tryandcatch.net

Ten years ago Rancid BBS was going online. The Bulletin Board System was built on top of Remote Access 2.1 and was running on a 386SX and 8MB RAM with a 14,400bps modem.

The BBS had more than 10 calls every night and about 2000 registered users (it was online only at nigth because it used the phone line of my parent's home).

Sometimes I miss the old days, chatting with others Sysops, the Fidonet point and the UUCP issues, the ANSI arts, the Locolist...and so on.

When I developed Rancid BBS I was 14 years old and it was the beginning of my computer career. I really enjoyed that beginning :)

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Today in the Latin America Agile Software Development forum (laasd) someone post this Google Tech Talk by Ken Schwaber.

The Tech Talk Abstract:
Scrum is an amazingly simple process that causes many, many changes when it is implemented. This seminar presents the basic framework of Scrum and some of the implementation issues associated with it.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7230144396191025011

These days I've been working doing a user's interface for a couple of scripts.

For that I used a HTML Application (HTA). Developing a HTA is a very easy task, but because I don't like to start something from scratch I searched for some scripts snippets and I found a very nice utilty the HTA Helpomatic.

The utility has a lot of very basic but useful tasks like how to:

• Autorun Script
• Change cursor
• Copy to Clipboard
• Create basic HTA
• Paste from Clipboard
• Prompt the user for input
• Save data
• Table
• Timer
• ToolTip

If you are not very familiar with HTML and coding, I'm pretty sure that this will help you .

Microsoft announced the acquisition of Winternals / Sysinternals.

Microsoft continues with its policy of hiring very smart people :)

Here it is the official press release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jul06/07-18WinternalsPR.mspx

These two last months I've been working with some classic data mining algorithms like Apriori, D-ARM, K-means, Fuzzy C-means, Birch and so on. I found implementations of most of them in Java and other languages like c++ or c. There is also a nice open source application called WEKA from the University of Waikato that has a lot of machine learning algorithms implemented but also coded in Java.

I've found just one site with some algorithms implemented in C#, but just a few and just one site.

Why there is not .NET implementations of these algortithms?

If anybody knows a good source code resource for data mining algorithms for C# developers just leave a comment :) also if you would be interested in C# implementations of these algorithms, please leave a comment. I'm thinking about implement some of them if people is interested.

Yesterday I was at Campo Argentino de Polo in Buenos Aires, Argentina to hear Oasis live.

The concert was nice, they rock very well but I have to say that it was a little short, the sound was really bad and at the field there was too much people.

They opened with Turn Up the Sun and then played a lot of classic songs like Morning Glory, Rock'n'Roll Star,Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova and Don't Look Back in Anger.

Then a song was dedicated to Diego Maradona, Cigarettes And Alcohol :).

After all they closed with My Generation (a cover from The Who).

Last year I went to the Ready Launch Tour 2005 and as Ezequiel tells in his post I won a Imation Disc Stakka. But it didn't arrive until yesterday (three months later!).

The CD Stakka is pretty cool (but a little big for my desktop). The management software  that it uses is OpdiTracker that is a very complete program. You can define:

• disc name
  
• disc type (e.g. data CD or video DVD)
  
• disc content (e.g. file names and directory structures for data CDs, or track names, lengths, and artists for audio CDs)
  
• disc description (e.g. keywords and other details to help you identify and locate the disc)
  
• disc location (e.g. the physical location of the disc, or the name of the person who currently has the disc and when it is due to be returned)
  

But I wonder why it does not come with a web based interface so everybody in the LAN could query the discs database and get the disc that is looking for.

If someone is interested in build a new stuff, I think that here is an opportunity. As far as I know there is not web front end for de Disk Stakka. If you are interested, here it is the SDK.

The latest version of the most used web browsers like Mozila FireFox 1.5, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or Safari have a nice feature to discover RSS feeds. This feature is implemented as a little icon on the address bar that indicates if the visited website offers a RSS feed. Allowing you to read and bookmark the feed with one click.

This is also available in older browsers thru a plugin like Active Web Reader or NewzCrawler.

So if you are a webmaster and have a RSS feed in your site and you want to enable the RSS discovery icon in most browsers you have to add this tag inside your html <head>:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Juan Pablo Rizzo's Blog" href="http://blogs.tryandcatch.net/jprizzo/rss.aspx"  />

Of course you have to change the title and href values to the corresponding website.

You are allowed to have as many link tags as RSS feeds you have.