Heating up the place

Today I had to stay at home in the morning, there was a problem with the central heating in my apartment and I had to wait for the repair guy to come and fix it.

Nothing particularly noteworthy about it. Until I started asking him some questions about the system, that is.

You see, I have a thermostat control for the thing but it is located on the wrong place entirely (I won’t go into that now, trust me on this one) and I also wanted to fit it with a time-control mechanism. You know, the kind where you can program it to turn on at a certain time and turn off at another time and so on.

So what’s so remarkable about this you may ask? And you do have a point, it doesn’t look interesting. And neither was his answer which was basically that I had to get an electrical contractor to do it as it was not something the heating company does as it basically amounts to closing a circuit when you want the heater on and opening it when you want it off. He also said that I can just replace my current thermostat with one which not only does the… er… thermostat thingie, but also has a timer built in for programming. He even told me where to get one, but I wasn’t really listening at this point.

No, I wasn’t listening at all. And that’s because I was mulling over the fact that the whole heater control circuit revolves around opening or closing a simple one line circuit. One wire-end at one side and another wire-end at the other side… Connect them if you want the heater on, disconnect them if you want the heater off… Can you say X10??

Must… resist… temptation… to… wire… up… the… whole… house!

Danças de salão

Uma actividade que comecei relativamente tarde, com a Tuxa, também grande fã.

Estilos

Entende-se por danças de salão um conjunto de estilos ou ritmos divididos em vários grupos:

• Latinos:
  • salsa;
  • merengue;
  • cha cha cha;
  • passo doble;
  • rumba quadrada;
  • samba;
• Clássicos modernos:
  • valsa inglesa (ou simplesmente valsa);
  • valsa vienense;
  • jive;
  • tango;
  • quickstep;
  • slow fox.

Locais onde dançar

Todos os estilos

• Trópico de Dança - Este grupo organiza (entre outras coisas) noites mensais de dança, de todos os estilos de dança de salão e também de alguns estilos Africanos (bem dispensáveis na minha opinião, mas enfim) nas instalações da AERLIS, em Oeiras, junto ao Parque dos Poetas. O croqui do local está aqui;
• Barrio Latino Café - Essencialmente salsa, com um pouco de merengue à mistura e também alguns outros ritmos. Fica no Parque das Nações, junto à FIL, no lado Norte;
• Dançarte - Jantar e dança. Um restaurante com uma pista de dança bastante boa e música ao vivo. Também tem escola de dança própria. Localizado no Lourel, Sintra.

Histórico de exames e eventos

Iniciei-me nas danças de salão durante o ano lectivo de 2003/2004, no Centro de Ténis de Oeiras. No ano de 2004/2005 passei para o Centro de Dança de Oeiras. Neste ano comecei a ter exames regulares.

• Janeiro 2005, CDO - Cha-Cha-Cha, Paso Doble, Tango;
• Abril 2005, CDO - Jive, Valsa, Quickstep;
• Abril 2005, U.K.A. - Cha-Cha-Cha, Valsa.

Outras páginas e recursos vários

• U.K.A. - United Kingdom Alliance of Professional Teachers of Dancing - Entidade que examina e avalia os alunos das escolas em que tenho tido aulas.

Times ahead

By the way, fully expect an increase in bursts of posts about life in general and nothing in particular, and then, possibly, long(ish) periods of silence. This will probably happen as I use this weblog as a vent for frustrations relating to… let’s say, less interesting times, professionally speaking.

Then again, it might just spike my interest in filling up the site (mainly the wiki). Who knows?

Not now!

It was predictable. I saw it coming and I just knew it would work out like this. I had no illusions whatsoever about it. And that it happened!

Some time ago I cleaned out my “later” bookmarks folder and sent everything on it to my (then fresh new) del.icio.us account.

And after a few days I had gone through it and brought the total of items “to see later” down from a whooping 121 to a manageable 10 or so.
And life was bliss and I could keep up with stuff I come across in the vast interweb (heh) mostly at home in the evenings.

But I knew. I just knew. The danger lurked all around. The old monster was not dead, it was dormant, sleeping, biding it’s time to come back at me when I least suspected it.

And so it is that, once again, I have nearly 100 items in my later section of del.icio.us.
Yes, I knew it would happen. It was only a matter of time. Isn’t it great to know yourself?

<sigh!>

Ainda a mania dos telemóveis

Afinal não sou só eu que acha ridícula esta mania dos telemóveis em tudo o que é concertos (e o Fred, claro que até respondeu ao meu post).

Geração duh. Indeed!

Ena pá, dois posts de seguida na mesma onda… Quem não me conhecer até fica a pensar que os 31 me estão a pesar…

Mas não, não é isso, eu sempre soube que a minha geração é a melhor que já existiu, e todas as outras a seguir estão irremediavelmente perdidas e condenadas a ficar sempre atrás. É um facto da vida. :-)

Musiquinhas cotas

Descobri, graças a uns amigos das aulas de dança, que no bar do Inatel em Oeiras (no passeio marítimo) há um senhor que às quintas-feiras toca ao vivo.

Agora bares com música ao vivo há muitos. Não que eu seja grande frequentador, sou mais de ficar em casa agarrado ao computador ou a ler ou assim, mas também verdade seja dita que não conheço assim tantos sítios que realmente me atraiam… Mas adiante, não é isto que eu quero dizer.

O que este bar tem de particular, ou melhor, o que o músico tem de particular é o repertório. É que não se adequa claramente àquilo que se espera de um bar moderno ou jovem, não. O senhor toca coisas como Paul Simon, James Taylor, Don McLean, Rod Stewart (gasp! há sempre qualquer coisa que estraga o arranjinho…) e até músicas dele (mas que podiam perfeitamente ser de um Zeca Afonso). Ou seja, aquelas músicas que os meus pais ouviam quando eu era novo e que ainda hoje acabo por ouvir de vez em quando em casa. Aliás, diga-se de passagem que eu conhecia quase tudo o que ele tocou, excepção feita a um blues que eu quase juro que deve ser Eric Clapton, mas que não posso confirmar porque realmente acho que nunca tinha ouvido.

Clara e assumidamente música de cotas. Mas muito fixe naquele ambiente. E na realidade eu, em termos musicais, oiço (e aprecio) quase tudo.

Pelo que me apercebi ele vai estar por lá mais um mês (era suposto ser apenas durante o verão, mas as pessoas continuam a ir lá e ele está a prolongar a estação). Acho que ganhei programa para as próximas quintas-feiras à noite. E, ainda por cima, até o horário é fixe: das 21h30 às 23h00, mesmo bom para me levantar cedo e ir ao ginásio à sexta de manhã! (Enfim, a mentalização é tudo, não é?)

On the whole song rating business or “boy am I complicated!”

How people can actually rate their songs and keep playlists of things they like is, quite frankly, beyond me.

Oh I do rate all my songs in iTunes, and I do have my playlists. But the thing is that after I rated a song I keep constantly updating it’s rating. It is a never-ending process.

It just seems that there is no way on earth I can be absolutely accurate about how much I like a song. There are many, many examples of songs which have swung from 4 starts to 2 and then back to 3 or 4. The songs don’t change, of course, but my mood does.

And this is only on a small, day-to-day scale, let alone songs or albums I absolutely adored a few years back and I just can’t stand now.

So when I hear people talking about the “album of their lives” or their “favorite song of all time” or how great their playlists are and how they only have music they absolutely love on their iPod and how all those songs are their absolute favorite I actually envy them.

The closest thing I’ve ever come to this bliss is to have “mood” playlists, one kind of playlist for when I’m coding and need the power jolt, another one for when I’m really happy, yet another for when I’m angry, another for when I’m depressed and so on. And the most peculiar thing about this is that when I listen to one of the playlists which I’m not in the mood to hear, I hate it and actually hate most of the songs in it. And yet they are usually rated 4 or above (nothing gets on a playlist with a rating bellow 4) so I do love them when I’m in the right mood.

So, again, my point is: how can people just rate a song and put it on a “favorites” playlist and actually listen to it all the time, no matter what, and like it? Boy I wish I could…

Music blogs

The (not so) new generation of music blogs or mp3 blogs or whatever you may call it are indeed a great idea.

With the right setup you can spend part of your (working) day listening to new music with just a few clicks of the mouse.

The concept is very simple: mp3 tracks which are presented as samples of a band’s work or album and which are available for a limited time-span so as not to irate the RIAA gods (or is it demons?).

I’ve had a leg up from Fred on catching up on the interesting blogs and even though I’ve only started “tuning in” a couple of days ago I’ve already discovered quite a few good songs and bands that show great promise.

Radio Paradise and DI’s Chillout are really getting some strong competition these days.

Spam

Nearly 600 spam posts from the same guy between midnight and two o’clock tonight.

Guess I will have to consider more carefully making the comment system fully moderated.

It’s just sad.

darcs

darcs is a version control system touted by it’s author as “a replacement for CVS”.

From the project’s page:

darcs is decentralized, based on a “theory of patches” with roots in quantum mechanics.

Groovy!

It includes a CGI interface that allows browsing of the repository via the Internet.

Resources

• Homepage;
• The wiki;
• Using Darcs for CVS addicts.

My notes on darcs

These notes where taken either through the documentation reading process or through its usage.

Off-line operation and branch philosophy

Each copy of the source is a fully functional branch or every copy of your source code is a full repository. This allows for developing off-line and totally experimental branches with full darcs functionality available and later, if so desired these changes are then merged in with the other repositories.

The contrast with CVS is very clear in that in CVS there is only one master repository and each local copy is check-out once and all check-ins and so on must be performed with on-line access to the repository.

The theory of patches behind darcs

The philosophy behind darcs is that of patches. Each patch has some meta-information associated with it and this enables some advanced manipulation of the repository and the patches. The basic premisses behind the patches formalism are the following:

1. Every patch is invertible;
2. Sequential patches may be re-ordered but there may be dependencies between patches which may affect this re-ordering property;
3. Parallel patches (in different parallel trees) can be merged, and the result of a set of merges is independent of the order in which the merges are performed.

Layers of a versioning tool

1. The ability to manipulate changes. This one is central and fundamental do darcs;
2. A database system to keep track of the changes. In darcs this consists of an ordered list of patches (and the patches themselves), one per file;
3. A distribution system for the changes. the system for achieving this depends on a dumb server (Apache or some sort of NetworkFileSystem) for pulling patches but uses a more reliable/secure mechanism (scp or GPG-signed email messages) when pushing patches in.

Feature short-list

• Local record changes: A record is equivalent to a CVS checkin and it is always done locally obviating the need for network access or even a special disconnected mode;

CVS to darcs command correspondence

Meme du jour

The llama song is so last week…

The meme of the moment just has to be the banana phone. Even though it is old, it is always a classic!

Get re-acquainted with these and more boingboing’s earworm zen story.

Cascais.pm is alive!

Finaly, after a looong wait (since Yapc::Europe::2004 actually), Cascais.pm has come through.

Now it is time for me and Paulo to start getting the content together on the site and finding people to join the cause on that particular neck of the woods.

But the question that comes to mind is: Can you code Perl on the beach?

Extend your Ethernet

This weekend I got my hands on a couple of Corinex wall mounts and decided to test out how power-line Ethernet would pan out on my home.

My setup is particular in that I would want to use it to connect my attic with my main floor and I have X10 devices on the attic, so I was interested in checking out how power-line Ethernet and X10 would get along together on the same installation.

It turns out they get along famously, and even going through another phase into the attic I could still get 12Mbps out of the 14Mbps theoretical maximum for this equipment.

Apparently I can get my PVR in the attic and have the main server in the office do the file serving without having to worry about Wi-Fi connectivity.

Ping

Hello world,
I’m still here, despite the silence.

Lots of stuff happening which should have been mentioned as they were happening but where not. So I’ll do a short recap here and, most assuredly, leave almost half of it out but hey, that’s life in blog-land…

Automobile fun

Finally got my car re-shaped and re-painted after having bashed two doors in in my most recent vacation.
It sounds pretty awful when I put it this way but it really wasn’t, there where just some scratches and it had a little bit bashed in, but I live near the sea and I don’t like rusty cars and anyway the car is new so to the shop it went and out it came looking like new.

Now the funny thing is that while my new car (Ford Focus C-Max) was getting painted I got a little Ford Fiesta from the car shop to drive around. I’ve had a Fiesta a while ago and my wife currently has one herself but after four years driving a Renault Clio and now with the big C-Max I had almost forgotten how fun it is to drive the Fiesta. It may be small, it may have a weak engine and so on but it is just so much fun!
I think it has something to do with the way you are seated so low (as in near the road) and the way the engine, while weak, is just so nervous (it doesn’t get you high speeds but it sure gets you to it’s top speed fast). And the way it starts to slide while curving but in a thoroughly controlled way. And surely the way you feel the speed in it plays a huge part too, when you are going at 100Km/h you feel like you’re doing maybe 150Km/h. What a fantastic car!

I guess I’d better stop now before I say something that really gets me in trouble in the (very unlikely) event that Tuxa stumbles upon this… ;-)

But the fun is over anyway, my big C-Max is back and now I have to be really careful not to go over 140Km/h when I’m just trying to cruise lazily along the high-way…

#0000ff

The woes of corporate life in the tech-industry or “The Blue Packet”.
A satire by Rui of the product development cycle in the mobile industry which resonates altogether too much with the real life of many a person I know…

Hang on to your hats

Fedora Core 3 is out (we’ve had it mirrored for a few days now but only got the go-ahead to make it public late monday just like all the mirrors out there).
I’ve pretty much dropped Linux on the desktop after getting my Mac but I still have a RedHat9-based desktop at home which I sometimes fire up as it is the only way I currently have to get music from my MP3 collection into the house music system.
As such I haven’t tried it myself (it will be some time before I start upgrading the servers, I’m not that crazy) but as always people are searing at it and people are swearing by it.
I’ve actually looked a bit at the Evolution version which comes with it and it does look good but then some people are really having a hard time with it so I’ll just let it roll for a while…

Our numbers are growing each day

Yet another big mouth which, for the time being, prefers to remain anonymous.
He’s trying to get the hang of this blogging thingie. Will it last? Will he like it? Will it be a hit?
Who knows? As long as he has fun that’s the point of it, right?
Good luck to you Mr. Blue.
Oh yes, it’s in portuguese only (at least for now).

Get thee behind me…

Someone who has nothing better to do is tempting me with a possible price reduction on a Canon EF 17-40 f/4L USM lens (which is already on my wishlist so he knows I’m vulnerable to his fiendish attacks).
Yes you, you know who you are… Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?
This is starting to look like an arms race! (Private joke, sorry everyone else).

Assorted temptations

As if that wasn’t enough, Melo found out about a whole lot of nice, bright and shinny toys to spend our hard earned money on. <sigh…>

Well then, that’s it for now. Isn’t my life interesting? :-)

Growl

I can’t believe it took me this long to try out something that most everyone who has already tried has been praising so highly!

You know how it sucks that each and every application you have, and which needs to get your attention sometimes, has it’s own mechanism to do so?
I get annoyed by it constantly and I hate the lack of uniformity and especially the way some apps don’t allow me to configure the way I want it to talk to me.

What would be nice was for the system to provide a generic notification mechanism, with an open interface that all applications could use and which could be configured at the system level, both for the notification method and appearance but also for each individual application.

Well, Growl does just that! And even though it can be improved it already does a bang-up job.

Baptizado do Diogo

Foi ontem (7 de Novembro) o baptizado do Diogo (o meu primeiro sobrinho).

De cada vez que há um acontecimento mais importante referente a ele eu apercebo-me que ainda não me entrou por completo o significado total do Diogo ter nascido.

Os meus pais são avós. Os meus tios são tios-avós. Os meus avós são bisavós!!

How cool is that? :-):w

Tim Booth at the Aula Magna

Just came back from the concert.

First off I just have to say that I like Tim Booth a lot. And I liked James a lot too (probably even more). And they (James) have been to Portugal more times than I care to remember. And I managed to miss every single one of their concerts. Every. Single. One. That’s what being young, broke and stupid does to you.
Well then, now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with it.

This concert was based mainly on Tim’s new album, Bone, a few tracks from his previous one, Booth and the Bad Angel (made by him and Angelo Badalamenti —that’s right the one from Twin Peaks and so on— and which I still like even better than Bone) and a couple of songs from James.

The concert was great, albeit starting almost an hour late. I’m definitely getting old as this things just piss me off. Actually no, I’ve always hated this kind of thing. Not in another type of concert like in a festival or something like that where you expect it to happen and don’t care at that point, but in a single, booked concert? Almost an hour? Come on!

Still they did get there and they did put on a show. And what a show! This is clearly a band made up of people who know their stuff. Tim is a great composer, this is well known (and I’m not counting tastes here, if you hate it, you hate it) and also a great performer, but the rest of the band is more than capable of carrying their own weight around him. The playing was almost flawless during the whole show and even the hardest vocals were always right on the stop. Just great!

As I said the musics that were played were mostly from Tim’s two latest albums (heh, just can’t bring myself around to say latest CDs… Guess it is just as well I don’t say latest records. If you don’t know what the heck I’m on about you’re too young, go read some Marilyn Manson reviews now, shoo!) but there was still a great rendition of Laid and another mind shattering version of Sometimes. But the best part was that they did not play Sit Down, despite the shrieking pleas from some half crazed girl on the middle of the room! :-)

All in all a great (almost) hour and a half concert with a very simple lineup (one guitar, one bass guitar, one keyboard and one guy on main vocals), very loud sound, lots of distortion on the guitars… Sometimes it sounded like the good old rock concerts of my youth. Sometimes it was just so soft. Other times the vocals just filled the room all by themselves. A great time all around.

And I like the Aula Magna room more and more each time. This time there was even a girl siting a few sits over with a great big SLR camera and a great big lens on it, shooting almost in front of everyone (not to mention all the point-and-shoots and the cell-phone cameras) and no one bothered her. Now this was frustrating as I was in the front row of the “normal” seats (not the doctorate chairs but right behind them) and I could have got some beautiful shots from that position. Oh well, maybe next time I’ll remember.

I’ve been real lucky lately regarding concerts. Almost every one I’ve been to has been great, as opposed to last year when I had some big disappointments. Either I’m getting better at picking them (and people who offer me the tickets —as was the case this time— too) or I’ve just has plain dumb luck. Either way, let the good times roll! :-)

Feriado

A mudança de hora é uma chatice e uma estupidez de todo o tamanho. às cinco e meia da tarde é praticamente de noite e ainda vamos perder um bom bocado de dia até ao pico do Inverno.

E agora o meu (fabuloso) dia de feriado:

Estou inscrito no ginásio Solinca há quase um ano. No início, com o objectivo de me pôr em forma para a época de ski, fui bastante assíduo. Mal sabia que não iria poder ir esquiar nesse ano, mas adiante. Passado esse período inicial e visto que eu detesto o ginásio, comecei a ir cada vez menos.
Hoje voltei ao ginásio de manhã, após uns meses largos de ausência e aconteceu uma coisa que certamente não haverá muita gente com quem se tenha passado o mesmo: quando cheguei ao ginásio e fui procurar a minha ficha com os esquemas que estava a seguir não a encontrei no lugar. Quando pedi a um dos monitores para ver o que se passava fiquei a saber que como já não aparecia por lá há tanto tempo a minha ficha foi retirada e “expirou”. Tenho de fazer a avaliação de novo. Não uma reavaliação, mas uma avaliação de primeira vez. De novo!
Se me preocupasse o suficiente com isso isto seria embaraçoso! :-)

Bom, de tarde fomos aproveitar o sol (que tivemos a sorte incrível de ter hoje e que não se deve repetir muito mais vezes este ano) até à Costa da Caparica e depois ao Guincho.

Entretanto as tentativas de encontrar um cinema com a versão original do Shark Tale a horas interessantes falhou redondamente. Acho que se quisermos ver esse filme vamos ter de ir para Lisboa ou então contentarmo-nos com a versão dobrada.
Claro que há sempre o DVD dentro de algum tempo, mas a Tuxa gostava mesmo de ir ao cinema vê-lo e desta vez sabia bem não perder o filme como de costume…

Moon shots

Tonight there was a big (although not full) moon right in front of my living room’s balcony.
This prompted me to try something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: take some pictures of the moon as seen through Tuxa’s telescope.

This is a small and weak telescope but I does allow a great view of the moons surface even with the smallest lens (the one I used for the shots.

Of course I don’t have a camera adapter for the telescope (yet…) so I ended up trying my luck with a really flimsy setup: I put the telescope on its tripod pointing at the moon and used the angular eye piece so that the piece was pointing back and upwards but very low (due to the moon being really high in the sky). I then setup my EOS 10D camera on it’s own (very old and broken but still serviceable in controlled conditions) tripod and got the lens as close to the telescope’s eye piece as I possibly could.

Then I just fired away a few shots and after checking out the results I wasn’t too disappointed (considering the precarious conditions I to take them in).

[There where a couple of examples here, but unfortunately the photos got lost in the way.]

I just wish I had remembered to clean out the telescope’s lens… :-)