Tonight I went to the birthday party of two very close friends. There were many good friends there. I had a really good time, although I cannot the sense of gloominess that comes from the fact that in less than a month I will be leaving Dartmouth for good. Five years living in the same place are quite a lot, and even if I changed friends and company many times during these five years, I feel now even more nostalgic.
Most of the friends at this party are people from Europe that will at some point go back home, whatever home means for them. I am leaving but I am not going home or getting closer for what matters.
I felt really touched by all those that told me that they are going to miss me. They were mainly drunk, I think they really meant it. I ended up DJing after midnight, first with some salsa and then with some awesome songs that we loved and shared. It felt so good, it really seemed that we were celebrating all the time we spent together with the songs that touched us the most.
Friede got a photoalbum for her birthday. It was incredibly nice. Months and months of experiences collected in a single book, and I am in many of them as well. It is scary. People never used to take so many pictures.
Well, this post is a bit of a mess, but that's how I feel now, despite the fact that I have not drunk at all. I feel a lot of gloominess. There were too many nice things happening tonight to believe that it will all be just part of the past soon.
But, as the movies Benjamin Button points out, how would we know how special the people we care about are if they were never to leave us?
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Cully's run
It does not happen very often, for me, to participate in a 5K run organized for someone that committed suicide which I actually knew at some point in my life. More in general, it does not happen to me to participate in a 5K run at all.
The day was cloudy and windy, as the typical days in spring and summer in New Hampshire. You could feel the chills on your bare legs and the humidity from the grass and the mud. I did not know very well Cully, the person which the 5K was organized for. But I felt touched by the attempt her Rugby team put on the remember her. There were plenty of pictures of her and a long letter describing what person she was like and quoting things that she said. Everything was aimed at describing what a nice and caring person she was.
It seems like after you are dead you suddenly become a wonderful person. It made me wonder what people will remember about me when I will be gone. I do not like the idea to be remembered just for the good things I have done. I would rather have a completely sincere version of me.
The day was cloudy and windy, as the typical days in spring and summer in New Hampshire. You could feel the chills on your bare legs and the humidity from the grass and the mud. I did not know very well Cully, the person which the 5K was organized for. But I felt touched by the attempt her Rugby team put on the remember her. There were plenty of pictures of her and a long letter describing what person she was like and quoting things that she said. Everything was aimed at describing what a nice and caring person she was.
It seems like after you are dead you suddenly become a wonderful person. It made me wonder what people will remember about me when I will be gone. I do not like the idea to be remembered just for the good things I have done. I would rather have a completely sincere version of me.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Samsung NC20
I know it is kind of lame to make a post about a laptop, but I cannot help. The geek inside me is screaming. Well, as you might have guessed, I bought a new laptop this week. Last weekend I googled "netbook 12", looking for an affordable light laptop. All of us have seen this little laptop called netbooks and got fascinated to some degree. I have been disgusted though. What is the use of a computer with the keyboard of a large cellphone. None in my opinion.
But I do like the idea of a light laptop, without the useless cd drive, which I can bring everywhere, with my thumb, my index finger, and my middle finger. Well, the NC20 is exactly what I was asking for. For a mere $550 you get an awesome 12 inches laptop, weighing 1.5kg. If it was oval, you could use it like a frisbee. Resolution is cool, 1280x800, hard drive is awesome, 160GB. You can read the specs online, it has everything you need.
On a side note, why they did not invent it before? The answer is awesome. Intel forbade hardware manufacturers from putting their processors in netbooks larger than 10 inches, to avoid competing with the more lucrative notebook market. So VIA came out with this new platform, Nano, which is targeted at ultramobile devices. Basically all of my laptop, other than few pieces, is made in Taiwan.
The keyboard feels awesome, you can type really fast, and the screen also looks great, and the system is so silent, you cannot tell the hard drive is working or the fan is spinning. Compared to my 5kg old laptop this looks like a feather blown by the wind.
Here is my geeky post, if you are planning to buy a laptop consider the NC20. You will be able to sit by someone with the Macbook Air and say, "Oh, cool like mine, just three times as expensive". Only problem, not everything works with Linux, which bothers me but it seems like it might get fixed. I can still hook it up at a conference and give a presentation with it. That is good enough with me.
Oh, I forgot to say, the battery lasts 6 hours. I always thought of the battery as that awesome piece of metal that allows you to move from one room to another without having to reboot. Well, it is time for a change. I am on my way to see if I can get some work done with matlab while getting some tan. Bu-ya-ka-sha!
But I do like the idea of a light laptop, without the useless cd drive, which I can bring everywhere, with my thumb, my index finger, and my middle finger. Well, the NC20 is exactly what I was asking for. For a mere $550 you get an awesome 12 inches laptop, weighing 1.5kg. If it was oval, you could use it like a frisbee. Resolution is cool, 1280x800, hard drive is awesome, 160GB. You can read the specs online, it has everything you need.
On a side note, why they did not invent it before? The answer is awesome. Intel forbade hardware manufacturers from putting their processors in netbooks larger than 10 inches, to avoid competing with the more lucrative notebook market. So VIA came out with this new platform, Nano, which is targeted at ultramobile devices. Basically all of my laptop, other than few pieces, is made in Taiwan.
The keyboard feels awesome, you can type really fast, and the screen also looks great, and the system is so silent, you cannot tell the hard drive is working or the fan is spinning. Compared to my 5kg old laptop this looks like a feather blown by the wind.
Here is my geeky post, if you are planning to buy a laptop consider the NC20. You will be able to sit by someone with the Macbook Air and say, "Oh, cool like mine, just three times as expensive". Only problem, not everything works with Linux, which bothers me but it seems like it might get fixed. I can still hook it up at a conference and give a presentation with it. That is good enough with me.
Oh, I forgot to say, the battery lasts 6 hours. I always thought of the battery as that awesome piece of metal that allows you to move from one room to another without having to reboot. Well, it is time for a change. I am on my way to see if I can get some work done with matlab while getting some tan. Bu-ya-ka-sha!
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Making a movie
Last weekend I finally got together a couple of friends and shot a movie that I had in mind for a couple of weeks. What an amazing experience. It was very interesting. When you try to make a movie you start realizing all the little problems that you can bump into and that can make something that you would think as very easy to do as a titanic project. But it went well. The audio was kind of bad, but we all had a lot of fun acting and two of us ended up jumping in the lake, which was freezing cold.
I have had some experience with editing movie clips, but I had never tried to put together a short movie before. I have indeed acted before and I knew that it is a very tiring process, that you have to repeat many times the scenes over and over again. But it was a completely different experience to have to tell other people what to do. When directing a movie you need to be conscious of the other people needs as well as your needs to get the scenes well done, which can take many tries. It is a hard balance to keep.
Then, once the shots have been taken, I brought everything to my lab. It took at least eight hours of work to edit all the scenes together, and to think as well how to put them together. It is a sad process, since you also have to decide what to keep out, even if you liked and you know that everybody else put efforts in acting it. The movie ended up being kind of long, about nine minutes. I thought it would have been about three. That tells already how unexperienced I am.
Overall, the experience was a blast. If you have the time and the skills, I suggest to save a weekend to do it. It pays off a lot, and watching it a long time from now will bring back a lot of good memories. On the side, I developed a kind of tick now. Everytime I see a movie I am now always looking at where the hands are and when the angle changes, you will always find out that their position moved a little bit. After you try to edit a scene with multiple angles, you cannot stop thinking about it.
Final remarks, what is the movie about? Well, I do not want to give the details away. If you are curios, then you need to ask me.
I have had some experience with editing movie clips, but I had never tried to put together a short movie before. I have indeed acted before and I knew that it is a very tiring process, that you have to repeat many times the scenes over and over again. But it was a completely different experience to have to tell other people what to do. When directing a movie you need to be conscious of the other people needs as well as your needs to get the scenes well done, which can take many tries. It is a hard balance to keep.
Then, once the shots have been taken, I brought everything to my lab. It took at least eight hours of work to edit all the scenes together, and to think as well how to put them together. It is a sad process, since you also have to decide what to keep out, even if you liked and you know that everybody else put efforts in acting it. The movie ended up being kind of long, about nine minutes. I thought it would have been about three. That tells already how unexperienced I am.
Overall, the experience was a blast. If you have the time and the skills, I suggest to save a weekend to do it. It pays off a lot, and watching it a long time from now will bring back a lot of good memories. On the side, I developed a kind of tick now. Everytime I see a movie I am now always looking at where the hands are and when the angle changes, you will always find out that their position moved a little bit. After you try to edit a scene with multiple angles, you cannot stop thinking about it.
Final remarks, what is the movie about? Well, I do not want to give the details away. If you are curios, then you need to ask me.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Languages around the world
Yesterday evening I ended up entertaining conversation with a Turkish girl at dinner. Turkey is such a close country to Europe. More than a decade ago I went to Skopelos, in the Aegean sea, not too far from it, and maybe I will eventually go sailing with my uncle to Rhodes, which is very close to the Western coast of Turkey.
Despite little desire to learn Turkish, I am always fascinated by how different languages are and how we bear the irreversible imprinting of it. So I started asking all possible questions about names for different objects and concepts trying to catch any similarities with the languages I know. Despite the long list I had little luck, the only thing that came out was "kim" which is the Italian equivalent for "chi" and "baba" that is the equivalent for dad and which can be said in Italian as "babbo". Not much overall.
What I had forgot was that Turkish is not an Indo-European language. Despite the fact that Turkey is closer than India, it would be easier to find similarities with Indian languages. I did not investigate the grammar myself but I read that it is very different. Turkish is part of the bigger superfamily of Altaic languages which do not use articles or gender or even pronouns, if I remember correctly.
I have been studying a little bit of German and I got fascinated by how much the echo of an ancestral grammar lives in Italic languages like Italian and Spanish as it does in German. I can understand how dialects come to life. Each one of us, looking at his own past, might find istances of inventing a new word to describe something special to be recognized only by a small circle of friends. But grammar structures go way beyond what anybody might have tried to come up to change how we comunicate with each other. Who was responsible for genders in Germanic and Italic languages? For sure, for such a change to take place, the logical explanation would be that there was a time that language was spoken by a really small circle of people. Those choices of change, whoever made them, have an everlasting echo across the whole Europe now, and, through English, across the whole world.
Nevertheless, even the Turkish language has the familiar Subject Object Verb order as German and Latin do. Most of languages seem to share this characteristic around the world and I easily believe that this might have to do with something hard encoded in our brain. So, how much is language innate and how much is it acquired after birth? A lot of people asked this question and the answer is such an amazing mystery. It is a fact that in the past ancestral humans could not spoke and at some point something changes, maybe something dramatic. But we have to remember that everything that happened must have taken place step by step. In this regard, I find in these words from the book "Before the dawn" fascinating:
"... the human capacity for syntax might have evolved out of animal brain module designed for some other purpose, such as navigation. Their argument is that the essential feature of language is recursion, the ability to embed one phrase inside another in an indefinitely long chain. Recursion may also be a feature of faculties like navigation that require an animal to remember how to get from A to D, with and excursion to B and C if the way is blocked. If the genes that specify the brain's navigation module were accidentally duplicated, the spare set would be free to evolve and perhaps acquire the function of encoding thought into language."
We might know much more about it in the next decade. Just recently, the Neanderthal genome project proved that Neanderthals had the same copy of gene FOXP2 as humans do, which is believed to have had a big part in the development of language. Even if this is not proof that the Neanderthal could talk, finding a different copy would have indeed proved the contrary, as many people believe.
Little doubt there is that language is one of the key defining feature of the human species. Languages, in their diversity, carry the choices that people like us took thousands of years ago. Choices that echo still now, everytime we entertain conversation with someone.
Despite little desire to learn Turkish, I am always fascinated by how different languages are and how we bear the irreversible imprinting of it. So I started asking all possible questions about names for different objects and concepts trying to catch any similarities with the languages I know. Despite the long list I had little luck, the only thing that came out was "kim" which is the Italian equivalent for "chi" and "baba" that is the equivalent for dad and which can be said in Italian as "babbo". Not much overall.
What I had forgot was that Turkish is not an Indo-European language. Despite the fact that Turkey is closer than India, it would be easier to find similarities with Indian languages. I did not investigate the grammar myself but I read that it is very different. Turkish is part of the bigger superfamily of Altaic languages which do not use articles or gender or even pronouns, if I remember correctly.
I have been studying a little bit of German and I got fascinated by how much the echo of an ancestral grammar lives in Italic languages like Italian and Spanish as it does in German. I can understand how dialects come to life. Each one of us, looking at his own past, might find istances of inventing a new word to describe something special to be recognized only by a small circle of friends. But grammar structures go way beyond what anybody might have tried to come up to change how we comunicate with each other. Who was responsible for genders in Germanic and Italic languages? For sure, for such a change to take place, the logical explanation would be that there was a time that language was spoken by a really small circle of people. Those choices of change, whoever made them, have an everlasting echo across the whole Europe now, and, through English, across the whole world.
Nevertheless, even the Turkish language has the familiar Subject Object Verb order as German and Latin do. Most of languages seem to share this characteristic around the world and I easily believe that this might have to do with something hard encoded in our brain. So, how much is language innate and how much is it acquired after birth? A lot of people asked this question and the answer is such an amazing mystery. It is a fact that in the past ancestral humans could not spoke and at some point something changes, maybe something dramatic. But we have to remember that everything that happened must have taken place step by step. In this regard, I find in these words from the book "Before the dawn" fascinating:
"... the human capacity for syntax might have evolved out of animal brain module designed for some other purpose, such as navigation. Their argument is that the essential feature of language is recursion, the ability to embed one phrase inside another in an indefinitely long chain. Recursion may also be a feature of faculties like navigation that require an animal to remember how to get from A to D, with and excursion to B and C if the way is blocked. If the genes that specify the brain's navigation module were accidentally duplicated, the spare set would be free to evolve and perhaps acquire the function of encoding thought into language."
We might know much more about it in the next decade. Just recently, the Neanderthal genome project proved that Neanderthals had the same copy of gene FOXP2 as humans do, which is believed to have had a big part in the development of language. Even if this is not proof that the Neanderthal could talk, finding a different copy would have indeed proved the contrary, as many people believe.
Little doubt there is that language is one of the key defining feature of the human species. Languages, in their diversity, carry the choices that people like us took thousands of years ago. Choices that echo still now, everytime we entertain conversation with someone.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
And what if he gets hit by a bus?
This week I have been at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, the biggest conference for mathematicians taking place yearly in the United States. I have not been terribly impressed but it was an interesting experience overall.
I took a minicourse teaching how to use a computer software named GeoGebra. It is a program that allows to play with Euclidean geometry very intuitively. It is one of those tools that you wished you had back in high school. Still, I thought it would be interesting to learn how to use it in case I ever have to teach something to younger kids. And, it is completely open source, a plus.
Later on, I went to the exhibits and in one of the many stands there was a girl presenting SketchPad, a software that is terribly similar to GeoGebra but is proprietary and comes with a price. I could not be easily impressed.
Although I decided to engage conversation with the presenter starting saying that GeoGebra looked extremely similar to their software. As I said that, I could see the gloom in her eyes. She did confess me later on that people in their company were very worried about it since SketchPad was their main asset. And once a free and open source version is out, who would buy it?
Definitely not me, since SketchPad does not even run on Linux. Still, I was touched by the story. The people at SketchPad are not against open source, it is just that they do not have a business model for it.
Moreover, I learnt that there was a single designer for SketchPad and that actually, everybody in the company, ten people more or less, was very dependent on the work of this person. The girl confessed me that sometimes she wanders, and what if he gets hit by a bus?
That brought me to something that few people think about when using software. In general, software is very complicated. People write it, people change it. When those people leave, there is a piece of software that nobody wants to touch anymore because it takes forever only to learn how it was designed. It is very common for software engineers to rewrite it from scratch every once in a while. It seems like an inevitable doom. So what do you do? The only answer is: make it as modular as you can, so that when you need to rewrite a piece it is a small one. That seems like the best you can do. And open source is really good at modularizing. Maybe overall that is the very power of it. How many people understand that though?
I took a minicourse teaching how to use a computer software named GeoGebra. It is a program that allows to play with Euclidean geometry very intuitively. It is one of those tools that you wished you had back in high school. Still, I thought it would be interesting to learn how to use it in case I ever have to teach something to younger kids. And, it is completely open source, a plus.
Later on, I went to the exhibits and in one of the many stands there was a girl presenting SketchPad, a software that is terribly similar to GeoGebra but is proprietary and comes with a price. I could not be easily impressed.
Although I decided to engage conversation with the presenter starting saying that GeoGebra looked extremely similar to their software. As I said that, I could see the gloom in her eyes. She did confess me later on that people in their company were very worried about it since SketchPad was their main asset. And once a free and open source version is out, who would buy it?
Definitely not me, since SketchPad does not even run on Linux. Still, I was touched by the story. The people at SketchPad are not against open source, it is just that they do not have a business model for it.
Moreover, I learnt that there was a single designer for SketchPad and that actually, everybody in the company, ten people more or less, was very dependent on the work of this person. The girl confessed me that sometimes she wanders, and what if he gets hit by a bus?
That brought me to something that few people think about when using software. In general, software is very complicated. People write it, people change it. When those people leave, there is a piece of software that nobody wants to touch anymore because it takes forever only to learn how it was designed. It is very common for software engineers to rewrite it from scratch every once in a while. It seems like an inevitable doom. So what do you do? The only answer is: make it as modular as you can, so that when you need to rewrite a piece it is a small one. That seems like the best you can do. And open source is really good at modularizing. Maybe overall that is the very power of it. How many people understand that though?
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Android, that is, the Google phone
Christmas is still three weeks away but Black Friday, the second most important shopping day in the United States, has already passed. I decided to buy myself another Christmas present, after the DNA kit. This one is more conventional, the G1 from HTC, the first cellphone using Android, the Google operating system based on Linux. For those of you that have seen an iPhone (there are about 15 millions around the world, chances are that you have), the G1 is the first serious competitor. Since the moment I have heard about Android I have been waiting to see one. Since the G1 came out on the market I had seen a lot of videos of how cool the phone is and I really felt like I wanted one. Problem was that it was only sold locked to the T-mobile network that works only in big cities, and Dartmouth is way far from big cities. But recently some people have figured it out how to unlock it and after spending half afternoon reading on forums about people successfully unlocking it and playing around with it I decided to take my chance too.
I got a used one on eBay yesterday and I bought right away an unlocking code and this morning I got a friend SIM to perform the activation, since without it the phone is little more than a brick. Once all these technicalities have been solved I started playing. I do not even have a SIM card but the amount of Internet applications you can play with is so diversified that it is worth it the money just as a PDA. I think of it, for now, as an iPod touch with microphone and gps and a keyboard. Now, let me explain you why Android is so much better than the iPhone. It is not just because it runs Linux, although the open source philosophy has a lot to do with it.
First of all, the phone has a better processor, more memory and a keyboard which, if it might not look aesthetically beautiful when open, it does make it way more functional when browsing. This in turn gives more flexibility to the applications that you can run.
One of the features I like the best is the ability to synchronize with the Internet your contacts, your calendar and your email. This basically puts an end to having to organize your private information more than once ever again. Just one problem less to think about in your life. As the developers put it, if you lose your phone you just buy another one, login into your account, and you are ready to go with no further configuration.
The applications you can install are absolutely innovative. The most surprising is the barcode scanner. You can scan anything with a barcode and in a few seconds you are redirected to a website with a list of online shops with prices for that product. Basically the best deal is now always two clicks away. Merchants will have to deal with this at some point because customers are about to get a lot smarter. Another very cool application is the one that recognizes the name of a song after listening to it for a few seconds. It is not fail proof but it works fairly well. This one exists also on the iPhone actually, as it should be. Applications should not be tied to a given operating system. Another great application to show off the features of the G1 is the one to look at the stars in the sky. Using the accelerometer and the compass built in the phone, it is enough to point it to the sky and the correct region of the sky is displayed on the screen. So easy that I almost cry at all the time spent trying to recognize the stars in the sky equipped with different maps and books. Now it is just about to become much easier.
Overall the idea of the phone is simple. Making the information on the Internet as easily accessible as possible. To this extent, probably the best application is the browser. There is not much to say about it. It works great, as much as the one on the iPhone, since both browser are based on Webkit. If you ever used a browser on a different phone do not get it wrong. The experience on the G1 and the iPhone is completely different and it will not make you regret too much not being in front of the computer.
Someone once said that since the beginning of the 80s little has changed in the PC world, other than the little chord that connects it to the Internet. I can see the point but this new generation of cellphones is adding something new to the PC experience. Maybe 20 years from now we will all have connections deep in our brain that will allow us to connect to the Internet straight with our thought and cellphones will seem something from the past. But, nevertheless, the G1 is about to make history and I am not missing the excitement.
I cannot way to get back home for Christmas to show it off.
I got a used one on eBay yesterday and I bought right away an unlocking code and this morning I got a friend SIM to perform the activation, since without it the phone is little more than a brick. Once all these technicalities have been solved I started playing. I do not even have a SIM card but the amount of Internet applications you can play with is so diversified that it is worth it the money just as a PDA. I think of it, for now, as an iPod touch with microphone and gps and a keyboard. Now, let me explain you why Android is so much better than the iPhone. It is not just because it runs Linux, although the open source philosophy has a lot to do with it.
First of all, the phone has a better processor, more memory and a keyboard which, if it might not look aesthetically beautiful when open, it does make it way more functional when browsing. This in turn gives more flexibility to the applications that you can run.
One of the features I like the best is the ability to synchronize with the Internet your contacts, your calendar and your email. This basically puts an end to having to organize your private information more than once ever again. Just one problem less to think about in your life. As the developers put it, if you lose your phone you just buy another one, login into your account, and you are ready to go with no further configuration.
The applications you can install are absolutely innovative. The most surprising is the barcode scanner. You can scan anything with a barcode and in a few seconds you are redirected to a website with a list of online shops with prices for that product. Basically the best deal is now always two clicks away. Merchants will have to deal with this at some point because customers are about to get a lot smarter. Another very cool application is the one that recognizes the name of a song after listening to it for a few seconds. It is not fail proof but it works fairly well. This one exists also on the iPhone actually, as it should be. Applications should not be tied to a given operating system. Another great application to show off the features of the G1 is the one to look at the stars in the sky. Using the accelerometer and the compass built in the phone, it is enough to point it to the sky and the correct region of the sky is displayed on the screen. So easy that I almost cry at all the time spent trying to recognize the stars in the sky equipped with different maps and books. Now it is just about to become much easier.
Overall the idea of the phone is simple. Making the information on the Internet as easily accessible as possible. To this extent, probably the best application is the browser. There is not much to say about it. It works great, as much as the one on the iPhone, since both browser are based on Webkit. If you ever used a browser on a different phone do not get it wrong. The experience on the G1 and the iPhone is completely different and it will not make you regret too much not being in front of the computer.
Someone once said that since the beginning of the 80s little has changed in the PC world, other than the little chord that connects it to the Internet. I can see the point but this new generation of cellphones is adding something new to the PC experience. Maybe 20 years from now we will all have connections deep in our brain that will allow us to connect to the Internet straight with our thought and cellphones will seem something from the past. But, nevertheless, the G1 is about to make history and I am not missing the excitement.
I cannot way to get back home for Christmas to show it off.
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