quite often, when working on a project, i have to install several packages and libraries that, most certainly, i’ll never use again after the project is done, so i need to remember to remove them. what i usually did was:

1. install the packages as dependencies (pacman -S –asdeps) and then,
2. later, when project is done, check my database for all installed packages that depended on no other explicitly installed package (pacman -Qdt).

the thing is that, over time, and many simultaneous projects, the listing gets crowded, and mixed up with optional dependencies for packages that i use (i install them as dependencies so they get removed when i remove the main package (pacman -Rncs)).

what i needed was a feature to “mark this installation with a reason: this project”. no, pacman does not support that, afaik. but it does support something perhaps better: meta-packages! for example, for the odtone project (my thesis depends on), i created the odtone-meta package that depends on all the packages that are needed, and has no particular source! thus, all i need to do is install the package, all dependencies are managed automatically! the PKGBUILD:

pkgname=odtone-meta
pkgver=001
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="This package depends on all necessary packages for odtone"
arch=('any')
url="http://helios.av.it.pt/embedded/odtone/index.html"
license=('LGPL')
depends=('boost' 'boost-libs' 'rasqal' 'raptor' 'redland' 'redland-storage-sqlite')

this way, when the project is finished, i just remove the odtone-meta package, and everything that isn’t a dependency for another package is just removed!

neat!!

for the next “year”, the big thesis road, my mind is more or less settled on working on top of odtone. maybe you laptop-owner-linux-user will read my name in a few manpages in the future! =)

well, but it seemed a hard and tough result to achieve, i had read some tutorials for photoshop and gimp, and it looked like a pain in the arse. well, not anymore. i’m going to guide you through a few easy steps in order to achieve those amazing results!

step one:

get luminance hdr: http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/

step two:

use it!

result:

this is my first experience. i barely looked in the viewfinder, i just downloaded luminance hdr and ran out to get this scene. one of the main reasons i didn’t get the d3100 instead of this d7000 was the stupid absence of automatic bracketing… even at 5fps the scene, or my hand, moves, so having to change the exposure automatically and align the images must be really boring… yeah, i don’t own a tripod, yet. neither i would carry it at all times, even if i had…

https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap/tree/master/Bada

it was just a few days ago that i complained about not being able to spend big to get big. well, it’s been about 6 years now, and i finally bought a real camera. browsing for prices this weekend i ended up on the mediamarkt.pt shitty website, which advertised a sale for today: no vat! i couldn’t resist, it had to be now. and it was. and i’m glad!

23%, thanks jose socrates, means that i bought the d7000 + 18-105mm kit, and get a few hundred bucks left. these will be spent there on a 35mm f/1.8, plus a memory card and we’ll see what else. probably a bag!

i didn’t want the 18-105 anyway, i don’t fancy the plastic bayonet, but no body-only option was available. i take it as a good thing, though, being forced to buy a general purpose zoom lens. buying just the 35mm could be a bad option since i don’t want to spend any more money on this any time soon. besides the card and the bag, i still need a polarizing and nd filter, and a tripod, and i’m done for years to come!

many thanks, unknowingly, go to ken rockwell and florian freundt! of course, dpreview as well.

recently, though, i’ve come to think that this is perhaps not the case. i have something wired, but it no longer looks like delayed gratification.

it behaves more like a disappointment paralysis!

in a sentence, i freeze the desire of applying large investments on new things that i’ve been dreaming for years now, but i’m very keen on the idea of investing those same volumes for others. it means that i don’t care about the value involved, just as long as i don’t end up knowing that it was a bad move! fear of failure, huh?

well, it’s still a part of me, and it’s probably still a good thing, getting me here so far, but!

it sucks!!

in a nutshell, and like i’ve always studied in school, nature has a nice way of being. rule of thumb: it regenerates itself, it is self-sustainable, its systems are cyclic!

we, humans, and the systems that we come up with, on the other hand, rule of thumb: are not! that’s what’s artificial to me. and no, humans weren’t created to invent plastic! =D

o problema, efectivamente, tem a ver com quebras de ligação a todo o minuto a partir das 18 horas, por exemplo, e até ser hora de deitar. na verdade a ligação não cai com frqeuência, é mais ao contrário. fica frequentemente desligada e liga-se momentaneamente. como não conseguem garantir-me os débitos de uns miseros 4MB a ligação tenta ressincronizar a uma taxa inferior, mas volta a falhar de qualquer modo. no ano passado baixaram-me o downstream para 3MB, mas este ano a ligação conseguiu ficar ainda pior.

if you ask me, someone has ever more clients, but no hardware upgrade concerns.

executado no arranque do gnome (que efectivamente me liga à internet), .mailnetcommand.sh:

#!/bin/bash

while :
do
	mutt -s "Problemacia descontornável" -- mail16200@telecom.pt < $HOME/.mailnetbody.txt
	mutt -s "Problemacia descontornável" -- suporte@acesso.sapo.pt < $HOME/.mailnetbody.txt
#	rm $HOME/sent
	sleep $((900+$RANDOM%900)) # repeat after 15 to 30 minutes
done &

.muttrc:

set sendmail="/usr/bin/msmtp"
set from=myname@myserver.tld

.msmtprc:

account default
host mail.myserver.tld
from myname@myserver.tld

auth on
user myname@myserver.tld
password mypassword
tls on
tls_certcheck off # who cares?

.mailnetbody.txt

<insert intended puns here>
...
Reenviarei esta mensagem sempre que achar conveniente,
e até considerar o problema resolvido.

sou capaz de ter problemas também com o “myserver.tld” por causa de estar sempre a enviar e-mails para o mesmo sítio, mas hão-de ser enviadas mensagens suficientes para dar um ar de cliente aborrecido…

care: \_/

i thankfully never fully embraced these ideas, though.

back in fifth grade i asked my parents for a musical keyboard. we bought a nice casio one, i though. i chose it. i believe the idea came from sharing a possession with a friend of mine, who still is one of my best. i hammered it for a while, but of course i needed teaching, and so i went to a local music school for it. after a year i was quite proficient at it. although listed under the piano class, i was practicing at home with non-touch-sensitive-keys keyboard. very much unlike a piano! my parents didn’t bide to my “want a piano” desire, about the same time my teacher suggested that i got in the conservatory, since i was learning nothing already, there. a school teacher of mine even suggested i moved with her into town and study there. i was fucking 12, they scared the shit out of me.

so i went through grade school without a serious hobby other than video games. it was not until i was 18 that i finally decided to try and plain tennis. once again i went to a local school. at the end of the first month or so i had bought my own racket. half a year into once a week training, it didn’t feel very appropriate for my technique, i had a hard time confidently swinging with it. having to pay more attention to my national exams and the driving lessons i decided to abandon the sport. i thought that i should try and sell my racket and forget about tennis. the coach wouldn’t let me. he told me that i had learned so much in those six months and had developed so well compared to all other trainees that it was just stupid to quit, sell the racket. i still keep the racket, and occasionally play, but i should really get one better suited for me, even for recreation…

this kind of bothers me. i quit things that i enjoy partly because i can’t or don’t afford better equipment, but mostly because, after asserting my ability, the drive to increase the proficiency level just vanishes. it was quite interesting to see a university teacher (doctor) telling the same about himself a couple of weeks ago, while defending his aggregation. the jury was asking the reason for such a broad curriculum rather than being emphasised on a single field of studies. the doctor answered that he had that problem. he was curious about many things and, once he proved himself apt for those fields, he lost interest and moved on.

this is what i find myself in, in those two stories, but nowadays as well at a smaller scale. this semester i had two projects to deliver. one on advanced network architectures and another one on knowledge and data engineering. the first project consisted on implementing a subset of the http protocol and a peer-to-peer network on top of that. me and my colleague didn’t do that great a job, it was quite disappointing for what we could accomplish. even with the project being so interesting, i wasn’t able to devote as much time as was necessary for a good release (more on group project responsibility in the future, maybe).

that (same of the aggregation!) teacher is a serious right brain thinker. for the final presentation, he asked the students to emphasize anything they wanted about the project, and talk about that. we decided to just talk about how our modelling of the solution. we had called our project p80p (p2p on top of http, port 80). the “P80P” text was clean and big on the screen on the first slide, and it reminded the teacher of the p-80 from the second great war’s aircraft. the first few minutes into the presentation (we presented last) the teacher noted “by far, the best presentation”. but at the end he was again reminded of the airplane. we had a very good start, but we didn’t have a good conclusion for the presentation. we impressed with the structure and attitude, but it was so exhausting to develop those slides that we simply forgot to think about how to finish.

and you know what? i was more than happy about the comments. i felt “by far, the best” anyway. truth be told, i prepared most of the presentation, and it was awesome. though it was incomplete, i feel i did my part.

the same happened with the other project. we didn’t have that many ideas, and they had to be our own. we just had to mess with xml, webservices, user accounts, etc. lots of projects consisted of ideas that messed with all of it, but they were just feed aggregators, webstores, and stuff like that. a group even implemented the last.fm’s funcionality on top of the last.fm api! :S no way i was going to do that! how could i feel that my project was better than google reader, or itunes or last.fm? me and my colleague simply messed with rss. we engineered a website where you can add a few feeds, configure a set of rules to match feeds to categories, and present graphics about the distribution of contents among that categories. for example, we input news feeds about politics, set a few matches for each candidate of the upcoming elections and get “how much is being written about each candidate”. this was very easy to code, my colleague didn’t feel good about that being our project.

guess what! it wasn’t, there were very nice projects, but ours was new, and the teacher said “i like your idea, you can sell that!”. our grade will probably be at the middle of the table, even lower, but i enjoy that our project matters.

and this has been my academic life. i get satisfaction from slightly above average results; i never attended a “resort exam” to raise my average; teachers and coordinators seem to understand and trust me. but! i will be one mark below 16 by the end of the masters, which is the minimum for a phd studies scholarship. this time, the phd will then be the next equipment that i can’t or don’t want to afford.

and you know what? i’m more than happy! life is not devotion to professional success. not mine, anyway. i’ll just keep being half awesome. =)