Benavent

What have in common philosohpy, learning languages and this engineering degree? No, the answer is not english is a subject.

The act of thinking is directly related with the language you use. You may have a clear experience if you talk more than one language. And also, with how good is you language: the better you language is, the better your thinking is. (Let me explain just one thing: better here stands for something related with complexity not with a moral virtue.)

This issue must be told in classrooms to all teens, ’cause they still keep arguing Why should I study english/catalonian/spanish/latin/greek if I’m in science branch? I don’t need all those languages, I just need to learn maths. By the way, teachers must explain maths are also a language also.

So, there’s a direct relation betwen your language quality and your reasoning quality: If you’re the master of your language then you’re the master of your brain, your thinking process, your thoughs, …

Until here nothing new for a mediocre philosophy student. Now, relation betwen languagues and engineering: Learning languagues and learning engineering both have in common problems solutions. Languagues has rules, also called syntax, grammar, … and elements, also called vocabulary, and practices, also called exercises or programms.

Like a engineering, where we’re taught in rules, for instance programming essentials, in elements, for instance reserved words in a programming language (again, computing programming is also a languague)…

This is what philosophy, learning languagues and engineering they all three have in common. I leave a lot of things to say but I wanna keep myself in essentials questions.

Two late things:

1. have a look Language, engineering and philosophy that I read yesterday April 4 and don’t fear of philosophy, mates 🙂
2. I my humble opinion there’s a big difference between engineering and languagues: engineering is a technical issue, languague is an art (and this is a very Plato point of view but I can’t get out my own shadow)

My wife wants some tasks to be done at our LAN in a very precise moments of the day. Sure, I say, and then came to my mind that I never remember how to write cron configuration lines. I even consider to writte a short post about essentials, but, as soon as I’ve a look on the Internet I found so good documentation that it would useless to writte it.

One of most simple explanation that I need to keep here is that from RH:

• minute — any integer from 0 to 59
• hour — any integer from 0 to 23
• day — any integer from 1 to 31 (must be a valid day if a month is specified)

month — any integer from 1 to 12 (or the short name of the month such as jan, feb, and so on)

• dayofweek — any integer from 0 to 7 where 0 or 7 represents Sunday (or the short same of the week such as sun, mon, and so on)
• command — the command to execute. The command can either be a command such as ls /proc >> /tmp/proc or the command to execute a custom script that you wrote.

I’d remembered that cron from Linux is slightly different from other Unixes; Linux has a field that lets you specify wich user is goin to run the command. Linux also, has an special cron called anacron wich is mainly the same as cron but oriented to computers that aren’t running continously, such as laptop.

You may also have a look on this helpful links:

• Automating task with cron services
• Automating task with cron more Linux oriented
• Red Hat documentation con Configuring a Cron Task Red Hat doc’s usually are very well explained, with usefull samples.

My hated-loved Oracle has been moving around OSS. It has been told (and confirmed too) that they have tried to buy MySql

In this article from BusinessWeek they talk about how Open Source initiatives may be controlled by big software companyies. For instance, they talk about recent Oracle adquisitions, about how IBM has been injecting money and coders inside this comunity and they end with a very clarifying sentence from Bruce Perens; If Larry thinks he can have his way in the open-source community, he’s going to find he can’t get any developers to work [with him]

But also, Ellison says that open source needs big business, and I agree … in part. I think it’s possible to keep up open source initiatives without big companyies, but also, it’s naive to think that OSS have may grow up so much just because we all are good fellows. Have you never have a look to OSDL partner list?

Active State it’s a nice company, because they build Perl but not just because of it.

They were owned by Shopos (an antivir company) that had been sold out Active State to a Canadian venture capital. Althoug it’s seems to me a little bit … risky situation … it cames with good news. News says Active State will keep on Open Source Roots.

I wanna remember here that Active State has a great perl documentation on-line, nice perl port, but also, their CEO has a blog where he explain this Active State spin out movement, and other tools like their IDE Komodo, IDE for Linux, Mac OS and Windows.

I’m encouraging my wife to start her own blog on Estudio-L but at least I’ll drop few lines about her job…

Via a this book review upon a HTML + CSS book I get this head sample for an HTML Transitional document, ’till here nothing extrange. The book has a very good evaluation at Slashdot review by the way.

At first glance I saw that xhtml sample and I perceive that they don’t use utf-8. Utf-8 it’s becoming the cool movement among some web gurus this days here in spain, just browse Minid or Microsiervos and look at archives.

Inmediatly I’ve been editing my wife page at Estudio-L and show that her pages contains a nice and heavily strict code!!!.