July 2006 Archives
While The Pink Panther fans didn't like this movie, I liked it. I didn't saw any of the previous movies (well, probably I saw small parts on the TV) and thus, I do not know how the old Inspector Jacques Clouseau really was. I think the French accent was really good, and the stupidity was also very funny. I had a pleasant time watching Steve Martin. Jean Reno was a good Gendarme Gilbert Ponton, always with a serious face.
Regarding girls, while not fabulous, Emily Mortimer and Beyoncé Knowles make the movie catchy enough.
Wallace and Gromit is another exccelent animation from Dreamworks.
Based on the same technology used from Chicken Run, this is a very funny animation with Wallace, a cheese fanatic, and his smart dog.
Although the story is very predictable at times, it is a great movie.
The characters are well designed, voices very well chosen. And the subtle jokes are everywhere. Just watch with attention.
Good Movie!
For YAPC::EU::2006 I need to prepare an article (and presentation) comparing parser technology (specially, Perl parsing technology). Here is a preview of the results I am achieving. Click the image to get my latest graphic.
Scary Movie 4 is, as all Scary Movies, a funny movie. I think it is not the best of the four. In fact, I think it is the worst, but good enough for a lot of good laughs. As usual, it plays with other movies in the cinemas around the same dates. Instead of talking more about the movie, let me try to identify other movies present on Scary Movie 4:
- Saw
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- The Village
- The Grudge
- Brokeback Mountain
- Million Dollar Baby
Surely I am missing some others. If you know any other movie, please post below. Thanks!
I still do not know if I really like this new design, but I'll maintain it some time. By the way, it is "best viewed by Firefox" as I use some CSS3 issues not yet "standardized" but that Firefox supports as extensions.
The toilet...
The toilet sign...
Last night was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest time. I had good company, it was a nice day, there were popcorns... but I didn't like to movie. Ok, I didn't hate it. I just think it is not worth the 7.5 points on IMDB. It is fun, it is true, but it is SLOW (very slow, I should say). Also, if you do not know the characters from the previous movie you lose a lot (well, I didn't see the first one, but I hope it helps with this one).
So, if you saw the first one, and you liked it, probably you like this one as most people do. If you didn't see the first one, I would probably go see another movie...
Firefox 2.0 b1 is available for download. Yes, it is. I can't find it on the mozilla webpage as well, but I know it is somewhere as I found it before. I am using Firefox 2.0 b1 for about four days on my Mac and it seems quite stable. Also, a little slower as well.
New features I like (well, I think they are all the new features I've found): now each tab has a close button (instead of the single button at the right); textareas in forms have spell checking (that might be useful to me, as my posts are always filled with errors) and the one I most liked: google search entry is based on the AJAX google suggest. Neat!
MicroMachines are back!
After some time since the last MicroMachines, Codemasters released a new and challenging MicroMachines game.
With the same idea as base (as the old idea is quite good, I must say) and an upgrade in graphics, MicroMachines v4 is a good game for children and grownup. Quite enjoyable to play for a long time.
Buy it, and drive anywhere you like!!
Took 5 minutes of fun to write the script, ask domm for the needed data and create it. It was fun. Don't know how useful it can be... or not!
One week ago I was in a lego expo here in Portugal (yeah, very small compared with lots of other in the Europe). Meanwhile, it was cool. Click on the image to see some photos.
Yeah, I know I do not know how to take photos!
For the first I've used my powerbook to talk using skype. I was surprised that the builtin microphone was good enough. At least the other interlocutor understood me quite well when I whisper. Very nice!!
As you might know, I work on Natural Language Processing. Given that I work mostly with Portuguese, Spanish and English, ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin 1 is sufficient to encode corpora on these languages. Meanwhile, some corpora about the European Legislation (JRC corpus) appeared, and I am interested on using it. They are encoded in Unicode (UTF-8). I tried to recode them to latin 1 but that is not possible as they include some Greek sentences (you know, Greece is also in Europe).
I found a way to make this fit on Latin 1. It has some problems but works, and it enough for me at the moment. But as I know more Unicode corpora will appear, and probably I will want use them (or try to use any other languages like Greek) .
As my programs are written mostly on C (the Perl stuff is easy to change to support unicode), I am searching for methods to manage unicode from C. My first atempt was to use wchar. From this url I found that there is (at least in the standard) support for unicode on C. The problem is that I can't make it work.
Do you know you can control the temperature of a room through Internet? Yeah, today my room at the University surely got hot, as the server was processing corpora all day. On the other hand, this way I didn't make the room where I was hotter. Unfortunately, it was hot enough :-S
I love to make remote machines work for me!!
I had the double CD and I've heard them a lot of times. But I couldn't resist on buying the DVD.
It was on my amazon wishlist, but nobody offered it (as usual with wishlists). So, when coming back from Oslo about 15 days ago, I took the DVD to Portugal. Unfortunately I didn't had the time to watch it full... yet.
Meanwhile, other Queen DVDs continue on my wishlist, so feel free to buy them... hehehehe!
And, yeah, I am a Queen addict!!
This last three days (since Monday) and until friday, I am at the Faculdade de Letras from the Oporto University in a summer school for linguists and Natural Language Processing researchers. This is a recent building (I would say, less than 10 years), at the side of the Douro river. Also, this is a HOT building. There is no A/C in the building, and it is impossible to be in the computers rooms during the day.
I never went to a sauna before, but it shouldn't be much different.
After a Portuguese Sports newspaper call idiot to a French player because he didn't know the name of the Portuguese players and coach, I was completely surprised for such a bad title. Ignorance is not Stupidity. Now, after the French vs Italy game I know they are stupid. If a player in the end of lots of years playing football, and in his last game in the French team can't control himself, and gets a red card, these French players are really stupid.
The game is not over yet, Portugal is losing with Germany by three goals. I must congratulate the team for the fourth position. To say the truth, I was not expecting Portugal to pass the groups stage at all.
Although this is true, I should also say that it would be all different if Portugal was a bigger country. Trust me!
I need to buy a bicycle. I do not want to buy anything too expensive, but I want a bicycle good enough, so it doesn't break when I sit on it (yeah, I am heavy). Also, I need a big one, as I am tall.
Any recomendations?
In a previous post I commented the movie, Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift. Now, I need to comment the soundtrack. During the movie we do not listen much to it, you are distracted with the girls, the cars and their noise. Now that I listen to the OST, I need to say it is very good!
What is LOVE?
How do you know when you are in Love with someone?
Is it easy to understand when somebody is in love with you?
Well, just some thoughts to help me think on the subject.
Today APPP (The Portuguese Association for Perl Programmers) did one more step. Real soon now the authorities should be publishing APPP creation.
Hoodwinked is the true story about Red, the girl visitiing her grandma, and finding a wolf in the bed, instead of her beloved grandmother. It is a nice movie. Not just the characters are quite well chosen, but the story is told in a very interesting way. See it if you can.
Just to make you smile a little, here is a quote from the movie:
The Wolf: [receiving a lit stick of dynamite]
What kind of candles are those?
Twitchy: [pointing at writing on dynamite]
Dee-na-mee-tay. Must be Italian.
Unfortunately Portugal lost against France. It was a dead game: France scored and did nothing more during the rest of the game. Portugal tried to change the score during the remaining of the first half, but did nothing more during second half. Oh well, we are between the top four teams. Now, let us go for the sausages...
I know I had thank you for breaking the 200 comments barrier... but that does not mean: do not comment anymore. You know, I want to break the 300 comments as well, and so on. So, comments are still welcome.
NumExp is a project I started some years ago with a friend, Gustavo Carneiro. We were starting working on Linux, and we wanted an interesting project different from others around. At the time I was in my second year at the University having a class of Computational Mathematics, with teaacher Raquel Valença. Thanks to her classes I become interested in numerical algorithms implementation, and the project began.
The project is about eight years old, and not as good as an eight years old project could be. The problem is that we were just two developers for about seven years, both students at University, both with a lot of other projects. Recently, David Boucher joined. Thanks to him, the project continues, as he pushes us ahead.
Also, recently I bought numexp.org domain. This meaning we hope to get it alive a lot more time.
With this post I would like to thanks all the people here mentioned for helping me with this project.
Lego is releasing their new Technic sets: 8284, 8285 and 8288. While the first one is not tempting me, the other two are. And the problem is that the NXT set will be also available and that one I can't miss.
Basically, all year I try to save money, to use it all later in September with Lego.
And I am 28 years old. *shame*
And the Portuguese team surprised me again winning against England at the Penaltiy Kicks. While the portuguese team missed two shots (ball completly out of the goal) the English team managed to shoot them all correctly (four of them) but the Portuguese goalkeeper keeped three of them (congratulations to Ricardo!!).
This might explain the disillusion stamped on England players.
