Pablo's blog

A bit of this, a bit of that and a lot about computers

11 Feb 2012
6 Comments

Typing Esperanto in MacOSX

In one way or another you can type Esperanto in any operating system without using the x-system (which I really dislike). Of all the operating systems and UIs I used (many!), the one that makes typing Esperanto the best is MacOSX, but you have to configure your keyboard properly first (this is for English based Qwerty keyboards, not sure how it would work with others). You want U.S. Extended:

To type the pointy hats, you press ⌥+6 which gives you:

and then the following letter, g, c, S, G, whatever: Ĝ

For ŭ is the same, but you have to press ⌥+b to get the other kind of hat:

and that’s all there’s to it.

Posted in Personal and tagged , ,
07 Feb 2012

The importance of context

Since I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time when I was 15 years old, I’ve been wanting to watch it on the big screen. Last Sunday I realized that dream.

A little story about why that movie was so important to me. There’s a before and an after 2001 in my life. I think it was the first movie that really challenged my brain. The first movie that when the credits rolled up I asked myself “What the fuck just happened?”.

It was recommended to me by a teacher, so I went and asked him… without the “fuck” I suppose. He told me that if I wanted to understand it, I’d have to read the book. I read the book and I understood more, but I had even more questions. So I read the next book, and the next, and the next. And by the time I had finished I was hooked into reading science fiction for the rest of my life.

Back to the topic, context. It’s not an entertaining movie. It’s slow, it’s abstract, it’s art. But hey, even if you watch Alien it doesn’t look like entertainment, it’s slow and looks artistic. Honestly, go and watch it, you’ll see. 2001 was released before Armstrong put a foot on the moon, in 1968.

Let me put that in context for you. Star Wars wouldn’t come out for another 9 years. Star Trek was on it’s second season and not many people were paying attention, yet. I bet for most people, 2001 was the first time in their lives when they saw outer space in the big screen.

But 2001 isn’t just another silly space opera (of which the space age was probably full of). In 2001, space is silent, like it really is. How important is that? I watched Firefly just because space was silent. That important.

2001 doesn’t have some magic solution for artificial gravity, like almost all other movies and TV shows. We have huge revolving space stations as well as spaceships with revolving sections. We see amazing shots of people walking on this curved floors. Or using sticky shoes. We not only see space… we see ourselves, for real, in space. I don’t think I’d seen anything that treated outer space as realistically as 2001, ever. And it happened in 1968.

Put that movie in context, ignore the long psychedelic scenes (hey! it was the 60s!), and it’ll blow your mind. Context is important.

I also recently read Snow Crash. When the book started describing a kind of physical virtual reality, with people walking on virtual streets, companies putting buildings on those streets, etc. I was honestly disgusted. I couldn’t stop feeling that the author somehow missed the last 10 years of history when we realised that VRML (remember VRML? Virtual Reality Markup Language) was not the way to go. And then I saw the book was released on 1992 and all made sense to me. Reading it in context was awesome and I enjoyed it a lot.

Thanks to Daniel Magliola and Romina Roca for reading drafts of this.

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04 Feb 2012

Making your app work with no data

Most applications, web, desktop or mobile, handle some kind of data. When we are developing them we generally generate some sample data to play with and we forget to ever run the application without it. The problem is that the first impression people will get of our app is without data. And first impressions are important.

In the application I’m building, Watu, we are resorting to just create some sample data for customers to play with. Making the application beautiful and meaningful without data is just too hard. It seems the guys at JetBrains spent some time thinking of this because RubyMine 4.0 shows this when there are no open files:

I think that simple change it’s a good step towards making the application nicer in the no-data scenario, making people happier, as well as making people more productive in it, making the application more useful.

I do wonder why they didn’t include the most useful of the shortcuts: ⌘⇧N. I think I press that more than any other. It pops up this little dialog:

in which you can type and it’ll search among all your files (and files inside the gems, that is, libraries, of your project if it doesn’t match anything in your project or if you enable by ticking the include non-project files):

What I really like, compared to other implementations of this feature, is that you can add more parts of the path, for example:

Without that feature, my productivity would drop a 10%. I’m not exaggerating, that’s my estimation, as I recently have to code using TextMate instead of RubyMine.

Before you send me the hate-mail, I know TextMate has a similar feature although I think not as advanced (not without plugins at least) but since the key shortcut was different, it was almost like it didn’t exist for me, so I experienced coding without that feature at all.

Another potentially useful way to find code is to use ⌘N which allows you to search for a class:

But since in a Rails projects most classes are in a file with the same name (but underscore instead of camel case) and the file dialog allows me to find views, wich the class dialog doesn’t, I never use the class dialog.

No… I’m not affiliated with JetBrains, makers of RubyMine in any way. I just love the tool and I wish more Ruby programmers would give it a try because I think they’ll also find it useful and the more people that are using it, the more resources JetBrains is likely to put into its development which ultimately benefits me. And they are cool guys, a pleasure to deal with every time I report a bug or ask for a feature.

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03 Feb 2012

ASCII Table of Correlatives

Recently I needed the table of correlatives in pure ASCII form and I couldn’t find it online, so I built it (it took more time that I’m willing to admit):

┌───────────────┬──────────┬────────────┬────────────┬───────────┬──────────┐
│               │ Question │ Indication │ Indefinite │ Universal │ Negative │
│               │ ki–      │ ti–        │ i–         │ ĉi–       │ neni–    │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Thing -o      │ kio      │ tio        │ io         │ ĉio       │ nenio    │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Individual -u │ kiu      │ tiu        │ iu         │ ĉiu       │ neniu    │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Reason –al    │ kial     │ tial       │ ial        │ ĉial      │ nenial   │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Time -am      │ kiam     │ tiam       │ iam        │ ĉiam      │ neniam   │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Place -e      │ kie      │ tie        │ ie         │ ĉie       │ nenie    │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Manner -el    │ kiel     │ tiel       │ iel        │ ĉiel      │ neniel   │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Quality –a    │ kia      │ tia        │ ia         │ ĉia       │ nenia    │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Amount -om    │ kom      │ tiom       │ iom        │ ĉiom      │ neniom   │
└───────────────┴──────────┴────────────┴────────────┴───────────┴──────────┘

I used the DOS box drawing characters and only single lines. Double lines in some common fonts were broken. And the beautiful Unicode box drawing characters were broken in several fonts.

If you admire the table of correlatives as much as I do, maybe you want to buy some schwag with it: http://www.cafepress.com/correlatives (disclaimer, I’m selling that stuff).

Isn’t this a great notebook to take to your Esperanto lessons:

Not allowed during exams

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01 Feb 2012
1 Comment

Drawing, proud for the first time

Since I been taking drawing lessons I was never satisfied with the results. To be honest, the approach the teacher is proposing is not what’s natural for me, so it’s a struggle.

Posted in Personal and tagged
26 Jan 2012
1 Comment

Dancing

Couple dancing

Photo by mattcornock

I started taking dancing lessons recently. It was something that’s been on my to-do list for maybe half my life… but that’s another story. I went for ballroom and latin dancing lessons at The Dance of Life Studio. I think the teacher, Angelo, is great.

Angelo shows us a move, first to the gents and then to the ladies or the other way around. We practice it by ourselves for a little while and then the expected but also dreaded time comes: to try it out with a partner.

I walk to a partner, take her right hand with my left and set into position. It’s like walking to the edge of a cliff and peek down. The excitement! The expectation! 2… 3… 4… we jump! Most of the time, we crash. Sometimes even literally!

But sometimes, we fly! Together we rise above the horizon and I wish we would never land again. It’s magic!

Thanks for reviewing this post to: Daniel Magliola and Romina Roca.

Posted in Personal and tagged , , , ,
10 Nov 2011
2 Comments

Strange experience when viewing a flat

I recently moved to London and I’m looking for a flatshare close to the office. I went to see one and after we did the usual tour of the whole house and we sat down for a little chat, something unexpected happened… the lights went off.

A big dark house

Picture by Ben Gilman

The lights and everything. Total black out. The woman receiving me quickly confirmed that it was the whole block. I suppose we both felt better about it. It wasn’t something wrong at the house.

I used the flashlight… or should I say torch? in my phone and she was glad we got some light. The situation was less than ideal… but some laugh, light some candles and it would have been alright. Something else happened.

The alarm… that alarm that is installed at the house but nobody uses and it’s supposedly disabled. That alarm started to making a loud horrible noise. What a pain! We tried calling the numbers in the alarm box but those lines were disconnected. When I left it was still hauling. So weird.

Posted in Personal and tagged , , , ,
01 Nov 2011
1 Comment

Moving to London, joining a startup

The Palace of Westminster at night seen from the south bank of the River Thames.

London by Jim Trodel

I’m making a lot of changes in my life. I’m moving to London… tomorrow. I’m really excited about it. I wanted to live in London for a while already. In that topic, do you know anyone that wants to share a flat in the London Bridge area?

Also, I’m changing jobs. In London I’m joining a startup called Watu. Well, I’m part of the founding team and I’ll be the CTO, which for now, it’s just an overly fancy way to say the coder, but I like it. We are solving the problem of managing employees from publishing the open positions at a company to interviewing, to paying salaries, to assigning and managing shifts. The whole deal. I’m really excited about it and I’m looking forward to it.

Posted in Personal and tagged , , , , ,
17 Oct 2011
1 Comment

Learning to shoot a handgun

Finally I managed to go to a course to learn to shoot a handgun. Generally I would prefer to spend money on things. For the price of the course I could have bought a great airgun, but happier people spend money on experiences, not on things. I’m trying to learn.

The first lesson was with a .22 handgun. The teacher lent me his own CZ 122 of which I took a picture:

Picture of CZ 122 Sport, part black and silver, with the slider open

CZ 122 Sport, the one I shot with.

I loved shooting with that one. It worked really well. Much better than the other really used up guns for beginners. On the second lesson we went up in calibre to a Bersa Thunder 9:

Stock picture of a pistol Bersa Thunder 9, black

Bersa Thunder 9.

I learned something very important. The teacher told us to load 5 rounds and shoot them. I did that, put down the gun and moved the target back to me. I counted 4 holes. I doubt I missed the target completely because those four holes were very close to the center. Then I looked down to the table and the gun: it was still loaded, there was still one round in the chamber and ready to fire. In my mind that gun was unloaded; but it wasn’t. I obviously treated it as loaded even when I believed it wasn’t because of… well… this.

Me, shooting in a very controlled environment, knowing I had to count the shots, and I miscounted. I’ll never laugh again at anybody for not counting the number of shots correctly. It’s so easy to make a mistake. And always, always treat every gun as loaded… they might be.

Thanks for reading a draft of this to Ethan Blanton.

Posted in Personal and tagged , , , , , ,
01 Oct 2011

Uptime: 100%

Balance by Tony Roberts

This is the first time I see this:

-------------------------------------
pupeno.com
Service: pupeno.com
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
-------------------------------------

It was always above 98%, often above 99% and I was proud of that because it was my own crappy server doing it. But now I’m proud of not caring about it, letting someone else solve a problem I’m not interested in and focus on what I am interested in. 100% uptime provided by WordPress.com.

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