I leave the fucker alone for three months..

...and it's completely outdated!

Well, I should keep a real diary, not this lame failed disconnected "blog" attempt.

In short:
I dumped most things I could take for granted just for the sake of aiming high, enjoying the unknown and enjoying the overabundance of life.

Different people have different properties along these dimensions.

People often "sort of" are great but not quite as well as you need them to be.

Contextual expansions on sentences from a Machine Learning-related text.

The wine situation.

A friend of mine from Ancona, Italy asked me to describe the "wine scene" here in Brazil/Santa Catarina/Florianopolis. As I started replying him, I got excited and ended up writing a short but maybe useful analysis. Here it goes:

Hi mate! Everything is great here! So, I believe I can give you a good insight on this "wine" situation around here. First of all, the city I live now is 200km from Florianópolis and before living here I lived there for 6 years so I know it very well. This both cities are very alike so my report is valuable for both.
Lots of people drink wine here. The most common types of wine are very diverse but mainly they are Red Wines. I would say that the most popular types are "Cabernet Sauvignon", "Merlot" but other types are common as well (Syrah, Carmeneré, Porto).

Wines from all nationalities are common but in order of popularity I would say something like Chile, Argentina, Italy, France. Chilean wines are popular mainly due to their good quality/price ratio.
A bottle of good Chilean wine, let's say "as good as" (I know this is hard to tell, but it is just a simple comparison) a Rosso Conero of 5€ a bottle in Ancona, costs here 8€. In all supermarkets here (as big as a normal COOP) they have a wine section as big as the one in COOP.. so I would say it sells a lot.

Popular (Chilean) brands are the ones from "Concha y Toro", "Santa Carolina", "León de Tarapacá" (this one I remember seeing for sale at Ancona's COOP for 8€, which is more or less the same price as here).

Well, this should help you, right? If you want I may take videos of this wine sections at supermarkets so you can compare prices & types, I may even picture "La Carta de Vino" from some Italian restaurants around here.

Hope to hear from you soon too! Take Care!

Bash prompt custom substitution

I know this is only eye candy but sometimes LONG prompts do bother me.
If you ever got disturbed by too-long bash prompts that span over the entire terminal window in such a way that the commands you write go directly to the second line -- sometimes even a simple "ls" -- here is the solution.

1. Problem:
Your shell sometimes looks like:


2. Solution:
Open up your .bashrc (I'm assuming ubuntu but this should work everywhere) and paste the following to the end (I say at the end so it overrides any other ugly stuff you might have there!).

my_bash_prompt() {
case "$PWD" in

"/home/cpscotti/big_name_dir/huge_name_subdir/divide_and_conquer/little_one")
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}@SOMEBETTERNAME~\$ '
;;
"/home/cpscotti/big_name_dir/huge_name_subdir/divide_and_conquer/another")
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}@SOMEEVENBETTERNAME~\$ '
;;
*)
PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
;;
esac

# If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir
case "$TERM" in
xterm*|rxvt*)
PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\w\a\]$PS1"
;;
*)
;;
esac
}
PROMPT_COMMAND=my_bash_prompt
unset bash_prompt


Substitute the big directories for whatever suits you and change SOMEBETTERNAME and SOMEEVENBETTERNAME for something fancy and you're done! The real trick is to set PROMPT_COMMAND to call your function and do this "PWD abstraction" before displaying PS1. This is very similar to what the shell already does with your home folder, changing its path to ~ (tilde).

Ok, back to work!

n900 Fanboism taken to where it should stand.

So, after searching around the net for blog posts or some fanboism regarding the N900 and finding little about it, I decided to express myself here and let my voice be heard.

First of all, if you love linux (namely ubuntu or other debian-based systems) you should stop reading here and do yourself a favor.. go there and spend your useless money in this useless piece of fun! (I say useless because well.. what's useful anyways... Condoms, Toilet Paper or a Smartphone?)

If you are a python lover, go to a nokia store and ask the guy to "try" this phone.. then.. on the desktop press: Shift+Ctrl+x, this will open a xterminal (well, if you aren't into this whole brevity-keyboard-shortcuts thing you can get to the same terminal through the apps menu).
Now type "python".. push enter..... doesn't it feel it is YOUR phone? That you can do the fucking whatever you want with it and all!? This extends to the whole thing, apt-get, ScummVM, firefox, IRC..

Now, if you are not into this linux thing, then I'll just say one thing.. call me on gtalk, skype or my own phone number and it will all look the fucking same to me (except for a cuttie and informative icon on the upper right corner telling me where the hell that message came from).

Don't come with this i(Pad/Phone) shit.. I can name thousands of things you can't accomplish with that. And if you come with those "but it just works".. well.. that's what I want for my mom's phone, not for mine! I'm a developer, I understand (to some extent) electronics and software therefore I can "deal" with them.

Besides, it is linux and it is as open as hell so if anything doesn't pleases you.. go there and change!

Enough of this now..

Well, I'm done now.. eno

As one can guess, there is a lot to awkward situations;

To begin with, awkward situations are as such only when you don't laugh enough.
As the fella says,
"Remember, men. There is nothing wrong with surrendering to overwhelming powers, as long as it is done in a military manner. "
--
Well, in fact this draft was saved since June and I'm not quite sure where I was heading to or which, then recent, events triggered me to start writing this. Probably something related to the "dating a Ho" thing.. (much anticipated future post).

Where I'm heading now with this post is a brief encounter with truth. Let truth be told:

What would the one you love tell you if they could say anything, no hard feelings! What would they say you're doing wrong?

The problem with most people's modern, entertainment-full, lives is that although they have lots of plans on how to achieve things, they keep living day by day too much.

I could say that entertainment can be part of your life in two different ways:
a) Something that distracts you, shadowing what you really should be doing. Its like procrastinating but without much guilt.
b) The moments you take off your "path" in order to simply, celebrate your wins!

Obviously, there ain't no simple nor visible line in between the two. One can't easily say when the "moments off" become something that "distracts you away from your future goals". One way of seeing the lives of lots of people is that at a certain point, in which they consider themselves "winners", they stop for some deserved distraction/entertainment but they never come back, ever.

All this is pretty obvious of course, but writing about it never ceases to have some effect.

Another random post? NOT

I only mention it because sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? But sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude, in Los Angeles.

And sometimes there's chick... the chick that fits right in some other weird place between the blankets and the mattress.

I drink to that! Never missed a chance to do so..

Oh so again?

The thing is growing up again, just found out that I live again with people that keep telling me stuff I don't need to know.
Ok, lets get to work
:)

Beware!

When going for a C implementation for crazy python programs, don't forget to valgrind -v through the whole process. Saves the day!

Graphs, automatons, petri nets, lists and standing your ground.

At first there is this great idea about the guy that pays a hitman to kill him in the future for some obscure reason.
In fact he doesn't want to die.. but he NEEDS this hitman trying to kill him in the future.

And then there are the finite state machines... those are just plain math, reasoning and abstraction; lots of abstraction. I wasn't so much of an advocate of silence but every time I step into some of this things I just can't work while everybody around me are discussing related issues, video cards or whatever the coffee tastes like. No matter how much you like the thing or how able you are to solve the problem but just... you need peace of mind!
Give me a quiet Saturday, nine notebook sheets and half a liter of coffee and we're done!
Then is when you are free to experiment with crazed recursion through some non formal dingbat "resource allocation" lists! What do we have in common between graphs, automatons and petri nets?! They all look great for their didactic examples and initial purposes. Heck! they are awesome! But then again, when you get down to business you'll do some crazed mixed up thing! Colored petri nets? I'm pretty sure that they were someone's hack for their problem.

Regarding your own squared piece of ground in this social-psychological world, it is very easy to note how much size matters. When you get to a totally new environment you start with your 1x sized square as if you were ready to be taken down. To survive and at the same time be something more than an ordinary button pusher you do have to stand your ground and start growing to reach your vital space! Mein Kampf anyone?! HAHA! anyway..

Here I go back to music, coffee, chatting and Sunday things!

Now it's practically official!

Employed!
Can't really get the whole dimension of the thing but it just looks pretty darn awesome!
Nice place, nice people, nice responsibilities and nice challenges!

At the same time, some great things left behind, some great thing coming on!
And here we go rolling and blowing in(with) the wind!

(In fact this whole thing deserves a lot more fuuuny/philosophical things but not much time left now.. and nothing to procrastinate so..)

And then, just again what to tell them!?

Another funny day joins the queue for funniest ones of all time!
Here we go!

Google App Engine?!

After so much time with the fixed idea:

I should try google app engine one day

or

Google App Engine must be awesome!

I finally got to it!
Just works..

Confrontations.

Now and then you'll encounter this people, whom maybe you like and have some respect for, being stubborn, and wrong, in some particular topic. Sometimes the discussion seem good at the start but then you realize that they are NOT going to change their opinion, let aside their arguments, without a good battle.
It is then that the blurred difference between being stubborn and having "strong opinions" becomes slightly more noticeable.
In fact I am one of those! "There I was, oh there I am!"
One thing some people don't seem to get is the idea that sometimes conversation revolves around arguments and that the real purpose about conversations lays on the exchange of arguments, lots of them. A big discussion about something isn't fun if some of the parties fails to find, or even to search for, new arguments to prove their point. If the exchange of arguments keeps on going, it really doesn't matter at the end who wins (if that comes to happen at all).
Sometimes it pays off to enter a discussion on something that the other parties aren't even wrong, it is just that they could be "more correct"; for the sake of the records man!

I even remember trying with someone to deliberately find a diverging point so that you could engage in one of this "events".

But please, urban legends are just that.. urban legends.

Not Procrastinating (2) (too much)

I should be writing my thesis but I feel like posting something so I'll be short.

"Keep moving, keep moving, keep bouncing!"
Said the crazy Frenchy that opened doors kicking with her military boots!

The need for a badass.

There are this self-confident girls. They sometimes just need a badass guy that albeit being very intimate, surprisingly enough, don't care about them "in other ways" and never even hits on them. They need it to get a grip on good old life. Note that it must be pretty obvious that the problem is NOT the guy and indeed them. Than there is just a small number of possible outcomes.
On of them is just complete nervous breakdown.

On asymmetric memories and writing your thesis.

To get the fun out of it, you gotta go all the way down. You wake up with someone calling you asking for their lost memories! At first you consider that if they remember enough so that they called *you* and not any other person, they remember enough so you don't get into details. What you don't consider is that maybe, just maybe, the person called you because some third party told them to do so; you know, like following clues. It is like as if one was searching for gossip about their own self.. And then still, if you are the only one that remembers the truth, you can just shape it a little bit and throw it back to lions to see what happens!You know, just to see the reaction! That is just about how much extra fun you can attain from those cheerful events.

Well.. writing your thesis? Your final report? That is precisely the best time in your life to read a book, make new friends at the pub and write blog posts: go for it!

LaTeX, subfig, subfigure, subfloat and table

Just crashed my head for half an hour on LaTeX bc I was trying to use an ordinary \begin{table}.. in a document using \usepackage{subfig} for subfloats like:

\begin{figure}

\centering

\subfloat[Raw Line Extraction]{\label{fig:lex_raw}\includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{EXPS/raw_extraction.png}}

\hspace{4pt}

\subfloat[Using Timestamp Matching]{\label{fig:lex_tm}\includegraphics[width=0.35\textwidth]{EXPS/matched_extraction.png}}
\caption{Line Feature Extraction while spinning at +$1rad/s$; orange lines represent real walls.}

\label{fig:lExtraction}

\end{figure}

It'll just mess up with your table's caption... seems that there's something related to the caption package.
This problem will make your tables look like this:


The solution is to dump \usepackage{subfig} in favor of \usepackage{subfigure} and \subfloat[..]{..} in favor of \subfigure[..]{..}.. the rest is all the same

Procrastination Failed!

Deadlines are useful on putting a limit to perfectionism.. otherwise one wouldn't do much.
And then now.. time to another!

This is blood for blood and by the gallon.

These are the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days.
Since I should be working, I'll be fast here..

A ideia é estourar o reto do pessoal!

G.C. on rape.

Not Procrastinating

I can't post anything really good now because I have to finish my article.

Meta-procastination..

So it's like this, I'm procrastinating my work...
Currently, I'm starting to write an article so it really is like the "writer's blockage".
You start a sentence, then you don't quite find a good way to finish it.. and then you read it all over again and it sound bad. That's when you delete your newly created sentence and you're back at zero again. After two or three iterations of this, you start to look at your e-mail, IM, news; you name it! And then... BANG! You realize that you really ARE procrastinating, you start feeling useless, lazy, cheating on your job and things like that.
This is when "meta-procrastination" starts, you start writing a blog post about your current dilemma, pondering about what are the implications of this, how to eradicate such behavior, etc. But still.. you are there, sitting on your chair, writing this blog post and thinking things like:

Probably post like this are commonplace when regarding procrastination

or even suggesting that probably

Every work on the study of procrastination on all probability was coined by someone procrastinating some other thing

As a matter of fact, I may start to work now.. but first, in order to keep this blog's purpose:

Lavoura Arcaica is a poetic Brazilian movie (note that the posted poster is for the French adv.), full of insightful, heart touching and mind breaking monologues. More than that, it's an intricate verbal puke of a guy whose problems, although most of them mundane, have deeper implications resulting from the whole, so called "perfect", bounding environment. And then, adding the cherry on top of the pie, there is the beautiful, all dancing, provoking mute girl... (hehe.. trying not to spoil any good thing)
Ok.. back to work!

How unique is the human being?

For the ones that shared with me a holly moment, a beer or a bar table, this talk may be a good thought provoking one or even just a "a-ha! I knew it" thing.

For example, I wasn't aware of the way dopamine works (as showcased on the video) but now I see it all makes complete sense.. just my older posts on "pleasure delaying".. its there!
On faith; I just totally agree with that guy and that makes me a little less "human" in the direction of being more "chimpanzee-like"... which is great!

If you watch the video from start (by default it will auto-play starting from ~5:00), there's a little bit of an introduction on the guy and check the book he wrote:

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

That could serve to someone I know.. but anyway..

c ya!