January 2007 Archives
This is not anything our country should be proud of, but every day (or most days) when I get back home I find two prostitutes in a car, waiting for clients. While this is not anything to be proud of, the following is: they are both reading, but not reading any light magazine... they are reading literature!
DBLP is a database of computer science bibliography. It is maintained by Prof. Michael Ley who is doing a very good job. After CiteSeer.IST (or before? I am not sure, but I knew citeseer before), a simpler interface, less features, easier to navigate.
I just have a complain... tryed to contact Prof. Ley twice and didn't get an answer (yet, I hope).
Yesterday I was trying to find a bug with some code. It complaining that a file didn't exist but it was there, with more than 2GB in size. Thus, it was quite strange it couldn't be found. After looking to the code found up that it used a fopen(file,"r") to check if the file exist or not. And fopen failed with 2GB. Commented that part and the code now runs smoothly (the 2GB file is opened by SQLite which knows how to open it). Now I need to test if stat works with 2GB files.
Today I went to an Hospital with my father. He needed an exam to the intestine. After the exam we went to a near cafeteria to eat something. In fact, that cafeteria just has people from the Hospital, as nothing interesting exists near. And I hate when I am eating and somebody sits on a table near mine and starts smoking. I really hate that smell, and I also hate the smoke, specially because I have some asthma. Now, why people continue smoking knowing that they bother other people? Let me guess, because they like it. Ok, now suppose I love to scream. Can I go to a cafeteria and start screaming, and screaming? Probably you won't mind, but somebody will make me exit the building. That's for sure!!!
Last night I had a PSP at home with two games. RocoLoco and RidgeRacer. I asked its owner to give me a night to check if I would like to buy or not one. RocoLoco is a children game. The PSP is from a 5 years old boy, so I understand why it is there. RidgeRacer, if I am not wrong, is one of the games that you can buy the PSP with. It has some nice graphics, but I really did not like to play it. The car is quite static (I like to play car games with the car, not the full screen mode), and I did not like to see that cars do not start running all from the same place (or if they do, they can go quite fast!). Regarding the PSP itself, the graphics are quite good, the controls seems reasonable, the menu is very intuitive, the browser sucks balls. As a resume, I think PSP is a nice playing machine but too expensive (as well as the games). As I do not know if the prices are similar around the globe, in Portugal you buy a PSP for about 220 euros, and today I saw need for speed carbon being sold by 60 euros.
A quote from YAPC::EU::2007 organizers:
We are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the YAPC Europe 2007 in Vienna, Austria, 29th to 31st August 2007. The theme for this year's conference is "Social Perl", which we hope will inspire submissions for this and related topics. If Perl has helped you or your company to get people together, or if you can report how Perl is "social" to other programming languages, or how Perl may profit from inspirations from other languages, we'd like to hear about it. Although this is our main topic for the conference, it will not be the only one, and as such we will also be accepting talks on just about any theme.
Types of talks include 20 or 40 minutes talks, 60-90 minute tutorials, or 3 hour Hack-a-thons, BOFs or Workshops. Please submit talk proposals via the conference web site until Sunday, 27th May 2007.
It was just me that was expecting much more from MacWorld 2007? There were rumors for the iPhone but also some saying it would not exist. In fact, I understand this is quite more than an iPhone. It is a gadget but does not replace a computer at all. There were rumors for a MacTablet. This is not a tablet at all. Ok, I would not buy a MacTablet because I can't see myself writing Perl scripts using a stylus pen. In the other hand, I could see myself writing Perl scripts on a keyboard of a 12 inches MacBook Pro. I was really expecting a small computer. If this continues like this, when I need to buy a new computer it will not be a Mac. I do not want a bigger one than this quite nice 12 inches PowerBook.
Just to give you an idea how my work is evolving on the use of the cluster at the University. Each cell is a process. Arrows are dependencies. And GraphViz rockz.
And thanks to Rúben for Makefile::Parallel development.
When will she notice she can't live without me?
Portuguese government want to add biometric methods to check hospital workers (doctors included) schedules. They are all against it. I really can't understand why (we at the university have it, for instance). My only opinion on this is: if they are against it, it just means they do not fulfill their schedule.
