[Fri Feb 27 17:00:12 CET 2009]

Now, this is somehow interesting. Apparently, Steve Ballmer sees Linux as a bigger competitor than Apple. The slide is taken from a recent speech given by Microsoft's CEO where he briefly discussed which companies Microsoft sees as its competitors. He correctly described, I think, Windows pirated software as the main competitor and, immediately after that, to everybody's surprise, he included Linux instead of Apple.

{link to this story}

[Fri Feb 27 11:48:34 CET 2009]

A friend pointed out to me an interesting discussion thread from Slashdot about the Intel compilers creating slower AMD binaries. The person who started the thread explains that he noticed the problem with the Intel C++ compiler back in January of 2004:

On any non-Intel processors, it specifically included an alternate code patch for memcpy that actually used rep movsb to copy one byte at a time, instead of (for example) rep movsd to copy a doubleword at a time (or MMX instructions to copy quadwords). This was probably the most brain-dead memcpy I'd ever seen, and was around 4X slower than even a typical naive assembly memcpy.

Needless to say, this undocumented trick would severely affect AMD processors or, to put it a different way, Intel's main competitor. How curious!

Actually, we shouldn't say that the behavior is undocumented but rather poorly documented. In other words, Intel tried to sell it as a feature included in their compilers that would speed up the code only on their own processors when, in reality, there was no reason whatsoever that would prevent the same code from running on the competitor's processors if it weren't because Intel engineers hardcoded it that way. This other entry from the same discussion thread is quite informative too in this respect. {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 21 11:27:53 CET 2009]

My oldest son, Nicolás, has become quite interested in Rubik's Cube lately. We had one that I used when I was a child laying around the house, he picked it up and is somehow intrigued by its possibilities. I explained to him a few things about the Math behind it and also told him how, back in my days, I used to walk around the school during recess trying the different solutions with a few fellow schoolmates. It occurred to me that, of course, the best way to look for the solutions to the puzzle these days is the Internet. There is no need to rely on the books we used back then. So, I quickly performed a search and came across a section of the Wikipedia document dedicated to Rubik's Cube where they discuss the different solutions to the riddle as well as a document published on the wikiHow website. Of course, there are plenty of YouTube videos on the topic too. The first one that I found on the list (and that looks pretty decent) is the series of tutorials put together by one RobH0629. Plenty of resources at your fingertips. {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 21 11:13:32 CET 2009]

The Spanish daily El Mundo publishes a news piece today stating that 99.9% of the homes in Singapore are connected to the Internet using high bandwidth (in Spanish), which places the country right at the top of the international rankings in this field. The authorities warn that this doesn't necessarily mean that every single home actually is connected, since there are quite a few cases where the same home pays for several connections. Still, it does indicate a very high degree of penetration of the new technologies in this dynamic economy. Singapore is a city-state in the Malay Peninsula and one of the most advanced economies in South-East Asia. How did they achieve this? Basically with very low prices. The ISPs offer high-bandwidth connections at a low price and, at times, they even give away desktop or laptop computers in exchange for signing up with them. Additionally, the Government has invested large amounts of money promoting the new technologies too. Their Wireless@SG program, for instance, is a clear example of this: it provides wireless access to the Internet from any point in the city-state for free. Will it pay off? I suppose it's a gamble, of course, but in a world that's progressively more and more interconnected and where access to information is key, my guess is that it will provide Singapore with a significant competitive advantage. {link to this story}

[Fri Feb 20 14:20:57 CET 2009]

Here's a couple of interesting pieces of software. First of all, Bryan Richards tells us in Linux Magazine about the latest code editor in the cloud (he is referring to Mozilla Labs' Bespin). It's a tool that provides a web-based framework for code editing. For the time being, it only supports HTML, CSS and JavaScript but chances are that people will quickly extend it to include support for other programming languages. Here is an introductory video:

I find the performance (check the video) quite impressive for a web-based product. Any user of Google Docs will know what I'm talking about. I must say the Mozilla Labs folks are coming up with some pretty interesting tools lately. Creative, innovative stuff that promise to truly change the way we use the Web.

Also, from The Geek Stuff we have an interesting piece explaining how to install, configure and use a bash-support plugin for vim which allows you to automate some of the code editing when you write shell scripts in bash. {link to this story}

[Fri Feb 20 14:07:42 CET 2009]

A nice thing about running Linux is that it allows for a higher degree of flexibility. You don't have to stick to whatever the hardware or software vendor bundled with the system you bought. So, if the version of Ubuntu or Fedora that you are running includes an old version of Firefox and you'd rather run the latest one, you can download it and install it from their FTP servers. As a matter of fact, you can even download the source code and compile it to your own needs with whichever specific customizations you like. That's nice, sure, but it sometimes causes problems too. Or, to put it a different way, in computing, with the flexibility and power, there also comes a certain degree of responsibility. So, a friend told me earlier of a problem he ran into when trying to run the latest version of Firefox on an older Linux distribution. The program refuses to run and displays the following error:

    free(): invalid pointer 0x8265a30!
  

The solution? It can be found here. It's triggered by an underlying issue with the installed version of the GTK+ toolkit. {link to this story}

[Thu Feb 19 08:58:31 CET 2009]

Just came across an interesting article about a load balancing app for Linux that was published a few years ago. It's definitely something to look into if you are running your shop on really old hardware, which tends to happen in the NGO sector.

And here is another article explaining how to set up and use network block devices in Linux. What do they provide that something like NFS cannot offer, you may ask? As far as I can see, the key difference should already be clear by taking a careful look at the acronym of these products: while NFS provides remote access to a filesystem, NBD gives you access to a block device. This means that you can also mount swap and raw devices. {link to this story}

[Wed Feb 18 16:39:41 CET 2009]

The Spanish magazine Muy Interesante has this short piece about a photographic exhibit by French artist Christophe Beauregard titled Technomades where electronic devices have been removed from pictures that show us their influence on our gestures. I thought it was quite interesting, especially when one realizes that these gestures were virtually non-existent until pretty recently. Here is an example:

{link to this story}

[Wed Feb 18 14:00:18 CET 2009]

E17 is shaping up to be a very nice window manager indeed. Every now and then I give it a try on my Ubuntu machine. Today I came across this review of Elive E17 Compiz published by Softpedia that shows a few amazing screenshots of this innotaive window manager. Check it out. Here is one of the screenshots.

{link to this story}

[Wed Feb 18 13:50:01 CET 2009]

I really love the way certain newspapers are starting to come up with very nice visualizations to illustrate complex pieces of news, such as information about budgets and the like. Take, for example, this visualization of the stimulus package published by The Washington Post.

Just try to imagine what it'd be like to summarize all that information in plain text. {link to this story}

[Wed Feb 18 13:41:46 CET 2009]

Just came across a pretty good Firefox extension: Wired-marker. It's a virtual highlighter that can be used to mark web pages with different colors and also annotate the same block of texts. If anything, the only problem I have with it is that I don't seem to be able to annotate pages in such a manner that they can be spotted easily (i.e., in such a way that the annotation shows up next to the text itself). I know there are tools out there that will help me with this. I will search around and report back. In the meantime, I will spend some time checking out the Wired-marker tutorial. {link to this story}

[Tue Feb 17 10:36:25 CET 2009]

Somebody posted a story on Slashdot about a drug that deletes fearful memories. The original story was published by MIT Technology Review here, and it makes for an interesting read:

A common blood-pressure drug can selectively dampen fearful memories, according to research published today in Nature Neuroscience.

The findings add support for a new approach to treating anxiety disorders: chemically blocking the emotional component of a memory as it is being recalled. In healthy volunteers, the drug was more effective than exposure therapy, one of the most common treatments for anxiety disorders, which involves repeatedly exposing patients to what they fear.

(...)

In recent years, scientists have discovered that the simple act of remembering a past experience requires that the memory be consolidated once again. And both animal research and some human studies have shown that during reconsolidation, long-term memories —once thought to be fairly stable— can be more easily meddled with.

(...)

The new findings build on decades of animal research that shows that the brain stores different types of memories in different areas. A brain region called the amygdala, often dubbed the brain's fear center, plays a central role in the storage of emotional memories. Research in animals suggests that propranolol, which blocks a certain molecule in the amygdala, interferes with reconsolidation by preventing the synthesis of proteins needed to store the memory.

{link to this story}

[Mon Feb 16 13:34:21 CET 2009]

I read in Computer World that Apple has argued in comments filed with the US Copyright Office that hacking an iPhone is against the law. Basically, the argue that jailbreaking (i.e., breaking out of the system installed on the iPhone by Apple to allow the installation of third-party applications not sold via Apple's own App Store amounts to a copyright infringement because they imply the "unauthorized modification to the copyrighted bootloader and OS". To be honest, I'm not so sure I share their view. One figures that, once the device has been purchased, it belongs to its rightful owner. Sure, I shouldn't expect to be able to tinker with the iPhone and then go up to Apple seeking support if something goes wrong. However, the way I see it, it still is my device. It certainly is not something I rented from Apple. Yes, I know. I'm familiar with the way software ownership has traditionally been interpreted in a court of law. Yet, unless we change this we're bound to run into more and more problems like this in the future. We're starting to have software all over the place: in cars, airplanes, espresso machines, cell phones... Can we truly go on living like this, applying the same rules that were created to deal with a world where software use was truly limited to a desktop computer that wasn't even connected to other systems? Things have changed too much in the last decade and a half. {link to this story}

[Fri Feb 13 15:00:30 CET 2009]

Now, this is an interesting post on Slashdot about the real risks of Obama's Blackberry:

When the mainstream media first announced Barack Obama's "victory" in keeping his Blackberry, the focus was on the security of the device, and keeping the US president's e-mail communications private from spies and hackers. The news coverage and analysis by armchair security experts thus far has failed to focus on the real threat: attacks against President Obama's location privacy, and the potential physical security risks that come with someone knowing the president's real-time physical location.

That's an interesting take. {link to this story}

[Wed Feb 11 13:16:17 CET 2009]

I read on Wired's website that the cognitive computing project at IBM's Almaden Research Center is trying to reverse-engineer the mind in what amount so to a very ambitious project indeed:

In what could be one of the most ambitious computing projects ever, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists are coming together in a bid to create an entirely new computing architecture that can simulate the brain's abilities for perception, interaction and cognition. All that, while being small enough to fit into a lunch box and consuming extremely small amounts of power.

(...)

The researcher's goal is first to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. Then they plan to use nano-materials to create logic gates and transistor-based equivalents of neurons and synapses, in order to build a hardware-based, brain-like system. It's the first attempt of its kind.

(...)

Computing today is based on the von Neumann architecture, a design whose building blocks —the control unit, the arithmetic logic unit and the memory— is the stuff of Computing 101. But that architecture presents two fundamental problems: The connection between the memory and the processor can get overloaded, limiting the speed of the computer to the pace at which it can transfer data between the two. And it requires specific programs written to perform specific tasks.

In contrast, the brain distributes memory and processing functions throughout the system, learning through situations and solving problems it has never encountered before, using a complex combination of reasoning, synthesis and creativity.

(...)

The brain is composed of billions of interlinked neurons, or nerve cells that transmit signals. Each neuron receives input from 8,000 other neurons and sends an output to another 8,000. If the input is enough to agitate the neuron, it fires, transmitting a signal through its axon in the direction of another neuron. The junction between two neurons is called a synapse, and that's where signals move from one neuron to another.

Impossible? Well, perhaps, but there's little doubt in my mind that facing this challenge we can learn lots about the way our brain functions and, along the way, we will also find out ways to improve our current computer technology. Besides, according to the same piece it has already been accomplished at a smaller scale:

The structure of the cerebral cortex is the same in all mammals. So researchers started with a real-time simulation of a small brain, about the size of a rat's, in which they put together simulated neurons connected through a digital network. It took 8 terabytes of memory on a 32,768-processor Blue Gene/L supercomputer to make it happen.

The simulation doesn't replicate the rat brain itself, but rather imitates just the cortex. Despite being incomplete, the simulation is enough to offer insights into the brain's high-level computational principles...

The human cortex has about 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses, making it roughly 400 times larger than the rat scale model. A supercomputer capable of running a software simulation of the human brain doesn't exist yet. Researchers would require at least a machine with a computational capacity of 36.8 petaflops and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes —a scale that supercomputer technology isn't expected to hit for a least three years.

A fascinating read, especially taking into account that these days I'm going through John von Neumann's The Computer and the Brain. {link to this story}

[Wed Feb 11 12:52:36 CET 2009]

Interesting piece published by Fast Company on Pixar's approach to hiring:

Mostly, it's about hiring ultra-nerds with good communication skills. To wit: You want people who have become exceptional at a tiny discipline, no matter how obscure or dorky, since it's that compulsion to truly master something that predicts how they'll handle a new task. (Wannabe Pixar employees: Don't bury your unicycle or juggling skills on your resume). Another idea is looking for people who have failed and overcome —as Nelson puts it, "The core skill of innovators is error recovery not failure avoidance," which is key if you're asking someone to solve a never-before-solved problem. But perhaps the squishiest trait is the ability to make others around you better, through communication and camaraderie.

It's the future of hiring in our global knowledge economy, I think. {link to this story}

[Mon Feb 9 15:54:43 CET 2009]

OK, here's an update on the vim issue I wrote about below. As it turned out, Hardy Heron doesn't install vim by default, but rather vim-tiny, which is quite smaller and doesn't have all the features of its older sibling. So, all it takes to solve the problem is to run the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get remove vim-tiny; sudo apt-get install vim

{link to this story}

[Mon Feb 9 11:09:29 CET 2009]

I tend to postpone upgrades to the latest version of Ubuntu (my Linux distribution of choice) almost indefinitely. Not only that but, as a matter of fact, I also stick to their LTS (Long-Term Support) release as a way to make sure that I don't have to upgrade so often. Why do this? Well, basically because I normally have too many customizations in my work environment that tend to break or slightly change behavior whenever a new version of the distribution is installed... and yes, I'm quite picky when it comes to my work environment. I spend all day in front of the computer, so I think I'm entitled to being this picky.

In any case, although I installed Hardy Heron on my latop sometime ago, it wasn't until this past weekend that I truly spent a while testing all my applications, configuring things, etc. So, what did I find? First of all, Hardy Heron broke the Cisco VPN client, which in my case is absolutely vital to connect to the company network. Yes, there are documents out there explaining how to solve the problem (people's favorites appear to be this and this). However, after following every single step suggested in those documents, it still didn't work. So, what was my problem? Let me be clear: I have no idea what the ultimate cause of the problem was, but I do know that simply running the ifdown on the wireless interface fixed the problem and, since I usually work from my office desk and use a fixed ethernet connection, that is no problem for me. It's working, which is all that matters to me for the time being. I suppose I will find the time one of these days to look further into it and figure out how to get it to work with the wireless connectiont too. It may just be a routing issue and perhaps after enabling the wireless connection and disabling the ethernet one everything will work just fine. I haven't tried that yet. One way or another, the fact remains that the VPN client worked just fine over wireless with the previous Ubuntu release.

Now, onto a second problem. I use two separate Firefox profiles under the same user account in Linux, and the version of the browser installed by Hardy Heron (Firefox 3.0.5) doesn't allow me to do so easily. In the previous release, I just used the -P flag to point to a particular user profile, but that doesn't work on Hardy Heron anymore. So, what do you do? Once again, I found a couple of documents suggesting how to fix it: here and here. Although the second one is obviously written for Windows, it's the one that worked for me. In other words, you will need to use the -P [profile_name] -no-remote command, instead of using the caps, as suggested in the first document linked above. To be honest, I still have to continue testing this to make sure it works.

Finally, I've noticed a strange behavior in vim: it doesn't accept a set of options included in my ~/.vimrc file that have worked fine forever, and it doesn't accept other hotkeys to perform some basic operations such as indenting, justifying a paragraph, removing a whole block of text, etc. I still have to look into this other problem and try to figure out how to fix it. {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 7 19:49:21 CET 2009]

OK, OK, this is the last story from Wired's website today, I promise. MIT students have created a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. A few cool ideas of possible uses can be seen in the video below:

{link to this story}

[Sat Feb 7 19:31:52 CET 2009]

Yet another science-related article published on Wired's website: this time on how the colors red and blue can be used to tweak your brain a bit. According to a study carried out by Juliet Zhu of the Univeristy of British Columbia certain colors enhance performance, although apparently they don't impair it. So, for instance, red has been found to help with attention-demanding tasks while blue seems to increase creativity. {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 7 19:19:34 CET 2009]

While reading a Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2008 on Wired's website, I found this really cool picture of Jaguar, a Cray XT4 supercomputer currently installed at the National Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Wow! Supercomputers are about the only systems that look cool these days. Well, those and Apple machines, of course. {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 7 18:38:56 CET 2009]

Just came across an interestinginterview with the researcher Maggie Jackson on Wired's website about the effects that digital technology may be having on our attention span:

We are programmed to be interrupted. We get an adrelnalin jolt when orienting to new simuli: Our body actually rewards us for paying attention to the new. So in this very fast-paced world, it's easy and tempting to always react to the new thing. But when we live in a reactive way, we minimze our capacity to pursue goals.

(...)

This degree of interruption is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity. That makes sense. When you're scattered and diffuse, you're less creative. When your times of reflection are always punctured, it's hard to go deeply into problem-solving, into relating, into thinking.

These are the problems of attention in our new world. Gadgets and technologies give us extraordinary opportunities, the potential to connect and to learn. At the same time, we've created a culture, and are making choices, that undermine our powers of attention.

I agree Jackson definitely has a point, but on the other hand I also have a feeling this threat is sometimes overstated. Yes, we need to make sure our kids learn to concentrate on the task at hand, reflect on things, make an effort to think about issues from multiple points of view, think things through, etc. Sure. However, just as important these days is the need to associate or link with phenomena in other fields, something that one can only do when exposed to those other fields and avoiding overspecialization. Intrruptions do come in handy sometimes to help us associate two facts that, at first sight, are completely unrelated. Said that, I do agree that there is a need to be able to concentrate on issues, a skill that we are not doing enough to promote among the younger generations perhaps (and I say perhaps because we've been hearing these or similar complaints about younger generations forever now).

So, the real question is this: is it possible to physically rewire our brains? Will all this over-reliance on short attention spans end up causing some major anatomical or neurological changes in our brains? Jackson doesn't seem to have the answer:

But I can't say if attention fragmentation really rewires our brains. When you sit at a desk for six hours multitasking like a maniac, are you actually rewiring parts of your attention networks? That's difficult to say right now.

Hmm, not so clear then. I'd add one more warning to the whole piece: when discussing short attention spans, gaming automatically pops up to mind. Well, it's not so clear to me that this might be the case. I don't know about you, but when my kids are playing at the Wii or with a computer game, it's darn difficult to draw their attention. Is that a distraction? Yes, there are plenty of things going on at the same time on the screen, but they are definitely paying attention to a single thing, focusing all of their energy on the task at hand, whatever it is (it tends to be saving their own virtual skin, for the most part).

In any case, Jackson makes some good points that are well worth some consideration:

The other important thing is to discuss interruption as an environmental question and collective social issue. In our country, stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn't have time and is constantly interrupted. By striving towards this model of inattention, we're doing ourselves a tremendous injustice.

(...)

Dark times are times of forgetting, when the advancements of the past are underutilized. If we forget to use our powers of deep focus, we'll depend more on black-and-whiet thinking, on surface ideas, on surface relationships. That breeds a tremendous potential for tyranny and misunderstanding. The possibility of an attention-deficit future society is very sobering.

Regarding this latter issue, we ought to seriously considering whether democracy itself is even possible with this black-and-white world that Jackson portrays. Is it still possible to debate any serious issue in depth in today's society? Do media foster the sort of discussion that makes it possible for a modern liberal democracy to exist? Jackson's book (Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age) may make an interesting read. {link to this story}

[Sat Feb 7 18:18:48 CET 2009]

The Idea Excursion blog has published an introduction to Linux swap in three separate articles (other than the first one, linked here, we also have a second and a third parts). Together with very basic concepts (like a mere explanation of terms such as virtual memory), it also contains some good decriptions of things like the swappiness kernel tunable parameter. It's altogether a pretty decent introduction to the topic. {link to this story}

[Thu Feb 5 16:29:45 CET 2009]

Every now and then, I like to run a window manager other than GNOME (my default desktop environment) just for shits and giggles. Well, for that and to see what else is going on in the world out there, as well as to foce myself to dislodge deeply seated habits. It's not a bad thing to try new things every now and then, even if it's just to keep an open mind to new ideas. So, with that in mind, I gave Fluxbox a try a couple of days ago. It's a very nice light-weight window manager that I'd definitely recommend for low-end systems. It's fast, simple-looking (minimalistic, some would say) and, yet, it does everything one needs it to do. It doesn't require memorizing lots of key combinations and options (as in the case of Ion3, for example) and it sort of behaves in a manner that one would find normal.

Now, the reason why I bring it up here is because the test-drive made me realize a little detail that I wasn't aware of. The issue is that sometime back in September 2007 I reported here about how I managed to reconfigure things in GNOME to be able to use Spanish accented characters by using some of the dead keys on my US keyboard. It all worked nicely for a long time until I switched to Fluxbox. At that point, some of the keys worked and some others didn't. To my susprise, the keycode for the right Alt key had changed under Fluxbox, which required a reconfiguration via xmodmap. I just wasn't aware of the fact that your choice of window manager made a different in that respect. I had always assumed that the keyboard configuration made via xmodmap functioned at the X level and was, therefore, unaffected by the window manager or desktop environment. Oh, well. I suppose you can say that one learns something new every day. {link to this story}