Friday, May 25, 2007

Religion

I have always had a strange feeling about religion and finally a friend of mine put down in words that impression: "religion sets a backdoor in your mind".

I think that truly describes what I think. Religion is a kind of people control method as it stands some precepts you don't need to think about anymore. I don't mean religion is bad or of no use at all. Indeed, as Pancho pointed out, it is very useful for that people who in fact doesn't want to evaluate their principles. For those people, religion and control by fear is quite good as far as those precepts are fair (and not misunderstood or interpreted in own profit). For me it works just as inspiration. Some times about how to act. Some others about how I shouldn't. But in all cases, I try to choose my own way of living after a thoughtful evaluation.

One example of this is baptism. Its (supposed) original meaning was related with spiritual recleaning and rebirth, mostly for adult people who are the ones who really may need that kind of recleaning before embrace Christian cult by their own decision. Nowadays, baptism is done on infants who hardly can need any clean nor recleaning and of course have not taken any decision. Despite, by custom, some people believe by baptism they are educating their childrens. Weird.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Emulation vs. Virtualization

These days virtualization is the breaking new appliance for the enterprise. Everybody is migrating to this "new" concept but, which is the difference with emulation?

And interesenting one. Just for the sake of correctness:
  • Emulation involves emulating the virtual machines hardware and architecture. Microsoft's VirtualPC is an example of an emulation based virtual machine. It emulates the x86 architecture, and adds a layer of indirection and translation at the guest level, which means VirtualPC can run on different chipsets, like the PowerPC, in addition to the x86 architecture. However, that layer of indirection slows down the virtual machine significantly.
  • Virtualization, on the other hand, involves simply isolating the virtual machine within memory. The host instance simply passes the execution of the guest virtual machine directly to the native hardware. Without the translation layer, the performance of a virtualization virtual machine is much faster and approaches native speeds. However, since the native hardware is used, the chipset of the virtual machine must match. Usually, this means the Intel x86 architecture. VMWare is an example of this type of application
    for Windows.

Friday, May 18, 2007

Cats

Some months ago we adopted a little kitty we called Wifi as my girlfriend always had thought it was a (female) cat name. And I must say I agree with that. Unfortunatelly she was with us just ten days before a chlamydia infection take her from us.

That was the first time I positively tried to begin a blog, but I did not.

Now, a prudential time later, we have adopted another little cat we have called Val from Valentine, Ender's sister. She is our little panther!

Salamanca

We have been thinking about going to Salamanca for a long time, but we couldn't do it after Ranty's accident two years ago.

Now, we finally were able to go there. But again this is related to a tragic happening. We were there trying to give some support to Ele, one of those friends I left behind at IBM, who has now her heart broken, stolen.

You are stronger than you think you are.