I read several books, less than I’d like to, but each year I watch less TV.
Three books changed the way I see work:
Rich Dad Poor Dad
E-Myth
The Millionaire Next Door
After reading these three books, pay attention to what you do and many things you still do wrong. Money is something that Europeans know how to manipulate.
Life isn’t easy for those who have an iMac and want to install Windows 7 64 bits. Apple decided that the 64-bit drivers couldn’t be installed on iMacs, only on MacPros, but everything has a way :-D. In this other post, I described how to install the 32-bit version of Windows 7 RC, but with Boot Camp 2.1 from old Leopard.
The problem is that I liked the new toy and bought the Windows 7 Home Premium Edition. I already knew that the RC would be destroyed, so I started prepared. The box arrived on Monday, I bought it for $56 in a super promotion still in July at PixMania.be! For $56 it’s an interesting option, I don’t know if I would have done the same if I had to pay the $99 that Microsoft asks today. Backup made, starts the adventure!
Everything has to be automated. As I’m writing a small book on Python, I have to update the version of the language every year :-D. With Python 3.1, the problem became more serious, because now I have to test the examples in the book with this new version that is not fully compatible. The book is being written in LaTeX, using TextMate and Skim on Mac OS X. I made a mistake by manually inserting the Python source code into the LaTeX text; now I have to review each script individually.
Back-ups are always a good idea… this week I lost two HDs. One on the PC, I was able to recover all the data and transfer it to a remote server. The other, my Ubuntu, Tambaqui of war.
I arrived at work in the morning and saw that the computer was turned off. As the Tambaqui is also a small server, I usually leave it running. I plugged in the fish and the boot occurred normally (I always say that only what was previously working perfectly will give you problems :-), otherwise nobody would come up with that worn-out excuse: yesterday it was fine!). Looking at the files after booting, I saw that there were several files with strange names with ??? and !!!!… a sign of file system problems, but fsck swore everything was okay :-)
With nothing much to do, I created a new character in the programming barbarian universe: COOnan. COOnan is a barbarian who lives in Java… in Indonesia.
As every barbarian, few tools are all he needs. So OO (Object-Oriented) does everything and there’s no other thing on the horizon. Like an unshakeable faith, nothing escapes OO, except for heretical creations with more amusing names than the name of the island where he lives.
It has been almost 3 years since I moved to Belgium. A small European country, three times smaller than Portugal, a bit larger than the state of Alagoas.
Coming from Brazil, mainly from Amazonas where everything is big and far away, it takes some time to understand local distances.
Slightly more than 10 million inhabitants live in Belgium. To complete, they speak 3 languages: Dutch, French and German. Where I live, French is spoken. The conflict between the north (Dutch) and the south (French) is growing. The part that speaks German is very small to create a problem, they simply are there.
Well, the final installation has finally ended and World of Warcraft is still working. Almost an hour of installation and a few reboots later, everything went well. The installation is fully automatic, I let it install while I watched TV. All customizations of colors, keyboard, language, dashboard etc were preserved. The old Mac as always.
Today, I revisited the iTunes U section. For those who are still not familiar with it, iTunes U is a section of the iTunes Store that offers classes from various universities. The number of courses available has been increasing and the quality is excellent, although I prefer video lectures over podcasts.
You can find videos from MIT and Stanford for free. I’m looking for more videos on mathematics and statistics, Fourier series, and other topics related to my work, but there’s also a lot of material on history, economics, biotechnology, and more. Some are introductory courses while others are quite advanced; sometimes it feels like there are gaps between the two extremes, but this is still a great resource for getting an idea about the subject or simply gaining another perspective.
I still remember the “magicians” of the DOS era. Those folks who created their colorful prompts or unimaginable graphics for the time (special characters and symbols lost in almost forgotten code pages). I recall when a colleague bought MS DOS 5.0 and we spent an afternoon setting up the page 850. The manual said that Portuguese accents would only appear correctly on this page. It was all very simple, just a few lines in the CONFIG.SYS and others in the AUTOEXEC.BAT. Yes, Word was text mode. Then we discovered that the keyboard also had to be configured… more lines in the AUTOEXEC.BAT. Of course, nothing of this resolved the problem of printing accents on the printer, it was another battle!
