The other day I was surfing through del.icio.us (a social bookmarking website) and clicked on a user that had a fair amount of links organized in a strange way that I wasn’t familiar with, something along the lines of this:

I then quickly found what I had been missing is known as ‘bundle tags’ and permits organizing the tags into categories (the so called bundles).

I’m now also adding friends to my ‘network’ there. It’s useful because if I find a link about X or Y and remember one of my friends I can recommend the link to he/she just the clicking ‘Tag this page’ (via the firefox extension) and write ‘for:username‘. That’s it.

If you don’t want your friends sneaking up all your bookmarks you can always turn the privacy option in your profile so there’s really no reason not to be using this already ;)

So if you have a del.icio.us user send it to me, mine is morgadinho.

I finished my graduation in computer science last year (July 2005). In September 2005 I started assisting the course of Data Warehousing at the University as a so-called colaborator, a no-so-good status quo but good enough for me since it would give me time during the week (3 hours per week) to work on a MSc. It was a cheerful experience which I enjoyed and from which I learned a lot of things. Teaching gives a whole new perspective on the material since you really have to know, you can’t know more or less.

In the semester that followed I started assisting a different course – digital systems. It certainly isn’t one of my main interest areas but as someone who loves computers and technology I found interesting and challenging problems that gave me a lot of work but also a lot of fun solving and teaching. As a professor I find the relation professor-students one of the most rewarding experiences. Making them think and pose questions. Showing how one big problem that seems unsolvable to them can be reduced simply to a trivial one when approaching it in the right way.

As the semester ended and I went into summer vacations (July 2006) my MSc work was going as expected and I had a lot of items to work on. I didn’t do almost anything useful till early September for the MSc but I had a great vacations. At least great enough to not feel they were short.

In early September I came back to Évora to catch up with my MSc advisor and to work on my thesis. I was also expecting to get payed for my work at the University (between March till July 2006) since the last payment I received from them was on March! Till today I haven’t received anything yet, which makes a total of 6 months without payment.

Me and my girlfriend in the same situation knew we didn’t want to continue living like this and both agreed on not accepting any further offers from the University. We were even advised by faculty people that the next semester would be even worse since no funds had been allocated to pay colaborators.

The plan right now is to finish my MSc thesis. Luckily my parents can support me while I don’t finish this milestone in my life but I can’t say I’m not heavily dissapointed by the inefficiency of the University as an institution. But running through my life right now I don’t regret a thing.

After a vacation week on Olhos de Água, Algarve, I’m back on track. The week was completely off computers and work, being the photos download from the digital camera the only allowed task.

Now I’m in Coimbra, after picking up Marc Balmer at the Lisbon airport for the OpenBSD-PT meeting that will start today.

Bought a 1Gb black iPod nano and I’m using [[http://gtkpod.sourceforge.net/|gtkpod]] for managing it under Linux. It works pretty well till now. I also tryed [[http://amarok.kde.org/|amarok]] and its pretty good also.

Most of my web feeds are on technical issues or from friends that blog about work. That’s ok but sometimes gets really boring. I decided to make reading my feeds more fun and went on search for humorous comics feeds.

Tapestry Comics, a web app built on top of Ruby on Rails, is a directory of web comics with feeds from which I glady pulled out dilbert, Every One Loves Eric Raymond, Sev Wars and Snap-o-Mania for now. They are so many that its difficult to choose

I wanted of course a feed for PhD comics and Userfriendly, but couldn’t find any. It’s a pitty, but I understand their bussiness decision, most of these sites earn money from advertisement and page views, a web feed would danger that (or so they seem to think).

If you have more fun stuff let me know. Thanks.

Note: If you don’t know what a ‘feed’ is go to this page and use Bloglines, for example, to track your favorite feeds.

Bumped into a problem with multiple gcc installations. I wanted to force the use of gcc-2.95 but I couldn’t use the normal ‘update-alternatives’ script because the package wasn’t being managed by it. I tryed another approach that was to put a copy of the gcc binary I wanted, together with ‘cpp0′ and ‘cc1′, on ~/bin and added it to PATH. I then tryed to compile a minimal C file:


main(){}


But then I was having this error:

ld: crtbegin.o: No such file or directory


GCC searches the PATH for an assembler and a loader, but it only does so after searching a directory list hard-coded in the GCC executables. By issuing ‘gcc –print-search-dirs’ you can check that list. By doing this I found that I needed to include yet another directory and by exporting LIBRARY_PATH to that directory I was able to make it work.

This problem eated most of my day so I hope this saves someone (or me next time) some time.

**Note:** If after this you have problems with the headers you may need to pass to gcc in the compilation command the directory of the headers you want with the option -I.