costela.net

I guess you should start worrying if buying a big stack of books is the biggest endorphin rush in your day-to-day. Specially considering the time it’ll take to actually go through them…

I was trying not to complain about it, but now that the number of people asking me about it is getting bigger, my frustration got the best of me.

So unfortunately I won’t see you all there.

Changes:

• added an INSTALL file by popular request
• use LIBPURPLE_LIBDIR in install target

Get it here

Well, what do you know? Sometimes you can actually find some pretty interesting things, when looking for something totally unrelated.

My heathen gods bless the internet.

Original site: catpianofilm.com

Absolutely, but there are at least two workarounds:

1. Adding

   BINDMOUNTS="/var/cache/apt/archives"
   APTCACHE=""

   to your .pbuilderrc, in case you don’t need any special separation of local and pbuilder caches (that’s my case).

2. Using apt-proxy or the like, which has its overhead, but also its other advantages.

None of them seem all that bad to me, considering the sensible speed improvements to pbuilder, but the ultimate decision probably depends on the amount of disk-access the packages in question need.

After watching Avatar twice – first the normal version then the 3D one – I must say it’s a pretty interesting movie.

If nothing else for being another brilliant example of media as message. The plot exists as a simple support for the astounding aesthetic voyage, being specially appealing for those that appreciate the fact most of it was drawn, technically assisted as it may have been. The eye-candy blurs the line between reality and animation so successfully it barely needs any suspension of disbelief.

The plot, on the other hand, needs plenty. If you’re only interested in the higher art of story telling or the myriad social and cultural implications of human-alien interaction, the movie will probably disappoint. It’s not a bad story per se, but it’s just too basic to be of interest, even if well told and superbly assisted by the visuals.

It’s a pity the producers didn’t deign the story worthy of a more serious take, specially considering the extreme graphic violence. It’s certainly no kiddie movie so I see no reason why the story couldn’t have been sensibly improved and turned into a compelling argument about several different interesting dilemmas with only a few basic twists.

As it stands it surely takes the prize as the most beautiful film I’ve seen in a while and the 3D experience only adds to it, but it could have achieved classic status had they taken just a few more risks.

When I moved here someone told me “nah, it almost never snows here“.

Granted, that’s not a lot of snow, but it’s been there for a couple of days already and it’s still snowing, so certainly more than “almost never”. Specially considering we’re not even in winter yet.

On a different note, I think this cellphone camera can actually do some half-decent pictures, with good lightning conditions:

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to buy a real camera in the near future, but it counts for something.

Just some quick superficial observations on the Debian/Ubuntu package distributed by Google:

• Most files are installed in /opt/google/.
• It attempts to patch /usr/share/gnome-control-center/gnome-default-applications.xml on postinst (maybe legacy compatibility? Someone with more gnome-fu than me care to explain?).
• The postinst also automatically adds a souce for updates to /etc/apt/sources.list.d and an archive key (this is IMHO the worst part)
• It includes a daily cronjob that – at least at first glance – tries to do the same things the postinst did (new apt source, archive key, etc) and some further archive configuration. The cron script is called at the end of postinst.
• A casual look at objdump suggests it’s statically linked to libv8
• On a slightly more positive note, it at least seems to successfully undo most of the changes once removed, with the exception of the added archive key and the above mentioned patch to gnome’s default apps list (that is: if there’s any situation it actually gets applied).

I understand it might be too much hassle doing it the right way (from the corporate POV), but then why not simply cooperate a bit more with the community? Hopefully they’ll accept some criticism and suggestions.
Or even better: they could simply reuse all the work being done to officially package Chromium.

UPDATE: forgot to mention that the version string (something like “4.0.249.43-r34537″) doesn’t follow policy. Not a huge deal for a non-distributable package, but in the name of forward-compatibility – if Chrome ever becomes fully open-source – it could be smart to adopt something like “4.0.249.43-0.x”.

Ever since my misadventures into ACPI-land with my old laptop I’ve been quite curious to better understand how it’s all implemented under Linux. I skimmed the ACPI spec and that may have given me some insight on how to hack together a temporary fix to the problem I had then, but it doesn’t really count as real understanding.

Since I don’t currently have the necessary time, I wrote it off as just another one of my many dead-end interests, but I nevertheless remained subscribed to the linux-acpi mailing list and the curiosity was still there, so it was a nice surprise to read a couple of posts by Mathew Garret on the subject, elucidating some bits of technicality, and I just decided to show some appreciation by posting about it! (I figure there’s not enough appreciation out there, generally speaking…)

Who knows, maybe someday I’ll get my act together and be able to contribute some code?

Fixing a stupid bug I was too hasty to notice (even though it was obvious).
Nothing to see here, move along.