May 2006 Archives

Last night I went with three friends to see X-Men 3. I saw the first one and liked. I can't remember why I didn't see the second. Gone to see this one anyway.

Friends: two girls, and a boy. None boyfriend of each other. I was in the middle of the two girls. Yes, it was pleasant if they wasn't constantly saing each other they want to see Wolverine butt. Oh well, they didn't see it, and I didn't see any beautiful girl. A few nice but young girls. But enough on that, on to the movie comments.

The movie is very nice. Nice special effects, interesting story, a lot of nice details, some forgotten details (oh well), great music (although the sound in the cinema was too loud) a lot of laughs, a lot of side jokes (by me to the girls around). Very nice evening. No, I'll not comment more on the movie. Go see it! :-P

I really love to see the face of people when we offer something they were not expecting. Specially, then you write something on it that means a lot to the person! How much I would like to see her face again!

No, not space for myself. I know I am pretty big (almost fat, or almost not fat) but what I want is space for an old PC. Basically, at home I have my laptop (PowerBook), an AMD with Windows XP which is my game console, and my father and sister work machine, but no linux box at all.

** shame **

Ok, I do not need a new, high performance box. I want a simple box where I can install slackware and start doing interesting things. I think I know where to find that box for free. Now the problem is where to put it. The only space I have is quite away from the router, and I don't want to put a cable all the way. Also, I think the WiFi signal is not strong enough there, and I am not properly interested to waste money on an wireless ethernet card.

Oh, well! I think I'll continue SSHing to the University computers!

Let me present you with three of my friends blogs. Two of them write mostly in Portuguese, on posts sometimes in English. Sorting them by the time I know them (the friends):

• José Castro, known as cog in the Perl world, is a good friend. He normally writes Perl stuff on use.perl, but now writes about life in thigs blog. This is a nice a fun blog, specially if you know cog well, and if you know Portuguese, of course.
• Gimli, known as Carlos by a few, is a good guy, but likes Metal. The good thing is that he listens to Classical Music as well, So, I just need to read his entries about Metal, and how good were Lordi on the Eurovision.
• Cecília is a friend I do not know personally, but who does two things I really like: short blog posts, and a friendly personality, giving us some strenght when we need it.

Well, I was really expecting it. It was a simple project: to create a compiler for a toy programming language (LISS, used primarly here at the university as a resource to teach basic programming, and compilers) targeted at Parrot. So, I will not have a Google SoC T-Shirt, and I'll have a summer with less work.

The soccer world championship should start soon, and Portugal will be playing. Since last European Championship that Portuguese people is putting the Portuguese flag in their houses. Of course this was a lot more interesting during the European Championship because it was in Portugal, but nevertheless, people continue to put Portuguese flags.

Now, for those who do not know our flag:

Now, the question is, people do not know how to use our National flag. First, they do not know that the green is to the left (remember that flags can be seen by the reverse side as well, so it is possible to put the red part to the left without putting the flag upside down). Second, is how to put it in the vertical. In this case, the green part should be at the top.

If you feel interested on how to use our flag, visit this (PT) site.

Just because somebody asked this: what do I win if the project gets accepted? Well, I got the project done, the mentoring work and a Tshirt. Good, huh?

By the way, the student who accomplishes the project gets 4500 dollars for three months work, and TPF gets 500 dollars.

Two days to know if the project I proposed for Google SoC will be accepted or not. I proposed it for The Perl Foundation, but unfortunately they did not accept my mentoring proposal yet. That might mean that the project will not be accepted, or that I'll not be the project mentor.

And, no, I'll not detail the project yet: just after it gets accepted or not. But it is easy to find, if you know how to Google.

This photo was taken by a friend and, I tell you: this is the best photo of the "Stadium of the Dragao" in Oporto I've seen!

APPP stands for "Associação Portuguesa de Programadores Perl" and, as the portuguese name says, it is an association of Perl programmers. The idea is to be something like The Perl Foundation but for Portugal. When we organized YAPC::EU::2005 we had a lot of trouble with receipts, and we hope we can solve this problem with this new association. So, expect Portuguese Perl Workshops for soon and, who knows, another YAPC::EU.

And again, Futebol Clube do Porto wins another cup, this time the Portuguese Cup. A normal game against Vitória Futebol Clube. FCP won by one goal (1-0).

This is what we call "dobradinha": to win the Portuguese championship and the Portuguese cup in the same year. Congratulations, FCP!!

Ok, consider the following code to calculate bigrams for word beginnings:

#!/usr/bin/perl
my $file = shift;
my $text;

open F, $file;
while() {
  $text.=$_;
}
close F;

my %els;
while ($text =~ /\b(\w\w)\w/g) {
  $els{$1}++;
}

Now, run it on a 100K file. You will get less than one second of execution time. Now, add a line with use XML::DT; after the shebang. Time the program again. Yes, about 45 seconds (on my machine). Why does this happen? And, why just with this specific module? What is happening?

I love classical music, but not all. For instance, I really do not appreciate Opera or harpichord. Normally, I love symphonic works. But, one of my favourite compositions is Messiah, by George Frideric Handel. I bought a double CD with it (by The English Concert and Choir, directed by Trevor Pinnock) a couple of years ago, but the truth is that everytime I listen to it I get marvelled. I really love both Handel work but also thie nice interpretation on this CD.

Do you know the difference between these two signs? In the last days I found that road workers do not know. They just use the later one for both indications. Well, in case you don't know the different, the first mean, there is an obstacle, so please keep left of it. The second means, turn left! You can't go ahead.

Good news!! An article accepted on EAMT -- European Association for Machine Translation -- 11th conference. And this is good news because I need to make publications for my PhD!!

It will be in Oslo from 19 to 20 of June. If everything goes fine, I'll be in Oslo during three days. I hope the weather is good, at least better than the last time I was there (it was snowing)! Talking about that, I just shot my PhD mentor with a snowball...

Some time ago I posted telling that I bought the DVD with the Transformers Season One (Generation One, for those who know what I am talking about). It includes three DVDs, the first two with 16 (I think) episodies. Today I finished seeing them. The third CD includes the episodies scripts (PDF files, in a Shakespeare format), three wallpapers (so many!) and some interviews. Also, something which should be cool but wasn't well done: character profiles. It not just misses the essential characters (like Megatron or Optimus Prime) but also includes just a small text about them (it misses, for instance, the object it transforms into).

Anyway, I love this, and I already have the second season to see!

I am a member of Braga.pm Perl Mongers group. Unfortunately we do not have much time to do much technical meeting and discuss a lot of Perl as we would like. But I could manage to get some time to prepare the Braga.pm website with a simple Mason implementation with persistence in SQLite.

I hope we can add new and interesting information to the website in the near future, at least some book reviews and some documentation links.

Everytime I visit thinkgeek I get mad with them. Why? Because they rock. You can find nice stuff there, like tshirts, toys, books, electronics, gadgets, and more funny tshirts, and more, and more fun stuff. Then, why I get mad with them? Because they are in the United States of America, and if I order anything from there I need to pay taxes. Last (and unique) time I ordered anything from them I paid more than 100% in taxes. We have an european alternative, named OpenStuff but, unfortunately, doen't have a tenth of the things available from thinkgeek.

I didn't resist! I know I have the other enzo Lego set (the small one), but this one is a technic-like building, with more than 45 cm of length. A nice car. A lot of details, some decals to add some Ferrari logos on some specific points, a nice 12 valves engine... very nice. Unfortunately a little expensive.