Saturday, December 17, 2005

Video of Kanye West in Katrina Relief Concert


From the site of Micheal Moore, I just stumble on this link to a video showing Kanye West (whom I dont know who is he but it appears that he is a performer) speaking his mind in front of millions of TV viewers about the perception that George Bush "does not like black people". It shocks... but beneath his statements he is saying a truth about how the media portrayed the black population in Louisiana during the Katrina crisis. Here is a post from Albizu blog made in September 2, 2005 illustrating this fact. It just sad that there is still a long road ahead for racial harmony in the US.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Computer information trivia...BASIC

Recently I posted a comentary in the Dark Soul's blog giving a short summary of the history of the computer language BASIC.

Here are more trivia of BASIC taken from this source:


Basic was the first product sold by Microsoft corporation, and also the first major case of software piracy - It was copied widely even before Microsoft made it available (Bill Gates lost track of a copy on paper tape during a computer show).

The BASIC version that Allen and Gates licensed to M.I.T.S. for the Altair took a total of 4K memory including the code and data used for a source code.

The name "BASIC" may have come directly or indirectly from the science of human languages. Before the second world war, C. K. Ogden wrote a series called "Basic English". This was a list of 850 English words which would serve to describe any other word in English (perhaps by using more than one).

Party this weekend....

This past Saturday was the company's christmas party in Dorado. The expectations of the reggeton star was not fulfilled because he did not show up (and it was not his fault). By not going into much details, I will give the following advice:

Never believe a manager on a friday night especially in a bar.

Speaking shortly about the party, it was good.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Two things to say for tonight...

First, from the dark corners of Dark Soul blog I found this interesting link to a site to test your nerd level. This is my score:


I am nerdier than 65% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!



Go find for yourself.

Second, the company that I work for is celebrating its 20 years and tomorrow they will have a special christmas party for this occasion. I found out 4 hours ago that one of the performers for the christmas party will be no other that the regaeton star Daddy Yankee. Frankly I am not a huge fan for this music genre but he is one of the few of this genre that I like to listen. Also, in the music genre I listen to Vico C and Tego Calderon. But, I usually like classic rock, hard rock, alternative rock and electronic (ambient, trance, and chill-out).

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Finally, Homework #2 (Gentoo Linux)


This a screenshot of Gentoo Linux running AMD64 in 64-bit enviroment. I feel some accomplishment of achieving this stage of Gentoo instalation since it took me almost two weeks and plus I have to redo the whole operation in the process.

The reason for taking a long time for the installation was in part of the 64-bit enviroment itself since it is relatively new compared to 32-bit x86 enviroment. Most applications and drivers on binaries packages are not 64-bit native yet. It for certain that soon more vendors and developers will shift to develop more 64-bit native applications. The other reason is that I am new in the Linux world and there is a long road ahead for me.

To give an example, I have problems in installing the drivers for wireless adapter. I tried with no success to install this adapter by using the drivers in Ralink Tech (chip set manufacturer for the model of the Wireless adapter used) and then using RT2x00 Open Source. At the end, I have to get a very long Cat5 cable to connect the DSL Modem from PRTC to the desktop to continue the installation.

Firsthand observations: Looks light and fast...but still I have not installed yet all the stuff that I intend to install, like extra desktop visual stuff (wallpapers, screensaver, icons,etc), multimedia support for video and sound (especially to play DVD and 3d rendering for games that I intend to install) and a development enviroment.

The hardware used for this instalation:

Procesor: AMD64 +3000 1.8 GHz
Motherboard: ASUS A8V Deluxe (with LAN network integrated-Marvell Yukon )
RAM: 2 GB RAM
HardDrive: SATA with 150 GB capacity
Wireless: Linksys 2.4 GHz Wireless-G PCI Adapter(WMP54G)
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra (256 MB)

For the installation I downloaded the ISO image called Gentoo Linux Universal Installation for AMD64 (in my case, torrent was used to download the image).

Followed the instructions in the Gentoo installation intructions for AMD:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2005.1/handbook-amd64.xml

( NOTE: The driver original linux kernel driver for the LAN network adapter integrated with the motherboard included in the Gentoo package was very erratic. I downloaded the driver here since I desperately needed this network adapter to work flawlessly during the entire process.)

Then I followed the following links for the instructions for installing X11 (X graphical user interfase) and GNOME with 3d rendering with NVIDIA:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/xorg-config.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nvidia-guide.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gnome-config.xml
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Xorg

For the last "tweaking" of this stage of installation, the info in the site http://gentoo-wiki.com/ was (and still is) very helpfull and also the forum area in Gentoo.org.

All of this is a work in progress. Posted by Picasa

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Microsoft hacia el mundo de 64 bit

Aparentemente Microsoft esta anunciando que comenzando el año que viene, ellos comenzaran a sacar soluciones solo para servidores con el sistema operativo de Microsoft en 64 bit para servidores, Microsoft Windows Server 203 64 bit, y Microsoft “Longhorn” Server 64 bit. Comenzaran con la próxima versión de Microsoft Exchange que sería la versión 12. Interesante movida de Microsoft que se venia esperando.

Para mas info, ver este
link.

Bueno no he escrito nada recientemente porque he estado ocupado por una emergencia en el trabajo (que curiosamente tiene que ver con el Exchange) y por la asignación que les describí en la publicación anterior en instalar dos diferentes sistemas operativos que ambos son 64 bit. Tuve éxito con Windows Vista beta 1 64 bit después de un tiempo pero estoy batallando con Gentoo Linux. Hice una segunda instalación recientemente de Gentoo Linux para ver si levanto por fin la interfase grafica de Gnome y poder dejar funcionando la tarjeta de red inalámbrica.

Tan pronto termine con la instalación de Gentoo Linux, les dejare saber.