If you are going to vote in the next electoral round, then you might be baffled by the choices that the Italian parties offer you. Valentino sent me to this link to find my position in the political panorama: Elezioni 2008. E tu dove sei?. It is a quick test on differentiating topics for the different parties that gives you the party closest to your opinions.
Home Sw-eth Home
When I was a child Lego Technics was about to come and the term “Steampunk” wasn’t even in Gibson and Sterling minds. And that’s a pity because there would have been a lot of fascinating stuff to do like this Dardenbahst. On a complete different steam, I relocated my PC in the living room on a small desk. Unfortunately the phone plug is far away from it so I decided to solve the problem with the homeplug powerline.
Homeplug is a standard that solves easily and promptly the cabling problem in private house, where you are unlikely allowed (by wife or parents) to dig through walls to lie CAT5 cables or, even worse, to leave such cabling on the floor for longer than a couple of breaths.
The homeplug solution creates a network over the power line that are already cabled. The standard is one, but the devices you can shop for have different speeds ranging from 14 to 200Mbits/s (with prices varying accordingly). I opted for a couple of Atlantis adapters at 85Mbits/s and shelled out 85€ for both.
Unlike several advanced technology device, they worked quite “plug’n’playable”. Just plug into the power outlet and connect the patch ethernet cable. Then you have to run the Atlantis utility (Windows only) to set the encryption password.
The only glitch I found is that the utility is supposed to remotely configure any device provided you have its password (printed on the case). I had found no way to do that, so I just temporarily attached the other device to the PC, configured it too and then put it back to it final location. Done.
While talking about cables I had to notice that the small PC desk is not large enough to hide the forest of cabling behind the PC. Power supply, USB connections, ethernet cables, monitor and so on, each device accounts for at least 2 cables. Wouldn’t it be nice if all this stuff could communicate through the homeplug standard? In this way every box would have just the power line.
Oil price vs. $/€ exchange rate
Oil price is monotonically rising, right now is approaching 110$/barrel while just a bunch of years ago it was around 70$. At the same time the $/€ exchange rate is increasing, that is a single euro can buy more and more dollars. Oil market is based on dollars, so comparing the rate exchange and the oil price we can determine whether in Europe the oil price in € should raise or fall. According to this article (in Italian) written by Massimiliano Marzo (who covers an undefined role at Bologna University) oil price and $/€ exchange rate are rather correlated, apparently to keep a steady level so that the oil producers maintain the same value per barrel regardless of the dollar depreciation.
You know you are old when…
… your youngest coworker not only never watched “The Muppet Show“, he doesn’t even know what a “Muppet Show” is. I had that uneasiness feeling!
Fedora Core 8 audio
Fedora Core is supposed to be “bleeding edge” technology. What you may not expect is that it puts the edge while you provide the bleeding. Suppose you want to write an audio application, something simple, gathering audio from a microphone and feeding audio to a speaker. How could it be a nightmare?
Quite easily it is right from the beginning. How many audio API does linux have? Two? Three? Well, I counted seven – OSS, alsa, jack, esd, pulseaudio, openAL, gstreamer. You may argue that not all these APIs are on the same abstraction level, yes, I agree, nonetheless you have to decide what to pick and hope that the API you picked is widespread enough among your target customers.
I had some legacy code that relied on OSS, so I stuck with that. Knowing that Alsa was the answer to OSS, I tried it out and I left wondering which was the question. Alsa is significantly more complex to program than OSS, the bare minimum playback code is longer for ALSA than OSS.
So I gave up with ALSA.
Next problem is when I tried my legacy code on the brand new Fedora Core 8. The microphone seems not to work. I tried the command line OSS test with:
# cat /dev/dsp >/tmp/foo
just to discover that no audio was collected.
After some twiddling and after having tried the canned solutions I found without success, I decided that I need another distro to test my code.
This time too, as soon as I find a solution there is a new problem ready for it. Fedora Core 8 uses logical volumes, so it is not straightforward to shrink them from say Debian install. In order to resize a logical volume, first you have to unmount the partition in it, resize the partition, and eventually shrink the logical volume.
You can’t do this on the default install in a running system because there is just a single partition with the whole system (but “/boot”). You can’t do either from the Debian install because “etch” doesn’t manage logical volumes.
Third approach I went for another PC-like device we are developing for a customer. Before doing anything, I tested the OSS driver on this box and it worked, so I downloaded my code and … “error: missing libSDL”.
Sooner or later I will master this adversity, I’m sure, I just hope not to bleed too much in process.
Deadlock in practice
Hardly you can get a better idea of what a deadlock is than looking at this picture:
(from The daily WTF)
Incidentally this appears to be not just a real life deadlock, but also the results of software bug as most of the deadlocks I’m faced with turn out to be.
I also guess that most of the drivers and passengers involved in the jam would have heartedly approved that extra bit of testing, or that extra money required to hire an experienced professional that would have prevented a deadlock-avoiding device such as a traffic light transformed itself in the deadlock-causing device.
Talking about problem-solving, how would you recover from this situation?
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Documents delivered
Documents for our adoption process have been delivered on Feb 19th. Go go go! Well the current problem is to make a homely room for our two children. After identifying the room (not that hard, since we don’t live in a palace), we stumbled on the first problem – that room has been filled, during these 11 years of wedding, with tons of stuff… mostly mine. There is a desk with the PC, two bookcases, videogames, another small PC desk, and also, at least according to my wife, a countless number of cables and wires.
It is a matter of fact that problems don’t exist alone in their space, they usually bring a number of sub-problems, pre-problems and post-problems, clustering together much like troubles.
So the pre-problem for making room is to find some space to fill without offending anyone or incurring in any legal consequence. Indeed the canonical place to store stuff that rather than throw away is better forget in some dark and cobweb ridden dungeon, is the cellar.
The last time I opened our cellar door I had to quickly grab things falling outside. Not an easily solvable problem, but a tractable one, at least. Last Saturday afternoon my wife and me went down to our cellar and started digging out rubbish and set a couple of shelves. At the end of the afternoon we were worn out, a pile of stuff waited to be brought to the recycle area, but we managed to insert some emptiness in the cellar.
Sunday had been devolved to move stuff out of the room and prepare it for the cellar, the public library or the recycle area. Given the amount of stuff moved out and the amount of stuff yet to be moved, I am quite surprised that the floor hasn’t collapsed on the storey below long ago.
In a single week end we have moved out most of the books, I think we’d better start moving out stuff faster or we’ll finish to have some help by our children.
Two?!!
Sometimes there is a sequence of unfortunate events all happening very close together. For example if you think that having a second car is a good backup against mechanical troubles, well it is not. Last Saturday the flagship of our little car fleet went into major troubles, while the backup already left me in Castellanza outskirts. I just called the mechanic and he told me there is problem with coils they are to be replaced. Well that’s the third time. My Scenic is going to cost me more in coils than in gasoline!
The first time the warranty period had just expired. It was a manufacturing fault so Renault offered the repair at half the price. The second time was last year. The mechanic replaced the four coils, at least that’s what he said. According to the current mechanic, three of the installed coils are of the same kind while the fourth differs.
Anyway, if this is the Universal Order, acting through the Law of Large Numbers, taking back what he gave us by the wonderful event occurred on January 23… well I feel like the old Jack Burton saying – Just remember what ol’ Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big old storm right in the eye and says, ‘Give me your best shot. I can take it.'”
Five?!
According to the latest reports, 5 submarine Internet cables have been brought down either by “accidental” cuts or by power supply failure. Now, though I am fascinated by conspiracy theories, I am not an easy believer. But this time I found quite hard to opt for the coincidence. As brilliantly put by Auric Goldfinger in the famous James Bond movie: “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”