It's become kind of a clich for me to claim that the reason I'm happy working on ACPI and UEFI and similarly arcane pieces of convoluted functionality is that no matter how bad things are there's at least some form of documentation and there's a well-understood language at the heart of them. My PhD was in biology, working on fruitflies. They're a poorly documented set of layering violations which only work because of side-effects at the quantum level, and they tend to die at inconvenient times. They're made up of 165 million bases of a byte code language that's almost impossible to bootstrap[1] and which passes through an intermediate representations before it does anything useful[2]. It's an awful field to try to do rigorous work in because your attempts to impose any kind of meaningful order on what you're looking at are pretty much guaranteed to be sufficiently naive that your results bear a resemblance to reality more by accident than design.

The field of bioinformatics is a fairly young one, and because of that it's very easy to be ignorant of its history. Crick and Watson (and those other people) determined the structure of DNA. Sanger worked out how to sequence proteins and nucleic acids. Some other people made all of these things faster and better and now we have huge sequence databases that mean we can get hold of an intractable quantity of data faster than we could ever plausibly need to, and what else is there to know?

Margaret Dayhoff graduated with a PhD in quantum chemistry from Columbia, where she'd performed computational analysis of various molecules to calculate their resonance energies[3]. The next few years involved plenty of worthwhile research that aren't relevant to the story, so we'll (entirely unfairly) skip forward to the early 60s and the problem of turning a set of sequence fragments into a single sequence. Dayhoff worked on a suite of applications called "Comprotein". The original paper can be downloaded here, and it's a charming look back at a rigorous analysis of a problem that anyone in the field would take for granted these days. Modern fragment assembly involves taking millions of DNA sequence reads and assembling them into an entire genome. In 1960, we were still at the point where it was only just getting impractical to do everything by hand.

This single piece of software was arguably the birth of modern bioinformatics, the creation of a computational method for taking sequence data and turning it into something more useful. But Dayhoff didn't stop there. The 60s brought a growing realisation that small sequence differences between the same protein in related species could give insight into their evolutionary past. In 1965 Dayhoff released the first edition of the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure, containing all 65 protein sequences that had been determined by then. Around the same time she developed computational methods for analysing the evolutionary relationship of these sequences, helping produce the first computationally generated phylogenetic tree. Her single-letter representation of amino acids was born of necessity[4] but remains the standard for protein sequences. And the atlas of 65 protein sequences developed into the Protein Information Resource, a dial-up database that allowed researchers to download the sequences they were interested in. It's now part of UniProt, the world's largest protein database.

Her contributions to the field were immense. Every aspect of her work on bioinformatics is present in the modern day larger, faster and more capable, but still very much tied to the techniques and concepts she pioneered. And so it still puzzles me that I only heard of her for the first time when I went back to write the introduction to my thesis. She's remembered today in the form of the Margaret Oakley Dayhoff award for women showing high promise in biophysics, having died of a heart attack at only 57.

I don't work on fruitflies any more, and to be honest I'm not terribly upset by that. But it's still somewhat disconcerting that I spent almost 10 years working in a field so defined by one person that I knew so little about. So my contribution to Ada Lovelace day is to highlight a pivotal woman in science who heavily influenced my life without me even knowing.

[1] You think it's difficult bringing up a compiler on a new architecture? Try bringing up a fruitfly from scratch.
[2] Except for the cases where the low-level language itself is functionally significant, and the cases where the intermediate representation is functionally significant.
[3] Something that seems to have involved a lot of putting punch cards through a set of machines, getting new cards out, and repeating. I'm glad I live in the future.
[4] The three-letter representation took up too much space on punch cards

comments

A commentor on my previous post asked why I think MySQL is a toy. I've actually blogged about that a number of times, but when wanting to point that out, I found that most of those posts point out just one thing, rather than having one post that enumerates them all. So let's remedy that, shall we? There are many things wrong with MySQL, including, but not limited to:

• In my personal opinion, the whole storage engine thing is a bad idea. It leads to dilution of effort (the MySQL developers need to implement stuff more than once), and makes users choose between disjoint feature sets, which will almost always result in suboptimal results. It also neatly allows PR people to claim that MySQL is 'fast' and 'ACID compliant', without mentioning that you can't combine both.
• One of MySQL's default settings is to truncate string values if they are longer than the field in which they're supposed to fit. This eats data. Hint: it's a database. While truncating strings might be appropriate in extreme corner cases, making it the default is so wrong it's not even funny.
• One of MySQL's default settings is to use MyISAM as a storage engine, which doesn't do transactions. This means you don't have atomicity, which eats data. Hint: it's a database. While telling a user "if the system crashes, I might write your entire data set to disk, or I might write just half of it, or I might corrupt the data set and I'm not going to tell you until you try to read again" might be appropriate in extreme corner cases, making it the default is so wrong it's not even funny. Update: as many people pointed out to me in the comments, apparently one of the first things Oracle did when they took over MySQL is to change the default from MyISAM to InnoDB, making this point no longer valid. I still think the replaceable storage engine thing is a bad idea, but with InnoDB as default, it's not as much of a pain anymore.
• If those two weren't enough 'mysql eats your data' arguments, note that most distributions routinely run a data recovery tool at MySQL startup, because not doing so caused problems in the past.
• I've seen MySQL crash and burn and segfault reproducibly when it encountered a corrupt table. Now I'm not saying that the database should be able to read data as if nothing happened from a corrupt file, but it should not crash and burn and segfault; instead, it should produce an error message.
• Fetching a result set can be done in two ways: either you call mysql_use_result() before calling mysql_fetch_row() which tells MySQL you'll be fetching the result one row at a time, or you call mysql_store_result(), which will read the entire result set into memory. So far so good. The problem, however, is that if you use mysql_use_result(), you're locking the tables from which you're fetching data, and no other client will be able to update any data in those tables until you're finished. On the other hand, if you need to process a large amount of data that can't be processed on the server for some reason, you may need to run a query that returns more data than you have memory. In that case, running mysql_store_result() is plain impossible. This isn't just a theoretical thing; I've seen cases in data warehouse situations where a database client needed to process multi-gigabyte query results. Trying this on MySQL is a pain.
• When compared to PostgreSQL, the MySQL feature set is immature. For instance, here's a number of useful[1] features which PostgreSQL has but MySQL, to the best of my knowledge, does not (corrections are welcome):
  • table inheritance
  • asynchronous notification
  • full ACID compliance, in all cases. (MySQL only offers full ACID compliance if you pick a particular storage engine)
  • asynchronous command processing.
  • Very flexible authentication system, and real actual users. For instance, PostgreSQL supports Kerberos authentication, and understands that users may actually log in from different hosts (gasp!)
  • SELinux extensions, called SE-PostgreSQL.
  • Server-side languages are implemented using a plugin scheme, allowing stored procedures to be written bascially in any possible language. Someone wrote a PL/LOLCODE which, while not very useful, shows the flexibility; MySQL only supports one language for stored procedures and triggers if the storage engine supports triggers, which not all do.
  • Sequences (an AUTO_INCREMENT column is a reasonable workaround, but still not a sequence)
  • window functions
  • extensible data type system; of those, MySQL only supports enumerated types.
Against that list, MySQL can only pit "multi-master clustering". While I'm sure that's useful for some use cases, I remain unconvinced that it's a useful enough feature to have to deal with the administrative overhead that MySQL's multi-master clustering imposes upon you, or that it is worth losing all the above over.

So it's my opinion that any database which fails to store data correctly in its default settings can't be anything but a toy; or that a database which has a comparatively small feature set can't be anything but a toy. But maybe that's just me. [1] No, I haven't used all those features; but I have used asynchronous notification, sequences (other than for primary keys), kerberos auth, custom data types, and (obviously) I have enjoyed the extra peace of mind of knowing that my database is ACID compliant, meaning that it will either accept my transaction as a whole, or reject it as a whole (but usually the former). In addition, I've seen customers use the table inheritance feature.

Oogoo and Raspberry Pi While I haven't been doing much blogable myself, I have recently found a couple of interesting things via Hack A Day: Oogoo is a moldable silicone clay that is easy to make from readily available substances. The main problem for what I'm thinking of using it for is it releases acid as it cures, so I'm not sure using it to encapsulate metal is a good idea. Still, it looks like something fun to work with. Raspberry Pi while not shipping yet (they hope for November/December) looks very interesting -- a $35 (or $25 for the less well configured one) low-power credit-card sized Arm board running Linux with a reasonable amount of I/O (USB, Ethernet, HDMI, I2C, I2S, SPI, serial, audio, composite video, and GPIO). The alpha version is running Debian, but they plan on shipping with Ubuntu or another distro. While the first version is aimed at experimenters (no case, no power supply) they are a UK non-profit aiming at the education market. This is not a direct competitor with the OLPC, which is aimed at younger children.

Quite probably, the best thing got for myself during the last year was my Kindle. I just love it! It has changed the way I interact with knowledge, and saved me from hours of boredom. But it has also taught me the value of scribbling along the book pages and of underlining passages. Yes, I hold a deep regard for my regular (paper) books, and I never scribble on them, not even on text books. In any case, I can scribble on a post-it or something like that. Still, when you underline or comment on a passage in the Kindle, what can you do with your annotation? Well, not much. Annotations (called clippings in Kindlespeak) are stored on an easily accessible My Clippings.txt text file, very easy to parse and work with. So, I devoted yesterday evening to coming up with a first prototype of an app that I think can be very useful if you use clippings extensively: It displays each clipping with its base information separately, allows you to filter on the specific book to which each clipping is related as well as on the clipping type. So, if it interests you, clone it away from github!

git://github.com/gwolf/kindleclip.git

Written in Ruby, Gtk (Glade). No further libraries are (currently?) needed. The code is far from beautiful, but is a first stab towards functionality. Any comments welcome!

What Yes, I have not used this kind of outfit for over 20 years. And I hope it will be 20 more years before I do it again. But today, I was seen like this in public. Why? Well, I won't explain the whole background yet again I did it a bit over a month ago in this same space. Much much in short, I never attended university, so after many years of working without any formal validation for my knowledge I followed the CENEVAL Acuerdo 286 procedure to get a "Software Engineering" title and the corresponding c dula profesional. Today I did the last portion of this procedure: Presenting an oral exam, defending the work I developed. Not precisely a thesis, but you can see it as an equivalent. One of the requisites was to go on formal attire Of course, I have some beautiful shirts I am very fond of, but I didn't want to risk it to such a detail, so I asked my friend and almost-neighbour Miguel Barajas to lend me the needed bits of clothing, and presented the exam. Was it easy? No, not by a long shot. Did I pass? Yes! Now, back to work!

So this is that misterious red type of produce known only to a certain US ex-vicepresident? (seen at a Mexico City supermarket. Note that there was no label stating what the misterious thing was in Spanish)

...Or something like that ;-) For those who don't understand the silly joke Blender is a production-quality free 3D rendering/animation engine, which you can download for basiclally any operating system you can think of. Thanks to Claudia and Octavio, from the G-Blender Spanish-speaking community, for the nice sticker :-

I should probably have researched the batteries in this old solar-powered house before I installed a charge controller. I had assumed that the 24 6-volt batteries in the house's battery bay were standard lead-acid deep cycle batteries. It wasn't until I stumbled over a receipt from 1997 that I learned that the batteries are really NiCads. Specifically Saft model STM5-180. Thirty of these were purchased in 1997 from TVA in Chatanooga, for $350 total. An amazing price, since a single deep cycle battery is in that ballpark, new. These batteries were used, they had been in a "bus" -- perhaps it was a 1995 Chrysler TEVan, or maybe one of the pilot electric buses running there in the late 90's. They were probably not in this '79 VW TVA Bus. All mentions of these batteries I can find involve electric vehicles -- it's unusual for them to be used to power a house. Being vented NiCads probably accounts for these batteries' long useful life -- surely at least 15 years. Still, with only twenty-four good ones left, they are probably toward the end of their lifespan and need to be taken care of in order to last. Once I realized they were NiCads, I knew the charge controller was charging them wrong. NiCads like to be charged at a higher voltage than the 13 or so volts used for lead acid. I would have liked to charge them at 16 volts, but that would feed back through the house wiring, and could fry 12 volt stuff. Checking ratings, 15 volts seemed the highest voltage I could risk. Coming back a week later, I found the batteries charged up to 13.4 volts. And they are now working great. Through several cloudy days, we had all the power we needed. And when the sun was out fully, I sometimes saw the solar panels charging the batteries at 125 watts -- fully half of the panels' rated capacity, and much better than before. The batteries start each evening at 13.4 volts, and only drop to 13.3 by morning. We started using electric lights more, and then just leaving them on all evening, and the nslu2 online all night, and the batteries remained at the magic 13.3 in the morning. This is because NiCad batteries have a near-constant voltage until they are perhaps 30% discharged. In other words, I had been charging them less than half full before. I have figured out how to combine the two banks the batteries are in into one large bank, and once I get the cables to do that, I hope to have battery capacity to get through up to a week of solid clouds in midwinter.

battery box and solar panel

Left: British Petroleum's logo. British Petroleum gained international notoriety last April because of the catastrophic oil spill it is still unable to contain in the North of the Gulf of Mexico; so far, the oil has reached the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi, and keeps growing and spreading, as probably the worst-ever oil spill. So far, the sea surface covered by oil is larger than several countries in the world. Some sites have very interesting maps that might help understand the importance and size of the spill: BP Gulf Oil Spill Maps in The Daily Green, Deepwater Horizon Incident, Office of Response and Restoration, USA National Ocean Service, Article on Slashdot about quantifying and dealing with the deepwater spill. Right: Mexico's de facto government's logo. One of the most pushed projects of Felipe Calder n's government (that was fortunately canceled) was to pursue the tesorito de las aguas profundas (little treasure that lies deep in the water); they strongly pushed for a reform in the oil legislation, which is 100% government-funded since 1938, to allow for private investment in orded to build platforms reaching oil deposits 3000m below the Gulf's surface. Yup, precisely like the one that produced this massive spill, although most would probably be bound to much less strict regulation and controls to what they have in the US. Is the similarity between the two logos just a strange coincidence?

And just to round off my last post (and of course, following a completely non-technical thematic), what is the logical consequence of feeling introspective and blogging just before preparing dinner? Of course Dinner gets prepared with sharing it in mind. The dish ends up even looking as if meant to be served! So this was it: One of my simplest and still favorite dishes: Tostadas. But, yes, these are heterodox tostadas, as they share the basic tostadiness (a hard, roasted and cracky toasted corn tortilla with a soft leguminous layer to give it some consistency, and with... stuff on top. Yes, stuff is sometimes too generic, but that's the beauty of it). What did I come up with? In the strict order with which they were approached at feeding time, and described bottom to top:

1. Closest to traditional, top left: Mashed beans, bits of panela cheese with little bits of chipotle and soybean-based vegetarian chorizo
2. Something I have only seen in Guatemala, and which I intend to take a better look at next time I'm there (top right): Mashed frijoles, , cochinita pibil (canned, shame on me, and frankly lacking in taste), grated beet (betabel/remolacha/betarraga/whatnot), grated cabbage
3. The heterodoxiest of them all, and the idea that led me to the others (center): Mashed lima/fava beans (according to Google habas), cochinita pibil, nopales, and a hint of habanero sauce.

Yum! [update] On a completely unrelated notice, but not worth opening a third post in a row... Some minutes after I published the earlier post, I got a visit to http://gwolf.org/blog/pleasant-perception-changes?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter. Now, it beats me: I don't use twitter. I don't even care about twitter. And were my message so deep somebody just twitted (twat it?) right away, I still find the time lapse too short. Who's auto-twitting me? Maybe a planet or other such aggregator?

AdRevenge is an interesting concept to pay for Google Adsense adverts about how companies suck [1]. If a suitably large group of people pay to warn you about a company then it s a good signal that the company is actually doing the wrong thing. A guest post by Mili on Charles Stross blog has an interesting analysis of the economcs of Intellectual Property and concludes that content is a public good [2]. New Age Terrorists Develop Homeopathic Bomb [3], an amusing satire of medical fraud and security theatre. The sit has a lot of other good satire too. Mark Shuttleworth wrote an interesting post about new window management changes that will soon go into Ubuntu [4]. He points out that the bottom status bar in applications is a throw-back to Windows 3.1 and notes that a large part of the incentive for removing it (and using the title-bar for the status) is the work on the Netbook version of Ubuntu. This is really ironic given that the resolution of current Netbooks is quite similar to that of desktop systems that were current when Windows 3.1 came out. Omar Ahmad gave an insightful TED talk about the benefit of using a pen and paper to send a letter to a politician [5]. Sebastian Wernicke gave an amusing and informative TED talk about how to give a good TED talk [6]. His talk gives some useful ideas for public speaking that are worth considering. Catherine Mohr gave a brief and interesting TED talk about how to build an energy efficient house with low embodied energy [7]. Her blog at www.301monroe.com has the details. Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame) gave an interesting TED talk [8]. He covers a lot of interesting things that can be done with computers, primarily based on the Wolfram Alpha [9] platform which allows natural language queries of a large data set. He also talks about the search for a Theory of Everything. Esther Duflo gave an interesting TED talk about using social experiments to fight poverty [10]. She describes how scientific tests have been used to determine the effectiveness of various ways of preventing disease and encouraging education in developing countries. One example of the effectiveness of such research is the DeWormTheWorld.org project which was founded after it was discovered that treating intestinal worms was the most cost effective way of getting African children to spend longer at school. David L. Rosenhan wrote an interesting research paper On Being Sane In Insane Places about pseudo-patients admitted to psychiatric hospitals [11]. It seems that psychiatric staff were totally unable to recognise a sane person who was admitted even though other patients could do so. It also documents how psychiatric patients were treated as sub-human. One would hope that things had improved since 1973, but it seems likely that many modern psychiatric hospitals are as bad as was typical in 1973. It s also worth considering the issue of the treatment in society of people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness, it seems likely that the way people are treated in the community would have similar bad results to that which was documented for treatment in psychiatric hospitals even the sanest people will act strangely if treated in an insane manner! Also it seems to me that there could be potential for using a panel of patients assembled via the Delphi Method as part of the psychiatric assessment process as it has been demonstrated that patients can sometimes assess other patients more accurately than psychiatrists! Simon Sinek gave an inspiring TED talk about how great leaders inspire action [12]. Of course the ideas he describes don t just apply to great leaders, they should apply to ordinary people who just want to convince others to adopt their ideas. Stephen Collins write a good article summarising the main reasons why the proposed great firewall of Australia is a bad idea [13]. Lenore Skenazy who is famous for letting her 9yo son catch the metro alone during broad daylight on a pre-planned route home has created a web site about Free Range Kids [14]. She seems to be starting a movement to oppose Helicopter Parenting and has already written a book about her ideas for parenting. The incidence of crime has been steadily increasing, as has the ability of the police to apprehend criminals and recover abducted children. There s no reason for children to be prevented from doing most of the things that children did when I was young!

• [1] http://ramthemdown.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/adrevenge- -a-business-idea/
• [2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/why-content-is-a-public-good.html
• [3] http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2010/04/20/new-age-terrorists-develop-homeopathic-bomb/
• [4] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/333
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/omar_ahmad_political_change_with_pen_and_paper.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/lies_damned_lies_and_statistics_about_tedtalks.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_mohr_builds_green.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_of_everything.html
• [9] http://www.wolframalpha.com/
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_duflo_social_experiments_to_fight_poverty.html
• [11] http://www.walnet.org/llf/ROSENHAN-BEINGSANE.PDF
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html
• [13] http://www.acidlabs.org/2010/05/13/on-folly-freedom-and-filters/
• [14] http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/faq/

Michael Specter gave an interesting TED talk about the dangers of science-denial [1]. Most of his talk is about the people who oppose vaccines, such as the former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy who thinks that she knows more about medicine than people who do medical research. He notes that a doctor who advocates vaccination has been receiving threats from the anti-vaccine lobby, including threats to his children. An good new development is that Andrew Wakefield (the British ex-Doctor behind the discredited research linking Autism and Vaccination) has been barred from practicing by Britain s General Medical Council [2]. Michael also mentions the opposition to GM food which has the potential to save many lives in developing countries that have food shortages. This convinced me to reduce my opposition to GM food, it s really not GM food that I m opposed to but the poor testing, the bad features (such as the Terminator Gene), and the Intellectual Property controls which allow GM companies to sue farmers who accidentally have GM crops grow on their land due to wind-borne seeds. It s also a pity that there is no work being done on GM versions of any food crop which is only used for feeding poor people. Every GM plant is one that is used to provide food for rich people and is essentially a way for farmers in first-world countries to make more money. But GM versions of Cassava (with less of the toxic chemicals among other things) and Sorghum would improve the situation of many poor people. One interesting related development is that Craig Venter has just announced the creation of the first synthetic life [3]. This technical development could lead to dramatic changes in the production of basic foods, such as algae that produce proteins that have the ideal mixture of all the essential amino acids needed for humans as well as the semi-essential ones that children need. While feeding pond slime to children isn t going to be glamorous it would be a lot better than the current situation where a significant number of children in developing countries have their physical and mental development stunted due to malnutrition. Craig mentions the possibility of using his research to develop vaccines much faster, including perhaps the possibility of vaccinating people against fast evolving viruses such as the common cold!

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_specter_the_danger_of_science_denial.html
• [2] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100524/ap_on_sc/eu_britain_autism_doctor_11
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_unveils_synthetic_life.html

Snail mail has become a despised media. While I still held long conversations at a distance written with ink on paper, with latency measured in weeks and not in milliseconds, that's basically history now. Snail mail is where invoices are received. Ocassionally, a joyous invitation finds its way into my mailbox But its regular use has been almost completely abandoned. Which probably makes it more striking and more of a surprise to receive a very short note of a good friend living far away just stating a very warm greeting. (of course, the paper was not GPG-signed, but I'll have to believe it was sent by him ;-) ) (Oh, about the title: The card is a print of Don Nisbett's Fly By , which recreates Ilwaco, Washington's panorama)

It s hard to do a healthy diet outside the home? Whereas many of the activities carried out. Try some tips refer to following a healthy diet that you can do outside. re Dieting to reduce consumption of fats, carbohydrates or sugar? That does not mean you can not eat well. With a few tricks and cunning look of food, you can even a good meal in a restaurant also order food from fast-food restaurant. Try it voyeur tips from DASH, Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. With these healthy tips you can still eat well and avoid high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels. Well, try telling refer to the following tips: 1. Avoid foods with saturated fats and cholesterol High
But avoid foods that contain saturated fatty acids and also high yan foods contain cholesterol. You can avoid these foods but still give priority to taste, a variety of menus to choose from, even a favorite. If you re eating out make sure the following things:
- Make sure your food is cooked using olive oil instead of butter or
fat if the dish was a stir-fried or something.
- Ask for salad dressing or salad dressings are low in fat.
- If mkan meat or chicken, remove the parts that contain fat such as chicken skin.
- Choose foods with dimaska burned, boiled, or baked. In addition to not using oil, usually healthier. 2. Watchful Against Salt
Another thing to note that this works DASH diet is salt. Because salt can raise your blood pressure, while salt is often used in a variety of restaurants to make food more delicious. You still can control the salt in your food when eating out by doing:
- Ask the waiter to not put salt or MSG in your food.
- Beware of any food that a high salt content such as pickles, soy sauce, broth, bacon, and others.
- Keep the salt from your desk, because usually you will reflexively add salt to the food.
- Reduce the use of mustard, ketchup, pickles, and other Condiment a high salt content.
- Choose fruits or vegetables as the opening menu. 3. Avoid foods with a portion of
But avoid foods with large portions. In addition you will feel
unfortunately if the foods are not consumed, you will feel sick if you eat too much excess. We recommend that you order enough food. Or if that portion is too big, shared with friends is much better. 4. Always Instill Healthy Living Patterns in the Mind
More and more people realize how important a healthy life, making a lot of restaurants started to state that low-fat or rich in antioxidants to the food they sell. Actually do not stop until the food alone, you
also have to think about drinks or dessert healthy what happens to the balance. For example:
- Choose a drink that does not cause side effects, such as mineral water, fruit juice, or herbal tea.
- Expand vegetables and fruits as well as the opening menu to avoid overeating at the main menu.
- If you decide to eat a salad, choose low-fat sauce or put the sauce on the plate edge so that its use is not excessive.
- Avoid mouthwashes that contain high fat like cheese cake. We recommend that you choose desserts such as fruit, sorbet, or fruit jelly. 5. Order careful in Resto Fast Food
Fast-food restaurant is the most dangerous enemy to your diet. But if you are careful, you can still enjoy fast food without the fear of cholesterol or high blood pressure soared and certainly does not ruin your diet program. Here are some tips if your food in the restaurant inginmemesan fast food:
- Take your time choosing foods, read the content carefully to what
contained in one serving. And do not be shy to ask the waiter about
Andapesan food.
- Combine your foods such as grilled chicken with whole wheat and yogurt drinks or low-fat milk.
- Do not order more servings.
- Be aware of and avoid salad dressings containing Condiment bleak high salt soy sauce, ketchup, and pickles.
- To drink mineral water should choose, even if others want to order to avoid fizzy drinks.

So I finally got off my lazy butt and started the paperwork to get a formal recognition of studies equivalence for a undergraduate studies (Licenciatura en ingenier a de software) via CENEVAL's Acuerdo 286 (licenciatura). Part of the paperwork involves filling the form I photographed and attached to this node. This is the utmost example of ber-redundant paperwork... Where it requires my personal data, some of the fields are:

CURP

Clave nica de Registro Poblacional, Unique Populational Registration Key. This is a string composed by:

• WOIG: First letter and first vowel after the first letter of my first family name, first letter of my second family name, first letter of my given name
• 760427: birth date, yymmdd
• H: Sex (H = male, M = female, I guess)
• DF: State or federative entity I was born in
• LSN: First consonant after the first letter of the first and second family name and of the given name
• 03: Deambiguation digits

So far, so good.

Age

Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It has my full birth date!

Sex

Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It is a specific field in it

Birth date

Man, you already have it literally on top of the field!

Nationality

This tramit is only for Mexicans, so... what's the point?

Birth place

The CURP states already the state or federative entity I was born... But I'll accept this one, as not all states have only one city as DF does

Quite a nice catalog of redundancies. As a cherry on top of the cake, the phone number states I should write my long distance phone code (LADA historically, Larga Distancia Autom tica, Automatic Long Distance) only if I am in any of the states. I can only ask myself why... Anyway... Lets continue filling paperwork. Grah. Hopefully I will be able to get my papers... somewhen in the next half century.

Quoting The Klezmatics: It's everybody-else's annual end-of-the-year-time holiday, the name of which respectfully we do not choose to say, but that does not prohibit us in any concievable way from wishing you a very merry everybody-else's end-of-the-year-time holiday!
In order to properly welcome this 2010 in a geeky fashion, I got the following wines to share with my friends:

• My last bottle of the now world-famous and limited edition Debian wine, from Extremadura Tempranillo grapes
• What is it like trying to coordinate a timely, predictable release? Why, yes, it has precisely been described as herding cats. And even better, the most successful project so far to mate Debian with timely, predictable releases seems to come from South Africa. Likewise this nice bottle!
• Mar del Sur (Southern Sea) Chilean wine. Strikingly similar to our Debian wine, with a swirl that tends towards some reformistic proposals we have seen. We shall see what it holds for us!
• And as a tribute to our little derivative, Emdebian, we shall also try this Australian Little Penguin.

Happy $ joyful_ocassion !

A nice, non-aggressive, brown-colored theme suitable for your siamese herding cats, courtesy of South African people trying to bring a better life to this world.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to travel to Colombia, where I delivered a talk at III Encuentro Internacional de Seguridad Inform tica in the city of Manizales (photos available, of course. I travelled with Colombia's nacional airline, Avianca. On completely unrelated news, today I entered Avianca's website to check my miles. To my biggest amusement Turns out I am now a resident of Bamiyan, Afghanistan! (I swear I didn't select that) Seems they do beard-based georeferentiation?

NP: Hey, mister Taliban, tally me bananas
daylight come and me wanna go home!