If in debt.

If you need some help to repay $60bn dollars for an air conditioned golf course, just short the banks that lent you the $60bn, then walk up to a microphone and say "we are not paying you back the $60bn". Job done.

Print A5 booklet from pdf

I went kind of crazy with psbook and pdf2ps and all the rest of it, when it is actually a lot simpler. Just open acrobat, do print->page scaling->booklet. Select print on both sides and there you are, no Makefile involved.

Vim spellcheck two languages

You can load more than one language in the builtin Vim 7 spellcheck. However it does not look like you can choose when to switch languages, it just uses both all the time, so the more you load the more the chance of some false negative.

set spell spelllang=en_gb,it

Remux

Reminder to self, this will fix audio/video sync problems and streaming.

mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy -of avi -o output.avi input.avi

Ultimate LaTeX plotting solution

After years of struggling with rubbish PNGs in pdf files (don't scale), the nightmares of running latex -> ps2pdf and the like just to get vector graphics, painful pstricks list of substitutions finally I found the ultimate plotting thing for LaTeX. It hasn't been around for too long, and it is pgfplots/TikZ.

There is even a matlab2tikz function that does a decent job at grabbing your current matlab figure, converting it to a pgfplots script and then you can go round and change things to make them pretty. It is king.

The Killers

Some four years late I realised that the bass line in "Jenny Was A
Friend Of Mine" is probably worth getting the album.

Professional bias

Look at that, watching the You Tube video of Britains Got Talent 2009 when Susan Boyle sings, I thought, before anything else: "look, they have the same Denon CD player as we do"!

Obama violates copyright laws?

A really nice article on how giving an iPod full of music as a gift to a friend, or, say, the Queen is a real mess of copyright laws being maybe violated. Or maybe not.

Tate modern extension.

Some interesting pictures of this thing, that although ugly at first might actually be quite nice. Or, although promising at first might turn out to be quite ugly.

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=377117&page=17

Errata corrige.

I would like to point out to the italian papers that this morning were headlining "Sir Goodwin gets a check of 630000 pounds per month", that the actual figure quoted is "per year". Still free (and possibly right) to be outraged, but by an order of magnitude less.

Ipse dixit.

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

Risk free suit

You buy a suit, and if you lose your job, they give your money back!.

Facebook groups.

I love some of these groups that promise something if you join (and invite friends) with the only (useless) aim to get thousands of people sign up. I seem to get more invitation from the italian ones, like this one, that promises you to give statistics on who is visiting your profile...and got 300000 subscriptions! Another popular one promises to reveal your family tree, and got 1,300,000 people...

Vacation

Due to the extreme weather conditions and the difficulty staff and students are experiencing in getting into College, all lectures for today are cancelled. Hopefully, we can return to normal tomorrow, I will post notice on the Dept website if this is not the case.

I see.

XPSP2

After installing Windows XP SP2 one spends about 12 hours downloading updates...:(

Not in my name

This is quite pretentious...nice still.

Tanning

Do read the italian newspapers, for added comedy value.

Bad designed forms.

What is the "confirm email address" field for? For people that touch type with their eyes closed? I think they should leave it out as a preliminary filter...

General merriment

Although is understandable to be happy when your favourite candidate wins, I am a bit puzzled to see all the merriment as if the battle was won. I see a dangerous confusion between the significance of the recent elections and the expectations from the winning candidate. If you supported Obama and his ideas, then the victory should only mean to you that the majority of the Americans agree with you, they are moved by the same ideals. You could go as far as saying that you're happy because maybe there is hope for some of the other countries where these ideals don't have that much success.

But this is far from saying that your expectations have been fulfilled. You can just hope that they will, in the years to come. You can hope that the policies will be implemented, and you can hope that once implemented they will work. This victory is surely a step forward for the human kind, but is a bit early for all the merriment.

Good trailers

The trailer of burn after reading is definitely one of the best trailers ever. The movies comes out quite late in the UK, but doesn't matter, I can watch the trailer more!

On a side note, all films with a scene of someone backlit that walks into light gradually should be banned. Uh, I said this already. Nevermind.