As my geek side wouldn’t allow me to do any different, this site is hosted in my own server, located at a tiny storage room in my flat. Besides hosting this site and being a test bed for my nerd ideas, it does lot’s of irrelevant things and one of them is to collect dust in it’s bowels. A lot of it. 24 over 7. Thus, besides all the tweaking and maintenance that I must (and love) to do as the server administrator, it also requires me to do a not so usual maintenance action: to vacuum clean it.
For most people that have a website, renting an hosting service is the way to go. And when the site is offline, it means something like an hardware or software upgrade, perhaps even restoring backups due to a cracker attack. With me, usually it means I’m vacuum cleaning it. At least, that is usually the case, but not the last time.
No, I wasn’t hacked. Nor had an hardware failure. Just when I was planning to vacuum clean it, I got into a bigger problem than dust and mites: my home electricity has been cut off (due to some mix up with the billing). That’s the reason this site has been offline the past 24 hours.
Sure, I know that I wouldn’t have this problem if my hosting option would be a more classic one. I could go on an on about the advantages and disadvantages of it – I won’t. I’m not even reconsidering it, I still think this is the best choice for me.
What caught my attention was if people ever thought about where their site sites. Physically that is. Usually their only clue is about the country, sometimes just the continent where it’s located. I guess that for most people this detail is completely irrelevant and the only reason this is interesting for me it’s due do my server being located just next to my kitchen.
Still, last night during the blackout, with not much to do, I wondered about this for a while. It’s easy (for me) to picture how and where (ideally) a big hosting company have their storage servers. That’s not what intrigues me – the competition on this area is quite big and there are loads of small to medium hosting companies located who knows where and how.
I’m aware that some of this small hosting companies have well seasoned administrators that do things the right way. But what about all the others? The ones that improvise along the way doing implementations that aren’t that different from mine. Pictures like this or this always make me smile. The location of the servers can be peculiar has well – most of the maintenance can be done remotely therefore any cheap rented room will do. As long the connection can get there, some good options are those rooms that no one rents. For instance, rooms above loud places like bars or discos, or at some bad neighborhood having at next door someone called Lolita and across the hall a terrorist making plans. But this isn’t the weirdest solution I can think of. I’m sure some of those hosting solutions around are located in attics, or creepy cellars, the kind of places no one goes- not even to vacuum clean them. Now excuse me, I’ve to do some server maintenance.

Once I posted about biro-web, a website made with drawings made with just trivial pens and imagination. Now, it’s author Jon Burgerman is drawing them for BBC Comedy cartoon section. Doesn’t please all tastes but it’s certainly different.

I wonder if in the future, light anti-depressives will be something like this. It sure made me laugh.

At elementary school there weren’t many things I liked to do. Besides being a very quite child, I was very tall for my age and therefore had too clumsy movements to join most of other kids plays. Although I was a good student, I was always being humiliated by the teacher about my bad handwriting. Anyhow, there was one thing I really loved to do: paper folding (aka origami). It was _the_ thing that pulled me from the almost zombie state and got me wired. Occasionally we had classes to do only paper folding where I learned models at first sight and repeated them till perfection. But eventually my teacher didn’t had more models to teach and I was bored again.

Fifteen years later, over a dinner at Mr. Jacks with some foreign friends, I’ve come to realize that my keenness for paper folding wasn’t just an hobbie of only a few or a kids play. Paper folding (origami) plays a really big part in the culture and tradition of Asian countries, specially in Japan and Korea. The fact that amazed me most was a Korean tradition that involved paper cranes – the model I enjoy most folding.

This tradition is still popular today and used widely in Korea. It says that if you fold 1000 paper cranes and give them to the one you love, your wishes of love will come true. Yes, 1000. Still not very impressed? Then, first do some math: I take between 5 to 10 minutes to fold the Korean paper crane version (which isn’t very different from the one I’ve learned in elementary school but slightly more complex, providing a more elegant and robust model) from a square extracted from a A4 paper sheet. Assuming one would take 5 minutes on average, he would be occupied for more than 83 hours. Seems a lot? Right, but it’s still not hard enough so why don’t we save some trees and use instead of A4 paper sheets, 5cmx5cm ones – the most common size for the 1000 paper crane folding? I never tried folding this size but I’m sure it’s a pretty hard task.

If you got interested in the paper crane model, you can try it yourself by following this animated instructions. But if what really catchs your eye is the 1000 paper tradition, you might want to know that it’s possible to buy kits online with 1000 paper sheets and even glass bowls to put them. Right, what I shouldn’t be telling you is that if you are lazy, it’s possible for about 40 euros to buy packages of already folded paper cranes. But of course you wouldn’t cheat on such a thing, am I right?

Special thanks to my friend, D. Y., for all the helpful info on the subject and also for the company at that dinner. :)

I received today my first book from bookcrossing. It came from Greece in a neat brown package and I’m just thrilled with the idea that bookcrossing actually works.

For the ones who might not know bookcrossing yet, the main idea is quite simple: people start by registering books they have at bookcrossing.com and tag them with a number and some instructions. Then, they release it and that’s when the real book crossing starts. There are several methods for doing it and I think I still don’t know them all. The classic one is to release it into the wild by leaving it at some place where it can be found by someone else. Although it sounds nice, this method has proved to get many books lost. Alternatively, one of the most used methods are book rings where the book travels around the people that have subscribe to it and in the end the book returns to it’s original owner. Book rays, same as the previous, but the book keeps traveling ad infinitum. And, of course, simply borrowing it to anyone interested. Oh, yes, there are also RABCK (Random Acts of Bookcrossing Kindness) where someone wants to send a book to someone else randomly, who then reads it and sends it to someone else they randomly find on the site.
It’s possible to check at anytime who first registered a book, where it has been and who has it at the moment through journal entries that each registered book has.
I’m aware that this idea doesn’t attract everyone and even myself only got really interested now, although I heard about it sometime ago. In what comes to books, I hardly read one twice and, unless it’s not mine, why not allow someone else to read it? Most books are too precious to keep in a bookshelf for years IMHO, plus, this way books come with bonus stories about the traveling they already made meeting different places and readers. It’s something like free software meeting project Gutenberg meeting interactive global library. :-)

Ok. So, you are an IT bloke, and you know that if you wanna succeed, you should at least be up to date. Plus, you need to be able to predict things so that you’re not behind when they happen. What do you?

a) make random guesses
b) go to the closest witch and ask her to look into her crystal ball for you
c) take the red pill and go ask Oracle

Seriously, how often do you think about what the future holds in terms of technology? Our parents have witnessed some of the biggest inventions ever, should we expect something of the same magnitude? According to this BBC article, inventions in the future will have a much smaller impact in our lives than the ones in the past.
The article reminded me of a BT Exact white paper I read some time ago. It’s authors, Ian Pearson and Ian Neild, have compiled a technology timeline (link to pdf) to provide BT researchers and managers a way to foresee what the future holds when they have to make products or services. The document is quite easy to read and doesn’t focus only on technology itself but also in areas like education, demographics, transport and others and deserves a quick browse. It started in 1991 and has been updated every two or three years, learning from it’s own mistakes, and adding new predictions every edition. I’ve emailed Ian Pearson asking if there will be a new version since the latest dates from 2001 and it’s scheduled for next spring. Meanwhile, here are some handpicked predictions for the future from that document.

And if for some reason you don’t find this enough to make the future sound interesting, try this technology timeline and poke into future millennia. Satisfaction garanteed or your money returned. Maybe.

The creator of this book is an Italian design/animation company called Delicatessen that putted together 400 works of 24 Japanese artists. Now, they created another book called Mascotte! which does not only have illustration works but also reaches several other fields of design, photography, advertising works and more.

 
Still on the illustration line, check the results of this contest which had for the theme, Gary Larson’s work The far side.

It’s not a very good year for selling chestnuts, miss E. said. She is 73, and spent a big part of them doing it so she ought to know. She started by helping her relatives and through the years she sold at almost every city in the country. There isn’t anything relevant about chestnuts that she doesn’t know about.

First, offered me two extra chestnuts. Because I was friendly she said. Then, gave me big beautiful smile when I asked to take some pictures of her. I’ve promissed her a copy. I hope she likes it.

Some of my friends would say I’m a plan maker by nature. Truth is, I hate to make plans, but I dislike even more the consequences of not making them. I would rather toy with a plan at it’s own speed and give birth to it when we both think it’s ready. I don’t see this has a passive attitude although I know this has as much of wishful thinking as naiveness.

My future is starting to stumble on me and plans are required so that I don’t fall but rather lift off. Faster that I wished, my last school semester is running towards it’s end, and with that the closer is my internship and graduation. Delaying this for another year sounds appealing but I can’t afford that. Rather, my parents can’t afford having me another year in the university. I need to get rid of this feeling of being such a weight to them and perhaps even pay them back somehow to justify why they did so many sacrifices to allow me to do what I wanted. For that, I’m the one that has to do some sacrifices now: this semester expects me to work like mad while at the same time I’m craving for some vacations. Maybe I’ll have to make some plans to have some at some point.

(Meanwhile, posting should get back to normal in the next days. It has been raining on my raft lately so I’ve decided to suspend posts for the sake of the blog itself.)

Did you ever thought about your family tree closely? Common sense says that we all have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents and so on following a geometric progression, doubling in each generation. But, as someone said, “common sense is what tells us that the world is flat“.

If we assume that there is a new generation each 25 years and we go back 600 years, that’s 2²⁴ which is already a respectable number of 1 million grandparents. But things get trickier when we go further. For instance, if go back another 600 years (to 800AD), that will get us 2⁴⁸. That’s 281.5 trillion grandparents and with this we get a problem: in 800AD there weren’t that much people on the world. Actually, today we are only 6.3 billions.

So where’s the catch? You probably guessed it already. Our ancestors along the way married their cousins without knowing. This is called pedigree collapse and the closer the cousin, the bigger is the percentage of the collapse. Of course the worst case is when two siblings got married (think royalty-wise for instance) when it’s a major 50% collapse. With a first cousin it’s a 25% cut-down but collapses are still relevant with more distant cousins which is the most common case.

Some geneticists believe that everybody on earth is at least 50^th cousin to everybody else and most of us are a lot more closer, which really puts the mankind family concept into perspective. So, please keep up in mind that if you get mad with some complete stranger, chances are that he/she is probably your 25^th cousin. :)

• Europe is following Canada’s example on the use of shocking images in the anti-smoking campaign: a total of 42 images containing from rotten lungs to a man with a large tumour on his throat. The European comission will let each country do decide whether or not to include the images on cigarette packs. Somehow, I think that smokers will not be the only ones to get shocked by this.
• Should programs made by public broadcasters, like television and radio – paid with public funds – belong to public domain? Dutch parliamentarians believe so and they go further: it should be distributed online.
• In an interview to the MOJO magazine, the Icelandic singer Björk confessed that Amália Rodrigues is one of her 3 favourite female voices being povo que lavas no rio the favourite song from her.