cat /proc/claus | java

So, one of my summer projects was to build a manager for my bibtex files. They have been growing bigger and bigger as time went by, and now I have many somewhat different, somewhat similar, bibtex files for each of my writs.

Of course, before I set out to build anything, I decided to look around to see what is done. And I find kbibtex, a very nice looking, and actively developed project. It has most of the filtering and search abilities that I wanted, and while it does not have some (like a good support of comments, and merging/splitting of bibfiles) it seems to fit my needs pretty well.

So if you needed a bibtex managing tool, check out this one. And I need to find out a new summer project. Maybe my own research? Naaah…

So today Marilia was telling me about her Digital Circuit class, that her teacher asked them to design the circuit to display a 7-led digit:

“So, for instance, for this one I use an AND gate for the first and third bit, and a EOR gate for…”

“EOR gate?”

“Exclusive OR”

…

This was actually the first time I had ever heard that XOR could also be called EOR. I was sceptical for a while; in her book it was indeed written EOR. Wikipedia also confirmed it, in the opening paragraph of the XOR page, that it can also be called EOR. Googlefight gives 5.000.000 hits for XOR, and 1.000.000 hits for EOR.

Living and learning, I guess.

Something I like about running mostly open source software is the sense of humor that comes when doing something mostly by yourself, mostly just for the sheer pleasure of programming. The most recent example was with GnuCash, an accounting program I have just downloaded.

So after skimming over the documentation, I start a new file, and thus comes the set-up wizard. Except it is not a wizard, but a druid:

This Druid will help you create a set of GnuCash accounts for your assets

Heh, brings a smile to my face every time.

People always say “Ah, but configuring linux/unix is hard - you have to mess with all those configuration files!”. Well: (from a discussion site)

The problem:

Last week, our phone guy decided to reinstall the OS on our main voice mail server. Since it was running a “lowly” copy of Windows 2000 Pro, he decided that it needed a “server-grade” OS, and bought Microsoft Windows 2003 Server for Small Businesses. He installed in near the end of the week, and then took time off to put a new roof on his house.

Well, this morning, the machine in question shut itself off. I turned it on, it shut itself off again in a couple of hours. I looked in event log, and found that the machine was turning itself off because we violated the EULA by not setting it up as a domain controller.

Yep. Just because we didn’t need to authenticate users, the machine keeps shutting itself off. Isn’t that user-friendly?

The “solution”:

MS has this ridiculous system service called “SBSCore” that exists only to turn off the computer every hour if you aren’t running as a DC. Install SysInternals’ Process Explorer, suspend/pause sbscrexe, go into the registry to set the service to disabled, then remove all read permissions for every account from the actual file. The file is in \windows\system32\sbscrexe.exe. Then you can terminate the process. Don’t delete the file, though, that really got Windows upset when I tried that.

Reg key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\SBCore

In regedit, right click, give Administrators permission to the key and all child nodes. Then change the Start DWORD that will appear undernearth that to 4.

I still think that changing one line or two in /etc/foo is easier.

So I’m posting from the “Internet Room” from the robotics congress in Okayama. Contrary to what I thought, Okayama is a pretty big city with more than 600.000 inhabitants - about the size of Sao Vicente, perhaps.

The congress seems to be pretty big, with people from the major universities of Japan. According to a friend of the lab, it is also an “all or nothing” kind of conference: You have very bad and useless presentations, along with very good ones.

However, for me I think I’m missing most of these. First of all, my interest in low level robotics is kinda low. Then, the presentations are at most 10 minutes duration. Then they’re in japanese… So at most I get some general idea of what is being presented, whithout getting into many details.

As for how I got here, I’m replacing a friend from the lab, who couldn’t come to make his presentation.

To tell the truth, I wasn’t very “wow” about coming here. However, yesterday night I met with the brazillian students at Okayama (I’m staying in their’s place) - and that was quite fun. I hope we can mess around more before saturday.

That’s it for now. There will be a session on space robots in 30 minutes. Even if I can’t (again) understand anything, it promises some pretty pictures.

Cheers.