Sebastian Alonso

The Foundation - by Isaac Asimov

For the last month or so I have been reading the entire Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, from “Foundation” all through “Foundation and Earth”. No wonder it has been awarded the Hugo award for the best science fiction series of all time.

Yet it’s not what anyone would expect when told that it’s a science fiction story. It approaches the fall of an empire and rise of a new and improved one, but from a somehow political point of view embedded in a science fiction environment.

That’s right, the way I felt it, science fiction is not the real focus of the series. Even though it has a detailed description of this futuristic empire in which the story is set, it thoroughly describes the political relationship between planets, sectors and all kinds of organizations. It’s all about the many stages of development of a rising empire, going through all of it’s economics developments, major shifts in the empire’s system and much more.

And what I loved the most, Psychohistory. Asimov was smart enough, to come up with a new branch of science that can predict future when applied to a large amount of humans based on probabilities and psychology. And this somehow makes sense in my head, after all today we study history as a way to learn from past trends and learn from them to avoid the same mistakes over and over again (Although the trend in my country is to make the same mistakes over and over again).

Overall the Foundation Series is highly recommendable. All five books of it (I haven’t yet read “Prelude to Foundation” and “Forward the Foundation”) are thrilling and engaging. Definitely something enjoyable and not only by nerds or alikes.

Why I am changing my major

For some time now, I have been tinkering with the idea of changing my course, do a major shift and leave my computing engineering course to look for a new challenge that I can later on mix with some computing knowledge.

Much has been written about this, and it is my turn to listen to it. I believe programming and computing is much more valuable when used in a different area and can be an easy and practical way to stand out.

First, I thought of seeking proficiency in a different field within engineering, something like Industrial Engineering or others, this certainly was an interesting path. However, I did several job searches for these careers and turns out I am not interested in the work environments for others engineering branches.

Then, I began thinking much about going into business school. And whether it is to become and actuary, economist, or whatever it will help me later on if I want to set up a computer-related company. (Actually, I found a course on Business Information Systems that is highly interesting)

Truth is that I have already built a couple products that never got to see the day of light, or at least not in a meaningful manner. I strongly believe that this could change if I included some business, economy and such into my skill set.

I strongly believe that the coalition of different areas is a powerful tool, and if I achieve this within myself I will be able to carry out more projects, and convert more ideas intro fully grown projects.

However, I keep working on Social ID and can’t wait to see how I will mix it with my new area of studies!

Intel Isef 2012

Well, it happens that last year I won the Grand National Science and Technology award together with other awards by people such as Intel and alike. And because of this the National Ministry of Education chose me to participate at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair 2012 that took place in Pittsburgh this May.

And it was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. I got to meet highly interesting people from all around the world, with all kinds of outstanding ideas and a great spirit to change our surroundings for best. It was a week full of nerd adrenaline all around, chats in all kinds of languages, pin exchange with people whom I would have never thought I would meet and hearing about great science and engineering work from really nice people.

And what could have made it all even better? Friday noon I was announced as a Grand Award winner of my category (Electrical and Mechanical Engineering)! As of now I am a part of a really small group that got through all the science and technology programs in Argentina and after being chosen to be a finalist at the Intel ISEF came back home with a Grand Award. It is so exciting!!

Personal security at Social ID

Another concern that usually comes up with new users at Social ID is how are their sites protected from showing all of their contact information to any random stranger messing with the web page. There are a few measures already implemented and many to come, for example, restricted search.

• To search for people at Social ID, looking up names is useless, personal pages are only indexed based on their linked IDs. So the only way to look for a given page, is to search for an ID.

• What’s more, you can’t just look up anything, you have to at least know 4 digits out of the 8 that comprise a Social ID.
• Let’s suppose someone starts looking up IDs. In case many results come up (due to an ambiguous search), these are restricted, and only 10 of those are shown.

I hope this clarifies how things work on our site and why user’s information is only available to those who they share their IDs or profiles with.

why yet another ID online?

Since I started showing Social ID to people, I got a lot of responses like:

“So far we have emails, twitter handles, facebook profiles and maybe our personal pages. Why should we register for yet another ID online?”

And it believe it is being miss understood. I myself needed a way to concentrate my online presence somewhere, something I can easily manage that conveys all of who I am online. This is not provided by any social network I know or use. Facebook, twitter and any other site do not convey, independently, who you are online.

So I went the extra mile and made it available to everyone! After plain simple registration (or facebook login) you can configure your page and start showing it around.  Some of us consider our blogs, linkedin profiles, and more part of who we want to show to the world. Let’s take advantage of that.

Soon I’ll be talking about how crucial security is at Social ID and how isolated profiles are from public display. Stay tuned.

Social id, a unique way of finding your friends

So this idea has been tinkering inside my head for a while now. What if people could have an easily manageable identity online? I believe this could, at least, improve the way you can find someone online. With only a few characters you would be describing someone in a unique manner, no need for common friends, no one with the same name to mess the search up. A unique id matched to a unique human being.

This has a few advantages, mainly while traveling and meeting people, I have experienced server shifts where I had a lot of trouble finding people from other countries, not to mention what I went through when I was in a different country trying to keep in touch with people.

So, after some development, today I have settled with a minimal version of what I will be calling Social ID from now on. It’s meant to provide the minimal feature set to try this concept of manageable online identity.

For example, I am Sebastian Alonso (00000001) and you can find me here. (I should mention that the ID 00000001 is only a fancy way of showing that I created this, new registrars will have an ID much different to that one).

We will see how this goes, I can only predict that soon I will be writing about some technicals details of what is going on there, such as infrastructure, used software and such.

btw, I’ll try to write every now and then on twitter.

Online Identity

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about Online Identity and how broken it is currently. I realized that I have one recurrent problem that always happens when I travel: I have an amazingly hard time at finding people online.

It is always the same, when meeting someone with whom I have no previous contact, no friends in common and we don’t live in the same country, there is no way to relate us. This makes it amazingly difficult to find someone online. I even had trouble finding someone with whom I had one friend in common.

Yes, e-mail accounts are quite unique and it is a feasible way to stay in touch with someone, but our online presence is much more than that.

Our online presence comprises our facebook, twitter, linkedin, tumblr and much more. There should be an easy, straight-forward way to manage who we are online and easily find people who are completely unrelated to us.

Has this ever happened to you? or is it just me?

Definitely something to think about.

One week into college

Last Monday I started my first week as an official college student and so far, things are looking really nice. Much has been said about how nowadays the model of higher education is broken and how it does not bring much to the table. I have to admit that at first sight, having 24 hours of algebra, calculus and physics does look useless if I am on a computer engineering course. However the sheer experience of college makes you a great engineer.

In only 5 days of classes, I was able to get a grasp at what being always behind schedule feels like, what having to figure it out on your own means. In my university specially, if you run into an administrative problem, it’s highly likely that you will have to fix it. No one will fix it for you. And since I sat 3 subjects off classes, my schedule was quite different from other freshman in the same course. Which meant 5 days of going back and forward with paper work.

College is full of unexpected events, messy schedules, running into new people every single day and having to work with them, etc. No one can say that this does not endure you. And being able to endure stuff makes you stronger and skillful.

URL, an old concept on which we rely to this date

During the early age of internet, it was all about resources. Plain text and photos, that was pretty much all there was. Slowly we started building on top of this in order to provide better user experience, text became tailored thanks to dynamic sites, photos are no longer just there, now you have animations of them, you can view a bunch of them within a viewer and go through an album quite easily.

The whole shift from static to dynamic revolutionized the internet, we added cookies to avoid the stateless nature of HTTP, Javascript became popular for better UX, etc. However, some underlying concepts have not come to date yet.

URL was meant to be the Unique Resource Locator, a string of characters that refers to one and only one resource, one document. Now, I find myself mapping URLs to functions all the time. For example, a given URL in most sites will not retrieve text stored in a server, it will trigger a program that will do some magic, fetch some data from a DB, and only then return a document.

URL has began to lose it’s meaning. Although using URL for static content (images, css, js, etc) still makes sense, it might not do in 10 years from now.

I am excited about seeing where this goes in the future, it’s amusing to think of all the possibilities.

From zero to French in a couple of weeks

For the last few weeks or so I’ve been staying in France, and despite the INSA has managed to keep me busy, I got the chance to have a deep look at the language and culture of the locals. I landed here with absolutely no clue of what the language looked like, figuring I’d be able to find my way with English or Spanish, however I left something aside: The human factor.

I got to stay with a great family who hosted me while I was off activities at the university, non of which really spoke any language other than French. This gave me an incredible opportunity to be forced into the language, in only a few days I was getting the meaning of sentences and was able to mumble small answers and I feel it keeps getting easier and easier every day.

This drove me to the conclusion that knowing the local language will only make things a bit easier, however it is not that necessary. It will surely help if you are to engage much interaction with unknowns all the time (it helps much to get used to people’s voice and accent) but it won’t really affect your communication skills.

Humans are humans, everywhere. That makes us share much, share habits, needs and interests. Learn to exploit this and boost your traveling experience!