Posts in May dAmerica/Chicago 2007

Bandwidth thieves
Friday, 25-May-2007

If you can read this, your browser cannot render “Scalable Vector Graphics”… get FIREFOX or OPERA
Some people love using Google Images for finding images to use in their blogs. And they use the absolute URL, which means: they show the image in their sites, but they use YOUR bandwidth. In the last few weeks I’ve […]

Trying to discover a tune’s name
Friday, 25-May-2007

Sometimes a melody starts to sing inside your head, and you have no idea where it is from. Maybe from a TV series, maybe from a stupid summer song… How can you find out the name of that tune? Ta-ra-ta-ti-taaa-taaa, ta-ra-ta-ti-taaaaa…
This week at the office everybody’ve been whistling a melody without knowing where it was […]

Anisette with lemon!
Thursday, 24-May-2007

Here comes the summer!
And the best way to survive it is by drinking fresh anisette with lemon.
The recipe:
- The juice of 1 lemon (if it’s home cultivated, the better)
- 2 spoons of sugar
- 1 drop of anisette
- 2 ice cubes
- and water
Mr. Summer, please come in!

On keyboard layouts
Tuesday, 22-May-2007

Somebody at the office played a joke on me. This morning I found my keyboard with 2 exchanged keys: the “Y” and the “I”. It was interesting however. I tried to work without putting them back to their original positions, and the result was quite surprising: if I typed without looking at the keyboard, I […]

Experience
Sunday, 20-May-2007

“Good judgement comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgement.”
A couple of years ago I was working on an (NLP aided) Information Retrieval system, for my PhD. It was somehow a prototype, with lots of wild modules merged. Now if I try to look back, I can see lots of mistakes in that system.
Yesterday I met […]

Internet Spanish day
Thursday, 17-May-2007

Today is the Internet day in Spain (but I’m not sure if it’s also in other countries). The Government has organized some events in Madrid (yes, in the Real World™), showing no idea of what Internet is. A Spanish newspaper was asking “Can you live without internet (in Spanish)?”… interesting question.
Internet for me is an […]

Horizontal or vertical monitors?
Wednesday, 16-May-2007

Recently at the office we have had some new incorporations, and we had to buy new equipments. It was a surprise to see that our hardware’s manager brought one 16:9 screen… and I suggested that a 4:3 could be better for programming issues. Then we started to argue the differences, and basically I commented that […]

Useless napkins, but widely used
Monday, 14-May-2007

Today I was having lunch with a coworker in a Japanese restaurant and he was becoming impatient because the waiter forgot to bring us some napkins. He really needed having a napkin near his hands. The funny detail is that the cutlery (and also the chopsticks) were invented to keep the hands clean, avoiding the […]

Elastic shapes with SVG improved
Monday, 7-May-2007

I have been testing some formulas about elasticity and friction, and finally I updated my shape elasticity simulation with these stuff, creating a nice new version.
Have fun!

Elasticity with SVG and Javascript
Wednesday, 2-May-2007

Planes. An interesting place to program computers. I find the idle hours, that you spend in the airport and the plane, the perfect time to research on new ideas.
During my last flight (a trip to Germany) I decided to play with some SVG and Javascript, for simulating “elasticity” (inspired by the plane’s wings). SVG could […]