Notes

Yesterday, I was doing some shopping in a local mall and I happen to cruise by the monitor section and they had an Acer 20" with a 1680x1050 resolution on promotion. They had 6 monitors left with a very good price.

Today I stopped by and picked up the last one left.

I'm now writing this on a large widescreen display. It's pretty nice, and the pixel-maniac in me is pretty happy. I'm still tuning the contrast and to make it easier on the eyes, but the new real-estate is very useful.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

In the following weeks me and my wife will be traveling a bit and mostly outside our usual places of work.

That means no net.

Or at least it usually did mean that. I bought her a Vodafone Mobile Connect Card, the 3G, not the 3.5G "broad band". I'm a TMN subscriber and she is a Optimus subscriber, but I went to Vodafone because they have better coverage.

The card was pretty much plug & pray in Windows, and we where online fetching mail in no time. Very nice.

They I turned to my Mac. The card brand is Option, and they have Mac OS X drivers, so I downloaded them, installed them and bingo, I was online also with my Mac.

I then tried to log-on to the VPN at work, but it seems to have vanished. I realized that the installation program for the card completely obliterates the VPN setup you had previously. Not good.

All in all, it was a good experience and we now have a way to fetch our mail in the next few weeks. Even with the VPN-fiasco, I would recommend this card to anyone in Portugal in search of a 3G connection. Personally I would prefer a phone-based approach but I didn't want to wast money on a 3G phone that I don't need.

The problem will arrive later, when the Macbook Pro arrives and the PCMCIA slot disappears...

Update: yuck, yuck, yuck... The Vodafone "Dashboard" erases my entire VPN setup every time I activate the card. And that is a required step in the process of connecting. Sucks big time, Vodafone.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

As you might have notice, sometimes there are weeks where I don't write nothing here.

This trend will accelerate in the next few weeks, while I'm on vacation.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I have no words...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Here is something that took me a while to get.

If you are writing scripts in Perl to do some reports and statistic analysis, and you are not using format, stop right now, do a perldoc perlform.

Then, in case you need to switch reports in the middle of the script, for example if your script dumps the data collected in three different layouts, use this code between each report:

$~ = 'REPORT_NAME';
$^= 'REPORT_NAME_TOP';
$= = 100;  # Number of lines on each page
$- = 0;    # Force the print of the new header

You can use English and use the long versions of these variables. See perldoc perlvar for those.

The $- is the one that had me pulling my hair. If you switch to a new layout and start writing data, the system doesn't know that this is a new layout, and will not print a header until he needs to switch the page. Setting this variable to 0 forces a page feed, and forces the new header to be printed.

Technorati Tags: perl, perl5

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Interesting way to deal with a DoS that you get from being a major asshole: just dump it on someone else.

Kudos to the SixApart network team.

Technorati Tags: sixapart

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The Macbook Pro 17" specs state:

Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 2560 by 1600 pixels on an external display, both at millions of colors

That means that you can have 2560x1600 pixels on the external monitor, for a total of 4096000 pixels.

I wonder if you could do 3840x1024... It would mean less pixels, but a different layout.

I ask this because this is very very tempting.

Update: sucks... According to Matrox compatibility chart, the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 is not supported.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, macbookpro

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)