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.

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…

So guess what? I am spanish, I am an electrical engineer, and I am not currently working in Spain. What!? How can that be? Well, in such situation, companies have no option but to raise the wages in order to attract more engineers. These are the open market rules, right? So I must be crazy to leave my city, friends and family and, above all, an environment so favorable professionally.

It turns out that with such high demand the offered wages for a decent position are around 25,000 €/ year (pre-taxes), which would translate into a monthly pay of about 1300 €/month (after taxes). On the other hand, by working abroad, more than twice that amount can be easily made. And from what I’ve seen, it’s not only about the paycheck, but the jobs offered are also better.

After reading the article though, I didn’t find a single hint that situation was about to change. On the contrary, if I understood correctly, they were demanding more engineers with the mentioned salary. An offer impossible to turn down…

So let’s see how big the shortage has to become before they open their eyes and finally accept open market rules. For now, I know I won’t be coming back soon!

Yet I don’t know why, about two weeks ago, I sensed some kind of change. Call me paranoid, but I think something is going on! It all started when after being close to 0 degrees in the beginning of June, the sun decided to show up. I felt a strange warmth on my white skin. I think we may have changed the season of the year, you know, from Winter to Summer (until September, when it switches back).

With the new situation I even felt cheerful for no reason. I wanted to go out and wander around the streets of Stuttgart. At this point, I started to get suspicious, something had happened! Instead of the gray and empty streets I remembered, a hughe crowd was there. A demonstration? maybe, but the people didn’t seem angry nor german.

I had to find more about that misterious event, so the following days I checked the streets again with the same result, yet I stopped looking for reasons and started paying more attention to the people there. They seemed all terribly happy and that feeling invaded me too. For no apparent reason I felt joy, as if something bigger than any of us is going on in Germany.

After a long long winter, all I can say is… let’s enjoy it while we can!