Marco Islas Blog

New laptop

markuz@islascruz.org (Marco Antonio Islas Cruz) — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 23:26:07 -0600

Finally I bought a new laptop, I have in my hands a new Acer Aspire 6530 which runs smooth as far as I have used it. It comes with Windows Vista Home Premium but I didn't really use it, just check it and convince me again that Windows Vista sucks!. Anyway, one thing I learn from my brother who is a Microsoft Windows Fan is that the crapy Os (vista) rates your hardware and my computer gets rated with 3.1. comparing with my brother desktop computer this laptop hardware is good enough.

This computer have an AMD Turion 64 x2 processor which means that it have a two core processor. Good for me, I'm going to use them when testing my programs on Microsoft Windows. This computer also have 250 Gb in a SATA hard drive, 3GB of RAM and a ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics card, now that AMD have released the source code for several ATI cards, I hope new and better modules come soon.

Now I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 and will upgrade to the latest tomorrow, then use rsync to sync my $HOME between the old laptop and this.

I'll thell you how my trip was

Calle 13 web page

markuz@islascruz.org (Marco Antonio Islas Cruz) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:54:35 -0600

Calle 13 web page

Originally uploaded by markuz

I was looking for calle 13 video "Fiesta de Locos" (if it exists) and in my search I get to the calle 13 web page. There is something to note, they (or.. I should say the webmaster). Curious.

january 2 2009

markuz@islascruz.org (Marco Antonio Islas Cruz) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:33:49 -0600

I'm getting ready to get back to Salamanca, I have to be in the office the next Monday... So sad, my vacations are over . This remind me why I hate this days (December 24 and January early days). In the city where my parents live, most men go to the USA to work and let their wives and kids here, other, like me, leave this place looking for a new job and opportunities.

Then, this days the road is full, a lot of people is heading to this city or other near cities (I'm talking about December 24) then, the early days of the year, they get back to their work places. Roads are impassable, and even when you try to travel in bus everything is sold. Fortunately I bought my tickets and my way to salamanca is sure.

I'll be in Salamanca on Sunday and start working again on monday. See ya there!

January 1st. 2009

markuz@islascruz.org (Marco Antonio Islas Cruz) — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 01:33:46 -0600

This is the first post of 2009. I woke up more or less at the middle day this is because I get sleep at almots 5 in the morning. I was playing Mario 64 on my old Nintendo 64.

I also made some last year commits to the christine source code. Now it's supposed to "import" your files in a very fast way. Obviously, I removed the tag import. then, christine is just importing the file path and then it will update the tags of the visible items in the list as the user is using christine, something like what xmms does. But, going far, christine will randomly select items and look for the tags in the background.

I start learning the use of the awesome window manager, fisrt because some times I need something that load faster than GNOME, fluxbox is good but I want to try something new and I like it.

Mario, a friend of mine teach me how to discover wep keys from access points, very interesting. I wish I could stay here more time to learn more about this and play a bit with my neighbors wireless network.

That's all for today

Last post in 2008

markuz@islascruz.org (Marco Antonio Islas Cruz) — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:07:54 -0600

I think this will be the last post in 2008, I'm with my family in puebla since December 20 and I'm going to get back to work on January 5.

I have to say that I have a good year, with some problems, but a good year. I have grown as person, in my current job. I have started the year with a lot of troubles in my software, but they got solved as the time pass, and now is a very stable software, that makes me feel good. And Im happy because this very same software is getting international, doing its work on Several countrys on latin america.

But I'm even more happy because in this year cristina and I start living together and now we are waiting for our first baby. I have to admit that this year pass too fast with cristina, I clearly remember when I travel to Tapachula, chiapas to see her. I'm really happy with her and really believe she's the love of my life.

But, not everything is sweet, as I said before, I have problems in the early versions of the software I'm developping, something I hope never have to repeat. Problems with cristina's parents that do not support us because we didn't do it the way they want, and problems with money that as you know... nobody have enought, less if you have to pay two cell phones, the BAM and other stuff. The harder is being far from my family, now that I'm in their dining room while my parents and my sister in law are in the tv room watching news, while cristina and my grandmother is sleeping and my brother and my nephew arep playing Company of Heroes make me realize that being far from family is not what I want in my near future.

But, at the end this was a good year for me, I have grown in almost any way. I hope I can grow this year in the other ways.

I hope this new year become a super year for you.

An easy one.

markuz@islascruz.org (Marco Antonio Islas Cruz) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 23:54:33 -0600

For those that are starting with python...

I have two ways to iterate over sequence with a simple filter, one is making a filtered list and store it in a variable, then iterate over that filtered list, the second is put the mapping list in the for statement. Which one is faster and why?

TIMES = 10000

a = xrange(10000)

c = [k for k in a if (k % 2) == 0]

#

def iterate(c):

    for i in c:

        pass

def mapea():

    for i in [k for k in a if (k % 2) == 0]:

        pass

#

for i in xrange(TIMES):

    iterate(c)

#

for i in xrange(TIMES):

    mapea()

100 points for the first comment with the right answer.

Update: Zodman wins (even when he is not a python newbie)... the iterate function is making just one iteration over a list with the filterered items, the second (mapea) is creating this filtered list in every iteration, so, mapea uses two for cycles and that's why it is slower.

Christine 0.2.1

markuz@islascruz.org (Marco Antonio Islas Cruz) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:32:15 -0600

Just a few days since the release of christine 0.2.0 and now we have another new release. This time is a bug fix release.

As usual you may download from sourceforge.net, this are the links:

Christine 0.2.0

markuz@islascruz.org (Marco Antonio Islas Cruz) — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:37:22 -0600

Im proud to announce the release of Christine 0.2.0. I have been working with it for several weeks and after fixing some bugs reported I feel it quite stable to be used for everyone.

What's the new?

This version makes use of the sqlite3 python module to store info in a SQLite 3 database file.
The item lists have been reworked and now they are faster than ever.
We have early support for plugins
Re worked TreeModel wich makes christine load faster
gconf dependency is removed.
Notify bubbles and TrayIcon are now plugins easy to be enabled/disabled.
Plugin for Pidgin.
Plugin for twitter (for those that want to tweet their songs)

Where can I have it?

christine-0.2.0.tar.bz2
christine-0.2.0.tar.gz
christine_0.2.0_i386.deb (Ubuntu intrepid)

Thank you to everyone who contribuite with this release, bug submitters, patch submitters, packagers and users.

Debugging with pydev

markuz@islascruz.org (Marco Antonio Islas Cruz) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:52:43 -0600

My first attempt to create video tutorials

Python 3000

markuz@islascruz.org (Marco Antonio Islas Cruz) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:58:03 -0600

Yeap.. Python 3000 or Py3k hit the streets. I'm more than glade to hear about the new version of this powerfull programming language. It seems that was yesterday when I watch a video where Guido Van Rossum was talking about the propossal for this new version and excusing the lack of compatiblity with the 2.x python series.

I like the idea that this language is evolving even with this move (which for me is too risky) where we are going to be forced to modify our programs if we want in the future be compatible with Python.