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I spent a few minutes trying out the new support for using the Facebook chat
with Jabber/XMPP, which is a great idea, since I hate to chat using the web
interface. Sadly, it doesn't support grouping your contacts (you set a group,
but it doesn't keep registered, probably they didn't implement that feature),
and that make my empathy client look quite untidy...
I'll keep my account setup for a while, but I guess it will not be long
until I remove it and continue not chatting with Facebook. Maybe some day they
can properly implement the protocol...
Update: As Tobias Wich and Clifford Hansen had kindly pointed out to me, you can actually group your contacts, but only from the web interface. I've tried it and it works, but it's not really comfortable.
For the first time in my life, I'll be going to FOSDEM, yay!! So I hope to
see a lot of Debian friends there, drink a lot of Belgian beer and have a great
time.
Also, I'm finally going back home on March, after almost a year living in
France, I expect a continuous stream of meetings, barbecues and random
partying. I can't wait!
Hoy debería estar estudiando, pero me la pasé leyendo cosas en la web.
Típico.
Cosas que fui encontrando: que Spinetta
va a dar un recital juntando a sus antiguas bandas Almendra, Pescado, Invisible
y Jade. Me topé con un artículo
en el suplemento económico de Página/12 hablando de software libre, comentando
asuntos de licencias, la diferencia con el Open Source, sin decir pavadas!
Mientras repasaba algunos artículos comentados en una clase de ayer, me
encontré con una nota en LWN
sobre una propuesta de Van Jacobson, extendiendo el viejo principio de
"end-to-end" al manejo de packetes de red dentro del kernel. Aunque no pude
encontrar si alguien está trabajando para llevarlo a la práctica.
Pero la coronación del día fue enterarme de la existencia de un grupo
llamado "Putos peronistas
(tortas, trans, travestis y putos del pueblo), cuya frase fundadora sería "El puto es peronista, el gorila es gay". Más allá de mis problemas con el
peronismo, me cayeron simpáticos desde el nombre, el lenguaje directo y
popular, los grupos a los que pretenden representar ("Somos la marica
de barrio, la peluquera y costurera charleta, la travesti que labura en una
panadería, ..."), y en general el hecho de que dentro del peronismo, que
tradicionalmente ha sido bastante homófobo (recordar "¡No somos putos,/ no
somos faloperos,/ somos soldados de FAR y Montoneros!") aparezca un grupo
así.
Dear Lazyweb,
I'm tempted to buy one of this neat boxes with embedded hard drive, network
interface, sound card and TV output to use as a media center for the house.
I've seen some of them in an ample range of prices, but all of them lack any
detailed description of what's running inside. I'll bet that most of them are
running Linux, but I'd like to be able to modify it to my heart's content. For
example to use MPD as a music server, be able to mount filesystems with sshfs,
and whatnot.
I'm also tempted to take the 'Neuf box' that was given by the internet
company, add a USB sound card and external hard drive; but already some people
jumped to warn me about the dreaded terms of use contract, and all that jazz.
Plus, having everything in a compact box seems more convenient for a not so big
price. Does anybody have a recommendation on this? Being able to buy it in
France is a plus :)
Just wanted to share comments on some movies I've watched recently.
- The hurt locker: about the days of a bomb disposal team in
the war of Iraq; well done, entertaining, and it didn't trigger my
oh-again-the-yanks-saving-the-day response.
- Gran Torino: cannot say much about this one, I loved each
minute of it. Clint Eastwood is getting better every day; must see.
- The union: the business behind getting high: a documentary
on cannabis, nice but not that interesting.
- Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis: a simple French comedy, nothing
deep here. Nevertheless, I found the characters lovable, and now I'd like to
visit Nord-pas-de-Calais.
- La môme: another French film, which I really enjoyed.
Marion Cotillard is really impressive in her rendition of Edith Piaf.
- Death proof: ah, Tarantino, can't help enjoying, even
though there was not much plot here.
- Les poupees russes: more French cinema. The sequel of
"L'auberge espagnole" —which wasn't that great— is quite dull. The
director doesn't get tired of trying to show off all these fancy edition
effects, and instead of being clever, it looks silly.
- Der Untergang: disturbing, well done, enjoyed.
- Cidade de Deus: quite a surprise this one; dynamic,
thrilling, great edition. Based on a real story, but goriest than
Tarantino.
- Blade runner: I got a high quality copy, which was enough
of an excuse to watch and enjoy it once again. A beautiful film in every
sense.
- This is England: didn't know anything about This is
England, and surprised me to see a film that touches on the war of the Malvinas
(Falklands) from an English perspective, although that is not central to the
plot. It revolves around a boy who joins a gang of skinheads, which was another
surprise, as I didn't even know that the non-racist skinheads existed.
- Zack and Miri make a porno: funny, edgy, but they had to
ruin everything with romance, bleargh.
- Happy together (春光乍洩): I think I liked it, but I'll
need to see it again with readable subtitles!
- School of rock: I think I will never enjoy north-American
comedies...
Last night I was about to sit down and write a post about how happy I was.
After a long search, I found a beautiful appartment in Nice, with my flatmates
we're cleaning and arranging stuff, we're planing parties and inviting friends
to come over... When we were doing the moving, I started to see the city
differenty: this time it was not just a visit. It made me remember the taste of
starting from scratch, like when I did when I was 21.
But some jerks ruined the party. Before sitting to write the blog post, I
said I better check that the car is parked in a good place, tomorrow is
Monday . And all of a sudden three guys assaulted me, making me a pass thru
a real bad moment, and taking the car and house keys. Nothing happened to me,
luckily, but I have no more car. I spent the day making things straight with
police, insurance, etc. I had to spend a HUGE load on money to change a stupid
door lock (I still cannot believe that people pay that much money for this
"security" stuff), and more importantly, they ruined my mood.
I'm really okay, so no need to help me or anything, I just wanted to say
this somewhere.
Matt, not only Perl can do it, but is part of the standard POSIX
extended regexes (see regex(7)). Here I check for 7-letters palindromes:
perl -lne '/^(.)(.)(.).\3\2\1$/ and print'
/usr/share/dict/words
grep '^\(.\)\(.\)\(.\).\3\2\1$' /usr/share/dict/words
Una vez más, recibí spam de Linux college. No hace falta que me esfuerce en
probar que es spam: está dirigido a la dirección -owner de una de las listas de
correo que administro y, obviamente, el link de desubscripción no funciona. Es,
como siempre, una oferta bien ladri de cursos para cazar desprevenidos y
sacarles un montón de plata (gracias al 60% de descuento, sólo te cobran $
3125 por dos cursitos!!). No sé si es habitual, pero la UTN además les presta
el nombre para hacer spam. Es triste, pero ya no me extraña: hace un tiempo,
mandé un mail a una universidad que también prestaba el nombre para otros
spammers y me contestaron que la universidad avalaba a estos otros ladris.
En resúmen, contribuya a la disminución del spam y la truchada: no permita
que sus amigos vayan al "Linux college".
The other day I received a mail that was a variation of something I had read
many years ago on Slashdot, but it looked more like the chain letters some
people like to torture me with. It went like this:
Only great minds can read this
This is weird, but interesting!
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at
Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a
wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be
in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed
it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed
ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and
I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad
it.
I went on trying to find the original article, and I did, but incidentally I
stumbled upon a page that claimed that it was a fake. Combining that with the
obvious change in style made me get interest into the matter. After some time
finding out references going back in time, aided with the invaluable WayBack Machine service I
could more or less reconstruct the history of this long-lived meme.
Apparently all started when a guy named Graham Rawlinson wrote his Ph.D.
thesis for the Nottingham University in 1976 with the title
"The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition". In this work he
makes some experiments that show this phenomenon. A summary apparently made by
the original author can be found here.
The IEEEXplore magazine printed a verbatim copy of this summary in their
January 2007 issue, the PDF is available for subscribers in this non-clickable
address (I don't want to link to subscriber-only sites):
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/62/4119199/04126417.pdf
It seems that the thesis went undetected (by Google standards, that is) for some time, until an article that discussed how people could understand sentences even if the words were played backwards from a tape was published in the Nature journal.
The article can be read in Nature's website under the title Cognitive restoration of reversed speech, and a comment in the
same issue: Backwards Bohemian Rhapsody.
Apparently it was also published in New Scientist (I cannot find any content
on the web), and then Rawlinson sent a letter linking these results with his own thesis from the
seventies. A thread shorty thereafter appeared on Usenet.
I don't know what happened after this, but somehow it kept roaming in teh
intarweb until 2003 when it gained critical mass.
James F. Bisso blogged about it in May, 1st. In his post, the premise is to keep the first and last two letters instead of just one; and also proposes replacing all vowels with hyphens. After September, this entry will receive many comments, including Rawlinson's.
In September 12th, 2003, David Harris posted in blogs.salon.com a slightly modified version of the
then-circulating text to experiment with meme dissemination, later explained in
another post. The meme was picked up by many blogs in a few days: Languagehat,
James Bisso posted about it again, and then again, and again. Even a Perl
program to scramble text was published. But the fire became
unstoppable after it was seen on Slashdot.
After that, everybody was talking about this for a few days, and there was
even college assignments. Instead of talking about "an English
university", Cambridge and other institutions appeared on the texts. Matt
Davis, member of the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, in Cambridge, wrote a
huge compilation of sample scrambled texts in different languages, including
comments based on actual reading research.
Somehow, the meme survived for
many years, and came back to me six years later.
I'm writing this post aboard the train, still in Lisbon. After TAP managed
to make almost lose the train because of a series of delays, and having to
withstand too many (two is already too many!) children in the plane; I finally
can relax and write a little.
This week has been quite hectic, trying to finish some work, getting my
French residence permit that among other things, allows me to leave the
country, buying cheese for the Cheese & wine party (sorry Bubulle, I had to
buy cheese in Casino, didn't have the time to go to the market), and also,
fixing the keyboard in my computer!
Having a working keyboard is usually a desired feature in a computer. This
one was working, but it was a little... sticky. You see, one night I managed to
spill my glass of port wine all over it. So while I managed to use the computer
with an external keyboard, for DebConf I wanted to fix it; and since the last
laptop keyboard that I dismantled for cleaning —a quite similar
accident, not too surprising if you know my drinking habits— ended
up with a broken key I wanted a less intrusive approach.
So this is truly the reason for this post: to share a quite simple way of
removing sticky materials from your oh-so-delicate keyboard. What I did was to
remove the keyboard following the usual procedure, clean the port overflow that
could be found behind the keyboard and adjacent places, and then
soaking the keyboard with ethanol. I was quite generous with the
alcohol, since I decided that being alcohol in a few hours it will just
evaporate, and the excess of it would sweep away the dirt and sugar. This
morning I reassembled everything, and not only it didn't break, but all the
stickiness went away!
Update from Cáceres. I arrived a couple of hours ago. I should have arrived
around 5:30, but couldn't because somehow I managed to forget to print a map,
copy the address or have something that would allow me to find the
place! I remembered the name "Muñoz Torrero" and with that I got some
directions, and stopped on each corner trying to find some open AP, with little
luck. Finally I found one and learnt that I should go to the other residence,
and two hours after leaving the train, I got to my room... Next time I should
remember these little details...
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