in a nutshell, and like i’ve always studied in school, nature has a nice way of being. rule of thumb: it regenerates itself, it is self-sustainable, its systems are cyclic!

we, humans, and the systems that we come up with, on the other hand, rule of thumb: are not! that’s what’s artificial to me. and no, humans weren’t created to invent plastic! =D

i thankfully never fully embraced these ideas, though.

back in fifth grade i asked my parents for a musical keyboard. we bought a nice casio one, i though. i chose it. i believe the idea came from sharing a possession with a friend of mine, who still is one of my best. i hammered it for a while, but of course i needed teaching, and so i went to a local music school for it. after a year i was quite proficient at it. although listed under the piano class, i was practicing at home with non-touch-sensitive-keys keyboard. very much unlike a piano! my parents didn’t bide to my “want a piano” desire, about the same time my teacher suggested that i got in the conservatory, since i was learning nothing already, there. a school teacher of mine even suggested i moved with her into town and study there. i was fucking 12, they scared the shit out of me.

so i went through grade school without a serious hobby other than video games. it was not until i was 18 that i finally decided to try and plain tennis. once again i went to a local school. at the end of the first month or so i had bought my own racket. half a year into once a week training, it didn’t feel very appropriate for my technique, i had a hard time confidently swinging with it. having to pay more attention to my national exams and the driving lessons i decided to abandon the sport. i thought that i should try and sell my racket and forget about tennis. the coach wouldn’t let me. he told me that i had learned so much in those six months and had developed so well compared to all other trainees that it was just stupid to quit, sell the racket. i still keep the racket, and occasionally play, but i should really get one better suited for me, even for recreation…

this kind of bothers me. i quit things that i enjoy partly because i can’t or don’t afford better equipment, but mostly because, after asserting my ability, the drive to increase the proficiency level just vanishes. it was quite interesting to see a university teacher (doctor) telling the same about himself a couple of weeks ago, while defending his aggregation. the jury was asking the reason for such a broad curriculum rather than being emphasised on a single field of studies. the doctor answered that he had that problem. he was curious about many things and, once he proved himself apt for those fields, he lost interest and moved on.

this is what i find myself in, in those two stories, but nowadays as well at a smaller scale. this semester i had two projects to deliver. one on advanced network architectures and another one on knowledge and data engineering. the first project consisted on implementing a subset of the http protocol and a peer-to-peer network on top of that. me and my colleague didn’t do that great a job, it was quite disappointing for what we could accomplish. even with the project being so interesting, i wasn’t able to devote as much time as was necessary for a good release (more on group project responsibility in the future, maybe).

that (same of the aggregation!) teacher is a serious right brain thinker. for the final presentation, he asked the students to emphasize anything they wanted about the project, and talk about that. we decided to just talk about how our modelling of the solution. we had called our project p80p (p2p on top of http, port 80). the “P80P” text was clean and big on the screen on the first slide, and it reminded the teacher of the p-80 from the second great war’s aircraft. the first few minutes into the presentation (we presented last) the teacher noted “by far, the best presentation”. but at the end he was again reminded of the airplane. we had a very good start, but we didn’t have a good conclusion for the presentation. we impressed with the structure and attitude, but it was so exhausting to develop those slides that we simply forgot to think about how to finish.

and you know what? i was more than happy about the comments. i felt “by far, the best” anyway. truth be told, i prepared most of the presentation, and it was awesome. though it was incomplete, i feel i did my part.

the same happened with the other project. we didn’t have that many ideas, and they had to be our own. we just had to mess with xml, webservices, user accounts, etc. lots of projects consisted of ideas that messed with all of it, but they were just feed aggregators, webstores, and stuff like that. a group even implemented the last.fm’s funcionality on top of the last.fm api! :S no way i was going to do that! how could i feel that my project was better than google reader, or itunes or last.fm? me and my colleague simply messed with rss. we engineered a website where you can add a few feeds, configure a set of rules to match feeds to categories, and present graphics about the distribution of contents among that categories. for example, we input news feeds about politics, set a few matches for each candidate of the upcoming elections and get “how much is being written about each candidate”. this was very easy to code, my colleague didn’t feel good about that being our project.

guess what! it wasn’t, there were very nice projects, but ours was new, and the teacher said “i like your idea, you can sell that!”. our grade will probably be at the middle of the table, even lower, but i enjoy that our project matters.

and this has been my academic life. i get satisfaction from slightly above average results; i never attended a “resort exam” to raise my average; teachers and coordinators seem to understand and trust me. but! i will be one mark below 16 by the end of the masters, which is the minimum for a phd studies scholarship. this time, the phd will then be the next equipment that i can’t or don’t want to afford.

and you know what? i’m more than happy! life is not devotion to professional success. not mine, anyway. i’ll just keep being half awesome. =)

because we are limited:

a few days ago i was discussing with the devs of cambada about something that has bothered me for a long time. the cambada is a robotic soccer team here at the university of aveiro. the idea is that, by 2050, robots can defeat the best human team. currently the robots are very advanced, play together, form a team! they all communicate by a wireless link. sometime in the future this will be forbidden, because most humans can’t communicate telepathically, so the robots would have an unfair advantage. likewise, robots will have to stand up in two legs, whilst currently they are usually based in holonomic solutions.

this kind of makes sense given that the purpose is to challenge human beings, so it should be between “equals”. but apart from this specific environment, we see this kind of handicap assigned to robots in lots of places! it strikes me why would anyone ever want a robot that can walk on two legs, since there are so many movement strategies that are far easier to program and unquestionably more efficient. sure, the control system is a good challenge, and might be of service for other applications, but it’s generally useless!

because we have limits:

decades ago we could drive a horse back to our parents house (:s). then cars appeared, and were a little faster and we liked them. now we can build cars much faster than we can consider for safe usage by humans. cars nowadays ship with electronic controls that limit its speed on purpose. it’s perhaps just one bit on a chip! in many other fields we have technology being held back so that humans can control it.

we could have hour long movies screened in a few seconds, if that makes any sense, but we just couldn’t perceive them. we could transmit an hour long conversation to our girlfriend in a second, but we need to have it at the pace we can talk it and listen to it. the robots could shoot balls at a few hundred km/h, but that would just mean broken legs for the human team. we could have a space ship march out of the solar system for a trek, but no human would survive that! (ok, that’s kind of the opposite example, it’s the machine that would have to be faster. but it works same way around: the machine would stand the challenge, not the humans!!)

because limits aren’t bad:

a friend of mine was just telling me how having a 100mbit connection is bad. he was kidding, of course, but right, nonetheless! think about it: 10 years ago, if we wanted to see a movie, we had to go out and rent it. on the way out, we could stop for candy, or do other chores in the pathway. more recently, acquiring a movie no longer requires going out, we just get it only (means buy it online) and download it in an hour, or so! meanwhile, we could still do the laundry, wash the dishes or cook dinner.

now it has completely changed. in a few minutes we are watching a full hd movie. we no longer have the opportunity to pipeline our actions, our life is just more synchronized! this is how we start losing time everyday with evolution, because we no longer try to do more than one thing at once! ok, it is arguable that we do this things much faster, nevertheless, i was just pointing what makes some sense! :P

because it’s not over yet:

am i saying that machines are better than humans? well, i’d like to say “far from it”, but it really isn’t anymore. the only thing machines can’t do better than us is cognition and right brain abilities. hell, we don’t fully understand it ourselves, no machine can possess it yet! also we haven’t paid attention to our right brain in a very long time, and still aren’t these days. once we value its power and understand how it works maybe we’ll be able to put that in a machine and have them be harder, better, faster, stronger than us in every sense.

it really isn’t anymore!

i scanned the market a lot, as always. at first i was hoping to buy a macbook pro. the pros were battery life, operating system, and good design/construction. the problem is that, more than that, i always look for a good performance/cost compromise. current 13” mbps aren’t the case, and i’d have to wait more than a couple more months for a then-outdated spec list.

so, having crossed macbooks off the list, i started looking everywhere else, even leaving brand prejudice aside. i was very glad to read about the new dell xps powerhouses. i wanted the 14 incher, but then, as they were (and still are) taking too long to arrive to portugal, i gave the laptop a lot of thought and ended giving up on it. (and it was actually pretty difficult to get in touch with portuguese dell to find out. i couldn’t find such information on almost 20 minutes of calls). it just wasn’t right for my present/future concerns.

why? i started giving less and less importance to graphics and multimedia capabilities to prefer mobility and business-oriented service. that’s when i put the toshiba r700 and the hp elitebook 8440p on the table. i’m now typing on the latter, due to the first being slightly less spec’ed for a higher price, although it tops this one easily in the mobility department.

this laptop is the absolute category winner. what i needed to replace my old one, now soon-to-be stationed back home, was a bump in memory, storage and processor speed. this laptop provides all that on top of an excellent accessory list. it is a 4-thread (2-core) 620m intel processor, an almost outdated nvs 3100 cuda enabled nvidia graphics card, 320gb momentus xt hybrid drive (home upgrade), 4gb ram. all of this on top of a perfectly linux compatible docking station. at the end the boxes went for almost as much as i had paid for my previous a8js. it’s not just the performance increase, it’s the service quality:

a nicely rugged laptop. the aluminum feels cold and solid. the laptop does feel a bit light for what it looks like, but it’s by no means light, it is almost as heavy as my previous one, and almost doubles the r700′s mark. not that i care. besides the solid feel, i am entitled to a 3-year (battery included!) next business day on site repairs with toll-free 24×7 phone support. this is not a boston technology battery (i guess, i have to check the papers more carefully), so the warranty is only one year.

i had only troubles trying to boot archlinux from a pen, the bios would freeze. that was with a dd’ed hybrid image. it worked when i flashed the stick with universal usb installer, so i might just be headed for a flyspray bug report.

many people whined about this touchpad. it is not a good one, it’s small and a bit too much sunk, and i can’t two-finger-scroll in linux, though it is possible in windows. the buttons are hinged. i didn’t even know what that meant until i clicked them, but i don’t see why that’s bad, i actually like it. the point-stick (or clitoris, as it is more widely known) isn’t very much usable for me, and it sometimes gets in the way of typing, but that could be just me.

the keys have a _very_ good response, a long and solid stroke, but with a smooth feeling. this is a very good keyboard and though i haven’t used a thinkpad’s before, i think they don’t provide the smooth feeling with the solid stroke combo. this is really nice. i’m portuguese, but i could only get a decent deal on this with a gbr layout. not that i care, it might actually help me work, and so far didn’t get in the way of typing with the portuguese layout.

battery-life-wise, i have been writing and browsing for a almost an hour with low brightness and a powersave cpu frequency governor (booted and browsed a few minutes with ondemand and maximum brightness), and the battery is now around 70%. it’s not spectacular, but it’s more than i could ever expect from my previous laptop, and i will use it mostly as a power failure backup mechanism, so that’s a good mark. (mind that the newly installed hard-drive drains a few more watts than the original momentus shipped inside).

i can’t tell if the momentus xt is paying its dues. some applications do feel faster to go up, but the new processor and memory coupled with an anyway 7200rpm hard drive certainly make the difference compared to the previous machine.

edit:

sorry, i forgot to mention the keyboard flex… oh, wait: no, i didn’t!

edit 2:

this _is_ the hp long life 6 cell 51 whr li-ion battery! so yes: boston technology, 3 year warranty. boy, am i glad/lucky!!

a couple of things i did forget to mention:

this momentus xt is fairly noisy. i haven’t had laptop with a 7200rpm before, so i’m not sure if this was true for the shipped drive as well.

but, most important, the screen. the contrast sucks, there’s no other way to put it. it can’t be used for image/video work. it isn’t very bright and the colors might surprise you in the output. but the truth is that a bad matte screen is easily better for me than a reasonable glossy one. i see no reflections here, and this is a very good point on this screen.