02.28.07
Fortune of the Day
After some time without a decent quote around here…
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”
– Albert Einstein
02.26.07
Scheme and its implementation
While trying to find references regarding the keywords “pure interpreter” due to a thread on the r6rs mailing list, I just found out this book: An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation . I haven’t looked into it yet but it seems to be worthwhile of a look.
02.24.07
Ah… music!
A little bit after I arrived to Southampton after Christmas I decided this would be the year I would go and take some time every day and dedicate it to the study of music theory and playing an instrument. Since I had played the classical guitar for a few years when I was about 10 (which means I knew nothing about it!) it was a nice instrument to play (although the piano was also a possibility). Anyway, there’s a reason why in at the end of the day I sticked to the guitar.
When I was a kid, my mother (hope you’re there thinking about me mum, I’m surely thinking about you) used to take me and my brother to a beach in Sesimbra. One day, I remember perfectly (it’s surely one of my oldest memories), I say a full-grown man playing the guitar under a big sun umbrella to his wife and kids. Well, for some reason, I thought I would want to be able to exactly that one day: Play to my family, and that thought stays with me up until today (it’s funny how some simple events and people we never knew and probably never will know can change our lives for ever).
Well, this is the year. So, I talked with a PhD colleague of mine which plays the piano, and the classical guitar and has a huge knowledge regarding classical music, mainly because his father was a professional pianist, and he advised me on how to learn the classical guitar. I knew only one thing: I didn’t want to pay a guy huge amounts of money for him to teach me, what I could learn with a lot of patience and time by myself (and it happens that I have both!). So, my colleague, John, borrowed me his concert classical guitar and I bought a bunch of books which I’ve been reading daily with some time for practising in the guitar. Another of my aims was not just to be able to play some tunes but to know the theory behind the thing. I prefer playing a very simple tune and know the theory behind it than playing a very complex, shine and popular tune without knowing the basic concepts of tempo, rhythm, harmonics, etc. So I got four books:
- The AB Guide to Music Theory Vol 1
, by Eric Taylor – to study the theory behind the music.
- Solo Guitar Playing: Book 1 (with CD)
, by Frederick Noad – which is a tutorial from beginner to advanced guitar playing which will take me about 2 years to go through.
- Aaron Shearer Learning the Classic Guitar: Part 1
and Learning the Classic Guitar Part 2
which will serve as a reference guide to playing the classical guitar, as well as music reading, positioning, nail care, etc.
Now, I’ve already done quite a bit of exercises and I’ve played some very simple things along with arpeggios from Noads book. One of the most things which surprised me enormously is was the importance of nail care and surely they do all the difference. Just by trimming them appropriately and having them at the correct size changed my plays completely. It was a huge improvement! :-)
Well, I’m really happy with my development in the last two months (almost) and hopefully I’ll be able to play something more complex later, who knows even post some recorded plays from me! heheh (that should be something!)
Now I’ll leave you with some references to Kent Murdicks videos at YouTube (which knows pretty well Shearer’s method). Enjoy:
- Positioning the Guitar
- P-Stroke
- Rest Stroke
- Free Stroke
- Tremolo
- Arpeggios
- Left Hand Part I
- Left Hand Part II
- Left Hand Part III
On more two music related references, I found MusiXTeX a very nice typesetting solution for music and on software Rosegarden is a dream come true. Obviously I don’t compose anything as of yet but it is useful as a metronome and as a checker, i.e., as a way to check that I’m playing the exercises correctly. I copy the exercises from the book to rosegarden and I follows rosegarden’s play. I can then obviously increase the number of beats per measure as I get proficient on a given exercise. It’s very, very good!
The Way to Enlightenment [Part II]
Basic Programs & Configuration
Ok, so we have a usable system but it’s quite rude to use it like this without any tweaking, configuration or side-apps which will improve your user experience. So, basically in what follows I’ll install and configure some basic apps and I’ll leave configuration of Enlightenment itself for Part III.
Eterm
First we need a terminal. If we really want “full” enlightenment get eterm sources from:
http://www.eterm.org/ or using gentoo:
$ emerge eterm
(couldn’t be more simple!)
Now, this is a hell of a terminal and configuration is not so simple so I’ll leave that for part IV. Still you can already start one with the default options:
GKrellm2
Now get this magic app: GKrellm2 which is a monitor which seats on your desktop and informs you of what is going on.
If also has some pretty nice plugins which you can install to do more that what is initially programmed to and a set of themes so you can change its look to better fit your style. So, again, you can find it’s page here: http://members.dslextreme.com/users/billw/gkrellm/gkrellm.html to install from source or if you’re using gentoo:
$ emerge -av gkrellm gkrellm-plugins gkrellm-themes
After this everything is installed and I advise you to start the gkrellmd daemon at the beginning so:
$ rc-update add gkrellmd default
$ /etc/init.d/gkrellmd start
will install the daemon in the default runlevel and start it. Now, fire up eterm and do
$ gkrellm2 &
$ exit
will start gkrellm2 and exit the terminal without quitting the application (of course, we will have to set up enlightenment to start this whenever E16 itself starts but that I’ll leave for Part III, among other gkrellm2 tweaks).
I like to have it on my top right part of the screen so I just drag it there and right click it to get to the configuration window which should look like this:
The options are pretty straightforward to set as are the plugins and the ones I’ll describe are biased to my taste, suit yourself when picking options and plugins for you.
No sensors. I enable the 24hour clock with seconds shown. CPU is left untouched. Enable my disk usage graph, disable net ppp0, disable mail check, enable battery time and uptime.
I didn’t setup any plugins.
This is just a very quick review of what I did. It by no means is conformant with this gkrellm shot or with your system. Just choose those you prefer.
And finally I selected the Invisible theme.
aDesklets
aDesklets is a nice thing for your desktop. Mainly I want two desklets: photo and yab. First get adesklets from the site or:
$ emerge adesklets
Then let’s install the desklets:
$ adesklets -i
Select the desklets you wish to install and that’s it, they’ll be automagically installed to your home dir.
Get to the terminal and run the scripts corresponding to the desklets you wish to start, in my case:
$ .desklets/photo-0.0.5/photo.py
$ .desklets/yab-0.0.2/yab.py
Press r in both for register them. Now start adesklets
$ adesklets
and the desklets should appear in your desktop every time you start adesklets.
KeyBindings Editor
Now, let’s one of my favourite feature working: Keybindings.
Get e16keyedit from http://www.enlightenment.org/ or:
$ emerge -av e16keyedit
Well, now, run it! You get as you can see a whole bunch of already defined keybindings. I define a bunch of other to run applications I commonly use without accessing the menus. Emacs, DrScheme, Firefox and Eterm:
I’ve zoomed a bit so you can see what I configured:
The usage is really simple, you just select a key, a modifier and an action. Remember to click on “New Keybinding” each time you start creating a new one and on save at the end, otherwise they’ll no be saved!
If you are confused by the Eterm line, don’t worry, I’ll explain it in Part IV and I’ll also what goes into .eterm.cfg. :-)
Next we’ll configure enlightenment itself, along with some udev rules and an easy way to mount devices.
02.23.07
The Way to Enlightenment [Part I]
Getting Enlightenment
Well, for those using gentoo is pretty simple:
emerge -av enlightenment
With this you’ll get enlightenment 0.16.8.1 (currently), since this is the current stable Gentoo version. For other distros it should be pretty easy too, however I don’t know how.
Note: I’ve just sent a bug report for Gentoo to add 0.16.8.6 to the portage repository, however, it’ll still probably take a while. Anyway, an easy way to get this version is just to do, as root:
$ cp /usr/portage/x11-wm/enlightenment/enlightenment-0.16.8.5.ebuild /usr/portage/x11-wm/enlightenment/enlightenment-0.16.8.6.ebuild
$ ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~arch” emerge -av enlightenment
For those installing from sources the procedure is simple since development is based on autotools so it is pretty standard. The sources can be find at : http://www.enlightenment.org/Enlightenment/Get_Enlightenment/
This is the first big step for the series of Enlightenment configuration which should be coming up one at a time for the following days. After this you should be able to select E16 from your current desktop manager (usually kdm, gdm or xdm) and start it up.
And you get…
02.22.07
Muslim girl loses case… girl wins the case!
Regarding this issue, which I’ve not mentioned here before, I cannot move on without a few words.
First, my point of view in this case is simple. The girl goes to class to be taught, not to practice religion. So if using the full-face niqab hinders the teaching, she has no right to use it if the teacher decides that she shouldn’t be using it.
Fortunately, there are still people in this world with some sense of justice and this is one of them. Like we, in Portugal at least, do not let our students go with caps to classes, not even for religious excuses, it would be even worse to have a girl wearing a full-face niqab in classes. We could go into a major discussion regarding the use of caps in classes but I don’t want to go into it right now (I don’t have a well-thought opinion on this) but I know that some teachers I had prohibited it.
Still, although the muslim girl lost, the girl behind the muslim connotation wins the case…
Moreover, should I ask, like Dawkins does, why is the girl called muslim??? Does she want to be a muslim? Oh well, she’s not a muslim… the poor little girl had just the bad luck to be born from muslim parents (and exchange muslim here by catholics, christians, jews or whatever you feel like) and so she’s, by default, one of them!
SETI Breakthrough
Via slashdot, it seems that there was a major breakthrough with SETI one of these days. Great! One alien laptop found!
After reading the story I could not help wondering what would be like in Portugal to get to a Police station and say : “Hey, I have an IP for my stolen computer, can you find it?”
UnBargain: The X Files – Complete Collection
The X Files – Complete Collection
Note: If you are able to get the other bargains (previously posted) on X-Files this boxset is useless since it is just a shoebox with all the other boxes in it. So if you’re really a fan, get all the other boxes individually!
