Finally, another book finished. It is not that I am illiterate, really, but lately I have been listening to podcasts every single free minute. I even fall asleep like that sometimes.

Anyway, this book is rather well written and gives some interesting insights into the Microsoft "puzzle" hiring interviews, revealing as well the highly competitive culture behind the system, as well as the most obvious flaws. One of the most famous such puzzles is in the very title of the book. The interviewer would ask one how would they move mount Fuji. The expected answer is a detailed analysis of the process and the more situations and data the candidate thinks of, the better. Of course, there are really stupid puzzles as well, used only to assess how the prospective employee reacts under stress. Others are deceptively simple, but hard to guess.

I will give you one. Please think about it as long as it takes to be CERTAIN the response is right. In fact, I won't even give you the answer. Here it goes:

You have four cards on the table. Each card has a digit on a side and a capital letter on the other. As placed on the table you see the cards like this:

The request of the puzzle is this: what cards must be turned in order to verify that the four cards on the table verify the rule "Every card with a vowel has an even number on the other side". You need to give the exact cards not the number of cards and (of course) turn only the ones that you need, so as little card turning as possible.

Long time since I posted a song on the blog. This is one old, but good song AND video. Rarely you find a truly good combination of sound and presentation nowadays. Quoting from the Wikipedia article for this song: Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke wrote the song about a narcissistic friend of his, which on closer inspection is showcased by the imagery in the lyrics - a parallel to earlier My Iron Lung EP track "Lewis [Mistreated]". He also says that it was somewhat of a competition between him and Jonny Greenwood to see who could fit the most chords into a song. "Just" is especially notable for Greenwood's guitar solo, which showcases some of his first uses of the Digitech Whammy Pedal. The guitar work in the song has been seen as an homage to post-punk band Magazine, one of Radiohead's key influences at the time.



The video reminds me of an old sci-fi story I've read about a word that, when heard by a person, would transform them into a purple jelly cone, including the one saying it. When someone finally understood and accepted the reality of it, it all turned into a race to stop a deaf person going to a radio station and speaking the word. He was immune, you see. Anyway, enjoy.

Science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke is one of the people that has defined me as a person and who's books provided both comfort and excitement during my childhood and adolescence. He is mostly known for the movie adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey although I liked the Rama series more. He also invented the concept of a geo synchronous satellite. 
He has lived a full life and I don't believe in artificially prolonging living above a certain threshold (he was suffering for 13 years now), so I am just happy to have known about him rather than sad for his death.

More details at this BBC News article and this Wikipedia entry.

Ok, I will make a quick list and description. The rest is up to you.

• Stargate Atlantis - the spinoff series of Stargate SG1 has ended its 4Th season, but a 5Th is under way. I am watching it mechanically now, as the quality and originality of the show has decreased in time to the point of negative values
  


• Battlestar Galactica - another sci-fi show, it reinvented completely the story of the old 70's BattleStar Galactica. It started great, but the third season ended in some weird pseudo spiritual mambo jumbo. Hopefully, the fourth season due in April will not suffer from the 'Lost' disease
  


• Doctor Who - British sci fi, a bit goofy, but fun nonetheless. It is about an alien that travels space and time with his human female companions (nothing kinky though ;) )
  


• Eureka - silly sci-fi show about an American town that is populated only with brilliant scientists. Very far fetched, but nice as a light comedy. I haven't been able to finish season 2 that finished airing. I think there will be a season 3 as well.
  


• Regenesis - a bit hard to catalogue, this Canadian sci-fi depicts a multinational scientific group with no political associations trying to fight the medical national emergencies in the world. All kinds of diseases and wacky characters, but a bit failing in the field of science. Season 4 is ongoing.
  


• Jericho - now this is a series that was almost cancelled, then brought back at popular demand. Twelve American cities have been blown to smithereens by carefully planted nukes. The US quickly destroyed Iran and North Korea, but it seems the actual perpetrators are American. A small town in the US has to fight off both corporate conspiracies, the newly formed American government and the bands of bandits and neighbouring towns that want what Jericho has: a fan base :).
  


• Numb3rs - oh, what a waste. It started so beautifully as a mathematician applying math to help his FBI agent brother. By season 3 it got completely unscientific, season 4 lost math completely and turned into yet another cop show.
  


• Lost - I am not watching this anymore, only my wife does. I stopped watching this crap after the first season. Meanwhile they use the same psychological system to carry on a story that makes no sense and that everybody watches for the sole purpose of seeing it end. Like a modern day 1001 Arabian nights played on the audience. The only worth watching part of Lost is the pilot episode, then you should continue the story in your own way.
  


• Grey's Anatomy - medical/soap opera. My wife watches it. It started a bit interesting, but ended up crappy. Almost no medicine anymore, instead you see the personal issues of various medical staff people.
  


• Private Practice - as if Grey's Anatomy was not enough, they made a spinoff out of it. I don't know if it will ever air again, though, with the writer strike and all.
  


• Ugly Betty - it proved a commercial success in Latin America, so the TV corporations cloned it for the US market. A gayified version of the South American show, it is basically a women magazine made TV series.
  


• Prison Break - interesting beginning. I recommend the first season, then it all got 'Lost', with psychological effect to keep the audience interested, an escalation of tension, a complete disaster of a plot.
  


• House MD - this one lasted a bit longer before turning to shit. It is a medical show that depicts a wacky, but brilliant diagnostician trying to figure out what the disease and cure is before the sick expires. It has become repetitive and self-satirical, moving away from medicine and back on the ugly and not interesting ploy of human relationships, but then it got back on track. Still worth watching, although the quality is dropping and the story grows old.
  


• Criminal Minds - TV cop show with a team of FBI agents trying to find criminals by using behavioural analysis. Interesting enough, although, as you can imagine, not very technical.
  


• Sarah Connor Chronicles - [chuckle] Terminator is not a teenage girl. She protects John Connor and his mother from other Terminators that roam freely in the past, yet keep a low profile for some reason or another. It's not terrible.
  


• South Park - delicious animated gross comedy, making fun of everything and everybody. They lost the way around season 10, when the authors seemed buried in scandals and full of rage, unable to make fun of things, starting to instead vent frustration in the show. I am happy to see they have recovered in season 11 and season 12 has just started.
  


• Dexter - a serial killer hunts serial killers. This makes him good, somehow, but he is still a killer. Funny enough his cop father taught him how to hide from the police, his sister doesn't know and she is a cop, too, and a colleague of Dexter, who is a criminal forensic in the police department.
  


• Big Love - this is like a family in distress kind of show, but this time the family is made of one husband, 3 wives and numerous children I've lost count of. Yes, they are Mormons and they must navigate the perils of hiding their religion and marital arrangements from the rest of the world, while managing to obey or wriggle around the organisational structure of the Mormons in their community. As much a fascinating subject as this is, the show is pretty ordinary. Tom Hanks is an executive producer.

That's about it.

While in search for interesting and high quality podcasts I've stumbled upon escapepod.org, a site that offers free sci-fi stories in audio format. They last about 40 minutes, so just about the time it takes me to get from my home to work and they are great in both content and narration quality. It completely takes care of my needs when I get back home and I don't feel like listening to some tech podcast.

Even more, it seems that they post two or three books a week, so you won't finish the site right away. Great job, guys! A site truly after my own heart: exactly what you need, how you need it and with no annoying ads or marketing ploys.

Well, imagine a lonely boy, without a family, learning magic in a special school and who's archenemy is a powerful yet evil wizard. He is always accompanied by his friends, a boy and a girl. The evil wizard likes snakes and manages to kill the headmaster of the magic school. No, it's not Harry Potter, it's Naruto!

It's like the Japanese liked Harry Potter, but thought they can do one better. They're not exactly magicians, but ninjas; Naruto Uzumaki, the main character, is a mix of both Harry and Ron, while boy number two, Sasuke Uchiha, is more like a small Snape. With a bit of a stretch, one could take the Naruto story and rip it off in a prequel to Harry Potter, with the parents as the characters :)

Anyway, long story short: the anime is children oriented, with all kind of soapy feelings, camaraderie and friendships, no gore, little blood, a bit of death, but "censored" where violence or tension is concerned. If you ignore the ridiculous simplicity of the characters, the story is pretty captivating and the "ninja science" fun. It more than makes up in quantity what it misses in quality. The first anime, Naruto, is concerned with the childhood of the characters and spans 220 episodes, while the ongoing Naruto: Shippūden with the adolescence and it is close to 50 episodes so far. There are 20 minutes episodes, if you count the 1.5 minutes presentation in, but don't worry, the fights last well into fourth episodes >:). Also, there are currently 4 Naruto movies: 3 for the first series and 1 for Shippūden.

Basically, if you cross Inuyasha with Harry Potter you get Naruto. I guess that any media industry, once it reaches a level of maturity, makes compromises in order to satisfy the greater audience. What Hollywood did for the US, the anime companies are doing for Japan, but in the end, the result is the same: dumbed down versions of what it could be.

Fortunately, animes are often based on manga publications and you can read Naruto well over the story arch in the anime, freely online.

Links:
Naruto Wikipedia
Naruto Manga Online
Naruto meets Harry Potter video

You thought the World Sucks series had ended? No, it is just in the process of gathering data for cool new posts! This one is about moronic shows on children TV! Do their parents know what "children-centric" stuff their kids watch?

First of all I must explain what "manele" is. It is a kind of music with Arabic and Romanian folk music influences that has become a symbol of a type of Romanian urban subculture inspired from tribalism. You know the type, they are never original: members call themselves a family, they call each other brother, they dress and behave in a "manly" fashion, with speech inflexions that are supposed to show how tough and superior they are. It's like the US "African-American" street culture and in many ways it is a local clone of it.

Ok, now for the actual topic of this post. Yesterday I was watching TV (why, you ask? because I haven't bought yet the second computer and my wife commandeered the only one) and I was given the ultimate proof that it makes people dumb. It was a children TV show that involved teenagers from our own time having superpowers in some mystical realm.

So far so good, but then I noticed how their super powers came from a cell phone! To invoke the magical mana they actually typed some number on the phone pad. Then they transformed into colored knights that were heavily inspired from Japanese shows of the same persuasion, basically a guy in a colourful spandex suit and a motorcycle helmet with a silly sword in hand. The colors of the knights were a bright green, a bright cyan, pink, bright magenta, red and yellow! But what shocked me the most was that they spoke in "manele" style, calling each other "brother" and basically street talk! When they actually combined into a big mechanical knight on a big mechanical flying dragon and fought against what looked like a monster hydra with special effects from the old Japanese Godzilla versus [enter stupid monster name here] movies I was laughing my ass off.

No, really, I am not kidding! This was on TV, on a children's channel! Yeah, bro, that's coo'! Gimme five (gay porn looking knights that "couple" with each other to form a really stupid looking toy like fighting machine)! TV sucks, that was obvious, but to actually show this kind of scatological aberration is even beyond my pessimistic expectations.

In my own quest to find interesting books that would help me understand my place as a software developer I've stumbled upon Dreaming in Code, something I knew nothing about other than it featured the word "code" in the title. It had to be good!

In the end the book surpassed my expectations by describing software from a totally different point of view than the programming books I am used to. Dreaming in Code is not a technical book. It can be read by software developers and bored housewives alike. It features a kind and professional tone and the three years of documenting the book can only help put the whole story in perspective.

The storyline is simple: a software visionary decides to start a new project, one that would be open source, innovative and revolutionary and also a replacement for slumbering Outlook and Exchange type of software. Scott Rosenberg documents the development process, trying to figure out the answer to the decades long question: why is software hard? What starts very ambitious, with no financial or time contraints, ends up taking more than three years to get to a reasonable 0.6 release, time when the book ends. The project is still ongoing. They make a lot of mistakes and change their design a lot, but they keep at it, trying to learn from errors and adapt to a constantly changing world.

For me that is both a source of inspiration and concern. If Americans with a long history of software spend millions of dollars and years to create a software that might just as well not work, what chance do I stand trying to figure out the same questions? On the other hand the spirit of the team is inspirational, they look like a bunch of heroes battling the boring and pointless world of software development I am used to. And of course, there is the little smugness "Hey, I would have done this better. Give a million dollars to a Romanian and he will build you anything within a month". The problem, of course, is when you try to hire two Romanians! :)

Anyway, I loved this book. It ended before it had any chance of getting boring, it detailed the quest of the developers while in the same time putting everything in the context of great software thinkers and innovators and explaining the origin and motivation behind the most common and taken for granted technologies and IT ideas. It is a must read for devs, IT managers and even people that try to understand programmers, like their wives.

Here are some links:
Official book site
Scott Rosenberg's own blog
The official site of the Chandler software project

Now this is one cool song. If the quality would have been just a little bit better... Anyway, I have been searching the entire videosphere looking for something even remotely similar. Bjork is weird, but usually restrained in her singing. In this video she shows the power in that tiny Icelandic body. Still searching... Skin sounds great as always, but I feel she can't really keep up :)



You might want to see this video as well. High quality and a collection of weird instruments, but not my favourite way of remixing a song.

I was browsing the HanselMinutes site for interesting podcasts to listen to while going to work and I found one entitled Windows Home Server. First I thought it was one of those Home versions, like Windows XP Home which ended up being total crap. But a home server? So I got curious and listened to it.

Apparently Windows Home Server is meant to act as a central point to your data, providing easy backup solutions and storage management well above what RAID can do. Also, there is a central console that you can use to manage and also connect to the computers in your home. I found interesting enough the way they plan to combine Microsoft Passport with a dynamic DNS for your computer, allowing you to connect to your home via browser, waking up computers that are shut down and accessing them as well.

But the most interesting technology seems to be the Windows Home Server Drive Extender, a technology that takes all drives available of any type and adds all of the storage to a single namespace that you can access. You select which part of the data will be duplicated, which means the server will choose multiple drives to store your important data, leaving downloaded movies and music alone and saving space. Even more interesting is that the server backup system itself uniquely stores clusters. So, in my understanding, if you have 10 computers with Windows XP on it, all the common files will have the same clusters and will only be stored once!

This technology seems more useful and powerful than Windows Vista and considering it is based on the Windows Server 2003 technology which itself was based on Windows Server 2000, the minimum requirements are really low, like an old 1Ghz computer.

Another game in the Vampire universe, this time everything is happening in the present, with a lowly human being Embraced out of a sudden by a rebelious vampire. The outcome is that your "sire" is killed and you are left alone to discover what a vampire really is.



Now, at the start of the game I thought to myself "Redemption was way better". It's true, Bloodlines is trully 3D, but you have 1 character only. It does employ a lot of elements from first person shooters, but the only thing the main character seems to be able to do is take orders from everybody. But then the story really became interesting. The annoying lack of free will remained a thorn in my side for the rest of the game, but with each quest I had to finish there appeared more ways to solve problems, more and more innovative quests (not just go, kill, exit like in Redemption).

What I found really cool is the little quiz you get to answer in the beginning of the game. The answers to it determine the vampire "clan" you belong to and they give you some special abilities accordingly. It guessed me right, too. I got to be Gangrel and killed almost all enemies with axe or sword, even if they had Steyr AUG :). That means that they had a way of ending any situation according to the chosen clan, which is very cool indeed as programming goes. Also, the 3D characters are really well defined. Chicks are sexy, movements are natural and facial expressions are almost realistic!

As with Redemption, the story is really well defined and together at the start of the game then it goes faster and faster as the end approaches. I didn't like that. Also, when you are close to the end and you want to escape a collapsing cave using an inflatable boat the game crashes to Windows desktop. What you need to do, actually what you need to do from the start of the game is go download the patch and install it. Here is the link. Also, the minimum requirements are 512MB of memory, but you will find yourself unable to control your character from time to time, and in this case you must tweak the game a little. It will provide a modest help, the only real solution I found is to save the game when this happends and then some memory gets freed or whatever. You can also try all kinds of console commands provided you start the game with the -console command line option.

My conclusion: another great game probably plagued by deadline management. They were planning even a multiplayer option in the game, but they scratched it. The ending also allowed for at least a dozen continuations, but they didn't pursue this. Bottom line: if you liked Redemption, but you thought it wasn't "killy" enough or you wanted to be more FPS like, you will love this one.

This book is a short and easy read and it describes the way the web will change the world in Hamilton's vision. Part of the Web series it tells the story of a quest of online friends in the Realworld. At the end both virtual and real worlds mingle in an interesting way. A nice read from Hamilton, a quick pocket book relaxing read.

I wondered about this book, since it had Hamilton's later style combined with a nearly marginal subject. Also, Misspent Youth has the title Magic Memories on my PDA. But the bottom line is that this is the story of the beginning of the rejuvenation technology, heavily featured in the Pandora/Void universe, but with other details that link it to Night's Dawn. However, if you completely ignore this science fiction limbo status and the few social issues that Peter F. Hamilton raises in the book, the story is no more than a soap!

I mean you have it all: young upper class people interchanging partners like they're researching combinatorics, puppy romance broken by experienced charmer, broken homes, even parent and son on opposite political sides. For someone that has read the more monumental scifi from the writer, this is like a break from the science fiction of it and towards a more personal point of view. For someone else, it may feel simply mediocre.

My conclusion: even if the book is well written, it is plagued by a the lack of a proper subject, the positive outcome of every single thing (remember Fallen Dragon? I said I can't possibly relate with the passive philosophy of the main character there, same here) and the quick, undetalied ending that one can observe also in the Commonwealth Saga.

The concept of Open Courses is not so new. You've probably stumbled across some course package that is both free and online, but that is just not doing anything for you. A good example is the Microsoft courses, which need that annoying passport registration, you need to take the html based courses in a specific amount of time and they spam you with all the email reminders. What you actually wanted was information, quickly summarized, indexed maybe, and a video/audio stream that would demonstrate what the theory is all about. You don't want to register, have restrictions or even do it online. You want to download stuff and run it locally whenever you feel like it.

I am glad to say I found exactly what I wanted in the MIT Open Course Ware site. They have a huge list of classes, most have only PDF materials, but some have video recordings of the actuall class! With PDF notes! Even MP3 materials for your mp3 player! No registration required and everything you have there you can also find on YouTube! And the videos are profesionally shot, not some web cam in the back thing.

Interested yet? Access the site and browse about. You might want to use this link to get to the audio/video only courses or use Google to find only the courses that have video. You won't get MIT to say you studied with them, but you will learn what they teach if you make the effort!

One thing you need to be able to run the .RM files is Real Alternative, a package that allows you to play Real Media without installing the annoying and not free Real Player.

And MIT is not the only one doing that. You can access the links of:
Open Courseware Consortium
OpenContentOnline
Open Courseware finder

There are a lot of things I want to blog about right now, but I'll start with this, since it is at the root of all the other articles I want to write. What is time management all about? It's about making use of those bits and small crums of free time!

I mean you wake up in the morning, you do what you need to do: make the bed, wash, pet the pet, wife the wife, make the meal, eat the meal, read your emails and blogs, etc... and you are left with about 17 minutes of extra time. If you leave home you get to the office too early, if you watch a TV series episode you leave in 50 minutes and you get there too late. You can't read a book, because that would mean make yourself confortable, open the book, get in the atmosphere of it, then get out of it and leave through the front door in 17 minutes. It can't be done and let you feel good about it. So, what to do?

My first choice is audio podcasts. I download a few (related to programming, but that's my personal interest), all in MP3 format, I choose one every morning and copy it on my cell phone. I use the handsfree to listen to it and that's it. In an ideal world I could do that while washing, making the bed, cooking the meal and eating it, but then I would mess the wife and pet part. Even so, audio files will run through the 17 minutes, through you leaving the house, walking to the car or bus or tram or even directly to the office, during the trip with any means of transportation and up until you get to the office.

Ok, you're in the tram, right in the middle of the distance between home and office and the podcast ends. You have a small cell phone with capacity for only one podcast or you ran out of battery. What to do?

My second choice: a PDA. I am using an 5 year old PDA, one that is black and white, has no screen backlight, it was a present from my uncle (Thanks, Alex!). I use a simple text reader like HandStory to read text books. The advantage is that the battery holds a lot (no cell or Bluetooth capability or graphics or lights to consume it) and you leave the book in the exact place where you stopped reading. Yes: turn PDA on, continue reading, turn PDA off. That means zero time consumed on finding the book, the page, the paragraph. The PDA comes with it's own protective casing and it fits perfectly in my jeans pocket. I can have tens of books on it and I need to recharge it once a week or even two weeks.
Of course, a new PDA could be used both as an audio player and a book reader.

So we've covered staying in touch with the world evolution with audio files and keeping literated by using text books. What's next? Video! In theory you could use the PDA for video feeds, but that would be pointless, in my opinion, since you cannot watch video while walking and something really small cannot give the output that is required for comfort. But that's me.

Anyway, I plan to write an entire article about open courseware next, but you may already know what I am hinting at. Use open courseware videos or video presentations on your computer while you are waiting for programs to compile, in the office lunch break or even in the background while you work. If something needs video, you can switch quickly, rewind a little, and see it done. You can watch parts of it before you leave for work or while you are eating when you come back.

And there you have it. Every single moment of your day can be used to absorb information. What are the downsides? Besides the obvious medical issues like reading or watching something on a screen every single moment (I don't have problems with this yet and I've been kind of glued to the screen for at least 10 years), there is the absorbtion capacity problem. At times you will feel totally wasted, tired, stupid, nothing works, you don't get the world around you, it's like your IQ has droppped a few stories to a neighbour below. Well, in that case TAKE A BREAK! Yes, that's all that is required. Take a day off or spend a weekend day doing absolutely nothing. With so many distractions around you, it will be difficult, especially after you've trained yourself to gobble down information, but think of it like jogging. Even if you manage to do it for half an hour, there is a small moment when you need to stop in order to continue running. Walking fast doesn't cut it, you need to stop.

Happy gobbling! :)