Tag: english

Ubuntu

December 5, 2008
valeblog
0 Comment

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).

Read More

#!/bin/sh

November 30, 2008
valeblog
0 Comment

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 179th 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…

Read More

Eventlessness

November 29, 2008
valeblog
0 Comment

Today was, well, kind of eventless. I woke up just about an hour later than i wanted to, but i couldn’t make myself crawl out of bed when my phone rang around eight in the morning. Then i hurried to the university and worked until two pm with Ai on our homework for “compintro” (introduction to computer science), which was quite fun (bash (shell) scripting some interesting stuff). Then i had lunch and hurried with packing so that i could catch the 3.30 bus—which naturally i missed. But got on the 4.00 one, so i got home sometime around six, and since then i was translating Bleach subtitles (fansub, you see) for Hidden Leaf Team. I’ve done two and a half now, and will do the other half and one more tomorrow. That leaves two for sunday and one for monday. That’s quite much seeing that the coming three weeks i’ll have tests and exams in all my subjects at the university, so i’m supposed to study all day and all night like hell. Luck i’m writing good summaries so i can quickly understand all that stuff which i couldn’t when i was making notes. The weekend won’t be idle for sure.

Wounded

November 26, 2008
valeblog
0 Comment

My knee hurts like hell, and that wound just doesn’t want to heal yet. I don’t want to be complaining, because i knew all too well how it’ll end if i went out playing soccer on ice and snow, but still it hurts. Hope it won’t last long.

But at least i’m more or less done with my “portfolio” website, and i’d be very interested to hear all comments and critiques you have up your sleeve (by the way, that goes to all websites i publish as complete ones). The third one i’ll be doing—beside totally rebuilding the blog—is the photo site, but that’s not anytime near, since i first want to get a proper machine with which i could shoot photos the way i want (i’ve been long planning a specific one with extra-long shutter speed), and i first need to get the money for it, and that’ll take a while for sure.

Now—since i have free time till two pm—i’ll be having fun. Having fun this time means learning spanish and doing the german homework (hopefully learning something then too), and trying to solve the math intro homework problems i couldn’t yet. All this listening to Mägo de Oz and Ska-P—both spanish and sound great. (I’m thinking about integrating a last.fm widget in the blog too.)

Urge

November 20, 2008
valeblog
0 Comment

Now about five minutes before my time to leave for the usual thursday (Thor’s day) afternoon german lesson, i felt a sudden urge to blog (once again there is this neologism—and many more, nouns turning into verbs, verbs into adjectives and so on). So i blog. There was a nice argument going on among a few plurkers including me about a few interesting verbs with prefixes (i hope that’s how they’re called in english), and whether it’s correct to use them with those prefixes i’ve been using them with.

Another thing is the reason for my silence this week. First of all, my day ends usually after ten in the evening, and by then my brain’s like a ragged mop, only having enough power to laugh on lame videos posted on plurk, eat my dinner and after a hot shower go to sleep. Not to mention i’m not feeling the best nowadays… Though i’m getting used to it. I don’t think anyone around me could tell, but that’s alright. I hate to worry myself, and i hate to make others worry even more. Rather die quietly in my dreams. This strange feel sometimes also gets stronger, and then it’s like the world’s turned off, i’m forced to sink in and just think. Though i can’t. Anyway, then i have so really cool ideas for blogging, that it’s really strange i couldn’t reproduce any when i’m well. Like now.

A short weekend

November 17, 2008
valeblog
0 Comment

In the past month usually i’ve been going home on friday and coming back to the dorm monday, but now that changed. Went home only saturday, because of the Sonata Arctica gig friday night, and came back yesterday afternoon, to see a theatre play. I was just surprised how quickly this weekend passed, and then realised that i don’t have anything to do today till eve except the last two pages of a really annoying programming homework, so this is somewhat like weekend still.

I plan on going down to the gym and then working on that thing. I’ll have to comment almost every single line of my programcode, and that won’t be much fun since i’ve written it as compact as i could—thus it’ll need quite a lot of explanation.

I’ll also meet with a past classmate to have a talk about business matters, i think that if we could launch that plan of his, then i won’t be in a financial pinch like now. I try to fix my situation without having to give up any of my important plans (going to that gig on friday, buying myself headphones sometime in the future). Won’t be easy for sure. But if that business starts up as planned, there won’t be any problems for a while then.

Keith Haring and the ice ages

November 15, 2008
valeblog
0 Comment

Today i attended two exhibitions, one in the National Museum of Nature Sciences, about the ice ages (and also there was another one about predators), and the Ludwig Museum’s three floors–on the first an exhibit of Agnes Denes, on the second the Keith Haring one and on the third the collection of the museum.

The ice ages exhibition (Jégkorszakok in Hungarian—and in plural) was aimed at a much younger audience in my opinion, much like what i experienced in the nature sciences museums of Chicago. It was highly interactive, with a couple of really interesting details on the past climate changes of our planet—for example, did you know our climate is so nicely moderate only because of the ice age not so long ago? (It’s “not so long ago” only in geological time scale, naturally. That means about ten thousand years.) In the age of the dinosaurs it’s supposed to have been a lot warmer. At the last stages of the exhibition were the models of ice age animals, huge predators (saber-toothed tiger, hyenas and co) and even larger herbivores (mammoths, ancestory of deer and horses), and i stood there thinking if i’d had a chance against such an animal. I ended up with the decision that if i lived then i probably would be a lot more muscular than i am now, so a precise kick in the face of the wolf would stop it for sure, and with a large piece of wood or stone i could crush the head of a tiger too. I wonder. Have read not so long about a man killing a brown bear so—i guess it’s not hopeless then.

Read More

Fail

November 13, 2008
valeblog
0 Comment

I just had dinner. I ate fish. Don’t ask what kind of fish though—i didn’t care enough to check. It was edible (i hope) and with the usual lemon addition a better ending for this day than what it deserved. The evening was worse than my worst expectations. The modern theories lesson was annoying, with the teacher going on about arts students (you know, bachelor of arts and stuff), and how they are good for nothing. I almost told him that i’m more of an arts student than a programmer, and if this snobbishness and scorn is what it means to be a nature sciences student, i’d rather become a philosopher of the possible most theoretical type. That annoys the hell out of me, just as that how a groupmate there speaks when the teacher is present. Makes me shiver. Oh and the spanish test… Catastrophe, to be short. We were asked the words for family members and other stuff, all i thought to be not of much importance—my judgements are declining, apparently. Or i am. So… I’m not in the best possible mood now, but at least writing all this stuff somewhat cheered me up and now i’ll go and have fun. I won’t sleep enough, as usual.

Children of a brave new world

November 12, 2008
valeblog
0 Comment

I’ve finished Children of Dune. It took more than usual, this i started on friday and yet only finished it now on the way to the uni. It was good, for sure. But i have problems with it, just as i had with Dune Messiah. There are disturbing stuff, the characters taking something we don’t know a bit about for granted, and most of all, that they are almost omniscient and omnipotent, somewhere near gods, though they’re only humans (more or less) with specially trained cognitive (and in some cases physical) abilities, but still just a being started as a homo sapiens. The story is fascinating, though it’s nowhere near the first and one and only Dune, nor is the story, but creating a masterpiece when it’s about a series is not an easy task. Harry Potter is an example.

Now i’ll start Brave new world by Huxley, i hope it’ll be as good as famous it is.

Luna(tic)

November 10, 2008
valeblog
0 Comment

Blogging again after the day of God, which i spent learning spanish all afternoon, after coming back from Recsk, where my grandfather died at the labour camp (know the phrase “gulag”?), during the travel and in the breaks of spanish reading Children of Dune (the third book in the series). Last week i forgot to mention that i finished the book i got from my ex-girlfriend, “Vercoquin et le plancton” by Boris Vian. I couldn’t find an english title, so i guess it wasn’t yet translated—though that’d be very surprising, since it’s a fantastic one. A bit hard to digest, but hilarious. The ill sense of humour in every single bit of it (pay attention to the names!) almost made me fall off the chair—and that would’ve been troublesome, as i was on a stuffed bus on the way to the capital. On the one hand, it’s very funny, but on the other hand it’s a bit too much, that’s why it took a year to read it. The style’s not that charming, rather grotesque. The latter Dune books aren’t as good as the first one either, though they are still better than many i’ve read, but not “unputdownable” (a word my sis’ seen on an ad back in London), because there are many inconsistencies, references to stuff unknown and new phrases of which i can’t decide if they’re just a different translation of a known thing or something new. This sounds as if i didn’t like them, but that’s not the case at all. “I’m lovin’ it!”