Insultante spot de Luis Fishman

En medio de la terrible campaña electoral del 2010 en Costa Rica, realmente da mucha pena ver el nuevo spot del candidato de La Unidad, Luis Fishman. Con el motto de "El menos malo", realmente le ha asestado el golpe de gracia a una campaña totalmente nula en ideas.

La Chinchilla es la que (según ella) ha aportado más ideas, pero sus anuncios han sido tan superficiales que realmente entre eso y las chabacanerías de Solís y Guevara, pues el balance se antoja negativo.

Pero esto del "menos malo" es vergonzoso, y demuestra por un lado la desesperación del candidato Fishman (y su padrino Calderón Fournier), y por otro lado el poco compromiso de los políticos actuales con el buen gusto y la altura que debería de primar.

Realmente patético.

Homemade bread primer

Well, yesterday I baked my first homemade bread. I'm really a fan of bread, and recently did my first attempt to replicate the kind of bread that my grandma used to bake when I was a kid.

I got some basic ideas from my mom, and with some basic cooking sense, I started the experiment.

It went well. The hardest critics (my two sons) really liked it, so it must have been good :).

You will need:

• 2 tablespoons of dry yeast
• 2 ounces of butter (butter is the quintessential ingredient for good cooking)
• 4 cups of flour
• 3/4 cup of sugar
• 1 tablespoon of sugar (to mix with the yeast)
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt
• 1 cup of milk
• 1 whole egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 cup of warm water
  

Preparation:

1. Mix very well the yeast with the warm water and the sugar. Put it to rest and grow for 15 minutes or until a kind of foam develops on top of the mix.
2. Slowly add the melted butter, the milk , sugar and salt to the mix. Mix very well.
3. Slowly add two cups of flour to the mix, until a elastic (not solid) dough is formed -- do all the mixing with a wooden spoon, of course :).
   
4. Add the egg. Begin to knead until all ingredients are well incorporated. Put to grow for 1/2 hour.
5. After growing, pour out the mix in a flat surface, add the rest of the flour and continue kneading. After kneading, put the dough on a greased bowl and put to grow for another 1/2 hour.
6. After growing, knead a little bit more ... and the dough is ready!!!
   
7. To make the buns, take pieces of dough about the size of a golf ball. Form a rounded strip with the dough, and then form a knot with it.
8. Place the buns on a greased cookie sheet. Let them rest for 20 minutes before taking them to the oven.
   
9. Mix the egg yolk, and glaze the buns with it.
   
10. Bake for 45 minutes at 300 F, or until the buns are brown on the top.

Enjoy!!!

Setting up Informix IDS 11.5 on Ubuntu Server 8.04

I am setting up a VM (on VirtualBox, of course) for performing a migration from Informix4GL to Java. Although IBM recommends RHEL for IDS, I am trying to stick to my long time favorite: Ubuntu.

The idea is to have a self-contained environment for doing this kind of migration without resorting to external servers.

The first attempt turned out to fail: I was unable to initialize the shared memory for IDS, and after some google-ups, I gave up. I found out that I did not follow the installation instructions (typical geek :-( ) ... so I am starting from scratch again ...

When I'm done I will post the steps here ...

Guadalajara, Guadalajara

Today I am finishing a one-week consultancy in Guadalajara. It is my first time in Mexico. In previous occasions I had just made connections in Mexico City.

Guadalajara is a really nice city. It is quite big (4+ million inhabitants), but the people is really nice and warm.

I did a consultancy at a grocery distributor in the city. From a work perspective, it was very interesting to see a company that supports its entire operation on a computer system. Nothing moves if not through the system. They are planning to move the system from Informix4GL to Java using ArtinSoft services. I really hope that the project comes along, because I really enjoy working in Java and making things happen for customers.

My hosts were really nice people. I got the opportunity to try the "tortas ahogadas", a typical dish from Jalisco, and some other really good food and beer.

On the personal side, I got myself a protective cover for my car's hood and front bumper. This is a really necessary gadget when you drive on streets that are being repaired, and a lot of small rocks can scratch the paint of your brand-new car.

I'll keep posting on how this conversion project goes.

Viva Mexico!!!

First Scrum Experience

On Wednesday and Thursday, I attended a certification course on Scrum - one of the most widely used agile methodologies around - that was quite a surprise to me.

I work currently a ArtinSoft, a company that develops A.I. technology for software transformation (source code to source code). The company is using Scrum in one of its research projects, but the methodology is not currently widespread. When I first heard about Scrum, it looked to me as one of those "flavor of the day" approaches, that go away as fast as they come.

After the CSM (Certified Scrum Master) course that I took, I must say that the methodology is quite appealing and quite cool, especially for development of software from the scratch. I still have some reluctances as if Scrum could be applied to software projects where the customer is difficult to convince of getting involved as the methodology requires.

Anyway, the course was really fun and entertaining, and I could get my CSM certificate after paying 50 bucks ...

Hello World!!!

Today I inaugurated myself as a blogger! I must confess that I was quite skeptic to this new trend at the beginning, but I fell to it once I felt the need to share some random thoughts about this and that. I intend to post entries about my experiences as a software developer and as a still-on-the-making cooker. I hope anybody who stumbles to this site either by intention or not, find it enjoyable.