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! :)

Update: Damn YouTube and their lawsuits! I had to change the song with another live performance, but it isn't that good. Well, the quality of the video is better, but not so emotional.

This is a song that I find myself liking while listening to my music in the background. It's a pretty difficult feat, since I usually type away and don't really pay attention to what I listen. I am putting the live show from Spain, because I think that the official video for this song is crap. Enjoy!

This is not a single story, but many short ones from my latest favourite writer: Peter F. Hamilton. A Second Chance at Eden is set in the Night's Dawn universe, but before that story unfolded. We have Marcus Calvert, father of Joshua, the hero of Night's Dawn; we have the birth of Eden, affinity bondage stories, zero-tau, psychic abilities, even a party assassin turned good (that would provide the template for a character in Pandora's Star).

I think that the collection is best read after you've read the lengthy stories. It rings so many bells that would normally not mean anything than sci fi speculation otherwise.

Bottom line: Great writing from Hamilton. It's nice that you can read one story and take a break and do something else :). I guess if you are not that sure you want to read the sagas, starting with this will open your appetite and you will find the same connections I did, only backwards.

I was following a link of someone trying to translate my blog in Japanese. Apparently Siderite = シデライト . As you can see, it's like a little story: first there was this smiling guy, then his smile got smaller and smaller as his eyes got bigger and bigger. In the end, he was completely abstracted. Poor old Siderite :(

Update: Babylon says Siderite in Japanese is 菱鉄鉱. Is there any Japanese reader who can help me with this dilemma?

Acquires, purchases, whatever... they paid for it and they will have it. Sun will have MySql. Does that mean that they want to go towards easily usable SQL servers or that they want to compete with Oracle? PostgreSQL would have been a more appropriate choice in that case. Will MySql for Java be like SQL server is for .NET ? Anyway, 1 billion dollars is selling short, I think. Youtube was two. Is a media distribution software more important than a database server?

Here is the official announcement.

Small quote: MySQL's open source database is the "M" in LAMP - the software platform comprised of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl often viewed as the foundation of the Internet. Sun is committed to enhancing and optimizing the LAMP stack on GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows along with OpenSolaris and MAC OS X. The database from MySQL, OpenSolaris and GlassFish, together with Sun's Java platform and NetBeans communities, will create a powerful Web application platform across a wide range of customers shifting their applications to the Web.

Something happened to Peter F. Hamilton between the second and third volumes of the Greg Mandel trilogy. He turned from a good average writing style to a great one. The Nano Flower is almost at the same level as Pandora's Star and births Hamilton's detailed universe. No wonder there was no fourth novel in the series, it would only drag the writer down.

The book has everything I came to expect from Peter F. Hamilton: hard sci-fi, detailed socio-political context, aliens, the party of braves, the sociopathic villains, a reference to Lord of the Rings... I do believe that Tolkien inspired Hamilton to write, but now it has become the chink in the writing armour, Achilles' heal. I've read a few great Hamilton books, but each had the basic layout of a battle between good and evil, groups of people uniting under improbable ideals to defeat an all too dark a villain. The qualities that attracted so many people to Lord of the Rings, for example, like camaraderie, honor, desire to help others, are not so attractive to me anymore. They are basic, very unlikely to truly define a character. I would very much want to see a Hamilton gray book. Maybe the new Void Trilogy will fulfil my wish (if I don't die of waiting for it to appear), although the vengeance driven character that remains pure and good at heart described in the first volume doesn't give me a lot of hope.

Anyway, even if I do seem to concentrate on what I don't like or what I would change in the writing of this great book maker, my appreciation for him is way higher than any possible defect in his writing. So, if you don't totally dislike sci-fi, go to a book store and buy Peter F. Hamilton books.

I was looking for songs by David Bowie, one of my favourite singers, but I wanted to find something different than the brilliant Under Pressure which he performed together with Freddie Mercury and which is my "subway song" :) And I found another "coproduction", this time he teamed up with Nine Inch Nails, another band that I enjoy (Perfect Drug is their best song, I think, although I may interpret it more personally than others).



The funny thing is that I remembered to post a Bowie song when I heard a quote from Criminal Minds, a series I am watching:
Garcia: [To Reid and Morgan] When I was in the ambulance I could hear the song 'Heroes' playing in my head. I kept flashing in and out of consciousness and I remember thinking, 'Wait. Is David Bowie really God?'

• I have started with a book recommended by many sites about software architecture and design as a must read: Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck. It is well written and I can see why it attracted a lot of people, even if there aren't so many Smalltalk programmers out there: it is written for use! That means that the book has less than 200 pages, but each of the specific patterns there are laden with references to others in the book, some even in the next chapters. That's because the book itself is structured to be kept nearby and consulted whenever a new project is started or in progress, not something that you read and forget in a bookshelf, gathering dust.
  
  However, the patterns presented are sometimes useless for a C# programmer, some being already integrated in language and some being not applicable. The fact that Smalltalk works with Messages further complicates things. I did eventually open a link to #-Smalltalk, but who will ever have time for it?
  
  I have decided that rather than reading this book and forgetting or not getting many of the things inside, it would be more efficient searching for a similar book that is more C# oriented.
  
  So, bottom line: great approach, both literary and technical, but a little hard to use for one such as me. Anyone know of a C# Best Practice Patterns book?
• My next attempt was in the wonderful world of management! Yes, I was approached by their people, apparently they want me to join them and rule the galaxy. Maybe if they wrote more concise books!!
  
  
  The Knowledge Management Toolkit: Practical Techniques for Building a Knowledge Management System starts interestingly enough, describing the need of every company to build a way to retain knowledge against employee turnover or plain forgetfulness. Basically what I am doing with this blog. But it goes further than that, quantifying the return on investment for such a KM system, describing ways of rewarding people and encouraging them to use it (it is not something done automatically).
  
  All great, but then it kept going on telling me how the book is going to change my world, rock my boat, help me in my business... after reading the preface, the introduction, the "how it's structured", the marketing bullshit, the first chapter (full of promises about the next chapters) I was completely bored! If there is any technical description of what to do, when to do it, how to do it, why , etc, I didn't find a trace of it in the first chapter. Reading on my PDA from a badly scanned txt file didn't help either.
  
  Besides, I got more and more frustrated. I barely have the time to scratch all I planned on doing in this holiday (while getting nagged on by the wife, the cat and whatever friends I got left) and improving the company workings is not my responsibility. I am the god damn coder! I write code! I have a management system all of my own and I get my ROI by googling a frustrating bug and discovering I solved it a month ago myself and wrote about it here.
  
  So there! If you have a business it is good to have a repository of actual knowledge (a.k.a. processed information) and encourage people to use it so that they don't take all their experience with them when they leave your sorry cheap ass company! I've summarised the entire book for you! I am not reading it anymore. It hurts my sensitive techie soul!

A Quantum Murder comes to continue the story of Greg Mandel, psychic detective. Does it sound tacky? I agree that the subject is not the best possible choice, but the writing is good, Hamilton style: scifi social speculation, action, a detective story that makes the reader wonder what will happen next and whodunit!

I personally did enjoy the book, but it wasn't even close to the latest and more hard scifi writings of Peter Hamilton's. Maybe it's just me, but mental detectives in a post apocalyptic corporate world just doesn't do it for me. Maybe that's why The Nano Flower's first chapter starts with Suzi doing tekmerk stuff ;)

Again, the second volume of the three Mindstar books is stand-alone, making it easy to read even if you didn't read the first book. It is basically a scifi policier.

Another great book from Hamilton! This is part of the "Greg Mandel trilogy", that meaning there are three books to show for this particular side of the Hamilton universe, and unlike his later work, Mindstar Rising is actually a stand-alone book. You can read it without its next two parts and understand it as a single story. I've even started to read A Quantum Murder (volume 2) and Hamilton is making the effort to summarize what the characters did in the previous volume.

I understand the dilemma facing such a prolific writer: should one break a story in stand alone segments, thus cauterizing story arches and trying to put every single idea into single puny volumes? Should one bore the readers with summaries of previous volumes? Or should one write huge three volume books that you need to read in their entirety to understand anything? :) It would be a hard choice for me, as well. All I can say is that I enjoyed the big stories as well as the more common way of writing one book stories and reminding the reader of previous stories. I highly recommend the Seafort Saga for this particular style, even if it grows old by the eighth volume. Consider it, though, I was attracted to the story by accidentally reading volume 3 and understanding all of it!

Anyway, back to the book that I was reviewing, damn it! Mindstar Rising describes a post apocalyptic Earth, where global warming and subsequent social and economic disasters brought civilization to the brink of dissolution. A psychic ex-military, now working as a private eye is asked to help in finding the source of industrial sabotage and from then on it just gets more complex and thrilling. I wouldn't say that this is one of Hamilton's better books, though. Even if the book is definitely fun to read, it pales in comparison with Night's Dawn or the Commonwealth Saga. It is more like Fallen Dragon in style, although I do hope it doesn't end in the same ridiculous way.

More to come as I read the next two books.

I was bent on writing an article about tea. You see, tea :) is a word often used instead of "infusion", but the definition of the word says it is specifically an infusion of Camellia sinensis, or the tea plant. I drink tea a lot, although I prefer to alternate the different tastes as much as possible.

But the tea and coffee plants are far from being the only ones used for energizing drinks. In the Theaceae family alone there are a few species that are traditionally used for infusions.

Then there is the mate, from Yerba Mate, a species of the Holly (Ilex) family. 
Other members of the Ilex family are used for traditional drinks.

The Roiboos infusion is an African tea made from a plant that is part of the legume family! I've tried it and I didn't enjoy it much.

How about a little Coca to boost the spirit? The "Coca tea" or "mate de coca" is a traditional drink in the Andes.

You can try Bubble tea made from Tapioca, the processed root of the Cassava plant.

All these links are giving me headaches, but there is more! The stuff above is just the tip of the iceberg, or the most famous plant infusions that are known as tea, because there are all the other plant infusions that are covered by the more generic term "Herbal tea". On that particular page you can find over 60 herbal infusions not made from the tea plant, including mate.

Please follow the plethora of links as I can assure you you will find a lot of interesting things there. This also got me thinking of the way the markets are functioning right now. I drank about every possible tea I could commercially find without looking too deep and I've only experienced tea and mate infusions. How about all the others? When will I be able to drink tapioca tea or coca tea? The plant itself is not illegal! Perhaps deeper digging in the commercial part of the Internet will help me find sources for some of the drinks above. Also, if I only had the time, I would try to learn about herbalism.

Eh, enough of this. Now I must add the images to the post and hopefully someone will read it.

Here is the video for Adrenaline:



Pleymo is a French band, friends of Enhancer and Aqme, two other French bands that I enjoy listening to. Check them out:
French Wikipedia page
English Wikipedia page
Pleymo official site
Myspace page

Darwin's Children comes to continue the story from Darwin's Radio.

My general feeling is that this is not a very good book or series. The basic ideas that started it are interesting, although pretty hard to advocate to a scientist, certainly interesting from a literary point of view, giving multiple opportunities for tension, drama, unexpected, etc. Unfortunately, Greg Bear failed to capitalise those ideas, writing a book that has only a few characters that kind of stumble upon the most important clues for the book subject; it all happens in the USA, with almost no regard to what could or would have happened elsewhere. In a time of a great crisis, the international situation is put on hold, like every nation would take a time-out and ignore its neighbours. And the style is really not touching any emotional chord whatsoever.

Let me summarize: the sudden leap in human evolution is treated by the politicians as a disease, the new species being imprisoned in what could only be described as concentration camps. The entire U.S. democracy and freedom collapses like a giant soap bubble, while the fear of every child bearing family transcends to racism and fascism in no time. The few enlightened people that understand what is going on and try to protect the evolved offspring are also persecuted and surveillanced.

So here we have the eternal American obsession with children in distress and terrified families combined with concentration camps for some of their children, racism and civil disobedience, a newly discovered and frightening evolutionary mechanism, cutting edge genetics and archaeology. This could have been a fantastic story! But no, what came out was an impersonal account of hard to believe actions or feelings coming from emotionally stunted characters. And what was worse is that whenever the tension grew and there was a hint of a great thing happening, the author would make a sudden leap in time, after all had already happened, without describing much anyway.

Also, Darwin's Children is the last book of the series, while the story (as far as I am concerned) stopped halfway through, with no reasonable conclusion. Bottom line: not worth the time.

Her name was Andrea, but her friends called her Andrew, for some reason. Or at least this is what I found out a bit later, at my place. I'd also call her Andrew, as I thought she enjoyed it, or at least that she was used to it more. Turned out she really hated it, but she would not show herself vulnerable to something like this in front of her acquaintances.

One would not call her neither skinny, nor athletic, but she was a thin blonde, with a rather tense looking face, a bit short, but not much; really nice skin. I met her at this party and, even if I wasn't really attracted to her, I was in the mood. I wouldn't have minded shagging her if she was up for it. She certainly was more friendly than the brunette earlier. The bitch had noticed me looking at her and started making faces, to everyone's amusement. I told her she was looking very cute, in a babyish kind of way. I am not very good at acid remarks, obviously, especially when I am wasted. Hitting on a girl that drank in a corner with some other girl was not a good idea, anyway.

I had sobered up by the time I met Andrea. She started talking to me, actually, and I found the conversation with her quite entertaining. Her face was really interesting once she got to smile. All the tension would suddenly vanish and that smile would take 10 years off her. I was quite curious to see how she laughed. She wasn't much of a laugher, though, although I did use some of my best party jokes.

After a while she started telling me stuff about her, even rather private things. I am used to people getting drunk and spilling everything out - I usually do that - but she wasn't drunk. She did accept a drink from me, but she was definitely sober, yet she seemed desperate, somehow. Apparently she was quite the party girl. She told me about one time when she and her friends partied in a bus they rented and they woke up the next morning, all hung over and drooling all over each other. I stupidly smiled and told her I knew how that felt, all the time feeling a bit envious because I had no idea. I also felt like she read me like an open book, anyway.

By that time we'd ended up at my place and Andrea and me continued talking about all kinds of things. In a matter of hours we ended up feeling like good friends, although it was pretty clear we would not stop there. We were never going to be in love with one another either. I think she really enjoyed that I wasn't like her friends and that I didn't even know them. It was then when she told me not to call her Andrew anymore, her name was Andrea.

In fact, we got to leave the party after she did something really unexpected. We had been talking for a few minutes, normal stuff like names and how we are feeling and how the party is like, the bus thing, when she suddenly pulled a big notebook filled with pictures and personal notes written on paper that was cut in different shapes, all glued together in a thing that looked like a little girl's diary. She said "You want me to show you my life plan?". She'd written in that thing all the dreams that she had, detailed plans of what she intended to do with her life, things that she saw and she liked and she wanted to see more of. Her photos were really good, but the notes were really personal. I couldn't believe that she would show something like that to me. I felt like a thief, getting something I did not earn. The party was not a good place to be anymore, it was too impersonal and it lacked privacy.

I told her that if she wrote in the thing that she wanted to get married and have children and that was some weird ploy to pull me into it, it would certainly be a waste of time and not go well. Then she laughed, mind you. It was something I was really honest about, but I think she realised that and to my personal relief, there was no talk of children inside there. Her laughter was really beautiful.

So back at my place I started to look deeper into her journal thingie. She gave me a CD, told me that she would need to process some of the pictures she took and that on the CD was a special software that would read Binko files, whatever graphics format that was, and it would be good if I had it on my computer. It was funny and refreshing to hear that, I laughed and proceeded on installing the software. You see, we never talked about getting together again after this, certainly not at my house again. It was like she was admitting that she liked me and that she knew I liked her and that talking about it would be moot.

I felt than that maybe she would end up fixating on me, acting all neurotic and possessive at one time or another, but I didn't really care. If she would do that, she would be just opening more to me and I would never be forced to lie to her because of it, I would just react to what she would be doing or saying. Without actually defining it, it was already decided that we would have an honest relationship above all else. Not like boyfriend and girlfriend, more like that of best friends.

At that time I got a little nervous, thinking maybe I will get the "let's just be friends" speech and that was to be that, but before I could finish my thought, Andrea was kissing me. She would be gentle and sentimental in bed, not something one would expect from a party girl, but then again, I wouldn't want to believe that she would do that with anyone else.

And then I woke up. It was time for me to go to work and Andrea was already fading from my memory. It was a beautiful dream.