El blog de Mabela
¡Mabela ya recuperó sus datos de usuario y contraseña para escribir en su «blog»! Espero ver muchos «posts» suyos muy pronto.
12/20/05
11/10/05
The magic world of windows
Three o'clock in the morning. Mabel is working with the computer, preparing a presentation she has to present at 11 o'clock. She's been working on it for several hours now. Meanwhile, I'm in a semiconscious state, half listening to an interesting podcast and half dreaming of it.
Ten minutes later, she awakes me very worried, telling me that something's wrong with the machine. Suddenly, with no further ado, windows decided it was time to shutdown the machine. She tried to stop it, to no avail. And the best part: the files she had been working on are no longer there!
-Ok, don't panic- I tell her. And I begin the search for the files. Again, to no avail. Wow! I ask the explorer program to show the hidden files. Nothing. I look in the list of recently opened documents. Nothing.
I notice something: some files (.ppt files, mainly) have their name written in blue letters. Besides that, and the fact that the files are not there, everything seems to be working all right. At that moment I started suspecting of some form of malware (besides the MS one).
I boot the machine in GNU/Linux. I mount the windows partition. I perform a find command, and voilà: there they are, the unconspicuous files. From this moment on, the recovery process is trivial and worthless to describe here.
What happened to the files? What happened to the machine? I don't know, and I suspect I'll never know. I have verified the presence and actuality of an antivirus. I have verified the configuration of the firewall, seemingly all right.
But people seems to like being treated the way microsoft treats them...
10/06/05
Social software day
Today has been a social software discovery day for me.
On the one hand, I created today my flickr account, and used it to publish some photographs of my incredible family.
On the other hand, I've got acquainted to the last.fm site, which is interfaceable with my amarok music player. I created an account there, as well.
It is amazing how the social networks (although not a difficult to express concept) can have such a broad, rich and surprising applications. Let's see how I feel about this after some days.
09/21/05
The roots of cursing
A very interesting article about the psychology behind the act of cursing has appeared at the New York Times.
In my opinion, those who at all times refrain from cursing are denying themselves the opportunity to get in touch with [perhaps not so] basic states of the mind, to get relaxation from the expression of own's feelings, to discriminate between the good use of the language and the loose one.
I find interesting the fact that my three years old daughter, my dearest Sophie, can already curse. She does so in increasingly accurate contexts, and she knows what words are appropriate for every place and which ones are only to be spoken with the family. A three years old little girl! What this tells me is the very basic and extremely important role that cursing plays, as a part of the expresiveness supposedly assigned to human languages.
A final reflexion on the matter: what language do we curse on? At a first thought, I would say that mother tongue is the best resource. But what is the reason behind that? And what happens when I find myself using the word "fuck" as it comes as naturally to my mind as it comes any other mexican curse?
Teaching programming to kids
Igor Kholodov has a son (at least). Me too.
Igor is a programmer. Me too.
He is interested in teaching his son how to program (see Juan's ideas on the basic, cultural character of the programming skills). Me too.
He created a board game, called c-jump, that helps him in the endeavour.
I want this game!
