It was a Sunday, it was in Yokohama.
It was the first time for me to visit this show. I expected something more, anyway I had a lot of fun playing with all that gear.
CP+ camera & photo imaging show (yokohama)
Asakusa – Tsukiji – Asakusa
When you are too busy coding and your mind doesn’t work anymore, instead of keep pushing, take a break and do something completely different. That’s what I did on Saturday. I left home in the afternoon and walked down the Sumida River until it ends.
Arigato from Japan Earthquake Victims
If you cannot see the video, check here direct link.
I didn’t know that I died when I was 30
How many people in this world achieved amazing results within the first 3 decades of their lives? Alexander the Great by the age of thirty, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world. Jesus Christ died around 30. Albert Einstein conceived in his mind his most important theories, before 30. Nikola Tesla also achieved his most important inventions during 3 decades, and many others. 30 years is a life, an entire life. No more than 200 years ago, life expectancy was around 40. That means one life! Nowadays life expectancy in the industrialized world is 2 or 3 times that, which means, at least two lives in one!
Culture and society understands life as a progressive path with goals down the road to achieve. Birth, Education, Job, Family, Old Age and Death. All this on a “life spam”, but it doesn’t specify time. So what about if we extend our lives up to 120 years? That means that we again start to work before 25, and keep working until we retire, let’s say 90… Does it make any sense? So, let’s face it. We humans can achieve whatever we want, in the first 30 years of our live. We can change the world in just 3 decades!
So, I propose to change our vision to a new way to understand life and goals. I’m 36 at the moment I’m writing this. If I assume my symbolic death when I was 30, it means that now I’m 6 years old. But I don’t need to go to elementary school and I don’t have to deal with all the obstacles of my lack of experience as a 6 year old child. I want to imagine, that I woke up and now I’m 6 years old but I have all the knowledge that I’ve accumulated in my first 30 years of life.
I already spent one life, whatever I did it’s done, I can’t change it. But, I can learn from that life experience for my new life that’s started 6 years ago and I just didn’t know. So instead of start thinking in terms of “I’m too old now”, “I lost the train and the opportunity to do this or that…”, “I can’t start a new career now”… I will think in terms of “I’m 6 years old and I know a lot!!, I still have one more life left in this video game”.
So that’s it, I’m still in the middle of the road of my life, that means I have just made the 50% of it. We can start over again, planning again, studying again, doing again whatever we want and work for this second chance we have.
If you are in your 30s think about this: you just started your clock again and you maybe didn’t realize about it. If you are in your 40s, you are just about 10 years old! You still have a life ahead so don’t loose the illusion. If you are far away from that, remember that at 60, you will die again, and a third chance is given to you, so don’t waste it, because that’s the last one, at least based on our current medical advances :)
This is my exercise for this 2012. Realize that I died at 30, I’m 6 years old, and my life started again. Let’s take a break, and rethink about everything. I have the opportunity to make it again, better and more interesting than before. Go ahead and do the same. Think about what you have done until now and if you are not satisfied with it, now it’s the moment to start anew!
Good luck!
Books, Sports, Music, Electronics
If you are in Tokyo I recommend to follow this path.
Get out at Kudanshita station, exit 2 and walk all the road down to Jimboucho to find tons and tons of old books. Even if you don’t understand Japanese, it’s very interesting to see the atmosphere in there. Then you’ll find streets dedicated to sports, then streets of music and finally you will be in Akihabara, the geek kingdom.
View Books, Sports, Music, Electronics in a larger map
Java Life
I used to do this kind of life for some time, not only in Java, almost for everything. Now my cubicle is my home. Anyway really funny video:
Baby Asahi Beer
I saw this size only in Japan! :)
Sometimes I saw these small cans, specially on tombs or dead altars.
Too many HDD
This is the result of buying whatever you find in Akihabara. Maybe I should recycle the magnets inside or the plates? This is just a lot of junk that spent already 2 years in my balcony… 
Precautions before creating a server dependent mobile application
A server costs money. Not only the monthly rate you have to pay to keep it alive, also maintenance and system administration takes time, so it takes money.
If you plan to develop an app that uses a server to read/write data, be very careful and before starting anything, take into account these considerations.
- Does your server need HA (High Availability)? How to know that!? Does your application need to connect to your server to operate? In the answer is yes, you need HA! That means that your application, to do what it has to do, needs to be able to connect to the server. You can’t prevent when the user will do that and the last thing you want is a bad rating and some complain in the App Store.
HA is more expensive than conventional systems. It’s more difficult to configure and to administer. If you don’t have experience as a system administrator, and you have a great idea for an app that needs a server to work, think about partnership with a good friend with experience as sysadmin. - Is your server able to scale? What about if your app is a great success and your current configuration is not ready for the overload? Even if your app is great it can become a great deception for the users just because your system wasn’t able to scale when it was needed. Remember, the user doesn’t know and doesn’t care about technical issues. For the user all technical explanations are just excuses. So try to avoid to be in such situation.
- Is your app a paid or free app? If it’s a paid app, think about including in the price, not only the expenses to maintain the server. Think also about the expenses for scaling! The same reason of the previous point. Maybe you need to provide 2xTimes or more the performance of your current system. That will cost you money and you have to include that expense in your app price as well. It’s important to plan for an eventual future scenario. It doesn’t depend only on how many times your app was downloaded. How will people use the app? Does it help on common repetitive daily tasks? Does it make intense network use with the server (for example a photo sharing service)? The amount of data to read/write, just text? multimedia? It’s not easy and a mistake can costs not only money but also reputation and bad ratings.
- If your app is free, well good luck! It’s a free app and the number of downloads could be huge. Who is going to pay for the server?? Ok you can use ads but remember, a paid app will cost a specific amount of money that you can control. You know exactly how much money you will get for each app and that makes prospection easier. For ad-based apps, you know you will get paid but you don’t know how much and when. If a customer buys the app, he paid for it in that very moment. Even if he’ll never use the app again, the transaction has been made and you got paid. For ad-based ones, maybe he will start using the app next month or never. So risks increase for server dependent free-apps.
- Even if your system administrator is a guru, as a developer you have to think about the possibility that your application architecture could create some constrains if time to scale comes. So the whole plan has to be discussed with your admin as well.
Just try to think about how your system will react in case of the worse and best scenario. Don’t let you go only by the enthusiasm of your idea. Keeping a cold mind, will save you from bad headaches.
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