December 2006 Archives

I know people like different things, and I know people who doesn't agree with me. Meanwhile, that doesn't make me agree with them and not express my feelings. So, here they go! I like this kind of drinks (unfortunately I really like some of them, which make me drink a lot and get fatter and fatter). Also, you know that two of these brands are from Pepsi (7up and Pepsi-cola) and other two from The Coca-Cola Company (Sprite and Coca-Cola). Now, the interesting thing: I like 7up from Pepsi and Coca-Cola from The Coca-Cola Company. I can't drink Pepsi-cola or Sprite at all. So, I would ask, why they do not forget the concurrence and invest in their own original products?

Continuing in my search for places I had visited, I found King's Cross Railway Station in London. When looking into its wikipedia page I found that Harry Potter platform 9 3/4 is right there. Unfortunately I didn't know that before, or I would take a photo there... crashing myself against the wall...

Did you notice the hotel where 007 and Vesper sleep during the games in Montenegro? I was seeing the movie and thinking: I know this hotel, but I never was in Montenegro... this is Czech Republic.. Some days later found in IMDB that the movie was recorded in Czech Republic, but with no more details.

Last night I was using Google Earth to find places where I stayed in the world. I was looking into the Gradhotel Pupp homepage and discovered Casino Royale was recorded there, in Karlovy Vary.

Now I can say I was in the same hotel as 007 ;)

No, unfortunately I will not talk about Need For Speed. Indeed, I love to play Need For Speed but at the moment I want to talk about the opposite NFS: Network File System. It is not fast at all, so I really do not understand why EA Sports chose NFS.

Ok, now, what my problem with NFS? The Search Cluster is using NFS to share homes between the nodes (more than 46). From time to time we have the front-end node with load of 60... 70... 60... and job submissions start failing.

In fact, job submissions doesn't fail. It returns the job id, but the job crashes with an negative exit status (-2). If you know something on Unix, you know that processes exit status are stored in an unsigned char (thus, 0 to 255). This means it is quite weird to receive a negative value. I subscribed to a torque mailing list but until now, nobody knows what the -2 exit code means...

Just to wish you a nice and warm Christmas!

Sorry my dear English readers, but this post is in Portuguese. Meanwhile, take a look at the photos. By the way, thanks to portsmouth for the screencap.

A friend, so strange like myself, sent me this image that I post here. Nice. Comic. Why I am posting it, because I love teddy bears, being them bears or not.

I found this picture at Caedes, taken by given2f1y. I didn't ask for her permission but I hope she doesn't mind. All credits of the crazy idea for her, of course.

Accordingly with the latest news from Mozilla, Thunderbird 2 beta 1 is out. I am still downloading it, but reading the release notes there are not many interesting changes. Anyway, if it gets more stable it will be good enough. Also, if I find anything real interesting, I'll post it here. If you want, you can download it.

Thanks to Rúben Fonseca (also known as the crazy who asked for the user root at cpan.org and... got it), now we can melt the Minho's University cluster. Basically, this module lets you define a set of jobs and their inter-dependencies. Makefile::Parallel schedules them accordingly with the dependencies, so we can take the most from the available resources. At the end, the module uses GraphViz to render this cool graph with all the jobs and their times.

Click to see a real size image.

Again, a post about vacuum in this blog. If you find out, please let me know where these pictures were taken.

Let me do some negative advertisement about FNAC.pt, the online store for this shop in Portugal. If you want to buy something and you find it on the Fnac catalogue, just do not buy it. Specially if the site says that it ships in 24 hours. Why? Because they are liars. I ordered COSMOS, the well known TV series from Carl Sagan. It is sold in two packs. I ordered both. They were both on stock (or at least, both would ship in 24 hours). First week, received the first pack. Three weeks later, no notice about the second pack. When contacted, they say Pack 2 is not in stock and thus they are giving back my money.

Now, I just ask: Why in hell they say the ship things in 24 hours when then don't? And why they do not contact the client to inform him about his order?

I will never buy anything on Fnac.pt again.

I am very interested in a music score manipulation software named Sibelius. It is one of the best I know (there aren't many) and it runs on MacOS X (that's good). Contacted the seller in Portugal and their answer is that they have it in stock, for 350 euros.

Now, should I risk prison or bankruptcy?

I just ordered this set, used, from bricklink by something near twenty five euros. Now, why I need luck? Two main reasons: it is an used set (hope it is complete as stated in the shop) and, given they will come from Canada I hope customs do not want the set to offer in Christmas (so, hope they do not add extra taxes).

Wish me luck!

Remember by post about installing Linux on an old computer without builtin network card (just pcmcia one) and with a broken CD Player? Well, there were two options for Slackware 11: to install using NFS as the network card was detected (with the pcmcia image disk which contains some extra kernel modules), or using an usb external drive (the option I used). Luckly, the standard boot disks detect it correctly.

Now I just need to have some time to configure it. Also, anybody knows if it is safe to use a laptop closed as a server at home? I am a little afraid to let it on 24 hours a day...

STUPIDITY! That's how I define it. 118.pt, a service provided by Portugal Telecom to search phone numbers online is not dead. They changed it to a 1820.pt service. In this one, you need to register (ok, no big deal) but you need to have a PHONE NUMBER. STUPID!!!

Perl.pt website starts breathing. In fact, at the moment just the news backend, and the bilingual web-site is running. A lot of features planned but I need some more time to implement them.

traceroute to eremita (193.136.19.131), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  * * *
 2  dial-b1-...-....telepac.pt (1x4.xx.xxx.xxx)  229.319 ms  14.411 ms *
 3  dial-b1-174-93.telepac.pt (194.65.174.93)  40.430 ms  18.003 ms  19.840 ms
 4  213.13.135.158 (213.13.135.158)  20.963 ms  22.633 ms *
 5  * * *
 6  * 213.13.135.174 (213.13.135.174)  111.639 ms  28.568 ms
 7  fccn.as1930.gigapix.pt (193.136.250.10)  158.901 ms  38.582 ms  27.513 ms
 8  router3.ge.lisboa.fccn.pt (193.137.0.27)  21.875 ms  36.457 ms  28.368 ms
 9  router2.10ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.1.222)  48.704 ms  145.626 ms *
10  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  32.914 ms  24.447 ms  23.752 ms
11  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  23.159 ms  36.993 ms  93.594 ms
12  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  29.397 ms  27.503 ms  23.495 ms
13  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  22.308 ms  22.503 ms  21.568 ms
14  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  25.479 ms  22.898 ms  23.530 ms
15  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  23.475 ms  23.341 ms  23.443 ms
16  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  28.563 ms  25.680 ms  25.089 ms
17  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  54.360 ms  23.227 ms  25.283 ms
18  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  25.223 ms  42.963 ms  23.450 ms
19  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  25.219 ms  50.328 ms  26.384 ms
20  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  51.672 ms  26.725 ms  25.532 ms
21  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  50.769 ms  27.667 ms  26.259 ms
22  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  51.852 ms  25.871 ms  27.967 ms
23  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  53.088 ms  26.582 ms  27.687 ms
24  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  60.203 ms  87.679 ms  27.385 ms
25  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  46.414 ms  139.645 ms  27.496 ms
26  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  35.267 ms  115.091 ms  29.271 ms
27  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  32.767 ms  26.968 ms  27.448 ms
28  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  54.240 ms  27.834 ms  50.445 ms
29  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  56.770 ms  29.194 ms  29.537 ms
30  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  29.194 ms  29.766 ms  28.807 ms
31  * router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  267.413 ms  375.525 ms
32  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  385.276 ms  111.013 ms  136.296 ms
33  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  158.037 ms  220.955 ms  219.214 ms
34  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  223.805 ms  275.139 ms  162.463 ms
35  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  417.574 ms  230.569 ms  382.533 ms
36  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  423.893 ms  219.303 ms  479.625 ms
37  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  319.949 ms  322.565 ms *
38  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  40.334 ms  32.346 ms  146.329 ms
39  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  36.349 ms  33.371 ms  31.934 ms
40  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  59.436 ms  32.882 ms  32.529 ms
41  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  47.857 ms  34.365 ms  33.660 ms
42  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  39.004 ms  132.299 ms  58.821 ms
43  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  33.230 ms  41.785 ms  116.000 ms
44  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  114.977 ms  33.242 ms  35.961 ms
45  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  89.131 ms  34.974 ms  36.026 ms
46  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  37.671 ms  113.535 ms  107.469 ms
47  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  35.075 ms  35.929 ms  91.239 ms
48  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  204.442 ms  110.823 ms  43.739 ms
49  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  38.859 ms  123.686 ms  62.854 ms
50  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  37.334 ms  64.348 ms  58.589 ms
51  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  36.643 ms  37.771 ms  37.015 ms
52  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  45.233 ms  39.479 ms  77.229 ms
53  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  109.890 ms  156.058 ms  159.351 ms
54  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  58.503 ms  86.431 ms  161.322 ms
55  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  209.215 ms  119.919 ms  42.104 ms
56  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  130.985 ms  114.314 ms  214.221 ms
57  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  258.260 ms  368.701 ms  119.326 ms
58  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  101.260 ms  192.912 ms  52.424 ms
59  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  44.158 ms  72.136 ms  97.728 ms
60  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  43.489 ms  41.884 ms  40.111 ms
61  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  45.711 ms  43.503 ms  83.967 ms
62  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  109.775 ms  49.321 ms  60.716 ms
63  router2.ge.porto.fccn.pt (193.136.4.101)  72.480 ms  41.174 ms  42.570 ms
64  uminho.braga.fccn.pt (193.136.4.100)  156.179 ms  302.052 ms  63.063 ms

Last Wednesday I went to see 007, Casino Royale. This was the first James Bond movie I see in the Cinema. Also, the first one I said from the beginning I didn't like the main actor. But he surprised me, and I almost forgot he was blond with blue eyes.

The second important thing on a 007 movie is the Bond Girl. She is pretty, but she could have some more curves. Third important thing is the car: the Aston Martin is wonderful. Unfortunately the movie just has a few minutes with it. Also, Aston Martin do not have airbags? (also, from imdb: In one afternoon's shooting, three Aston Martin DBS cars valued at $300,000 each were destroyed for the car roll sequence.)

Also, please, don't remind me of the torture scene.