Somehow today I remembered the movie The Exorcist. I later went to the Wikipedia page that covers the film details and guess what, I found an actual 360º virtual view of the steps where Father Damien Karras dies. Creepy. Went to Google Maps and Yahoo Maps but it hasn’t enough detail on that spot to make it interesting.

I rented the DVD Last Days, to watch tonight. Yesterday I watched Wiker Park (2004) with Ana and I thought it was great. I went back to MovieLens today, a movie recomendation site after a few months of absence since I registered. I first heard about it when I went to Brazil and saw a workshop on recomendation systems. The system is rather interesting, it uses simple algorithms like K-Means and correlation, etc.. but I didn’t saw any movie recommended by it so I can’t say if it works or not

Other than that, today I was able to run for 20min in a row, wow, not bad.

Upgraded to the latest Dapper release of Ubuntu Linux and got this kernel panic:


Begin: Mounting root file system... ...
Begin: Running /scripts/local-top...
PANIC: Circular dependancy. Exiting.
[4294675.656000] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!


A synatic “Mark all upgrades” and “Apply” fixed the problem.

One of my laptop wings broke a few days ago. Its the end-of-life for this old Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 that will turn 6 years next August. Funny that precisely the same thing happened to Cláudio a few months ago, he had the same laptop with nearly the same age (a month older) and the right wing broke. I guess Toshiba had this pretty well figured out, ham?

I’m now inclined to acquire a Macbook Pro or a Thinkpad but this will not happen probably until October or so. Although I have the money to buy it now I also have to think about the next months and I decided I wouldn’t take money from my parents anymore. 25 years financially supporting a slacker like me is already more than enough and not easy. They are in good age to enjoy life, travelling or in any other way they see fit.

Tiago invited me and Ana to a stand-up show by Pedro Tochas, a Portuguese well-known comediant. It will be great, this guy realls rocks. In the mean time, my new ADSL modem has arrived! Me and Ana have upgraded to Clix 16 Mbits, the fastest home-user internet solution available at the moment in Portugal (I think). For my happy surprise, the modem supports Ethernet :) Work has also arrived, this time via e-mail. Have to prepare this week classes.

Google has launched the Google Calendar and they got it right as usual. I don’t want to think what will happen now to those couple of startups that were on the run for a web calendar. Close the doors probably.

Publico newspaper featured a two page article this week about Web 2.0 and “social networking” web sites. Many well-known sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, 43folders, etc.. were featured. Very nice article.

I’m the maintaner of the gprolog package under OpenBSD. GNU Prolog stopped building correctly a few months ago and I’m trying to fix it. Some related ideas follow..

I suspect the problem is related to the changes in malloc(3):

> “..the userland’s method for allocating memory, has been rewritten to use the mmap(2) system call on OpenBSD. Traditionally, memory allocated to a system would be all together in one contiguous region. If an algorithm in a program behaved reliably but stepping slightly outside the area of memory it allocated, this was a bug gone undetected. With the release of 3.8, because of the way mmap randomizes the location in memory, this is no longer true.”

This new behavior seemed to break the compilation process.

**Update:** To those of you of saw the first version of this post you might have noticed I lost part of it. This was due to a problem with my internet connection while updating the post at the same time. Oh well, life goes on..

Last weekend, at an event in Portugal, OpenBSD .PT showed a redundant OpenBSD firewall working with two soekrises and two laptops. We had one laptop playing an mp3 that was physically on the second laptop, being shared via NFS, and then simulated a failure on the firewall. A second machine claimed automatically the firewall identity on the network and the music playing just choked a bit and recovered nicely. Kind of what Ryan McBride did at EuroBSDCon but without the axe part! Anyway, it definitely was fun to watch and it is also a good reminder of an OpenBSD based solution that companies can implement under a low budget. Some photos are also available.

Update: I submitted this story to the OpenBSD Journal and it got published.

OpenBSD .PT is running a collective donation effort for OpenBSD. We have gathered around 170€ till now (if you’re interested read here).

Btw, have you seen Theo De Raadt's blog?

OMG! My very first Wikipedia page is up. It’s about PM2, a software for distributed computing I’m using on work. I’ve deleted the local page I had, not that anyone should care.