handyfloss

I previously posted about the sudoku fever that had attacked my family. I have found amusing solving some sudokus, but what I really thought was interesting was making a computer program to solve them automatically. Not that it would be more “challenging” (some sudokus are quite difficult), just more fun for me.

OK, so that I did, and today I have released a Perl program that (hopefully) solves any sudoku we feed to it. The program is called Sudaku (well, one sweats when solves a sudoku, doesn’t one?), and can be freely downloaded from my home page. I have licensed it under the GPLv2.

Yes, I know there are other sudoku solvers around, probably better than mine, on top of that. However, I just wanted to make it, and releasing it may help someone, or (more probably) even me, if some better programers than me out there e-mail me proposing changes/corrections.

What the heck, I just felt like releasing it! :^)

Yesterday I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, as it was a must-see for me, after the first part, which I liked very much.

I have to say I liked it much (my critic[es] at FilmAffinity), but it lacks originality (this was to be expected). The special effects are superb, and the setting, the script, the costumes and acting all join together to make the story believable (meaning that just the fights and chases are incredible, not the development of the events) and easygoing. Ten points for that.

However, the movie is little more than a clone on steroids of its predecessor Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl: it repeats the “success recipe” of the first part shamelessly. Bad boy, Gore Verbinski!

All in all, very funny and a good pastime, but not as good as the first one.

I’m back to work (and blogging) from a three-week holiday period in Valencia.

I have a couple of things to blog about. I’ll blog them, then try to hack the entries to pretend they were blogged the day I would have blogged them, were I not AFK :^)

UPDATE: silly me, posts can be given any date. It’s not even a “trick”. It’s just an everyday feature.

Today I walked by a photograph development shop, and was struck by an ad they had showing:

Watch out for viruses! Put your digital photos to on paper, lest you lose them to computer failures.

Now, with the advance in popularity of digital photography, it is evident that development shops need to find (or invent) new incentives for attracting fleeing customers, who make do with watching their pics on the computer screen.

However, I think they miss the shot here (see the pun?), and for two reasons:

Paper is a bad format

Hard disks can fail, and digital contents (e.g. pictures), can be lost. However, putting them on paper is hardly a solution. The convenience, comfort and flexibility given by a digital format can not be matched by a paper copy. What if I want to manipulate a picture (say, with the GIMP)? What if I want to send a copy to a friend by e-mail? What if I want to make an arbitrary number of copies for free and with no quality loss?

One could argue that paper is indeed good in some cases, e.g. if we want to be able to watch the pics without turning the computer on. But then, those reasons should be called upon to suport the development shops, not the backup excuse!

Viruses don’t ruin digital content

OK, this is not completely true. With MS Windows, viruses can damage the contents of your hard disk. However, that poor excuse of an OS is hardly the only OS out there, and most others (all others?) are impervious to viruses. Taking care of potential (eventual?) errors in that lame plataform is like putting an airbag in your car because it doesn’t have brakes. Well, yes, the airbag is great (and would be a great improvement, even in a car with brakes), but who in her right mind would drive a car without brakes in first place, for god’s sake!?

Anyway, as mentioned above, hard disks do fail, regardless of the OS they run under, so some backup is highly desirable, that’s true. It just turns out that paper is not suitable for such a task.

The way to go is, obviously, backing up your photos (or whatever) into other digital media, such as another hard disk, a CD, a DVD, etc. No virus or critical error of my stupid OS can delete the photos in a CD sitting on a shelf. The CD can wear out and fail, but it would be too big a coincidence to have it happen the same day your hard disk is also damaged by your (if you use Windows) or your computer’s (if the HD wears out) error.

And if you are paranoid, just make TWO CD backups.

I had resisted the social pressure to start making Sudokus until this August. I just didn’t want to make them “because they are fashionable”.

However, I have finally succumbed, and tried them. I have to say that (unlike my parents, who are hooked), I found them mildly amusing. Yes, they are entertaining, and yes, they can be quite difficult sometimes. I can not say that they bore me because they are too easy, or desperate me because they are too difficult. I enjoy them, just I don’t go crazy over them.

An anecdote about the matter is that one day my father and I went to a newsagent’s looking for a booklet of Sudokus, but found none in the pastimes section. We were puzzled, because Sudokus are such a hit, and a newsagent’s not selling them made no sense. We asked the seller, and she pointed to another section: the Sudoku section. They had devoted a whole section to them! Now, that made sense :^)

The only information I previously had about the web hosting company GoDaddy was that they massively changed some “parked” domains from GNU/Linux to MS Windows machines (see new in Netcraft.com and Menéame[es]). “Parked” domains are URLs that have owner, but no content (e.g. they have been “reserved” for future use). As such, they do not need any security or high performance, so switching from Linux/Apache to Windows/IIS was meaningless. The objective of this movement was just propagandistic: most likely MS bribed them to switch, so that they could say: “Hey, IIS has 3.5M more web pages, and Apache 3.5M less! It shows that IIS is gaining market!”. Pathetic.

However, bad news from GoDaddy are far from over. I just read at Javi Moya’s blog[es], the lack of professionality of its tech support[es].

It seems that not only customers are angry: some ex-employees are, also. One even made a web page to comment how much GoDaddy sucks.

Somehow (don’t remember exactly) I came across this LaTeX advocacy page, in which some reasons are given as to why use the typesetting software the reader must already know I use and love: LaTeX.

Looking at the Free Software page in the Wikipedia (to which I have contributed with the “However, direct economic benefit is hardly the main reason[…]” paragraph), I found the following link.

Although it’s about 9 months old, it is still meaningfull, and makes for a good reading. Also check this Groklaw article.

Go ahead and “get the facts”.

Yesterday I watched Tu vida en 65′, a Catalan movie about three young men who mistankenly attend the funeral of a guy they thought was their friend, but isn’t, and some existential questions follow.

I have posted a comment of this movie (in Spanish) at FilmAffinity.com.

The movie is not bad, but it is no masterpiece. Often times “strange” movies are mistaken for “high quality” movies, and I think that this one slips towards the former, rather than the latter.

This is an unconventional movie, with some skillful use of techniques, shots and photography, but some other ingredients are lacking. The story is OK, but the script is irregular, and some things (e.g. the ending) are difficult to understand. There are very humorous moments, and also sad ones, but they just don’t cut it.

The acting is not academy award-winning, but is correct in general. However, I didn’t like the main actor (Javier Pereira), at all. I don’t know if it was the actor’s or the character’s fault, but he had a frightening wako face all through the film. He had the eyes too wide open, and the face of someone expecting something, like one is during the seconds between asking a girl for a date, and her answer… just Pereira has this face the whole 93 minutes.

I expected more from that movie.

Ever have a Gaussian job die with this error?:

Omega: Change in point group or standard orientation.

It simply means that up to that point the molecule had a certain symmetry (for example, it was planar), and the last optimization step made it jump to another (usually lower) symmetry (for example, bend out of the plane). This is regarded as an error by Gaussian, and thus it aborts the job.

However, sometimes we are not interested in mantaining the symmetry, maybe even the high symmetry of the input was just a coincidence! One way or another, we might be interesting in having this job go on even if the symmetry changes. To do so, we just need to include the following IOp in the input file:

IOp(2/16=1)