Older blog entries for ralsina (starting at number 617)

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El viernes que viene me voy a París. Me llevo a mi mujer, a mi nene, y a mi vieja. Me llevo a mi mujer porque nunca tuvimos luna de miel, entonces cualquier excusa es buena, me llevo a mi nene porque tardé mucho, y me llevo a mi vieja porque se lo debo.

Mi mamá tiene 78 años y cuando estudiaba, pupila, en un colegio de monjas, estudiaba francés. Y cuando estudiás francés semipresa, las lecciones sobre París, el libro con fotos de la torre Eiffel... se me hace que deben haber sido material de los sueños de esa piba de quince. Yo sé que mi vieja sueña con este viaje hace más de sesenta años.

También lo soñaba mi viejo que siempre contaba de cuando tenía que escribir una redacción (en francés obviamente) sobre el puerto de Le Havre y como no la había hecho la inventó al vuelo, hizo como que la leía y le pusieron un diez igual, en su secundario en Resistencia, pero mi viejo se enfermó y se murió.

Entonces ahora que puedo, porque con la tarjeta la saco en muchas cuotas, y tengo un descuento, y el pasaje mío lo paga un cliente, y Tato paga la mitad, y alquilar un departamento allá sale lo mismo que en Mar del Plata (o lo mismo que una carpa en La Perla), y tengo un ahorrito, hace un tiempo le dije a mi vieja que sacara el pasaporte, que se venía conmigo.

Y que no, que estoy grande, que qué me vas a llevar, para qué, qué voy a hacer allá, pero el ojo bueno se le iluminaba, porque mi vieja por adentro es todavía esa alumna pupila del colegio en Santa Fe, que tenia que estudiar en silencio sus lecciones de francés, sobre esa tierra lejana, exótica de gente con boina.

Y la plata no compra la felicidad, pero esta plata, justo esta plata, me deja darle de regalo del día de la madre un viaje con el que sueña hace mi vida y media, ir a Montmartre, sentarnos en alguna parte, pedir dos cafés, morfarnos dos croissants, darle un beso a mi Tato, abrazar a mi mujer, a mi viejita, saludar a mi viejo, y sé que se me va a piantar un lagrimón, si se me está piantando ahora, mientras escribo, cómo no se me va a piantar allá.

Y me la llevo para allá. Y vamos a ser felices.


Syndicated 2012-10-19 21:32:18 from Lateral Opinion

Kremlinology of Myself

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Understanding what goes on inside my head is not easy for me. I am separated from the thing I am examining by subjectivity, and suffer a comprehensive observer effect that clobbers simple reporting and disables my comprehension.

So, it's rare that I have a moment where I feel one way or another in a clear manner. To me "How are you?" is confusing. I tend to hesitate for ten seconds while scrambling for the standard response, like the terminator scrolling through response trees. Usually my state is, I feel exactly like myself. I feel the way I feel, and I just have not put that in words, scales, and comparisons, much less one word.

Half the time it's easier for me to know how others feel. I look at my wife and I know. I look at my son and I can probably tell you if he got a good lunch at school today, and whether he won his last rock paper scissors match.

I can do that because I can see them. I can see their faces, and I know how they look, how they change, how they react, I know Juan does this thing with his lip when he's frustrated, I know Rosario puts her sweater backwards if she's distracted.

I have to get my self-status indirectly. I woke up early and rested. I look forward to working, or to doing something in the weekend. I attack a task with intensity, I avoid an encounter, I forget to start music, I abandon projects, I reach out to people, I can't come up with ideas, I make up excuses, I make a quick joke.

I have to wonder where that comes from, then. Who is the me doing those things I examine to decide how I feel? I feel like my head is a town and I sit in a cafe, in a street table, and listen to the passers-by, gauging the mood.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I was simpler, and straightfrward. I wish I could do things without thinking so much. I wish I could react normally without intermediating myself in my own thoughts.

Of course maybe everyone does the same things. Maybe everyone is the same. Even if not the same, strange in the same way, just like things can be all different and part of a class, different in degrees and the same in essence.

I am fine, thanks. And you?


Syndicated 2012-10-18 22:12:55 from Lateral Opinion

Nature Hates You.

The next time someone suggests you take a dietary supplement, or a plant or herb extract, or tells you to eat, drink, apply on your skin, inhale, or do anything with the argument that it's natural, remember this:

NATURE HATES YOU

Almost everything that comes from nature will kill you. All animals would prefer that you die, all plants are toxic, and it's only through a long evolutionary process that you are barely capable of digesting any vegetables.

There is a reason why we take aspirin instead of chewing bark, and why we cook meat before we eat it. Freaking potatos are toxic if eaten raw.

Give parsley to a parrot, give chocolate to a dog, give celery to a cat, give hemlock to you: DEAD. Because all around you is trying to kill you. All the time.

Nature is not a mother, nature is actively hostile to you and will be happy to make your life as hard, brief and painful as possible. Man has changed that. Saying "oh, but this is natural" is an indictment, a warning sign.

Raw foodists, paleo diet advocates, herbal-supplement-chuggers: you are all the beneficiaries of a long history of knowing what is semi-safe to eat because everything else will kill you.

I will not eat anything nature gives me until it has been carefully tested by men and science. Because science is good and nature is evil.


Syndicated 2012-10-16 13:14:47 from Lateral Opinion

How You Could Not Replace Cable, If Only This Were Legal

Suppose you wanted to have free TV. Suppose by that you mean series, not movies or news (both of which you can get in other ways).

Also, suppose you want to have it on your actual TV. Also, that you don't mind breaking IP laws. Well, this is how I would do it, if that was the case.

First: get hardware.

You need a general computational device with TV connectors and lots of storage. Like, say, a Mele A1000 or A2000 running android, and a SATA disk. This will cost you around $150 or so.

The Mele has HDMI, VGA and composite, so it can connect to pretty much anything that can display images. You could even use a 64GB SD card instead of a SATA drive if you want to go cheaper.

Second: choose some series.

You could go to ShowRSS create an account and just choose series you like. ShowRSS would then provide you with a nice RSS feed updated as your shows are uploaded.

You could even choose between SD and HD versions.

Third: get the episodes.

You would need a BitTorrent client that supports this:

  1. Android.
  2. Choosing the destination folder (uTorrent for android doesn't)
  3. RSS Feeds with autodownload

For example: aDownloader

If you are using the Mele and the SATA drive, there is a bug in aDownloader where it can't write to the SATA disk. You can fix it if you have root and some patience.

Fourth: get a good video player.

You want one that:

  1. Has HW decoding
  2. Has SW audio decoding (a mele-specific issue)
  3. Supports many video formats
  4. Supports subtitles, if you need them

For example: MX Player

Fifth: get subtitles.

If you ever watch something that is not in your native language, you also want something that automatically gets subtitles for your videos. For example Subloader

How well would this work? Well, it would take roughly 5 minutes to download a show in SD or 15 minutes to download it in HD on a 10Mbps internet link.

It would let you play them in your own time.

It would let you see shows before they air in your country, and even if they will never air there.

It is also illegal as all hell, so don't do it.


Syndicated 2012-10-10 21:35:54 from Lateral Opinion

100 Days With the Mele A1000

I have been using the Mele A1000 for a few months now. I think I have settled into a usage pattern, so let's do a quick roundup of what it's good for and what it's not very good at.

First a quick reminder of what it is:

  • Small computer running Android (4.0.4 right now)
  • HDMI/VGA/Composite video output, ideal for using with a TV
  • SATA connector, full size SD card, 3 USB ports: basically unlimited storage capacity.
  • Remote control that works with most apps
  • Wifi and Ethernet
  • It will cost you ~ $90 to get one.
  • No noise, low power usage.

I have it in my bedroom, next to my old CRT TV. I could put it in the living room with the newer LED one, but I have a Mac Mini I got for work there anyway.

Having it plugged to an old TV means the video quality sucks. However, it works great for watching videos, and when connected to a modern display it works perfectly.

So, what do I do with it?

I watch movies and series on Netflix.

Version 1.8.1 of the Netflix app works fine (later versions do not!) and lets you see movies and series legally for a flat low monthly cost. The remote provided doesn't really work all that well, because you can't do "drags" and therefore can't scroll the movie lists left and right. So, to take full advantage of this you need to get a keyboard/mouse set. I use this one.

However, if you know what you want to see, it's just a matter of searching for it.

I watch videos in general.

MX Player works very well, and gives smooth, well synced video. The Hardware video decoder works just fine, but you have to switch to software audio decoding.

Having a pluggable SATA drive is very useful here. Just get any 2.5" SATA drive, plug it in, and start using it.

File Server

I used Samba Filesharing and it "just works". You set it up, configure user and password, and your drives are now shared locally and accessible to all your other devices.

I am using it to store backups from my "real" computers, created using rdiff-backup but any backup tool that can store in a remote folder should work.

Radio & Music Player

There are plenty of android applications that handle music streaming and playing your local music collection. Just use the one you like.

Weather Gadget

I like my TV telling me the weather. Uses a random widget from the play store.

VNC Server

In order to use it more comfortably, or be able to do stuff in it when I am on the notebook, I am using Droid VNC Server and that even means I can use my own phone as a "remote" using the Jump VNC client

Yes, that means I am in my bed using my android phone as a remote to my android TV's screen. If the performance were better, it would be as cool as it sounds.

I am using Jump because it's the only Android VNC client I found that supports dragging things (and it's not perfect by a long shot).

Possible future uses

  • Skype box (need to hook a webcam. Microphone?)

  • Game console?

    I have Need For Speed: Shift and I would love to play it on a large screen, but how would I control it? I need to investigate controllers, maybe joysticks or gamepads.

I bought this with the idea of using Ubuntu on it, but the lack of accelerated drivers and Netflix support has made that a non-starter. So, I am doing lots of things where Android really has lower quality software than Ubuntu, but those are forcing me to stay there.

I am quite happy with it, and as a "dumb-tv-smartener" it's quite awesome for its price.


Syndicated 2012-10-03 14:15:52 from Lateral Opinion

Cuando Sea Grande

Este sábado cumplo 41 (no, no hago fiesta, no es que no te invité), y creo que llegó el momento de decidir que voy a ser cuando sea grande.

Mi problema principal para decidir un tema tan crucial antes de hoy es que me interesan muchas cosas. Y las que no me interesan... sospecho que si le pusiera un poco de ganas me interesarían.

Pero peor, tengo esa convicción interna, totalmente injustificada de que si me pongo, puedo más o menos hacer casi cualquier cosa que no involucre una aptitud física específica.

O sea, no, nunca voy a ser power forward en la NBA, ni triatlonista, ni equilibrista, ni ninja. Pero... sospecho que podría ser un guitarrista mediocre, o un poeta medio pelo, un escritor adecuado, o un razonable peluquero, por no decir un competente paleontólogo, un interesante director de cine, un actor promedio, un interesante analista político, o un buen taxista.

Esa sospecha es infundada dado mi desinterés en la política, poesía, detalles de cómo se toca la guitarra, y no saber manejar, entre otras cosas.

Así que durante los próximos diez años, mientras me voy haciendo grande, me voy a concentrar en cosas que ya sé hacer, como... epa. Lo charlamos el año que viene.


Syndicated 2012-09-13 16:34:27 from Lateral Opinion

Nikola is Pluginificated.

Yes, I know that's not a real word.

So, the git master of Nikola now has plugins. In fact, not only does it have plugins, but is basically made of plugins.

You see, the code used to mostly be inside a class (called Nikola), and ... it had grown. That class had grown up to around 2000 lines of code. Which is completely ridiculous.

So, using Yapsy I turned the code inside out: almost all the code that was in that monster class was moved into plugins and the class turned into a smart plugin loader.

This has brought several advantages:

  • Now you can extend Nikola for your own purposes. Just create a plugin folder in your site, and put the extra functionality there.
  • Support for whole categories of things is now modular. Want to support a different markup? A different template system? Just write a plugin.
  • Want to add completely new functions to Nikola? Like, say, a way to import data from another blog tool, or something like planet software? Well, just add a "command plugin".

What has changed for the user?

  • You can delete dodo.py from your site.
  • Use nikola build instead of doit
  • Use nikola serve instead of doit serve

Some minor things still need doing in this area (notable, fixing the docs), but the main refactoring is there.


Syndicated 2012-09-11 18:50:56 from Lateral Opinion

Taxes, Game Theory, and Python (Part 1 of 2)

Before I gave up on becoming an educated man, I studied math. And to this day it pisses me that noone has figured out how to make math interesting to the math-averse. Here's a small attempt.

Let's consider the following scenario, based completely on things I know, not things I do ;-)

Suppose that in a city called San Isidro, there is a house. Houses in San Isidro pay a municipal tax, in exchange for the service of garbage collection, street sweeping, tree trimming, and street lighting.

It's a very small tax, but let's say it's $100 a month because it's a nice, easy to handle number.

Also, San Isidro is in a country called Argentina. In that country there are several laws that affect the home owners:

  1. You can't sell a house if you owe any taxes.
  2. The owner has a 1% chance of wanting to sell the house each month.
  3. Debts expire after 5 years.
  4. If you are sued and you lose, you pay they other guy's lawyer fees.
  5. Lawyer fees are capped to 25% of the money being disputed.
  6. Lawyers are reluctant to help you sue someone if they get very little money (defined as less than $2000)
  7. If sued by the city for owed taxes, the owner always loses.
  8. Unpaid taxes accrue 2% compound interest monthly. So, if you don't pay your $100, you will owe $102, then $104.04, $106.0128 etc.

With all those elements in place, let's play a game called "Tax Golf"!

The game is played by an indetermined number of players called owners and one special player called city.

The game is played to 100 "months" or until all property has been sold.

The goal of the game, for the owners, is to pay as little money as they can. The score is calculated like this: amount of money you paid divided by the time you owned the house.

The owner with the lowest score is the winner.

The goal of the game for the city, is to get as much money as he can. He's not competing against the players, for him it's a sort of solitaire where he competes against his past performance.

This, my friends is math. Math is a tool that helps you (among other things) do the right thing in this sort of complicated, arbitrary, real life scenario.

So, what's a good strategy for a owner, and for the city?

In a second post next wednesday, I will give some answers to those questions, using python.


Syndicated 2012-09-05 10:13:39 from Lateral Opinion

Improved Wordpress.com Importer and a Question

Thanks to the cooperation of Humitos who gave me his wordpress backup, I did some improvements in the wordpress.com import feature of Nikola, my static website/blog generator

So, if you were to try to use nikola_wordpress_importer from master now, it would:

  1. Not crash ;-)
  2. Download attachments
  3. Fix links to attachments so they work on the new site

However, I am now unsure of what exactly is in wordpress.com's export XML file. The posts themselves are in this form:

Muchas gracias Nico por hacer el video este. Groso, quedó muy bueno.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=es&amp;v=882qxARXa6c]

Two things jump to me:

  1. That's not HTML
  2. WTF is that youtube thing?

I am having some success processing it as markdown, since that handles the paragraph breaks and some other stuff. Maybe the youtube embedding is done with a markdown extension?

Anyone knows?


Syndicated 2012-09-03 21:47:01 from Lateral Opinion

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