A dream during siesta

I had a strange dream this Sunday afternoon. I was in a complex enterprise of some sort. Don’t know of what kind but seemed very powerful and diverse, yet loosely organized. I was a stranger in that place and apparently had just escaped prison. Don’t know why I was in prison in the first place; don’t know how I managed to swiftly appear outside of it either.

At some points, I had friends walking with me through doors of different departments and rooms. Friends and rooms were simply popping in and out, without any explanation. Like a poor movie. Effusive were my efforts to understand what was going on. I was looking all over the place for something; at least some clue. Don’t know what. And nothing gave me any edge. And nobody seemed to care so I kept walking.

I see the prison again and a friend materializes right next to me. Don’t know how or why. Now at least we have a purpose. We need to escape, get out of there as soon as possible, no matter what. We try to pretend we have nothing to hide while walking casually. They see us, of course. It was clearly obvious that they would. The sun was shinning brightly in the sky; there was nowhere to run to.

I get rid of them. Don’t ask me. Don’t know what happened to my friend. But I meet new friends, a lot of them, all ready to go to some war. We walk past some door and suddenly we are finally outside the enterprise. We turn left and the street was empty but they tell me to stop. I see a door, everything else was blurred and I ignore my friends. I run to get inside, having some unidentified hope.

The building is tall but thin. It is just stairs and the door I came through. Not even windows, just grey walls and cement stairs. And again I run up until I find another door. The top of the building is a small balcony and I can contemplate my tiny friends down the street. No other building is as tall as this one so I cannot jump. They engage a huge fight with another group. I am passive.

After a while, some of them go through the same door I took before. I hear a friend shout: “I will take care of them! I will leave only the easy ones for you!” Am I not able to take care of myself? I see I can go up the structure built around the exit door. It’s not simple to reach the top so I climb it. Up there I lay down. It seems like a plan to attack anyone who comes out the door and push them off the balcony. But I’m worried: What if it is my friend? I wake up.

How many open source developers does it take to change a light bulb?

The answer is 17!

17 to argue about the license; 17 to argue about the brain-deadness of the light bulb architecture; 17 to argue about a new model that encompasses all models of illumination and makes it simple to replace candles, campfires, pilot lights, and skylights with the same easy-to-extend mechanism; 17 to speculate about the secretive industrial conspiracy that ensures that light bulbs will burn out frequently; 1 to finally change the light bulb, and 16 who decide that this solution is good enough for the time being.

From Peter Wayner, cited by Steven Weber's book, The Success of Open Source, p. 81.

Incy Bella, a bookshop of note

In Cochin, Kerala I found a rather small and yet very charming bookshop this weekend. Kerala is a south Indian state known for its rich natural beauty and cultural diversity and the bookshop ended up being a very appropriate example of these characteristics.

The place was full of books on India and its many faces. Religion, culinary, cities, history, economy, rituals, landmarks, dances, music, you name it… It was all there translated into pictures and text. What was even more impressive was its collection of books on Kerala. I certainly didn’t expect that and I was obviously glad with the finding. I simply couldn't leave the place! It was so attractive that a word of caution is necessary: do not enter with a full pocket – you'll want to spend all of it.

Incy Bella - The Bookshop
Synagogue Lane
Jew Town
Cochin
682002 India
T 0484-2228049

What a great F1 race... for the public!

The first grand prix of the 2008 season, in Melbourne, Australia, was very exciting! And I would bet that at least part of reason was the prohibition of the traction control system, which helped the cars to stay on track. Life is harder for the pilots now and we could see this even before the race, during the qualifying sessions.

As for the race, what to say? Only seven (of 22) cars finished it. A lot of accidents and mistakes were the tone of most of it. Even last year’s world champion, Kimi Raikkonen, did not escape spinning twice in his impulse to reach better positions, and ended up abandoning the race with some technical problem.

Of the seven, I must highlight Barrichelo’s sixth place, finally scoring points for Honda after more than a year, and Alonso’s performance with his poor Renault car. For most teams this was a nightmare weekend, for me it was great fun!

Update: Barrichelo was disqualified because he left the pits while the red lights were still on. Too bad for Honda which remains with no points since 2006.

A sunset on sundays

Central Park, New York

Are you tired or sleepy?

For Wiktionary, which in this case borrows the definitions from the Oxford Dictionary, “tired” and “sleepy” are synonyms. However, in other dictionaries and sites, the definition of “tired” is slightly different:

1. From Babylon:
"fatigued, dead-tired, exhausted (Informal)"

2. From Wikipedia, not Wiktionary, where it is a synonym of fatigue:
"It is ubiquitous in everyday life, but usually becomes particularly
noticeable during heavy exercise. Mental fatigue, on the other hand,
rather manifests in somnolence."

3. From Wordnet:
"depleted of strength or energy;"

In these cases, sleepiness might be just one manifestation of being tired, but someone can be sleepy without being tired (when taking a pill, for example). Therefore, in some circumstances there can be a causal relationship but these are independent words in my opinion.

I know this is a rather silly discussion but I started it with a friend the other day and now I want to settle it down. I even opened a thread on Wiktionary, proposing to change their first definition of the word “tired”.

Of course I’m ignoring the other uses of the word which don’t apply here, for example:
1. Fed up, annoyed, irritated, sick of: “I'm tired of this”
2. Overused, cliché: “a tired song”

The Firefox add-ons I use

When I saw this post and a print screen of a Firefox window in it with a lot of add-ons, I wondered about which were being used. Some I could guess as I also had them installed but I ended up asking Luke about the others. The question resulted in a follow-up post where he lists all the nice and cute third-party features he uses that you can add to your browser to make it even better!

From his list, I also use Adblock Plus, Fasterfox, Faviconize Tab, Firebug, Google Notebook, and PDF Download. They are all excellent utilities that come in hand often. Now, before I get into the other add-ons I use which are not listed there, let me add a word about the difference between Adblock Plus and Adblock. The second, in my opinion, is very obsolete right now and the maintenance of the project is almost abandoned. Besides, most pre-made block filters developed by other groups are only being updated for Adblock Plus these days. In any case, however, you can improve both with another add-on called Adblock Filterset.G. It essentially adds and maintains its own set of filters for you.

Now, to my add-ons:

FireFTP
This is a very simple and fast FTP client working inside your Firefox tabs. It is really easy to use and support many nice features such as SSL and integrity checks. Besides, it offers you the ability to store profiles of FTP servers you work more often with.

Resizeable Textarea
This is a tiny add-on that lets you resize textareas. Very useful in forms of blogs and forums that offer you a limited space for all your great set of arguments!

Locationbar²
A recent addition to my collection. I discovered it reading the comments of a post evaluating the new IE8 beta release on Google Blogoscoped. A new feature of this new version of the Microsoft browser is basically a copy of this add-on: It highlights and decodes the URL you are current on for a variety of reasons:

1. Helps identify spoofing;
2. the readability of the address;
3. Allows you to quickly click a directory in the address to navigate through the hierarchy of the web page.

Forecastfox
There are many weather forecast add-ons available for Firefox. I use this one when I’m travelling because it is the less obtrusive among the ones I evaluated. Just add your cities and voilà!

Understanding Quantum Computing

For readers interested in Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computing, here is a list of topics in order of difficulty or deepness.

1. For a basic and fun overview of interrelated concepts, refer to The Elegant Universe documentary. The official web site of the show also has a number of other useful resources.
2. For the necessary mathematical understanding, watch the comprehensive set of video lectures from the MIT on linear algebra;
3. Get into the world of Quantum Mechanics with the introduction from Wikipedia or a series of fundamental concepts by Professor Richard Fitzpatrick, from the University of Texas;
   
4. Go deep into the Wikipedia articles on Quantum Computing and on Quantum Mechanics;
5. Read the book Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Michael A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang.
   

After that, you are all set to start understand this crazy world! ;-)