March 2006 Archives

Went yesterday to see this movie. In fact I was not expecting such a nice movie. The story is well written, although it can be seen as a set of small stolen stories from different movies and books. Meanwhile, it is not totally previsible.

The film photography is very good as well. The sound, better. Specially because of the Tchaikovsky 1812 overture. I am a Classical music fan (almost all kinds) and I really love this one. tararara tam tam.. tararararara tam tam... Oh well, almost 24 hours and I can't remove it from my mind.

Yeah, I lost a full afternoon to find a bug that wasn't a bug but a change on how C handles NULL pointers. Basically, I was printing a NULL pointer, something you can test with a simple program like:

#include <stdio.h>
void main(void) {
  char *f = NULL;
  printf("%s\n", f);
}

Now... what should this code do? If you ask me before my war with C, I would say: it gives a nice segmentation fault. And in fact, it does, but for gcc 4.1.x. If you try with gcc 4.0.x or gcc 3.x, it prints "(null)". Now, when you suppose to have a string with "(null)" but you have not, and on some systems to print it really prints "(null)", can give you a big headache.

The computer science department of the University of Minho (where I am doing my PhD) is selling the Portuguese version of "The not so short introduction to LaTeX2e" that I translated.

About 150 pages of Portuguese text about LaTeX, originally written in English by Tobias Oetiker (thanks, folk!). Covers basics and some advanced features as XY-Pic.

I am not earning any money with it, it is being sold at cost price (about three euros). But it feels very well to see your work in a book.

Do you depend of system administrators? Yeah, me too. And that suckz. Why they say something works, we say it doesn't, they say it does, we say it doesn't, they say it does, and finally we think "go fuck yourself, I'll forget it and use it otherway".

Good I am not a system administrator, because people might say the same about me. Good is also that I am the administrator of my own server, and my own mail server. Pheww...

Reinstalled the 10.4.5 update and now it works. Hurray!

Finally a sunny day!!!

I know this winter was not rainy enough to prevent us from desertifying more and more in the next summer, but I was really needing a hot and sunny day like today!!

I know this is an old movie, but I saw it recently to remember. It is crazy, funny, crazy, funny and crazy. I can't really find any other adjective suitable to it. It has a story (a vulgar one, is true), it has some sarcarm regarding other movies (and that is really cool), and a lot of laughs. Basically you can't stop laughing from the start. It is true that in some situations you really need to look around and not just to the main actors to understand why you are not laughing at that moment.

If you never saw it, go out and buy or rent it. Yes, now!! NOW!

I was trying to mount a disk image on my 10.4.5 as usual:

[ambs@Diabelli Desktop]$ hdiutil attach lilypond-2.6.5-1.dmg 
load_hdi: timed out waiting for driver to load

but as you suspect, that last line is not usual. It is repeated a lot of times, and finally does timeout. Meanwhile, googled around but didn't find a solution. A friend helped me solving this with:

sudo kextunload -c com.apple.AppleDiskImageController
sudo kextload -b com.apple.AppleDiskImageController

It works. I can mount the image after this unload/load procedure. The problem is that if I reboot, I need to do this all again. I tried to update kext caches but it didn't work (or I didn't update the correct ones). If you had this problem, or if you know how to help me, please let me know.

Finished reading this book. It was offered on my Birthday, so I really didn't waste money on it. Not that it is that bad, but not good enough. It includes good parts, where you really like what you are reading. But globally the author could not work a good story as a whole. When you read it, you expect more from it.

Also, for the first time in a book I found an error in the story. At a moment an object is destroyed, and later it is used as nothing had happened to it... well, I don't give more details. If you read the book, try to find out what is that object.

Do you know Pandora project? Is was created by the Music Genome Project and consists of a webpage with a java applet, to let you hear music. You choose one (or more artists) and Pandora plays music from those artists, and other it thinks are similar. Then, you can say you like or not them, letting the software adjust to you.

I just wonder... will I use more than my 2GB international traffic for this month?

Take 1 liter of milk. Boil it. Put twelve eggs and 300 grams of sugar together. Join a spoon of flour with ferment (leaven). When well mixed, join the milk. Take this mixture in a container (a metal one you can close). This container should be previously baked with caramel. Take the closed container inside a pression pot with some water. Boil it during about 20 to 25 minutes. Remove the container, and let it get cold. Remove the pudding into a dish, and put in the fridge. Yummy!!

Yep, I am a transformers fan, but fan from the first generation cartoons, not the colorful new ones. Bought the first serie DVD and I am having a lot of fun seeing them. Seeing an episode from time to time, because I know as soon as I end up seeing them, I will want to buy the second, third and fourth seasons as well. So, if you are thinking on offering me anything, those DVDs might be a good choice O:-)

To help you with the task, here is my wishlist.