Advance and Be Mechanized

Vida Latina en Canadá es una revista de periodicidad mensual que se reparte en las ciudades de Kitchener, Waterloo, Guelph y London en el suroeste de Ontario.

La revista está dirigida por Luis Gutiérrez y se edita en formato bilingüe inglés - español.

Desde el número de enero de este año he empezado a colaborar con una página de tecnología. Se aceptan con gusto ideas o sugerencias para próximos artículos.

Latin Life in Canada is a monthly magazine distributed in the cities of Kitchener, Waterloo, Guelph and London in southwestern Ontario.

The magazine is directed by Luis Gutierrez and it's edited in a bilingual English/Spanish format.

Since this year's January issue I'm collaborating with a technology page. I'll gladly hear any ideas or suggestions for upcoming articles.

There are a bunch of places where I go to lunch and in a couple of them the can of soda is $1 and bottled water is $1.50 or more. I mean soda is water plus some other unhealthy stuff like sugar (actually most likely High Fructose Corn Syrup or HFCS, which is everywhere due to corn subsidies in the US) , so how come an aluminum can with water and other ingredients is more expensive than a plastic bottle of just water?

And it's not like all the bottled water comes from some far-away pristine underground spring where is carefully bottled in all its purity, but for example here in Ontario the Aquafina water bottle (from Pepsi) is tap water. I kid you not, it's right there in the label: “water from the public distribution of Mississauga" and I'm pretty sure they didn't volunteer that bit of information. Canadian public water is considered one of the best in the world and we have the biggest reserves of it by the way, but come on, tap water?

By the way,in North America some people refer to the carbonated drinks as "soda" (most US, especially in the south) and other people call it "pop" (mostly New England and Canada). In Spain it's a "refreshment" and in Chile is a "drink" (yes, and they really drink a lot of it as we can guess from the generalized word, one of the biggest consumers per capita in the world).

Besides explanations based on offer and demand I think the difference in price comes from the difference in size; just pure transportation and logistics costs. We can see how in electronics when a product is commoditized and becomes cheaper and cheaper at the end its price is pretty much determined by its size. VCRs, DVD players got as cheap as about $40 - $20 and then they stayed there; you need to charge at least $20 and make a buck or two for selling a box the size of a VCR, regardless if it's full of electronics or sand.

So what do you think of when you hear "Java"? (I added the "technology" part to differentiate from the beverage). Well, I think of "enterprise programming", like most people in IT, I guess.

Now what does Sun say about Java? If we go to Java's home site we get a page with the tag in the title: "Hot Games, Cool Apps", and by looking at the page we'd agree; after all it's all games except for one box dedicated to OpenOffice.

This is explained in the What is Java? page:

Java allows you to play online games, chat with people around the world, calculate your mortgage interest, and view images in 3D.

So according to Sun it's all about games. And it's all about applets:

These applications, written in the Java programming language and access from your browse, are called "applets"

And more games:

After you download Java, visit java.com to find the latest Java games, software, and multimedia players.

Err... what?

Nobody seems to know (OK, I don't know) where Sun is headed or what they really are (hardware company? software company?). Remember the "We are the dot in the .com"?, what the hell did that mean?, a dot is like a small thing right? I mean, at least you could be the "com" in the .com.

But now after a dozen years or so of Java they had a PR idea: they changed their NASDAQ ticket from SUN to JAVA. Aah, now it's all clear to me...

The nice guys at Google have rehashed their PageRank algorithm and as a result a lot of sites have taken a little step back. The Washington Post has now a PageRank of only 5 for example. Well, now I have some catch-up to do...

(Update: I took out the ads).

After resisting and incredible amount of pressure, I gave up and put Google's AdSense ads in my blog. My little corner of the cyberspace was one of the only places with more than two readers (I have three o four) without the pervasive publicity links.

So what the heck, I decided to dive in shouting "show me da money!" and claim my 20 or 30 cents that I was missing out. I hope that if everything pans out my silly thinking aloud will pay for my addiction to Tim Hortons . (I need my daily doses of medium double-double coffee and donut, and that's like CND $2.09 !).

I don't like to have my site full of advertisement; we already have John Chow with his good ad tips for that, so I placed an ad block at the bottom and another in the sidebar. The problem was that the sidebar add block was showing also in my "about me" pages and I don't like to have ads there, especially when one of the ads that appeared in this blog was Living with a Sociopath?; most of the ads are related to the text in the articles but sometimes you get an oddball.

I decided to make the modifications in WordPress and the current theme so that I don't display ads in the sidebar for my "pages", but just in the regular posts.

These are my notes:

Copy the sidebar.php of your theme into another file without the AdSense code, 'sidebarpage.php' for example.

Edit the page.php file for your theme, for instance ./wp-content/themes/mistylook-101/page.php , and rename the function get_sidebar() at the bottom, for instance get_sidebarpage()

Edit the ./wp-includes/general-template.php file and copy the get_sidebar() function but now this function will call the sidebarpage.php:

function get_sidebarpage() {
if ( file_exists( TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebarpage.php') )
load_template( TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebarpage.php');
else
load_template( ABSPATH . 'wp-content/themes/default/sidebar.php');
}

And that's all.

I'm so happy! Today I got my first piece of "hate email", so that means I'm almost cyber-famous he he. A little more work and my little blog may as well go from Google PageRank 5 to 6!

Well, I'm really exaggerating here, the mail was more of a patronizing rant by a "Colin" (of course no last name or web site) regarding my blog entry about the PHP Photo Albums:

In this article, you state, "There’s a little problem with Gallery (besides the unfortunate name that is so common that is impossible to find the site in a web search)..."

Fernando, Fernando, Fernando. Allow me to introduce you to two of the most popular search engines in use today: Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) and Google (www.google.com). Go to either of these search portals and search the word "gallery". That's right, gallery. Now click the search button. What do you see in the very first hit? What's that? What's the unfortunate name of the online photo gallery software? Was it Gallery?

When I first read this "unfortunate name" claim of yours, I thought to myself...Hmm, another typical Internet user...all those search engines and they don't have a clue how to use them. THEN! THEN, Fernando, I clicked on your "About Me" link. What I read here absolutely astonished me:

"I’m an Information Technology professional with over nine years of international experience..."

"Some of my interests are: open source software, computer and network security, web publishing..."

I too am an IT professional. And I am embarrassed.

Keep studying, Fernando. Colin.

So I guess some people have lots of free time and have nothing better to do than trolling around and that's OK.

The funny thing is that while Gallery is now top result in the search engines for "gallery", it wasn't the case when the article was written over a year ago, not even close (tip: before ranting about an article, check its publication date please). There's even a whole new version: Gallery 2. I'm happy to see that the stuff I pick early on gets bigger and better, like Ubuntu or Wordpress. Watch out now for Django!.

Surprise, surprise, time flies by in the Internet, and by the way I know a thing or two about web searching, including a professional project involving a niche search engine and working for Google as a Web Quality Rater (this is some undisguised name-dropping here, there's nothing like having your own blog eh!).

Since I'm in a self-serving inertia, to show some examples of how time changes things quickly in the Internets and its tubes, who do you think is a (or "the") world expert now according to Google in 4images coppermine gallery , wifi troubleshooting , macbook airport internet sharing , webmin vulnerabilities , defending against ssh brute force or ubuntu security tools ? Yes, I know, scary.

Now, changing gears to talk about good names and bad names. There are probably a gazillion blog entries by your Guy Kawasaki or your Seth Godin or their wannabees about good product and company names and even a few books dedicated to the subject too. Anyways, here's my random list of things to have in a good name:

• Easy to remember. I walk everyday into my office building besides a sign of a company name that I could never remember, something like "techmax", "maxtech", "techcom" or the like. Please, no more "star", "tech", "com", "max" etc combinations in tech companies. And please drop the three letter names or acronyms too. (I'll leave the "azura" type of name of "Web 2.0" companies for another day, whatever Web 2.0 is). Something that brings an image to the mind is easier to remember, so "Red Hat" and "Sleepy Cat" (oops, Oracle ate the sleepy cat!) are good names, better than a made-up "Web 2.0" name. A contradiction or funny image is still easier to remember, although it's not suitable for "serious" stuff: when I was looking for a memorable domain name in 1999 to play around with HTML and PHP3 I came up with "LazyAnt.com".


• Easy to spell and pronounce. I worked for a company called "Megaxess"; I had to spell it several times when mentioning it and I just had trouble remembering the right spelling, not to mention that it sounded like "mega sex".


• For Internet presence, the name must be easy to search. So common words or letter combinations are not good choices, this is the origin of my "Gallery" complaint. I'm working (rephrase that: I should be working) in bringing Mandriva's "msec" program to Ubuntu, and as you can imagine, the abbreviation for millisecond is not a good name choice regarding web searches.


• Other stuff. There's lots of other common good advice, like making sure the name is not something offensive in some language, starting the name with an "a" (this is probably overrated Guy) and for products it's good if the name evokes in a positive way what the product does, like "Front Row" for a multimedia application or "Gallery" for a photo album program.

I had like 45 minutes of "free" time today, so I decided to upgrade Wordpress to its latest version, mostly for security reasons, I wasn't missing any feature (well, maybe what about a "disallow comments in ALL posts? I don't see it  in this 2.0.4 version either).

Also I  wanted to  give the site a little facelift, so I found a WP theme that I liked, changed a couple of things (pages go on top of the side bar for instance), added a couple of ego-pictures of myself and also went outside to take some "nature" photograph with lots of green for the header. The broken flowers after the rain weren't convincing so I decided for the foot of one of my frontyard trees, I think is cool.

I used the new toy *ehem* tool I got and with Apple's iPhoto I changed the picture's brightness etc. Then I needed to crop and resize the image. Cropping was easy but I couldn't find a way to resize the picture with iPhoto so after a little googling I came upon EasyCrop and with a some fiddling I had the exact size I wanted (patted myself in the back, I can go to bed now).

So I ordered a computer through bestbuy.ca. The description of the item said: "In Stock: Usually ships next business day." If you click on the explanation of what that means, it says: "This is an estimate only and means that BestBuy.ca will ship the product as soon as we confirm that stock is available and your order is processed.". I expected this order processing to be in "real time", like a few seconds or a couple of minutes like every retail site in the Internet.

Long story short, what bestbuy.ca-sucks means is that in 5 (five) days they will send you an email, then you have to call them and they charge you and in two days they ship the product. In over seven years of buying stuff in the internet I've never seen anything like this (what's next, having to show up at their HQs with two official IDs before they confirm your order?).

In the meantime, emails to customer support went unanswered, and their people in their call center ranged from the clueless to the rude. One even made up that my product wasn't in stock when I ordered.

I even tried to pick up the item in my local BestBuy (it wasn't available when I ordered online and then became available) but after spending one hour in the store talking to their reps they wouldn't let me because they didn't want to honor the promotion that bestbuy.ca-sucks had a few days before, or more exactly, they would honor it if I bought a $300 or so extended warranty (yeah sure, and the undercar coating too please).

And this wasn't the first time that I buy in bestbuy.ca (masochist), some months ago I ordered a digital camera that arrived dead.

Note to self: do not buy from bestbuy.ca

Latest addition to the family: Ian Duran El último fichaje de la familia.

My friend R. wanted a quote on some parts from a computer vendor in Los Angeles, California. He lives in New Mexico and in his original email he included his full address with phone number and zip code. He forwarded me the reply he got that I copy & paste here:

We apologize but we currently do not ship to a non-US address. We are currently only accepting orders which will be shipped to locations within US. However, if you have a valid US Physical address, we may ship it there then you can get another carrier to ship it directly to New Mexico.

So this person just two states away from New Mexico doesn't even know that it belongs to the US. Maybe they should rename it "East Arizona". And I need to find the link to the article where a Republican politician told the story of George Bush Junior discussing an international peace mission and confusing Sweden with Switzerland.

This is not an isolated case. Before he moved to NM he was visiting the state and then he got his credit card (from his bank in the state he was then living) blocked. When he called the bank they explained that they do that when they see a charge made in another country.

R. also sent me a link to this related article: One of our 50 is missing.

I just read somewhere that only 20% of US citizens have passport. Well, it's a big country, why don't you go visit beautiful New Mexico?

I worked for several years for a computer services company sited in Seville's Cartuja Technological Park, as a software and network engineer.

In January 1st 1999, I came to the US as a guest researcher of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in its facilities at Gaithersburg, Maryland. NIST is part of the US goverment Department of Commerce. I worked for the Information and Technology Laboratory and the CIO office.

After two years at NIST, I worked for a year and a half as a senior software engineer for a start-up company in Germantown, Maryland.

In 2002 I went to the University of Louisville to work and study in its Computer Engineering and Computer Science school. I worked as main software developer in a new project for a contractor of the US Navy and I was also the system administrator of the Database Lab.

In 2004 I came back to the Washington DC area to work as a scientific analyst / programmer for a new network security company.

In 2005 I came to Toronto as a Canadian Permanent Resident and in summer 2006 I moved to Waterloo, Ontario.

I'm currently working as a software developer for a software company that caters to the financial industry. I also work giving Linux technical support to the best web hosting company at this side of the galaxy: RimuHosting

I graduated from Universidad de Sevilla, (founded in 1505) with a 5-year Bachelor's Degree in Physics from its Physics School. My specialization was in atomic and nuclear physics.

Then I worked for several years for a computer services company sited in Seville's Cartuja Technological Park, as a software and network engineer.


In January 1st 1999, I came to the US as a guest researcher of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in its facilities at Gaithersburg, Maryland. NIST is part of the US government Department of Commerce. I worked for the Information and Technology Laboratory and the CIO office.
Our area of research was Quality of Service and traffic congestion in networks.

From this research our group of two researchers and myself published seven papers (two articles in a professional journal and five papers for international conferences), some of them are publicly available at: NIST 1999, 2000, DBLP or Google Scholar

The complete list is as follows:

• Performance Effects of Voice & Data Convergence, Journal of Network and Systems Management, December 2000.


• Best Case for TCP Management, Journal of Network and Systems Management (JSNM), Vol. 8, No. 4, December 2000.
• Strategies for TCP That Can Improve Multimedia Services, Proceedings of the International Association of Science & Technology for Development (IASTED), Internet & Multimedia Systems & Applications (IMSA) 2000 Conference, November 2000.
• Implementation Guidelines for Internet Based Multimedia Services, Proceedings of the IASTED, IMSA 2000 Conference, November 2000.


• Modeling Access Networks for Quality of Service, 1st IEEE European Conference on Universal Multiservice Networks (ECUMN), October 2000, Colmar, France.


• TCP Throughput and Buffer Management, 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Object-Oriented Real-Time Distributed Computing (ISORC), March 15-17 2000, Newport Beach, California.


• Priority Scheduling and Buffer Management for ATM Traffic Shaping, 7th IEEE Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems (FTDCS'99), December 20-22, 1999, Cape Town, South Africa.

I came in 2002 to the University of Louisville, Kentucky as a graduate student in the Computer Engineer and Computer Science Department CECS. I had a research assistantship under Dr. Antonio Badia, Director of its Database Lab.

I got my master's degree in summer 2003 (straight A's) and in summer 2004 I completed the coursework requirements towards the PhD.

List of some of the 3-credit courses taken:

• Evaluation of Computer Systems


• Design of Computer Algorithms


• Introduction to Databases


• Fundamentals of Computer Networks


• Design of Compilers


• Experimental Design


• Advanced Databases and Warehousing


• Advanced Software Engineering


• Independent Study: Cryptology Web Portal


• Artificial Intelligence


• Computer Graphics


• Computer Architecture


• Internet Applications Development


• Introduction to Cryptology


• Information Security

In 2004 I came back to the Washington DC area to work as a scientific analyst / programmer for a new network security company. I did research and development on automatic document classification.

In 2005 I came to Toronto as a Canadian Permanent Resident and in summer 2006 I moved to Waterloo, Ontario.

	I'm an Information Technology professional with over nine years of international experience living in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I'm from Cádiz, Spain. You can see some pictures of my hometown. I'm married to Chilean ceramic artist Pamela Rojas and we have two sons, Daniel Duran and Ian Duran
Some of my interests are: open source software, computer and network security, web publishing, life and evolution, human brain and consciousness, ants, close-up magic, human rights, learning and teaching, and the Roman Empire. (Well, not really but sounds good).You can contact me at:

So I upgraded to WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn”. The default look is very nice, but I wanted to personalize it a little bit so I took a picture of my "antique" Underwood and after some work with top-of-the-line publishing software (MS Paint) and some fiddling with the theme CSS I came up with the current "design".

So far I've found some good new features in Wordpress, the only thing that is bothering me is that when you go to a category the posts are truncated and what's worse, the links are gone in those summaries. OK, next time I'm bored I know what to do...
Update: I solved this issue by adding a link at the end of the excerpts.

I also found that in my WP database the wp_options table is the largest one, taking up 200 KB. The surprise is that the RSS feeds of the dashboard, while only showing the first tree or four lines of the WP developer's blog posts, it's adding ALL the contents of these posts with hundreds of lines; no big deal since I think I will only have the last three feeds in three rows but it's a waste and kind of intrusing to have something in my database that I didn't ask for.