White Rabbit

Previously, a song for a dark mood. Later, a sexy one. Now, it’s time for some psychedelic tunes, with the gorgeous Grace Slick. “White Rabbit” belongs to Surrealistic Pillow (1967), the second album by Jefferson Airplane. Besides being one of the essential rock albums, “Surrealistic Pillow” meant the debut of Slick as vocalist of JA on studio records.

By the way, covers of “White Rabbit” by Patti Smith and by Grace Potter and The Nocturnals are very good.

Postales en Sepia: II

No la amo, es sólo que me gusta escucharla todas las horas que ella quiera. Tampoco es que me parezca linda, pero me siento cómodo en su cintura. Es decir, el problema es mío, y por suerte, ella no se entera. Me duele la garganta si no quiebro el silencio con su nombre. Ya no siento la piel si no es con sus besos clandestinos y apresurados (a veces, torpes). Pero no se lo cuentes, porque entonces ya no podré hacer que se sienta vacía cuando le digo: “Es sólo un juego”.

Postal anterior

Programmers from the Wild West

Analysis, Design, and related topics are for sissies, and for allowing professors of Computer Science who are bad at mathematics to make a living. SDLC is a pony. Cowboys ride horses.

We all know what happens when a project’s deadline is not met. Besides firing someone, hard, dry heroes appear. Lonesome, ruthless and distrustful heroes which brings the peace only revolvers can conquer. Sometimes, the guys with the money hire them as the ultimate saviors: they have bothered to come here, from the farthest west, to rescue the project. They are irresistible: they are the cowboy programmers. It’s men’s time.

Ben Cartwright & Sons
Ben Cartwright & Sons

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Imparcialidad

En las semanas previas Rudyard Kipling ha estado presente en mis lecturas. Primero con Kim y luego con The Phantom Rickshaw. Cuando comenté sobre el cuento, destaqué el humor que mostraba. En relación con el humor en la literatura, hoy me he reencontrado con una oración de mi autor favorito, en su cuento “La Señora Mayor”, incluido en El Informe de Brodie:

Siempre envidiosos de nuestras glorias, los venezolanos atribuyeron esta victoria al general Simón Bolívar, pero el observador imparcial, el historiador argentino, no se deja embaucar y sabe muy bien que sus laureles corresponden al coronel Mariano Rubio.

En ningún momento tengo dudas sobre la imparcialidad alegada allí 😀

Por cierto que el prólogo de El Informe de Brodie inicia con una referencia a Kipling. Dice Borges:

Los últimos relatos de Kipling fueron no menos laberínticos y angustiosos que los de Kafka o los de James, a los que sin duda superan; pero en 1885, en Lahore, había emprendido una serie de cuentos breves, escritos de manera directa, que reuniría en 1890. No pocos – “In the House of Suddhoo”, “Beyond the Pale”, “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows” – son lacónicas obras maestras; alguna vez pensé que lo que ha concebido y ejecutado un muchacho genial puede ser imitado sin inmodestia por un hombre en los lindes de la vejez, que conoce el oficio. El fruto de esa reflexión es este volumen, que mis lectores juzgarán.

Kim precisamente vive en Lahore, y es allí donde acontece su encuentro con el lama tibetano, evento que desencadena su aventura a través de la India colonial. Me encanta establecer estas conexiones literarias.

Debugging “hello, world”

The Go command (g) will run the program starting at the given address (in this case, CS:0100) If everything goes right, the program should output the intended “hello, world!” string, and finish with the message “Program terminated normally.”

Yesterday, we took a break after long hours of intensive coding, and a coworker started establishing similarities between our current frantic coding and the (fortunately) gone days of college homework. I specifically recalled a project I had to build by using MS-DEBUG: a simple calculator in assembly, which also required the hassle of dealing with pretty and safe user input. I have no intention of looking for such listings, but I thought about revisiting, for a moment, the old and dear friend MS-DEBUG 🙂 I’ll harness a previous post in this blog, and try to build a little ‘hello, world’ program in MS-DEBUG. I know this has little value outside a personal feeling and a tad of nostalgia, maybe.

I remember that a 100 tells DEBUG to accept code in memory starting out from CS:0100. Ok.

Now comes the data, which here simply consist of the string 'hello, world!'. A neat output, however, would require newlines before and after our intended string. A newline is comprised of a carriage return (CR = ASCII 13) and a line feed (LF = ASCII 10) on the display. As DEBUG only understand hexadecimal numbers, we must use 0Dh and 0Ah for CR and LF, respectively. Except in code, we will represent hexadecimal numbers by following the value with ‘h’.) Fortunately, DEBUG also admits ASCII characters directly (and the pseudo-instructions DB and DW!), so we can express our complete string as

db 0d,0a,"hello, world!",0d,0a,"$"

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A Review of OpenGL Programming on Mac OS X

All of the explanations are crystal clear, focused into the concepts and techniques OpenGL developers really need. The book comprises OpenGL architecture and configuration on OS X, and the various APIs we can use in order to create OpenGL applications, specifically, CGL, AGL, Cocoa, (our old buddy) GLUT, and X11 APIs.

OpenGL Programming on Mac OS X

The full title of this book is “OpenGL Programming on Mac OS X: Architecture, Performance and Integration.” Its fortunate authors are Robert P. Kuehne and J. D. Sullivan, two professionals who thoroughly know what they are talking about. Moreover, the book has been published by one of my favorites, Addison-Wesley. Therefore, success in conveying the details of OpenGL Programming on the Apple platform seems guaranteed. After reading it, I confirmed that any graphics programmer will learn a lot of things from this book. And nowadays, with a market saturated by rushed books, it’s a bliss.
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Kipling’s wit

I’m delighted by Kipling’s ghost tale “The Phantom Rickshaw”. The tale is exceptionally well-structured, takes place in his beloved India, and I have to remark that the prose is clever, amusing and pleasant (such is the blessing of Kipling’s writings). Further, Kipling’s humor is very keen and critic. Take, for example, this sentence:

The weather in India is often sultry, and since the tale of bricks is always a fixed quantity, and the only liberty allowed is permission to work overtime and get no thanks, men occasionally break down and become as mixed as the metaphors in this sentence.

Or this other extract:

When he recovered I suggested that he should write out the whole affair from beginning to end, knowing that ink might assist him to ease his mind. When little boys have learned a new bad word they are never happy till they have chalked it up on a door. And this also is Literature.

And the perpetual persistence of Mrs Keith-Wessington, reducing her problems with ill-fated Jack Pansay to a “hideous mistake” seems very funny to me 😀 The full tale may be read here.

Première Soirée

Auteur: Arthur Rimbaud (écrit mai-juin 1870)

– Elle était fort déshabillée
Et de grands arbres indiscrets
Aux vitres jetaient leur feuillée
Malinement, tout près, tout près.

Assise sur ma grande chaise,
Mi-nue, elle joignait les mains.
Sur le plancher frissonnaient d’aise
Ses petits pieds si fins, si fins.

– Je regardai, couleur de cire,
Un petit rayon buissonnier
Papillonner dans son sourire
Et sur son sein, – mouche au rosier.

– Je baisai ses fines chevilles.
Elle eut un doux rire brutal
Qui s’égrenait en claires trilles,
Un joli rire de cristal.

Les petits pieds sous la chemise
Se sauvèrent : “Veux-tu en finir !”
– La première audace permise,
Le rire feignait de punir !

– Pauvrets palpitants sous ma lèvre,
Je baisai doucement ses yeux :
– Elle jeta sa tête mièvre
En arrière : “Oh ! c’est encor mieux !…

Monsieur, j’ai deux mots à te dire…”
– Je lui jetai le reste au sein
Dans un baiser, qui la fit rire
D’un bon rire qui voulait bien…

– Elle était fort déshabillée
Et de grands arbres indiscrets
Aux vitres jetaient leur feuillée
Malinement, tout près, tout près.

Commentaire par Alejandro: Ici, un poème sensuel écrit par Rimbaud à l’âge de 16 ans. En fait, “Première soirée” est son premier poème amoureux.