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During the last ten years more or less, I often wished to be a chemical engineer because I’m pretty sure that I could enjoy my free time without finding someone that bothers me with phrases like “You are a chemical engineer… oh, I was just looking for someone to fix the plant I have at home”. Unfortunately, I’m not this kind of designer, I’m a computer engineeer and I’m pretty bored finding pepole that:
- have some device or software to make up and running (preferably with some dark side OS);
- have some parent/girlfriend/kid stuck into some unchallenging problem.
Through the years, I’ve tried to develop some kind of strategy to avoid these situations without much success: they guess I’m a Comp. Eng. even if I don’t talk about software (yes, even when I don’t wear obvious hacker style t-shirts :D). Any help is much appreciated.
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At the end of each of the last few years I sent a short message to my friends with a text like “Dear Name, I wish you a Happy New Year”.
It was not possible to send a custom message to each of them using my mobile, so with a bit of scripting I got the job done.
First bind the serial of your GSM mobile/modem with
rfcomm bind 0 xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx 2 # 2 is my first serial channel
then, in a loop, use something like
gsmsendsms -d /dev/rfcomm0 $NUMBER "Dear $NAME, I wish you a Happy New Year"
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Piergiorgio is the man_of_the_day; my day and yours, even if you are not Italian or if you are not an Italian radical.
Sometimes I have to deal with people who use a tentatively OS that, among other things, doesn’t understand UNIX-like permissions :).
I modified a bash script of Kaz Kylheku (found in bash-doc) which for a given folder recursively changes:
- the permissions of all its files to 644 (and “dos2unix” them);
- the permissions of all its subdirectories to 755
You can find it here.
UPDATE (2007-01-11): it doesn’t make sense to run dos2unix against a non text file so I have just uploaded here a “-t” version that processes with dos2unix only some kind of file as in:
if [[ "$file" =~ '[css|html|js|php]$’ ]]; then
dos2unix $file
fi
An artificial solar system made of six stars of the same kind placed to make a hexagon: this view is described in an old novel by Arthur C. Clarke (I’ve forgotten its title, sorry); the whole thing was made by an alien civilization before its extinction and, million years later, it still reminds the human explorer the greatness of its creators.
This story came back to my mind some weeks ago reading a well known article about what could survive our civilization in the long term (I lost the link, sorry again).
Our radio signal is larger than a century so its “sphere” will grow endlessly or something… but what about a more rock solid sign? I know we are not ready for an artificial solar system (we are on a budget and I guess some green warriors will try to stop the whole project :D) but what could we create, or what have we already created that will survive us in the long term? No, nuclear pollution doesn’t count :).
It’s funny that these kind of things are written on a blog whose name means temporariness :).
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As you may have noticed, yesterday I started to use FeedBurner and today it states that there are, on average, seven feed readers of temporaneità: it’s not that much but having some not random readers is a good start and a good surprise :).
So dear members of the seven club, let me say that I would be pleased to offer you a round of good beer or grappa (if you are not Italian and you have never tried it) if you come here in Piedmont before 2007 :).
Writing using English helps me to avoid offending too much most of the Italian journalists :-\
I use the Internet every day for work, without any problems, even recently.
Today I discovered they’ve started to bother all of us with a new national emergency: we would all be affected by a strong spyware epidemy.
I don’t want to say they are paid to omit that the computers which are affected are running one OS of the well known infamous family but… I know they are so please, sometimes stop preaching about freedom and do something without an eye to your damn wallet!
I bought a Samsung SyncMaster 204B monitor. It’s a 1600×1200 20” with a 5 ms response and bright colors (for a complete review of it, you can point your browser to HardwareCentral). Here I just want to let you know it shines perfectly with Kubuntu :) and that here you can find my xorg.conf, which is a modified version of the one I use with my laptop (Acer TravelMate 8003Lmi which is shipped with ATI Mobility Radeon 9700). I switch between the two xorg.conf of my laptop inside or outside my office (aka with or without the Samsung monitor).
UPDATE (2006-12-21): if it still does not work, try following this Wiki then activate the driver directly with the Kubuntu video control manager (and use one of the ATI versions of my xorg.conf).
UPDATE (2007-04-23): with Feisty it works even better. :)
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I admit I didn’t do my homework :) so I tried this test to check the knowledge and the ability to recognize logical fallacies: I got a modest 60% score. What about you?
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Come promemoria personale ed eventuale notizia per altri, gli unici siti di social bookmarking italiano indicati da Wikipedia che ho trovato funzionanti sono: