Early new year's eve @ Borders!

Until this next Sunday 24, Borders @ Plaza las Américas will open for 24 hours. They will be giving away free coffee, live music, and conversations with several authors. They will welcome the new year both nights and @ 2am, ASOPAO for everyone!

The official itinerary is:

Friday December 22, 2006

7:00 pm - Maria Chuzema y sus personajes, La Hora del Cuento, 2do nivel
11:00 pm - Conversatorio con autores puertorriqueños, 1er nivel
11:00 pm - Niño Planeta, 2do nivel
12:00 am - ¡Despedida de Año! Y Haciendo punto en Otro Son, 2do nivel
1:00 am - Banda Serpenta, 2do nivel
2:00 am - Banda Fragmentos, 2do nivel
2:00 am - Asopao gratis cortesía de Perrone Importers

Saturday December 23, 2006

11:00 pm - Banda El Octavo Día, regalará sus CD singles, 2do nivel
12:00 am - ¡Despedida de Año! Y Banda Néctar Delirios, 2do nivel
1:00 am - Banda [TRANS]Figura, 2do nivel
2:00 am - Asopao gratis para todos
2 am - 5 am - Putumayo Music-DJ Iohann Rashi, regalarán CD singles y calendarios 2do nivel

Is that cool or what!?

Psychic Sylvia Browne: BUSTED!!!

I won't say much about this.

Exhibit A: Look at her website: http://sylvia.org. Very nice looking website...she even has books she's written.

Exhibit B: Watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dU0Q208HKI.

Once again, in the words of Penn from Penn & Teller: BULLSHIT!

Assholes that don't know how to park their car correctly

During this season, you know that finding a parking spot when you go shopping is an adventure. How many times have you found a spot, just to realize that your car won't fit because the other fellow "parkers" went over the lines that delimit the parking space? Don't you feel like waiting for them so you can kick their butts?

Well, this is not a solution, but it a lot of fun. Go to YouParkLikeAnAssHole.com, and get a hold of one of their notices. This will give you a PDF file. Print it out and have it handy. When you find one of these "assholes", pull one out, check the appropriate boxes and leave it in their windshield.

Christmas just turned fun again!

Who wrote the bible?

In the words of Penn & Teller: Get your good book. Ok. Put it away and get your damn bible.

I just watched this video. It's a non-biased analysis on the origins of the bible, revealing that it was indeed written and edited by men with political agendas.

Watch video

Evolution

Though not an expert in the topic, I believe in the theory of the evolution of species through natural selection. This past week I came across two news items that talk about two different instances of "evolution at work".

The first, a group of lions in an island that evolved into a new "sort of" breed of lions that can swim and became strong enough to tackle their natural predator on the island, the giant buffalo.

The second one, in Africa, a group of people that have developed the ability of digesting milk in adulthood.

Both very interesting stories.

What do I mean by appliance?

People have asked me this question...I thought it was completely clear, now I know it's not, so I'll explain.

An appliance, is like a TV set, a DVD player, an MP3 player, a microwave oven etc. It's a piece of hardware, designed for a specific purpose.

Let's take for instance Tivo, one of the leaders in tv on demand. In short, Tivo is a cute box (or appliance) that you connect to your TV set, subscribe to their service, and you have TV on demand, DVR, listings, and many other features.

These appliances start out as an idea, then software, and then packaging. The idea is clear in Tivo's case. For software, they use Linux and then, their cute black box with pretty logo. So, they have a piece of software, running in a widely used operating system, inside a marketing-friendly box. That's what I mean by an appliance.

To put it in more simplistic terms, let's explore the building blocks of an appliance such as Tivo.

Exhibit A: Myth TV

Myth TV is a software solution, that "wraps" the necessary functionalities to use your computer as a "media center". With Myth TV you can have tv shows, music, photos, watch dvd's, rip dvd's, download torrents, etc. Myth TV is freely available, and you can download it and use it yourself.

Now, let's add some business sense to the equation. We say "Neat, this is a great product, but the user needs to install Linux on his/her computer...that's not gonna happen...unless, we can find a way to help them with the task". If we can find a cost effective way of putting together a computer with all the software (Linux and Myth TV) pre-installed, people may be willing to buy it....after all, that's what Tivo is doing...they just don't tell you that they run Linux because that's a "need to know"...and users don't need to know.

Great, let's look for a packaging for our product. MicroATX motherboards are the smallest I know of that can run Intel/AMD processors, so we look around to see what we find, and we find this:


Click for larger image


This case is excellent for our purpose, since it even has card readers, so we can feed memory cards directly from digital cameras into the "media center".

We make some custom modifications to the software...to make it more appealing..and to make it ours...branding if you will, and the end result, a packaged product... An Appliance, named Hannibal.

So we can also make a Mac OS appliance...

Today I read an article detailing the necessary steps to boot Mac OSX from a USB Pendrive (Boot MacOS X from USB pendrive). Just in like my previous posts, where I use Linux, in this case we can have Mac OS X. I think this is pretty cool, at least for me that I legally own a Mac. It's also interesting, since it demonstrates that the operating system itself is very thin, and the rest of the disk usage is for additional features and options, which are not essential.

I'm yet to see a way of running Windows XP from an USB pendrive, but something tells me that it will never happen.

-R

What better way to describe what Linux is....

I just came across this link. It's an IBM tv commercial describing what Linux is. It's a very elegant, non-fanatic ad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOlrKH3SmtI

-R