erroneous thoughts

… I’ll this opportunity to share some of the “funny” tabs that have been left opened in my Firefox:

• so first we have, a Portuguese family that plays World of Warcraft. Now let me clarify that: yes the whole family plays it, from the father (a physician), downright to their 5 year old son (!!)
• (in Portuguese) next, another great post parody on why «intellectual property» is a fallacy based on flawed misconceptions.
• Google releases the Android, with software that contained (it has been fixed now) what I humbly think could be classified as the bug of the decade: everything you type with the keyboard, gets interpreted by a root shell. I don’t own one of those gadgets, but unless the whole world is conspiring over the internet, I’d say it’s true.
• lastly, and this one is almost too good to be true: it seems that nice folks over Batman town, Turkey, are suing their Hollywood «counterparts»! ROTFLMAO

And that’s all for the day!

I never thought I would see this coming from the US, from all places! Specially when considering the situation so far. But maybe there really are winds of change (from the first link):

Barack Obama’s campaign built a powerful synergy between grass-roots politics and grass-roots technology, while presenting what many consider to be the most disciplined campaign of any candidate in modern history.

And technology is (finally!) starting to play its role in transforming our current polyarchies wrongly labelled as democracies, into true democracies. Again quoting from the first link:

One of the strongest criticisms made against Barack Obama during his campaign is that he consistently said that he would go through the Federal budget “line-by-line” and cut wasteful spending, but he never gave any specifics. The open source-based application http://USAspending.gov was implemented after Congress passed a law in 2006 saying that by the start of 2008, every government contract for every government agency (except those that are classified) had to be online, with information disclosing costs, sponsors, contractors, etc

Wow! This is a major leap forward, indeed! One can only hope that the words to describe his campaign can be used four years from now to describe his first term in office. Sadly we here in Europe aren’t quite there yet. That’s a really sad example: the details of deal between Microsoft and the European Council (or more accurately MS’s commercial interests on the deal) were deemed more important (and hence kept secret) than the public interest of having taxpayers know how is their money being used. This kind of crap in the US used to have the label of “national security”; I can only wonder what we’ll call it over here… Anyway, some of the first comments are really more insightful than the article itself; I leave you with one such comment:

It’s not in the public interest to know how much public money MSFT is getting and for what?

That’s not what is being claimed. The information IS in the public interest — the argument is that Microsoft’s commercial interest is MORE IMPORTANT than the public interest. Which I think is even worse-sounding that what you said.

This is for C/C++, but it can also be done in other languages (details will come as I go). The bulk of the instructions are here, but I add one remark: the map to generate tags for the current directory, the command is wrong. Use this one, instead (exclamation mark inserted, and required!):

map <S-F8> :!ctags -R --c++-kinds=+p --fields=+iaS --extra=+q .<CR>

Also changed the key combination to Shift-F8, you use whatever suits you.

On a (not so) related note, on the that blog there’s also an interesting post about getting the 10 more used commands using this command:

$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head

Using it  in home computer yielded this:

53 make
48 ls
48 cd
40 mplayer
39 exit
22 ./sdlm
19 convert
18 vim
16 rm
15 man

I also only have 500 lines in .bash_history. Will have to increase that to get a better picture…