Ubiquitous Build System

Research projects with available code are useful, Open Source is awesome, Free Software is even more, but ultimately building any piece of software has never been as easy as one wish.

The fact is that there is such a miscellaneous of tools to build software that it becomes confusing to build. It wastes developers time and decreases code reuse. Some companies and projects keep a repository with all needed code, external binaries and create build scripts and configurations so that any developer can easily rebuild any part of the project. If you ever worked on such company or project, you know how useful those can be when compared to a miscellaneous of tools available on the wild.

As most developers I am not specially interested in building details, I just wish for a building system to work. Though as an engineer I do wonder what properties such system should have. On the rest of this post I try to specify what requirements I foresee:

Audio Memories

One month ago, before departing from home, I grabbed my old ipod-nano. I had planned to updated it, though there was only time to charge it before boarding a 16 hours travel.

During the travel, the time came to actually start it and listen. Songs were somehow old, and summoned on me, not the meaning of any lyrics, music patterns and rhythms, but feelings. Not the ones the artist tried to transmit but the ones I had by the time I used to listen to those musics. The importance was not on the music details, but on images, feeling and thoughts coming back. In sum, my senses were being exercise by all these audio memories.

30 Days - Solving a problem with code

For years I have participated and actively trained for programming competitions. On a eval of my past I recognize those problems have contributed a lot, if not totally, to my current algorithmic skills. But on the last year I have almost stopped practising or exercising those skills.

Online Personas

All this social web, online identity and personalization has been bugging me for ages and although I do agree web should improve in that vector, I mainly disagree with most approaches. I do wonder not only on implementation aspects (decentralized, security, etc, etc....) but also on other aspects such as unaware behaviours it can build on individuals.

On this post I try to organize my thoughts by writing about it!

30 Days Quests: Revising Method

If you have been reading my latest posts, you will know that I have been trying to do something for each block of 30 days or well.. rounding up to a month.

Part of the project implies posting about it, thus exploiting my motivation on not failing on people to give me extra dedication. For example, this month I have been postponing my challenge and I do realize I have to decide for once and commit to it (by publishing it).

Additionally on a late night chat close to the sea, me and some friends came up with the idea to use the 30 days quests in a social way.

30 days - Watching Movies with Swedish Subtitles

During the past month I have worked on my first 30 day quest:

Watch an English dubbed movie with Swedish subtitles

Although I would not consider it to be a success on learning Swedish, it was satisfying to daily complete something I proposed myself to. I do recognize that performing something daily requires a certain degree of motivation and commitment even when that means spending 2 hours per day watching a movie.

Regarding learning Swedish, I believe that in order to better learn it I should have watched them with no sound and force me to pause and translate the Swedish words I do not know. Though pausing so often during the movie would require more time than the one I had available. Anyhow the list of movies follows:

Trackers and DHT, Torrents and Hashes Trees

I have been spending quite some time reading on P2P file transfers and networks such as BitTorrent so that I can better understand the technology and engineering details on the backend. One of the aspects I am interested on is on how to use magnet links and have torrentless file transfers.

It is interesting to notice that this change from the original bit torrent design to a trackerless and torrentless one conforms to a paradigm change from a distributing tool to a distributed content network.