H. Mijail's Blog

3 months ago, I started a Salsa course.  In fact it was an unexpected and (supposedly) quick experiment. I had played percussion for some years in my hometown's music band; that was about 10 years ago. So when I saw a short weekend minicourse in a dance school about how to play latin percussion in salsa music, I went in. At the moment, someone I knew was asking me to play percussion in their oh-so-amateurish group, so I thought it could be a quick way to regain some practice and have a go at playing with them. The percussion course ended up being not too interesting. Like the group anyway. But, that same day I found that a Salsa (on1/linear) crash course was about to start, just after the percussion course. I was already there in the school, with no other plans for the weekend, and the Salsa course would be in fact almost gratis for me. So... why not?  That night there was also the periodic saturday latin party in the dance school (Salsa Libre), which started with a dan...

I had an .mp4 video file (with audio and video), and wanted to extract the audio to play it independently. (Sometimes the song version used in some music video is better than the original song!) That can be done in a number of ways; with Quicktime it is more or less immediate: Window, movie properties, select audio, extract, File, export. But I wanted to do it without recompressing, since the audio was already in MPEG4 format (ACC). My first impulse was to try mencoder, but it doesn't seem to work, at least not in a few quick tries. But that can be because the version I have installed is somewhat b0rken, or SVN-ish, or macports-ish, or because the output options say they are beta, or because I should re-study the manpage. Again. So while Macports installed my second impulse (ffmpeg), I went back to Quicktime to make sure that there is not some option for "direct", "non-reencoding", "codec: copy" or some such. And there is! But ...

"It's easy to see our problems and the solution to the problems that we have now. But it is very hard to see how that solution is going to turn on us, and the new problem that it's going to be." From the interview to Roger Williams ("localroger") in the Gday World podcast. He is the author of "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" , a "short" (more than 100 pages long) story available online. Very interesting, at least for me, who still had not read any Singularity fiction. Seedy title and a letdownish ending. But pretty good, and some deep stuff, if hard to stomach at times... although it makes sense. Also, very interesting to compare that kind of world to Matrix… and, even more, to Baudrillard's complaints about Matrix . His other short stories, the Passage series, are also pretty good. Donation-worth good. I arrived at this from Yegge's 3rd entry on the "a programmer´s view of the universe" series, ...

I just bought a stereo bluetooth headset (A2DP, the works), planning to use it to hear the sound from the PS3 while gaming, to avoid having to look for some long audio cable for my normal headphones. Bad news: the headset works, BUT it is only used for voice communication; not for the actual music or sfx from games. Which is something I had not seen mentioned anywhere, and had me chasing around for a while. I finally saw it as a side comment in some FAQ in some forum. So I hope this helps anyone before buying his/her own headset. Soooo lame.

Generar un documento RTF simple (sin tablas ni imágenes, por ejemplo) pero con cosas interesantes (fuentes, colores, párrafos, incluso estilos!) es muy fácil. En inglés hay una pequeña guía en http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/RTF-Writer/lib/RTF/Cookbook.pod , pero no llega a meterse en estilos. También está la especificación completa del formato RTF en la web de Microsoft. Yo necesitaba algo intermedio, y no parece haber guías en castellano, así que aquí está lo que he aprendido y estoy usando.

After a couple of too-close-together performance-competition-between-browsers thingies, I decided to make my very own quick & dirty benchmark of current browsers. Webkit-based at least, although soon I'd like to at least try again Firefox; it's been months since I abandoned it for Webkit itself, due to a multitude of small problems, some of them caused by myself (much more than a hundred tabs always open, lots of extensions to lessen the load) but magnified by Firefox itself (extensions failing, slowness even when with much more reasonable numbers of tabs, sluggish Flash performance, problematic Java)... In fact it's a great moment to make this kind of test, since Safari 4.0.2 has just appeared, Stainless 0.6.5 too, and ... well, WebKit has a recent nightly (r45641). Chrome is the available one right now: 3.0.192 (developer release) A surprise has been to learn that Opera seems to have abandoned the race some time ago (ten times slower, javascript-wise, than any of th...

Smart Crash Reporter es un Input Manager creado por Unsanity (creadores de los "haxies"). La historia completa está en http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/smart_crash_reports . El resumen de la historia en español es que los Input Managers son en teoría una forma de añadir al sistema formas de entrada de texto. Pero en la práctica, los Input Managers pueden hacer muchas más cosas. Se cargan automáticamente en cualquier programa y pueden alterarlo (en memoria, al ejecutarse; los programas no son alterados en disco). Un Input Manager conocido es (era?) Pith Helmet, que añade capacidades anti-anuncios a Safari. Así que los Input Managers son muy potentes, y también pueden ser muy peligrosos. Hay quien dice que son el sueño de cualquier programador de malware, y de hecho Leopard trajo como mejora de seguridad serias restricciones al uso de Input Managers. Smart Crash Reporter es otro Input Manager típico, y mosqueante porque suele ser instalado por varias aplicaciones sin avisar ...