The same information fits into one matrix equation \(A\mathbf{x} = \mathbf{b}\), where

Each row of \(A\) holds the coefficients of one equation, and \(\mathbf{b}\) holds the constants on the right-hand side.

Augmented matrix

We pack \(A\) and \(\mathbf{b}\) into the augmented matrix \([A \mid \mathbf{b}]\). Row operations on this matrix are exactly the legitimate moves from elimination: add a multiple of one row to another, multiply a row by a nonzero scalar, swap two rows.

Subtract \(2\) times row \(1\) from row \(2\), and \(3\) times row \(1\) from row \(3\):

Swap rows \(2\) and \(3\) so the next pivot sits in a convenient place, then multiply the new row \(2\) by \(-1\):

Add \(3\) times row \(2\) to row \(3\):

Divide row \(3\) by \(11\):

Now back-substitute with row operations. Back-substitution means solving from the bottom up once the matrix is triangular: the last row gives \(z = 3\); the row above reads \(y + 4z = 14\), so \(y = 2\); then the first row \(x + y + z = 6\) yields \(x = 1\). The next row operations carry out the same idea without writing each substitution out longhand—they clear the entries above each pivot until the left side is the identity. Subtract \(4\) times row \(3\) from row \(2\):

Subtract row \(2\) and row \(3\) from row \(1\):

The left block is the identity matrix, so the last column reads off the solution:

which matches what we obtained by hand in the first post.

Same idea, different bookkeeping

Elimination and row reduction are the same moves; the matrix form just keeps the coefficients lined up so each step is easy to scan. For a \(3 \times 3\) system with a unique solution, \(\det A \neq 0\), and you could also write \(\mathbf{x} = A^{-1}\mathbf{b}\) or use Cramer’s rule; for larger systems, stable computer implementations usually stick to variants of this row-reduction idea rather than explicit inverses.

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What’s funny is that I remember seeing this object distinctively. I was in sixth grade of school, and had recently celebrated my 12th birthday. I was in class, when all of a sudden somebody interrupted my teacher to tell her to come outside, and bam, there it was.

The whole class went outside on the school patio; it was a bright, crisp, beautiful spring day outside. And that thing, whatever it was, call it UFO or UAP or OVNI, shiny and metallic, was flying above Buenos Aires, easily seen floating above our heads.

Now that I think about it, if the reel is correct and the thing was so high above that not even a Mirage fighter of the Air Force could approach it, then it must have been massively big. It was easy to tell that it was metallic, and very, very high. It was more than just a dot in the sky.

And then it drifted away. The next day they claimed it was an atmospheric balloon, or something like that, as shown the following day on the cover of Clarin, one of Argentina’s most widely read newspapers. But of course nobody believed that version, and according to the reel, apparently neither did the pilot that flew as close as possible to it.

At the end of that scene, visible on YouTube, judge Fortuna-Lacalle stands next to Pablo Sandoval (played by the immense Guillermo Francella) and describes how he (who in the movie suffers of quite chronic alcoholism) started drinking “a bottle of Old Smuggler” in the middle of a small town in Argentina.

The name of the whisky brand is not anodyne and rang a bell in me; the film is set in 1974, right before the start of the “National Reorganization Process”. I was a baby at that point in time, but years later I had to endure the alcoholism of my mother, who would down a bottle of… Old Smuggler, precisely, and sometimes up to 4 times a week.

No, she never abused me or anything; no, she wasn’t violent. She was sad. She was deeply wounded, and wouldn’t go to a psychologist for a simple reason: if she did, and my father got wind of that, she could lose custody of her child (me) because my father could argue insanity in front of a judge.

So, 3 or 4 bottles of Old Smuggler a week. Yes, a whole bottle per evening. Sometimes coupled with tranquilizers. And in the process, she would tell me, once and again, the shitty situation of being herself, a divorced woman in 1970s and 1980s Argentina.

Which, to be honest, it was all 100% true. I just do not know exactly how she thought that a 6 year-old kid could help her. I could not; but of course, I thought I had to. Why you ask, well, because I loved her, and I wanted her to be happy. But I couldn’t do that. Her happiness was not my responsibility. But I did not know that. Couple a mother wound with a father wound, and that’s what you end up with.

The problem was that during the process, as I said, she also mixed various other substances with the bottle of Old Smuggler, like Valium and Lexotanil, and such a cocktail left wounds in her brain, which would directly lead to her death in 2010, at the young age of 65.

For my part, I had to learn to cope with her alcoholism, until I couldn’t do it anymore, and one morning of 1996 I literally fled home to take a vacation in Argentina, and then after I returned to Geneva I ended up renting my first appartment and moving out of her life completely the following year.

I wrote the paragraph above with a select mix of pride and sadness and shame and guilt… and, yes, with a glass of Glenfiddich next to my laptop. All of those feelings at the same time. It does not matter how much I write about this, it does not matter how often I talk about this in therapy, it does not matter how much I cry over these things, there are consequences. There are always consequences.

Yes, I was a weirdo when I was a kid. I know that many of you reading these lines, who knew me from the 1980s, will agree with this assessment. There were reasons for my odd behavior. But of course, nobody gave a fucking shit. I was alone handling all this; my father was of course very busy not being there that whole time, and then my grandmother passed away.

So I would come back from school, and I could smell that Old Smuggler shit from a block away, way before opening the door to my home. I knew my mum was dead drunk. I just fucking knew it. Probably puking in the bathroom floor. Probably meaning to tell me once again another story of her childhood. Probably yelling at me for not helping her at all. Probably crying asking me for forgiveness after yelling at me.

Of course, the most definining story of her childhood, that is, her father raping her, was hidden in her subconscious, and she wouldn’t learn about it until she started undergoing deep therapy in the early 2000s.

Whenever I tried to talk my mother out of that bottle of Old Smuggler, she quoted the following lyrics from a 1927 tango by Carlos Gardel, called “El Tabernero”.

Todos los que son borrachos
no es por el gusto de serlo,
sólo Dios conoce el alma
que palpita en cada ebrio.

Deepl just brilliantly translated the above lyrics as follows:

Not everyone who drinks
does so because they enjoy it;
only God knows the soul
that beats within each drunkard.

She was right. Only God knows the soul that beat within my mother’s chest.

I’m not drunk. I’m just processing, which I will most probably be doing until the day I die. Generational trauma is a thing, and then you die. And that’s why reading “It Didn’t Start With You” by Mark Wolynn has been such a trascendental event for me this year.

• Hard to make a “Corporation” entry about Nintendo, being a secretive company. And not catering particularly to developers per se.
• Overall theme: Nintendo is about connecting people
• Book structured around games and franchises
• All games are quite surreal. When you play them, we inhabit two worlds at once (page 46)
• Miyamoto: characters devised by programmer not an artist (page 42)
• Universal suing Nintendo over the name Donkey Kong (page 36)
• Homo ludens (page 8)
• Game impact in human society (pages 14 & 15)
• Shintoism (page 46)
  • Also bottom page 64
• Developers vs management (page 47 bottom)
• Wii Sports best selling game ever, followed by Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for the 2017 Switch (page 51)
• 30 years of Super Mario 64
• “Older and younger developers together” (page 55 bottom)
• The people making Mario nowadays grew up playing Mario as kids (page 61)
  • Also: Nintendo holds on to its staff for decades
• “Video games are…” (page 67)
• “Manzai Trio” (page 69)
• Music by Koji Kondo
  • November 2025 viral video by Keichan
• Dreams are a common theme in the Zelda series (page 74)
• Another religious reference: Link’s horse in Ocarina of Time is Epona, goddess of horses in Celtic mythology
• Company willing to take risks (page 87)
• Zelda as analogy of the story of game dev in the past 40 years (page 94)
• 4 R&D units (page 101)
• Samus Aran first female video game character, inspired by Alien’s Ripley (page 103)
  • More on 112-113, comparison to other female characters
• “Designers didn’t need to know about tech” (page 104)
• Producer cried in relief when Super Metroid was ready (page 107)
• Chaotic collab with Retro in the USA (pages 110 & 111)
• “Tabloid scaremongering” about video games (122)
• Pokémon Go phenomenon in 2016 (123)
• Pokémon biggest franchise of all time (124)
• Pokémon == Pocket Monsters
• Horrid Time Magazine article about the creator of Pokémon (129)
• Pokémon Go crowd disasters (136)
• Kirby: literally unheard of in the western world, wildly popular in Japan (142)
  • Song: Big in Japan by Alphaville
• Kirby was created by a Tokyo partner company, HAL. The CEO would become Nintendo CEO in 2002 (143)
  • Quote in page 144
  • Death in 2015
  • Kirby’s chapter is more about Iwata
  • HP-65
  • Appetite for business books (147)
  • Expanding game to everyone (152)
  • “Unless you shock people, you’ll never gain new customers” (155)
  • Iwata perspective of a coder (155) even as CEO
• Wii Sports was to the Wii what Tetris was to the Game Boy (169)
• Not every game has to be like an encyclopedia. Some are more like magazine or comics (Iwata, 171)
• Technology as a whole fells much less playful now than it did then (174)
• Animal Crossing and COVID (181)
• We are all, along with the developers, cocreators of a game (188) -> Borges?
• The spirit of communication of Animal Crossing rubbed off on the developers (193)
• Animal Crossing team is almost half women
• Change in public perspective on video games after the pandemic (198-199)
• Developers should always envision who will eventually play what they’re making, the place that the game might occupy in people’s actual lives. (199)
• Nintendo is first and foremost a toy maker (207)
• Designing software and hardware simultaneously (208)
• Business model compared to PlayStation (212)
• Wii U flop (215)
• Nobody sets out to make a game that isn’t fun (221)
• Core principles of every Nintendo game (223)
• Super Smash Bros in the height of 1990s moral panic over violence on video games (226)
• Sakurai’s tendinitis working on Smash Ultimate (233)
• Roger Caillois in 1958: paidia vs ludus (235)
• Video games in museums and covers of magazines: “defining cultural medium of the modern world” (242)
  • Games are operas made out of bridges (242)
• Nintendo more agile than other companies (250)
  • Nintendo pairs older and younger developers since always (250)
• Nintendo behaves in the opposite of “move fast and break things” (252,253)
• A company that expends more on protecting than on coming up with new ideas is doomed to failure (261)

That all changed after her passing in April 1985. All of a sudden I’d come back to an empty home, and would have to learn to heat some leftovers or even sometimes cook something for myself from scratch.

Until one day I realized in the middle of my class day that I had forgotten my home keys, and hence there was no way to enter home.

I panicked, as the 11 year old I was still, and asked to call my mom at work to let her know. She called a friend of ours, and I ended up having lunch at the home of Graciela and “Neno” Grosso, the parents of my school friend Leonardo and his older sister Silvina (if you guys are reading this, hi!)

The panic I felt that day was kind of a shock, and it left a visible mark in my psyche and my Virgo maniac attitudes: the checklist. Without exception, every time I leave home since that fateful day 41 years ago, I have repeated in my head the same song in Spanish:

“Llaves, guita”.

Translated from Rioplatense Spanish to English, that would read as “keys, cash”. And I would recite this poem in my head while reaching for those items in my pocket, just to make sure they were there.

Around 1986 my mom gifted me my first wristwatch, so I added a new item on my checklist:

“Llaves, guita, reloj” (“keys, money, watch.”)

That song stay fixed in my head as I moved to Switzerland in 1991, and then back to Argentina in 1998.

Precisely, in 1998 I bought my first car (a white Ford Ka dubbed “Gutiérrez”), so the song became:

“Llaves, guita, reloj, llaves del auto” (“keys, money, watch, car keys.”)

In 1999 I got my first cellphone, so the song changed accordingly:

“Llaves, guita, reloj, llaves del auto, celular” (“keys, money, watch, car keys, cellphone.”)

I sold my car in 2001, and after my short stint in Patagonia I moved back to Switzerland. No car, so the song went back to

“Llaves, guita, reloj, celular” (“keys, money, watch, cellphone.”)

In July 2008, almost at the same time, Claudia and I bought our current car (a lovely red Fiat 500) and we also got our first iPhones 3G, so that the song all of a sudden became again

“Llaves, guita, reloj, llaves del auto, iPhone” (“keys, money, watch, car keys, iPhone.”)

And finally, in 2011 I started using reading glasses, which means another item on the list:

“Llaves, guita, reloj, llaves del auto, iPhone, anteojos” (“keys, money, watch, car keys, iPhone, reading glasses.”)

So, there you have it. It’s weird how one’s mind gets used to such routines, and how I can’t avoid going through the same list every time I leave a place (not only home, to be honest.) I have tried to instill that knowledge and practice to Claudia, but… she’s not a Virgo, so it doesn’t speak to her like it does to me.

And yet, despite such discipline… I still manage to forget things every so often, so it’s not completely foolproof.

In between maki and nigiri, he heard a song on the loudspeakers of the restaurant, called “Shima Uta”, by a Japanese group named The Boom. The coup de coeur was immediate.

He asked the waiter for the name of the song, and the next day he somehow found a copy of the CD in Buenos Aires, got obsessed with it, and ended up deciding to record a cover… in Japanese. Because why not.

Needless to say, Alfredo Casero speaks Japanese as well as I speak Klingon. Never mind, Japanese pronounciation is quite easy for Spanish speakers apparently, so he learned the lyrics phonetically, as one does, and recorded the song.

Lo and behold, the song topped the charts in Argentina, and against all odds, even became a hit in Japan.

The official video of the song features a “making of” at the end, and it’s hilarious.

Not only that, but in 2002 the football world cup took place in Japan & South Korea… and I kid you not, The Boom invited Casero to sing the song with them, live, in a stadium in Japan.

There’s something unusually Argentine about this whole story. Naive, bold, stupid, brilliant, funny.

That URL does not exist anymore, and sadly the Internet Archive never archived it. I do have some fragments here and there, in some very old CD-ROMs I burned at the turn of the millenium, but I haven’t been able to find a proper, exhaustive backup of the whole thing. To give you an idea, this is what the home page of sc2a.unige.ch looked like in December of 1996. This was “the web”; a bunch of text formatted with Times New Roman, or whatever the default serif font was in your workstation.

In that message I also asked for help, since I was using a text-based operating system (a VAX system running an old version of VMS) and I did not have a computer with Netscape available to test the page. Imagine that. How did I create that content? At home, using HoTMetaL Pro and an HTML plugin for Microsoft Word 6.0 that could save documents as (horrendous, let’s be honest) HTML. Years later I moved into EditPlus, FrontPage, Dreamweaver… but not yet at that point. This was just me, most probably Notepad, and some late night HTML knowledge on my PC running Windows 3.1.

How did I get this knowledge? Well, through Elizabeth Castro’s awesome HTML Visual Quickstart Guide 1st Edition! The last edition I could find of that book was from 2018.

Some of the older articles in this blog were initially published in that page, like for example my tongue-in-cheek manual for users of the Internet at the sc2a.unige.ch server, or my first JavaScript calculator. I even published a journal of my 1996 trip to Argentina… maybe one day I’ll publish it again here.

That website single-handedly kickstarted my career as a professional web designer, programmer, and now, 30 years later, software architect. It all boils down to that moment in time, when I used FTP to upload those humble HTML files into the VMS account that my university provided their students with.

Since then, web technology evolved in uncanny and extraordinary ways; from the wonder of AJAX, which I first saw in action in 2002, to Flash movies, to XML, to JSON, to CSS, to WebSockets, to the <canvas> tag, to the incredible evolution of JavaScript (both on the client and server sides), to Java applets, to WebAssembly, I’ve used pretty much every single technology that browsers have made available to us.

It all started the moment I decided to click on the “View Source” menu on Netscape, and started to learn how websites were made.

Ghostty is yet another brainchild of Mitchell Hashimoto, of HashiCorp fame.

The installation on Fedora 44 requires a few steps, since it’s not available on Flatpak at the moment, nor it is immediately available on standard Fedora repos:

$ sudo dnf copr enable scottames/ghostty
$ sudo dnf install ghostty

I then opened the configuration file ~/.config/ghostty/config.ghostty using the CTRL+, (comma) sequence, and added these settings for my personal pleasure:

app-notifications = no-clipboard-copy
cursor-style = block
cursor-style-blink = true
font-family = "BlexMono Nerd Font"
font-size = 16
keybind = F11=toggle_fullscreen
link-url = true
maximize = true
shell-integration-features = no-cursor
theme = light:iTerm2 Light Background,dark:iTerm2 Dark Background
window-theme = system
working-directory = window-inherit-working-directory

And conveniently enough, a quick CTRL+SHIFT+, reloads the configuration live after editing the file.

I found Ghostty to be exactly the terminal application I wanted all along; it’s fast, cross-platform, convenient, configurable, and it behaves perfectly well.

Let’s assume your Markdown posts have this structure:

---
title: 'Some Title'
author: 'Jane Smith'
excerpt: 'Blah blah…'
slug: some-title
image: some-title.jpg
---

This is my article…

Then in your Hugo theme templates you can use code like this to read the image, transform it as Base64, and embed the result on the final HTML:

{{- $imgPath := $page.Params.image -}}
{{- $image := $page.Resources.GetMatch $imgPath -}}
{{- if $image -}}
{{- $thumb := $image.Fit "420x420" -}} {{/* Obviously optional */}}
{{- $base64 := $thumb.Content | base64Encode -}}
  <p><a href="{{ $page.Permalink }}"><img class="thumbnail"
    src="data:{{ $image.MediaType.Type }};base64,{{ $base64 }}"></a></p>
{{- else -}}
  <p><a href="{{ $page.Permalink }}">
    {{ partial "gray-image-placeholder" (dict "className" "thumbnail") }}</a>
  </p>
{{- end -}}

The gray-image-placeholder shown in the else clause is just a file located in the layouts/partials/ folder of your theme, to be used in case the image your specified does not exist, called gray-image-placeholder.html and looking like this:

<img class="{{ .className }}" src="data:image/png;base64,
iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAABAAAAAMACAIAAAA12IJaAAAABGdBTUEAALGPC/
xhBQAAAAFzUkdCAdnJLH8AAAAgY0hSTQAAeiYAAICEAAD6AAAAgOgAAHUwAADqYAAAOpgA
ABdwnLpRPAAAAAlwSFlzAAALEwAACxMBAJqcGAAADS1JREFUeNrt10ENAAAIxDBA9cnHBg
mthP3WSQoAAPhhJAAAAAMAAAAYAAAAwAAAAAAGAAAAMAAAAIABAAAADAAAAGAAAAAAAwAA
ABgAAADAAAAAgAEAAAAMAAAAYAAAAAADAAAAGAAAAMAAAAAABg (… snip…)
AAAYAAAAMAAAAAABgAAADAAAACAAQAAAK5bhvYHaF3qNu4AAAAASUVORK5CYII=">

The className inserted will be the one passed in the (dict) used when calling the partial.

In Asciidoctor and Antora I liked to use such highlighted blocks, to showcase some particular information, so I wanted to have them on this website too. Although, as you might imagine, Markdown does not provide this capability per se.

The Markdown code I use looks like this, showing its corresponding output below.

Notes

Great for extra information.

::: note
This is a note.
:::

NOTE: This is a note.

Tips

In green, for suggestions or shortcuts.

::: tip
This is a tip.
:::

TIP: This is a tip.

Important

Emphasis you must not miss.

::: important
This is important.
:::

IMPORTANT: This is important.

Caution

Risk of confusion or bad outcome.

::: caution
This is a cautionary tale.
:::

CAUTION: This is a cautionary tale.

Warning

To highlight hazard or serious consequences.

::: warning
This is a warning.
:::

WARNING: This is a warning.

PDF and EPUB

This also works in the PDF and EPUB outputs, too.