H. Mijail's Blog

A test I thought could be interesting to get some (diffuse) idea of the processing power of the iPhone 4: Mijails-iPhone:~ mobile$ uname -a Darwin Mijails-iPhone 10.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.4.0: Wed Oct 20 20:14:45 PDT 2010; root:xnu-1504.58.28~3/RELEASE_ARM_S5L8930X iPhone3,1 arm N90AP Darwin Mijails-iPhone:~ mobile$ openssl speed To get the most accurate results, try to run this program when this computer is idle. Doing md2 for 3s on 16 size blocks: 113903 md2's in 2.93s Doing md2 for 3s on 64 size blocks: 59789 md2's in 2.96s Doing md2 for 3s on 256 size blocks: 20740 md2's in 2.94s Doing md2 for 3s on 1024 size blocks: 5722 md2's in 2.95s Doing md2 for 3s on 8192 size blocks: 741 md2's in 2.95s Doing md4 for 3s on 16 size blocks: 962184 md4's in 2.99s Doing md4 for 3s on 64 size blocks: 808365 md4's in 2.94s Doing md4 for 3s on 256 size blocks: 553565 md4's in 2.94s Doing md4 for 3s on 1024 size blocks: 251644 md4's in 2.96s D...

(spoilers ahead! :P) I came out of watching Moon thinking that Blade Runner, if you only thought a bit about it, covered the same ground, and in a better way. Moon is a corollary, a footnote to the world of Blade Runner. And had the same feeling of fake-ish, exercise-ish, not-really-well-thought-to-the-end-ish that for example had Gattaca: there are a number of small details that are just left there hanging. They can be just forgotten and the main story is still there; or that's what I guess that the film makers thought. But nevertheless that makes it feel non-finished, not-taken-care-of. Like someone said "c'mon, the premise is good enough, don't mess too much with the details". But no, the result isn't good enough; interesting how that detracts from the whole feeling. (I will forget about these details later, so better dump them here now: isn't it too easy to have those "filers" with the clones ready to be deployed? Is enough Gerty with t...

A number of times now some friends have asked me for advice about starting "some salsa or dance course", and of course they are surprised when I ask back what kind of salsa. I too had no clue that there were different kinds when I started. So I'll write the answers down so next time I can just point people here. For history and dry reading I could just point them to Wikipedia, but I know that it didn't help me to understand things better. Now it is more interesting, but when I was absolutely starting, it was pretty much useless. Even the videos don't say a lot; it's a bit like going to a restaurant for some cuisine type you don't know, and having to choose a dish by the ingredient list or by some photo: hardly ideal. So I'll write about what I feel can be more interesting / practical for someone wanting to start and choose. Will also be interesting to check how my opinions evolve in a future. My credentials: I am still mostly a beginner. I only st...

I went to the sky slopes, and arranged for a normal one hour session with an instructor. It had been about 15 years since I last skied and even then I had little experience; so even though I could manage myself, I could definitely use a little teaching. So the instructor came and asked what I wanted to learn. "Good question", I thought*. Feeling stupid, I asked what were the options. She offered skiing or snowboarding; from 0 or something specific, like turning or jumping or ... . I settled for rechecking the basics and building up from there. But that night I kept thinking about the question: what did I want to learn? I had never thought about snowboard; I started skiing when I was 15 without ever questioning or being questioned. I guess I was happy enough to just see snow. So I began googling and reading and watching videos. I already had the equipment for skiing, but in life you pay for things with money or with time, or with both if you're unlucky; I still could a...

(sounds better than Aikikizomba... ;P) The Bachaturo festival was not exactly very well organized. In fact if I had came from far away I guess I would be pretty pissed off. I've heard that last year it was much better, and that this edition was problematic because it had to be rescheduled after the Smolensk plane accident... Anyway, the high point for me has been Kwenda. He was funny and interesting just as a Kizomba teacher. But then it got stranger / more interesting: there was a class called "Kainzen Dance". Looks like that was a typo and the real name is "Kaizen" (shitty organization!). Sounded like something japanese, and I half assumed some Noh-style dance or similar (read: not interesting ;P ). So when I finally went in because some other class was overcrowded, ... surprise. Incense, and some mix of afro bodymovement and... exercises that reminded me the strangest Tai Chi class I had, so long ago. I wouldn't say I liked it (it felt a bit rushe...

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 ...