Personal aggregator

Bookmark: AppleMix - Portateis

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 11:20:13 -0800

Will buy a Macbook Pro... :-P

Interesting: November 16, 2008

(author unknown) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:00:00 -0800

Interesting: November 16, 2008

(author unknown) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:00:00 -0800

Interesting: Pause torrents while I’m using the computer

sil — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 13:40:21 -0800

I use the Transmission BitTorrent client, and it’s pretty cool. However, it’s irritating when it eats my bandwidth while I’m trying to do stuff. So, one obvious hack would be to disable it when the screensaver is off (i.e., I’m using the computer) and enable it only when the screensaver is on (i.e., I’m in bed). Fortunately, Transmission has an API (which you have to enable by turning on the web interface in Preferences) and you can watch the Gnome screensaver for changes. So, a quick Python script later, and throw that Python script and Transmission itself into your session Startup Programs to make them run whenever you log in, and Bob’s your uncle. the script:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import dbus, urllib
from dbus.mainloop.glib import DBusGMainLoop START_TORRENTS = "http://localhost:9091/transmission/rpc?method=torrent-start"
STOP_TORRENTS = "http://localhost:9091/transmission/rpc?method=torrent-stop" DBusGMainLoop(set_as_default=True)
sess=dbus.SessionBus()
def sig(screensaverActive): if screensaverActive: data = urllib.urlopen(START_TORRENTS).read() else: data = urllib.urlopen(STOP_TORRENTS).read() sess.add_signal_receiver(sig, 'ActiveChanged','org.gnome.ScreenSaver')
import gobject
loop = gobject.MainLoop()
loop.run()

Interesting: Pause torrents while I’m using the computer

sil — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 13:40:21 -0800

#!/usr/bin/env python
import dbus, urllib
from dbus.mainloop.glib import DBusGMainLoop START_TORRENTS = "http://localhost:9091/transmission/rpc?method=torrent-start"
STOP_TORRENTS = "http://localhost:9091/transmission/rpc?method=torrent-stop" DBusGMainLoop(set_as_default=True)
sess=dbus.SessionBus()
def sig(screensaverActive): if screensaverActive: data = urllib.urlopen(START_TORRENTS).read() else: data = urllib.urlopen(STOP_TORRENTS).read() sess.add_signal_receiver(sig, 'ActiveChanged','org.gnome.ScreenSaver')
import gobject
loop = gobject.MainLoop()
loop.run()

Bookmark: Lightning Timer

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 11:24:04 -0800

Cool counter for talks.

Bookmark: Holocaust survivors to Mormons: Stop baptisms of dead Jews - CNN.com

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:40:36 -0800

Please tell your imaginary unicorn to stop eating my imaginary flowers. Thanks!

Bookmark: WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Warrior -> Talent Calculator

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 06:03:24 -0800

End-game build for Litl.

Bookmark: WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Warrior -> Talent Calculator

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 06:03:03 -0800

Build for Litl, current.

Bookmark: BlueTripCSS Framework - Blueprint meets Tripoli | Capsize Designs

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 17:52:45 -0800

Bookmark: Totem Talk: Pack your bags - WoW Insider

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 05:32:50 -0800

Initial steps for a shaman in Northrend

Bookmark: http://ocw.mit.edu/NR/rdonlyres/Earth--Atmospheric--and-Planetary-Sciences/12-990Spring2003/87731C0C-0D0D-4CC4-87A3-3507825B9C4B/0/l95drive.m

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:03:50 -0800

\dot{x}_i = -x_{i-2}*x_{i-1} + x_{i-1}*x_{i+1} - x_{i} + f

Bookmark: Tecnologia em Software Livre» Arquivo do Blog » Timweb no Ubuntu 8.10. Nunca foi tão fácil ter Internet móvel no Linux.

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:52:18 -0800

Bookmark: typeface.js -- Rendering text with Javascript, , and VML

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:14:15 -0700

typeface.js uses browsers' vector drawing capabilites to draw text in HTML documents. For a good while, browsers have had support for vector drawing -- Firefox, Safari, and Opera support the <canvas> element (as well as SVG), and IE supports VML. The typeface.js project has two components: the perl module for converting fonts, and the javascript library for drawing in the browser. The perl module extracts glyph outline information from truetype fonts and writes that data in JSON format. The javascript library then traverses the HTML document and renders text using <canvas> or VML to draw the glyphs.

Bookmark: The Discovery of Global Warming - A History

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 05:55:34 -0700

Essays on climate. Really nice.

Bookmark: Pitch and Color Recognition

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 13:57:32 -0700

Bookmark: DSC01818 on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 13:57:27 -0700

Interesting: PyCon 2008 on YouTube: Using Optparse, Subprocess, and Doctest To Make Unix Utils

(author unknown) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 10:58:09 -0700

Noah Gift Most developers use Unix derived command line tools, written in C, everyday. This talk will discuss using the Python Standard Library modules, Optparse, Subprocess, and Doctest, to create equally robust tools in pure Python. There has been a lot of talk recently about Web 2.0 mashups, but the same concepts can be applied to creating command line tools in Python. I will be discussing how easy it is to combine the power of the Optparse module, with the flexibility of the Subprocess module, to create standalone, and "mashup" tools from existing, and widely available Unix utilities. Finally, Doctests can be embedded to serve as an important documentation and testing tool for your newly created Unix mashup tool.

Author: pycon08
Keywords: python pyconn
Added: October 25, 2008

Interesting: PyCon 2008 on YouTube: Using Optparse, Subprocess, and Doctest To Make Unix Utils

(author unknown) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 10:58:09 -0700

Author: pycon08
Keywords: python pyconn
Added: October 25, 2008

Travelling: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Roberto De Almeida — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:00:00 -0700

Buenos Aires, Argentina from October 26th to November 14th

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:54:57 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:53:23 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:51:36 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:49:56 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:48:23 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:47:12 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:45:45 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:44:12 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:42:40 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:41:19 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:40:35 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:39:24 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:38:25 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:37:28 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:36:15 -0700

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:34:39 -0700

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:33:14 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:31:18 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:29:52 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

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RobDeAlmeida — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 23:27:51 -0700

RobDeAlmeida posted a photo:

Bookmark: WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Warrior -> Talent Calculator

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 11:21:58 -0700

Build for my gnome warrior.

Bookmark: BNF and EBNF: What are they and how do they work?

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:40:20 -0700

Travelling: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Roberto De Almeida — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 17:00:00 -0700

Amsterdam, Netherlands from October 12th to 19th

Also going to Loire, Mt. St. Michel, The Hague, Utrecht, Delft, Brussels, Bruges, Gent and Antwerp.

Travelling: Paris, France

Roberto De Almeida — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:00:00 -0700

Paris, France from October 2nd to 11th

Also going to Loire, Mt. St. Michel, The Hague, Utrecht, Delft, Brussels, Bruges, Gent and Antwerp.

Interesting: Steve Holden: The Photo Meme

(author unknown) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 01:55:23 -0700

Instructions: Take a picture of yourself right now. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair - just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. Post these instructions with the picture.

From a post by Jeremy Hylton.

Interesting: CodeSOD: Keeping It Stupid Simple

Alex Papadimoulis — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:00:00 -0700

Interesting: Four Tweaks for Using Linux with Solid State Drives

Tom — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:00:11 -0700

SSDs (solid state drives) are great. They’re shock resistant, consume less power, produce less heat, and have very fast seek times. If you have a computer with an SSD, such as an Eee PC, there are some tweaks you can make to increase performance and extend the life of the disk.

The simplest tweak is to mount volumes using the noatime option. By default Linux will write the last accessed time attribute to files. This can reduce the life of your SSD by causing a lot of writes. The noatime mount option turns this off.
Open your fstab file:
sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Ubuntu uses the relatime option by default. For your SSD partitions (formatted as ext3), replace relatime with noatime in fstab. Reboot for the changes to take effect.
Using a ramdisk instead of the SSD to store temporary files will speed things up, but will cost you a few megabytes of RAM.
Open your fstab file:
sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Add this line to fstab to mount /tmp (temporary files) as tmpfs (temporary file system):
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

Reboot for the changes to take effect. Running df, you should see a new line with /tmp mounted on tmpfs:
tmpfs 513472 30320 483152 6% /tmp
Firefox puts its cache in your home partition. By moving this cache in RAM you can speed up Firefox and reduce disk writes. Complete the previous tweak to mount /tmp in RAM, and you can put the cache there as well.
Open about:config in Firefox. Right click in an open area and create a new string value called browser.cache.disk.parent_directory. Set the value to /tmp.
An I/O scheduler decides which applications get to write to the disk when. Because SSDs are so different than a spinning hard drive, not all I/O schedulers work well with SSDs.
The default I/O scheduler in Linux is cfq, completely fair queuing. cfq is works well on hard disks, but I’ve found it to cause problems on my Eee PC’s SSD. While writing a large file to disk, any other application which tries to write hang until the other write finishes.

The I/O scheduler can be changed on a per-drive basis without rebooting. Run this command to get the current scheduler for a disk and the alternative options:
cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

You’ll probably have four options, the one in brackets is currently being used by the disk specified in the previous command:
noop anticipatory deadline [cfq]

Two of these are better suited to SSD drives: noop and deadline. Using one of these in the same situation, the application will still hang but only for a few seconds instead of until the disk is free again. Not great, but much better than cfq.

Here’s how to change the I/O scheduler of a disk to deadline:
echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

(Note: the above command needs to be run as root, but sudo does not work with it on my system. Run sudo -i if you have a problem to get a root prompt.)

You can replace sda with the disk you want to change, and deadline with any of the available schedulers. This change is temporary and will be reset when you reboot.

If you’re using the deadline scheduler, there’s another option you can change for the SSD. This command is also temporary and also is a per-disk option:
echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch

You can apply the scheduler you want to all your drives by adding a boot parameter in GRUB. The menu.lst file is regenerated whenever the kernel is updated, which would wipe out your change. Instead of this way, I added commands to rc.local to do the same thing.

Open rc.local:
sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

Put any lines you add before the exit 0. I added six lines for my Eee PC, three to change sda (small SSD), sdb (large SSD), and sdc (SD card) to deadline, and three to get the fifo_batch option on each:
echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler echo deadline > /sys/block/sdb/queue/scheduler echo deadline > /sys/block/sdc/queue/scheduler echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch echo 1 > /sys/block/sdb/queue/iosched/fifo_batch echo 1 > /sys/block/sdc/queue/iosched/fifo_batch

Reboot to run the new rc.local file.

[update] Commenter dondad has pointed out that it’s possible to add boot parameters to menu.lst that won’t be wiped out by an upgrade. Open menu.lst (Remember to make a backup of this file before you edit it):
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

The kopt line gives the default parameters to boot Linux with. Mine looks like this:
# kopt=root=UUID=6722605f-677c-4d22-b9ea-e1fb0c7470ee ro

Don’t uncomment this line. Just add any extra parameters you would like. To change the I/O scheduler, use the elevator option:
elevator=deadline

Append that to the end of the kopt line. Save and close menu.lst. Then you need to run update-grub to apply your change to the whole menu:
sudo update-grub[end update]

Want to know how fast your SSD or other storage device is? Using hdparm you can test the read performance of your disk:
sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda

The 4 GB SSD on my Eee PC 901 gets about 33 MB/s. My desktop PC’s hard drive gets about 78 MB/s. (What hdparm doesn’t show is that the seek time for an SSD is much, much lower than a hard disk.)

Have any other suggestions for SSDs, or disagree with any of these? Leave a comment to let me know.

Interesting: Four Tweaks for Using Linux with Solid State Drives

Tom — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:00:11 -0700

The simplest tweak is to mount volumes using the noatime option. By default Linux will write the last accessed time attribute to files. This can reduce the life of your SSD by causing a lot of writes. The noatime mount option turns this off.
Open your fstab file:
sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Ubuntu uses the relatime option by default. For your SSD partitions (formatted as ext3), replace relatime with noatime in fstab. Reboot for the changes to take effect.
Using a ramdisk instead of the SSD to store temporary files will speed things up, but will cost you a few megabytes of RAM.
Open your fstab file:
sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Add this line to fstab to mount /tmp (temporary files) as tmpfs (temporary file system):
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

Reboot for the changes to take effect. Running df, you should see a new line with /tmp mounted on tmpfs:
tmpfs 513472 30320 483152 6% /tmp
Firefox puts its cache in your home partition. By moving this cache in RAM you can speed up Firefox and reduce disk writes. Complete the previous tweak to mount /tmp in RAM, and you can put the cache there as well.
Open about:config in Firefox. Right click in an open area and create a new string value called browser.cache.disk.parent_directory. Set the value to /tmp.
An I/O scheduler decides which applications get to write to the disk when. Because SSDs are so different than a spinning hard drive, not all I/O schedulers work well with SSDs.
The default I/O scheduler in Linux is cfq, completely fair queuing. cfq is works well on hard disks, but I’ve found it to cause problems on my Eee PC’s SSD. While writing a large file to disk, any other application which tries to write hang until the other write finishes.

The I/O scheduler can be changed on a per-drive basis without rebooting. Run this command to get the current scheduler for a disk and the alternative options:
cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

You’ll probably have four options, the one in brackets is currently being used by the disk specified in the previous command:
noop anticipatory deadline [cfq]

Two of these are better suited to SSD drives: noop and deadline. Using one of these in the same situation, the application will still hang but only for a few seconds instead of until the disk is free again. Not great, but much better than cfq.

Here’s how to change the I/O scheduler of a disk to deadline:
echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

(Note: the above command needs to be run as root, but sudo does not work with it on my system. Run sudo -i if you have a problem to get a root prompt.)

You can replace sda with the disk you want to change, and deadline with any of the available schedulers. This change is temporary and will be reset when you reboot.

If you’re using the deadline scheduler, there’s another option you can change for the SSD. This command is also temporary and also is a per-disk option:
echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch

You can apply the scheduler you want to all your drives by adding a boot parameter in GRUB. The menu.lst file is regenerated whenever the kernel is updated, which would wipe out your change. Instead of this way, I added commands to rc.local to do the same thing.

Open rc.local:
sudo gedit /etc/rc.local

Put any lines you add before the exit 0. I added six lines for my Eee PC, three to change sda (small SSD), sdb (large SSD), and sdc (SD card) to deadline, and three to get the fifo_batch option on each:
echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler echo deadline > /sys/block/sdb/queue/scheduler echo deadline > /sys/block/sdc/queue/scheduler echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch echo 1 > /sys/block/sdb/queue/iosched/fifo_batch echo 1 > /sys/block/sdc/queue/iosched/fifo_batch

Reboot to run the new rc.local file.

[update] Commenter dondad has pointed out that it’s possible to add boot parameters to menu.lst that won’t be wiped out by an upgrade. Open menu.lst (Remember to make a backup of this file before you edit it):
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

The kopt line gives the default parameters to boot Linux with. Mine looks like this:
# kopt=root=UUID=6722605f-677c-4d22-b9ea-e1fb0c7470ee ro

Don’t uncomment this line. Just add any extra parameters you would like. To change the I/O scheduler, use the elevator option:
elevator=deadline

Append that to the end of the kopt line. Save and close menu.lst. Then you need to run update-grub to apply your change to the whole menu:
sudo update-grub[end update]

Want to know how fast your SSD or other storage device is? Using hdparm you can test the read performance of your disk:
sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda

The 4 GB SSD on my Eee PC 901 gets about 33 MB/s. My desktop PC’s hard drive gets about 78 MB/s. (What hdparm doesn’t show is that the seek time for an SSD is much, much lower than a hard disk.)

Have any other suggestions for SSDs, or disagree with any of these? Leave a comment to let me know.

Interesting: The Dream Customer

Jake Vinson — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 07:00:00 -0700

Interesting: The Dream Customer

Jake Vinson — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 07:00:00 -0700

Interesting: forkmap, threadmap

Connelly Barnes — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:59:00 -0700

I have an 8 core machine, so vanilla Python increasingly annoys me by running roughly 200*8 times slower than optimized C code (I use OpenMP), rather than 200 times slower than C.

To use more cores, I occasionally use these parallel map functions in Python:

threadmap spawns a number of threads equal to the number of cores, and distributes work across threads. forkmap requires Cygwin, Mac, or Unix, and does the same thing with fork() and pipe(), basically to get around GIL restrictions in regular Python. Probably a better solution is to use a Python implementation such as IronPython which doesn't have the GIL, but the FFIs for CPython libraries seem spotty in these other Python implementations.

Merely using parallel map() functions is rather limiting; OpenMP-style syntax should probably be added to Python at some point, after the GIL is removed. (As the number of processor cores goes to infinity, either the GIL will be removed or Python will become irrelevant, as languages with similar syntax and fine-grain locking will take over.)

There are libraries which implement parallelism by using spawn() instead of fork() to get Windows compatibility without Cygwin, but I couldn't figure out how exactly these libraries were spawning new copies of my code, so due to lack of documentation on this point I used other solutions.

Interesting: forkmap, threadmap

Connelly Barnes — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:59:00 -0700

Interesting: GMT is 20 years old

Kurt — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:40:03 -0700

Interesting: GMT is 20 years old

Kurt — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:40:03 -0700

Why can't I post anything?

Roberto De Almeida — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:13:13 -0700

Why can't I post anything?

Status: http://tinyurl.com/6by4p3

Rob De Almeida — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:48:58 -0700

http://tinyurl.com/6by4p3

Interesting: Fernando Gonsales - 04/07/2008

(author unknown) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:16:53 -0700

Interesting: Backburn

(author unknown) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:00:00 -0700

Interesting: Liniers - Macanudo

Autoliniers — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:20:00 -0700

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Humor
Jueves 19 de junio de 2008

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Interesting: Breakfast Topic: Saving quests

Amanda Dean — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:00:00 -0700

Interesting: PEP 333 -- Python Web Server Gateway Interface v1.0

(author unknown) — Mon, 12 May 2008 04:44:42 -0700

This is something I need to fix in pydap.

Interesting: Caching RSS Feeds With feedcache

(author unknown) — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:53:13 -0700

Hmmm, I should use this for my personal aggregator.

Interesting: How to use tinydb.org

(author unknown) — Sun, 11 May 2008 06:44:34 -0700

Nice simple db.

Interesting: Backups

(author unknown) — Sat, 10 May 2008 03:55:34 -0700

Quote by Jamie Zwinski...

Interesting: Getting Started with Paver — Paver v0.7 documentation

(author unknown) — Thu, 08 May 2008 04:57:14 -0700

I'm already using Sphinx for pydap 2.3, now I need to learn how to use Paver.

Interesting: Ask YC: Which is the best book for Data Structures and Algorithms?

(author unknown) — Thu, 08 May 2008 04:31:53 -0700

Interesting: Play Chronotron, a free online game on Kongregate

(author unknown) — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:09:58 -0700

Really really cool game that blows my mind!

Interesting: Firefox 3 Excessive Disk IO and Freezing

Tom — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:00:58 -0700

Randomly while browsing Firefox will stop responding for a few seconds and recover. This can happen a few times in a row while my hard drive works so furiously that other applications also slow down. I haven’t found a reliable way to reproduce the problem, but today I did get around to finding the bug report.

An update ~~should be arriving soon~~ that will fix this problem. In the meantime, if you’re affected you can try a workaround. [update] The update has arrived this morning.

In Firefox, click Edit->Preferences. In the Security section, uncheck the two boxes for attack site and forgery warnings. Close Firefox. Open your file browser to ~/.mozilla/firefox/[profile], where [profile] will be a short random string of characters. Delete any files with names starting with urlclassifier.

Be advised that this workaround will disable Firefox’s warnings for phishing and malicious websites. Re-enable the warnings when the update to the package xulrunner-1.9 arrives, which should fix the issue.

The problem is caused by Firefox’s urlclassifier database, which can get very large. Because the cache for this database is too small, there’s a lot of disk and CPU usage at certain times when accessing it.

I’ve done the workaround, but it’s hard to say whether it’s working because the problem comes and goes randomly.

[update] The update hasn’t fixed the problem for me. However, I’ve had only one brief random freeze, so maybe the issue has been minimized.

Interesting: I'm using Google Reader as a microblog. I tried using Pownce,

Rob De Almeida — Wed, 07 May 2008 05:44:14 -0700

I'm using Google Reader as a microblog. I tried using Pownce, but last night it almost lost a post I wrote, after failing to submit it via AJAX -- and since it was using AJAX, I couldn't press the back button to repost the message. Bad, bad, site!

Anyway, Google Reader now has this "notes" functionality, where you can add notes to interesting posts. You can also use it to write plain, lonely notes, so I'm using it as my blogging app right now.

Interesting: the 4th dimension

Spiceee — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:48:02 -0700

consigo entender por que algumas pessoas verão o the 4th dimension e o descartarão como pretensioso: é preto e branco, metade dos créditos são dedicados à consultoria de físicos e, ao fim, muda para colorido.

não sei se existe algum termo para esse tipo de filme, eu chamo de puzzle movie e vai bem com o pi do darren aronofsky e o primer do shane carruth. é sobre jack emitni (”in time” ao contrário), um cara com TOC que acredita que pode sentir a quarta dimensão quando dorme. a história começa com ele pequeno, quando dá sinais de ser um gênio da matemática, mas, com o passar do tempo, com jack mais velho trabalhando numa oficina de relógios, não fica bem claro se ele realmente desenvolve a habilidade ou só pensa em seus delírios que o faz.

num de seus sonhos à quarta dimensão, jack vê alguém, que se supõe ser albert einstein, colocar um livro de anotações num relógio que jack havia recém consertado. ele vai a casa da dona do relógio e o rouba, com a esperança de que a fórmula para viajar no tempo. o estudo do livro, porém, desperta uma série de eventos que revelam a verdade sobre a vida de jack.

pensando bem, 4th dimension não é tanto um filme quebra-cabeças, já que o final dá uma conclusão bem clara à trama. porém existe espaço para divagação e elaboração de loucas teorias, o que deve garantir uma certa sobrevida cult ao filme, que foi bem recebido no circuito indie americano.

o que me fascinou em 4th dimension foi mesmo o clima pesado, as referências de teorias físicas bem aplicadas e a trilha, que além de um bom score original, repete a insana gwely mernans do aphex twin quase à exaustão. é frio na espinha certeiro todas as vezes que é executada.

o filme é o debut de uma dupla de diretores que já estão no meu radar, tom mattera e david mazzoni. ainda vou revê-lo com as 2 trilhas de comentários, é em filmes assim que o dvd brilha como formato.

Tags: filmes, dvds, movies, dvds, sci-fi, physics

Simplify, simplify... said Thoreau, though I heard it from Calvin's...

Roberto De Almeida — Tue, 06 May 2008 13:19:34 -0700

Simplify, simplify... said Thoreau, though I heard it from Calvin's father first. Simplify and reduce LOC.

A big limitation of Yahoo! Pipes: if you have a...

Roberto De Almeida — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:54:49 -0700

A big limitation of Yahoo! Pipes: if you have a feed with more than one element of the same type (like and ) only the first one is available.

An implementation of vi in Javascript. I've seen this some...

Roberto De Almeida — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:47:11 -0700

An implementation of vi in Javascript. I've seen this some time ago, but it was closed source -- at least as closed as Javascript can be. I had to completely erase it from mind to avoid using it without permission on my weblog, where no one would ever find out. This script combined with Greasemonkey could make the web much more user-friendly to me.

My paper with Domingos just published!

Roberto De Almeida — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:48:32 -0700

My paper with Domingos just published!

Hmmm, looks like Pownce has no editing capabilities.

Roberto De Almeida — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:43:44 -0700

Hmmm, looks like Pownce has no editing capabilities.

So, my new feed from Yahoo! Pipes seems to be...

Roberto De Almeida — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:42:55 -0700

So, my new feed from Yahoo! Pipes seems to be working... now I want to write a Python script running on crontab that downloads and stores the entries in a simple database -- I'm thinking a simple pickled representation of an ElementTree should be fine. Later I can create another script that renders HTML from the entries and uses Google to search.

Moved from Twitter to Pownce... let's see how this goes....

Roberto De Almeida — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:35:04 -0700

Moved from Twitter to Pownce... let's see how this goes.

Ok, here's my idea. Pownce for blogging. Flickr for pictures....

Roberto De Almeida — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:03:57 -0700

Ok, here's my idea. Pownce for blogging. Flickr for pictures. Delicious for interesting sites. Join everything using Yahoo! Pipes -- that feed will my web presence. No need for weblog software, and if I eventually start using another service I just add it to my pipe. I should also store everything, reading from the feed, on a database somehow, and perhaps display it with a template.

Status: Updated every blue moon.

Rob De Almeida — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:26:32 -0700

Updated every blue moon.

Status: easy_install --find-links http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/ Imaging

Rob De Almeida — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:17:03 -0700

easy_install --find-links http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/ Imaging

Status: Making a game for pyweek

Rob De Almeida — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:29:06 -0700

Making a game for pyweek

Status: Got myself a Thinkpad T43...

Rob De Almeida — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:07:51 -0700

Got myself a Thinkpad T43...

Status: Going for a Pyzza -- pizza with Python programmers!

Rob De Almeida — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:23:43 -0700

Going for a Pyzza -- pizza with Python programmers!

Status: pydap 2.3 almost ready

Rob De Almeida — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:18:16 -0700

pydap 2.3 almost ready

Status: Addicted to WOW... :(

Rob De Almeida — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:27:22 -0700

Addicted to WOW... :(

Status: @idiotao Python won't force you to learn OO in the begining.

Rob De Almeida — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:00:27 -0700

@idiotao Python won't force you to learn OO in the begining.

Status: Botafogo 3 X 2 Flamengo

Rob De Almeida — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 07:23:58 -0700

Botafogo 3 X 2 Flamengo

Status: Going to Curitiba for my birthday (sunday)

Rob De Almeida — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:12:05 -0800

Going to Curitiba for my birthday (sunday)

Status: I finally squashed a bug that cost me the whole day!

Rob De Almeida — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:20:26 -0800

I finally squashed a bug that cost me the whole day!

Travelling: Curitiba, Brazil

Roberto De Almeida — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:00:00 -0800

Curitiba, Brazil from March 7th to 11th, 2008

My birthday, March 9th.

Status: @nandokanarski pois é, nem fale, ainda nem acabei de pagar este e já quero outro! :)

Rob De Almeida — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:05:51 -0800

@nandokanarski pois é, nem fale, ainda nem acabei de pagar este e já quero outro! :)

Status: @nandokanarski eu sou heavy-user e estou usando ele no dia-a-dia para tudo.

Rob De Almeida — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:35:12 -0800

@nandokanarski eu sou heavy-user e estou usando ele no dia-a-dia para tudo.

Status: For sale: almost new EEE with a 7" screen.

Rob De Almeida — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:54:12 -0800

For sale: almost new EEE with a 7" screen.

Status: Damn, it sucks being an early adopter! I want an EEE 900. :(

Rob De Almeida — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:25:24 -0800

Damn, it sucks being an early adopter! I want an EEE 900. :(

Status: Por que a receita não usa Bittorrent?

Rob De Almeida — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 18:29:08 -0800

Por que a receita não usa Bittorrent?

Status: I need to be more pragmatic.

Rob De Almeida — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:58:54 -0800

I need to be more pragmatic.

Status: My new EEE is already obsolete..

Rob De Almeida — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 07:04:09 -0800

My new EEE is already obsolete..

Status: In Belo Horizonte for a Google interview.

Rob De Almeida — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:21:00 -0800

In Belo Horizonte for a Google interview.

Travelling: Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Roberto De Almeida — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 16:00:00 -0800

Belo Horizonte, Brazil from March 3rd to 4th, 2008

Google interview.

Interesting: Sunday morning

(author unknown) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:00:00 -0800

Interesting: Gustavo Niemeyer: geohash.org is public!

(author unknown) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:11:38 -0800

After about one year writing this service in my spare time, it’s finally out.

geohash.org offers short URLs which encode a latitude/longitude pair, so that referencing them in emails, forums, and websites is more convenient.

Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision, similar prefixes for nearby positions, and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision). I’ve put the algorithm created in the public domain. Some details may be seen in the Wikipedia article about it (hopefully that’ll help establishing prior art, and prevent Microsoft from patenting it).

To obtain the Geohash, the user provides latitude and longitude coordinates in a single input box (most commonly used formats for latitude and longitude pairs are accepted), and performs the request.

Besides showing the latitude and longitude corresponding to the given Geohash, users who navigate to a Geohash at geohash.org are also presented with an embedded map, and may download a GPX file, or transfer the waypoint directly to certain GPS receivers. Links are also provided to external sites that may provide further details around the specified location.

Interesting: Python for All Scientific Needs

(author unknown) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 04:23:44 -0800

Interesting: creating movies from images files on mac osx 10.5 from a script

Kurt — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:58:09 -0800

Interesting: Apache proxy auto-re-loader

(author unknown) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 01:44:02 -0800

Travelling: Natal, Brazil

Roberto De Almeida — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:00:00 -0800

Natal, Brazil from February 16th to 23rd, 2008

PIRATA-13 meeting.

Interesting: Rene Dudfield: Great from scratch blender animation tutorial

(author unknown) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:42:00 -0800

I've gone through this great blender animation tutorial.

It's really well made, and teaches you blender from the beginning - explaining everything as you go.

It was a "Blender summer of documentation" project where someone spent a whole month working on it. It was also based on an older tutorial which was itself really good There's a downloadable PDF version (180ish pages) if you prefer to read things that way - otherwise it's broken up into many separate html pages. It's also got .blend files you can download at every step if you wish - so you can skip steps.

So if you want to go from knowing nothing about blender, to being able to construct and animate a basic 3d character - this is the tutorial for you.

Introduction to Character Animation - with blender

Interesting: Transitioning from Java Classes to JavaScript Prototypes

(author unknown) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 07:10:21 -0800

Interesting: How not to write Python code

(author unknown) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:54:05 -0800

Interesting: Yahoo Board To Reject Microsoft Offer

(author unknown) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:54:02 -0800

Interesting: Yippee! Yahoo board rejects MSFT's offer

(author unknown) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 09:18:10 -0800

Travelling: São Paulo, Brazil

Roberto De Almeida — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:00:00 -0700

São Paulo, Brazil from October 29th to 30th, 2007