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...and it's completely outdated!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..