Video of the Week: Good thing I don't know how to Dunk!

Good thing I don't know how to Dunk or else I might lose my head!


http://view.break.com/336209 - Watch more free videos

What is YAGNI?

This is generally a software engineering term that stands You Ain't Gonna Need It.

Basically in software development a programmer should never create a "generalize" module for the sake of generalization, adding complexity to things that will probable never exist. This usually happens when a programmer over thinks too much about code reuse should be advocated in every modules he will create.

A best advice usually given is keeping all modules in the simplest state as possible. And adding new features as needed so that modules might not lead to code bloat.

Con quits Linux

Con Kolivas, a prominent Linux kernel developer, recently hanged up his glove in Linux development. Why did he left it all behind? If you're interested on Linux programming please take a time to read about the article. It talks about the software and hardware market and its impact on the Linux kernel development. He also gave an insight about the brutal kernel development discussions and how ego tripping runs amok in it.

Con Kolivas was a kernel developer who specializes in process scheduling. If you are a computer science student you will understand what process scheduling is about. If you don't know what it is, please take a look at scheduling computing [wikipedia] to appreciate it more.

As much as I wanted to join in the kernel development, the mailing list just struck fear in me. I know a little about operating systems development back in college days but it seems that I'm just a small fish in a big pond of kernel hackers. Oh well, sad day for Linux development, but all the thanks and luck to Con in his future endeavor.

Picture of the Week: Priceless Facial Expression

Price of the balloon: $1
Price of the red necklace: $1

A very funny facial expression that will be your trademark until you die: Priceless

The Dark Room

Recently, I've been visiting Codesqueeze and stumbled upon an article about how the author writes blogs. He outlined that he uses an editor named Dark Room. Curious, I went to the Dark Room site and quickly downloaded the application. According to the site Dark Room is "a full screen, distraction free, writing environment and unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text". Pretty simple explanation but still I gave it a try. The application is small, it contains about 3 files - the DarkRoom.exe file, a configuration file and a bug-list file. No more installation, just a simple executable file. The program automatically launches into fullscreen and looks like a shell application - a bash shell to be exact to *nix users. It is simple, elegant and it really is a distraction-free tool.

Bloggers should take a look at this tool. This will save you countless of blogging hours and helps you focus in writing exactly what's on your mind.

Screenshot of Dark Room in fullscreen.

Video of the Week: Thriller!!!!!

Wtf! Will I be ashamed that the whole inmates in our country's prison are dancing to the tune of Thriller? or will I be proud that we are the best dancers in the world?

I wonder how did the discussion started....

Inmate1: Guys we need to have a dance number....
Inmate2: WTF? at least not "hit me baby one more time"
Inmate1: ok, it would be Thriller, we all love jacko the wacko!

On the sidenote, why not Smooth Criminal?

Simpsonized Yourself!

With Simpson's the Movie just around the corner, Burger King launches a new viral marketing ad that will transform your picture into one of the Simpson's character. Here is my photo before and after being simpsonized.

before

after

Jan2x Simpson in the famous Kwik-e-Mart

Please take note of all the instructions in the site. No black and white photography, well I posted my non-edited photo. Click here to be simpsonized!

* updated, sorry the proper link is www.simpsonizeme.com

Picture of the Week: Pacific Sunset wallpaper

Sunset over the Pacific. Simply breathtaking. Click the image to view the larger version.

I Want Eee!

I know what I want for Christmas! An Eee! According to Asus, Eee stands for "easy to learn, easy to play, easy to work". Just by hearing the name one can recall a similar product the Nintendo Wii. Maybe it was named as such to conjure the novice-friendly approach of Wii into computing.

Just look how small it is.

Specifications

According to reports the Asus Eee PC 701 specifications are:

• 7-inch display
  
• 802.11b/g WiFi
• Ethernet
• modem
• webcam
• 900 MHz Intel Dothan Pentium M CPU
• 512MB of RAM
• 4 or 8 GB flash drive
• and a Linux OS

This thing runs Linux.

What about the price?

This is the reason why I want this gadget. Price starts at $199 for the 4GB model and $299 for the 8GB model. Imagine that! For less than PHP 10K I can have a spanking brand new, powerful, and very ultraportable laptop-lite.

The Market

Students or someone who just wants a laptop to:

• browse the web
• check emails
• instant messaging
• video conferencing
• jot down notes
• create simple office related tasks
  
• upload and download files

This machine is heaven-sent. With Palm Foleo just around the corner, it will be an interesting year for laptop-lites. Hoping to grab one in stores by the year-end. And again hoping that Filipino tech shops won't overprice this thing.

* for a very thorough review of this thing, click here.

Video of the Week: Amazing Painting

Folding@home

Folding@home client running in my machine.

Do you leave your computer ALWAYS ON all the time? If yes, then please contribute to the Folding@home project. What better way to spend those idle processing hours than helping a scientific community achieve something groundbreaking. Don't worry, Folding@home only takes advantage of unused CPU cycles on a computer system. So when you're doing an all-nighter just downloading stuffs then you can take away the guilt by helping out at a fraction of your electricity consumption.

What is this Folding@home?

According to wikipedia, Folding@home (also known as FAH or F@H) is a distributed computing project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics simulations. Folding@home is one of the largest distributed computing projects. The goal of the project is "to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases."

Great! Can I use my Linux machine?

Hell yeah! Folding@home currently runs in Windows, Linux and Mac machines. And if you have a PlayStation 3, Folding@home just released a client for your big powerful console. To download the Folding@home client in your machine, please click here.

Picture of the Week: Billboard Wars

Filipinos are constantly bombarded with non-sense and eye-irritating billboards. But in India there is a Billboard war going on. Here are the 3 airlines competing at the same time lambasting their competitor. The top one was said to be photoshopped, but nevertheless funny as hell. Start from the bottom to the top and click the picture to view it at a larger size.

Who wants Pownce?

Today I received an invite to try out the new Web 2.0 app by Kevin Rose - the guy that founded Digg. The new web app is called Pownce. According to their site "Pownce is a way to send stuff to your friends. What kind of stuff? You can send just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more". Basically when you think about it, it is just a glorified FTP client with a slick graphical interface. You can use their web-app or download the Pownce desktop software.

How it was created

According to their site, Pownce was created using Django which is Python powered. The database is MySQL running on Linux Debian servers and web servers powered by a combination of Apache and Perlbal. Well, it is good to know that all of these are Open Source software.

The desktop client is written in Flex from Adobe's AIR platform. Which might be a deal breaker for some because as of now it only supports Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X platforms.

Invites

I have 4 invites remaining to be given away. So anyone who wants to try it out, just post a shout out. And don't forget to add me up.

Video of the Week: Is Baseball Boring?

Have you seen someone sleeping in a basketball tournament in the Philippines? I for one haven't seen one. But this video, in a baseball game (America's favorite past-time) someone was caught sleeping. And this is the reason why you shouldn't sleep during a sports game.



P.S. Is baseball that boring? Sorry for my ignorance, I haven't seen a baseball game before.

Will you drink the Kool-Aid?

This idiomatic expression has been going around the internets lately. It has been posted on Digg especially with regards to rabid Microsoft, Linux and Apple fanboys. And you may ask, what the hell does 'drinking the Kool-aid' means?

History

To give you a little background, according to wikipedia during the early 1960s a group of people called Merry Pranksters toured America and held 'Acid Test' events by drinking a LSD-laced Kool-Aid. Those who 'drink the Kool-Aid' upheld and accepted the LSD drug culture during that time.

'Drinking the Kool-Aid' is now closely associated with the cult mass-suicide by the people of Jonestown, Guyana by drinking grape-flavoured Flavor-Aid laced with potassium cyanide. Thus in the process 'Drinking the Kool-Aid' idiom becomes synonymous with unnatural loyalty and devotion.

Conclusions

Let's go back to all rabid fanboys out there. Say for example, when his Steveness at Apple announces a product every Mac fanatic will gladly embrace it and systematically bash other company's product. This is not just confined in Apple's world but also in Microsoft and Linux. This is clearly a manifestation of blindly following someone's philosophy. Clearly when someone does this you will definitely hear the phrase 'someone's been drinking Kool-Aid lately'.

So please use you mind and don't be a lemming. "There's a sucker born every minute" - P.T. Barnum.

Kill yourself. Save the world.

There was an article about a week ago that stated that planet Earth is not big enough for 6,500,000,000 people. The premise of the article was that there are 3 factors that contributes to the state of equilibrium of our planet, and if one of these state is breached then we will face catastrophic consequences. Apparently, it is the devastating human activity that leads to the deterioration of our planet.

What happened?

With the rise of human population during the last century there was also an increase in the exploitation and production of natural resources. In order to supply the world with enough basic needs (water and food) we have to rely on faster transaction of energy powers. Gone are the days that humans use organic resources to fuel the fire, now humans rely on fossil fuels to drive the economy, of which it sits on a limited supply.

As human population rises the birth rate of humans also increases. However the problem is that mortality rate of humans is decreasing. The advancement in medicine and technology have became - for some - a bane to human population control.

"Overpopulation? What's that?"

Conclusions

Is this really the reason why we have so many people in our planet? I always thought and believe - I am not an expert on this topic - that people generally tend to conclude that the population is booming because all the cities in the world are crowded. In my opinion, with respect to the size of the Earth, our population is not abnormal but rather it is just the opposite, however instability will arise when movement of people towards urban areas is not taken care of.

The more people concentrate their lives on urban areas the more susceptible we are in exploiting nature and thus gravitate towards self-destruction. It is not because rural areas tend to have low economy but because governments promote urbanism. If we can stay 50-50, half of the populace will live in rural areas and the remaining in urban areas I think population growth will balance itself.

A little quote on over-population from someone - "please kill yourself to give room for us all".

Picture of the Week: Aurora Borealis

This is the great Aurora Borealis as seen from space. Definitely one of the things I want to watch before I die. Click on the picture to view the larger version.