Be still… Though chaos rains around you now

It’s been a while. Sorry about that dear blog, it’s just that life has been kind of absorbing. Even though I totally suck about school on this term, somehow I don’t ever have time to do what must be done. My birthday is on Monday and I noticed it only a week ago. Second term exams are here already and I don’t know a thing about most of my subjects. I wasted a lot of time, and invested some of it in other things I found way more productive. Even though, I’ll study as hard as I possibly can. I don’t want to go down the 90 mark. That previous 95 mark was not even nearly as hard as this is going to be.

Anyway, among the bunch of things I need to do are a number of posts I had to write, pretty much, last month. I was thinking in a “CHM to PDF How-to” and I never did it, although it is very simple. It was just a matter of reading through most of the man page of chm2pdf, a Python script that relies on bindings to HTMLDoc and CHMLib to do the nasty work and get a very good PDF version of any CHM book.

Somatoxin is something I regret greatly. That little poor blog has been abandoned for a long time and I just can’t get enough time to get an album, listen to it thoroughly and write a review. I suck blog-wise lately. Also, inspiration abandoned me for a long time. Even though I wanted to blog, I never found the correct topic. That’s why I decided to rant for the next few minutes before reading, reading, and reading a bit more before falling asleep.

A lot of stuff has been going on recently. Some things are quite interesting, others are merely plans, some others I wished that they had never happened. Hey, just the everyday stuff. Or so. Maybe not. Whatever. I’m blogging again. I miss it very much, and it was a huge motivation to strike through the to-do list as fast as possible in order to get accomplished the “Everyday challenge” which by the way, I broke. Drastically.

So, the goal of this week will be to study hard, to hit a 92+ mark at least, blog and finish a couple of books on security I recently started to read. And finish that Poe’s book which just recently became the lent book I have had for the longest possible time. Shame on me, and sorry @Pyzlnar.

Which reminds that I have an iPad now. The only two things I miss from real, physical books are the smell of them and the fact that they don’t run out of battery. I’m just a romantic that can’t accept completely that a small piece of screen is the evolution of printed books which have been around since ~1500 a.D. That’s another post I need to write, how to handle a book library (I know, sounds odd)

Wish me luck. This time, I’ll really need it.

The Blog Commitment

The nearest thing I am right now to something involving commit, is to the “commit;” SQL instruction used to write a successful transaction. The post everyday commitment definitely didn’t pull out as I planned. I thought there would be enough time to write at least a little bit of random thoughts daily. But with 12 hours school days, it proved hard to find enough free time to blog.

A lot of things have taken places since a week and a half ago, the last time I blogged. Curiously enough, I have gone through entire months of not blogging anything but right now I feel as if I had left this blog for eons. I’ll try harder to get everything accomplished. Planning ahead has always been useful and now more than ever, it’s essential.

But summing up, a number of things happened. I got myself into the 95 club. Academic excellence. I went to the ceremony, received a fancy certificate and ate a lot of expensive things. Quite classy. It felt good to be there. I’m hitting this semester hard because I want to be there again. Which reminds I need to study hard, right away.

The Perl/Python thing didn’t pull out well either. I ended up mixing fine details (even though they’re different enough) and I had to choose between doing homework or studying both languages. I chose the former. School and that poorly written segment of a project I’m in charge of maintaining is heavily sucking up time. And it’s so boring.

Right now, I’m installing Arch Linux. I think I’ll give it a shot and come back tomorrow to keep on complaining about school and this idiotic thing they call social service. I rather call it let’s make the students pay our taxes.

The way I’d like it to be

I’m feeling like letting myself drift over the vast possibilities of a not so far future. I was talking with this random girl who lived pretty much the same story that I lived during the last days of the ex. For a glimpse, I remembered that odd sensation of uncertainty took over me when I realized how dependent I was. Somehow, Uberbyte’s Soma popped out of nowhere randomly out my library.

Not so long ago I said that, if anyone reading a tweet died after me and was present at my funeral, I’d like to pass away with that song. Even though I’d like to live forever, I know that day will come sooner or later. Even though it wasn’t that serious, I thought about not actually having that much plans for the future.

As I started studying systems engineering, I always fantasized with the idea of living somewhere in the United States. Even though I have been there only once in my life, I love the beautiful skylights found in almost every big city. As time went on, plans changed a bit and although I haven’t abandoned that plan, I’d like to start here, in Mexico City.

I haven’t actually decided completely the path I’d like to follow. I’d like to be a developer as almost everyone else enrolling in my career. I enjoy programming more than anything, feeling the flow of ideas being translated into lines of code passing through my fingers into a keyboard. Quite cheesy.

The thing is, developer positions are not exactly well paid in Mexico. Not at least a couple of years ago, when I began searching about my career. Even though, the market changes constantly and that’s the first thing I’m looking into during this semester. I’d like to start working and getting a part time job as a developer would be very nice. I’ll have to check some things first and I really need to hurry up with Microsoft technologies.

Security on the other side is a rising area that is growing more and more with big companies following closely. The reason is simple. Internet is now decentralized. A massive amount of businesses use it to execute transactions for many reasons. People use it everyday to communicate, browse web pages, read news, buy stuff, etc.

But there’s not 100% secure system, right? Hence, the importance of security. In order to keep everything working as it should, security measures must be taken. The beautiful part about it is that in a security job, there’s no common day. Everything is different, always. Whether it’s searching across a system finding a vulnerability, patching a security hole or analyzing malicious code, every day in the life of a security employee is a new adventure.

So I have yet to plan my life. I should start pretty much now, as I won’t ever be able to assimilate every single piece of knowledge in order to be ready when I decide what my life will be about.

Week plans

So… Blogging every day didn’t come out as well as I thought. School is way too time-consuming and only a little bit of time is left for my little personal blog. I still need to find more free time in order to keep my personal projects up-to-date. Leaving unfinished stuff behind is just horrible. I have a lot of books to finish before the end of the month and I’ll actually need to study this time. Unlike last semester, half of my subjects are completely unknown. Mainly because half of them are either unrelated to my career or are simply too boring to look further into them.

Unorganized at the moment, I’m using this post to brainstorm the week plans. I’m finishing two books this week. One of the was lent to me by Pyzlnar, a former blogger friend, Extraordinary Tales by Edgar Alan Poe. I’ve had the book for half a year and it’s time to give it back. It’s a very good compilation of Poe’s short stories. Way fancy.

Also, I need to check into some of the notes I wrote of the Learning Perl O’Reilly book. Most of them are not tidy and they just won’t be useful in the near future like that. I’m turning it back as soon as I finish. It’s a very good book to learn quickly the quirks of Perl, but I think I could’ve kick started by just reading the Camel book right away.

I’m thinking I should write it a review. It’s worth it and it may also serve as a sum up of the book. Maybe I should actually write reviews of the books I take out of CEM’s library. Perhaps it’ll help someone else in the future, That’s better than checking those 5 little stars and lets face it. No one actually checks that rating when taking out a book.

Academically speaking, we’re not that far anymore from the first term exams. I feel confident enough to pull out a nice score. This term, I’m punching it as hard as I can. The new low mark is 90, so things will get hectic in a week and a half. Taking into consideration the fact that I have a whole section to code from Atizapán’s custom system we made last semester, I have a lot to do. I need to learn to correctly code PHP by the way.

One thing at a time. I’m taking note, organizing and I’ll be back. I also need to get the other dusty blogs I abandoned last year. So I should say: Dear myself: Stop wasting time.

The DB essay

The database software industry scenario.

The database industry is and has been one of the main sectors of software development, being second only to Operating systems. It had a 35% growth at the moment of the publication of Database Systems: A Textbook Case of Research Paying Off representing a revenue of $7 billion USD in 1994.

It has kept this steady rate of growth up to now. The best proof of this, is that Oracle Corporation (at the moment of writing) had a total revenue of $26.82 billion USD on 2010, being the biggest corporation with a market share of around a 40% of the database sector.

An element that made decisive the power of this industry is data mining, as it provided an intelligence value for small, medium and large-scale enterprises, even though it started as a completely academic research.

Historic background

The history of database software began around 1960, when large-scale enterprises began archiving their information in an electronic way. This was known as record oriented archiving. It was simply the storage of information managed by records. Around 1970, the DBTG was created. It implemented the very first network concepts and data hierarchy.

This was the first purpose specific software designed for record storage. It was a low-level implementation used to keep track of records. Navigation was made possible by following pointers. Even though it was fast, it was not efficient and due to its low-level characteristics, if the database had to be modified, the programs had to be rewritten almost from scratch.

This particular problem would lead to the invention of two angular things in databases. During the decade of the 70’s, Ted Codd, who was working for IBM, developed the entity-relationship model. Its main feature was that it has only one way of representing data. Also, it defined a non-procedural language (4º generation) used only to retrieve data.

Using algebra and logic, the data is easily retrieved using either relational algebra or logic. It was long debated whether if this 4º generation language was as efficient as the previous low-level implementations. It was shown that the best implementation of this new language was as fast as an implementation in low-level.

Shortly after, the most important database management in the actual market, Oracle, DB2, Ingres, Sybase, Informix, etc… In 1980, the first parallel databases arose and the performance of databases was critically increased. In 1990, the Server Query Language (SQL) was consolidated. Every major DBMS had it’s own SQL dialect.

The future of databases at the moment of the article’s publication was pretty much the actual database industry. Today, the future of databases is, as everything else in the software industry, moving to the cloud. Databases, being the main storage banks of Internet’s backbone are going to play a critical role in a completely connected world.

In 1994, the database industry made $7 billion USD. Today, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, leaders of the commercial database industry have a combined revenue of about half a hundred billion dollars. If the cloud becomes the future, this massive revenue is bound to go further.

Yup. I actually blogged one the essays I have to turn over on Friday. Such a nice way to cross a task on my little-yet-nifty agenda.

Fuel

So… Yeah… That’s kind of the worst thing you can ever do to your stomach if you eat it daily. But common, they’re just so good that it’s plainly impossible not to devour one of those in a while. A ton of people can’t find what’s so great of eating a so-called guajolota, bread-tamal-bread with the argument that it is flour within flour containing.

Those poor-spirited young ones. I pray for their souls every night.

Obesity is one of Mexico’s top health problems. Fuck alcohol, tobacco, narcotics , they are the real enemy. But they’re cheap. And they’re way good. Tamales are actually part of the daily lifes of a lot of people. And that’s workers, engineers, executives, administrators, salesmen, students… Students. Yeah, that chubby guy who sits besides you probably loves them.

But common, who wouldn’t love them? They’re great. They’re tasty. And combined with something else as harmful, such as hot chocolate or coke, they’re the dream team. Thanks god I’m such a cheapskate. I would be as fat as everyone else.

Under pressure

I’ve probably said/listened a million times that everything pulls out nicely under pressure. I’m about to say I feel so stupid about it. Perhaps it’s just because this time it involves more things than those I am ready to handle. Right now I feel way ashamed and I just can’t bear with the fact that I can’t solve everything while feeling pressed against the floor. I just can’t fight the strength to stand up.

As usual, “tomorrow will be another day”. Sometimes things happen for an unseen reason and problems that seemed totally unreal strike with such strength that I’m caught completely off guard. Guess I just need time to think and stop feeding myself with these paranoid thoughts. Hell, I’m even having a hard time on writing these words.

Everything must be dealt with on the correct time. Today is definitely not the correct time but maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. One thing at a time. Right now I don’t feel safe enough to deal with it. When situations arise where I’m not the only affected one, when another person is involved… There’s the catch.

I could use some sleep. Perhaps tomorrow will be a much better day and everything will set itself on its correct place. Maybe they won’t and so, it’ll be my duty to do it. After all, I’m the only who can do this.

Late

Being late is something I really hate, particularly when it involves someone else than me. As this semester will be kind of stressing with the you ought to get a scholarship thing and the social service (insert favorite insult here) I don’t want to be late on anything as it would be fatal to fail even on a small detail.

Which reminds me that I forgot to do a couple of things which I’ll have to deal with tomorrow. Why I tend to forget things is something I’ll probably never understand. That’s why I usually carry an agenda (two, this year) to keep track of everything, not only academic things but also about what I’m doing at the moment. And even though… I forget about doing a couple of things I just don’t really care about. Shame on me.

And so, I was thinking. Although I’m still having a hard time on getting up early, I haven’t missed a single class (I almost did, but I roughly got there) so staying organized is paying back. Though I’d like to have more free time. I miss doing a couple of things I did on vacations, like shooting cigar filters, playing videogames or ordering my music. Or well, yeah, devoting half of the day to Perl.

I need to hurry up on Perl. Python is also a must-have and from this year on, according to TIOBE, Python is now the de-facto programming language for server scripting. Which is pretty much what I was learning Perl for. Also, I’ll be using Python in at least one subject as I wrote previously, so I need it right away.

At the moment, I’m not feeling like blogging, or gaming or living. So I’ll just do whatever is at the top of the list and begone. Yup, I suck. I should write that Psychic Driving post about now.

The Art of Deception

Yesterday I went to the library for the first catch of the semester: The Art of Deception.

The Art of Deception is a book written by Kevin Mitnick covering how social engineering can be applied to hacking. Kevin Mitnick was one of the greatest phreakers of all time, attacking big corporations such as Bell. In the book, he explains to actually attack a system as it’s not only about hacking and exploiting code, but also exploiting the human factor.

I have a ton of material to read, but I’ll find time to cover it right away anyway as I plan to take more books this semester than the former. I’m looking into security more and more. Databases (Oracle, MySQL, DB2, Microsoft SQL), networks (Cisco) and security are three of the most marketable technologies of these days. I have (somehow) had a near approach to the first two, but I find the security area the most interesting one.

It’s unavoidable to walk across the security section at the systems engineering section of CEM’s library without peeking a single book. That’s how I originally found a couple of books last semester which originally made me look into security and even consider dedicating my professional life to it.

What I like most of it is that, unlike most of the things I’ve learned, anything new to is different. Real-life encounters are different too, wether it’s about analyzing a system that was attacked to implementing security measures, requirements are very different. It’s something that is particularly similar to programming, which I like very much too.

So I’ll read more about it. I just remembered I really need to learn more about CGI’s, as it’s kind of important when it comes to security.

Side exit

The title of this post is borrowed from Tyrian, a vertical scroller shooter from my childhood. It was a level in which you had to escape from Ixmucane, a planet that was about to be turned into a star, but the systems were succesfully deactivated by you, Trent Hawkins.

The girlfriend and I finish the day at the same hour, so we went back to my home to eat, watch movies and else. Everything is perfect until I take her home, as she lives kind of far. Any possible route is not particularly fast, the short path gets constantly blocked by traffic, the long way has way too much bumps and is also blocked by traffic at the beginning. So any route was slow, until today.

Anyone living in Mexico city knows that the metro zone’s second level of the peripheric ring, the main “highway” that crosses both the metro zone and the city was opened last year, supposedly to celebrate the bicentenary of Mexico’s independence. It’s construction was chaotic, cruising through the metro zone was like being kidnapped inside a car, but now that it’s open it provides an awesome way to cross it from side to side in no more than twenty minutes.

So I loved it. Even though it’s not free, I’ll gladly pay those ~$16 MXN to cross a quarter of the metro zone in under five minutes and be back home in less than an hour, provided of course that I come back right away. It was a nice ride indeed, the feeling I got while driving through it was that it is a very good quality construction, at least for Mexico’s standards.

Being an elevated highway, there’s always the catch that small bumps are created everywhere where a piece joins another one. This small bumps, although noticeable are not significant enough to slow down when hitting them. Some of them are scarcely felt. Also, it feels great to see everyone else trapped within traffic below you. I hope karma won’t read this, as I may get caught in traffic while someone above me laughs (as it happened to me once, while crossing the express lane towards Lechería)