I snapped the picture above yesterday evening, watching the riots in South Croydon, London, on a British TV channel called Sky News. Someone in charge of the programming thought appropriate to broadcast that event (literally) in parallel with the closing bell in Wall Street.
And when I say appropriate, I weight my words; answering my own question, I have to say that no, it is not a joke; it is sadly the way the world works.
Esta noche me van a entrevistar en el programa “Su Atención Por Favor” de la radio Metro 95.1 de Buenos Aires. Hay una sección de argentinos en el extranjero y bueno, hoy me toca a mi desde Suiza :) Será alrededor de las 22 de Buenos Aires (algo así como las 3 de la mañana del sábado por acá! Voy a estar carburando al café para no quedarme dormido ja)
Mil gracias a mi querida amiga de toda la vida Betina Suárez, que fue la que permitió el primer contacto con la gente de la radio para que esto suceda! No se pierdan su blog “Mujer, Madre y Argentina”, absolutamente delirante.
PS: acabo de ver que la Metro 95.1 tiene una app iPhone… bajando!
Markdown is my new favorite tool.
It all started while looking for alternatives to LaTeX to write documents and booklets, because since the release of the iPad last year, I wanted to publish in PDF and in EPUB format at the same time, and LaTeX does not offer that option off the box.
And, besides, I really found that LaTeX was a great system, but reading LaTeX code was not always enjoyable. It’s a bit of a messy markup language.
So that’s how I learnt about Pandoc; it is an incredible tool written in Haskell that pretty much transforms any kind of markup into another: RTF, MediaWiki syntax, HTML, LaTeX, Textile, you name it. However, it extends and gives a special status to Markdown, as one of its primary formats, and it provides support to create PDF and EPUB files out of the box; bingo, that’s exactly what I needed. Even better, it uses LaTeX to generate PDF files, which means that I can reuse my LaTeX knowledge to generate beautiful documents.
But then, learning more about Markdown (the syntax is not very far away from Textile, which I knew better), I remembered that StackOverflow uses it; that GitHub uses it; and then I found an excellent Markdown plugin for WordPress and another great Markdown Redmine plugin. Then I updated Elements recently on my iPad (an excellent Dropbox-powered text editor for the iPad), and found out that it had native Markdown support. And of course, both MacVim and TextMate have an excellent Markdown support, including syntax highlighting and preview. And finally, even better, I discovered that MarsEdit supports Markdown natively.
So that’s it, I’m sold. I’m writing almost everything these days with Markdown. And it’s a simple, pure joy.
PS: I’m even considering buying Marked by Brett Terpstra, or even Macchiato (although this last one seems to me a bit pricey).
Hace mucho tiempo, Luisa, una amiga de toda la vida, me hizo una de esas preguntas que te dejan en offside y quedan picando durante largo rato: “que se siente vivir en un país central?”
Para que sepan, Luisa es socióloga, de las del alma. Quedan pocas como ella; son una especie rara que no se si esta en riesgo de extinción, pero algo es seguro; ninguna pregunta de ella es anodina.
Recuerdo aun que me agarró totalmente desprevenido. Nunca pensé en Suiza como un país central; es mas, para ser sincero, siempre me pareció que estaba bastante alejado del centro (cual sea el mismo). Particularmente en mi industria, la informática, siempre me pareció que el centro era en realidad Silicon Valley, y por extensión los Estados Unidos. El adjetivo mas común que empleo al hablar de Suiza suele ser “Tupperware”. Pero un “país central”? No.
Y sin embargo, pensandolo bien, ahora creo que quizás este Tupperware este en el centro del centro, que sea el núcleo mismo. El vivir en Argentina durante unos años me permitió ver eso de lejos; efectivamente Suiza es un país central. Y flor de país central.
Pero, que significa eso? Continue reading
After all my trouble with air travel, I thought I should add some positive views here. And they all turned to be around the iPad, so here they go.
The iPad is a better inflight entertainment system because…
‘Nuff said.
Here’s an update of the current status of my “one language per year” lifelong initiative:
The trend has roughly been an evolution from procedural during the 90′s, to object-oriented ones at the beginning of the 2000′s, and finally to functional languages right now.
And thus I realize, I’ve been programming for 20 years this year, 15 of which for a living.
Volviendo de Sudafrica con Clau, hicimos escala en Dubai, esa ciudad mitica, la que surgió en el desierto en solo 20 años, la del rascacielos mas alto del mundo, y que se yo cuantos superlativos mas. Lo que vimos en 10 horas ahí es algo imperdible.
He aquí la anécdota: la cosa era que nuestra escala era de 11 horas; llegamos de Durban a las 5 de la mañana, y el vuelo para Zurich era a las 4 de la tarde, así que apenas aterrizamos nos buscamos la manera de salir del (inmenso) aeropuerto de Dubai, y conocer un poco la ciudad.
Lo complicado de tal emprendimiento fue que Claudia posee un pasaporte boliviano, el cual requiere visas para entrar a varios países del mundo, incluyendo los Emiratos Arabes Unidos (donde se encuentra, justamente, Dubai). Así que fue medio tanteando la cosa que nos acercamos al mostrador de Emirates (la linea aérea) que nos dijo que, pagando lo que se debe (unos 50 dólares) no hay problema.
Dubai es el reino de la guita, y se nota hasta en estos detalles. Cabe aclarar que Clau no tuvo tal problema en Sudafrica, que es uno de los pocos países de Africa que permite el ingreso de ciudadanos bolivianos sin drama ni visa alguna. Gracias Nelson! Continue reading
2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.
Definitely one of the most useful videos I’ve seen in a while. Having to deal with clients in a regular basis, I can’t deny there is a great deal of common sense in it.
In my personal case, I do not do any client work without a contract in place, ever. I found it helps streamline the communication and the collaboration with the client, removing uncertainty and concerns upstream, instead of downstream. So far I haven’t encountered any client who didn’t want to have a contract in place; most usually we go through several revisions, depending on their legal team’s requirements or some other detail that has to be reviewed. But I’ve had people not respecting them. That’s another problem altogether.
I admit, however, that my contract model is far from perfect. And that’s where this video comes in handy. In particular, the “intellectual property transfer on last payment” part is the most interesting one for me; I’ve had payment problems in the past, even after an application was published on the app store, and I positively know that I do not want such problems in the future.
It is that time of the year again, just like in previous years. This is the list of the books I enjoyed most in 2010! You know that I like reading at least 6 books per year, and learning a new programming language every year. Last year’s programming language was LISP, and the books, well, here they go.
By all means, it is clear that 2010 was the year of the eBook. Maybe it’s because of the iPad, but I’ve been consuming more and more eBooks, even if I still enjoy buying some classics in paper form. Kindle, iPad, iBooks, Nook, GoodReader, PDF, ePub, all of those names have shaped my way of reading last year.
But one of the most visible changes of switching to eBooks was the speed of reading; consuming eBooks is fast, much faster than reading normal books. I can’t say that I prefer one or the other; it’s simply different. But reading eBooks is faster than reading paper books. Probably there’s a warmth factor in paper books, which makes me enjoy them longer, I don’t know, but the fact is, in 2010 my book reading consumption has gone up in an alarming rate. Continue reading
Exactly 20 years ago, on Wednesday February 20th, 1991, my mother and I arrived to Geneva, Switzerland, from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
It was a rainy, gloomy day, just like today. Our KLM flight from Amsterdam landed in Geneva airport at around 5pm. We left our bags in the lockers at the airport’s train station, and then took the first train to Geneva. I knew, from reading tourist guides, that there was a tourist office in Geneva’s main train station, so we decided to go there first, get a hotel, and then bring the bags later from the Airport. Continue reading