I'm accomplishing anything reading.

So today I decided to go back to one of my old hobbies: writing. Apart from not being a good writer, it's sometimes fun to just let you mind go wild with ideas and then try to put a consistent thread to tie them all. I'm actually trying to get back to one of my most ambitious writing projects (no, not the multi-language book - I can't write in German any more, I'm afraid). More details about it some other time.

Some talk about music theory

I was asked to comment on adviken, an interesting guy that posts music theory lessons on YouTube. His lessons are actually quite interesting in the sense that he can explain some things quite well, like the tonal relations and scale variations. However, there isn't much more there.

There are a couple of things that I've heard some time ago that intrigued me in relation to music theory:

1) Our ears are not as relative as we once thought. Classic music theory claims that if you play a piece in C major or C# major you won't feel the difference. And that's actually not true. Actually it was something that a lot of composers already claimed not to be true - some gave colors to different tonalities like Scriabin. Also I'm not falling for the statistics discussions that claims that there are more pieces in C, F, Bb and G major than any other key as proof for key preference, because that is probably mostly related to the difficulty of playing specific keys in some instruments. There are some interesting experiments that showed that people can sing their favorite song in the correct key only using their memory. Quite interesting
2) Sound compositions is extremely important. You learn that very quickly the first time you try to compose something with more than 4-5 instruments. It makes a huge difference to forget a little about harmony and counterpoint theory and just think about what you can do with two or more instruments that will sound interesting. Percussion is great for it. It has been proven that the attack of an instrument is what gives most of the difference in the sound. If you add a percussion to the attack, you suddenly have something very strong messing with the instrument identifier and what do you get? A "new instrument"!
3) Harmony and consonance is mostly cultural. In different cultures people get to (approximately) different harmonies and your ear gets used differently to what "soundg good". And that begs for the question: now that we are continuously moving towards a globalized world, are we losing this richness in hearing? Are we drifting towards somehing else?

Music is exciting! But sometimes work is necessary.

Self-describing data

Lately, for reasons I won't delve into here, I have been thinking quite a lot about self-describing data. I'll have to admit that the first time I heard of this expression, when I was reading about ontologies, DAML+OWL, RDF, I didn't give too much attention to it. It seemed a little odd for me to worry about it.

However, lately I have realized the real importance of it. Its wastefulness has some very interesting consequences:

- Independence between systems: two systems don't have to completely understand each other to interoperate, as long as they can find within their data things they can understand. Independence also relates to same-system upgrades - if you use this data for storing state, it's easier for a new version to understand the old version's state without having to explicitly code for it.
- "Isolationability" of data: data can be understood (somehow) without a system around it - you can build generic tools to look at the data - they will never be optimal for anything, but they allow for inspection and improve debug-ability.
- Extensibility: as you know that your clients can live with only understanding part of your date (yes, your clients have to be built with that in mind), you can extend your data without worrying too much about the consequences.

Let's give an example. Let's say that you are trying to store personal information about your friends around. Your first solution could be something like:

Joe Smith, 10/12, 555-555-5555
Clara Smurf, 05/05/1977, 555-555-5544
Joe Jack, 01/01

Now you have to build a system that will parse each line and understand that the name is before the first comma, the birth date (with or without year) is next and then the phone number (if you know it). Now let's say that you want also to add a city of residence. Now your system, has to know how to parse something completely new.

But what if you write a second file that contains how to parse this file? Something like:

<name>, <birth-month>/<birth-day>[/<birth-year>][, <phone-number>]

Let's call this file a dictionary. Now you have to keep that file always with your initial file. More than this you have to make sure that when you change one, you change the second one too. And that if you are dealing with files written with different dictionaries so you have to keep a copy of all the dictionaries around and how they relate to each other. One misunderstanding on which dictionary to pick and you are suddenly getting everything wrong. But I have to admit that it's better than the first option.

Now, what if you wrote something like:


Friend 1:
Family name: Smith
First name: Joe
Birth month: 10
Birth day: 12
Phone number: 555-555-5555
Friend 2:
Family name: Smurf
First name: Clara
Birth month: 05
Birth day: 05
Birth year: 1977
Phone number: 555-555-5544
Friend 3:
Family name: Jack
First name: Joe
Birth month: 01
Birth day: 01


Isn't it much easier to understand what I mean? Surely it's much more expensive to store in disk and to send out to people, also more expensive to parse and process, but what it's a matter of looking forward and thinking where do you want to go with your data. Are you building something that will only work for what you know you need right now, or do you accept that your needs change with time and you would like not to have to reinvent the wheel ever time it does (and more than this, keep track of all the wheels you have invented in the past, because they might come back to haunt you).

Surely I'm over-simplifying things here. There are lots of things that you can do that will make things not backwards compatible on the self-describing solution. Also there are things you can do to the dictionary solution that would contain the version of the dictionary in the message contents and a dictionary repository that you could get any specific version.

I guess my point is the following: if you can live with the complexities of non-self-describing data, if things don't change, or if change is centered around systems that you have good control over, go for it. For all the rest of us, mortals, it's just too painful for gains that it offers. Especially in our world where networks are fast and disk space is cheap.

It's superbowl weekend

Yes, it is, but that's now what I'm going to talk about. There are lots of interesting things happening right now, besides preparations for this money-packed event.

I'll have to start with my current most forbidden site: Amapedia. I've seen this site pretty much from its infancy all the way to launch and... Well... It's a very interesting concept. There are already some nice things that are coming out of it, especially related to more information about authors that you don't get on Amazon.com, contents of books and CDs, and not too much incorrect information. But one of the most exciting things, in my opinion, is the ability to do fact-based search, and leverage structured information. I wished I could send a link to it, but it seems only to be available to people that are logged on to the site. There is also one small issue with the structured search: it only works if you add structured information to the articles! Now come the reasons why it's a forbidden site for me:

1) I know how important structure is for the way the site works and most pages have no structure at all, so I go around and spend time cleaning up the data there. Spending time is not 5-10 minutes here and there, it's 30-120 minutes here and there!
2) Like wandering around Amazon.com, because I know the way things were supposed to work, bugs just become extremely evident and annoying. I just sent a short list as feedback.

Anyway, I will encourage people to try it out. Have fun, give them feedback and NEVER finish writing an article without entering fact information (in the second page of editing, you have to click on "Next")

I hate Yahoo! Mail

Yes, for the 5th or 6th time I've received all my messages on my Yahoo account on my POP3 client. I've talked with Yahoo support three times about this already. The first time they said they couldn't do anything. The second time I was routed around multiple times to the Brazilian support (it's my yahoo.com.br account) and the result is that they didn't know what was going on, but as it stopped happening they didn't have anything they could do. The third time I got a message back with instructions how to call or chat with support (and how much it would cost) and then another message with a survey asking how I was helped on my case. I never wrote so many "terrible"s in a survey!

Anyway, here I go again deleting 10K emails on my mail system hoping not to delete anything important by accident.

Back from Chicago

Unfortunately I don't have much time to discuss my trip to Chicago, but I can say it was great. Here are the brief highlights:

- Friends... Oh, meeting friends anywhere is always the most important highlight of anything. If any other friends want to come to the US, please let me know! :-)
- Art Institute of Chicago: Amazing impressionist collection!
- Charlie Trotter's: Awesome food... Certainly one of the best meals I've ever had in my life (and the most expensive too)
- Shedd Aquarium: lots of interesting things there, from trained whales and dolphins, and even penguins, to beautiful coral reef "replicas"
- Field Museum of Natural History: some very interesting exhibits, but sometimes seeing "stuffed" animals is not as interesting
- The city of Chicago: I think I've lived too long away from big cities... It felt good to be able to walk around downtown Chicago and feel like there are lots of things to do everywhere you walk. It felt like a big city.
- Walgreens: I have to add this. It was founded in Chicago, according to Wikipedia, so maybe that explains why there is one every 3-4 blocks. It was just amazing to think how much Chicago citizens like to go to the pharmacy!

Anyway, that's what I had to report. Now I'm back to normal work. Lots of things to do still and with a lot of events coming up this weekend, including a housewarming party.

Another weekend has gone by

Yes, it was one of those weekends when nothing got done. I can't really say "nothing" but it wasn't even close to what I had planned. Not too much of my fault, though. On Saturday I went volunteering at a Sand Points Community Housing (now part of Solid Ground). It was not very demanding, because we were diverted to a different project as the snow on the ground prevented us from doing the landscaping that was planned. Then Amy and I went home and played a game of Terakh... 3 hours later I left to have a haircut, buy groceries for dinner (it was quite icy outside, but I survived). Made dinner and the day was over.

Sunday started with a brunch to celebrate some people's 80th and 70th birthdays. It was quite nice, actually. Got back home and had about 2 hours before chatting with my parents. I turned on my work computer to find almost 900 messages in my inbox! Some system has gone completely bezerk and was sending me 5 messages every 10 minutes. Oh, joy - there I went to figure out what was going on and try to fix it. Result: I was 30 minutes late to my chat with my parents.

Then I went chatting, then dinner and again the day is over! Isn't it sad?

Well, at least we got some snow here. Last Wednesday it snowed and the snow is still around. It helped a little that we had a little snow on Saturday too and there is a slight chance of snow again on Tuesday. All for me to get ready to go to Chicago next weekend. That is going to be exciting!

How a service can be amazing, but quite useless

So I received the following email from a friend today (I'm changing some things just to keep things anonymous):

Dear past Dinner Out Participants,

We will be going to Great Princess Ethiopian Restaurant tomorrow night at 8pm.
Go here to read a description, RSVP, or read a review of the Great Princess Ethiopian
Restaurant. Hope you can make it tomorrow night!

...

This was through gmail... So on the right side I got the following suggested thing to do:

Would you like to...

Add to calendar
Dinner out at Great Pr...
Sat Jan 6, 2007 8pm

Note:
- At no place there was the explicit date there (you had the email date, plus "tomorrow")
- At no place it was written "Dinner" (or "out", for that matter).

Simple things, but made me smile. It's not that I would use it for anything, as I don't like online calendar for scheduling, but it's just good to see technology doing the right thing.

First it was orkut, not YouTube

Another Brazilian lawsuit, now trying to get YouTube to pay a fine of R$10 million (about US$4 million), and an extra R$250K a day while the video with the model and TV show host Daniella Cicarelli is available on their website. The interesting thing is that now they are trying to turn on the "Great Brazilian Firewall" and block access to YouTube to everybody in Brazil. That is something I want to see happening! [source - in Portuguese, couldn't find the news in English]

I do think there has to be a mechanism in place to take care of these kinds of things. Surely they were in a public place and the person that recorded they doing "whatever" at the beach in Spain had all the right to record it. But there is a limit where your personal freedom starts to hurt somebody else. In this case, there is no gain to anybody (maybe to some sick people, but I won't get into this level of details), only career and psychological loss to this "poor woman and her boyfriend". I know you can't take it from the internet - once digital, forever somewhere - but you can show that there is a way to get at least some things out from some places. And this is all that matters.

I've missed this one...

Microsoft and AMD decided to give out free computers loaded with Vista to "famous" bloggers, as reported by ComputerWorld. I think I was left out of this first batch...

Not that I'm really looking forward to having a computer running Vista. I'm actually dreading the fact that now that I maintain a Windows machine, I might be forced into it in a year or so, when software will start to be released that will only work on Vista.

Talking about windows machines, when I renewed my TurboTax I got also the new Quicken. I already had a Quicken for Mac, but the newest version only existed for Windows, so that's what I've received. And I was quite impressed with the amount of extra features that the Windows version has! It actually connects with all my financial organizations and gets all the bills. In the past, I had to go and download the statements manually and it was a big pain. Enough for me to give up this mechanism for keeping my finances up-to-date.

The only problem I had was that it does crash from time to time (it happened twice already in about 2 months) and it was a huge pain to import things from my Mac Quicken to the Windows Quicken. It would have been quicker to start over from scratch.

My conclusion is that software for Windows, when it isn't something that is especially focused on Mac users, like Photoshop and the likes, does receive much more support and care. The law of numbers in software quality: that's where the money is, and not on the half a dozen Mac users...

Society of weirdos

Being social sometimes is fun. It certainly helps you grow into a more generally complete person, enabling you to see views of the world that you wouldn't by yourself. However, it sometimes can attract some strange people. The latest is a person that seems to be quite nice, but, besides the very complicated-to-understand Portuguese, she ended the email with something in the lines of: "may God be with you and bless you and protect you and make His light shine on your face and give you peace!"

Sometimes email signatures should just be abolished.

Happy new year

That's all I'm going to post today. A whole new year is about to start (or has already started for some of us), so let's just forget everything and celebrate. It's well known that learning to leave some things behind and moving on has a lot of benefits and very few to no drawbacks, so... Enjoy 2007!

Homelessness?

So today I was going through my junk mail on Yahoo when I saw a very exciting ad. It featured a newspaper reproduction with the following headlines:

Homeless man beats the stock market
Michael Parness turns $33,000 into $7 million... going from a park bench to Multi-Million Dollar penthouse.

Now wait: if you are homeless how can you get $33K to turn into anything? What is a homeless person? Someone that can't buy their own house? That I can understand - you can't really buy a house in some parts of the country with less than 50K (well, you technically can, but maybe you shouldn't - but that's a whole other post).

Anyway, it was odd... Maybe it reflects well what this year was about: oddness.

So Christmas is over... What is the tally?

It was a major loss to everybody, I fear. Reality set in to some people and it wasn't nice. Of course I was one of these people. Let's explain:

1) Yesterday I was tired of staying home and decided to go driving around. Amy and I got into the car and drove down to Gig Harbor, a neat town in the South Puget Sound. We walked around a little, enjoyed the little shops and art galleries but... It was just raining all the time and we couldn't really enjoy the view (my camera got out of home, but I didn't take any pictures).

2) Today I was home in the afternoon and wrote a list of things I could do. The day was sunny and my camera was asking me to use it finally, but I didn't. I went downstairs, to the darkest place in the house and worked on my never-ending recipe reader project. As always, I've stopped working with a new list of things to buy in order to continue the work. As it was Christmas, the list was everything I was able to do.

3) Tonight there was a delayed Chanukah party to go. So I decided to open my Brazilian cookbook and see what I was going to do. I decided on empadas, wrote down the ingredients I needed from the grocery store and went there. I arrived at 3 pm and... they closed at 3 pm. I ended up going back home and making pasteis with what I had. Fried things is not my favorite thing.

But I did do some interesting ones:

- Poached pear and gorgonzola cheese
- Caramelized onions, pears and sheep cheese
- (and a two cheese one, just to make something simple)

Not too bad, but...

4) I've talked with a good friend of mine yesterday and found out that his wife is pregnant! He was very excited about it, and me too! I just feel sorry for the kid whenever it comes (August?). This friend is just a good spoiler. Where is the loss here? Oh... You should understand.

5) Yesterday I had a terrible headache. In the middle of all the medication I took I didn't realize that one of the ones I had was not non-drowsy. And I figured this out when I fell asleep watching Sherlock Holmes on the TV and when I tried to stand up after the movie was over I almost fell down. Good that I didn't take this one while I was driving!

6) And what about the world?

- Chaos in the air system in Brazil: there was a series of systems having problems - overbooking and then air control. Exciting times.
- I have to add too all the chaos in Denver. It's interesting that although it was only one single airport, I have heard of at least 3 people that I personally know that were directly affected by it. Odd... What is there about Colorado?
- I could be like Fox News and repeat that now more Americans died in Iraq than during 9/11. That's what a war is about anyway...
- Consumer spending this year in the US for holidays rose only about 6.6% comparing to last year's 8.7%, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal. Yes, I'm to blame for it. I didn't buy pretty much anything during the holiday season this year. I wanted to buy some things, but I just couldn't figure out what these things really were (apart from a Wii, but this I can continue to wait until it's easier to find around).

Enough bad news. Time to get ready to go to sleep. Tomorrow is a working day.

Appearing

So if nobody shows up at least I have fun. It's what I've decided to do lately. It is certainly very common for me to just concentrate on the hundreds of things I have to do and think and just forget what is going around me. Actually, lately I've been observing that I haven't been even reading the news. But I finally realized it and decided to turn it around.

No, it's not that I'll start going to all parties I've been invited to, watching TV, subscribe to all newspapers, it's just that I'll at least try to look around more often. Try to read something and maybe post on my blog about it. Like J.K. Rowling announcing the name of the last of the Harry Potter books, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (yes, even Amazon already has the book and lots of discussions about what the title means)

I have to also mention that there are still people around here with no power! Yes, it's been officially a week since the great wind storm and there are thousands of people still without power. And now they are even trying to name the storm! Quite amazing!

And just to end the list of links, this is not that interesting, but it goes with my "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" calendar: How to write worse and improve your Spinnish.

Crazy Yahoo Mail

I went out for a couple of hours to watch "Constant Gardener" (great movie, by the way - and I know you've probably already seen it, it's been out for some time) and when I get back I have 11,110 (neat number) unread emails. Yahoo decided to resend all my emails since time immemorial (that's mid-2004, before that I deleted all the emails from my Yahoo web account). It's amazing now my process of deleting them all, especially because they are mostly copies of what I have and I can't really sort them by date or anything.

Anyway, things that happen to keep you busy.

Dependence

It is interesting how much you depend on electricity and internet. At least how much I depend on it. Then came the great storm of last Thursday, December 14. It was mostly just a lot of wind. What do I mean by a lot of wind? Well this table gives you a good idea. It was quite windy - not as much as some days in Oklahoma, but clearly much more dangerously so. It's different to have a lot of wind in a place with few trees and not too many people, and when it happens in the middle of a place that was just not ready for it.

The power at home went out in the middle of the night between Thursday and Friday. Fortunately I was prepared and recharged my cell phone on the day before and had set it to be my second alarm to wake up in the morning. Fortunately, after I got back home, power was already back.

But then came the second dependency: cable was out, and with it my internet! And it was like this until the afternoon today. But now everything seems to be back to normal here. In many parts of the city it still isn't, though. I still have many friends that don't have electricity. Medina, one of the most expensive towns in the greater Seattle (where Bill Gates lives), is all dark (except from some houses with generators).

One of these friends were my girlfriend's parents that asked for refuge in our house last night and are staying at a hotel tonight. They also own a music store and it's without electricity in the single most important weekend of the year. Somebody is not very happy about it.

But life goes on and the cold is back.

The awareness that truth brings

Sometimes it's easy for people to take things for granted and forget that there are things happening around you that you don't have full knowledge. But suddenly when you are confronted with the truth, you realize that life can be much different than you have expected. Words acquire a different meaning, actions behind the shell of half-phrases and manipulations.

But eventually people do wake up and are startled to see that the world has changed. They can decide to go back to their shell, or face it as captains face storms. You look at it and try to adapt to the changes and always looking for the places where the changes are not as great, not that deep. And then the storm will be eventually over and you will have enough time to count the dead and attend the wounded.

Time... It's all a matter of having enough time.

And I thought it was dead

The other day I was observing that I haven't heard anything from Ruby on Rails for some time and was wondering if all its momentum was gone. But today, when I received the list of developer things coming for the Mac OSX Leopard I saw that the server version will come with Ruby on Rails pre-installed. Interesting move... Maybe I really wasn't paying enough attention to what is going on out there.

This weekend one of my plans is to dig again things about scientific programming in Python and see if I can find tools to quickly and easily analyze data and present results in a graphical manner. There are two projects that I'm working right now that would benefit immensely from that. I remember in the past that it was very complicated to install and run, but I've learned a lot about manually making things work in the last couple of years.

Finally, I'm tired. Today has been an extra-tiring day for some reason I just can't completely explain. So I got home earlier than usual (it was about 8:30pm) and now I'm trying to relax a little. Listen to some music, maybe watch a movie...

The world goes around and what is left is you

It's very interesting how often you have to amaze yourself with how some things around you never change. You can't then convince yourself that actually what doesn't change is you. A person grows older, but it's still the same person with the same crazy ideas about the world.

Yes, that's sometimes good, because that means you get all your life to apply your crazy ideas (and not just short spans of craziness that most probably won't change a thing). But that's sometimes bad when it keeps reminding you that you are something else.

Anyway, I shouldn't try to make much sense in 2 minutes before leaving to work. At least I post.

Snowy and Cold

Those are things that usually don't go very well with Seattle, but that's what the weather has been like the past two days. Yesterday it snowed about 2 inches around where I live. The temperature didn't quite go below freezing, so the snow didn't accumulate for long on the roads, just on grass and the roof of houses.

But today the temperature dropped and it snowed a little more and now all roads and sidewalks are quite icy and dangerous. Theoretically tomorrow is the only other cold day and then we are back to the 40s (about 5°C). It's been an interesting month! The wettest month of recorded history and now the snowiest that I've seen (these last two days it probably snowed more than all my 2 years in Seattle combined).

Besides that life has been going normally. The house is getting close to finished (mezuzot and my desktop are pretty much the only things missing), work is driving me crazy, but it's part of the process, and the rest is... well, not much of a rest, actually.

So, yes, I'm still alive and moving on. Hopefully I'll be less tired one day eventually and will be able to write more interesting things. Like my adventure to add a book to my Amazon shopping cart yesterday and this morning... Or maybe how many interesting technologies are out there waiting to be tried. I've been looking into a couple in particular:

1) GPS-driven driving aids - prices are going down, features are going up... It's so nice not to have to worry about how to get to places! Surely like cellphones you end up not learning your way (well, in the cellphone case you end up never memorizing phone numbers any more), but it's all a matter of removing stress from your life by burning money.

2) Video game platforms... So there are two new players in the area: the PS3 with amazing hardware but terrible SDK; and the Wii with incredible new interaction modes, very simple SDK (at least according to a friend of mine that works in a game company), but graphics that are a little outdated. Who will win? Well, I guess my only hope is that Nintendo will still survive. I don't really worry too much about the winner.

3) Digital cameras, accessories and image editing software. It's quite amazing how much you can do with the current technology. In many cases you get to a point where there isn't much more you can explain to people that you are improving, you just have to wait until people get tired of their cameras and then they will move on. And it does make a difference.

Alright, that's what I had to talk about today. Time to reply to a couple of emails and try to get some sleep.

Democracy with no power == chaos

Yesterday I was talking with someone that lived for a couple of years in Vladivostock, in the far East of Russia. She said that in there the Mafia is very strong (very far away from the central government, so there isn't much power given to the government). So strong that they easily decide who should win elections. Here is an example:

Elections for governor were going on, in the middle of winter. The privately owned water company said that they couldn't supply people with hot water this winter because there wasn't enough rain during the summer months. But cold water had unlimited stock. Did it make any sense to you? No... But it gets better.

So the current governor is trying to get reelected and loses the elections because people were quite distressed because of the lack of cold water. One day after the elections, suddenly hot water starts flowing again. For the general public they simply lost: they voted for someone that wouldn't really solve the water problem, just would be able to be nicer to the hot water owner and decrease the chance that in the future they will cut the hot water again.

And what about the government? They couldn't do anything... It's owned by private companies that offer a "service" to the region. If they claim that they can't supply hot water because they don't have enough water, what can the government do? Probably they even had some specialists analyzing the situation and having scientific claims that showed that couldn't afford providing hot water.

So what if there was no democracy? My claim is that the people would certainly suffer less. No figuring out what "they" want you to vote next. No retaliation for voting in the "wrong" candidate. Things wouldn't improve, but until you are able to ensure power to the government, why have one?

Project flashbacks

Lately I've been working on a quite big project trying to get things to move and allowing 5 people to be synchronized on what they are doing. And this has brought me memories of old times, old projects, where synchronization meant deprecation and substitution. Expanding meant more work.

This was my life during my graduation project (also known as senior design project in some universities, but for my university back in Brazil it was a 3 semester project - so we started not really being seniors). I had a very good team of friends - smart and hard working. However, things didn't work as planned. The team got divided because of some silly professional conflict (maybe it wasn't that silly for the people that were involved in it) and everything went downhill from there.

Anyway, the highlight of the project wasn't it, though. It was the day that one of my project mates was complaining that he had to simplify his voice recognition software so much that the errors were starting to be larger than the signal. The simplification was done because he couldn't fit all the coefficient precision that he wanted in our great 4K smartcard. When I decided to look a little more into it, I found out that he was trying to store the numbers as strings in the smart card and had to keep truncating the string to make it fit!

And this was my first proof why I despised XML and, in certain ways, Java. Now it's all around me... I even catch myself spending time reviewing design proposals and suggesting people to move away from some binary solutions into XML. Round and round the world goes and back we are to old projects.

At least one good thing: I finally was able to post something. I've had this blogger window open for more than a week now!

The end of technology, as we know it

Sorry for not really posting much lately. I have moved to a new house last weekend and I don't have internet until (hopefully) tomorrow.

But this morning, I'm not really sure why I should use computers any more:

- I got to my office computer and it was frozen.
- Then I tried to check my emails and Hotmail just wouldn't allow me to log it (I really don't like Hotmail - if you send me emails through my hotmail account, please switch)
- Tried to log onto my Yahoo account (with the new Beta Mail - amazing interface, if they could just remove some of those changing ads) and got an error message saying I couldn't log in
- Then I did a normal work-related search on Google and got the following results:

"Results 1 - 11 of about 17,400 for prettyprinting jaxb. (0.07 seconds)"

There were 17K results, but only 11 were "unique"??? (and didn't really have the answers for what I was searching)

And it's not even 9 AM yet...

Starting and putting out fires

Yes, finally I'm being literal on my post titles... I'm writing this as I observe my neighbor (but not my neighbor for much longer) try to put out fire on a cardboard box. He put the box outside his apartment on the walkway and was running in and out of his apartment with a cup of water and dumping it on the fire. Then running back in...

It's not wrong to use water to put out fire on paper. There are two things that are wrong with it. First: why is there a box on fire? Second: a cup of water? Can't you just use a pan, or, if you want to bed fancy, a bucket?

Sure, there right now there is no fire any more. He is still going in and out of his apartment to dump water on the walkway where the box was burning, trying to cover what happened.

What would I do? Usually the easiest way that I know to put out fire is not really using water (especially on small fires), but by starving the fire of air. Get another piece of cardboard and just use it to remove the air from the place on fire. It's easy, safe (again, only for small fires) and doesn't really require you to turn your back to the fire to get more water.

So, am I angry? Disappointed? Afraid that one day this neighbor might cause a fire in the whole apartment complex? Not at all... It was just funny! I felt like watching a badly produced comedy. It was missing the soundtrack in the background. :-)

So much life out there

We are living in a world of change. We plan our lives around change. We challenge and fight sameness. Interestingly, this is something quite new in human civilization. Surely the world always changed, but some time ago, we thought it was good if we found a "career" and just followed it. People would be working in the same company for decades and not really consider themselves sad.

We could ask ourselves many questions: what has changed? How has it changed? Is it actually a good thing for the human society in general? But I prefer the simpler question: why has it changed?

Humans are one of the most adaptive races out there. Our very big and expensive brain allows us to plan and execute very complex tasks that protect us from very adverse and sudden conditions. We are not the fastest or strongest. We don't have the longest lifespan. But we are one of the best survivors.

I think that this change is more of a realignment to our basal sense of adaptation. We were built for it, and not really to be inside a house, with a family and an 8-10 job (all normal jobs are 8-10, right?). So suddenly technology advances allowed us to recover this missing drive for adaptation. It is amazing how powerful it can be to our whole body. Think of the experience of starting a new job, or moving to a new house, to buying a new car...

On the other hand, sometimes the stress of "unplanned" (but potentially forecastable) changes is a little too unhealthy. And that's when changes erode our self, that's when it's always just better to go back to your cocoon and hide there for some time.

New layout

So you might be thinking why I've changed my layout... Well, sometimes it's time to do some moving around. Hope you enjoy it a little.

Being political, but tired

Sometimes you just have to accept some things and try to swallow as much anger as possible. There is nothing to do when somebody is just frustrated at you, because of incompetence of the people around them. At times like this you have two options:

1) Just blame it on them and start a war

2) Swallow the blame and try to work things out

Number 1 generates a war that could have repercussions that is difficult to forecast. Especially when you don't quite know the strength of your enemies. However, number 2 keeps everything on your side of the court. You can't sleep, you just let people slap you around and convince themselves that you can be their scapegoat for all their ailments. Soon enough you will continue receiving angry emails with lots of capital letters and you life will just collapse in unfinished business.

Anyway, that's my disappointment of the day. I'm tired, I have to start thinking about moving (yes, I'm moving to Seattle - no, I don't quite live in Seattle right now, more like Bellevue), I have some very busy and important last couple of days at work, and things don't look like they will get any better anytime soon. Sometimes I wished I could just have a weekend.

At times like this, my usual solution is to just alienate myself from the world and listen to some Steve Reich. It's like listening to noise, but mathematically beautiful musical noise.

By the way, talking about music, I've finished a book that I had on my list of "to read" for some time: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, by Dan Levitin

Interesting book, if you survive past the first chapter. Dan needs a better editor that will fix all the wrong and missing information on his introduction to music theory. He should have discussed well-tempered instruments. He should not have mentioned that multiplying the frequency of the pitch by 2, 3, 4, etc. causes us to think it's the same pitch (although an octave up). Instead he should have said that it's the factor of 2 that matter (2, 4, 8, etc).

After this painful chapter, the book gets quite intriguing. Nothing really shocking if you have read another very interesting book about brains: On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee.

These books make me hope that we are getting somewhere closer to understanding the brain. At least I can say I'm a little closer.

A whole lot of things

Lots of things to say and it's already almost 1:30 AM, so I'll try to just do a brain dump and maybe one day I might go into more details:

- Yom Kippur is over. It wasn't a very easy one, because my sinusitis decided to keep it more interesting. But I've survived the VERY LONG service (like last year, it started at 8:25am and ended at 7:40pm with no breaks and very little sitting time). I really like Yom Kippur, not only because of the concept of starting over, but because people take it seriously. You can see people getting into it. I even saw one thing I've heard about but don't remember having seen until last Monday: during the reader's confession, the cantor started crying... Sobbing... And still tried to go through the whole confession. Very interesting.

- I'm trying to decide if I should stay here or move on to a different place that has less carpet. Moving is a big pain, especially when you have a good amount of furniture; very heavy furniture! I'm trying to decide by this weekend, but I'll see if I'll be able to.

- I've finished Book 10 of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, Crossroads of Twilight. Robert Jordan likes to write a lot... It's LONG, but there are some exciting things that happen throughout the book. However, the ending was... grrr... It just hooked you to read the next book (Knife of Dreams - a book I already have, but I'm trying to convince myself to move to something else before)

- Real estate in downtown Bellevue is just crazy. Somebody told me that they were playing "count the cranes" last time they visited this area and they've counted 10! Another source told me that they just don't have more simply because there are none left! And prices are also great! Some townhouses that they are building just across the street from where I live were first advertised as "Starting in the 500s". They took that sign out and now it says: "Starting in the 700s"! They have started this in less than 4 months ago and already added a 40% price hike. Wünderbar.

- Gotta love emails... And new management... And reorgs

- The elections in Brazil were quite interesting. Not that I think that there is a chance that Lula will lose, but at least there is some negative feeling about it all. I just hope that this doesn't cause the same clean division of society that happened during the last elections here in the US. Actually, I've even seen a diagram where they divided the states into who had the majority in one candidate or the other (weirdly the colors were also red and blue)! And this doesn't quite make that much sense for Brazil, because votes are aggregated federally, and not by state.

- If things happen the way I fear they might happen, I fear I can't fear enough.

Ok. I should give up on trying to dump thoughts and go to bed. Long day ahead!

Talk about frustrations

So here are my frustrations for the day (in no particular order):

1) Character encoding, especially in PHP. Let's say that I basically had for some reason I don't quite remember (and hopefully won't bite me in the near future), some piece that did an encode(x,"UTF-8") ... then another piece that did a decode(y,"UTF-8) ... so you would expect that everything will go back to the way it was, right? Of course not! Everything except some characters, like long dashes worked fine. Others simply became "?"!

And character encoding always is painful on text documents, for example. The problem is that you never know what the encoding is and will be. For example, I had a document in UTF-8 and then I pasted some text from word. Suddenly my document had characters in UTF-8 and other characters in ISO-8859-1. A huge mess to fix it (because I also don't know any easy programs that just change the encoding).

In the Javaserver Faces world, the same thing is happening. At work we've tried to start working on some Japanese things on an interface that was supposed to be all UTF-8 and suddenly all our Japanese characters became HTML-escaped (&#xxxx) and would appear all garbled on text boxes! Yes, it just gets worse if you tag XML escaping or HTML escaping to it. There is something really wrong about all this, but I won't really spend my time thinking on it. I have more frustrations for the day.

2) Private communications becoming public. So, first it started with choir things. I've sent a message to a selected set of people about why I was not going to join the choir this year. One of these people replied to the message with a "life advice" type of email and decided that other people might benefit from reading it. However, it also meant that other people suddenly received my "private" email.

Now today it happened again. I've sent a very short and semi-out-of-context email to some people about a product they wanted me to have a look and analyze and suddenly I receive back an email from the Customer Rep from the company that works with the product replying to what I've said about their product.

3) Seattle residents and this weather fear... Some weeks ago, just after I came back from Brazil, the weather wasn't very good. Raining and a little cold. So everybody was in this gloom state saying "oh... Summer is over... We will only see rain from now on". However, last weekend everything changed and we are having really dry sunny days, in the 70s and even it supposed to get to the 80s today and what are people saying? "Oh... This is not going to last... Next week it is going to start raining and the summer will be over... We will only see rain from then on."

I should send an email to somebody like Paul Allen to stop investing on his "Brain Atlas" and invest on a group therapy for everybody here to stop fearing and being so negative about the weather. Weather is Seattle is great! Not perfect, but FAR from anything to be negative about.

Getting deeper

Some things just don't want to die. Most of them are things that I knew that they wouldn't die when I first said "yes" to them.

One of them is the great email system for B'nai B'rith Brasil. So it looks like it still has some issues, but might go finally online for the first time tomorrow. Still using my server to send out emails. It looks like their server is not very happy about being used to send mass quantities of emails. Anyway, what it all meant is that I still have to do PHP programming in my near future.

The next thing that doesn't really die is my wish to sing in a choir. However, I did miss the opportunity this year (meaning until next September) because I didn't act quickly enough to participate on any auditions. Surely the fact that I was in Brazil when most of them were taking place was a part of the reason. The other reason is that my bad experience with my previous choir kind of turned me off a little.

It's not that I didn't like singing there. Not at all! They are a great group of people, with a very detail-oriented conductor (something that I have been known to always look for in a conductor). However, there were two main issues: (1) I felt a little too young in that choir. It was a little hard to relate to people that are in yet another walk of life. (2) The publicity work having to deal with people that had very little time to devote to it having little time myself was just killing my perfectionist side and making me depressed.

So now I have to find a new way to get my mind off work (as if this is possible right now). Maybe I'll finally finish my recipe reader. I just have to do some electronics work rereuting the touch screen to use the laptop battery. My issue right now is that I just don't have the equipment to do electronics work (yes, I'm an electrical engineer, I know...). And I was just postponing spending money.

Ok, it's getting late and I'm really getting tired. It's been a common theme lately. Not a good sign thinking that next Monday is Yom Kippur: the time that I get to the synagogue at 8:30 am and only leave at 7:30 pm to finally go and eat and drink something. This is tiring!

The last day of the year

Today is the last day of the year, and I'm still far behind on the things I had planned to do this year. It's kind of distressing how fast this year went by and how much changed, without really things changing much. Anyway, I'll at least still get around to sending all the "Shana Tovah" messages to people that are expecting to receive them this weekend. So, if you haven't received yours yet, just wait a little longer.

Shana Tovah to everybody! Let 5767 be a good year all of us. A year of change, but maybe this time with things actually changing.

A day of random thoughts

Today was one of those days that was difficult to concentrate on one thing. But instead of just getting confused I guess my brain decided to go wild and just spew crazy ideas everywhere. No, nothing really useful, but some interesting flashbacks. Here are some examples:

1) The food that brings me the most memories (not in quality, though) is fried eggs (sunny side up, if you want details). Why the memories? Well, I did eat it a lot my whole life, it was my father's "dish to cook", and it was a great way to gross out Stacy.

2) The food that brings me the best memories? That's tough, but today I will have to say "chocolate cake with catchup". No, I've never had it... And I'm funnier than Fernando's fingertip, or something like that.

3) This is not really a thought, just a link: Web 2.0 Winners and Losers. It is interesting to see that Friendster is there as a loser simply because they weren't able to scale exponentially like their client base and everybody escaped to MySpace (although that's another loser). However, Orkut had also very big problems with scalability and still survived. Surely it has mostly only those crazy Brazilians that have this tendency of being very accepting of errors, but it was ridiculous how many times I got the message "No donut for you"

I was actually impressed that I've heard of all the sites and accessed most of them before reading the article. Maybe I'm more mainstream than I have thought.

4) The Jewish High Holidays start soon. Soon I'll become that silly thoughtful person that keeps apologizing to people for simple things. Good that most of the High Holidays are during the weekend this year!

Alright. Time to get ready to go to sleep. I finally went to the gym today, do you believe in that? It's probably been about 2 months that I haven't set foot on that place, and before that another month or so! And things were still the same. The people seemed different, though.

Back to Seattle

I know I've been here since last Tuesday afternoon, but today is the first day that I can really say that I'm enjoying being back. I've imported an annoying cold from Brazil (probably the same one that first went through my sisters, then my mother) that even made me get out of work earlier on Thursday. But I feel much better now!

So, what is going on here? Well, not that much, I guess. This trip was actually longer than usual and I did spend some time confused about where I was (probably allied to my sickness). I still have dreams about being in Brazil going to weddings! But it was a great time!

This weekend has been focused on helping Amy move in and cleaning (besides making sure I don't do too much as I'm not yet 100%). I've found out that I've gained about 3 lbs (1.5 kg) on my trip to Brazil, so I have to plan on getting healthier again.

I guess that's it. Time to start thinking about dinner. Oh, today I finally remembered to have a look at GameTap and was shocked by their game selection. There were too many "weird" ones to write here, but I'll give you a short list from memory (yes, I'm talking about my memory, i.e., if I can get 5 I'll be amazed):

- Pitfall (yes the old Atari one)
- Planetfall (probably you've never heard of it, but I've spent MANY days trying to solve it on my 8086 days)
- Ultima I-V (if I'm not mistaken - a classic)
- Shinobi (another game I was addicted to some time ago)
- Golden Axe

Alright, enough about picking my memory. Dinner thinking time.

Splogs, where the money spills

So, I've read the now-popular Wired article:

Spam + Blogs = Trouble

and was shocked by one single number: "Between August and October of 2005, they made at least $71,136.89." Every time people discuss revenue from ads on the web I am taken aback. Maybe it's just that I'm not an ad-clicker, but where does this money come from? Why would you go to a website that only has gibberish and click on the ads on that page? I wouldn't, but it looks like $23+K worth of people do that every month only for these splogs from these BYU guys. Maybe not only on clicks, but also on impressions, but you have to have A LOT of trafic to make money out of ad impressions.

So, where is this money coming from? How can they maintain such a leak of excess money to bogus people? Only Google knows...

Part 2: the dog down the tube

Just to tell one more story, so I've mentioned that on Sunday I went to the farm. On this trip, we took my sister's dog, a very small furry dog. She loves running around in the grass there and barking at the other dogs (much bigger than her, but well restrained). Also she runs away from you in an amazing speed evey time you try to catch her.

Well, my father, about 15 minutes before we had to leave, decided to try to catch her. She ran really fast, turned and banged her head on the side of a water drainage tube. Suddenly she disappeared! I don't know for what reason, but she suddenly decided to enter this tube!

Luckily it was the exit of the water drainage system, so the tube only went up. Also it was quite big, not enough to fit a person, but enough for her not to get stuck there. But I think she got scared and just froze in the middle of this tube, about 10 meters (~30 feet) from the entrance. She just wouldn't leave, even calling her name, offering food, anything. After about 20 minutes of calling her, we've decided to start dumping water on the other side of the tube hoping that the water going down would scare her enough to make her get out.

10 more minutes passed of us throwing water down the tube and she finally left, all dirty and wet! It took us another 20 minutes to clean and dry her enough so that she could enter the car. Result: my parents were very late to an event they were going to attend and had to call and tell people that they weren't going to make it. I was a little late to a dinner with some friends. But the dog is alright.

What a trip! But I took a lot of pictures. Not of the dog in the tube, because I didn't want to scare her even more, but of interesting fruit trees, birds, and other animals. It was fun. I'm labeling the pictures right now and will eventually post a link to them here.

Yes, I am alive - Part 1: the day of the weddings

So, I'm back after some time without writing much. I've been pretty busy here in Brazil. I'm not completely sure I won't be more tired when I get back than I was when I got here, but we'll see... For you to have an idea of how tiring it's been, I'll give you the example of Saturday, the day I had two weddings.

Well, but I can't start it, without mentioning that on Friday evening I got a message from one of my best friends, another best man of the Saturday evening wedding, saying that they were going out on a bachelor party. So there I went... We got to his place at 11pm, he wasn't ready yet... We left at about 11:30 pm and... well, I can't really tell you what we did. What happened that evening will stay between the people that were involved in the evening. The only thing I'll mention is that I arrived back home at about 4 am and then went to bed.

At 8:30 I woke up to get ready for my sister's civil wedding. It was an interesting wedding with about 25 people. I was one of the witnesses (out of 5), so I had to do something besides just staying there (I had to sign my name once). It was a quick event and then we went back to my grandmother's place for lunch. Very good food!

I arrived back home at about 4pm. 6:15 I'd have to leave to go to the other wedding, so there I went to change into the best men's clothes and wait (my younger sister's boyfriend was taking me there and I was first told that we were going to his place so that he would change before going to the wedding, but then my sister decided that she wasn't feeling very well and was not going - both my sisters have a cold right now). At about 6:15pm I went to the wedding.

It was a wonderful wedding, but I won't get into the details. Lots of fun, dancing, talking, enjoying seeing my friends and their families very happy. Also I was able to meet some old friends and to see people from their families that I've met last about 8 years ago. Some were VERY difficult to recognize, especially the younger ones (that are not that young any more).

But the result of it is that we've left at 5am and I got home at about 5:15am. Went to sleep, but at 10am I was up again to go with my parents to the farm. Not a lot of sleep again. I went to sleep at about 3 am and woke up again at 9 the next day (a lot of sleep comparatively). Went to sleep at about 2 am this morning and, for some reason I don't quite understand, I woke up at 6:30.

Oh, well... What else can happen? Wedding tomorrow and then traveling to Rio early afternoon on Thursday? Nah...

Weird NGO

Yes, I'm still here in Brazil, but I won't be talking about my experience here yet. Maybe one day I'll be able to summarize it all, although last post was a hint of what it is about.

Anyway, trying to focus here on what I'm going to talk about, an email that I've received of people asking for money. I receive this all the time because of some lists I subscribe to, but this time I felt that the idea behind the group was quite strange (and worked well for the whole set of events around here):

Simchat Tzion: Wedding for Orphans in Eretz Israel

They get money to sponsor poor orphans to get married! This shows how important people think the wedding ceremony itself is. For most people that I know, if you want to get married and you don't have money for a ceremony, you still get married, but without one. The fees to just get somebody to marry you are quite low. The expensive part it the party itself.

However, in this case, they are aiming for the joy of the ceremony itself, hoping that it alone might help those poor people to get enough energy to improve their lives. Interesting concept. And, no, I'm not donating money to this organization. After seeing the stress of organizing a wedding here, I can't see myself promoting such things to other people. It would be just mean.

Article watch from Brazil: "Brazil: Still the Country of the Future"

I read an interesting article at The Wall Street Journal today (although the article is dated about a week ago) entitled "Brazil: Still the Country of the Future".

It was a very negative article about Brazil, actually. Showing that the current government is clueless and it is going to win the elections again this year anyway. At least this government is not really harmful to the other countries in the world, only to Brazil's future.

There is a lot to talk about this article, but I just wanted to quote the last paragraph:

"Such a myopic attitude toward markets, prices and investment illustrates what Brazilian entrepreneurs have come to recognize more broadly: that socialist Lula together with the Brazilian constitution enshrining the nanny state, spells four more years of mediocrity at best. For young, talented minds eager to create, innovate and profit, such a forecast makes even an enchanting city like this one a good place to be from."

Scary, but maybe true.

You can't execute me, I'm too sick to die

So here I am back, getting myself ready to go to Brazil on Friday. Life has been quite hectic and I have had too little time to devote to blogging. It's tough!

Anyway, I was reading today on The Wall Street Journal (I won't give the link to the article, because it's only open to subscribers) that there are some Brazilian government people trying to fine Google R$7.6 million a month until it gives information about groups of alleged Neo-nazis, pedophiles and other illegal pratices in Brazil.

There are two interesting issues pointed out by this article: the difference in laws in different countries and how can this work in an international environment like the internet; and the weirdness of social networking systems that leave it open about the groups you participate (a issue also raised in the keynote speech by Jon Kleinberg (wikipedia, homepage) at SIGIR'06).

About the first issue, what can you do, as a human rights activist? You are trying to crack down on a group in your coutry, but the data is in a computer in another country that protects the privacy of those people. Technically you really can't do anything except creating something like "the big firewall of China" and not letting people from your country access sites that will hide information that you might want to track and harvest. You are just trying to do the job that your country considered important enough to add to the laws!

This problem is classically equivalent to people storing their money in banks from countries that both don't charge you taxes and keep you privacy, like Switzerland. What have people done about this? Pretty much nothing! They were never able to break those laws, they had to wait and monitor the person until you could find proof by looking at either transactions from banks you can monitor or physical travels and behavior of the alleged criminal. The only problem is that the internet makes crime easier to do and harder to track and this worries lawmakers.

Now onto the second issue: what is the effect of you having your social network open for anybody to see? Be afraid! I know you know that person!

Starting somewhere: SIGIR 2006

I had to start somewhere or else this blog would be idle forever, so I've decided to start with my impressions of SIGIR 2006. The first one that I've been to. And I suddenly realized how much I should have worked with this group during my Ph.D. There is an interesting overlap with what I was working on, both in problems and solutions. I've actually seen a presentation that contained pretty much 50% of all the basis of my research, just varying the method used (and a little bit the expected results from its use). Of course nobody referenced any of my papers, but that's what happens when you are not in the same research area. There is just too much out there and so people tend to isolated themselves to a specific research group.

And this brings me to one of the most interesting things I've noticed when listening to the talks: SIGIR is a very small community. There were about 700 people in the conference. At least about 10% from Microsoft, about 5% from Google, 5% from Yahoo and some other companies. As of actual researchers, I'm guessing there were about 300.

Aside from that, my observation was on the tight relation between these researchers. There was a core of about 20 labs that basically define SIGIR. They seem to have been there for years, citing each other, collaborating, and defining the state-of-the-art datasets and baseline solutions. Compared to the other conferences I've gone to, this had the largest amount of people either pointing to the people they cite in the audience, or people standing up at the end of the talk and giving their personal experience with the dataset and making constructive suggestions about how they tried to tackle some of the issues observed by the presenters.

This is a very good sign in many cases. It creates a very productive environment; and a comparable environment, where you can draw better conclusions about what you have done (I know I've suffered with that a lot on my research). However, it also causes inbreeding. New ideas and types of solutions are harder to come by, mostly because labs are building large infrastructures for a certain type of system and it's hard to part with it (I've listened to a couple of talks that the presenter had a very hard time explaining what they did in 25 minutes, because it's a temporal slice of results from a system that has been in the works for 10+ years). But also because there is an incentive of creating things that are comparable to what other people created.

In summary, it was a very exciting conference. I still have to follow up with some people that I've met there, send them links to some of my papers so that I can feel that what I've done in the past is not going to the waste of the "paper cloud". We'll see what comes out of it.

I wished I had more time to maybe write reviews of specific papers, but I'll have to leave that for some other lifetime, or parallel dimension.

So many things to say, so little time

Lots of things happened in the last few weeks. Two weeks ago I was in San Diego (and surrounding areas) for the weekend+Monday. Met my sister, a friend I haven't seen since high school and some of my girlfriend's friends (people that she talks about all the time). It was interesting, but I won't get into more details right now as I need to leave to go to work soon.

Then there was a rest-of-the-week of crazy work and weekend of shopping looking for presents to take to Brazil.

Then this week I was SIGIR here in Seattle. Lots of things to talk about the conference! And now I'm back to work and on-call until Wednesday next week. Besides the lack of time, I also don't know how I should structure the things I want to talk about. I've always had some issues about writing technical things in the middle of personal things, so in the end nobody ends up reading anything. I might - I said MIGHT - break this blog into 2 different blogs so that I can keep the personal and technical stuff separate. Let's see how much time I'll have.

Anyway, it's time to move on.

What a president

I know this is something that everybody already knows about, but I have to post this here. It was just hilarious and extremely depressing to read it:

Bush curses Hezbollah on live microphone

I think what makes me depressed is certainly related to my deep dislike for curse words. I rarely use them and when I do I actually feed ashamed of it. I think that people have to develop a richer vocabulary that will easily "prevent" you from employing words that are potentially offensive.

Anyway, I'm not sure what I'm doing still awake. I have been planning on going to sleep it's been almost two hours now. And my bed isn't even made yet (weekend bed sheets washing event). Oh, well, let me go and stop reading the news and replying to emails I haven't replied in more than 6 months. Ashamed I am indeed.

Small things that make my day

Sometimes it's strange how small details in a day can give you that extra energy to keep you moving. After a weekend of not-too-much-fun that actually ended well in a strict sense, I get this message from my best friend in Brazil (sorry, I have to quote him in Portuguese):

"Um grande abraço do seu eterno amigo e agora quase casado e muito feliz,"

What made me happy was not the "eterno amigo" part, but the end of it. They have been going through a very chaotic wedding process. Just for you to get an idea of the chaos, the bride was in the US for training for a whole month less than a month ago. Then she is going again to the US at the end of August and back on the 1st of September. On the 2nd they are getting married!

But he is happy, very happy. His email was a dual sign of being really busy, tired, but very excited and happy. The bad thing about being this far away from friends and family is that you lose track of how they are really doing. Even talking with my parents every week for at least an hour, I can't say I know how they are doing. Lots of things could be going on that I just don't know.

I'll be there at the end on August, so I'll have a better clue (hopefully)!

PS: Alright... Alright... The translation of the message: "A big hug of your eternal friend and now almost married and very happy,"

Tell me what you wish for and I'll tell you who you are

The other day I was trying to find a present for a friend and decided to check if he had an Amazon Wish List. Well, I wasn't able to find his wishlist, but I ended up looking through some very strange ones (like people looking for books on meditation, Kabbalah, Tarot, Puzzles, and classic literature). This made me get diverted into looking at random wishlists and trying to puzzle out who the person is. It was quite entertaining!

I could go on forever, so I'll give you only a few examples (I have to go to work soon). Note, they are not complete wish lists, just a sample of what is there (a little biased). I have put in parentesis my crude classification of the subject:

Subject 1 (tv-watching, card-playing, nerd):
- McAfee AntiSpyware 2006 Version 2.0
- Star Wars The New Essential Chronology (Star Wars Library)
- Hands Free Card Holder (Set/2)
- Wolverine MVP-9060 60 GB Portable Storage and Multimedia Viewer
- Elongated Deluxe Soft Toilet Seat
- Idol Chatter: Best of American Idols, Season 3 (karaoke)

Subject 2 (educated, politically engaged):
- Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature
- Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus
- The Ethics of Identity
- Grey's Anatomy - Season One
- Coupling - The Complete Seasons 1-4

Subject 3 (a person of history):
- Slaughterhouse: The Handbook of the Eastern Front
- Corvette Restoration Guide, 1968-1982 (Motorbooks Workshop)
- Seven (New Line Platinum Series)
- Rescued from the Reich: How One of Hitler's Soldiers Saved the Lubavitcher Rebbe
- Auto Mechanics for the Complete Dummy
- Battle of Britain

I'll give one more strange detail about these 3 subjects: all 3 have the same first and last names!

Anyway, time to go.

Grueling Sunday

I've been trying to post for some time now and I just can't finish it. So today I've decided to keep it simple and just talk about my great hike yesterday to Surprise Lake.

It's a great hike, with wonderful mountain views, waterfalls (not big ones, but a lot of small ones), creeks, and a cristal clear lake at the end of it. But it was HARD. We were in a group of 16 people and we took 2h 35min to go up (and when I say "up" I mean UP - we went up almost non-stop for all this time), stayed on the top having lunch and enjoying the view of the lake for a little over an hour and then took 2h 10min to go down. Total time for the trip: 6h 11min.

I was driving one of the cars, and this was another tiring experience. Especially because we were stuck in trafic on highway 2 for 40 minutes. And the trafic was there just because this highway goes through some small towns (with some strange names like Gold Bar and Startup) and everybody has to stop on lights.

When I got home I couldn't almost walk from my car to my apartment. It was exciting! But today I feel better.

Soon I'll have the pictures up and will post a link to them.

A potential great loss for Seattle

Rumors are going around right now that there is a chance that Seattle Symphony's music directory, Gerard Schwartz, might be leaving at the end of his contract (i.e. end of 2007-2008 season):

Discord at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra from the PI.

This is certainly sad. I'm not saying that the quality of the Seattle Symphony will certainly decrease if this turns out to be true, but any transition is always painful for any orchestra. You lose the ability to predict what the conductor will do until you get used to the new one and this always increases the level of stress, decreasing the quality of the music you can produce.

Anyway, I'll try to keep an eye on the development of this story.

The future of Microsoft

Just because there has been a lot of talk lately about how Microsoft will come out of this quicksand that some people say it has fallen, I've decided to write something about it myself. Yes, I know I'm far from being an expert analyst on Microsoft, or on anything at all. But I do read and have opinions of my own.

Will Microsoft buy eBay? It would be an interesting move by Microsoft, with a lot of money involved, but I don't think that MS management really thinks this way. They always have this idea that MS can do something much better with MS technology.

There are few counter-examples that actually prove the point, but I'll cite only one: Hotmail - one of the WORST free email systems out there because it seems that nobody even maintains it any more. You can't search your email, its spam detector is absolutely terrible, it tends to be slow and has some strange restrictions like if you don't pay for it and don't access it for some time, they clean all your messages! What is Microsoft's answer to it? Create their own Windows Live Mail from scratch.

Then you have Windows Live Shopping, still in Beta. The most AJAX-intensive shopping site out there (out of the real ones, and not small stores or front ends to other stores, as far as I know), and one of the ugliest in my opinion. Also, it doesn't accept a lot of browsers. Anyway, not a great site at all, but built with MS technology by MS people.

So, my conclusion: I don't think so... The proud Microsoft will continue working on their own projects and never get anywhere. What do I think they should do? I never liked eBay and I'm not that big of a fan of Microsoft, so go ahead!

Will Microsoft buy Yahoo!? That's actually a new idea that I've read yesterday... Yahoo? That's way a lot of money and a lot of people! Surely it will be great to get almost 40% of the search market in one move, but the management headache that it will be to merge the monster that Yahoo is with Microsoft will be something that I don't think the "great" MS management can do correctly. I would be very scared if they decide to go with this idea. Scared for the quality of the internet.

So what is the future of Microsoft? In my opinion is a much smaller and leaner company. Break it apart (not necessarily in completely independent companies on the outside, but certainly on the inside), restructure all its management for this new reality and focus on core technologies like its operating system, database, email system, office suite; and open it so that people can use your system in the backend and not try to create a competing system. It might dilute the Microsoft brand recognition, but it will keep it in the market and not as this hated example of who you should beat.

A concert report

In a day a fighting fires (quite literally, but without anybody or anything getting charred), I at least had a very pleasant experience that I wanted to convey here: a Seattle Symphony concert.

In the program there were two pieces: Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor, "Unfinished"; and Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 7 in E minor.

Schubert: a wonderful "short" symphony (short because it has only 2 movements), full of very great things, and this whole feeling that you are missing something. Brilliantly executed by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. A very energetic, precise and yet emotional interpretation.

But nothing compared to Mahler's 7th... Sure right now I'm being biased because I do prefer late Romantic period to Schubert's early Romanticism, but it was such a fenomenal (for my poor ears) interpretation that I'm still a little stunned. If you haven't heard Mahler's 7th, and I wouldn't blame you, as it seems to be something that is not that popular, you are in for an interesting surprise.

A very odd sounding 5-movement symphony, with strange instruments (for a symphony), like a guitar, a mandolin, a tenor horn and lots of different percussion varieties. A huge orchestration with 2 harps, 4 horns, 5 clarinets (1 bass and one Eb clarinet), 4 flutes, typical for Mahler. Quick variations between slow moving meditations and sudden quick and loud interludes. Or would it be quick and loud parts with sudden slow moving meditations?

If you ever come to Seattle, make sure to enjoy a Seattle Symphony concert. It will be worth it!

One interesting thing that happened in the concert is that when coming back from the intermission, there were a couple of people that were late arriving to their seats and Mr. Schwarz waited patiently on stage until all of them arrived to their seats to start the concert.

Another unexpected event was when the first violin simply lost one of his strings in the first movement of Mahler. We had a minute or so break to the second movement while he added a new string and set it all up.

Anyway, it was very exciting. When I came back home I was tired but I still had a lot of not-so-exciting things to do, but we have to pay the bills somehow. Pay for all the "yes"s that I've said in my life. But I did buy my tickets to go to San Diego and meet my sister. I just now need to book the hotel and a car rental.

A wedding later

Sunday's wedding was quite pleasant. A small event with about 45 people where two friends got married (oh, yes, people do get married in weddings). Now they are on their way to Hawaii for their 8 days of relaxing.

Sunday was also father's day here in the US. Not in Brazil, though, so I'm not worried about it. The strange thing that I've seen about father's day was on Seattle Times last Wednesday was this article. A Brazilian talking about doing food for father's day in memory of her father. So strange that it was done by a person from one of the few countries in the world that doesn't celebrate father's day on that weekend.

But this is not what I wanted to discuss here today. I wanted to talk about so many things that I ended up not really finishing this post. I've started it on Sunday and suddenly it's Thursday already! Where did the week go?

What is new? I bought a new computer (at least the parts to build a new computer) and it should arrive early next week. Now I should be able to play games on the computer again, an exciting thought!

Also I finished one more step on a project for my father. I'm actually getting a little bit more excited about this project, a little bit more accepting of PHP as a web development language. Maybe it was because I had less errors with no error message at all and that I had to remove line by line to figure out what was killing the PHP process. A lot of fun as you can see!

Finally, I've been tired. Trying not to snap on people as I tend to do when I'm tired, and also trying not to think that everybody is wrong. Most of the cases, I'm the one who is wrong! :)

Alright, time to get to work. I just wanted to finally finish this post.

Another long winter

And I'm back to write something and prove that I'm still alive... Somehow, at least.

I've been busy and tired lately. So tired that sometimes I even start fights with people without really realizing it. But everything has calmed down a little this weekend.

The problem of taking this long to post anything is that I have some intereting things to talk about, but those are going to take a lot of time, so I'll have to keep the post to the secondary subjects.

1) The gay parade in Sao Paulo just broke a record of the largest parade in the world with about 2.2 million people. But what makes this news interesting is not that, it is that they are sad because it didn't break the record set by another parade last thrusday: the March for Jesus that also happened in Sao Paulo in the same area. [source - in Portuguese]

2) I've been reading "The Wheel of Time" series, by Robert Jordan. It's a very famous series that I have always kind of ignored. I have never been a big fan of fantasy stories, to tell you the truth. But actually I'm happy with this series. Quite interesting setup of events and complications within complications. I'm just starting book 7 right now, A Crown of Swords. Some people claim that this is the beginning of the REALLY SLOW part of the series. I'll see...

One weird thing about it is that I have talked with my former roommate today and he is actually reading the same series! And is approximately at the same place I am right now! Quite a coincidence.

3) It's weird to read in the bottle of a mouthwash: "Do not use if cap seal is broken". How are you supposed to use it if you don't break the seal?

I guess that's the time I had. I'll maybe try to write some more in the next few days. Tomorrow I have a wedding to go. A wedding that will make me miss half of the Brazil World Cup game. I'm not a big fan of world cup as some of you might know, but it was the only weekend game until potentially the final and I wanted to organize a soccer watching party. Too bad...

Still no news

I know, I'm still not writing anything useful here. But I just don't have much to say. Life has been quite hectic and stressful. A lot of things not happening the way I wanted them to happen. Surely a couple of the things are better because of that, but it hurts my unselfish self.

Unfortunately I'm not here to talk about this, but to post yet another interesting article that I've read today:

Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won't Like About Windows Vista

Quite a good article trying to put in perspective what still isn't there on the Windows front. It's interesting how misguided Microsoft has been in the past years, lost in its goal of trying to build something that is just good for everybody. It's a little of the pattern that we in software engineering call "the curse of the do-it-all frameworks" - they might be more advanced than most overall, but what matters is what you want it to do. And on this area, they just can't win.

Make two classic comparisons: Mac OS X and Linux. The first one is aimed at user interface and stability and excels at that. It is painful, though, if you want to customize your system. A lot of the configurations are quite hidden, or simply not there at all! For example, I wanted to set my mouse scroller button to fan out the windows for selection (F9 in the keyboard), but because I don't have a certain brand of the mouse, I just don't get the option to do so.

Then comes Linux, the complete opposite. Linux (pretty much any of the hundreds of distributions) allows you to do whatever you want. You can set up initialization scripts, change colors, create new skins, even recompile the kernel if you want it to work with your new FireUSB port (no, there is no such thing)! But on the realm of ease of use, it's decades behind. User interface is clunky, options are non-intuitive and spread around the system, installing software can be a multi-day procedure if the software was not packaged specificly for your distribution, and so on.

So why Windows? The simple answer is: market share. Windows dominates the market share and with it it dominates the software and hardware development. Find me a product that does not work on Windows (alright, take away the ones made by Apple or open source things) and I'll show you things that won't really get anywhere.

What should you choose then? If your goal is to just use a computer for web and occasional document writing, I'd go for a Mac without any question (except money). If your goal is software development for yourself, Linux is your best bet. You have no idea the improved efficiency you get from not being tied to Visual Studio. Oh, but I did mention that it's good for "development for yourself", meaning that if you have to write things for .NET, well, you are out of luck there.

Finally, if your goal is to play games, buy new gadgets to connect to your computer, or use software from medium to small size companies, you can't escape Windows.

What about me? Well, I have two "working" computers at home: a PowerBook and a Linux box. Sometimes I do feel like I need a Windows box to invest on some "entertainment" but I just never found the time for it so why bother.

Alright, wrote too much already. Back to work here! Too many things to do, very short night ahead.

There are some ridiculous things out there

And one of them is this:

Apple's new store in New York City

It certainly looks cool! And it's 24 hours! But why?

Brazil with no Orkut

I don't know what would happen if this actually ends up doing anything with the Brazilian presence on Orkut:

Google in Brazil May Face Criminal Probe Over Orkut

It is quite scary. However, it's not that they can really shut down Orkut, they can only shut down Google's Orkut office in Brazil. And this won't really affect anything, only that maybe Google might decide that it's not worth the investment any more.

iPods and audiophiles

I found this very interesting article in Wired today:

Audiophiles Become IPodiophiles

Quite interesting what they are doing with the poor iPod...

Yes, I'll write something more interesting sometime soon.

Was bleibt? Es bleibt nur die Muttersprache

This is one of the most interesting classic articles that I've read in the last few years. It was actually an interview with the great Hannah Arendt (Wikipedia The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Günter Gaus. If you want to read it in German you can at Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg. For the faint of heart, you can find the tranlation to Engish in many books, such as the one I'm reading Essays in Understanding. Just for you to have an idea what you might be missing, the title in English is "What remains? The language remains". Not quite the same thing...

Anyway, it's a great discussion. It starts a little cold with many misses from the interviewer trying to pry about the interviewee's past and the Jewish persecution before WWII, when she left Germany. This part, although it is a little weak on details, gives an interesting perpective on what it was to be a thinker in the time on the assention of the Nazi party in Germany. And the shock of finding out much later about Auschwitz.

What triggered my interest in this article is the core captured in the title (something that I don't think is even the main subject of the whole talk, if there is one): what always will stay with you wherever you go is your mother tongue. Your brain was tought to think the way your mother tongue works, so you will never quite express yourself very well in any other language.

This is just too true. Not that my expressivity right now in Portuguese is very good. It's interesting how quickly you lose the fluency of a language if you don't speak it more than about once a week, but I still end up resorting to Portuguese expressions when I want to say a more complex idea.

This lead me to a more interesting line of thought (I had reading thought-provoking things): the concept of multiple overlapping sub-ontologies of the world. There is no unique way to represent things, only a unique local way. By getting away from the restriction of global logic rules, you will potentially be a little closer to what reality really is.

Not a new concept, I know... I am fully aware that the implementation of my overlapping sub-ontology world would be both very hard to scale to a reasonable size to see anything interesting and non-elegant. People are looking for things they can relate to. But if you are only one person, you are seeing the world from your sub-ontology. A lot of things can be represented, but an even larger amount just can't. And this doesn't make them less or more important.

Anyway, that's pretty much as far as I went with my thoughts. Actually I did go a little farther in writing down a schema for implementing this, but while I don't have real, exept when I riding the bus, to work on it, I'll stop this explanation here.

It's time for me to go to bed now. My eyes are closing (or have been closing for the last 45 minutes).

When posting does not happen

It's something like the 4th time that I'm trying to post since last time I actually finished it. It's either that I forget about it and close the browser, or the browser decides to crash and I can't finish it. Quite astounding!

Anyway, I'm back after a long time to say that I'm alive. Time is flying, I'm close to getting older, and I wished I could say that a lot has changed. Unfortunately life has been quite the same, only more hectic in the last weeks.

Last weekend I had a choir concert and before that I was fighting with some people in choir to get things done. I didn't have much time to devote to getting all the things for the concert done, and the people that were helping me didn't really make matters any easier. Let's say that until the last day I didn't know what was going to happen with the program for the concert.

But in the end I did find some people that were willing to help, including Amy, and everything worked out fine. It was a nice concert, sad that I was in the beginning on my cold, that still hasn't gone (most probably a side effect of all the stress to get the things for the concert done).

This cold has been quite interesting if you ask me. It started with a terrible stiff neck. This started on Saturday afternoon and is still around, but much better. On Tuesday the dry and sore throat started. On Wednesday it was the runny nose and last night the cough.

Anyway, that's not part of the interesting things I want to talk about. I'll finish this post here so that I would have at least posted something and leave the more complex posts for later. There is a good change I won't finish them tonight.

Celebrating Brazil's self sufficiency in oil

In this day I celebrate a great feat that has deeper meanings than what the title mentioned. Yes, right now with the barrel of oil skyrocketing, it is important to say that you have reached a point where you don't really care about international prices. But what else does it mean?

I am no economist or even living in Brazil to present an in-depth analysis of this. But I can certainly make some observations: Brazil is about number 12 in oil consumption [source] and number 9 in GDP [source]. Quite close, but as it happens with all this distributions, the power law tends to hide the importance of it. Take Russia as an extreme exemple: the GDP is pretty much the same ($1.5 trillion with purchasing power parity), while the oil consumption is 50% higher!

The important thing to take away from this is where your energy comes from. The whole ethanol push that Brazil has undergone might not have been as important as some people have claimed, but it was surely a good part of it.

Anyway, I'll stop here as most probably I've already gone far away from my domain of knowledge and will end up just embarrassing myself. With oil prices still going up and strong, it is an important thing to know... Or maybe you should just ignore it all and start walking.

And streams of time flow

Sometimes it is hard not to look back and realize the time that has gone by and wonder if you've used it well. This happens in all dimensions: personally, professionally, globally. You look at the things you have done, the things that define what you are right now and just wonder: have I traveled the right way? Have I traveled at all?

It has been tough to get a closure on this. Sometimes it feels like I'm not really doing anything; that I'm fooling myself and letting time just flow by. On other cases, I feel like it is just taking me downstream to a large clearing, I just have to pass through a few turns and everything will be easily visible.

It's interesting how it is easy to lose readers with only a couple of paragraphs. So for the people that are still reading, people that think that can extract some of the hidden meaning behind what is written here, I'll stop. There is no benefit in dwelling on things that are and just dreaming of what might one day be. Today I'm a little depressed, but the reason is not really something I can write down here. It's certainly temporary, but not isolated. It seeps into the future as well as illumine the past.

Alright. Writing too much, time to change topic. Time to go techie.

And the experiment began

Remember some time ago I mentioned Kevin Kelly's interview where he mentioned that in the future scientific articles will be done "wiki style"? Well, it seems like it had already started:

QEDen - a collaborative site to solve the Millenium Problems that are worth 1 million dollars each. It would be quite a feat if it works and I'll bow my head to Mr. KK for his vision.

Even if I haven't been blogging much lately, I have to blog this:

The Time Is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Ingenious observation! I think I'll stay up just to enjoy the moment! Of course that my headache might change the plans, but we'll see.

Besides this strange fact, not much to talk about. Daylight savings time is here and everything is so bright until so late... It's weird! And it will only get worse. At the height of summer here, the sunset is at about 10 pm.

I've been busy, trying to reorganize my life here and put some things behind me, but I haven't been able to complete the whole operation yet. There are some things that I just can't find energy to finish, like my father's project. I start working on it and when I see, I'm reading about JDM (Java Data Mining), Barnes & Noble's rejection of Sony's eBook reader (something that it looks like Amazon and Borders are hoping that will get some more traction on the books business), reading how people can waste time and not really realize it (not really reading it, just realizing it).

Anyway, I've been tired and a little stressed. This last weekend was just something to increase in my level of stress instead of relaxing. On Saturday I spent a lot of time digging out ivy at Golden Gardens Park. Then the rest of the day I did laundry and tried to relax a little. It was quite tiring! Then on Sunday I had two choir "pre-concerts". We went to a library and then a bookstore to advertise about the choir and our upcoming concert. I thought it was quite a waste of time. Surely there were people there, but I don't think there were enought people to really make a difference.

The choir I used to sing with in Brazil had a lot of those events. Singing in short events just to see if people would care enough about the choir. And it never really worked. In many times it seemed like we were not really welcome there. The conductor's theory that it also helped for us to get used to presenting had some merit. But after some time it made no difference at all. The current choir I'm singing, people have years of singing experience. I don't think they need to worry about "how to present". But, hey, who am I to say anything, anyway?

Alright. Time to move onto something else. Maybe I'll get some work done finally...