Plano Inclinado
Plano Inclinado é o nome de um programa da SIC Notícias, em que Mário Crespo juntamente com (pelo menos dois dentre) Nuno Crato, Henrique Medina Carreira, João Duque e um convidado, debatem semanalmente vários problemas do nosso real país (educação, economia, justiça, …). O programa é interessante, e está disponível online, no videos.sapo.pt. À data em que escrevo, o vídeo do último programa, sobre justiça precisamente, pode ser encontrado aqui. Mas ver o programa online padece de um mal: mesmo com uma boa ligação à net, o vídeo não carrega depressa o suficiente para que possa ser visualizado sem “pausas”. E é por isto que escrevo: para quem usar sistemas operativos que tenham a ferramenta wget, tem uma solução simples: na página onde está o vídeo de cada programa, é dado um URL para “Blogar vídeo”. No caso do programa que referi acima, o URL dado é o seguinte:
<embed src=”http://rd3.videos.sapo.pt/play?file=http://rd3.videos.sapo.pt/AdFRO8c3K9QZBN5UyhkD/mov/1” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowFullScreen=”true” width=”400″ height=”350″></embed>
Para obter o vídeo, basta usar o wget com a parte a negrito (para os URLs de outros vídeos do programa, a correspondente parte a negrito deve ser trivial de observar). No nosso exemplo:
$ wget http://rd3.videos.sapo.pt/AdFRO8c3K9QZBN5UyhkD/mov/1
Isto cria um ficheiro com a extensão .flv no disco, que pode ser visto com player preferido do utilizador (mplayer, vlc, …).
Two Vim tidbits
The first one is a boon to *nix programmers: how to open a man page from inside vim! Turns out this is rather easy: your vim installation came with the file /usr/share/vim/vim72/ftplugin/man.vim, which defines the command Man (with a capital ‘M’), which you can call like so: :Man _some_manpage_. To make this command available, just add this to your .vimrc:
runtime! ftplugin/man.vim
Now, while editing a C file for instance, you can do a :Man printf and vim will horizontally split the screen, and display the manpage in the upper half. If you’re like me, and prefer to split the screen vertically, do ^Wt^WH.
The second tidbit is about Vim folding. Whatever the fold method used (indent, marker, …), if one is used, when opening a file, all folds present will be collapsed. More often than not, I find this an annoyance, so after setting the indent method, I added another line that expands all the folds, like so (again done in ~/.vimrc):
set foldmethod=indent
set foldminlines=10
autocmd BufRead *.* norm zR
The last line expands all folds; the middle line is actually to prevent folds with less than 10 lines (which is fairly common in source code, given that the fold method is indent).
Paranoid tip of the week: ScroogleSSL
Scroogle is a sort of “web-wrapper” of Google. It essentially acts as an interface, that performs ordinary google searches while (literally) detaching the client executing the search from google’s prying eyes. To make this even better, it allows (unlike google) for searches to be done with https, and not only plain http (accessing https://google.com will just redirect you to the normal unencrypted google page). And now for the fun part: how to add SSL enabled Scroogle to Firefox search bar. First download the “Add to Search Bar” Firefox extension, then restart Firefox and go to the SSL Scroogle page, right click on the search form, and select “Add to Search Bar”. Select a name for the new search engine, and you’re done!
Privacy: Don’t be evil
Virtually every single time I’ve mentioned online privacy related concerns to anyone—even computer engineers—the reaction I get is similar: a shrug, followed by comments like: “yeah right, like that’s ever going to be a problem…”.
I don’t think this is because people stopped valuing their privacy. Rather, most people don’t seem to realize the extent of the lack of privacy they experiment when going online. This is hardly surprising: after all, in the comfort (and privacy!) of your homes, using a computer is not an experience likely to be perceived as privacy threatening—in fact, it may well happen the opposite, because you’re not interacting with actual people, but sitting comfortably behind a screen. This must be the reason, I’m led to surmise, why so many people on Facebook will happily provide their personal details—i.e. accept an invitation to befriend—pretty much anyone else, including a green plastic frog. The meagre and dwindling online privacy we have now is perceived to be higher than that which we enjoy in our “away from keyboard” lives.
But it gets better—or rather, worse—than that. How? When the bulk of your online activities, be those web browsing, email, calender schedule, and even DNS queries(!) are all done by the same corporation, viz. Google. And I know that for instance in the case of Google Public DNS, they state that “In the permanent logs, we don’t keep personally identifiable information or IP information.”. But if they wanted to do that (say, they got a subpoena from law enforcement), they could do that. That’s a fact. And history shows us, time and time again, that whenever power can be abused, it will be abused. But it gets even worse.
How? Well, everything I mentioned so far about Google, are all potential problems. Right? Well, that potential came a lot closer to reality when Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, uttered these words:
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place
Now think for a second: it’s Google’s CEO who said that! If that does not wake us up against the danger of anything remotely resembling online privacy disappearing into oblivion, then I don’t know what will.
Oh by the way, a couple of years ago, some folks over CNET did this little experiment: they used the Google search engine to search about Schmidt himself; the results of said search having pissed the hell out of him. By his own twisted logic, he was doing a lot of things he shouldn’t be doing…
So what is the average computer user suppose to make out of this? The interview in The Register, where the quote comes from, ends like this:
CNBC asks Schmidt: “People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?” But he answers by scoffing at those who don’t trust Google at all.
Not that you’d expect anything less. As always, Schmidt’s holier-than-thou attitude is wonderfully amusing. Except that it’s not.
The way I see it, he’s acting a whole lot like a drug dealer: he knows better than to use the stuff he sells. Continuing with the analogy for a little bit, when CNET forced his own drug onto him, he exacted revenge on them. But what are those of us that don’t head a multi billion dollar company supposed to do, when that same drug is so overwhelmingly forced upon us? That is a question still left open.
Religious people
Despite counting myself as one of those, religion is not something you’re likely to see me write much about. However, this image was just too good not to post:
In fact, I would go even further:
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people—atheists included
Via Helder Sanches
Dear Mandy
In the United Kingdom, Lord Peter Mandelson, also known as “Mandy”, has been for some time now trying to implement a “three-strikes-and-you-are-out” law, to address the “problem” of online “piracy”. Public outcry has of course ensued, but isn’t it so much better when besides complaining, you’re also being witty, not to mention tremendously fun? Well, that’s exactly what British musician Dan Bull did, yet again 
Manufacturing hapiness?!
This is one of the most disturbing TED talks I’ve ever seen. Its author, Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, contends that happiness comes in two flavours: “natural happiness”, which is what you get when you get what you wanted, and “manufactured happiness” (Gilbert’s expression), which is what you could get otherwise. I emphasized “could” because, he contends, that while we humans have the ability to actually create happiness, most of us don’t do it. Why? Economics. Don’t ask, see the talk.
But before that, I want to point something out: what Gilbert calls manufactured happiness, is not something along the lines of “it is only at the tree loaded with fruit that people throw stones”—i.e. “yeah I didn’t get it, but it wasn’t that much good anyway”. In fact, his research group carried out an experiment, he tells, with people suffering from anterograde amnesia, that shows that something more fundamental is taking place: your actual, intrinsic preference changes!
Quoting myself: “Don’t ask, see the talk.”
Arch Linux + KDE4.2
Taking the suggestion of a colleague, I decided to install Arch Linux on my home desktop. Considering that Arch is one of those distros in which you setup most of the stuff, and the fact that I used LVM on top of LUKS encryption, I’d say the installation process (all three attempts of it) went rather well. And being a long time KDE user that shifted to GNOME when KDE 4.0 (which was more a pre alpha release than a full blown 4.0) came out, I had some mix expectations. But a long of work has been done from KDE 4.0 to 4.2, and as this was the version available in Arch, I decided to give it try. And while it still carries a lot more of eye-candy than I either need or want, many of the usability problems that riddled 4.0 were solved. In particular, I could now create a bar at the top edge of my screen, and throw shortcuts to applications in there. This is in no way as trivial as in KDE 3.5.*, but it turns out it’s not that complicated either. For the applications that have an entry in the K-menu, just drag them to the bar and you are done. For the ones that don’t, create a folder somewhere in your home—I use the Desktop folder, because shortcuts you place in there won’t actually show on the desktop; only widgets are shown—create the desired shortcut (in Dolphin), and drag to the top bar. You can do the same with links to some location (as opposite to shortcuts to an application), but I don’t do this because you can’t change the icon that gets placed in the top bar, and so if you place more than one, you can’t distinguish between them unless you hover the mouse each one).
Overall, it’s being a pleasant (if far from bump-less) ride. Arch seems to have the right trade-off (for me, at least 
) between low and high level. About KDE4, I’m still forming my opinion, but I like what I’ve seen so far 
Oh and as a final remark, the default KDE theme, dubbed Air, in blueish tones, is so much better than the previous! (which was dubbed Oxygen, and was in tones of… black. Go figure…)
