erroneous thoughts

Searching first for the documentation, and then for the author of a Perl module I was working with, I eventually found this rant:

But that’s not the best part. The best part was the end of the message. First there were some mail addresses. Of the kind you send a complaint or unsubscription request to and you get a new flood of spam, since now they know there IS someone sitting at the other end.

 [ ... ]

So according to this “responsible” person, it’s OK to post some nonsense to thousands of completely uninterested people, but it’s “SPAMing” if they dare to complain. Sweeeeet.

Well, I just want to make the following note to the author: in Brazil, they speak Portuguese! Only. They do not speak Spanish (that’s just the rest of south and centre America!)

You’ve all seen that kind of blog posts where it’s just one (or a bunch) of videos embedded in the html, right? Well here’s another, for no better reason that, I felt like it… <whim>

</whim>

this guy said he did not do this girl. Here’s the news in the Portuguese press.

It’s not usual to mix languages in the same post, but I particularly like this comment on the news (Portuguese):

O homem podia matar o Mundo inteiro e seria aclamado herói. Teve uma “escapadela” quase era cruxificado. Hipócrisia [sic] humana.

Depois de me ter explicado veementemente (links em inglês) sobre o porquê e a importância de proibir o fumar em lugares públicos fechados, ora eis que aqui vai mais uma “acha para a fogueira”. Há mais de um ano, quando se começou a discutir sobre a nova legislação anti-tabágica que se avizinhava no horizonte, essa mesma discussão despoletou no meu antigo departamento. E não fosse aquele um departamento de informática, depressa a discussão tomou conta das mailing lists. E justamente ao pesquisar por aquelas, encontrei um mail datado de 19/12/2006 (!!), onde um antigo professor explicava mais uma vez a mesma coisa: porque não se deve fumar em lugares fechados. O texto é claro, e cita factos, pelo que o reproduzo aqui (as boas fontes de informação devem ser disseminadas ) O email é reproduzido na íntegra (mas foi retirada a citação de um mail anterior de outra pessoa; este mail era um reply).

Obviamente que podemos e devemos proibir vícios (ou quaisquer outros
comportamentos) de umas pessoas quando eles afectam negativamente a
vida de outras pessoas.

O que está aqui em causa não é a liberdade dos fumadores fumarem. Os
fumadores podem fumar ao ar livre e em suas casas.

Para além de se querer fazer cumprir a ler, o que está em causa é a
saúde dos não fumadores.

Relembro que fumar mata. Vejamos alguns dados:
- De acordo com os últimos dados, morreram 8400 pessoas em Portugal
no ano 2000 por motivos relaccionados com o fumo do tabaco. Dessas,
457 nem sequer eram fumadores. Isto é, eram fumadores passivos [1].
Para comparação, morreram esta ano perto de 1000 pessoas nas estradas
Portuguesas. Ou seja, fumar mata 8 vezes mais do que nas nossas
perigosíssimas estradas.

- Na Europa toda, morrem mais de 19000 pessoas por ano por serem
fumadores passivos. [2]

- O fumo de tabaco contém mais de 4000 substâncias químicas, 40 das
quais podem causar ou favorecer o aparecimento de cancro [2].

- Aliás, o fumo do tabaco expirado pelos fumadores e respirado
passivamente pelos não-fumadores é mais tóxico, por ser mais rico em
monóxido de carbono e substâncias não-queimadas do que o próprio fumo
respirado directamente pelos fumadores. [2]

- O fumo de tabaco é tão claramente mau para os não fumadores que a
Organização Mundial de Saúde (WHO) declarou já em 1988 que “all
citizens have the right to smoke-free air in enclosed public places
and transport”. [3]

Dá que pensar, heim?

Cumprimentos,
Pedro Bizarro

Referências:
[1] “Smoking and Passive Smoking in the EU – Data per Country”
[2] “Impact of Passive Smoking in the EU – Overview”
Ambos disponíveis em:
http://pt.help-eu.com/pages/index-lst_dos-REPORTS.html

[3] WHO, “The Charter Against Tobacco, 1988″,
http://www.euro.who.int/AboutWHO/Policy/20010927_9

I once knew a guy that quit half-way through his Psychology degree because each time a class was over, he started thinking he was carrying whatever (psychological) disease the teacher was just lecturing about. Well, a couple of hours ago, a friend of mine sent me this link, telling me that he had finally uncovered the explanation for his idleness the past few months:

The procrastinator is often remarkably optimistic about his ability to complete a task on a tight deadline; this is usually accompanied by expressions of reassurance that everything is under control. (Therefore, there is no need to start.) For example, he may estimate that a paper will take only five days to write; he has fifteen days; there is plenty of time; no need to start. Lulled by a false sense of security, time passes. At some point, he crosses over an imaginary starting time and suddenly realizes, “Oh no! – I am not in control! There isn’t enough time!”

Oddly enough (or maybe not?) this is exactly how I would describe myself, somewhere in my third and fourth years as an undergrad! Odd? If I compare it with the years before that, well not so much. You see, this started when the projects I was getting assigned, despite remarkably laborious, were, well, dull. No interest whatsoever, nothing (or puny little few things) to learn. I guess then it’s no wonder that one is «optimistic about his ability to complete a task on a tight deadline». After all, learning was the hard stuff, right? Well, not if you study in a place were there is the annoyingly implicit assumption that quantity will eventually make for that lack of quality… hooray for my teachers!

I was never so glad for no longer being in college…

I meant to post about this earlier, but as I was beaten to it, I’ll just leave the link.

The post contains three embedded videos: the first is that standard crap “You wouldn’t steal” movie trailer you’re forced to view each time you go to the cinema… the second is a rebuttal of the first, and the third is a campaign video for the freedom to share!

Ideas regarding how to show this to Portuguese lawmakers are most welcome.

Ok, so I’ve used aMsn for quite a while now (for at least some two and a half years). I like it a lot, it works great, lots of extra stuff: plugins, themes, and a very cool feature to annoy windows live msn users: you can send bulk nudges, without having to wait some seconds in between nudges. Very effective But we’re diverging…

As I was saying, I like aMsn a lot, what I don’t like as much is the language in which it is written: Tcl/Tk. But it was not like if I was going to start coding for amsn, so no worries. Until I found that there was no plugin (or any other way) to use OTR with amsn. So… learn Tcl? I’ve played with it for a very little while in college, but as I said, didn’t like it. Coding in Python, for instance, would be a ton more fun.

Of course, the first thing I did Google for “amsn python”; and that’s how I ended up in the emesene homepage. Gave it a try, and I’ve running it since. It lacks some things aMsn has, but overall it’s very good, specially for such a young project. While surveying their homepage, found this blog entry:

This post is to encourage people who want to start coding for emesene and don’t know how, for this you must have some understanding of programming, not necessary python.

The first pointer given is for a Python introduction (available on-line) book. I mention this here because, unlike other more “standard” introductions, this one gets right to the point: for instance, there are no “hello world!” scripts, you just get a fully functional script, that is educationally dissected during a couple of small chapters. Even if you already know Python, reading this will give you a pretty nice brush up. Now let’s hope there’s time to code.

The proof that genius and insanity often walk side by side, Bobby Fisher, the greatest American chess player to this date, died yesterday, somewhat poetically at the age of 64.

Funny I get to know this on the same day I start looking for a marble chess board… :/

In my quest to ease writing XML files in Vim (DocBook is essentially XML with a proper schema), I found a nifty plugin for vim. Installing it, however, is not so nifty…

copy xml.vim to  ~/.vim/ftplugin/xml.vim

Next, do this (required for editing DocBook files):

ln -s ~/.vim/ftplugin/xml.vim ~/.vim/ftplugin/docbk.vim

In the above fashion, adapt the next step from the instructions to suit your needs:

optionally link (or copy on windows) xml.vim in ~/.vim/ftplugin directory to docbk.vim, xsl.vim, html.vim, xhtml.vim

To generate the plugin documentation for the first time, open a DocBook document, and then type (in command mode):

:help xml-plugin

This command will show the mappings and remaining functionality of the plugin. And you should be on your way.