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Ugh, in the last year and a half I've only posted once. With the move to
Ireland, starting a new job, and then using too much Google+, I forgot
about this blog thing.
So, to start with something easy, I'll tell you about some films I watched
recently. This weekend I had a marathon of films, after sometime without
watching any, I watched two at home and two at my favourite cinema in Dublin:
the IFI, which I recommend to anyone
living here.
First, on Friday, I watched Brazil, the 1985
classic from Terry Gilliam. It was a long overdue obligation to watch it, and
some discussions with a friend about cinema made me finally do it. It was an
amazing film. Among the many memorable scenes, and cinephile winks, I liked the
one copying the famous Odessa steps sequence. The problems related to its US
release reminded me a bit of the problems with the edition of Touch of evil, although
in the case of Brazil, what the big studio did to the film was to butcher
it.
On Saturday I continued on the Gilliam streak and re-watched 12 Monkeys, which I had
forgotten completely. Another great film, with a clearly bigger budget, it does
not rely on the money but in the plot, art, and acting to be memorable. Also, I
love the main theme, a tune from Astor Piazzolla called "Suite Punta del
Este".
Just after finishing the film, I read that some people from the local Couch Surfing group were meeting at the
IFI to see one of the many features of the Polish film festival that took place
this weekend. So I went and saw A short film
about killing, a powerful and shocking movie about the death penalty.
Considered by many to be one of the most horrifying depictions of a killing
(two, in fact), it didn't shock me as much as some other films had done, maybe
it was because of the cinema overdose... Anyway, it was another must-see. IMDB asserts that the Polish
government suspended the death penalty in Poland for five years after the
release of this film, but I could not find sources to confirm this.
This morning I woke up pretty early, which is completely uncommon for me on
a Sunday. So I decided to use the tickets offered by the IFI for a
pre-screening that I had assumed I would not use, since I had to be in the
cinema at 11! This time it was an Irish documentary about Bernadette
Devlin, called Bernadette:
Notes on a political journey. It was really interesting, even if I had
never heard about this important figure of Ulster politics in the sixties.
Sadly, because of my ignorance on the topic (and some northern accents that I
have trouble understanding), I missed many parts of the film. In any case, it
has increased my appetite to know more about the Troubles, which had
started when I visited the Republican neighbourhood of Belfast, specially Falls road.
Many times we can recognise different periods in our lives, but the line
that divides those periods is not always clear. As I write this on the plane
that is going to take me back to Argentina, I know I am closing something.
20 months ago, I took a plane in the opposite direction. The idea was to
live and work in France for something like 7-9 months; I stayed more, got a
Master's degree, met a lot of people, made some good friends, found a place
that we would call —and feel as— home; and generally had a great
time, so much that I almost didn't have time for any hacking.
Good bye, France, the fond memories of this time are going to stay with me.
Maybe someday, life brings me back.
The last few weeks I have been using LaTex a lot, to write the final report
for my master's course. During that period I found a couple of LaTeX goodies
that might be interesting to share: the memoir class, gnuplot integration, and
some stuff to help preparing cover pages.
The memoir class is a kind of all-in-one package. It is meant to be
used in place of the book and report classes, but it
can also replace simpler environments, such as article. It
provides many ready-to-use templates, and loads of commands to easily customize
them. It seems to be specially tailored for dead-tree publication, dedicating
an entire chapter in the manual to page layout.
It also aims at removing the usual cruft you have to add into any medium
sized project, it is macro-compatible with: abstract,
appendix, array, booktabs,
ccaption, chngcntr, chngpage,
dcolumn, delarray, enumerate,
epigraph, framed, ifmtarg,
ifpdf, index, makeidx,
moreverb, needspace, newfile,
nextpage, parskip, patchcmd,
setspace, shortvrb, showidx,
tabularx, titleref , titling,
tocbibind, tocloft, verbatim, and
verse. Furthermore, it provides functionality equivalent to the
following packages: crop, fancyhdr,
geometry, sidecap, subfigure,
titlesec. In the end, you have a project that only needs a couple
of packages, and a few customisation commands, which is nice and also eases distribution.
Other nice thing I have found is that there is not one, but many ways of
merging gnuplot graphs into your text
while having LaTeX typeset all the labels. There is some LaTeX packages aimed
at this, but I have more success using a special gnuplot terminal .
Again, there is more than one option: eepic,
epslatex, latex, lua, mp,
pslatex, pstex, pstricks,
texdraw, and tpic. While I could not try them all, I
tried a few and the easiest and prettiest was epslatex. This
terminal creates two files: a EPS file, as would have been created with the
usual postscript terminal, except that it does not contain any
text; and a LaTeX snippet meant to be included with
\input{foo}. Finally, I could generate graphs that match the rest
of the document!
To end this post, a couple of things about creating the dreaded cover page.
First, a suggestion: don't fret too much about finding a ready-made template,
once you understood the basics of how to insert arbitrary spaces around text,
it is quite easy to roll your own cover! Having said that, the memoir manual
has some sample cover pages that can be useful to use as a base, and there is
another really useful resource I have found: titlepages.pdf, a collection of 40 sample title pages with source
code for you to choose.
If the Debian package of the day website were still alive, I would post this
there. Since I still have the backups lying in my harddrive waiting to be
restored in some other place, I'll post here.
In the graphviz package
there is a neat shell script called vimdot that will open
vim and a X window showing your progress with the drawing, updated
each time you save. Simple but really useful, probably not much people know it
exists.
Lately, I have recurring WTF moments when working with Python. I'm still
more or less a novice in Python, as I started to use it in my day job last
year, so sometimes it could be blamed to ignorance.
Today I was writing some code that takes any file descriptor as argument,
and thought it could be nice to accept also objects that represent one. But it
seems there is no common ancestor to file objects and socket objects, for
example. In Perl, I'd just check for IO::Handle.
Then, I wrote code to check if a passed argument was a socket, or a file
descriptor to one, with some obvious check: isinstance(s,
socket.socket). WRONG, when you create sockets with
socketpair, they are of an undocumented type which is not a
descendant of socket, nor of SocketType! (There is a patch for this since 2007)
In general, I have found a lack of any reasonable object hierarchy, and many
inconsistencies in the low-level interfaces, which is a pity, because Python is
in general quite tidy. Comparing with Perl is unavoidable, and I would have
expected that Python had learnt more from it.
Another thing that amazes me is the lack of anything like CPAN, which is one of the reasons
Perl was so successful. The cheese
factory doesn't come close, as you need to publish your files
somewhere else, there is no automated testing, no automatically generated
documentation, or anything that requires access to the source code.
In Perl-land, many people loathe the venerable MakeMaker, and some of the
alternatives are ugly as hell. The Python equivalent (or so) to Makemaker,
distutils, looks to me like a bad joke: advanced customisation is black magic
(if possible at all), and doesn't provide absolutely basic things like running
your unit tests! After fighting with it for some days, I decided to go back
writing my own Makefile and calling distutils just to build and install.
After one year in France, there's still something I cannot completely
understand; I don't know if it is something common in Europe, or a artifact of
the French law, or if it is just that French people like to do things so
formally all the time...
I was taking a look at the website of the local LUG, and was
amazed that they have «association loi de 1901» status, an
administration council with 11 members, statute, and written bylaws. Also, to
be a part of the association, you need to send a paper form and at least
€10.
According to the Wikipedia
page , an «association loi de 1901» is just a
non-profit organisation, and it has that status even if it is not registered.
But it seems that is not mandatory to have any of the hierarchical structure,
written rules and the such!
So it seems that any group of more than 10 that gets together to do
something go through all this trouble when it is not needed, there should be
some explanation for all this...
That's a phrase I fully adhere to (I don't want to work), but that's not the
point. There's a catchy song that I like a lot, it's sung in French and sounds
like an old song (most places say it's an Edith Piaf's song). The chorus goes
"Je ne veux pas travailler, je ne veux pas déjeuner...", and one would imagine
that that's indeed the title.
But nothing of this is true, once again the Internets is full of fail. The
band who performs the song is called Pink Martini, two
of them are the authors of it, and they are from Oregon. It was recorded in
1997 (some audio filters did the magic), and it's called "Sympathique". It also
seems that it was a big success, but probably not in my part of the world. I
thought that somebody should set this straight somewhere, as I couldn't find
anybody speaking of this confusion.
Having settled that, I invite you to listen to this
wonderful song, and sing along that you don't wanna work (forget about the rest
of the lyrics, it's a love song :-)).
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.
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