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.

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: \_/

because we are limited:

a few days ago i was discussing with the devs of cambada about something that has bothered me for a long time. the cambada is a robotic soccer team here at the university of aveiro. the idea is that, by 2050, robots can defeat the best human team. currently the robots are very advanced, play together, form a team! they all communicate by a wireless link. sometime in the future this will be forbidden, because most humans can’t communicate telepathically, so the robots would have an unfair advantage. likewise, robots will have to stand up in two legs, whilst currently they are usually based in holonomic solutions.

this kind of makes sense given that the purpose is to challenge human beings, so it should be between “equals”. but apart from this specific environment, we see this kind of handicap assigned to robots in lots of places! it strikes me why would anyone ever want a robot that can walk on two legs, since there are so many movement strategies that are far easier to program and unquestionably more efficient. sure, the control system is a good challenge, and might be of service for other applications, but it’s generally useless!

because we have limits:

decades ago we could drive a horse back to our parents house (:s). then cars appeared, and were a little faster and we liked them. now we can build cars much faster than we can consider for safe usage by humans. cars nowadays ship with electronic controls that limit its speed on purpose. it’s perhaps just one bit on a chip! in many other fields we have technology being held back so that humans can control it.

we could have hour long movies screened in a few seconds, if that makes any sense, but we just couldn’t perceive them. we could transmit an hour long conversation to our girlfriend in a second, but we need to have it at the pace we can talk it and listen to it. the robots could shoot balls at a few hundred km/h, but that would just mean broken legs for the human team. we could have a space ship march out of the solar system for a trek, but no human would survive that! (ok, that’s kind of the opposite example, it’s the machine that would have to be faster. but it works same way around: the machine would stand the challenge, not the humans!!)

because limits aren’t bad:

a friend of mine was just telling me how having a 100mbit connection is bad. he was kidding, of course, but right, nonetheless! think about it: 10 years ago, if we wanted to see a movie, we had to go out and rent it. on the way out, we could stop for candy, or do other chores in the pathway. more recently, acquiring a movie no longer requires going out, we just get it only (means buy it online) and download it in an hour, or so! meanwhile, we could still do the laundry, wash the dishes or cook dinner.

now it has completely changed. in a few minutes we are watching a full hd movie. we no longer have the opportunity to pipeline our actions, our life is just more synchronized! this is how we start losing time everyday with evolution, because we no longer try to do more than one thing at once! ok, it is arguable that we do this things much faster, nevertheless, i was just pointing what makes some sense! :P

because it’s not over yet:

am i saying that machines are better than humans? well, i’d like to say “far from it”, but it really isn’t anymore. the only thing machines can’t do better than us is cognition and right brain abilities. hell, we don’t fully understand it ourselves, no machine can possess it yet! also we haven’t paid attention to our right brain in a very long time, and still aren’t these days. once we value its power and understand how it works maybe we’ll be able to put that in a machine and have them be harder, better, faster, stronger than us in every sense.

it really isn’t anymore!

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.

so, having crossed macbooks off the list, i started looking everywhere else, even leaving brand prejudice aside. i was very glad to read about the new dell xps powerhouses. i wanted the 14 incher, but then, as they were (and still are) taking too long to arrive to portugal, i gave the laptop a lot of thought and ended giving up on it. (and it was actually pretty difficult to get in touch with portuguese dell to find out. i couldn’t find such information on almost 20 minutes of calls). it just wasn’t right for my present/future concerns.

why? i started giving less and less importance to graphics and multimedia capabilities to prefer mobility and business-oriented service. that’s when i put the toshiba r700 and the hp elitebook 8440p on the table. i’m now typing on the latter, due to the first being slightly less spec’ed for a higher price, although it tops this one easily in the mobility department.

this laptop is the absolute category winner. what i needed to replace my old one, now soon-to-be stationed back home, was a bump in memory, storage and processor speed. this laptop provides all that on top of an excellent accessory list. it is a 4-thread (2-core) 620m intel processor, an almost outdated nvs 3100 cuda enabled nvidia graphics card, 320gb momentus xt hybrid drive (home upgrade), 4gb ram. all of this on top of a perfectly linux compatible docking station. at the end the boxes went for almost as much as i had paid for my previous a8js. it’s not just the performance increase, it’s the service quality:

a nicely rugged laptop. the aluminum feels cold and solid. the laptop does feel a bit light for what it looks like, but it’s by no means light, it is almost as heavy as my previous one, and almost doubles the r700′s mark. not that i care. besides the solid feel, i am entitled to a 3-year (battery included!) next business day on site repairs with toll-free 24×7 phone support. this is not a boston technology battery (i guess, i have to check the papers more carefully), so the warranty is only one year.

i had only troubles trying to boot archlinux from a pen, the bios would freeze. that was with a dd’ed hybrid image. it worked when i flashed the stick with universal usb installer, so i might just be headed for a flyspray bug report.

many people whined about this touchpad. it is not a good one, it’s small and a bit too much sunk, and i can’t two-finger-scroll in linux, though it is possible in windows. the buttons are hinged. i didn’t even know what that meant until i clicked them, but i don’t see why that’s bad, i actually like it. the point-stick (or clitoris, as it is more widely known) isn’t very much usable for me, and it sometimes gets in the way of typing, but that could be just me.

the keys have a _very_ good response, a long and solid stroke, but with a smooth feeling. this is a very good keyboard and though i haven’t used a thinkpad’s before, i think they don’t provide the smooth feeling with the solid stroke combo. this is really nice. i’m portuguese, but i could only get a decent deal on this with a gbr layout. not that i care, it might actually help me work, and so far didn’t get in the way of typing with the portuguese layout.

battery-life-wise, i have been writing and browsing for a almost an hour with low brightness and a powersave cpu frequency governor (booted and browsed a few minutes with ondemand and maximum brightness), and the battery is now around 70%. it’s not spectacular, but it’s more than i could ever expect from my previous laptop, and i will use it mostly as a power failure backup mechanism, so that’s a good mark. (mind that the newly installed hard-drive drains a few more watts than the original momentus shipped inside).

i can’t tell if the momentus xt is paying its dues. some applications do feel faster to go up, but the new processor and memory coupled with an anyway 7200rpm hard drive certainly make the difference compared to the previous machine.

edit:

sorry, i forgot to mention the keyboard flex… oh, wait: no, i didn’t!

edit 2:

this _is_ the hp long life 6 cell 51 whr li-ion battery! so yes: boston technology, 3 year warranty. boy, am i glad/lucky!!

a couple of things i did forget to mention:

this momentus xt is fairly noisy. i haven’t had laptop with a 7200rpm before, so i’m not sure if this was true for the shipped drive as well.

but, most important, the screen. the contrast sucks, there’s no other way to put it. it can’t be used for image/video work. it isn’t very bright and the colors might surprise you in the output. but the truth is that a bad matte screen is easily better for me than a reasonable glossy one. i see no reflections here, and this is a very good point on this screen.

para o público isto é óptimo. é a garantia de que certamente surgirá algo novo, bom, e ilusão de que o prémio está ao alcance de todos. isto é o sonho americano. a falsa promessa das políticas de direita e do esforço pessoal em vista de um futuro bom. o problema é que estamos perante um ídolos. o sonho não está ao alcance de todos, apenas de um. no entanto todos os outros se esforçaram e devotaram o mesmo tempo e dedicação, apenas não tiveram sorte, e ficaram na miséria.

não está à vista?