Single Point of Failure

Space, The Final Frontier

singlepointoffailure — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 18:19:47 +0000

Saturday was not a family day because some of us had to work. No, I don’t mean me. This time is was A. who had to work the saturday all day long. The rest of the weekend (today!) was spent doing family stuff, trying to compensate.

So, the plan was to visit the latest exhibit by the “Pavilhão do Conhecimento” (Pavilion of Knowledge). With a fancy name, “Space, The Final Frontier” exposition shows some of the latest achievments of ESA. Hanging from the ceiling a 1:10 model of the International Space Station shows the complexity of that man-made structure. The visitor’s ability to land a space shuttle or the command rendevouz operations between two spacecrafts is put to the test. Amongst these and another lot of other experiments, I enjoyed controlling the Mars rover from “earth” while he was discovering the surface of Mars. The small robot vehicle was actually a few meters aways but it was cool!

It was a nice time spent learning about (some of them) new stuff!

For those of you how are interested, the exhibit is avaliable until August 30th 2009, but don’t miss it.

(Me, standing beside ESA’s Galileo Project poster.)

Homemade Sushi Night

singlepointoffailure — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 08:59:55 +0000

It may look be a little rough around the hedges, in fact it shouldn’t have any edges, but it tasted very nice.
Yesterday, after a quick travel to buy some products in a place called Martim Moniz, Lisbon’s very own “china town”, it was time to have our first sushi only homemade dinner. It was risky, but it was worth it.

Being the first we ever tried to prepare sushi, even after searching the whole internet for Sushi recipes the lack of experience resulted in huge amounts of left-overs. The dinner preparations were for three, but it could have been for five or six… and food would still be too much.

Changes between Night and Day

singlepointoffailure — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:19:08 +0000

The video shows how the day and night changes the Worldwide Air Traffic. Watch the day break in Europe and then in North America… Amazing!!!

Economy

singlepointoffailure — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 15:51:24 +0000

Economy is really not my thing. I really don’t what to know much about anything associated with economy, but this cartoon made me laugh (and think) for a while.

(It’s not mine, I took it from somewhere on the web, and unfortunatelly didn’t keep the author for reference.)

Back to School

singlepointoffailure — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 09:52:26 +0000

Tomorrow is school day, again. This does not mean that I’ll be starting to attend the SEE program at Stantford University, it just means that my days has a PhD student are about to start.

Two years of working as a software engineer made me realize that experience is very important, and that I have a lot to learn and do before I can call myself a experienced software engineer. I’m working on that issues, trying to read about new methodologies and techniques by myself and learning to apply them in the everyday job.

But there is also some other fields I’d like to improve, a lot more close to research new knowledge than to applied engineering. This is one thing that is seems to be missing from the current job. Let’s see if the ‘part-time’ PhD provides some new insights on other fields of knowledge.

Podcast Client Tool

singlepointoffailure — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:40:01 +0000

A good book makes an excellent company. The time it takes to go from home to work is usually occupied with some reading, but from time to time I prefer the more passive company of a good interview or technical discussion downloaded from any given podcast.

Until today, no Linux podcast client had all the features that made it perfect for me, but that was just because I was looking in the wrong place. I tried Amarok built-in client, gPodder and a few others but none of then was ever able to truly accomplish the task at hand.

A couple of days ago I found IcePodder (a Linux clone for Juice), a very simple to use podcast client (also available for Windows and Mac, not that I care). With a clean interface, the subscription process is very straight-forward and quick.

Unfortunately, the installation procedure on Ubuntu 8.04 is not the usual ’sudo aptitude install X’, but it still remains to be quite simple:

 > sudo apt-get install subversion

 > svn co https://icepodder.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/icepodder icepodder

 > cd icepodder

 > sudo ./install.sh

 > sudo apt-get install python-wxversion

and that is it. Just run iPodder.

[Updated after some complaints from the readers on not being able to install IcePodder]

Death of a Soldier

singlepointoffailure — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:31:00 +0000

I love photography and any thing related to it. Photo journalism is one of the many areas that I enjoy and the work of Michael Kamber (for New Your Times) just made me really thing about life. The work presents shoots taken during a USA military mission in Iraq, during which the 2nd Brigade Combat Team was attacked (suffering a casualty). The quality of the photos and the comments of the photographers made me think about how fragile is human life. I think one of photography’s main goals should be to make people think more often about that.

SFW

singlepointoffailure — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:35:15 +0000

Yes, I work with a bunch of conservatives. I found the video of the latest ad campaign from Diesel, and send them the link.

Just because I mentioned it contained Porn no one had the nerve to see it. I understand that being caught seeing porn at work is not the greatest ideia ever… But this ad campaign is based on the notion of SFW (Safe For Work) porn, which replaces all explicit images with cartoon pictures resulting in a very funny movie (and totally harmless)!

Just watch the video and tell me if it isn’t funny…

The Actual Size of Things…

singlepointoffailure — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 20:23:05 +0000

Tomorrow’s Workday

singlepointoffailure — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 16:56:52 +0000