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.

Decentralized Topology

In a generic way, browser is a term for an interface that allows navigation of objects [1]. Nonetheless, for the topic pursued on this post, the specific notion of browser is uninteresting: new browsers/interfaces can be implemented at any time but the inherent topology of the space transversed by them is fixed and defined by the space itself.

In case of the Web, the navigation topology is defined by the use of anchors and links. Those elements allow a page to reference it's neighbours and enforce a model of local authority where a page controls to where it links to. Problems show up as the inability or hard-time implementing back-links, collaborative information and social web. Additionally, certain content types do not allow links on it own, creating a web of pages rather than a web of contents.

30 Days Quests

For some time I got the feeling I want to organize my life in terms of challenges or projects and improve the number of completed ones. Let those tasks be physical activities or highly advanced computer science projects that get dropped easily after drawing a solution in my mind.

I saw then the Matt Cutts' talk on doing something new every 30 days and felt that would be a great start for me. Conforming that moves along I will re-iterate on the process and start planning longer-term and far-fetch objectives.

Controlling Flow: Call with Current Continuation

It is my belief that programming concepts one is able to understand and master truly distinguish a coder ability to think and design beautiful code. Learning those concepts is essential for becoming a better programmer. [I will refrain from defining "better programmer".]

Starting easily, do you remember when you tried to understand pointers for the first time? Or when you first heard about object oriented programming? Or all those fancy paradigms or data structures? It's not like you need to use them, but understanding them probably increases your awareness of how things can be done.

Also you can always survive without them, but having those tools readily available on a language allow you to focus on the implementation problem without needing to care on specific rules (e.g. Many people do OOP in pure C and many implement iterators in C++ though there is a clear lack of support for it).

I recently came with a new concept I was not aware of: a new way to control and understand the flow of computation. Well controlling flow can be done with several techniques - there is conditionals and loops for all flavours, there is exceptions and there is generators, there is callbacks, there is message oriented programming style, etc... - and there is continuations!

Hello World,

It is important to note that this blog has just been called into existence and it is an innocent and young concept that had very little time to come in terms with its identity. Nonetheless this is what the author thought at the time of creation:

Through life, one comes across several paths and decisions. Some are easily justified and some feel natural and in an unexplainable way agree with one's question to Life, Universe and Everything. But other decisions do not feel natural and are not easily justified: starting a blog was one of those for me.