Pensador's Blog

I was told that HostingIt365’s webserver was hit by a DoS attack and their DNS file got corrupted. I had to change servers twice in the past week; depending on your location, pensador.org could be pointing to three different copies of this website. I will wait until the DNS records get replicated worldwide and then I will try to synchronize the data between them.

This Monday I had yet another renal calculus crisis—the second one in less than 12 months. There was I, in the emergency section of the local hospital contorting in pain from 18:30 to 22:30. By 23:00 the stone had moved from my ureter to my bladder, which reduced the pain, and by the next day it finally got expelled from my system. After a blood test and an x-ray, the doctor said I had to drink more water and reduce the salt in my diet. I am considering taking Herba Desmodii capsules, a natural diuretic, which a co-worker said does wonders to kidney stones.

Here’s a little Bossa Nova for you to listen to when you get home from work. Just sit back and relax. I wanted to give YouTube’s custom players a try—I’ve put together this playlist with my favourite Bossa Nova videos.

A short but true story of someone who decided to quit World of Warcraft.

In the afternoon of November 23 of 2004, after my last class of the day, I headed to a computer store where I had reserved a copy of World of Warcraft Collector’s Edition. Three years later, I look back and I realize how I almost ruined my life with a computer game.

I am an undergraduate in Software Engineering. I feel kind of silly writing this, but I will share my true story with the intent of helping somebody who might be going through what I went through. I hope this will not bore you.

I was addicted to WoW during my first year of university. I seemed to be a pretty dedicated student; I did not miss any lectures and took detailed notes. However, my head would wander elsewhere—be it sketching my character, building its skills and planning the next quests. As an active member of a guild, I was the first to get a mount. Every day of my life led to the same—as soon as I got home, I would go straight to the computer and log in to WoW. My idea of having a good time was spending hours and hours in front of the screen completing quests, leveling up and earning gold at the auction house.

All was fun until I saw my first transcript: A+, C+, C+, C, C-, D+, D, D-, D- and D-.

With these results, I had a GPA of 1.96. In my institution, you need to keep it higher than 2.00, or else you get expelled. I decided to take a definite and concrete action. Not only did I uninstall WoW from my computer but also I completely eliminated games from my life. If I told you that I even removed the solitaire card game that comes with Windows, you would probably laugh, but I really wanted to stick with my resolution.

I also changed my studying habits. I stayed long hours at the university, reading lectures in advance, redoing exercises, rewriting notes—I pretty much lived at the library at that point. When I got my transcript I thought it was someone else’s: A, A, A, A-, B, B, B, B, B-, D+ and D-.

I knew that if I could stay focused and stick to my study routine, I would do even better. I was not mistaken. Here is my transcript for the third year: A+, A, A, A-, A-, A-, B+ and B-. Nothing below a B-grade, and now I have a cummulative GPA of 3.02.

That is only one side of my life that changed. Since I quit, I have met many interesting people, including a gorgeous and smart girl who is now my fiancée.
Some will say that it was not the game that influenced me but it was I who had problems in the first place; that might have been the case. I agree that games do not ruin lives, people ruin lives; all I can say is that I am a much more complete and happy person now.

This a video I took when I went to the Formula 1 Practice in Montreal. June 8th, 2007. Sorry for the low quality.

I can give at least two reasons: its PNG rendering and CSS support. When I worked on the new version of Pensador’s Blog and compared the results on both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7, I had the naïve assumption that I was covering most of the browsers, until my girlfriend told me she could not see half of my site on her laptop.

To be honest, at first I had the usual arrogant geek reaction—she must be doing something wrong. She had to send me a screenshot so that I could realize she was using version six of the infamous browser. I am not going into the technical intricacies as to why PNG and CSS are not well supported; all I will and can say is that IE just recently started to comply with the web standards.

Here are the side-by-side screenshots comparing Pensador’s Blog on Firefox 2, IE 7 and IE 6 respectively:

As you see, the PNG transparency was competely ignored and here is why the blog posts do not show up:

I was forced to convert all those PNG files to GIFs and to hack my CSS to get the desired results. For some reason, the “main” div in which I put the blog posts is too wide to fit in the “page” div. However it should fit since its width was 600 px and the menu on the left was 180 px, adding up to the 780 px of the “page” div. Anyway, I had to reduce the size of the “main” div to 585 px for it to show up on IE 6.

I was getting really frustrated with the fact that I had to copy and paste the character ç whenever I had a conversation with someone from Brazil. I did a search around the Ubuntu forums to realize that I was not the only one having this problem. The thing is that on Windows, when you type single quote and c, you get a c cedilla (ç). On Ubuntu, you get a c acute (ć).

If you are in the same boat, here is how I solved my problem.

1. Add “U.S. English International (with dead keys)” to your list of layouts (System > Preferences > Keyboard).
2. On the Layout Options tab, make sure the Alt key is a third level chooser.
3. Alt+, gives the desired results.

Apple did it again. They already redefined the way we listen to music with iPods and now they will revolutionize how we communicate with each other. An iPhone is a combination of an iPod with a cell phone with Internet and email facilities. I’ll probably get one in 2 years, when my contract ends and the price will be more affordable than $600 :)

The final version of Firefox 2.0 has been released today. Here are the great new features:

• Spell check for textareas (thank you!)
• Search engine manager
• Updated user interface
• Navigation arrows for when you’ve opened too many tabs
• Updated Add-ons manager
• And much more!

Download it now!

After several offers from many sources, Google finally closed the deal yesterday.

Google has agreed to purchase popular video sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, the two companies announced after the close of the stock market Monday. The deal marks the largest acquisition for Google in the company’s eight-year history.

I’m afraid that this acquisition will be just a merger with Google Video and YouTube will lose its unique user experience. Hopefully this won’t happen:

YouTube will retain its brand name and offices in San Bruno, Calif., the companies said, and all YouTube employees will keep their jobs. The acquisition is expected to close before the end of the year.

Source: BetaNews