April 2006 Archives
I am doing my PhD, so, I need to publish articles. The process is to send the article, reviewers comment on it, and your article might be or not accepted. Unfortunately they do not sign the review comments, what is very bad.
Here are two examples.
One article about a slang dictionary. It includes technical details of how it is maintained, and some examples of a DSL to handle the data. As it is a slang dictionary, examples include slang. The comment from the reviewer: this paper could not be accepted because it uses slang.
Good, huh?
Ok, this one is from about two weeks ago. I propose a system (ok, I trust it is not the best article I've wrote, and the system is not so good, but) which is open-source. In the article I stress the importance of having the source available, and I say there are no other systems open-source. The reviewer says I miss comparison with a paid system. During all the review stresses that specific system, not any other. In the middle of the review he says that he sees no importance on having the source available. Let me know if I am thinking wrong, but... he might be one of the developers of that system and don't want others to interfere?
I am not properly a soccer addicted, but I have my preferences. In this case, my choice is FCP, the main team from Porto. Yesterday, FCP won the Portuguese Championship for the 2005/2006 year.
Congratulations to them.
Saw this movie yesterday night. It is a very good movie and I really suggest you to see it. It is a comic movie (yeah, it is), with action and pedagogical issues (not just teaching you how to steal a Bank).
I just can't understand why Jodie Foster is credited as one of the major actors in the cast. She can be just deleted from the story and the movie would continue to be as great as it is.
Ho... and I almost forget to tell... it includes great boobies (just in case a comic and action movie are not your genre...)
This weekend saw Hulk in the television. I had it in the list of movies to see, so I took the afternoon to be in front of the television.
Bad Idea!! The movie is the standard stupid movie of super-heroes and with a big problem for a sunny afternoon: too dark. I closed all windows in the room but I couldn't see anything in the movie (no, it wasn't TV fault.. commercials were ok..)
At least, I saw the movie and took it out of the list of movies to see.
Lately I've been programming C and Perl for my PhD, and PIR (Parrot Intermediate Representation) and C for fun, helping in Parrot project. Meanwhile, there are a lot of other languages that I would like to learn, but unfortunately I do not have much time. Some of those languages are Ruby, Haskell, LISP (or Scheme) and to look again to my dear Prolog.
Am I forgetting any interesting language? (erm, no, not Python or Java, or C#)
I am trying to export and album from my iPhoto to publish in the web, but the default export plugin from iPhoto produces ugly and difficult to navigate pages. I was trying to find a better plugin, but just could find commercial software. Do you have any good tool for this task?
Meanwhile, I'll stick to my simple Perl script...
Just bought Endo. It is a nice and simple software, has some eye candy, and only can evolve with money and feedback. They say this is a registration for a life time, so I hope Endo continues getting better.
Now, I am considering to buy Comic Life... more about it later.
A friend (Marco a.k.a. CyBeR) suggested me endo as a RSS reader for Mac. It is a paid software, but there is a trial version for 21 days. Installed it and added some feeds. I am quite liking it. If I get additected to it I might buy it. Also, I could try firefox rss utility as well, given it is free, but endo is eye candy...
Last three days I was in the organization of JOIN'06, a small event organized to the students of computer science of the Minho's University. Although I think we had better editions regarding programme contents, these were better organized, and had really fun parts (for instance, me playing trivial pursuit with the winners of the webpaper).
I had some time to meet some invited speakers (some more than others) including Leopold Toetsch (which I knew before at YAPC::EU::2005), Peter Larsen (which I think I met before, don't really know where), Farhad Arbab, Henrik Jensen, Naranker Dulay and Xenxo Blanco. It is true that we had many more invited speakers, but I didn't have time to talk with them.
To be involved in the organization of these events are tiring, but very interesting!!
April 1st...
I think this is the time... I found the perfect girl, and I'm in love. More details later ;-)
