Mahound’s Weblog

I’ve put up a code snippet that can be used as a shell script, in order to consult the DLPO (portuguese) dictionary. It’s a simple HTML scraping (html5lib + BeautifulSoup) example, but it’s really useful (at least for me).

Example:

The landscape in St. Genis-Pouilly(GEO:  46.245616, 6.028238) was like this:

Do you remember that specific project that you started 7 or 8 years ago, and just didn’t have the will/time/manpower to maintain? Well, one of my early experiences happened when I was 16: ptCTF, a “Capture The Flag” extension for Half-Life, that I developed with some friends in high school. It seems, it was not totally forgotten…

• FRAGLíder :: Verificar tópico - Mod Tuga para HL2 - Gathering a Team] (portuguese)

At the time the objective was to create a portuguese-stereotype kind of game. Therefore, the scenario was a North vs. South war, one of the few (and, yet, artificial) ways in which we can split the portuguese culture. Some details were meant to be purely stereotypical, like the wine bottles that served as health packs, etc…
Well, it was essentially a failed project, as a whole (only the initial version was released, and no-one would want to play it, since there were far better alternatives), but i see that at least it hasn’t died, deep inside the mind of some (older) portuguese gamers.
Just as an aside, I believe that this project marked my first contact with the MingW32 gcc/glibc port, that eventually lead to my conversion to GNU/Linux.

Tags: ptctf, half-life, projects, past, nostalgy

I’d like to call your attention for the magnificent work of Robin Rimbaud, also known as Scanner. His album “Messe” is a  great piece of art, blending sacred music with the noisy patterns of the quotidian.

Status Quo:

• Reading: “Weaving the Web” (T. Berners-Lee and M. Fischetti) , “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (P. K. Dick)
• Willing to watch:
  • “2001 - A Space Odyssey” (S. Kubrick)
• Recently watched:
  • “Kin Dza Dza” (G. Daneliya)
  • “Water” (D. Mehta) - a must see…
  • “Irréversible” (G. Noé)
  • “Banlieue 13” (P. Morel)
  • “The Maltese Falcon” (J. Huston)
• Currently listening to:
  • Scanner, a.k.a. Robin Rimbaud
  • Aphex Twin

Hello, hello, hello.

It has been a long time since I last wrote for this blog. Actually, it has been a long time since I have written anything useful. Why? Well, internship report (now ready, but the presentation is yet to come), job interviews, my current job at CERN… everything has been conspiring, lately, in a way that prevents me from getting enough “free” time to keep this humble blog of mine up to date.

Well, in spite of the lack of time (OK, I have time, but it doesn’t reach the threshold for me to come here and write), I have been thinking about three main things:

• I urgently need an open source MIDI arpeggiator. Generalizing, the world needs a decent open source MIDI arpeggiator;
• Web 3.0, and the way it blends with REST and Service-based architectures;
• OO Content Storage - An easy, QL-less way of storing and retrieving OO data… it’s still a germinating idea, but that I find quite interesting;

The summary of the Status Quo follows:

• Reading: “Weaving the Web” (T. Berners-Lee and M. Fischetti) , “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (P. K. Dick)
• Recently read: “VALIS” (P. K. Dick)
• Willing to watch:
  • “Conte d’hiver” (E. Rohmer)
• Recently watched:
  • “Ma nuit chez Maud” (E. Rohmer)
  • “eXistenZ” (D. Cronenberg)
  • “Lost in La Mancha” (T. Gilliam)
  • “Ken Park” (L. Clark, E. Lachman)
• Currently listening to:
  • Porcupine Tree
  • Frank Zappa
  • Goran Bregovic
  • Scanner (DJ)

What if Roosevelt had been assassinated, and the United States had never recovered from the great depression, so that its military power had became insignificant, when compared to that of Japan or Germany? What if this fragile coalition which became known as the “allies” had lost the war, without the financial and military aid of the U.S.? A dark scenario, indeed, would take place. But Philip K. Dick decided to take this concept one step further. The level of detail of Dick’s description is amazingly high: a northern america divided between the German an Japanese invaders, a dystopian world where the civilization and simplicity (but sense of superiority) of the Japanese contrasts with the racist and madly-driven policies of a technologically advanced Nazi Germany. In the middle, “The Grasshoper lies heavy”, the narrative inside the narrative, a nested virtual world where the allies have won the war, although in circumstances that differ from those of our reality. Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of the “Grasshoper”, stays behind a mysterious shade of myth: it is said that he lives in a castle, on the top of a hill, defended by barbed wire and weapons. The end of the story is rather surprising, a nuance which suddenly connects the different realities contained in the book.

It is definitely recommended. One of the best sci-fi novels ever made - from the man who wrote “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” (which was adapted for the movie “Blade Runner”), “Minority Report” (which provides the foundations for the movie with the same name), “Total Recall” (once again, adapted for the big screen) and “VALIS” (which I will read next).

My supervisor asked me to migrate all the (and it’s a big “ALL”) information about Indico, currently in my personal wiki, to the new official Indico Wiki. Great! I love to see things documented, and adding information to the project wiki is a pleasure for me…
However, the Indico Wiki works on the MS Sharepoint platform. And… guess what? In 2007, this Sharepoint cr*p comes with a rich text editor that only works under Internet Explorer.
Yes, son… no IE, no editor… so, if you are persistent and still want to run Firefox (or simply if you use Linux), you are condemned to edit your wiki using… guess what… no wiki markup! Just plain old and crappy HTML! Why do they call it a “wiki”? It’s a damn CMS, people! Plone would do better!

Fortunately, there seems to be a fix for this:

• http://www.timheuer.com/blog/archive/2006/12/06/13939.aspx

I’ve already asked the guys who maintain Sharepoint to fix this. There should not be any problem with it…

Anyway, this is yet another revelation of what Microsoft thinks about cross-compatibility and standards.