É só para dizer que não gosto muito deste formato “quadrado”… prefiro jornais ao alto, estreitos, que se possam dobrar ao meio e ler ao bocadinhos conforme me dá prazer. O novo formato do público segue novas tendências, mais modernas… mas eu sou assim resmungão. Talvez dentro de uns anos nem me lembre do formato do Público ou de outro qualquer jornal impresso, de tal forma estarei habituado a ler online… mas até que a memória me atraiçoe fica o meu desabafo. Fora o formato venha o conteúdo. Continua a ser de há muitos anos o “meu” jornal (apesar de muitos pequenos aborrecimentos que tem e coisas que não tem).
Some LaTeX Caption Tricks to remember
Captions before Labels
Wherever you need to include a caption, be it figures, tables, equations, always include the caption before the label. If you don’t do this when you cross-reference them in the text the numbers will be wrong.
Better Captions with the caption package
By default the captions of figures, tables, etc… are typeset in the same font and size as the main text. This can be sometimes confusing, mainly if you have a figure on the top of a page followed by normal text. To solve this add
\usepackage[small,hang,bf]{caption} |
to your preamble. The options small, hang and bf define the size of the text, the hanging of the caption label (ex. Figure 7:) and the caption label font weight (in this case a bold face). It gives excellent results.
The Portuguese Soap Operas Continue
While Portugal is almost bankrupt, while cold is killing Portuguese people, while unemployment is skyrocketing… the important news of the day is a bad soap opera on the spelling of Portuguese. Portugal government sees itself as the Big Brother that must know all, rule all, decide all, even language needs to conform to some decree and not be allowed to evolve naturally as all (except Portuguese) do.
Apple FileVault2 encryption cracked
Never really liked FileVault on the mac but the news that its encryption has been cracked just shows that whenever you can get your hand on a computer… you OWN it. Don’t really trust your encryption scheme as bullet proof safe. It will hit you right back in your face.
Want security? Don’t leave your laptop alone! Don’t put sensitive information on the computer. Don’t trust technology with important stuff. That’s the only way to ensure that confidential information doesn’t get compromised.
Well, but we are living in the XXI century aren’t we? Yes… but that is also the reason why we have all these security problems. For every advance we have we also have thousands of people trying to scrutinize those advances and not all of them are white hats.
#pl118 – Updated Statistics on the Portuguse Copy Levy discussion
After almost 22 days of fight against the #pl118 it’s time to update some statistics. First, we have the daily tweet count of the #pl118 hashtag on twitter. It’s interesting to notice that it seems to show a 10 day cycle, although this can’t be taken as strong evidence of anything as more data points are needed.
Second we can see the daily distribution of tweets about the #pl118 copy levy that the government is trying to pass. As natural, discussion follows the circadian rhythm of Portugal with almost no tweets during the 3am-7am period. If you’re interested in participating in this vivid discussion, the best time of day is between 17h and 20h and between 22h and 24h. It’s also curious to notice the bump around lunch time when people seem to use their break to tweet their opinions on the #pl118.
This final stat show’s the above two plots condensed into a single image. You can see how the tweets on the #pl118 stack up by hour. You can see that they are pretty much stacked in hour groups probably reflecting moments of strong discussion when new information is available and then rapidly fading away.
Note: Data for Jan 29 was only available up until around 8am.
Is Twitter Evil?
You can’t service all of humanity if you allow the needs of politics to triumph over the needs of the people. And if you can’t service all of humanity, what is your relevance?
via Forbes – Twitter Commits Social Suicide
I don’t think that Twitter will fade out because, like Facebook, Twitter is too big to fail now. The problem is that these kind of measures (some might call them features) are now part of the process and not some kind of CIA tapping on the pipes. By doing automated self-censorship Twitter might be releasing a nest of wasps. That’s sad.
Apple: Imagine this…
Imagine you are a plastic artist.
Imagine you need to buy some new brushes.
Imagine that with the receipt there was also a small paper saying that by using these brushes, any painting you made could be offered free to anyone you wanted, but If you wanted to sell your painting you could only sell the painting through the brushes company that would require a cut in the sales price.
Imagine how you’d feel about that.
Now can someone explain me why any Book you make with iBooks Author software from Apple comes with this exact condition?
The coming war on general computation
The video of Cory Doctorow at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress during the last days of December of 2011 is a must see to anyone interested in the Copyright wars and the attack on general computation. After yesterday’s blackout it is important to see this.
Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation
The copyright war was just the beginningThe last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to “secure” anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.And general purpose computers can cause harm — whether it’s printing out AR15 components, causing mid-air collisions, or snarling traffic. So the number of parties with legitimate grievances against computers are going to continue to multiply, as will the cries to regulate PCs.The primary regulatory impulse is to use combinations of code-signing and other “trust” mechanisms to create computers that run programs that users can’t inspect or terminate, that run without users’ consent or knowledge, and that run even when users don’t want them to.The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression.Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.