El Caminito del Rey

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaeQykTZRHw]

Need to go there one of these days..

Finally Finished Portal

I borrowed the orange box from a friend to play Episode One, Episode Two and Portal. I actually had Portal for the PC (via Steam) but never got past the first few chambers. The best thing portal had to offer, better even than the innovative gameplay, was the humor.

Now that I’ve finished Ep1&2 and Portal I’m thinking about replaying HL2. The game levels are awesome and even though it’s a 4 year old game (and I’ve played it on the PC) the graphics still impress me.

For HL2, Episodes 1 and 2… well I don’t know… they were fun, the plot was ok, the gameplay was cool and sufficiently varied… yet there’s something missing… maybe it’s feeling or immersion maybe it’s something else. They’re not a Halo 3…

Portal End Song:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ljFaKRTrI]

Lyrics to the end song (my emphasis)

This was a triumph.
I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.
Aperture Science
We do what we must
because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.
But there’s no sense crying over every mistake.
You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.
And the Science gets done.
And you make a neat gun.
For the people who are still alive.
I’m not even angry.
I’m being so sincere right now.
Even though you broke my heart.
And killed me.
And tore me to pieces.
And threw every piece into a fire.
As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you!
Now these points of data make a beautiful line.
And we’re out of beta.
We’re releasing on time.
So I’m GLaD. I got burned.
Think of all the things we learned
for the people who are still alive.
Go ahead and leave me.
I think I prefer to stay inside.
Maybe you’ll find someone else to help you.
Maybe Black Mesa
THAT WAS A JOKE.
HAHA. FAT CHANCE.
Anyway, this cake is great.
It’s so delicious and moist.
Look at me still talking
when there’s Science to do.
When I look out there, it makes me GLaD I’m not you.
I’ve experiments to run.
There is research to be done.
On the people who are still alive.
And believe me I am still alive.
I’m doing Science and I’m still alive.
I feel FANTASTIC and I’m still alive.
While you’re dying I’ll be still alive.
And when you’re dead I will be still alive.
STILL ALIVE

Braid

Braid (blog) is one of the most interestingly different games I’ve played in a long while. It’s a plataform/puzzle game (mostly puzzle) with the particularity that the puzzles are solved by manipulating time.

It is available on the Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade and costs 1200 MS points (15 eur) which is a lot for an arcade game but it’s worth it. The game plays differently, looks different and sounds different. It’s fun and some of the puzzles are indeed challenging.

Watch a video review.

Listen to the game music (from magnatune which I’ve mentioned before).

Download Braid icons and wallpapers.

How To Fold a T-shirt

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An0mFZ3enhM]

Link.

Tool of The Month: jhead

jhead – Exif Jpeg header manipulation tool

I wish I had bothered to search for this tool when I bought my Samsung D900 which fails to write the correct timestamp on the damn photos… oh well, better late then never.

Via Mac OS X Hints (or more precisely, google and the keywords on a comment on that post):

Simply use jhead -dsft *.jpg on the files to set
the EXIF date to the file creation-date

Barcamp Portugal 2008 and my proposed talk

Link

When: September, 6 & 7
Where: Coimbra, Portugal
Dep. de Engenharia Informática
da Universidade de Coimbra

I’ve proposed talking about the basics of MySQL performance & optimization. A draft topic list is available here.

I would appreciate your comments:

- Is it boring/useless or something like that?
- Should some of the topics in the draft be left out? (I’m inclined to totally remove the section currently entitled “Pointers”)
- Is there something important I’m missing?
- Any other comments

Quick Read: Six classified Portuguese Iraq Intelligence Summaries from 2004

Six classified Portuguese Iraq Intelligence Summaries from 2004 (Wikileaks). Found this while browsing wikileaks. Just did a very quick skim read of a couple of the summaries.

Antena 1 2 3 Podcasts

The Portuguese public broadcast service, RTP (the Portuguese BBC) has podcasts for some of its radio shows.

Thanks, kudos/props/wtv for the people (person?) responsible for this. I hope more of Antena’s 2 (music) shows get added soon.

Sadly, it seems that, at least at the moment, it’s only low quality samples (for SOMDESCAPE which is the only show, among those available, that I’m interested in).

PS: what’s up with using WMA and Real instead of making stuff available in (high quality) mp3? That’s lame.

UbuntuWebServer Virtual Appliance V1.4

This is probably the last version of my ubuntu web server VM that will use Ubuntu 7.10.

UbuntuWebServer

Direct Download Link

REVISION LOG:

1.4 – added phppgadmin and some php stuff
1.3 – added FTP Server
1.2 – added JDK+Tomcat5.5 and PostegreSQL
1.1 – added OpenSSL and demo apache configuration (commented)
1.0 – initial release

friendsnippets.com

friendsnippets.com is for code what del.icio.us is for bookmarks. Just found it and fell in love with it.

link to my account.

reihttpd – a basic web server in C

My “Computer Networks” (Redes de Computadores) assignment is writing an HTTP server that implements GET and conditional (if-modified-since) GET with persistent connections.

Here’s the code – Obviously, no guarantees.

MNUM – SimpsonCsv

This one instead reads the values from a CSV file containing experimental data.
Link to my previous implementation of Simspson’s rule.

import csv

class simpsonCsv:
    def __init__(self, filename):
        reader = csv.reader(open(filename, "rb"))

        xlist = []
        ylist = []
       
        for row in reader:
            try:
               x = float(row[0])
               y = float(row[1])
            except TypeError:
                continue
            except ValueError:
                continue
            xlist.append(float(x))
            ylist.append(float(y))
       
        self.len = len(xlist) - 1
        self.xstart = xlist[0]
        self.xend = xlist[self.len]
        self.interval = self.xend / self.len
       
        self.data = map(None, xlist, ylist)
   
    def f(self, x):
        for (u,v) in self.data:
            if u == x:
                return v
               
        print "Bad x value (probably bad n): %s" % (x)
        return None
       
       
   
    def simpson(self, n):
        "Approximate the definite integral of f from a to b by Simpson's rule."

        if self.len % n != 0:
            print "Error: %d mod %d is not zero but should be." % (self.len, n)
            return -1
       
       
        h  = float(self.xend - self.xstart)/n
       
   
        si = 0.0
        sp = 0.0
        xk = 0.0
   
        for i in range(1, n, 2):
            xk = self.xstart + i*h
            si += self.f(xk)
   
        for i in range(2, n, 2):
            xk = self.xstart + i*h
            sp += self.f(xk)
       
       
        s = 2*sp + 4*si + self.f(self.xstart) + self.f(self.xend)

        return (h/3)*s
   

filename = "integral_tabela_CO2_csv.csv"
s = simpsonCsv(filename)

print s.simpson(20)
print s.simpson(40)
print s.simpson(60)
print s.simpson(100)
print s.simpson(300)
print s.simpson(600)
print s.simpson(900)
print s.simpson(1800)

WordPress Related Content

WordPress.com (where this blog is hosted) recently started appending

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

To every blog post. These are links to other blogs hosted on wordpress.com that are (possibly) related to it. This feature can be disabled but personally I like it

You can try it by clicking for example on one of my “not so new” posts (like this one) and scrolling to the bottom.

The History of Bungie

The History of Bungie is the history of a small (2 person) independent gaming software company that became a landmark in gaming with the Halo series.

Fate/stay night

From anidb:

Fate/stay night is my favorite anime. The summary above doesn’t do it justice. I remember reading it and thinking “this sounds lame”. It came so highly recommended that I decided to watch it anyway. I didn’t use to watch anime until I started watching FSN.

The Story
The game had the game in which the anime is based had three different scenarios that came together to explain the enitre story. The FSN anime storyline is basically the FATE scenario from the game with some extras (mostly from the Unlimited Blade Works scenario). Because of this, to understand the story, one has to pay great attention to otherwise small details. The relationship between characters and other essential bits can only be understood from interpreting short flashbacks or “clue scenes”. It was easy for me to understand almost the whole thing the first time I watched the show but I was still finding small details the third time. Yes, I’ve watched this anime 3 times! That’s how much I enjoyed it. A friend of mine who also watched it completely missed some crucial bits such as the identity of Archer which in spite of being semi-obvious from the first few episodes, is only shown by an object at the end of episode 14 (another clue is given in a later episode by another object or rather two). Without knowing who Archer is, you miss out on one of the main topics of the show – ideals suck (and disillusion which is the name of the first opening btw).

I also found interesting that the current Holy Grail War was shown as largely a consequence of the previous war. Many of those participating in the war had their lives completely changed by the previous war.

Emya Shiro, the show’s main character is the stereotypical dropout loser that you see in many anime with the particularity that he has some lofty ideals of saving the world.

Tosaka Rin, the “friendly” sorcerer that is sort of Shiro’s teacher in the ways of the force… herm… magic, is also sort of stereotypical (even if bisexual) It’s sort of interesting to see that she lives her life to fulfill what she believes were her father’s expectations for her – a top of the class student and a dedicated sorceress,

I don’t want to talk about the other important characters so as not to spoil the anime for anyone. It’s a 24 ep show that was subbed by the excellent Eclipse productions.

The soundtrack is by Kaway Kenji (Gundam 00, Higurashi, …) and even though it’s a bit too “synth” I still like it a lot.

In Summary: WATCH IT!

Wikipedia Link