tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49336129582796840582012-02-06T05:55:45.974-08:00This is a personal blog, meaning that it could contain interesting things, but likely for you it contains only crap.shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.comBlogger241100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-89811107792835386862011-06-26T03:58:00.000-07:002011-06-26T03:58:22.625-07:00

I've just realized to have confused often the word "physicist" with the word "physician". Luckly, after a fast check, I was not so bold to label myself as a "physicist" (since I've currently discontinued physics studies alas) in cv or sites' profiles, otherwise I would have written "physician" instead. Though, in forums and blogs here or there maybe it's happened. So forgive me, it is very likely

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-11223747675755011952011-06-23T14:11:00.000-07:002011-06-23T14:11:37.523-07:00

One of my preferred arguments about computers is character encodings. Years ago I began to write several lectures about computers and programming, and the first were all about this subtle issue. The fact is that people fail to understand that computers do not understand, they just execute codes (that is, data which can be interpreted as code by a special interpreter, the processor); they are

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-40829533163204356592011-05-17T11:00:00.000-07:002011-05-23T14:34:22.106-07:00

Through the codeproject mealing list I landed on that kind of article that is frustrating reading to, since it is totally pointless and someway false. So this post will be.Reasonable noteLikely the only thing to be remembered is that every single existing programming language has its own advocates. All have their strong reasons and subtle arguments to say their language of choice is better than

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-60705950783757105862011-04-09T06:56:00.000-07:002011-04-09T09:08:49.809-07:00

Back again. This time I fished out something I had put apart for future fun. It is simply a piece of code that, like a lot of pieces of code I've seen recently, drove me crazy; since it is clearly wrong, but people using it think it is right, just because it happens that it works. (Moreover names chosen for the functions are misleading, but this is a different fact).How about that, you ask: if

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-27339288675599203502011-02-01T10:49:00.001-08:002011-02-01T10:54:54.122-08:00

Turned my head just to see the path and woops, it's already February. As usual, since January had to end. Oh, happy new year to everybody!I'm thinking about some serious project to feed my mind. Currently I am trying to let my artistic fantasy fly, and technical or sub-technical stuffs are a little bit behind. Indeed they are stacking into my mind, one day they will pop, hopefully not too late.I

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-29647635766618283512010-12-12T11:53:00.000-08:002010-12-12T12:33:20.671-08:00

At last I've bought it: a new Acer Extensa 5235... Once I said I won't buy an Acer again because it was unsupportive with GNU/Linux and too much sort of "Microsoft is the best, buy it with my computers", but it happened this one came without Microsoft Windows... Maybe (surely) not the best hardware I could get, but it is a lot more than I've got before, and cheaper than I planned at the

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-88810109748407807282010-12-08T09:56:00.000-08:002010-12-08T10:16:17.829-08:00

I've just seen that there are stats about blog traffic! And I've just discovered a lot of traffic came from StackOverflow, a place I've almost discontinued to frequent — good place for practical solutions to practical problems, but absolutely deaf and blind for reasoning, "theoretical" analysis of hypothesis, exploring knowledge and so on (like any other Q&A site, no matter how much technical

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-41052436524127880792010-12-08T05:36:00.000-08:002010-12-08T09:07:10.819-08:00

A coworker proposed to me a little challenge sometimes I think about. My first solution, though correct, was rejected since it used the ternary operator ?: and there's a way to succeed without.Today is holiday here in Italy and I am using my spare time pushing the button of my almost-dead laptop just to hear the one-long-beep-two-short-beeps sequence (hoping not to hear it), then hold the button

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-18993673832990987902010-12-04T08:16:00.000-08:002010-12-04T09:23:14.970-08:00

Maybe 1 post per month is a very low activity for a personal blog, should I be more chatty? Ok, let's say so: car broken, a lot of money to make it work again but this is not hard to handle. The thing that is hard to handle is to accept that my laptop is old, and it started to stop working. Well, not exactly. It's hard to accept the fact that it indeed works still well, except for a small detail

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-79678458302041865732010-11-13T14:29:00.000-08:002010-11-13T15:14:11.333-08:00

Finally my badly over-tweaked "old" Mandriva's got wiped out by a fresh brand new Ubuntu 10.10. With the advent of a bit more of memory (from 256M to 1G!) I've decided to try again a full featured modern desktop and accept all the comforts of the defaults, though a little bit too much windowsish and even though accepting defaults is usually a bad idea. There will be time to tweak this system too

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-55568179055812886972010-10-09T03:21:00.000-07:002011-02-01T10:46:39.032-08:00

work in progress draftand it always will beI wish to scatter some thoughts about the subject. There's no a particular order, deep analysis or claim for correctness.Defining the project and its requirements Do not let the developers define the requirements! Requirements come first, then it comes developing code (with feedback, if needed/required). Documenting APIs (if appropriate) Be

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-24692716140813265932010-09-12T10:11:00.000-07:002010-09-12T10:31:24.827-07:00

For a project with friends of mine I was requested to write a C# class. Ok, it is a good opportunity to learn in practice some bits of that language, I thought. But at the end what happened was that large part of the C# code has to be generated automatically by a VBA script (I wanted to do it in Perl, but since the code must be generated from MS Excel data and formulae, VBA was suggested as a

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-17870106019707822542010-07-20T07:24:00.000-07:002010-07-20T08:54:15.056-07:00

Time for a brand new post.In my last job interview I was asked to write a function to copy a string. Thinking not about compactness, I wrote on the fly the following codevoid strcpy(const char *s, char *d){ while( *s != '\0' ) { *d = *s; s++; d++; } *d = '\0';}That of course works, but it is longer than the need (and by the way, it is not compliant with what standard says about real strcpy,

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-83246001391908471292010-06-17T10:00:00.000-07:002010-06-17T10:41:49.193-07:00

When I was very little I was used to copy a lot of circuits from electronics magazines my father bought, and also from his own diagrams. To me they meant nothing at all, but I found them beautiful and I sensed that there was a meaning in all those symbols. Growing, strangely my interests shifted more towards software, even after I studied those symbols and assigned their proper meanings. At some

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-26940485500479253752010-06-10T07:39:00.000-07:002010-06-10T09:12:17.278-07:00

Question/Answer sites are always the same. I mean, there they happen always the same kind of things that can be summarized with few words: biased subjectivity, misunderstandings, personal battles using the voting system. I am not saying I don't fall in those traps too, except for the last one and the first one(!): I do not use the voting or flagging system to fight my personal battles or to "

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-1277103094795426742010-05-27T22:36:00.000-07:002010-05-28T00:32:27.649-07:00

Few weeks ago I have marked as incorrect an implementation of a task on RosettaCode in Fortran. It has struck me since it appeared elegant and short, so I wanted to run the code and... alas obtained a wrong result (AAAA). So without further analysing the code I have marked it as incorrect.Yesterday I was looking for recent activities on RosettaCode and task to work on, when noticed that my "mark"

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-78150229590755342552010-05-24T11:23:00.000-07:002010-05-24T13:10:59.226-07:00

It is a problem that goes and returns back periodically: how can I download YouTube videos? It's not a problem that has a forever solution since YouTube changes things. Maybe it does so also to make it harder to download videos: we must "pass" through them, so they can control contents better (DRM!) and earn through traffic and data we produce using their service... Even supposing we're on the

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-37177076311042384052010-05-16T06:07:00.000-07:002010-05-16T06:55:22.289-07:00

I confess it: I often creep in forums and "ask your question" sites, sometimes I add my answers to solve a problem or manifest an idea (and often I think it's the best answers of course). Mostly it's boring but it is also a cheap pastime and I find it relaxing.Few hours ago someone asked help for the following problem: I have a JPG file N kbytes long, and I want to make it M kbytes long (M > N).

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-60280110585285468292010-05-10T23:17:00.000-07:002010-05-11T23:32:49.140-07:00

Few days ago I've found PDFs of interesting books (basically the same), old (and marked obsolete!) editions: Numerical Recipes in C, Numerical Recipes in Fortran 77, Numerical Recipes in Fortran 90, obsoleted by Numerical Recipes in C++ (not downloadable).These PDFs are encrypted through a hateable system, handled by the FileOpen plugin (they have a site and purchase their system to "protect" PDF

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-2163025132898522512010-05-06T05:53:00.000-07:002010-05-06T06:42:46.770-07:00

Today I was back on twitter (guess, shintakezou) and found among people I am following an interesting link. I wanted to download almost everything and lazyly built the following line:lynx http://address -dump | egrep -v thumb | egrep "[0-9]+\. http:" | egrep "mp3|jpg" |sed -e 's/[0-9]\+\.//;s/^ \+//' | xargs -n 1 wgetI am almost sure there's a better way, but I've just finished

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-88325033684451929272010-05-06T05:35:00.000-07:002010-05-06T05:47:15.779-07:00

I've read this and felt better: I simply hate Flash from the very beginning. Moreover current GNU/Linux version I am using is resource hungry and sometimes crashs. I don't know if all the good things said in the article are true (on the Apple part), but I would really like to delete definitively Flash and Flash plugins from my system. Hope I can do it soon!Post scriptum: I love PostScript and

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-64092647789630728432010-04-26T10:15:00.000-07:002010-04-26T11:17:57.406-07:00

I used to dislike OO programming paradigm. I suppose the main reasons were that I started programming with imperative languages and loved so much mc68k assembly, and that people trying to convince me about the advantages of OOP failed —often talking about the wrong feature in the wrong way (e.g. magnifying functions overloading... which is not a OOP-only thing, e.g. Fortran 95 and later has it!)

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-89879646282680635492010-03-30T07:01:00.000-07:002010-05-06T06:41:19.918-07:00

Since I've updated kernel and X server, my computer became slower... new "softwares" require new hardware to do the same things. This is a fact that always upset me. Anyway, I abandoned KDE (unusable... and half-mixed KDE3-4!) and installed WindowMaker. I also abandoned full graphics file-manager (avoid the loading of Qt libs and KDE services, being used to use Konqueror, uncomparable to Dolphin)

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4933612958279684058.post-68214806434315656532010-03-26T08:07:00.000-07:002010-03-26T09:02:15.296-07:00

What should I write just to introduce myself or rather this blog? I really don't know, thus I won't try to be smart, cool or whatever. Basically I've nothing to say, so I can say everything, though in an english that could make someone shuddering. And I'll begin from the very end. Few days ago (maybe already a week or more!) I was back from hospital. Recently I underwent a surgical operation,

shintakezouhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00097378869539038765noreply@blogger.com0