In relation to this topic and the Catalan struggle to find its place within Spain (or not), I came across a fascinating documentary about the coexistence of both identities in the northeastern Spanish territories. The documentary does a great job at accurately portraying the sensitivities shown by both sides, yet surprisingly it was not made by a local. The author is Gary Gibson, a British journalist who has been living in Catalonia for the last 20 years, who speaks Spanish properly but still with a strong British accent. Maybe it takes an external party to be able to look into an  issue so close to the heart and being able to portray it in a non-biased matter.

The documentary goes by the title “Spain’s secret Conflict” and it spans over 40 minutes in which Mr. Gibson interviews José Mª Aznar and Jordi Pujol, the former Spanish and Catalan presidents, numerous politicians, historians and even plain street people who voice their (strong) opinions on the matter.

Take a look at it yourselves:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As an anecdotal piece of evidence, I found it interesting that most people who have a negative view over Catalonia have actually never lived there; on the other hand, Spanish immigrants who are living there have a much more positive attitude towards the land that welcomed them.

Here’s the whole resignation letter:

And suddenly, everybody is talking about Steve: how great he’s been, how he transformed Apple, how many industries he revolutionized or whether Apple will be able to manage without him or not. He certainly more than deserves the attention, yet he is not looking for it. Steve is a private man. That’s why, in my opinion we should focus on his legacy. His vision.

There’s certainly a lot to learn about his vision, and ironically, I think one of the best ways in which it can be summed up is through the Think different ad campaign which himself put in place right after coming back to Apple in 1997. Take a look:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Thank you Steve.    Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

This past week, I was involved with a pet project that performs some picture resizing and then dynamically shows them to the user without saving a temp file. One of the ways to do that in Adobe Air would be through the data URI scheme, which allows to embed the actual image source into its declaration encoded as a base64 string.

Here’s an example I got from Wikipedia:

So, going back to my application, the workflow goes something like this:

• 1) the user selects or drops a large image from disk,
• 2) the image is loaded into an air.Bitmap object,
• 3) the image is resized via a scaling air.Matrix object,
• 4) the new bitmapdata is encoded to JPEG at the new resolution,
• 5) the jpeg bytearray is finally encoded to Base64,
• 6) the base64 image string is loaded via the data:image/jpeg;base64 scheme I referred to previously.

All these steps can be easily performed with the functionalities available within the Air framework except step #5. I’ve been unable to locate a javascript library that allows the conversion between a binary ByteArray object and an encoded base64 string. So I just translated an equivalent ActionScript3 (as3) library I came across here into javascript.

Then, using the library you can easily do something like this without saving the dynamic image into a temp file:

	var BmpData = new air.BitmapData( WIDTH, HEIGHT, true, 0x000000);
	/* BmpData manipulation */

	var jpgEncoder = new window.runtime.com.adobe.images.JPGEncoder();
	var jpeg = jpgEncoder.encode(BmpData);
	var b64string = Base64.encode(jpeg).toString();
	$("").attr("src", "data:image/jpg;base64," + b64string).appendTo("body");

And here’s the whole code of the base64 Air javascript library:

/* Base64 library for Javascript.
* Based on: Ma Bingyao code.
* Optimized by: Jean-Philippe Auclair  / jpauclair.wordpress.com
* Adapted to JS by: Francesc Calvo / vito@vito.es
* Copyright (C) 2007 Ma Bingyao
* LastModified: Aug 17, 2011
* This library is free.  You can redistribute it and/or modify it.
*/
var Base64 =
{
encode : function( data  /*air.ByteArray() */){
	 if (!data) return;

	 var out = new air.ByteArray();
	 var encChar = this._encodeChars;

	 data.position = 0;
     out.length = (2 + data.length - ((data.length + 2) % 3)) * 4 / 3;

	 var i = 0;
     var r = data.length % 3;
     var len = data.length - r;
     var c;

     while (i < len) {
          //Read 3 Characters (8bit * 3 = 24 bits)
          c = data.readUnsignedByte() << 16 | data.readUnsignedByte() << 8 | data.readUnsignedByte();              i += 3;           //Convert to 4 Characters (6 bit * 4 = 24 bits)           c = (encChar[c >>> 18] << 24) | (encChar[c >>> 12 & 0x3f] << 16) | (encChar[c >>> 6 & 0x3f] << 8 ) | encChar[c & 0x3f];           out.writeInt(c);      }                                  if (r == 1) {     //Need two "=" padding              c = data[i];           c = (encChar[c >>> 2] << 24) | (encChar[(c & 0x03) << 4] << 16) | 61 << 8 | 61;
          out.writeInt(c);
     }
     else if (r == 2) { //Need one "=" padding
          c = data[i++] << 8 | data[i];              c = (encChar[c >>> 10] << 24) | (encChar[c >>> 4 & 0x3f] << 16) | (encChar[(c & 0x0f) << 2] << 8 ) | 61;
          out.writeInt(c);
     }   

     out.position = 0;
     return out.readUTFBytes(out.length);
     },

decode : function (str){
	 if (!str) return;

	 var decChar = this._decodeChars;
     var c1, c2, c3, c4;
     var i, len, out;   

	 len = str.length;
     i = 0;
     out = new air.ByteArray();
     var byteString = new air.ByteArray();
     byteString.writeUTFBytes(str);

     while (i < len)
     {
         //c1
         do {
             c1 = decChar[byteString[i++]];
         } while (i < len && c1 == -1);
         if (c1 == -1) break;   

         //c2
         do {
             c2 = decChar[byteString[i++]];
         } while (i < len && c2 == -1);
         if (c2 == -1) break;    

         out.writeByte((c1 << 2) | ((c2 & 0x30) >> 4));   

         //c3
         do {
             c3 = byteString[i++];
             if (c3 == 61) return out;   

             c3 = decChar[c3];
         } while (i < len && c3 == -1);
         if (c3 == -1) break;   

         out.writeByte(((c2 & 0x0f) << 4) | ((c3 & 0x3c) >> 2));   

         //c4
         do {
             c4 = byteString[i++];
             if (c4 == 61) return out;

             c4 = decChar[c4];
         } while (i < len && c4 == -1);
         if (c4 == -1) break;   

         out.writeByte(((c3 & 0x03) << 6) | c4);   

     }
     return out;
},

_encodeChars : function(){
     var encodeChars = new Array();

     var chars = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/";
     for (var i = 0; i < 64; i++){
          encodeChars.push(chars.charCodeAt(i));
     }
     return encodeChars;
}(),

_decodeChars: function(){
    var decodeChars = new Array();

     decodeChars.push(-1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, 62, -1, -1, -1, 63,
     52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1,  0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
     15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40,
     41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1
     -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1,
     -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1);
	return decodeChars;
}()

};

I’ll upload the code to github in the next few days so you can easily download the whole javascript file.

Here’s one about the MBA experience:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Or how to condense the whole one year experience into a single day, well, or 3 minutes and a half . I guess that’s how the Insead average day goes… One Day One Year.

Is there a better way to get the Fonti versus Singy campuses than through a little bit of competition? Here’s the Fontainebleau state of mind, which reminds me… Fontainebleau gets really cold in the fall (at least from a Spaniards’ perspective).

And this is one of my favorites. I particularly like the catchy Lisztomania song by Phoenix. I present you with the Insead Brat pack mashup, also with both images from Singapore and Fontainebleau.

Click here to view the embedded video.

By the way, I believe most of those were done by students as part of some media marketing courses. Kudos guys!

However, all good things come must come to an end, so it is with a bittersweet feeling that last July 7th I proudly graduated from Insead, The Business School for the World.

As my diploma states:

The faculty of INSEAD certifies that
Francesc Calvo Serra
has succesfully completed all requirements
and has been awarded the degree of
MASTER of BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

And I certainly did!

After completing courses like Prices & Markets, Strategy, Corporate Financial Policy, International Politics Analysis, Macroeconomics, Advanced Game Theory, Negotiations, Uncertainty Data & Judgment, Marketing, Business Ethics, Accounting, Organizational Behavior, Valuation, Private Equity, Your First Hundred Days among many others I earned my degree.

But it’s not just me writing it here, I can actually prove it. Take a look:

As you can see, we were a lot of students and the whole ceremony spanned several hours out of which I walked 12 second on stage. It was not that boring though , it felt like a very nice way of putting an end to the year: surrounded by the people who have been my 2nd family. I guess you’ll get a better idea if you take a look at the actual speech by Drew. It was pretty funny.

For a whole year, it could not be only work though. The program can also be taken partly from Singapore, and I enjoyed that opportunity to discover a side of the world I had never previously visited. In short: lots of new cultures, religions and above all realizing how poor but happy certain countries are. These are just some of the memories that will be imprinted in my mind for a long time.

Now it’s time to look back towards the future and embark into my next endeavor…

She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour nine a.m.
And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss the earth so much I miss my wife
It’s lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight

The last couple of weeks were hectic. Since the moment I decided to move I had so much to do and so little time to do it. It is only now, when relaxed for the 1st time, I can barely contain a thousand different feelings. So many friends, so many experiences that I will never forget. What in 2006 felt foreign and strange, now is familiar and I already know that I am going to miss it.

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

I will sigh for the simplest things like the barbecues, the Sunday beach volleyball games, the midnight jacuzzi visits, supermarkets being open until late, my personalized plates, Juris and the yoga lessons, the warm weather, UCI and the ARC, the short pants, palm trees and the great sunsets, buying cheap technology stuff online, the persian Friday soccer games, Yosemite, San Francisco, hollywood, and above all… the people.

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it’s cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did
And all this science I don’t understand
It’s just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time…

I can only hope someday I will be back. Thank you California…

Usually, any bank will do that transfer (via wire) for you and charge you a fee that goes from 0 to 50$. It is not that expensive and the money will get there in a couple of days, right? riight!? The only problem is any of those banks will charge you an outrageous conversion rate between currencies. To give a specific example related to my case, I called Citibank a couple of weeks ago inquiring about the euro-dollar rate. At that time, you could check it online and it was around 1.30$ per euro. However, this is the info they gave me (it changes daily):

• They sold euros at 1.37$
• They bought euros at 1.24$

Maybe that seems normal to you but it is a huge spread. I searched online and basically all banks will have similar spreads. I was even willing to try unorthodox solutions like PayPal, but even they charge conversion rates not close to the “right” value. Continuing with the quote from Citibank, if you wanted to transfer 10,000 USD to Euros, the conversion rate quickly becomes significant:

10,000$ * 1.37 – 10,000$ * 1.30 = 10,000$ * 0.07 = 700$ lost

After some more search, I found OANDA, an online currency trading broker ( http://www.oanda.com ), which will charge you the same rate as banks charge to each other (interbank rate). From the previous example the spread would be much smaller, something like 1.2995 to 1.3005 and they give you a rate down to the minute.

Assuming you don’t trade currencies, all you will need from OANDA is the Global Transfer service, which lets you transfer money to a bunch of countries for a 25$ fee and the right currency rate.

If you want to check it out for yourselves, here are their currency rates: OANDA Currency Converter. You can get the same updated information from Citibank in the US by calling here:
“For exchange rates, call the 24-hour Exchange Rate Hotline at 1-800-756-7050 and press option #1.“

I hope this helps you. I know I already saved over 2,000$ in the last months…

However, from that moment on, in a brief period of time I stumbled upon many articles about minimalist running shoes. Here are just a few: the 4 hour week, Mail Online, CrunchGear, Wired, the Daily Show, and even TIME magazine named these shoes one of the best inventions of 2007.

Here’s a short interview that took place last August 18th on the Daily Show. They talk abut people from a Mexican tribe who run hundreds of miles barefoot and despite such achievement, they do it without injuries:

Such a buzz certainly caught my attention and made me think. The truth is that, as a kid, I used to walk barefoot all the time, and loved it; but that was a long time ago… so I’d rather hear from Vibram owners. Fortunately, these shoes are available at Amazon, where a few buyers commented on them (all of them positive).

I noticed most owners are initially reticent (like me); running injuries, pain or just curiosity leads them to buy into this new barefoot trend; after an initial adaptation period, they simply love their Vibrams. I was so intrigued that I decided to join the FiveFingers club; After a quick visit to the official website (http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/), I learnt they were available in the Sports Chalet from Huntington Beach. After all, there’s no way I am buying something like this without physically testing them first. A couple of hours later, there I was, with my brand new “shoes”…

So here’s my take on them… I’ll admit at the beginning they feel kind of funny, and most of the time, you can definitely see people staring at them. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, since they are certainly noticeable; but who cares!?
The attention is granted, but reactions are diverse; some people simply find them horrible (my roommate started laughing when he saw them for the first time), while some others think they are cool and inquire about their name or where I got them. “Are they some kind of water shoes?“, “Are they for climbing?“, “They look comfortable, are they?“. Even my girlfriend hates them; although with a little bit of luck, I might be able to convert her .

Somewhere online a guy was comparing them to the feeling of wearing gloves instead of mittens; it sounded funny but now I actually think it’s a pretty accurate comparison. When you walk, you can actually feel the ground, which turns out to be a nice feeling. Try to think of it as when you walk barefoot in the beach; isn’t it pleasant to feel the sand on your soles? Obviously, asphalt or concrete is not the same thing, but you get the idea.

As soon as you put them on and try to walk, you’ll realize you cannot land with the heel first (as we are used to do), so you try to use the balls of your feet; kind of like walking on the tips of your toes. It feels a little bit unnatural at first since you tend to overdo it. However, after a bit of practice, the feet will land almost flat on the ground; it just happens that the front does it a fraction of a second earlier.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I read some people were concerned about them smelling. The truth is they are quite open so your feet don’t feel that hot. I already washed mine a couple of times, but it was not due to the smell (and I live in hot Southern California); I just wanted them to recover that bright shiny red color
Probably, a cold weather would be a bigger inconvenience for this type of open shoes; I guess that’s why Vibram created the KSO and other models which cover the whole foot and offer more protection.

I’d like to emphasize there is an adaptation period (which is clearly stated in the box). Don’t expect your feet and leg to be comfortable with them right away. If you haven’t used your feet muscles properly in a long time, don’t expect them to strengthen overnight. At first, your calves and feet arches will feel sore for a few days, but a couple of weeks later the transition should be complete; that is why, the more you wear them, the more comfortable they feel. At this point, I own them for over a month and I use them as often as I can. I tried running with them but I haven’t gone over 2 miles yet. Even running with regular shoes, I can feel my stride is different than it used to be. I ran over different surface types and so far I only had a problem with loose gravel on top of a hard surface such as concrete. Although I still don’t know whether my feet should get tougher or it’s simply not the appropriate surface.

My main concerns are regarding their durability. Not that I encountered any problems so far, but being made just of a thin rubber sole and some elastic cloth on top, they might give up on me sooner than I’d like. Another worry I have, is the lack of protection for the feet; I wear them regularly to the gym and I could see how some unfortunate accident could be fatal for my toes.

The bottom line is I’m really happy with them; so I guess I’m just like most other Vibram owners I had previously read about . If you have doubts, I’d definitely encourage you to give them a try.

Isn’t it ironic how much we are moving forward only to realize some things we just did better in the past…?

In any case, I got to play with my friend’s iPhone and what got my attention the most was this application called Shazam. Why is it special? Basically, you play any song and let the Shazam listen to it for about 5-10 seconds and it will tell you the title, author, album, etc.

Here you can find a video I found that shows it in action:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(more detailed video review)

I am not gonna argue whether it is needed/useful or not, although I think online music shops such as iTunes could easily use the technology to increase their sales. As far as I’ve seen, the current iPhone implementation of the application is free, but their website refers to an existing previous service which was charged on a recognition basis. No match, no pay. So they have to be pretty confident on their recognition abilities…

What got my attention is the fact the application will succeed in recognizing the songs every single time just by listening only to about 8 seconds. It doesn’t matter what part of the songs Shazam listens to, how repetitive it is or how unrepresentative of the rest that segment is, it will get it right! Of course, I was able to make it fail, by feeding it traditional Catalan songs, but in this case, I’m almost certain it failed, not because the algorithm was not successful, but since it didn’t have that song in its database.

Having a background in electrical engineering and computer science I am somehow familiar with digital signal sampling, filtering, etc., and I find this product amazing. I googled around but could find no details at all (even high level ones) about its underlying algorithm.

It’s obvious the procedure goes something like this:

listen to fragment –> digital processing –> song signature –> database match

Given the low quality reception of the song, they will have to deal with plenty of noise but still manage to extract some fundamental audio parameters. If it were only dealing with voice, it would be something like pitch, tone, etc. the parameters that make your voice unique. That’s mostly how voice recognition works after all.

In the case of a full song, that’s not enough due to its high variance: The beginning might be completely different to the end, so the signature extracted by the algorithm has to be different every time. The only way I see they can do it, is by extracting much shorter audio signatures, maybe like 1 second long. I think it is safe to assume a song signature can remain constant within a second timespan.

Of course, with such short signatures, they don’t necessarily have to be unique, but at this point there can be more than one match. Yet, now it’s a matter of overlapping the result set for each of them. If the match is still not unique, signature sequences could also possibly narrow results down.

I read on their website the database is currently holding 4 million songs, which based on the 1 second long signature and assuming the average song is 4 minutes long (that is 240 seconds), that would give us a database of 1 billion (10^9) entries. Fortunately, a signature should be something tiny, similar to a hash value.

At this point, the issues are hardware resources and scalability, but given current technology with terabyte hard drives and mulit-core cpu’s this approach is clearly feasible. Isn’t that amazing? Maybe you don’t think so after all , but at least it makes me wonder where the limit is and where we can be just in a few years. Are we soon gonna see devices able recognize human voice given a 1 second sample in a unique enough way to discern it from the rest of humans? or maybe it can already be done…

By the way, does anybody have any details about the actual implementation?

Here are some pictures from some of the most fervorous soccer supporters:

On another note, and actually talking about soccer this time the outcome was quite different and Spain did actually perform up to the challenge. Game after game they showed their best game which led them to the final against Germany and ultimately to being the European champions after more than 40 years. Celebrations went on in Spain for many days and the local media argued that the country was finally united. However, as the BBC says,

…one trophy does not a unified nation make, and Mr Zapatero was perhaps overstating the point.

I couldn’t agree more. By the way, I grabbed most pictures surfing around, so they belong to their respective owners.