vale[ blog ] diary of the last hollow soul

Today my life's quite simple. In the morning (well, rathermore the hours neighboring noon) with a friend we went shopping important stuff for wednesday's party of new year's eve (that means we bought as many cans of beer as we could), left the stuff at the victim house and tested a few important devices (toilet, cooker, heating, electricity). Before and after that i've been playing StarCraft with my nephew, until he left to hang out with friends (man, how will i make a real kyub out of him?), since then i'm studying. Subject's linear algebra, those of you who studied it could understand why i love it so much (not). I'm playing with linear equation systems, trying to solve them using basis transformations (i hope that's what it's called in english), with more or less luck. Isn't really that so-very-joyful work, but has to be done because next wednesday i'm having an exam of it… Don't have to say, i could live without it.

For about a year now i've had a Nokia phone—don't ask exactly what kind, i don't know. The most important thing is that it has a game called Glamour Pinball. As the name indicates, it's a pinball (sometimes called flipper), and i really enjoy playing it in my spare time, while travelling or when i couldn't read a book. I've been playing it for a while and time by time i encountered modes or extras nowhere documented—you can't really find any resources on the net about this game, that's why i decided to write this post. I couldn't attach any pictures and maybe i'm mistranslating a few names, but i'm playing a localised version of the game, so i don't know how stuff are called in english.

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That's a nice word in some african languages, i think zulu, maybe? It's a nice idea, anyway about the universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity (now i'm quoting the Wiktionary page of the word). Anyway, i'm not going into linguistics now, rather into the open source community. I've installed Ubuntu, and it works fine and well. Tomorrow will be its grand test when at home i'll try out if that proprietary driver for my wireless card it installed works as it should. I hope it does. I already managed to share the Pidgin and Firefox profiles between Windows and Ubuntu, though making my heart stop for a few minutes. The Pidgin one wasn't as simple as with Firefox, i had to add a parameter to the shortcut so that it'd launch with the profile files loaded from the Windows version's folder (mounted under linux too). But i accidentally typed the and in Documents and Settings with a capital A—and because of that my Windows profile wouldn't launch and that scared the deep burning hell out of me. But i figured out what the problem was (it was strange there were two Documents and Settings folders, and then i just had to find out which one was the original), so it should work all right now (since then i haven't launched Win, but i hope it'll work as it should).

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I'm a bit fed up with that lately all i've been writing strangely always begins with #!/bin/sh. Those who know what this means are either totally sympathetic or totally confused. Those who don't: i've been bash shell scripting the past day. Rather say the weekend. It was fun… as long as i could find the corresponding manuals without going back to the 179^th page of the Google results, and everything worked as it should've. It's not simple if it's your first time coding shell without any proper education of it before. And somehow when they'd been teaching us that stuff whenever it did something strange, they just looked at it and responded with a shrug. Now that's not exactly what's useful when i can't get a relatively simple script to work, as it turned out, because shell is extra-super sensitive to whitespace. If you want to assign value to a variable, it crashes if there's any around the equation sign, but on the other hand, if you're comparing values or variables (eg in an if statement), there have to be spaces around the comparison operators. The single- and double-quotes (' and ") also function just as in php: if you try to get the value of a variable inside single quotes, that won't work as you want, but it will with double quotes. The troublesome with this is that when you're debugging the string it seems to be inserting the correct values…

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