Tag Archives: software

pacman: like, +1, upvote, digg, …

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i have been a quite happy archlinux user for a few years now. one of the reasons is surely pacman and, today, i have turned a little bit happier about it.

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!!

unintended (dis)honesty

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this morning i slipped to my boss/coordinator/teacher that i don’t have aspirations of going too far in my professional career. well, given some thought, that’s sort of a lie. what i usually mean by this is that i don’t want to be the head of something too large to handle on the nine to five schedule! for as long as i’ve known myself, i always felt great for being complimented. i often get that for being good at what i do, so i’ll keep trying!

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! =)

my own hdr tutorial

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in the past, before owning a camera, i’d seen some samples of hdr art. everyone likes it, there’s something about all that fake colors that makes us dream.

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! Continue reading →

problemacia descontornável

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numa tentativa infantil de erradicar os problemas da minha ligação adsl durante a noite, vi-me forçado a configurar novamente o mutt e msmtp para enviar mensagens periódicas aos serviços de apoio da sapo e pt.

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.

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all work, no play

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i finally went around buying a new computer. i actually waited a couple of days to start writing this in the new laptop and, my god, this keyboard is an absolute delight to type on…

i scanned the market a lot, as always. at first i was hoping to buy a macbook pro. the pros were battery life, operating system, and good design/construction. the problem is that, more than that, i always look for a good performance/cost compromise. current 13” mbps aren’t the case, and i’d have to wait more than a couple more months for a then-outdated spec list. Continue reading →

sign here, here, and here

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a few days ago i sold my soul to the institute of telecommunications, here in aveiro. this means a couple of months of android, for starters. i remember saying something about how stupidly android handles applications, compared to bada. well, yesterday i was reading some stuff about it and, my god, this all makes a whole lot of sense to me. it’s a little different approach to the concept of applications. android might just be the next best thing to search, from google. it’s a shame that this is java (i’d still like to see some efficiency data compared to c++, or other real language) and google can’t sell (remember google wave? buzz, what’s that?).

na crista da onda: anfíbio

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depois do fracasso e do sucesso parcial do desenvolvimento para bada, procurei descobrir como seria desenvolver um widget para o telemóvel. surpresa! os widgets não passam de páginas web! apesar de já ter confessado não gostar de programação por eventos, por algum motivo, javascript e html são coisas totalmente diferentes, para mim. talvez por associar scripting tão potente a linguagem de marcação de forma tão simples. não sei, mas gosto!

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na crista da onda: parte 2

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o flash é uma tarefa impossível, mas nada motivo para baixar os braços. outra aplicação que me interessou desenvolver consistia em procurar routers nas redondezas e, com base em vulnerabilidades conhecidas, ligar-se a eles. claro que os algoritmos sobre as vulnerabilidades não são meus, não tenho a destreza para esse trabalho, mas é uma boa maneira de iniciar interfaces. chamei-lhe Wi-Fi Smith. =)

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