Ebooks for the masses

 So...  everybody that loves to read loves books...  a chicken and egg kind of thing...
The question is how do they react when they receive an ebook reader ??
Well, my first view is that the love them !  it's impressive how the advantages of weight, cleanness (no mites as in old books)  and capabilities to increase or decrease the font size are the reasons that I hear the most...
The price war between Amazon and Barnes and Noble results were awesome for consumers, a decent reader for less than 150 USD is something that almost anybody can pay, and now it's just a matter of giving the writers the ability to reach their readers almost directly and voila ! a new successful business model brought to us by technology...
The coolest thing is that the impact is huge and positive for the readers...  
What's next ??

Long time !...

yesssssssssssss
tons of things change and I am just not able to keep up my literary initiatives with my real-life-adventures (which is cool... it means that I do more stuff than just comment shit)
Anyways...  now I'm back in good old Latin America, no horror or shock involved... just the acknowledge of big differences between our reality and the US.
So today I will complain about the assholes on the ticket sales systems in my country (Chile). If you are able to buy a ticket for a entertainment show on the internet, cool...  you live in one our of the 90% of countries which does (sorry Cuba). But how good is to have an internet charging system if you cannot order them to be sent to your home ??  no willcall either and the on-site ticket office requests FOR THE FUCKING CONFIRMATION EMAIL PRINTED !!!!

 So, technology is nothing without smart procedures and people...   that remains me of this clip:

HAAHahaHA I ran into this...

  Looking for other people's experience regarding to finish working for your company, I found a forum site with only complains about one company: DELL
  There, I found a thread that almost made me piss my pants...  enjoy:


Dear Co-Workers and Managers,

As many of you probably know, today is my last day. But before I leave, I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know what a great and distinct pleasure it has been to type "Today is my last day." For nearly as long as I've worked here, I've hoped that I might one day leave this company. And now that this dream has become a reality, please know that I could not have reached this goal without your unending lack of support. Words cannot express my gratitude for the words of gratitude you did not express.


I would especially like to thank all of my managers both past and present but with the exception of the wonderful Mr. ABC: in an age where miscommunication is all too common, you consistently impressed and inspired me with the sheer magnitude of your misinformation, ignorance and intolerance for true talent. It takes a strong man to admit his mistake - it takes a stronger man to attribute his mistake to me.

Over the past seven years, you have taught me more than I could ever ask for and, in most cases, ever did ask for. I have been fortunate enough to work with some absolutely interchangeable supervisors on a wide variety of seemingly identical projects - an invaluable lesson in overcoming daily tedium in overcoming daily tedium in overcoming daily tedium.

Your demands were high and your patience short, but I take great solace knowing that my work was, as stated on my annual review, "meets expectation." That is the type of praise that sends a man home happy after a 10 hour day, smiling his way through half a bottle of meets-expectation-scotch with a meets-expectation-cigar. Thanks [ ]!

And to most of my peers: even though we barely acknowledged each other within these office walls, I hope that in the future, should we pass on the street, you will regard me the same way as I regard you: sans eye contact.

But to those few souls with whom I've actually interacted, here are my personalized notes of farewell:

To [ ], I will not miss hearing you cry over absolutely nothing while laying blame on me and my coworkers. Your racial comments about [ ] were truly offensive and I hope that one day you might gain the strength to apologize to him.

To [ ] whom is long gone, I hope you find a manager that treats you as poorly as you have treated us. I worked harder for you then any manager in my career and I regret every ounce of it. Watching you take credit for my work was truly demoralizing.

To [ ], you should learn how to keep your mouth shut sweet heart. Bad mouthing the innocent is a negative thing, especially when you’re talking about someone who knows your disgusting secrets.

To [ ], well, I wish you had more of a back bone. You threw me to the wolves with that witch B and I learned all too much from it. I still can't believe that after following your instructions, I ended up getting written up, wow. Thanks for the experience buddy, lesson learned.

[ ], I'm happy that you were let go in the same manner that you have handed down to my dedicated coworkers. Hearing you on the phone last year brag about how great bonuses were going to be for you fellas in upper management because all of the lay offs made me nearly vomit. I never expected to see management benefit financially from the suffering of scores of people but then again, with this company's rooted history in the slave trade it only makes sense.

To all of the executives of this company, [ ] and such. Despite working through countless managers that practiced unethical behavior, racism, sexism, jealousy and cronyism, I have benefited tremendously by working here and I truly thank you for that. There was once a time where hard work was rewarded and acknowledged, it's a pity that all of our positive output now falls on deaf ears and passes blind eyes. My advice for you is to place yourself closer to the pulse of this company and enjoy the effort and dedication of us "faceless little people" more. There are many great people that are being over worked and mistreated but yet are still loyal not to those who abuse them but to the greater mission of providing excellent customer support. Find them and embrace them as they will help battle the cancerous plague that is ravishing the moral of this company.

So, in parting, if I could pass on any word of advice to the lower salary recipient ("because it's good for the company") in India or Tampa who will soon be filling my position, it would be to cherish this experience because a job opportunity like this comes along only once in a lifetime.

Meaning: if I had to work here again in this lifetime, I would sooner kill myself.

To those who I have held a great relationship with, I will miss being your co-worker and will cherish our history together.

Please don't bother responding as at this very moment I am most likely in my car doing 85 with the windows down.

One!

WC WC WC !!!!

  I just cannot think of a better month than the World Cup month...   I assume that the 4 years frequency adds more anxiety to everybody who likes to watch soccer.
  But in the US the sport it's still not as big as it should...  we need timeouts, beer and popcorn instead of coffee, peanuts and bad calls by the refs ?

 It's just a cultural difference, maybe...  maybe the always-increasing latin population will push the sport as they have done with religion and consumer tendencies....  

 Soccer is and will be one of the most passionate, emotional and complete experiences and that's why no superbowl or playoff will ever match it. There is a Chilean journalist which comments at ESPN in spanish, he always starts the games saying something like: "welcome to 90 minutes of the most beautiful sport in the world" ... ditto

     
   

Stuck with postgres 8.4

I am setting up my old PS3 with ubuntu in order to be my PPC server for my entrepreneurial adventures.

After upgrading from 9.04 to the always annoying karmic koala ( :P ) , I could not find the postgis modules I need so after a few drinks and a late night of playing around I ended up with postgres 8.3 and 8.4 in my server.... 

I almost set up the server again because I could not remove the postgres 8.4 packages due to some manual removal of files (I know I'm dumb, you don't have to remind me). Lucky shot, I found this thread over the ubuntu forums where another asshole did something similar hahahahaha

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1415362

 enjoy

Decision Engine ?

I just check the new ad the guys from Microsoft made to promote Bing (their search engine) and I cannot deny that is catchy...

It is not a search engine...  it's a decision engine... Huge difference and attacks directly google's over flooding their users with worthless links and corrupted page-rank values based on dummy websites.

On my view, perception + user needs are going to be the most important things to predict in order to provide the best searching experience (let's not forget the valuable and highly traceable info that we generate...)

Summary,  do not search for hardcore porn with your logged account !!!!  ahahahaha 

WOW

estaba twitteando un mensaje para una iniciativa paralela y me encontre con la siguiente imagen.... demas que estan buscando soluciones para sus bases de datos...

The best universal remote control

I am strugglin' with too many electronic appliances and gadgets... to me that's a blessing. Nevertheless, for regular human beings, to have to control more than 1 or 2 remote controls is so complicated that they rather stick to the books.... what a shame.

So I have been looking for a good universal remote control which allows me to control at least the following devices.:

• My brand new (thanks to castroooooo !!! ) Ps3
• Yamaha 5.1 receiver
• Motorola / Comcast cable box
• Philips LCD

In addition to this support, the ability to create macros would be a nice detail too.... let's add that to the 2do list.
So there are some high end alternatives, but since I am cheap and poor (bad combination) I am not willing to spend more than what I have to for this...
With all the pain in my wallet, I thought about getting a logitech harmony 1100, which has an extra device which allows you to control the PS3 (overall ~360 USD) .
Suddently I realized that the best way to have all of this control in my hands, I needed a device with 'native' bluetooth and InfraRed support... that's when the idea came... my old and faithful Palm Zire 72. I just finished charging it after a year and a half of no use.... this is the beginning of this DIY task !

Nerd power !

Turning 12 years of digital music into a library

I started collecting / ripping my cd's back in 98... I knew that between mp3's , vqf's and all the other formats lost in time we were about to see some fireworks.

The music model distribution changed. For good. Now I do not buy cd's I download only the good songs of a disc, or I get the vinyl if I am nuts about the LP.

I have a fair amount of music I gathered over these years and now I want to turn them into a highly efficient easy to use library working on linux... I had to start from scratch though.... here is what I already have done:

• Got myself a 500GB my passport (Western Digital)
• I copied all of my discs into the Music path
• made a script (python of course :D ) to group and rename the directories by artist/group. It is pretty simple but it did the trick... similar distribution as Itunes
  
  2do
  
• Update correct the tags for each disc, I started using MusicBrainz Picard... is there another option ?
  
• Get the art work for each full disc.
• Select a music player / library
  ideas: amarok - songbird - rythmbox
  
• Let's see how they behave after some tests..... stay tuned !
  

rename_music.py
#!/usr/bin/python
import os
import sys
import shutil

def put_in_format(text):
texto = (text.lower()).strip(' ')
tmp = []
for word in texto.split(' '):
tmp.append(word.capitalize())
return " ".join(a for a in tmp)

def main():
count = 0
dir=('/media/Master-hdd/Music/JUKEBOX')

os.chdir(dir)
list_dir = os.listdir('.')
for each in list_dir:
if each.count(' - '):
group = put_in_format(each.split(' - ')[0])
disc = put_in_format(each.split(' - ')[1])
try:
os.mkdir(group)
except:
count += 1
if group != each:
shutil.move(each, group+'/'+disc)

if __name__ == "__main__":
sys.exit(main())

Mid-life Crisis vs 2-year crisis

It is my fair guess that everybody has a point when they feel that they should be doing things in another way. Every once in a while... maybe people normally get the feeling at a certain age, so we as society put a name to it and we consider it normal... or at least common.

How should you feel if you get those life-changing, deeply-introspective moments more often ? are you a nut-house candidate ? bah... in a normal day I would say that it is just a matter of a few cigarettes and a good shot of any kind.

But age tends to fuck everything up, doesn't it ?? Now there is no movie that cheers me up, music sounds flat and powerless, basically is back to look for something that can bring the passion back into everyday business,,,

Now I know why Al Bundy was so caught up on the past... It's so sad...

Don't get me wrong, I am not stating that everything is pointless and that we should go out and start killing people, it is just that in some periods we are so concentrated in a narrow spectrum of activities that we loose the general and forget about exploring and doing something that can make you smile more often.

We all need that, I need that.

Ubuntu 9.10 -karmic- NO SOUND !!!!!! HP INTEL's audio hardware

Well... after more than a year I finally changed my laptop from a ~dv2000 HP model (14'') to a sweet ENVY 13... In an hour of use or so I was already installing the newest version of Ubuntu (9.10) in order to work and avoid the little things that make Microsoft's OS (Windows 7 on this case) a pain in the ass.

The installation went flawless, I am trying EXT4 as the filesystem and I can seriously say that it has a great impact on database queries and handling... Thumbs up

Unfortunately, Ubuntu does not support yet the two graphic cards and their awesome hot swapping in order to save battery... (which it can added to the thin, semi-light secondary battery actually reach more than 6 hours of real action... no pussy-ass lower brightness and stuff)

The biggest problem I found was the sound.... after wonder around in many forums I realized that the problem was the ALSA library version that comes in 9.10.... 1.09.21. In order to make it work, I downloaded the new release of ALSA followed by configuration, compilation and installation and voila !!!! everything working....

I followed this guide (THX to the creator !)

This is boring but it has to be done... I just hate linux without my classics... now I'm going for the last.fm audioscrobbler....

Yahoooooooooooooooooooooooooo