Uilton Dutra

I bought a Pavilion dv7-3085dx notebook based on my positive experience with HP. What a big surprise when I rebooted the computer after a Linux installation. The BIOS displayed a message warning about the machine overheating. That was intriguing because Windows 7 had been running fine before. After some time researching I found other users with the same problem and found out that the cause was a buggy BIOS version (f.04). To solve another problem, the synchronization with iphone/ipod, HP released the BIOS version f.13 and it was supposed to solve my problem as well. But the update is not available anymore and I got nothing talking with HP support. The attendant said that there are no updates available to my notebook and that I had to wait. I felt really frustrated with HP’s lack of interest to solve the problem. But I didn’t give up and continued the search for the file sp46749.exe that contains the latest BIOS version. With the help of Google Translate, I found the file for download in a Chinese website and decided to try. After a couple of minutes and a terrible stomach ache I rebooted the computer and… everything was working great! Since then I’ve been using the notebook for four days without any problem.

Update for download:
WinFlash for HP Notebook System BIOS (with Intel Processor) F.13 REV: A

Please be careful. I’m not responsible for any harm it may cause to your computer.

You don’t need to read statistic reports or visit the notable programmers list of Wikipedia to realize that we don’t have lots of girls working with computing. For who works in the field this fact is so natural that we don’t even talk about it (except when someone makes a joke).

I’ve always thought that the rareness of women was not a problem of computer science alone, because it’s easy to observe that sciences tend to have a bigger proportion of men. But toke my attention that disparity in CS is static or even shrinking according to an article published on New York Times:

“For decades, undergraduate women have been moving in ever greater numbers into science and engineering departments at American universities. Yet even as they approach or exceed enrollment parity in mathematics, biology and other fields, there is one area in which their presence relative to men is static or even shrinking: computer science.”

According to specialists, the social factor is determinant explaining why women don’t choose computer science. An article on ScienceDaily, affirms that women shy sciences and engineering because they think it’s a lonely activity. In complement, on cited NYTimes article, the scientist Dr. Jan Cuny, affirms that the nerd stereotype is a big problem.

The discrimination is also pointed as a factor of distance. But I think it’s equal to the other professional areas. What happens is that the small number of women working with computing may increase the felling of discrimination.

Another factor, generated a good debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard. It’s the idea that exist a difference of abilities between man and woman. And this fact would define the different career choices.

I don’t think that there are simple answers, because the motivations vary among different social environments. But I believe the organization and sensibility of women would be really beneficial to computing.

“SimCity 2000 was the first Sim game to feature the semi-nonsensical phrase Reticulating Splines, which means to make a network of splines. Will Wright has stated in an interview that the game does not actually reticulate splines when generating terrain, and he just inserted the phrase because it “sounded cool”.[citation needed] The phrase has since been featured in SimCopter, SimCity 4, The Sims and The Sims 2, as well as being referenced by a status message in Mozy, an off-site backup solution offered by EMC Corporation.” – Wikipedia

When making this website I discovered how difficult is to blog with WordPress in more than one language. There is no native support and the plugins or possible hacks can’t provide all needed features.

I was looking for the following characteristics:

• Easy translation of posts, pages, tags, categories and template;
• Automatic generation of feeds in different languages;
• Detection of language through browser or preferred language through cookie;
• Different permanent link for each language.

But it was not a surprise when I didn’t find a complete solution. I had the same problem with Joomla. A good question is: Why the community doesn’t give much attention to this?

In my search I found the plugins below (with last update and heritage):

Before choosing one of them, I learned how they store the content in order to avoid headaches if I need to migrate in the future.

Below how they save the information:

• Polyglot, xLanguage, qTranslate: all content on table posts with markups;
• ZdMultiLang: New tables to save the correspondences;
• WP_Multilingual: Save the versions on postmeta table.

I choose qTranslate because it has a friendly interface, a good source code organization, an active forum and because of its parentage with Polyglot and xLanguage. This way it’s easy for me to modify the sources and I’m not going to have problems if some day I choose to move to xLanguage, for example.

But it has lots of deficiencies like the impossibility to preview archived posts, the permanent links in one language only, the markups of identification showing around the tags and categories on admin etc. Nevertheless, it solves well the problem until I find a better solution.

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Update 10/02/08:
My first thought was to install two separate blogs and keep one of them as subdomain. But the maintenance of two code bases kept me away from this idea. Kelter on comments provided a link to a clever hack for wp-config.php to use only one WordPress installation.  It’s not a perfect solution because all texts of template need to be inside a .mo file, you will have a copy of all tables for each language, no shared comments etc. However comparing with the features of available plugins, it’s a good option.

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Cited plugins:

• Language Picker
• Polyglot
• qTranslate
• xLanguage
• Gengo
• WP_Multilingual
• Language Switcher
• ZdMultiLang

Following the competitors, DreamHost launched this month a promotional hosting package with unlimited disk space and transfer for the first 1,111 customers. At first sight the mindless may think: “it’s the end of my hosting problems”. But how is it possible to offer a service with those resources without changing the price?

I’ve been observing since 2006 an accelerated growth on hosting plan resources that would make Moore speechless. Observe the old DreamHost’s “Stricty Business” across the years:

I toke DreamHost plan as example, but this is a pattern in shared hosting market. The growth of disk and transfer limits is absurd. Even considering the reduction of costs by scale, acquisition of new equipments and the fall of bandwidth prices, it’s clear that is a marketing move.

Previously, to obtain a service with better quality, we chose a hosting company that didn’t oversell. It was a way to limit the number of users the provider put on each server. But today, the way it is sold, looks like it’s a good deal to host websites with a company who sells more then have to offer.

The truth is: with the promise of unlimited resources, the hosts have total freedom do define how many clients they will put on each server. The consequence is crowded servers that are slow and unstable. Beyond that, the users support is not good because of the lack of staff.

But then, what is the purpose of a plan without limits if the websites stay hours offline, with moments of slowness and without a good support?  Instead of offering this kind of service, it will be much more coherent if the hosting companies inform clearly what is the relation “resources/sites” they work with, what are memory and process limits (usualy hidden on TOS) and what are the uptime and workload of all servers.

Unfortunately Neverland does not exist. The resources are limited, cost money and there are just a few shared hosting providers who offer quality and transparency. The better choice for who needs service guarantee is to migrate to a VPS account or go directly to a Cloud. The extra money spent is irrelevant, if you compare it to the stress and the losses caused by a Nighmarehost.