A Credit Crisis explanation

TraceMonkey and howto run two versions of firefox

It seems the next thing in browsers performance is going to be javascript performance. With the V8 that Google Chrome uses, the standard is quite high, and it seems Mozilla was working with the same approach with their TraceMonkey, which is really fast.

Now you can try TraceMonkey by downloading firefox-minefield.

Since TraceMonkey is not used by default, you need to go to about:config in the address bar, then search theses two keys: "javascript.options.jit.content", "javascript.options.jit.chrome", and press toggle true.

But since minefield crashes, how do I enjoy its speed and browse my important webs in a safe Firefox?

You can run two versions of Firefox by following these steps:

Create a new profile for firefox.
Ubuntu: firefox -profilemanager -no-remote
Windows: Goto Start >> Run >> type: firefox.exe -profilemanager -no-remote

This will start up the profile manager. Create a profile, I've called it 'minefield'.

Then we need to launch Firefox adding "-P minefield -no-remote".

Ubuntu: In the installadion dir run "firefox -P minefield -no-remote &"

Windows: Righth click on a Minefield shortcut, update the target field to look something like this: "C:\Program Files\Minefield\firefox.exe" -P minefield -no-remote

Signing NxP Contract

Robotics

Impressive Robotics Dynamics

Viewed here

NoC simulator Code

After a request from a Electrical and Computer Engineering researcher from Villanova University, I decided to publish the code of my Network on Chip simulator under GPL v2. To do that, I have written a quick documentation and a README explaining how to use the simulator and how to add new modules. I hope you enjoy it.
The code is available in my NoC simulator blog.

Tie Race

I just want to sum yesterday primaries polling numbers.



Update: Clinton won the primaries by 15564 votes of a total of 14.8 millions votes.

And these were the primaries, in the caucus Obama built a clear victory(by 35811 state delegates):




Taking a look to the number of registered voters of these Caucus:
Alaska(477,040; 68% independent-democratic),Idaho(693,965; No registration by party),Kansas(1,646,599; 53% independent-democratic), North Dakota(495,411 estimated eligible voters) is easy to estimate that Obama won the popular vote in Tuesday 5, 2008.

I am impressed to see how Obama is so close in California. 50% of California electorate voted in January, where Clinton was leading because she was the inevitable candidate: The people didn't know Obama at that time, as in Florida or Michigan where no campaign was done.
Clinton only won 52% California. I would like to know the results of the people that went yesterday to vote in California, because I believe Obama outperformed Clinton there.
We will need to wait to know the delegates numbers, because in primaries votes are only the first step, the CNN estimation of the total number of delegates until now is:

Hillary Clinton
Pledged: 625

Barack Obama
Pledged: 624

1 delegate.
Tie race. But something is clear: Obama is going up, Clinton and the old-politics are going down.

PS:I just do not count the super-delegates because they vote in the convention, so I don't buy NYT polls on that. Or at least until all the super-delegates are taken into account a few days before the convention.

Fon Memo

[Story]
Here it is the last thing I wasted my time in: A Fon memorandum to help them build a better network.
Yeah, I also think that I waste a lot of time with different things, but I just felt that to present all my thoughts about Fon would help them a LOT to develop their WiFi network.
[Video]

RaycoHM Fon Memo from Rayco on Vimeo.

[State]
Update: They answered:
""""Hi Ray,
Thank you very much for your memo, I found it very interesting. Mesh is something that we have been debating about and certainly something for the future of FON, when there is better density of points.

Thanks again for your insight and good work.

Best Regards,

Diego Cabezudo
COO FON"""
It is always nice to know that someone inside has viewed it. I hope it will be useful, at least in the brainstorming of the Next FON.

Guy Kawasaki quote

Great conference from Guy Kawasaki back in 2006 about entrepreneurship, but today I just want to point out something about the Killer gene in men, it is just brilliant.

[Minute 16:16]
"""
Ask woman about your business model.
I believe you should not waste your time asking men about business models and business ideas.
I believe this is because mens have a fundamental genetic flaw, We all have the killer gene. Men want to kill things...
we want to kill plants,
we want to kill animals,
we want to kill other companies and products.
To a large degree this killer gene has been suppress by society
One place is hasn't been suppressed is entrepreneurship. It is sociable acceptable to want to kill a competition.
Thus when you ask a men should I start a company to kill Oracle, to kill Google, to kill Microsoft,
all men always say: YEEEES!!!! that's a great idea
[Audience(hahahahahah)]

Women do not have this fundamental genetic flaw.
So when you came up with an idea for business model ask women. Do not waste your time asking men. """

Copy Paste ends up as ŸŸ (Ubuntu+VirtualBox)

[Problem]

When I start using Virtualbox for a while I always have problems with copy and paste. All pasted text ends up as: ŸŸ. I can still c/p in the Windows XP inside the Virtualbox.

[Solution]

I was using VirtualBoX 1.5.2 but the guest additions of my virtual machine were 1.5.0.
I reinstalled the guest additions from the 1.5.2 image and the problem was solved.

FON versus Joost versus Meneame

Which company is doing better in Google Trends Spain?

Spain, last 12 months

fon

joost

meneame

Global identifier of Internet adult content

[Story]

Back in May'05 and before starting my Network on Chip Master Thesis I proposed another type of project as my master thesis. The topic had nothing in common with my actual field but I though I was able to come out with a better solution to identify Internet adult content, but not to censure it. The project was rejected because telematic is not a strong research field in the ULPGC -which are microelectronics and signal processing- and the tutors I tried to convince were more focused in low-quality and short term profitable projects. While I can understand that short term profits are really important for a company, I think university research should be long-term high quality research.
Since at that time I did not have a blog I had this idea in a drawer until today ;-). Be patient and don't expect a high-quality analysis, because my main notes are back in Canary island and I am writing as I remember things from here in Netherlands.
The idea was simple. There are a lot of entities spending money in banning adult-content webpages, from search engine filters as Google to adult-control filter for browsers. To be honest I understand this situation, since I have a little sister (6 or 7 years old at the time I studied the project) who uses internet. Thus, I was afraid about how adult content could shock a child at an age when they are not able to process these kind of things no matter what you teach them.

[Main idea]

The idea of the project is to change the view from an extremely cost individual banning to a cheap global tagging. To do so the proposal is a train ticket model in which the webmaster tells to the tagging entity whether or not the webpage/domain is an explicit adult-content. The tagging entity trusts the webmater's tagging, still there is a revision process which is focused on alerted webpages and if an adult content page was tagged as a non-adult content page, the webmaster will be required to pay a dissuasive price in order to retain its domain name.

What's the mystery? The global idea is simple but not the implementation since right now there is a lot of complexity in the management of the domain names so let's take a look to this complexity.

The Historical Context
-1993, Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI) was granted an exclusive contract by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to be the sole Domain name registrar for .com, .net and .org Top Level Domain (TLD) names. NSI also maintained the central database of assigned names called WHOIS. Network Solutions acted as a de facto registrar, selling names directly to end users.
-1998, on January 28, Postel, on his own authority, emailed eight of the twelve operators of Internet's regional root servers and instructed them to change the root zone server from Network Solutions (NSI)'s A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. (198.41.0.4) to DNSROOT.IANA.ORG (198.32.1.98). The operators complied with Postel's instructions, thus splitting control of Internet naming between IANA and the four remaining U.S. Government roots at NASA, the .mil server, BRL and NSI. He soon received a telephone call from a furious Ira Magaziner, President Clinton's senior science advisor, who instructed him to undo this change - which he did. Within a week, the US NTIA issued its "Green Paper" asserting the US government's definitive authority over the Internet DNS root zone.
-In 2000, Network Solutions(NSI) was acquired by VeriSign $21bill
-2003, In negotiations with ICANN, VeriSign gave up operation of the .org top-level domain in return for continued rights over .com, the largest domain with more than 34 million registered domain names.
-In mid-2005, the existing contract for the operation of .net expired and five companies, including VeriSign, bid for management of it. On the 8th of June 2005 ICANN announced that VeriSign had been approved to operate .net until 2011.

Light in the craziness of the domain names.
The key element is to work with the WHOIS database. Thus, the WHOIS database manager, as the tagging entity, should add a new task: To examine with a final human report, but with a computerize process whether or not a webmaster follows its web tag, and if the webmaster does not follow it, to increase the fee of 6$/year to keep that domain name. Thus, it does not matter which company is the registrar, and with the extra money the WHOIS database manager could afford to do a detailed human checking of each web page that has an alert. In this system it is key that search engines or other companies that crawl/index the web send alerts of suspected pages to the tagging entity. Otherwise, the tagging entity has to build a crawler by itself, but it is easy and cheaper to reward each successful alert made by the search companies. Therefore the tagging entity would value the quality of the alerts from different suppliers(I am thinking in google as the most capable) and would make a weighted queue of pending alerts taking into account the supplier history of success.
This is the main idea, but there are a lot of elements to research, for example, I have thought in 6 tags:
1) explicit adult-content.
2) unclassified(reasonable alert system and no extra payment.) Change the status to explicit adult content if that is the situation. It will be predetermined status at the beginning.
3) non-adult explicit(soft alert system, extra payment and change of tag if needed). Adult content sites are 80/100% explicit adult images so with this intermediate tag it should be extremely difficult to make a false alert in global content pages as http://www.nytimes.com/, art pages, blogs or any other "normal" web page with less than 10/30% of explicit adult pictures.
4) Explicit child-content(high alert system, extra payment and change of tag if needed).
5) Multidomain. Here is the biggest problem of the project. Example: www.ulpgc.com/USERS/John. Also, it is the part where there is space to design and implement a solution.
6) Untrustable multidomain.

Therefore the idea of the project was to clarify all this scheme and implement a small prototype, so the project tasks are as follows:

[Main Tasks]

Main task 1:
-Global solution for simple domains. Study tags. Add element to Resource Record. Create secure policy to access the tag or use WHOIS protocols.

Main task 2:
-Multi-domain: Example: iuma.ulpgc.es/USERS/alumnos/JohnTravolta
Propose a special tag(Multidomain) to delegate responsibility to a local server.
Create a secure protocol to connect a tag query to a WHOIS database with an answer from the local server which manages that subdomain.
Protocol for communication between the WHOIS database manager and the local server, which main goal is to change the local server tag status from the WHOIS database manager. If the local server does not follow this protocol to change a tag, the WHOIS database manager will set the status of such multi-domain to untrustable multidomain and there will be an economic sanction when the multidomain renews the domain name.

Main task 3:
Create prototypes of all these elements and study efficiency and security of proposed protocols. Study how the tags are propagated along the DNS servers (Times, efficiency, etc.).

[FAQ]

So this is, as far as I remember it, the draft of the rejected project. I understand you might have some questions, so here I write my answers to the typical questions:
Q1 Multidomain is key. A1: Yes is key and that's why this project is interesting.
Q2 DNS is not only about WEB. A2: Other services can be tagged as unclassified.
Q3 It will be like censure. A3: The idea is to be flexible and just to improve, not to be a policeman. The idea is that you put the filter in your browser, is never put by an ISP or a government. NEVER. If it is not possible to guarantee that China won't use this tags to censure is better to close this project forever.
Q4 People can access adult-content directly through ip protocol jumping the DNS. A4: AGAIN, the idea is not to censure, the idea is to improve search engines, child filters for browsers and the typical click access from one page to another. Thus, only if the final user wants to filter the tags will be used(You can always access whatever you want or, on the other hand you can filter adult tagged pages from your browser. You make the decision. For example if your are a porn addict you can make a search engine to search only pages with the tag porn. This project is not about censure, is about efficiency).
Q5 Once this project prototype is made is more about politics than about engineering. A5: Absolutely true.
Q6 I don't see money to support the final human reports. A6: The domain cost will increase if users lie about their tags. That money should support the human report cost, but is important to have an automated engine to make trusted alerts(As I said I think google and other search engines might have a good one.)
Q7 It is dangerous to have an entity controlling web content. A7: It is not web content control, is tagging identification available to the final user. In addition it is only adult/non-adult tagging, and there is a soft detection (sites with less than 30% adult-content) to make 0 false positives. At the same time the point is to support net neutrality; I can see some extremist "family" groups clamming the ISP to filter tags with adult-content and big Washington lobbies(Don't forget that ICANN is controlled by USA) pressing USA congress to make more tags and to change the soft detection(over 30% adult content) with a hard&stupid detection(over 0,1% of adult content). To answer this, I can say that we need to be strong supporters of net neutrality, and we will need that support with this project and without it, because in the next years we(as the Internet community) will be facing a lot of stupidity/insanity coming from lobby groups.

The Italian Man Who went to Malta

Besides Italian, Spanish guys also fit in the video ;-).

Nautilus script line count in Ubuntu Gibbon 7.10

[Story]

I was in an interview two weeks ago and the interviewer popped up an unexpected question.
Interviewer- How many code lines does your Master Thesis Project have?.
Ray-"To be honest I have NO IDEA". (My NoC Simulator is a modular system with around 125 source files)
Interviewer-But can you give me an approximation?
Ray-"I have not a clue" [(You should view his face). I tried to solve the situation by giving him the CD with the project, but he didn't take it so I guess I lost one job opportunity.(The interesting thing is that I believe this department needs me more than I need them. There are not many engineers with the background, passion and enthusiasm this research topic needs, and I have all of them ;-). Life is just like that, my experience tells me that some times when you follow a different path that the one you were planning the result is much better than the initial plan.)]

[Problem]

What do we do to count the number of code lines along many files and folders?.

[Solution]

A Nautilus script.
I searched internet and I found an script package from "Nicolas Cuntz (ni_ka_ro), 16.4.2005" with a line count script implemented, but since it is an old implementation it does not work with the last version of nautilus and bash(or at least it does not work for me).

I have updated some lines to solve the main problems, and right now I have a working solution. It is important to point out that there is an error in the execution, but does not affect the counting. In the future I will solve it and I will make a clean script but in the mean time you can download this functional version here.

-How to install&use it
Extract it and move the files to the folder /home/user/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/
Don't forget to move the hidden folder '.scripts' to the same destination.
Give execution permission to all the files inside .scripts an also to 'line_count' script in /home/user/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/
That's all. Select the folder with the project. Right click->Scripts->line_count.

Yes I know, the recursion along folders is just great.
I hope you find it useful and don't forget to reply me if you have a better solution.

Income tax in the Netherlands

Talking with my friends here in Eindhoven, I was surprise about their knowledge of the amount of taxes they pay to the government.
First she told me that the tax was about 30%, but one day later she called me back telling me that she was wrong the first time because the real tax was 42%. I was surprise, but I thought she is the one that is paying taxes, so she should know really well the amount of taxes she is paying.

I was assuming she was right until yesterday, when I realize that she might be wrong because I had the opportunity to take a look to the gross and the net amount of a salary and it was quite clear that taxes weren't 42%.

Thanks to Wikipedia right now I know how easy are the taxes to the incomes in Netherlands, because it is a step based income taxation.
Update: It is not that easy. I made a mistake because the steps taxes are only one of the aspects of the final incoming tax and they are named as Box 1 taxes. There are two other taxes, but a new worker might not use them because they involve account savings and investments(box3), and substantial business interest (box 2). It is important to point out that it is incorrect to use directly the Box1 taxes as the final taxes(that was my error) because you need to subtract an amount of 2043€. Yeeeeees! I am happy I was wrong.

I made this easy sheet, in order to have a good answer if a friend ask me about the taxes here in Netherlands.
You can play a little bit with the sheet by introducing a new value in the gross salary per month.

Power consumption along Ubuntu versions

Phoronix has published an article about power consumption rates along the lasts versions of Ubuntu.
Here are the main graphs.


It's interesting because with the last kernel it seems that the power-consumption goes down a little bit, which is extremely valuable because as it is stated in Phoronix there are more processes running in Ubuntu 7.10 than in 5.04.
Thanks to Phoronix benchmarks we can conclude that with the last Linux kernel there is no revolution in terms of power consumption, but on the other hand we know that Linux Kernel people are working on this thread. It's also interesting how Intel has started to work in order to solve this situation. To do so they have started building a tool, PowerTop, that identifies which applications are consuming the most power and thus draining the battery. Eventually, this tool will allow developers to optimize their applications for maximum power savings.

If you want to read the full power-consumption article is available at Phoronix.

5 Myths About Sick Old Europe

In the global economy, today's winners can become tomorrow's losers in a twinkling, and vice versa. Not so long ago, American pundits and economic analysts were snidely touting U.S. economic superiority to the "sick old man" of Europe. What a difference a few months can make. Today, with the stock market jittery over Iraq, the mortgage crisis, huge budget and trade deficits, and declining growth in productivity, investors are wringing their hands about the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, analysts point to the roaring economies of China and India as the only bright spots on the global horizon.

But what about Europe? You may be surprised to learn how our estranged transatlantic partner has been faring during these roller-coaster times -- and how successfully it has been knocking down the Europessimist myths about it.....

....Continue reading it at Washington Post

An Image

Writer’s Tools

Writer’s Tools is an all-around tool designed to help OpenOffice.org users to perform a wide range of tasks. It makes easier to backup documents, look up and translate words and phrases, manage text snippets, and keep tabs on document statistics.


It is available here and if you want more information before downloading it there is a good manual here.

Documentation Generator

Just in case you haven't used a documentation generator before I strongly recommend it for some situations. For example it is very helpful when you study a very big project or a hell of a code. In my field, Electronic Engineering, there are tons of engineers coding C, C+Classes, or C+Classes+SystemC with no love to the source code.
In this situation I suggest Doxygen as a documentation generator. You can use it for C++(SystemC), C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors) and to some extent PHP, C#, D and ActionScript.

My favourite Google Logo.....

I just love it.