January 2006 Archives
I'm in the norh of Portugal, and it is snowing at the south. This is totally unfair. I want some snow here as well!
My first comment regarding this movie will be a title from a comment posted in IMDB: Action, explosions, total disregard for physics. EXCELLENT. I feel the same regarding the movie. Cars, velocity, action, explosions, girls in bikini, more cars, more velocity, guns, more action, more cars... fantastic.
Jason Statham is very good. Liked specially that position after a jump, like Terminator. Very nice.
Finally, how much did Audi pay for the publicity? Also, if I am not wrong, Lamborghini is also a VW brand (as Audi, Seat and Skoda). And, talking about Lamborghini, could you identify the model? I want one of those.
Remembering one more time, I work (or study, if you preffer) in an University. We, every year, organize a conference for our computer-science students, where different subjects discussed.
As I am a LEGO fan, and I know of the NXT brick, the future mindstorms sets, I tried to invite somebody from LEGO to talk about the visual programming language RCX (and probably NXT) use for kids.
Tried a contact though Jake McKee but the answer was: LEGO can't send anybody to your conference. I wonder why. I told we would pay trip and hotel. So, the speaker would just lose some days of work. We were offering LEGO some advertisement and they decline it.
Maybe it is my fault... why to try to invite people from the industry. Everytime I try to do that, I get a no as an answer.
This is stupid. I get Diablo II and LOD, I say I will not blog much because I'll be playing, and I don't blog and don't play. Last days I've been always working. That sucks...
Do you remember Diablo II, and its expansion pack, LOD? Oh well, I remember it quite well. Played it a lot. Now that I have a Mac... guess.. I bought Diablo II and LOD for Macintosh. So... don't expect much blogging in the next times :-P
In the last two/three days I started using iCal to manage dates and events. I am not sure if I'll be able to maintain using it. I am too disorganized. Talking about it, and because I liked iCal (at least visually), anybody knows if Zire 31 can be synchronized with iCal?
And by the way, anybody knows what happened to Linux iCal? It is dead, I think... it's Apple fault? Sunbird is so ugly, and so Alpha yet...
As you might know, Parrot is a virtual machine being developed for perl 6. You can read detailled information on Parrot, as I'm not talk more about it.
With this blog entry I just want to show my feeling on heling this project. I started not much time ago. Three weeks, maybe. I don't understand half of the parrot internals, but I feel praised to help. I've been helping on implementing a compiler from TCL to parrot, and not I'm helping implementing some operating-system specific methods.
While I know my code sucks, and most of it might need change sooner or later, I feel happy and proud.
Almost every year, we organize a lunch or dinner to commemorate the birthday of MOOsaico, a multilingual MUD based on University of Minho (the place where I work).
This year we were commemorating the 12th aniversary, and got a lunch on Sameiro, a place near Braga with a nice restaurant. Check out the photos so you can meet some of the MOOers.
Those who read my blog for a long time might know that I work in Natural Language Processing. To publish in this area is not simple. There are few conferences, which mean they become top-conferences. Specially, when we want to publish in Portuguese, we just have one choice: to publish in the Encontro APL (Associação Portuguesa de Linguística - Portuguese Linguistic Association meeting) every year.
APL is organized by linguists, normally teachers from universities who have linguistic courses. They rarely accept papers on language processing as they can't understand them, and preffer to discuss the "gender of the angel".
This year we got a paper accepted as a Poster. We sent it, presented it, and now its time to publish the proceedings (yes, they are quite strange, and publish the proceedings after the conference). Received a mail from the organization asking to send the paper in Word (oh dear) in paper and in a diskette by standard mail for publication.
Yes, you read it correctly: in paper AND diskette, and no e-mail reference at all.
More: this conference is organized by linguists, right? That might explain why the email, with just one paragraph, if full of errors: spaces missing, words missing, word accents missing or in excess...
And more regarding this conference that I forgot before... they select the papers, but don't send the reviews to the authors. I think they might just chose them randomly. We asked for those reviews two times, and we didn't get any answer. Maybe that's because they don't know how to read email...
