August 2007 Archives

After changing the base design for this blog, today I was changing the design for Perl-Hackers, a Portuguese blog about computer-science, open-source, scripting-languages, databases, and a lot of other things. I stole the colors from Adium base theme. I hope they do not mind... much.

These vacations I read 'The Last Templar', a book by Raymond Khoury. The first thing interesting about this book is that I read the Portuguese version which name was: "Scriptum, the Manuscript". See? Nice translation. Although the title is not translated literally the book is quite well translated. First few chapters (two or three) are kind of direct translations, but soon it gets better. Also, he did his homework, with a lot of translation notes about specific issues that are trivial for American people, but not that easy to understand for foreigners. But Raymond did not do his homework. First, the whole book is based on strange ideas on Jesus Christ live (another book based on the same premises), and then, when he refers historic known facts, he does that without accuracy. For instance, when he talks about Portugal the translator adds a big footnote explaining that "it was not as it is described by the author... " and corrects the facts. Thus, I would ask authors that write fiction based on real facts to study a little more the facts he uses.

Probably I will change some more details on this design, but it is quite better than the default ones from Movable Type 4. Now I am more aware of the details to perform changes quickly. Also, I removed the category listing and added a Tag Cloud.

Here at the university where I am doing my PhD there is a big cluster (well, at least big for a Portuguese university) with more than 100 Xeon Processors. Unfortunately it sucks. Why? Because when I really need it, there are a lot of other jobs in queue before mine. You can argue that they have the same right as myself. That is true. The problem is that I think something should be bad configured on that cluster. It isn't normal that such a big cluster is almost ever full of processes, specially when there are almost just 10 users.

I am pondering to stop that process and make it run in the front-end. It should run faster and nobody would notice.

I hate this design, I hate another few things on this blog, I hope I can change them real soon. For not, have a good night. Movable Type 4 is on the way...

Trying to upgrade to Movable Type 4. Hope it works. Good I have a backup!

A friend asked me to do one of that strange/stupid lists that we can see in the web. In this case, 101 things I want to do in the next 1001 days. Check the extended entry for the list (in Portuguese). Do not expect much. It was just what got into my mind...

One thing I really hate is when websites that need registration say they will send us an email and that email takes the whole life to get in my inbox. I had this experience in lot of websites, from mailman mailing lists (that apparently are not subscription-moderated), big well known websites like eBay and Paypal, and not, a simple registration in the Movable Type website.

Damn! I think that sending the registration by snail mail would be quite faster...

I am the maintainer of the only Portuguese mirror for the Gutenberg project. When I started the mirror (the idea was about August 2005, started in September, two months of rsync) it was about 180GB of data. For that I bought a 300GB SATA Disk. Yesterday I noticed that that disk is 99% full (just 3.5GB free). I think this is the right time to start thinking on buying a new one. Unfortunately 1TB SATA disks are too much expensive at the moment (and they are also not available in stock). I think I'll need to stick to a 500GB SATA disk.

After some days without movies, playing Diablo II, here I am again with a movie. This time it was The Number 23, a strange but really interesting movie about obsession on numbers. The idea is simple: look to the world, and find that movie in everything. Like, check your birthday day and month, do some math and fine a way to sum it up to 23. It is just like the game of the 24. I do not know if it is known outside Portugal, but it is usually given to children learning arithmetic. Give them four numbers, and ask a way to compute 24 using those numbers.

The interesting about this movie is that they found a big number of coincidences. For instance, the fact that 2/3 is 0.666(6), and 666 is the number of the Devil. Of course in the movie they forgot it is an infinite sequence of sixes.

But, now the problem is, my birthday is 21 February... should I get worried?...

And this is my second panorama photo. While the first few photos are more or less correctly glued, I trusted too much the software and the last junctions are just too bad.

Anyway, anybody up to guess how many photos this composition has? (or how many junctions).

I normally use thunderbird to read e-mails. As I am on vacations, activated the option to read e-mails offline. So far so good. In the configure pane for offline reading there is an option to limit downloaded messages to 50K (so far so good) and an option to 'delete old messages (older than n days) to preserve disk space'. As this was an offline option I said I didn't want messages older than 7 days.

Not, the stupid Thunderbird deleted all messages both from the server and the local machine.

Next movie in the queue: Wedding Crashers, a comedy from 2005. The story is classic, and predictable from the beginning, so I will describe it here briefly: two best friends go to Weddings to meet girls and go to bed with them; in one of these Weddings they get in real love. And this is the story. Simple, huh?

Although the story is simple and predictable, the movie is fun, with nice moments of laugh. It is full of good actors, and in special of two actresses that do quite a good job: Rachel McAdams and Isla Fisher. They are two beautiful sisters that fall in love with the Wedding Crashers.

Gloria (Isla Fisher) is just a sex maniac. And the truth is that she performs that character quite well. The other sister is Claire (Rachel McAdams). She is a beauty. Really.

There is also a nice sequence of boobs jumping around into beds. This sequence is not really important for the movie. The movie would still be good. But for a maniac like me that adds some extra value.

Now, anybody wants to be a funeral crasher with me? I think I am desperate...

Next movie for vacations: Lucky Number Slevin. This one was a friend recommendation. As I am on vacations and I am trying to access the Internet not more than half an hour per day, I did not look into the IMDB entry for the movie, so, I was watching it without some valuable information, like movie genre, other people comments, and author list.

But I trust that friend. He did not like "Lost in Translation", and so I didn't. So, if he likes the movie, I should like it too. Hopefully.

Incredibly, during the movie I was almost loosing my patience. I was really not understanding were all the movie characters fitted in the story. It all seemed to strange. People without names, names without
people. But something kept me in the screen and this time it wasn't a girl (although Lucy Liu is quite an interesting girl), but a lot of kills, one after the another.

Almost at the end of the movie I was thinking to myself, this will be totally stupid, but I will need help from my friend to understand this story. Fortunately I didn't. The movie is quite well done, and if you
end watching the movie without understanding it all, wait some minutes. You will be still thinking in what happened in the story, and two or three more minutes, and you will connect all the dots, and draw
the full story in your mind.

Although not totally a movie in the way I love (if you read my webblog you know I like movies with girls and boobs, or a lot of action) it is a fairy good movie, and I'll continue trusting my friend about his
suggestions.

And sorry for the long post, but being in vacations give me some more time to write these things...

First, read that title as a Portuguese guy would (if you need some help, it would sound as "that movie is stupid").

This vacations I watched Date Movie. Unfortunately. As I was expected, it is a comedy, a strange comedy. But I was expecting some more similar to American Pie. This one is more like Scary Movie in the way that it is more stupid than usual. Unfortunately, Scary Movie normally has more interesting boobies. OK, this movie has at least two interesting girls, one of whom appears in nice clothes. OK, Carmen Electra appears for some seconds, as well, in bikini. But that doesn't change the stupidity in this movie. Really. I just watched it because I was always expecting something better later.

But enough of saying bad things about the movie. At least one part of the movie is really fun. Imagine a cat doing its things in a toilet for times and times. I really enjoy that scene. Oh! And that line in the end of the film stating the no animals were armed to perform the motion picture is also quite nice...

And yet another post regarding a movie. But quite different from the last few posts. This is a Thriller that can also be cataloged a little as Horror. But not that much. Well, the story is interesting and keeps us interested in the story for the 104 minutes. Also, keeps us interested given it has Sarah Roemer around.

It is when I see these pages from these girls that I think I am too old. And that there are quite a lot of nice girls, but I have no chance. Well, but no more about me, going back to the movie: although at first the movie title, the soundtrack, and the trailers makes us think of an horror movie, it is not that creepy.

It is true, this blog is being used too much for movie reviews. I am sorry, but I do not have anything more interesting to write here. Now, for the movie, The Devil Wears Prada is one of those standard American/Hollywood stories: quite easy to predict. Thus, I think I can't write much more about it, or you will end up knowing all the movie story.

Fortunately, the (or one of the) main actress is lovely: Anne Hathaway. The movie ends showing up that Anne is quite pretty with anything that she would like to wear. In the other hand, Meryl Streep seems too old regarding the age she really has. But both are great actresses.