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Comic: Fat Kids, the new norm.

Fat, new norm

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Ok friends, let’s learn something today. What’s lorem ipsum?, if you want to know, keep reading.

In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum[p][1][2] is the name given to commonly used placeholder text (filler text) to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout. The lorem ipsum text, which is typically a non-sensical list of semi-Latin words, is a hacked version of a Latin text by Cicero, with words/letters omitted and others inserted, but not proper Latin[1][2] (see below: History and discovery).

As non-sense (not actual Latin), the text is not italicized. The text often begins as, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit”. Substituting this dummy text for meaningful content should not be confused with “greeking“.

Even though using “lorem ipsum” often arouses curiosity due to its resemblance to classical Latin, it is not intended to have meaning. Where text is visible in a document, people tend to focus on the textual content rather than upon overall presentation, so publishers use lorem ipsum when displaying a typeface or design elements and page layout in order to direct the focus to the publication style and not the meaning of the text.[2]

Source: Wikipedia (the best encyclopedia ever).

Programming joke

Joke

Universe expansion

Now I’m working in a big company dedicated to research and development projects over the interesting and mysteriously cosmos field.

I’m pretty interested and I should say that the universe, expansion and its theories are one of my new topics when I surf the Internet.

I’m worried and a little bit more after watching the “home project” documentary, perhaps the humanity won’t find the way to go out before the end of the earth. Why can’t we spend more money on research that on military?. Does the government think that they are able to attack interplanetary tropes with our small missiles?

When talking about Big Bang expansion theory, this is a good figure that provides a nice summary:
Universe Expansion

iPhone OS running on Mac Pro multi-touch screen

I think this demo is interesting:

GOTO in PHP 5.3 (Good or Bad decision?)

Several years ago E.W.Dijkstra popularized the GOTO, an old technique to jump to a program specific part from wherever you want.

A brief introduction to the GOTO (thanks to wikipedia):

GOTO is a statement found in many computer programming languages. It is a combination of the English words go and to. When executed it causes an unconditional transfer of control (a “jump”) to another statement. The jumped-to statement is specified using some kind of label, which may be an identifier or a line number depending on the language. At the machine code level a goto is a form of branch or jump statement.

I think GOTO is a low-level programming language thing, from some point of view I can think that our core developers are thinking in put more powerful tools to the PHP programming language (maybe for performance tasks).

I don’t really know, the only thing I can say is that the GOTO feature might allow more disordered code; I’ve been dealing with a lot of bad coding practices that programmers have been adopted; all of that thanks to PHP’s flexibility.

Timothy Boronczyk thinks that the introduction of GOTO will be harmful to most web developers:

GOTO is no different than an if or switch statement. The absolute beginner has more trouble wrapping his mind around while-loops because suddenly there’s a conditional and variable states to keep track of, or understanding PHP’s internal typecasting rules.

GOTO will affect those who let themselves be affected by GOTO. I don’t mean that to sound like a non-answer… but some will work themselves up into frenzy and use it as fodder to bash PHP, others will take the approach I did and explore whether they can make use of a new language feature, and the rest will probably just ignore it. GOTO is simply another option PHP makes available to the programmer, just like functions, objects, variable-variables, and so on. It’s up to the programmer to know which constructs are suitable for the task at hand.

Maybe the PHP developers (I mean core developers) are thinking in an easier language for kids (PHP distribution with colored wax and a little blackboard). Or they are really going to demonstrate that a GOTO feature will be very useful for some purposes and a good thing for PHP’s future.

So, what do you think?

xkcd has its own point of view:

Xkcd - GOTO

Feeling like a TV actor when looking for flat or bedroom!

I’ve just started my search mission a week ago. I really have fun at each visit, it’s very particular the way in that bedrooms/flats rental works.

Everything seems to be a BBC casting for big brother, guys are looking for beautiful blonde girls and girls are looking for big-muscle men.

First of all I’m not blonde, I’m not girl and I’m not the big muscles man. However there are other options, as the 65 years old man who lives alone at a flat in Tres Cantos, Spain. He told me that his last guest went away mysteriously, the key point is that he looked like a serial killer (a mature serial killer).

There are more than 1.000 of flats for rental at Madrid, I’m looking at the north and there are around 400.

When I choose and I like a flat, the casting process is more exhaustive (and I lose) and when I pass (proudly) the casting, I don’t like the flat. I’ve several filters in order to choose the correct option, like non-smoking flat-mates (yes that is complicated in a city where 34% of the population smokes).

Well, being away from our original home is not good enough, I hope find the right place to live and work and the great friends to enjoy beers at the nights and weekends.

See you at the next post!

An Update: I finally got the flat; I’m going to live with a guy from Peru and a Girl from Bulgaria. The flat looks great and is located at the north, a very expensive but nice zone of Madrid.

Cloud Computing - Globus GRAM

Interfaz Cloud para servicios de gestión de recursos

En este artículo se analiza como funciona GRAM para la gestión de recursos y cómo puede ser enviado a través de WSGRAM un trabajo a un Grid. Se mencionan además algunos trucos para simplificar la instalación de Globus Toolkit con GRAM y WSGRAM, luego se implementará un prototipo de un Web Service tipo RESTful que servirá para recibir POSTs con descripciones de trabajo que luego se ejecutarán en el Grid.

Conociendo la importancia de los GRID y las oportunidades que este tipo de infraestructuras están proporcionando a la ciencia y a la industria, he decidido realizar este artículo para estudiar con un cierto nivel de detalle el funcionamiento de la ejecución de trabajos en Globus Toolkit 4 enfocado al servicio GRAM (Grid Resource Allocation and Management) y WSGRAM que está hecho para la creación de Web services, además se presentará un prototipo funcional de un Web service tipo RESTful creado en PHP para recibir un RSL de un trabajo en un POST y ejecutarlo vía globusrun-ws.

Este artículo hace parte de uno de mis pequeños estudios que hice en la UCM. El trabajo permite ver globalmente como funciona Globus Toolkit y como pueden ser implementados servicios de gestión de recursos.

Para ver la versión completa en PDF, haga clic aquí.

Clases de PHP y Tecnologías de Internet en Madrid, España

Estoy aprovechando un poco mi paso por Madrid y estoy transfiriendo mis conocimientos y experiencias que he conseguido en el mundo de tecnologías de Internet.

He notado que muchas personas quieren aprender y tienen talento para iniciar una carrera en el mundo del desarrollo de software web-enabled y de sitios Web 2.0. Sin embargo el problema es que no tienen una persona quién les dirija el aprendizaje y les asesore.

Aunque todos los recursos se encuentran en la red, es difícil hoy en día aprender tecnologías desde cero porque hay muchas alternativas y en gran número de ocasiones se usa la incorrecta.

Es por esto que ahora he iniciado sesiones con dos estudiantes, privadas y adaptadas a la medida de los conocimientos de los participantes. Tengo material y experiencias para estudiantes de todos los niveles pues desde la primera sesión se realiza un programa a seguir con base en los conocimientos.

¿Quieres aprender más de: HTML / CSS / Frameworks Javascript / PHP / PostgreSQL / MySQL / Oracle / Linux?

Esta es una buena oportunidad, en realidad me gusta compartir mi conocimiento y los precios son mejores de lo que puedes imaginar.

Si estás interesado puedes contactarme, no dudes en escribirme a: maomorales (a r r o b a) g m a i l . com

Si quieres saber quién soy haz clic aquí.

Software Libre como filosofía de vida (El Ñu)

Gracias a Cristian Ciro que nos ha referido a una excelente lectura publicada por Luis Alejandro Bernal Romero donde se narra con un estilo muy peculiar una historia que hace alusión al software libre.

 

http://el-directorio.org/El_ñu

La lectura es recomendada, si tienes 7 minutos de tiempo en tu descanso de trabajo entonces leela.  Yo la he visto muy adecuada también para personas que no entienden como funciona el software libre.