cesarbs’ blog

I have just migrated this blog to my new web hosting at Dreamhost. I hope everything is working fine.

Yesterday, the whole process of getting a dental implant in my mouth was finally finished. I now have a new artificial tooth, and I am amazed at how realistic it looks. It’s really not possible to tell it is an implant by just looking at it. I didn’t really think it was going to be that perfect.

The worst part of the process was the initial surgery for drilling my jaw and installing the titanium receptacle for the implant. That was back in August, and was a terrible experience. The shaking sensation you get from the drill going into your bone is absolutely unpleasant. Besides, anesthesia kept losing its effect and my dentist had to inject some more a few times during the procedure.

Anyways, it’s all done now, and all I have to do is to keep taking care of my implant for the rest of my life. Fortunately, my dentist told me maintenance is not needed so frequently, and there is only a small chance of something going wrong with it.

I really think that’s what we should have in mind when writing code:

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. — Donald Knuth

Today I took a personality type test at 41 Questions, and I enjoyed my results.

Apparently, the results can be taken seriously, since the test seems to be based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. I know that a lot of people criticize this kind of psychological tests, but I believe these tests are worth some value.

I have just installed the Twitter Updater plugin for my blog. Let’s see how it works

IEEE has recently published online a new set of articles from IEEE Spectrum. Among those, there is a very interesting article written by HP Labs’ fellow researched Dr. Stanley Williams telling the story of how he and his team found the memristor - the fourth fundamental electronic component, predicted in theory more than 50 years ago by Dr. Leon Chua.

The topic received a considerable amount of attention a while ago, but most stories were short and superficial, roughly mentioning the discovery and its possibilities for the future. In his article, Dr. Williams gives us a little more insight on future memristor applications, of which I believe the most incredible is the possibility of emulating brains in silicon. As it is explained, current technology isn’t enough for that. However, memristor behave in a way which closely resemble synapses in the brain. That was noted even by Dr. Chua when he wrote the theoretical description of the component.

Altough the article is a bit long, I really believe it is worth reading. Dr. Williams explains what the memristor is and how it works using analogies which make it easy for the layperson to understand. There are some very interesting facts in the article which I had never heard of, such as that David Packard had the intention to build a long-term scientific research laboratory at HP in order to “return knowledge to the well of fundamental science from which HP had been withdrawing for so long”. That was actually done in 1995, and Dr. Williams was given at the occasion to choose whatever topic he wanted to research in his field, given that they could have something usable in 10 years.

Something went wrong with my server, then I did something wrong, and now I’ve lost all my previsou posts
So, this blog has officially been reset.