estuans interius

We’re Google - we don’t give a f*ck about you…

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In other words:

Well, I guess I’ve got what I paid for…

El Silbo

I’ve just discovered something I had never tried to conceive and had no idea could exist… it’s also the kind of discovery that made me think “of course, why not?!” the moment I heard about it.

This discovery I made is El Silbo, called in English the Silbo Gomero language. The remarkable thing about this language, is that it is whistled!

“Spoken” by the inhabitants of La Gomera in the Canaries Islands, it apparently matches the spanish dialect spoken there: vowels and consonants are transmitted through pitch variation, continuity or pauses in the “melodic line”, and so on.

And if you’d whistle/understood El Silbo, you’d be able to be within earshot of someone 8 to 10 kilometers away from you! An amazing solution to the challenging topography of the island :)

To check out a sample conversation, just download this file!

Run your own Gem server!

OK, this is a technical post “again”, so if you’re not into Ruby development you might as well not read it ^^

Since I’ve read the excellent book Service-Oriented Design With Ruby on Rails by Paul Dix, I’ve begun developing some small Service-Oriented Architecture projects… you know, just to try it out…

Now I’ve finished developing a small Sinatra service for my website sylights.com, and I wanted to have the client gem for that service available somewhere private.
The solution to this problem is: let’s run my own Gem server!

I don’t need any fancy stuff, like pushing gems to my server. Not yet, at least. So this is going to be a very simple, “fetch-only” gem server.

Continue reading…

You probably suck at design

If you do, this is for you!
It’s software/web oriented, sorry for those who were looking for interior design ^^

This presentation is called “Design for developers” and is brought to you by Belgium-based designer Johan Ronsse. If you’re a developer and you think you can’t be any good at design, Johan will teach you how wrong you are :)

The presentation goes through different steps and explains some basics about design, while setting easy-to-follow rules and principles to get you started on the road to good (or great!) design.

Stop (your) motion (and watch)

Here’s a video that’s been buzzing a lot recently. I hadn’t watched at first, and just done it for the second time tonight.
I won’t spoil anything, just watch it: 

I hope you liked it :)
This kind of video just makes me want to stop everything I’m doing and start creating whatever I can create. What is stopping me to do so?

And what’s stopping you?

Humans, are you ready to be replaced?

Below is the full-length video showing the capabilities of the new ASIMO robot from Honda. It’s just crazy!

I can’t help help but smile naively when it opens the bottle of beverage and pours it into the paper cup…

If you can’t see why this is “magical”, just think about it:

• It “sees” and successfully identifies both objects.

• It “knows” how to open the bottle.

• The movements required to hold and turn the cap of the bottle are natural to us, but creating a robot that can reproduce them “on its own” is just amazing in itself. Just look at how the arms, shoulders and fingers are animated to create human-looking movements.

• Same thing for the movements involved in pouring the beverage.

• Have you noticed how it tilts the bottle at the end to make sure its empty?

• The bottle and the cup do not have the same robustness. Again it’ll feel completely natural to you, but see how ASIMO holds the cup. It closes its hand on it until it’s got a firm grip and you can see a small distortion, but it then stops. Determining the needed strength to hold the cup without actually crushing it must not be that easy!

Well I guess you’ve got the point! I’m a huge fan of all the technology behind ASIMO!

Last word though: keep in mind that the human body is just a form factor; the computer that powers this Honda robot could very well power your next car ;)

MacOS X: debugging a kext during boot/shutdown

Okay, first real geeky/technical post here!

This is mainly as a personal reminder but given that the information was not so easily found on Google, I guess it can help others too ^^
You can jump to the bold subtitle below if you want the procedure without the story :) 

Here’s the context: I’m working on a kernel extension (a device driver) that causes kernel panics in particular situations when the system is shutting down.
Debugging this involves using a secondary machine as a remote debugger; I’ll post on that soon too.

The difference with “regular” remote debugging here, is that we’re rebooting the machine. This is usually done over ethernet by connecting the debugger to the target machine’s IP, but since we’re shutting down the system, it doesn’t have an IP address anymore!

After spending some time trying to find an NVRAM option for a default “fallback” IP or such kind of things, an alternative solution came to my mind: FireWire. After all, you can set up a network over a FireWire connection!

That was the right track: the Developer Tools come with a command-line tool called fwkdp. FireWire KDP Tool (KDP being the Kernel Debugging Protocol used for kernel remote debugging).

Tell me what to do!

If you want all the pretty details on this command, well… RTFM ^^
But for the very basic/everyday usage, there you go:

• Connect your target (debugged) machine to your debugging one with a FireWire cable.
• On the target machine, run fwkdp -r (using default option at prompt is fine). It’ll set the NVRAM boot-args options for you, namely set your kernel in debug mode with some more related options.
• Reboot your target machine.
• On your debugging machine, just run fwkdp. It’ll start a small KDP Proxy that is going to do all the hard work for you!
• Now start GDB as you normally do for a remote debugging session (more on that in the next post)
• Trigger a kernel panic by restarting your target machine. You’ll see that the message indicating that the kernel is awaiting a remote debugger connection has changed.
• In GDB, just use kdp-reattach localhost and let the magic do the rest!

That’s it!
If you have any question, please ask =)

Intel is special…

… or so they pretend!

I don’t really know whether they have that strong corporate culture they advertise, but I do love their clips from their campaign “Sponsors of Tomorrow”.
Those clips aren’t new: the campaign was launched in May 2009 along with some of them. I just really enjoy watching them from time to time.

So here are my favorite ones:

Our jokes aren’t like your jokes

Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars 

Lunch Room

What’s your own favorite ads? ^^