El Ruidito

En varias ciudades de Suiza, cuando te subis a un trolebus de los viejos, siempre escucharas un “tic-tic-tic-tic-tic…” mientras se mueve el vehiculo. Como si fuese una bomba. El ruidito es escucha sobre todo si te sentas en la parte de adelante, cerca del chofer. Pasaron años hasta que alguien me explico lo que era: los choferes de las empresas de transporte publico tienen que entregar, cada dia, un informe que indica el kilometraje que hicieron, como prueba de que se hicieron correctamente todos los trayectos previstos. A partir de ahi se evalua el rendimiento y los salarios de cada uno.

El ruidito corresponde a un sistema, dentro de una especie de “caja negra”, que llena automaticamente una ficha a medida que circula el vehiculo, y que constituye el informe en cuestion. No se bien que contiene, pero me comentaron que informa sobre la velocidad del vehiculo en todo momento, sobre la distancia recorrida, sobre las paradas efectuadas, los retrasos eventuales, en fin, todo lo que concierne el recorrido del trolebus. Todo.

Es conocido el cariño que le tienen los suizos al control de los empleados. En una empresa donde laburaba hace 2 años, tenia que rellenar 3 planillas distintas de horarios. Asi fue como cultive un odio horrible a SAP. Alguna vez escribi sobre eso. Este control explica el porque del andar panfilo de los autobuses (nunca pretendas ir rapido en un autobus suizo) y los horarios tan precisos que te ponen, no solo en cada parada sino incluso en la web. Y explica tambien ese sentimiento de paranoia que es omnipresente en este pais.

Pero como hacen en Buenos Aires? Es conocido que los bondis a veces circulan a toda velocidad porque les hacen problema si llegan demasiado tarde o demasiado temprano (lo cual, en Buenos Aires, teniendo en cuenta el transito que hay, es una verdadera loteria la mayoria de las veces).

Creo yo, la cosa es asi: en Buenos Aires, cada linea corresponde a una empresa diferente. En Suiza no; todas las lineas de cada ciudad, pertenecen a una empresa unica, estatal, que posee los vehiculos y un equipo de choferes. La diferencia en el control de los choferes estriba en el hecho de que, a diferencia de Buenos Aires, donde las estaciones terminales de las lineas suelen tener un deposito de vehiculos, en Suiza las terminales de las lineas no corresponden usualmente con los depositos de los vehiculos; es decir que los patrones no estan en las estaciones terminales verificando si el chofer llego o no. Con lo cual el control se hace de manera automatica, transparente. Si alguien tiene una teoria mejor, adelante!

Tambien es tipico ver como los choferes cambian de turno en medio de los trayectos; es asi como uno, que esta apurado, tiene que presenciar como los choferes cambian de puesto, en medio del trayecto, bajandose del trolebus, saludandose mutuamente durante unos buenos minutos, y despues acomodandose panfilamente en el puesto del conductor.

En los vehiculos mas recientes, empero, el ruidito no se escucha mas. Ahora hay una computadora que transmite toda la informacion en tiempo real a la terminal. Es mas moderno, barato, efectivo, y podes controlar mejor a tus empleados. Creo que hasta transmite el peso del chofer antes y despues del almuerzo.

The LIFT Animation

During the pauses in the LIFT conference, there was always a highly allegorical video looping on the screens, showing different elements of technology, together with the names of the speakers. A laptop, a CD, a calculator, a pen, dices. Here it is:

I found that video nice, peaceful, really in sync with the whole spirit of the conference; here’s another video (thanks to Robert Scoble) about how they did it. Kudos to the Bread and Butter team!

Craving to read, back to commuting?

I’ve got a couple of books on my desk that I’m craving to read! The problem is, lately I’m lacking the time to sit quietly and enjoy them:

One of the good things (maybe the only one) of commuting from Lausanne to Geneva every day back and forth, was the delightful hour of peaceful reading that you get. In the 4 years that I’ve done that, I’ve read more books than in any other time of my life.

Feeling like a grown-up kid

Jedi Knights, when they achieve a certain level of maturity in their craft, are told to build their own lightsaber, as one of the final steps of their training. Software developers have similar feats to accomplish at least once in their coding life, like building their own Linux kernel, writing a rant about Microsoft Windows in their blog, submitting a patch for some open-source system, or even starting and managing their own company or open-source project.

Today I’ve compiled my own kernel from scratch, thanks to the instructions given in the Ubuntu forums. And I feel like I’ve done another nice, big, useful step in my career. I can only thank all of those who write how-tos and instructions in forums, which is one of the factors that make Linux so great; you can find information about how to do pretty much anything, with incredible levels of detail. I hope that my small contributions might be useful to others! This, for me, is a way to give back to the community as well.

The Register on Vista

http://www.theregister.com/2007/02/14/pricey_beta_bugger/

The stand-alone version of Vista Ultimate retails for €600, or $780 here in Ireland. Amazon.com is selling this $780 version to Americans for $380. Or, to put it another way, Europeans are subsidising Americans by $400 on every copy they buy. (…) Indeed, Aero looks nearly as good as KDE, although it demands about three times the system resources. (…) Now for the fun part. The trouble with Vista starts before you get the software home. It’s very difficult to know which edition is right for you, because there are many options, and MS has done a spectacularly bad job of communicating with the public. As I reported previously, I bought the Home Premium upgrade, which, according to the package, can be used on the following Windows OS’s: “Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP, or Windows Vista.” I had Windows XP Pro, and yet was not permitted to perform an upgrade – because it would have been a downgrade: I would have lost the use of a few XP features that I never use anyway. So instead of warning me of the features I would lose and asking me if I wanted to upgrade/downgrade anyway, I was offered only the choice of doing a clean install and losing all of my data and settings, and the aforementioned XP Pro features, in one go. Brilliant. (…) Now for another little irritant: immortal craplets. There are two. One is the Vista Security Centre. I have disabled it. I have shut it off in Services. I have tried to shut it off in Msconfig. It won’t die. Every time I boot, the craplet pops up and demands to be enabled. But if it really is disabled, then why am I seeing the bloody thing? And there’s another immortal craplet: one that tells you that you’ve “disabled important startup programs”, like the Security Centre, for example. I’ve tried to kill this ridiculous thing too, with no joy. So, one craplet pops up demanding to be enabled; you exit that, and a different one pops up telling you that you really ought not to have done that. Now, my definition of malware is pretty straightforward: malware is any code that causes my computer to behave in a way I don’t intend, or any code that prevents my computer from behaving in a way that I do intend. Thus the Vista Security Centre is, quite simply, malware. I won’t put up with this nonsense any longer than I’ll put up with a dysfunctional audio system, or a noisy fan that never shuts up for one second. And how about a few decent utilities? Yes, thank you for the DVD burner and thank you for the screenshot tool, and for the very basic photo and movie editing kit. But how about a decent text editor, for God’s sake? Would it be so difficult to give it a little of the magic that Kwrite has got? A spell checker perhaps? The ability to clean spaces? A little colour-coded action for us HTML homebrewers, so we can see simple typos, like forgetting to close a tag? Is that too much to ask? (…) And there’s more. Little things, really. Firefox is unable to make itself the default browser; my SSH client from Anonymizer won’t install; my attempts to apply security patches to Word 2000 fail (“the requested operation requires elevation”); the logout screen now has so many options it needs a pull-down menu, and it defaults to “sleep” when “restart” is the action which users know is the most common, most important – indeed, most therapeutic – one they can take on a Windows box.”

Truely cross-platform!

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/aa937793.aspx

Q: How widely used is C# in the gaming industry? A: The vast majority of game studios recognize the productivity benefits of C# and are already using it for creating internal tools within their studios. There are even a few great games for Windows written using C#. But before the advent of the XNA Framework, doing true cross-platform development with C# targeting both the Windows desktop and the Xbox 360 was not a reality. That’s why we believe the XNA Framework represents an exciting opportunity for game studios.

Pegasus Mail and Windows Vista

http://www.pmail.com/vista.htm

“Pegasus Mail: For reasons not adequately explained, Windows Vista does not include a functional help system (WinHelp has been removed, and HTMLHelp has been crippled). This means that you will not be able to use the Pegasus Mail help system unless you download WinHelp from the official Microsoft site (we are forbidden to distribute or make it available ourselves). We are working on developing our own help system to work around this problem. Vista also places new restrictions on applications wishing to perform default system functions (in Pegasus Mail’s case, acting as the default mail program). You will probably not be able to use Pegasus Mail as your default mail program for mailto: URLs under Vista until we produce registration code that complies with the new Vista rules. Finally, Windows now pops up a spurious and annoying warning any time you run an application that does not have a Microsoft Authenticode digital signature from a shared volume. Unfortunately, getting an Authenticode signature is an expensive and arduous process, but we will do so as soon as we can (note that this last issue is not specific to Vista – it will also occur on any Windows XP system where Internet Explorer 7 has been installed).”

I was at LIFT, I promise

For those that don’t believe me, take a look at this page: the guy sitting at the back of the photograph it’s me, surfing after lunch, while this interview was made! If you look carefully you’ll distinguish my black MacBook and the white Apple logo on it.

interview-me.png

OK, OK, I could as well have been the interviewed person, but for this year no more public exposure, thanks :)

Oh, and by the way: WordPress 2.1 is available! I’ve just installed and all I can say is: upgrade now! The new features are excellent!