November 2006 Archives
This year YAPC::EU::2007 will be help in Vienna. Their website is available at http://vienna.yapceurope.org/. Some important bits copy and pasted from Thomas Kalusner journal at use.perl:
"YAPC::Europe 2007 will happen from 29th to 31st August 2007 in Vienna, Austria. Larry Wall will be there, and we are currently looking for funding to invite Damian Conway, Audrey Tang and Mark Jason Dominus (if you want to sponsor, drop us an email).
Attendance will cost 100 Euros (but see the website for other tariffs), there will be a Attendees Dinner, conference t-shirts, orange mohawks, and we'll try hard to even squeeze in a bit of Perl :-)"
I have an old laptop (Compaq Armada) with a broken CDROM drive. It doesn't have ethernet. I want to install linux in it, but I do not know what is the better way. There are some hypothesis: to use an ethernet pcmcia card and make linux install from FTP (I am not sure if my pcmcia genius card will be recognized), to use an external USB 1 cdrom driver (but I am not sure also if it will be correctly detected).
I am thinking in installing Slackware 11 (or Arch, but probably Slackware 11). Any ideas?
Some time ago, Galp started selling gas on plastic bottles. Their publicity is right bellow, with a nice girl selling the bottles. Now they are striking back. If you join 'Galp Pluma' you can have the luck of having a girl installing the system in your house. How many times can we ask them to send a girl at home?
Today I have discovered Torcs (The Open Racing Car Simulator), an open-source car simulation game for Linux. While it is quite far from the commercial games (like Need for speed) it is working quite well, and have some interesting cars. Unfortunately the game on my machine resembles the old screenshots of the webpage, while the new ones are really more interesting.
Installed Tramp (an emacs module/plugin to edit remove files using the SSH protocol) about three days ago, and I am loving it. I know it exists for a long time, but never used it efficiently. Finally, got it working. In fact, this is a wonderful method to edit remote files. Normally I used a SSH terminal and vim inside it. Now I can work in my preferred environment.
And I know many people prefer vim, and other use sshfs to mount SSH accounts as an external disk. But I really prefer emacs and there isn't an sshfs module for Mac OS X (yet).
Today Portuguese public workers did a strike. They want a raise. The interesting thing is that people asking for a raise do not know how to ask. They ask for (for instance) a 2% raise. This is totally wrong. Why? Because while this could be an acceptable value for a worker which salary is 500 (10 euros raise), this value is not acceptable for a worker which salary is 5000 euros (100 euros raise).
Thus, raises need to be inversely proportional to each worker salary: for low salaries, a big raise, for big salaries, a low raise.
Next Thursday the Braga.pm Perl Mongers will have the second TechMeeting. As usual, I was the designer.
I am using the University cluster (named Search). You can browse (in Portuguese) the detailed description at http://www.di.uminho.pt/search. Now, it uses a mirinet network at 10Gbps, and homes are mounted my Network File System (NFS). But it is very slow. Too slow, to be precise.
That remembered me a story about Emacs. Emacs, the text editor, is written in Lisp. From time to time it needed to do garbage collecting (free all memory that is not being used). Now, people complained about the time emacs took doing garbage collection. In the other hand, NFS was flourishing and people loved to use it. Thus, emacs developers change the message, and instead of saying "Doing Garbage Collection" it said "Waiting for NFS...". And people no more complained about emacs... or NFS. They just become happy.
