Goodbye, WordPress

WordPress is really great. But when you are a programmer, nothing beats Git + Markdown + YAML metadata for a blog 🙂

My professional home page is: http://www.cirosantilli.com and I am collecting beautiful things at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/art

May you continue to serve Millions of non programmers as well as you have served me, WordPress.

RIP

Golf is a game of luck, the more I practice, the luckier I get.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Hogan, mentioned on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Room

Radio silence

Order to stop all radio communication, either for military stealth, of to be able to hear faint distress calls: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_silence

Mayday

Comes from the French “venez m’aider”

Mark Shuttleworth

South African creator of Ubuntu and the Shuttleworth Foundation. First South African in space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shuttleworth

Arecibo message

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

Shot at the “How to communicate with aliens” problem.

Minimum light response time: 50k years.

Neat techniques used:

– message is 23 x 79 (both primes), meaning that there are only two ways to make it into a rectangle. Using the wrong direction makes it clearly jumbled.

– human height encoded relative to wavelength of message

– solar system simplified representation. Drawing of human stands on top of earth representation.

FBI most famous cases

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art Theft

In 1990 two thieves enter disguised as police, take 500 million worth of paintings and leave: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Museum#Art_theft_of_1990

Eduardo Saverin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Saverin

Facebook cofounder and billionaire. Fun facts:

– Saverin took advantage of Brazil’s lax insider trading regulations and made $300,000 via strategic investments in the oil industry.

– he renounced his U.S. citizenship; the citizenship change may have reduced the capital gains taxes Saverin would have paid after the Facebook IPO.^[7][20] In response, Senator Chuck Schumer introduced the Ex-PATRIOT Act, which could have prevented Saverin from ever entering the U.S. again, but the bill died in committee.

Urashima Taro

Cool ancient Japanese story about time travel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urashima_Tar%C5%8D

Tomatos and Persimmons

In Chinese, tomatoes are literally called Red Persimmons from the West (西红柿 = West + Red + Persimmon). This is so because persimmons are native from China, where they are simply called (柿子), where 子 only indicates that  the grammatical class of the word is noun (and not, say, verb).

Jury rig

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_rig

Here be dragons

Cool English expression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons

Larry Wall

Interesting bio of the creator of Perl and patch utility:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall

Explains the origin of the name Perl, which is a biblic reference to the parable of the Peral of great value.

chuang horse gate chinese character

Pictographically cool character:

闯

The meaning is to charge quickly.

It is composed of:

门

which means gate, and:

马

which means horse, clearly suggesting that a horseman is barging into someone’s gate.

 

Origin of the term kike

Derogatory term used to refer to the Jews.

Origin according to wikipedia:

The word kike was born on Ellis Island when there were Jewish immigrants who were also illiterate (or could not use Latin alphabet letters), when asked to sign the entry-forms with the customary ‘X,’* refused, because they associated an X with the cross of Christianity, and made a circle in its place. The Yiddish word for ‘circle’ is kikel (pronounced KY-kul), and for ‘little circle,’ kikeleh (pronounced KY-kul-uh). Before long the immigration inspectors were calling anyone who signed with an ‘O’ in place of an ‘X’ a kikel or kikeleh or kikee or, finally and succinctly, kike.^[2]

glibc abort

Excerpt from the glibc manual found here:

Future Change Warning: Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program.

Explanation: a joke about the extreme sensitivity of the abortion issue on the US.

Jacques Mesrine

Unbelievable biography of a criminal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Mesrine

Dingbats

Font fun:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingbat

also note how wikipedia redirects some dingbats like the telephone to the actual telephone page!

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils

— Hector Berlioz

c trigraphs

the usefulness of this feature in modern systems is only surpassed by that of the comma operator!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C

sinecture

my dream job:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinecure

text vs code

the difference between developping code and text is that:

– you cannot do unit tests for text

– if you get one comma wrong on a text, it is stil usable

stackoverflow upvotes

sometimes, it is not your most important post that gets your repo up…

stuff that really helps:

– important subjects that everyone uses like git or vim

– the top answer is incorrect/incomplete. People will upvote you untill your answer overcomes the other one

vim ceci n’est pas une pipe

excerpt from the vim manual pages on :h |:

|            To screen column [count] in the current line.
|exclusive| motion.  Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

glory is like a circle in the water

Glory is like a circle in the water

Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself

Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.

sheakespeare, henry 6, part 1, act 1, scene 2, lines 133-135

sheakespeare king lear have more than thou showest

http://nfs.sparknotes.com/lear/page_56.html 105

FOOL

Mark it, nuncle.

Have more than thou showest,

Speak less than thou knowest,

Lend less than thou owest,

Ride more than thou goest,

Learn more than thou trowest,

Set less than thou throwest,

Leave thy drink and thy whore

And keep in-a-door,

And thou shalt have more

Than two tens to a score.

FOOL

Listen up, uncle.

Have more than you show,

Speak less than you know,

Lend less than you owe.

Ride more than you walk,

Don’t believe everything you hear,

Don’t bet everything on one throw of the dice,

Leave behind your booze and your whore,

And stay indoors,

And you’ll end up with more

Than two tens to a twenty.

su wu

real chinese character with classic interesting story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Wu

c comma operator

the most obscure and almost useless c c++ operator:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_operator

ncurses is how to make those purple gray terminal guis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses

Dsa encryption is an alternative to rsa

It is based on the discrete logarithm, and has some similarities to rsa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Signature_Algorithm

Film lists to quench your film thirst

Top 100 AFI, American only:

http://www.afi.com/100Years/movies10.aspx

Digital dream door films:

http://www.digitaldreamdoor.com/pages/movie-pages/movie_movies.html

Mubi, social film site:

http://mubi.com

Theme lists from Criterion:

http://www.criterion.com/explore

Essential art house (Criterion):

http://www.criterion.com/boxsets/305-essential-art-house-50-years-of-janus-films-50-dvd-box-set

Good sources to learn about gcc c/c++ compiling and linking

Learn how to use object files (.o), archives (.a) and shared objects (.so) when compiling c/c++:

http://www.network-theory.co.uk/docs/gccintro/gccintro_17.html

http://crasseux.com/books/ctutorial/Building-a-library.html

http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/ehchua/programming/cpp/gcc_make.html

mosuo people martriarchal ethnic group china

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoTrARDa8BU

Get a webpage and all the pages it links to for local viewing with wget

wget -r -l1 -p -np -k -nH -P 'outdir' http://www.aaa/bbb.html

#download bbb.html
#-r: recursivelly
#-l1: up to level 1 links, that is, download only the pages imediately linked to by www.aaa/bbb.html
#   (-l1, could be -l2, -l3, ... for nth level links)
#-p: saving all necessary files to view the page locally (images, css)
#-np: not downloading parent directories pages
#-k: converting links in htmls that were downloaded into local links for offline viewing
#-nH: not creating a directory 'www.aaa' as would be default
#-P 'outdir': saving output inside a directory 'outdir', and creating it if it doesn't exist

Python read ISO 8859-1 (Latin1) encoding

import codecs
f = codecs.open(path, 'r', 'iso-8859-1')
str = f.read()
f.close()

ISO 8859-1 (Latin1) encoding

if you ever meet 2 byte characters, that

1. are not UTF8
2. become rubbish when you translate to UTF8
3. should be latin character variations such as á, ç, or ö
4. have high first byte (0xF2), which is the case for the most commmon latin char variations

suspect this encoding. It is quite common. For a list see

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp

Numeric approximations in Chinese

二   =   2

三   =    3

十    =    10

二十    =    20

三十    =   30

二三是    =    around 20 or 30

Always remove trailling whitespace and multiple whitespace chars

piece of wisdom:

>>> before you do anything, do this

=~ s/s+/ /g
=~ s/s+$//g

( unless of course space data is meaningful… )

In china, under age people cannot go to a internet cafe.

The joys of open source: forum post was useful

> Thanks, Cirosantilli.
>
> Its works for me

Free software and free learning for all!

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11996455#post11996455

Synctex forward search example

1. make a multipage tex document with INPUT_PATH

   INPUT_PATH="/path/to/tex/file/asdf.tex"

2. compile with:

   pdflatex -synctex=1 "$INPUT_PATH"

   this should generate “asdf.pdf” and the synctex file ( because of -synctex=1)

3. run synctex as

   synctex view -i 77:1:/path/to/tex/file/./asdf.tex -o asdf.pdf

   77:1 means you are on line 77 column 1 of the tex file, and you want to get the position on the pdf. Note the ugly “/./” between the parent directory and the basename. It must be there!

4. sample output

   This is SyncTeX command line utility, version 1.2
   SyncTeX result begin
   Output:report.pdf
   Page:2
   x:261.757507
   y:492.330658
   h:255.095062
   v:495.319450
   W:100.061378
   H:13.902562
   before:
   offset:0
   middle:
   after:
   SyncTeX result end

   amongst other things, this is telling you that this position on the tex file corresponds to Page 2 of your pdf.

5. Now all you have to do is to tell your pdf viewer to open that page. In Okular this would be:

   okular -p 2 asdf.pdf

Reasons to learn the bash command line

Bash suffers from a few disadvantages

• Linux only
• quite complicated variable/parameters passing

which in my opinion make python a better choice for anything that is not a one liner.

On the other hand, learning bash and the basic Linux commands can be very useful for a programmer

• interface. the bash command line contains interface that is widely recognized and that has survived the test of time, meaning that you will be able to understand others programs and create programs that are more easily understandable. For example, if you name a method ‘find’, which does more or less the same as the Linux command, chances are that others will immediately understand and remember this, which is a crucial step to coping with complexity of programs.
• raw power. some standard bash utilities are so amazingly powerful for the amount of code that you have to write, that it is just worth learning it.

remove duplicates by content with fdupes

sudo apt-get install fdupes
fdupes -rd dirA dirB dirC

Will look for duplicates

• under relative paths dirA, dirB and dirC
• recursively (-r)
• ask print duplicate paths one by one and ask which you want to keep (can also type all to keep all) and delete the others (-d)

cd inside a script does not change the directory of current terminal

echo 'cd ..' > test && chmod +x test

./test

does not nothing because ./test is executed is a subshell

. test

works, because the ‘.’ operator does does the same thing as copying the file test and pasting inside the current shell

Bash pdf command

Linux command line is such a powerhouse it already comes with a pdf command! pdf –help to learn of course

sudo only works for one command, echo and redirection (>) are two commands

seeDvorak’s blog

Tee bash command

Useful, simple AND visually appealing. Beautiful. See Wiki link and by examples link.

Muesli was invented around 1900 by Swiss physician

WIKI LINK HERE

Tractrix

WIKI LINK HERE