When common TV channels are boring you...

During this Christmas time, contents in every TV channel in Spain are almost the same: films which has been on again and again, pop musical programs and mixtures of Youtube videos.
Because of this, I looked for other programs which could “entertain” me a little more, so I ended up on the BBC UK webpage, where I found tones and tones of good quality programs. It seems that the money that BBC gets from TV Licenses is well managed!

Thanks to the BBC webpage it is possible to watch their TV channels (BBC One, BBC Two, …) in live streaming but only if you are in the UK (due to legal facts). However, it’s possible to watch the programs which has been already on TV through the “BBC iPlayer”, a Flash application to play sources of video streaming (also available to run it with Adobe AIR).

My boringness seemed to be finished! But when I was trying to watch a programme... I realized that my Internet connection was not enough to watch it smoothly (iPlayer don’t allow you to change the cache size easily). I continue searching for a while and I found a multi-platform program to record and watch BBC programs which offers lots of options (subtitles, programmes guide, using of proxy [you know what for], etc...). It’s name is get_iplayer (http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html)  and it is an open-source project. It's aim is to provide a way to watch BBC programmes in devices which don't support Adobe Flash. It was abandoned by its author, but some other people has continued developing it.


So what I do now is start downloading the programme I want to watch, after a few seconds I start playing that file with VLC and I enjoy it :). When exams are gone, I’ll try to make a simple GUI to make it easier to use!

One programme I’d really like to recommend is “Come Fly With Me”, a new comedy series which takes place in an airport. You can read more about it and watch some chapters here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00trc9v
It’s on BBC One every Saturday at 21.00 (UK).

If I could pay for an UK TV License to watch these channels on my standard TV I would do it with pleasure.

Cyberattacks and microtasks

Today, a long bank holiday came to an end for me. Five days which had been led by the air traffic controllers and the Internet-war due to the W¡k¡leaks issue.

It's quite impressive how a relatively small number of users are creating such a mess to big companies like Mastercard, Visa or Paypal (I'm talking about the DDoS attacks). It is true that there are lots of people who want to show their support to W¡k¡leaks, but I don't know if this is the right way, mostly because of the possible side effects (such as using them as a an excuse to restrict the Internet user liberties in the future). The figures about this attacks are being tracked by Panda labs.

However, these days have been quite normal for me on the RealWorld™. I have been able to enjoy them with friends and also to prepare myself a bit more for the final exams on January. The end of this holiday seems to me the start of the countdown for exams, so that, my hours of studying are going to be increased in an exponential way in the next days.

To finish this entry, I would like to share the little piece of work we were working on last week for Microprocessors class. It can be useful for other students who have to face up to a task similar to this one.

The aim of it was just developing a program (for a specific machine) in assembler to calculate the factorial of a given number throughout consecutive sums. It was not a difficult task, but it took us more than expected owing to the fact of being used to coding in higher level languages.

The design of the machine for ISIS: http://db.tt/b00z7lG

The program itself: http://db.tt/rOZ3bg4

Because actions speak louder than words...

Last Monday I could attend a talk at my University where some Teleco alumnis explained us what they had done during the years they spent here as students, and also, how their career is being.

I found it very interesting for me and made me actually think about my future, but above all, about the present.

From what I listened, I could conclude that it would be better for me to do more things apart from just studying what the teachers say. I have realised how "similar" every single student seems to the companies when it finishes its studies and the need of being "noticed" among all that people.

Well, nowadays I am an active member of BEST Valladolid (being Public Relations Responsible since October), but it's time to take more responsabilities and be more proactive in this association, but also in other aspects of life.

So, this is the reason why I am starting this blog and the aims I'd like to achieve are: creating my personal identity on the net, improving my English by writing and starting to be a bit more "different" from the "student-mass". Let's see...