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It helped me create the soundtrack of my life, and it is back! Rock 101


--de utro miembro de la inolvidable banda utópica que creció escuchando puro, total y absoluto rock & roll.

Location, location, location. The fate of this place
would be different if it wasn't for its setting. I ordered two
different tacos (or tacones, as they call them) that got my mouth
watering: chipotle shrimp and adobo fish. What a disappointment! The
shrimp were cold machine pealed baby shrimp with nothing on them. The
chipotle sauce was the mayonnaise used on the tortilla (the flour
tortilla was the only thing that impressed me: fresh, and warmed with
a grill). The fish tacos did a bit better (they reminded me of a cod stew)
but were drown by the flavour of the cole slaw they use as a
garnishing (why put more cole slow when they serve it with a side of
cole slaw)? The only saving grace is that they sell each taco
individually (6 and 5 each). By the way, the roll them into cones,
which makes them difficult to eat and makes them look bigger than they
are (and they can put most of the prime filler towards the front of
the cone). Definitely only a place to have a quick snack while in the
area but I rather go to Hernandez or Jeff's Pig BBQ Joint for better
food. Why is it one of the top rated places in Trip Advisor? Because
tourists (and some locals) love to eat by the water. It also
highlights the way populism works: a person that goes to this place
has completely different expectations than one going to Brasserie
L'Ecole; I suspect that for many, Red Fish Blue Fish is less about
food than a cheap meal by the ocean. Reviews need context, and that is
why editors of information will continue to be needed.

By the way: this is a "take out" place with some seating. It has
absolutely no service.

I admire Jose Mourinho. Of course he gets to couch rich teams and hand picks his players. But at the level where he couches, his success is astonishing. His latest win of the 3 championships with the Inter is the best proof. In my opinion, he is the best (at least this year) and Guardiola will probably acknowledge that.

Football couching has changed a lot. Benitez and Mourinho are technocrats that approach teams like a machine. I would really like to know more about his methods. Perhaps one day he will write about them.

While he has been controversial, his latest move is one that I finally feel uneasy about. If he signs for Madrid, and it looks like he is, he will finally turn to the Dark Side of the Force. I can't wait to see what happens during the next season at La Liga. My loyalty, however, will stay with the children of La Masia, on the Bright Side of the Force.

--dmg

P.S. This World Cup, for the first time since I can remember, my loyalty has switched from the team of Cruyff to the country that adopted him---and whose core is from the team that he loves.

P.S.S. 2010 05 29. I just watched the way Valdes chases Mourinho after Inter eliminated Barza in the semifinal of the Champions. How despicable! Add on top of that the sprinklers. Mourinho was right: "After all, when you're not used to losing, it can be hard to lose." From the stadium administration, I can accept that, but from Valdes? It reminds me of Bobby Alomar when he spat on the umpire.

This weekend I watched "The People vs Larry Flint". One of the scenes is:


Larry: You guys read Playboy?
Friend 1: Well yeah.
Friend 2: Sure.
Jimmy: Yeah.
Larry: Uhmm . . . Did you, uh--excuse me, baby. Did you enjoy this month's article on how to hook up your quadraphonic stereo system?
Friend 3: I think I missed that one.
Larry: And, uh, did you follow their advice on how to make a perfect martini?
Chester: Hey, Larry, c'mon man, move over.
Larry: Who is this magazine for anyway? I mean, ya know, it's like if you don't make twenty thousand-plus a year, you don't jerk off. Seven million people buying it, and nobody's reading it. Gentlemen, Playboy is mocking you!

Today I opened the New York Times Travel Magazine, that is included with the Sunday edition of the paper (yes, I get the paper version). I found an editorial for the Yves Saint Laurent's Travel Adapter, at a list price of 450 US. The description reads: "Considering how long stylish travelers have had to cart around less-than-beautiful electrical doohickeys, it's a wonder that fashion hasn't come to the rescue sooner."

I wonder if it is mocking me.

And I haven't even mentioned the ads for many of its products.

--dmg

Most of Ubuntu works out of the box. One of the few areas that has no support is autorotation.

You need to create your own scripts to autorotate the screen, and more important, to set the wacom tablet to the corresponding rotation.

Three major changes in Ubuntu affect this.

I have always wonder why there is sooooo little research on the field of desks. Computers have changed the way we use them
(and need them). In fact, with a computer, it matters little the tilt of the desk. So why should they be horizontal at all.
And why should we be in "sitting" position.

My calendar keeps reminding me of birthdays of friends. Some of them I haven't seen in many years. One my friend's birthdays came and went again, and reminded me that she didn't respond the last time I emailed her. That surprised me. Perhaps I had the wrong email.

So I search for her. As a researcher, she is easy to find... I thought.... But after few minutes I found she had died. And it was 6 months before I emailed her the last time.

Makes me think about all those messages that I sometimes ignore. One day I won't be able to reply to them.

--dmg

I get tired of the little keyboards in the small devices (or lack of). Why don't hardware manufacturers use the back of the device for input?

Yes, it is not trivial. People will have to adjust to "touch type". but the real estate of the back of devices is huge (think my laptop in tablet mode). It can easily hold a small keyboard, or another new type of control device that will change the way we interact with our portable devices. The same applies to phones. Their back is usually wasted, except for a camera, in the best of cases.

Hardware manufactures, I want the back of my devices to have an input device!

--dmg

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/science/19essay.html

--dmg

Polaroiods with a Speed Graphic.

“You don’t need a lot of stuff to make a shot. You don’t need lights and tripods. Just look at your subject, look at the light and shoot. You don’t need to take a thousand pictures to get a good picture. You need one good picture. One shot."

“Most photographers don’t have a good picture of themselves,” he explained. “They think nobody can take as good a picture as they can. So, I prove them wrong. There’s good money there.”


I want my photo taken!



--dmg

@article{ 10.1109/MS.2009.10,
author = {Michael W. Godfrey and Ahmed E. Hassan and James Herbsleb and Gail C. Murphy and Martin Robillard and Prem Devanbu and Audris Mockus and Dewayne E. Perry and David Notkin},
title = {Future of Mining Software Archives: A Roundtable},
journal ={IEEE Software},
volume = {26},
number = {1},
issn = {0740-7459},
year = {2009},
pages = {67-70},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MS.2009.10},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}

Some opinions more interesting than others. My take:

- Mike: Get the users to create data that can be stored. And to better
understand the questions that are asked.

- Ahmed: let us look at repositories as assets (I think we already do
this)... Add APIs to repositories... more advanced
repositories.... (show us the money!)

- James: visualization and better exploration tools.

- Gail. Let us store more history (which brings the question... wouldn't
that be illegal under Canadian laws...)

- Martin: Let us learn from past searches (his was the one that I liked
the most)

- Prem: social aspects (and a small plug to Peter's work)

- Audris: Models (he refers to work I have been thinking
about... ownership)

- Perry (the only person in this group I don't know): MSR is a
researchers, not a practitioners field (I have been saying this for a
long time)

- David: Causality, something that many researchers in MSR forget.

Something we should not forget: Mike, Ahmed, Gail and Martin are Canadian researchers in Canadian Universities.

--dmg

My latest modification to xournal is the ability to open the same PDF in evince, and a menu option to open the same PDF (when annotating one) in Evince. This way you can cut and paste text from the PDF (a feature that does not exist in xournal).

Available in my fork of xournal: http://github.com/dmgerman/xournal


--dmg

A day after I claimed I did not align with her reviews, she offers a piece that exudes her love for the medium, and I could not agree more.

I rarely go to the movies these days, but out of the last 4 times I did, 2 were to see Batman in Imax, and one to see Avatar in 3d (the last one to see Coraline in 3D, plus one attempt at the Imax to see Star Trek, but it was sold-out). I soo much wish one day to see Avatar in 3d in Imax. Our movie theaters are too small to properly cover
my field of view (the old rule of the width of the view should be twice my distance to the screen). Avatar will be shown in iMax in Victoria, but I don't think with 3D. I'll have to check...

--dmg

How NOT to review a paper: the tools and techniques of the adversarial reviewer
is an entertaining paper that invites for self reflection. A must-read for anybody who has to review a paper in computer science.

--dmg

I need to be able to open xournal files (and pdfs) in a given page. This is part of trying to be able to use remember and org with PDFs.
Here is my patch to do it:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2924825&group_id=163434&atid=827735

It is already committed to my own personal fork of xournal

--dmg