Today, I took my kid to a pig farm near Mexico City, I think I let him get a little too close to the animals, FML

But more seriously, leave a comment if you think the whole Swine Flu is total BS to keep once again the world in fear and have them worry about stuff that doesn’t really matter.

Just check the price of oil today (dropping), and the prices of small pharmaceutical companies on the stock market (some doubling today)

World Domination BS… don’t fall for it.

Who benefits from Swine Flu

• The US tourism industry by keeping millions of dollars from going to mexico. Just one airplane going to Cancun from say Florida, will take about 300 passengers. In average each passenger will spend at least about $1,000. That’s $300k a pop. I’d imagine there’s at least 10 flights a day going to Cancun from several destinations in the US. That’s $3MM that stay in the US or go somewhere else. Now multiply this by the number of touristic destinations in Mexico plus flights that come from other countries. Their economy must be bleeding tens of millions a day because of this.
• Companies that use pork derived products, now they can get pork for a lot cheaper. Think McDonalds, Wendy’s, Burguer King, Super market chains. Buy low, sell high
• 3M has had to step up their mask production to keep up with the demand coming from CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, etc.
• Pharmaceutical companies related to vaccine R&D

In the meantime, I see nothing but a pattern of destructive media against mexico, first it was the Drug lord wars, then Swine Flu, and more recently an Earth Quake (I totally believe the US must have weapons to produce earthquakes, it’s the perfect attack, you can blame it on mother nature)

The Festo Bionic Learning Network.

Repost if you can. This ad is the first TV Ad ever to be run nationwide in Pro of Marijuana legalization. It started today, 4/20 “four twenty” a date that matches the pot-iconic number. It’s time it’s legalized, it’s not like they’re not smoking, you might as well tax it, create jobs, export it and explode a billion dollar industry. If America does it, the rest of the world will follow, and damn it, it’ll be cool as hell.

After I received comments from ispak on Flickr I made a few fixes.

ispak pointed out that it was a bad idea reading one byte at the time, also I had a gay ass try/catch that didn’t catch any exception :p

So now I read 16 byte chunks, and I also take care of the file ending. The previous version used to print the file ending with a bunch of null bytes. Now it stops reading at the end, and formats the output accordingly.

Here’s the new source:

//HexViewer.java
import java.io.*;

public final class HexViewer {
    public final static void printFile(String filePath) {
        try {
            File f = new File(filePath);
            BufferedInputStream bis =
                new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(f));

            byte[] chunk = null;
            int readStatus = 0;
            while (true) {
                chunk = new byte[16];
                readStatus = bis.read(chunk, 0, 16);
                char[] line = new char[16];

                if (readStatus == -1)
                    break;

                for (byte i=0; i < readStatus; i++) {
                    int readByte = (chunk[i] < 0) ? (-1 * (int) chunk[i]) : chunk[i];
                    String paddingZero = (readByte < 16) ? "0" : "";
                    System.out.print(paddingZero + Integer.toHexString(readByte).toUpperCase() + " ");
                    line[i] = (readByte >= 33 && readByte <= 126) ? (char) readByte : '.';
                }

                //We add some padding to print the text line right below the one above.
                String padding = new String();
                if (readStatus < 16) {
                    for (byte i=0; i < 16-readStatus; i++) {
                        padding += "   ";
                    }
                }

                System.out.println(padding + new String(line));
            }
        } catch (Exception e1) { e1.printStackTrace(); }
    }

    public final static void main(String[] args) {
        if (args.length == 0)
            return;

        printFile(args[0]);
    }
}

And see how it now handles file endings when the file size is not a multiple of 16 :p

I had the opportunity to break away from work for a week and visit one of the most important cities on my I-Have-To-Go-Here list, London.

I found many similarities between London life and New York life, but as I went outside every day I tried to put together a small list of things that I found curious from the perspective of a 4 year old New Yorker.

CCTV, CCTV, CCTV! From the moment you step foot in the city there’s a very clear message put into your head. CCTV!, Big brother’s watching!. The scare tactic seems to work, all my friends seemed to tell me, don’t do this, don’t do that, they’re watching. I personally think it’s more of a deterrent than anything. Nobody can possibly be watching so many cameras, they are probably used for “forensic” purposes.

Pound Currency design FAIL. I understand having different widths for blind people, but they made them way too wide to fit on a wallet. Also they don’t have their denomination shown on all 4 corners, for the tourist, if you insert bills backwards you have to take them out to see how much each bill is, slowing cashier lines with tourists.

They just don’t fit on my “American Sized” wallet. I guess you have to either have a bigger wallet, or fold them twice. Notice how you can’t tell what bills are what (If you’re a noob with the currency of course), no numbers on all corners.

One thing I loved though on the 10 pound bill, freaking Charles Darwin is in it!

Now see the mighty dollar (Euros have the numbers on all 4 corner) how good the “user experience” is (at least for the non blind)

London.Underground = NewYork.Subway;
London.Subway = NewYork.UnderPass
What the New Yorker calls the “Subway”, the Londoneer calls the “Underground”. Whoever designed the Logo of their system was a genius, it’s a very versatile logo. Now, here comes a weird thing, Waht we New Yorkers call an “Underpass” The Londoneer calls “Subway”. This little detail had me J-Walking a couple of big avenues with all my luggage right after I came out of the “Underground” , and I couldn’t find for the life of me a pedestrian area to cross, and I kept thinking that some parts of the city weren’t that pedestrian-friendly… Me and other tourists just had gotten out of what we call “Subway” when we saw a sign for the “Subway” again we didn’t use it and we J-Walked it baby. Then it was easy to cross big avenues. In london Underpass = Subway.

Nokia > iPhone
Most people have Nokia phones there. Didn’t see a single iphone among my friends. Saw an Android though

The underground has no exits, only ways out.

When you cross the street they always make you waste time on this buffer zone, many of the times lots of pedestrians end up waiting in the middle. Maybe its a combination of making car traffic flow faster, and also to help tourists remember cars are coming the other way.

It seems that the city is a very democratic place and that it has lots of issues, during the 6 days I was there I saw protests from very different groups. It also seems that there’s this love for Rollerblading like nowhere else, saw big crowds of Rollerbladers (wearing funny customs some times) in several occasions. Not sure if they were also protesting.

Maybe I’m just used to it, but I think the water in New York tastes 1000 times better than the water in London. There’s something in the London water after you swallow, it never seems to quench my thirst, it has to be extremely cold for it to feel the same way, and it was my experience that everywhere that I went I had to ask for a lot of ice. It must be an european thing (my wife doesn’t drink iced water either, nor does her family, they can even drink room temperature beer, yuck) drinking water at its natural temperature, maybe it’s part of the energy culture in America that we don’t give a crap to spend energy in cooling water?

Overall, I loved the experience, the night life seems very much alive and real. Heard some stories of pickpocketing and of areas that I shouldn’t dare visit and this made me think that it may be a city a little more dangerous than New York.

Maybe it’s the week dollar, I don’t know, but everything felt to me that it was double or triple the price than in New York. I only spent money on food, transportation and internet connectivity, other than that I don’t think it was worth it for someone who comes from New York to do any shopping over there and I certainly didn’t spend a “p” on anything outside my most basic needs.

Update: You might want to read this new version of the code instead. Thanks ispak

I was playing with a hex editor recently and then I thought it would be pretty easy to make a program to output what you see on a text editor. Here’s a quick & dirty Hex Visor I wrote in like 5 minutes with Java. It shows 15 bytes per line, and on the right side it prints all the visible characters of the ascii table, the non-visible ones are replaced with “.”

Enjoy:

//HexViewer.java
import java.io.*;

public final class HexViewer {
    public final static void printFile(String filePath) {
        File f;
        try {
            f = new File(filePath);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            return;
        }

        try {

            FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(f);
            while (fis.available() > 0) {
                char[] line = new char[16];
                for (int i=0; i < 16; i++) {
                    int readByte = fis.read();
                    String paddingZero = (readByte < 16) ? "0" : "";
                    System.out.print(paddingZero + Integer.toHexString(readByte) + " ");
                    line[i] = (readByte >= 33 && readByte <= 126) ? (char) readByte : '.';
                }
                System.out.println(new String(line));
            }
        } catch (Exception e1) { e1.printStackTrace(); }
    }

    public final static void main(String[] args) {
        if (args.length == 0)
            return;

        printFile(args[0]);
    }
}

Usage:

java HexViewer <path to file> | less

java HexViewer Desktop/Puppet.wmv | less

30 26 b2 75 8e 66 cf 11 a6 d9 00 aa 00 62 ce 6c 0&.u.f.......b.l
74 14 00 00 00 00 00 00 07 00 00 00 01 02 a1 dc t...............
ab 8c 47 a9 cf 11 8e e4 00 c0 0c 20 53 65 68 00 ..G.........Seh.
00 00 00 00 00 00 f4 10 68 f9 49 76 2e 43 b5 9f ........h.Iv.C..
09 0a 2d 19 45 7c 32 3a 24 00 00 00 00 00 70 ee ..-.E|2:$.....p.
14 06 fb da c7 01 28 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 8c ......(.........
bb 53 00 00 00 00 10 88 dd 52 00 00 00 00 b8 0b .S.......R......
00 00 00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00 40 1f 00 00 40 1f ..........@...@.
00 00 90 50 02 00 b5 03 bf 5f 2e a9 cf 11 8e e3 ...P....._......
00 c0 0c 20 53 65 61 10 00 00 00 00 00 00 11 d2 ....Sea.........
d3 ab ba a9 cf 11 8e e6 00 c0 0c 20 53 65 06 00 ............Se..
33 10 00 00 a9 46 43 7c e0 ef fc 4b b2 29 39 3e 3....FC|...K.)9>
de 41 5c 85 27 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 0c 65 .A\.'..........e
00 6e 00 2d 00 61 00 75 00 00 00 5d 8b f1 26 84 .n.-.a.u...]..&.
45 ec 47 9f 5f 0e 65 1f 04 52 c9 1a 00 00 00 00 E.G._.e..R......
00 00 00 02 01 ea cb f8 c5 af 5b 77 48 84 67 aa ..........[wH.g.
8c 44 fa 4c ca 62 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 06 00 00 .D.L.b..........
00 01 00 0c 00 02 00 02 00 00 00 49 00 73 00 56 ...........I.s.V
00 42 00 52 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 34 00 00 .B.R.........4..
00 06 00 00 00 44 00 65 00 76 00 69 00 63 00 65 .....D.e.v.i.c.e
00 43 00 6f 00 6e 00 66 00 6f 00 72 00 6d 00 61 .C.o.n.f.o.r.m.a
00 6e 00 63 00 65 00 54 00 65 00 6d 00 70 00 6c .n.c.e.T.e.m.p.l
00 61 00 74 00 65 00 00 00 4c 00 31 00 00 00 00 .a.t.e...L.1....
00 02 00 0c 00 02 00 02 00 00 00 49 00 73 00 56 ...........I.s.V
00 42 00 52 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 02 00 34 00 00 .B.R.........4..
00 0c 00 00 00 44 00 65 00 76 00 69 00 63 00 65 .....D.e.v.i.c.e
00 43 00 6f 00 6e 00 66 00 6f 00 72 00 6d 00 61 .C.o.n.f.o.r.m.a
00 6e 00 63 00 65 00 54 00 65 00 6d 00 70 00 6c .n.c.e.T.e.m.p.l
00 61 00 74 00 65 00 00 00 4d 00 50 00 40 00 4d .a.t.e...M.P.@.M
00 4c 00 00 00 00 00 01 00 2e 00 03 00 04 00 00 .L..............
00 57 00 4d 00 2f 00 57 00 4d 00 41 00 44 00 52 .W.M./.W.M.A.D.R
00 43 00 50 00 65 00 61 00 6b 00 52 00 65 00 66 .C.P.e.a.k.R.e.f
00 65 00 72 00 65 00 6e 00 63 00 65 00 00 00 a7 .e.r.e.n.c.e....
3f 00 00 00 00 01 00 34 00 03 00 04 00 00 00 57 ?......4.......W
00 4d 00 2f 00 57 00 4d 00 41 00 44 00 52 00 43 .M./.W.M.A.D.R.C
00 41 00 76 00 65 00 72 00 61 00 67 00 65 00 52 .A.v.e.r.a.g.e.R
00 65 00 66 00 65 00 72 00 65 00 6e 00 63 00 65 .e.f.e.r.e.n.c.e
00 00 00 b0 06 00 00 74 d4 06 18 df ca 09 45 a4 .......t......E.
ba 9a ab cb 96 aa e8 a4 0d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................

This how it looks on a full blown hex editor like HexEdit:

The Code of HexViewer.java on emacs:

Screenshot of the output:

Homework
Hack the code so that it ouputs the first column shown on the HexEdit screenshot. That column represents the byte position of each row. It's basically a counter incremented 16 units at the time, and shown in Hex.