For the sake of convenience, all posts
concatenated into one document.
Pelo benefício da comodidade, todos
os posts reunidos em um único documento.
by Mountaineerbr
#21 - Goals and Objectives
Uma lista e uma análise sobre as metas conquistadas (sem querer)
depois do mestrado e planos futuros.
I used to write end-of-year lists of what goals I met and the ones
I would pursue in the following year. It has been a long time I have
not written one of those.
After completing master's course from university in 2017, I was
completely lost.
Since about 2006, when I was in high school in Japan, I decided I wanted
to graduate in biological sciences and in a master's programme.
I would then go back to Japan visit my friends within 7 or 8 years.
Graduation took longer than expected and at one point I even thought
I would not make it.
Master's course went well, did not take longer than expected but I
am not able to go back to Japan for a visit.
For a long time I run after these goals and never thought about
what I would do once I had reached them.
I would like and enjoy it very much to go back to Japan
for a visit but I reckon I need earn some good money first
as I am getting older.
Other than a generic goal of getting a job with a signed work card
(carteira de trabalho assinada),
I have not got big dreams or expectations anymore. You see, I went to
Japan when I was young with my own efforts to plan the whole trip,
so I feel no need to travel the world anymore.
Instead, I learnt to like my country more and I wish to stay
close to my family, that is all I want right now.
So while I have not got bigger plans, I wish to write some stuff down
as an exercise. Maybe I can have a better idea and bigger goals later on.
Goals reached after Master's graduation (unplanned)
Installed Arch Linux
Learned Shell scripting, Bash and Z-Shell
Put my paws on financial markets
Learned money management
Made some good investments
Goals for 2021
Catch up with Brazilian environmental law
Apply for public examinations and get successively better marks
Become a runner or at least do physical exercise routinely
Quit smoking tobacco
Quit drinking beer
Marijuana only occasionally
Lose 5-8 kilos
Enjoy mum and dad more
Do good money management
Be more patient and polite with people in general
(empathy training)
I am fast, I work hard, I party hard and I drink hard.
--Ugly Old Goat
That just means I do things with a lot of passion and effort.
I ought add that I study hard, too, and
that I am trying to give up on bad habits acquired through hardship
of personal problems during university.
I wish all my readers a great 2021!
Much Health for everyone!
#20 - Generating Graphs of Covid19 Positivity Rate
I have been making some charts with data from
Johns Hopkins University CSSE and
Reuters News Agency to check how the number of
new cases, recovered and deaths are developing.
I update the charts almost everyday.
You can check them at
my github repo of covid19 graphs.
Unfortunately, I only discussed my opinion about them
in one unrelated forum, needed to get those references to
put them in my blog sometime.
I have been very curious about another type of graphs, that of positivity.
As the amount of test number per day have been variable since the pandemics
start, I thought it would be helpful if we could analyse the data
taking out such a parameter from the equation (in this case, graphs).
For one thing, we should not be keen to analyse the absolute numbers,
as there are so many diverging opinions, such as either numbers are
over or underestimated.. So they are not much good.
Let's check proportions!
By the way, that is a tip from
John McAfee,
who is currently in jail in Spain #freemcafee).
Experimental charts for Covid19 test positivity
How many percentage points of test results are positive to Covid19?
I could not find positivity charts around with long time series,
so I decided to make some charts with Brazilian data.
Below is my try for charting data from Paraná State reports.
Fig 1.
Positivity graph from data of the state of Paraná.
Y-axis for positivity percentage of total tests analysed,
X-axis relative date.
That is one state with the lowest positivity rate
amongst all I could see with this analysis.
Data ranges between 03/feb/2020 and 06/dec/2020.
Fig 2.
Same as fig. 1, but we see absolute dates in X-axis.
I am not sure how to configure gnuplot
to show fewer x-ticks and make them more readable, so
that is why it is so wide..
Analysing positivity rate is independent on test capacity,
meaning it does not matter if there is more testing now
than at the pandemics start. Everything can be levelled.
I got the data from
That is not the cleanest data.
I extract values for Positive cases and Negative cases with some awking.
After download the csv files, you can check the header line which contains
the column keys:
The following shell function was used
to calculate positivity.
The shell will loop through all csv files given and
group results by date.
Some awk conditionals will test
values from columns $12 and $30, and will decide if that
will be counted as a positive case, a negative case or be ignored.
There is no guarantee this analysis is sufficient.
You can check the script with some functions to process the data
at my sub repo
for covid test positivity studies.
The last step is to generate graphs with gnuplot.
I am having some difficulty with the x-ticks dates because
gnuplot only accepts numbers by defaults..
May as it be, bear in mind the data start from about February
and ends on 24th December.
Interpretation
I WILL FINISH THIS LATER ..
data for Paraná estate graph means positivity return of tests is just above 10% at 30-Nov-2020 (latest data point available). This is an EXPERIMENTAL graphs, a more robust and technical analysis will have different positivity results, but I was very curious..
#19 - State Governor Response
Semana passada, depois de
procurar concursos públicos na minha área de formação
e ver que estão em baixa, decidi me oferecer a trabalhar voluntariamente
no combate à Covid de um a dois meses. Especialmente, achei que poderia
ser útil agora no final do ano, durante as datas comemorativas,
visto que muito do pessoal deve tirar férias merecidas.
Mandei uma carta
e currículo para várias instituições em São Paulo e
algumas no Paraná. Claro, a princípio prefiro trabalhar
voluntariamente nas maiores instituições. Recebi algumas
respostas, inclusive uma surpreendente do Governador de São Paulo,
João Doria.
Last week I was searching for private companies to send in my
curriculum vitae. I also checked for public service examinations
for a position, however none was found on my area of training.
There are too many stories about people needing a job who
send dozens or hundreds CVs
and receive no answer, so I prepared to not give up so soon.
I actually sent dozens of unrequested CVs to private companies about my city
at the end of 2018 and got no replies. Indeed, most companies
I sent a copy of my CV may not need a biologist, but that was
worth a try. And I am hopeful enough to do that again this year!
In the meantime, that would be a smart move from me to do
volunteer work against Covid. My training as a biologist
may come in handy. I do not expect to be at the front line
of vaccine research or production but maybe I could be
useful for something. As a reward, I can add the public
institution name I served as a volunteer in my CV later..
It has been almost 4 years since my master's degree
and away from the academy. I know teachers and other
important people from the academy have got some prejudice
towards those away from the academy for so long. I have no
plans to take PhD degree nor do I plan on teaching at universities
in the foreseeable future. Yet, there is a longing to be back
within the science on the making..
I sent some presentation letters and CVs to the biggest
public institutions working against Covid, researching
and producing the vaccine. Because all my university training
was completed in various public, state and federal universities
from two states (Paraná and São Paulo), I thought it was almost
my duty to help in some way as retribution
for all the public money invested on me as a student.
These institutions or people include:
Secretary of State for Health from Paraná (my state)
Secretary of State for Health from São Paulo (neighbour state)
Secretary of State for Health form from São Paulo
Instituto Adolfo Lutz
Instituto Adolfo Lutz public relations department
Butantan Institute
Butantan Institute head directly
São Paulo governor personal e-mail (found on some document on Google)
As a last resort, I may still send an e-mail to
one graduation teacher of mine who is currently
involved with the Covid programme in my state, as she
is a biochemist and immunologist. I took
internship under her tuition so she knows that I
have been keen onto immunology and molecular
biology all along..
I got five responses in total, two of them came in quickly last week.
Mostly, they said thanks for the volunteer application
and my civility in trying to help our people.
On Monday, this week, I was reading the news and there was
an interview from São Paulo governor, reprinted below from
the magazine O Antagonista:
Doria defende frente para derrotar Bolsonaro
23.11.20 07:00 [$$ 5]
João Doria defende uma frente ampla para derrotar Jair Bolsonaro em 2022.
Ele disse para o Estadão:
“A frente não deve ser contra Bolsonaro, mas a favor do Brasil. A frente deve reunir o maior número possível de pessoas e pensamentos que estejam dispostos a proteger o Brasil e a população. Comporta o pensamento liberal de centro, que é o que eu pratico, mas comporta também centro-direita, centro-esquerda, aqueles que têm um pensamento mais à esquerda e à direita. Só não caberá o pensamento dos extremistas, até porque os extremistas não querem compartilhar, discutir. Eles querem impor situações ao País, tanto na extrema-esquerda, quanto na extrema-direita. Destes extremos nós temos que ficar longe.”
Sobre Sergio Moro, ele disse:
“Ele deve fazer parte dessa frente. Tem história, biografia e posicionamento. Nunca declarou que era candidato. Sempre teve altivez e grandeza para defender o País, independentemente dos interesses pessoais.”
https://www.oantagonista.com/brasil/doria-defende-frente-para-derrotar-bolsonaro/
(Fetched with a scraper script anta.sh from my GitHub repo)
The governor, João Doria, is talking about politics parties, however
as I was sort of expecting a response from him, I read through all
the nuances and extracted a message I thought was directed for me.
I read it like so:
If it only depended on me, those who have got loftiness and grandeur
to defend the country without personal interests in stand,
we want to gather. However, those who are right- and
left-extremists and want to impose things to their country,
we must avoid.
Maybe I should avoid sending my CV and volunteer letter insistently?
That seemed to be a very good tip from Mr Doria. That is useful for
not forcing it too much when asking for private jobs, too.
Either I was becoming mad or he really did reply to me
via that interview. That would not be so surprising, after all,
politics read and hear from a lot of people and they cannot
possibly reply to everyone directly. Maybe even unconsciously,
he read my e-mail and replied to it somehow.. Humans have got
some forms of communication that are not so obvious, but
that is subject for another post.
As I read through his answer and that was apparently good,
I decided to take it for me, nonetheless.
Fig 1.
Letter sent by the Governor personal secretary
with Govt stamps and even a letterhead symbol
saying thanks for my being available.
I don't reckon I will be sending any more CVs for volunteer work.
If they don't need me within two or three more weeks, I may not
be inclined or able to engage in that anymore.
While I reckon that may do me very well mentally and physically,
I may not be enough mentally stable to engage in that yet.
I need focus on private companies and public examination
for a fixed position at the local Govt, a city hall job,
and also focus on my health.
PS: After answering the Governor secretary e-mail
saying I felt happy and honoured by her message to me,
I remarked, a little jokingly and good-humored, I would
vote on his if he decides to run for president in 2022.
Some days later, there was this another speech from him
saying he does not care about elections but the nation!
Maybe I was inappropriate?
That is appropriate to be concerned about 'responsibilities' and 'service' to the community..
The communication channel through
the news feels like it has closed to me now.
"Aqui não há foco em nova eleição, há foco em vacinação", diz Doria
29.11.20 20:04
Ao comemorar a vitória de Bruno Covas, o governador João Doria defendeu o "equilíbrio, o bom senso e a capacidade de gestão".
"Bruno construiu sua vitória com seu programa de governo e sua própria trajetória. Foi meu sucessor e conduziu com eficiência, com foco. Foi brilhante, foi guerreiro, sério e dedicado."
Doria aproveitou para alfinetar Jair Bolsonaro, dizendo que "aqui não tem negacionismo" e que a prioridade será a vacinação. "Aqui não há foco em nova eleição, há foco em vacinação."
É fácil demais usar o comando
`rm -r *` e destruir todos os seus arquivos importantes.
Aqui relato mais um episódio de desventuras com esse comando!
This is not the first time I removed a lot of important files
with the command `rm -r *`.
Alone, the rm command does not remove recursively
by defaults and may even throw some errors because of not using
the -f flag and mixing directories with regular files.
However, do notice that apparently innocent
shell star glob *.
I am not sure if that was z-shell option RM_STAR_WAIT
or the rm command itself,
but a warning dialog was thrown asking if I wished to remove
25 files?, to which I hit Enter, even though I knew 25 files
was not the right sum of number of files..
If I had only noticed I was at the wrong directory..
A glob is a filename generator within the shell and it
will be substituted by all file names matching it.
The glob is not recursive by defaults, either, but in combination
with the -r flag of the rm command
that can cause havoc and a lot of time lost at the very least.
To put the story into context, I updated Arch Linux after almost two months
without sync'ing. As I synchonise that once a month and last month
there was news
the just-released Linux 5.9 was not yet compatible
with nvidia driver 455.38, I postponed the sync'ing to the following month,
which is precisely this month.
With the release of nvidia 455.45 last week,
today, I decided to do a first sync with the majority of
new packages from a fast Arch Linux mirror in my country.
I planned to sync again later with
Arch Linux Archive's monthly repo
(copy of the 1st of each month), and use that for the following
month or so again, and so on.
While in a Linux TTY with Tmux and pacman -Syu running,
I decided to go back in Tmux buffer and copy some warning messages.
I messed the keypresses and pasted a lot of text
while pacman was running post-install hooks..
That is important to mention I did play with the /boot directory
(which is in a different partition from /)
in my main SSD drive last week while my laptop hardware was at
the computer shop for repairing the display hinge mechanism..
I cannot be sure what exactly went wrong
with the pacman sync this time but following a reboot systemD printed
warnings it could not find a kernel module for vfat and
thus would not mount /boot, which is a separate partition.
I thought about following
Arch Linux Install Guide
and remaking the /boot partition completely, plus
I had a backup of its contents of before and after the
pacman update, so I thought I would give it a try.
At about the time I had chrooted into my SSD drive with
Arch Linux live media, an unrelated repair man who needed finish
a job with the house gate from yesterday arrived.
I lost a little of concentration at that point.
Plus, mum came to me asking some questions just before I was
to remove old /boot files..
I at /boot using vifm before I quit it,
and then instead of being at /boot,
$PWD was still at /.
I am used to automatically changing to the last directory vifm was
because of a vifm configuration which did not work when I was
chrooted!
I did not notice that. I then run `rm -r` with
the star glob and pressed Entertwice.
I only noticed the catastroph when rm was issuing warnings
it could not remove /proc/something,
to which I immediately responded with Ctrl+C.
Interestingly, rm did not remove /bin and other
non-system directories from /, however it did
remove /home before other directories! Yay! =.[
Luckily, I have got backups. However the newest
backup seems to be 3 months old.
I pushed/forgot to make my last 2 monthly backups, usually
made before Arch Linux updates.
I have got most of my files and system configs backed up.
My scripts, dotfiles and website are up-to-date
with GitHub because I sync with that so often..
I did not move much crypto recently and I have got paper
backups
of that, so that is really fortunate.
There are only about 4 files I really lost,
some of which are
my updated curriculum vitae from last week,
and other documents I may rewrite.
Other than those, I think I will lose mostly time.
Won't I ever learn?
Obviously I cannot blame nobody except myself for such
noob and silly mistakes.. This is not the first time,
and that is the second time this year already!
I reckon I am distracted and indisciplined and can improve on
these with some effort which I am willing to make.
Habits..
This is not the first time I mess up with
rm.
This is the second occasion I did a mistake
just after someone draws my attention,
but also on at least two other occasions
there was nobody to distract me.
I'm writing this from a backup laptop with Manjaro
which has got a complete local copy of official repositories and
has not been updated over 10 months! 10 months of no headaches!
Fig 1.
The Ethernet port is bad so download of packages is extremely slow (~80 Kbps). Downloading only essential packages with pacstrap. At that point, I had no idea why downloads were so slow..
I don't like Arch Linux moderators
as they are sort of a piece of shit.
However, not all of them are naughty (I suspect the younger ones
are more cruel), and I don't partake guilt in
those terrible Arch Forums anymore.
Independent as can be from them!
I have been thinking about installing OpenBSD
when Arch Linux became unbearable, but
hopping distros right now would demand
a lot of time there is use for better things
at this moment in my life.
So, unfortunately, I am just reinstalling Arch again.
I did cheat a little.
GPT table and partitions were reused.
I formatted all partitions again
with GParted from a Xubuntu 18.04 live media.
Partition scheme
sda1 - /efi Bootloader
sda2 - Linux swap
sda3 - / System root
sda4 - /home User directory
Back with the formatted computer
This will become a chronology!
Back to using my main laptop (driver).
Arch Linux reinstall was not too hard. I had to chroot twice
to properly install networking tools. Download of packages was slow
as heck. I discovered that the laptop ethernet port is bad.
Pacman downlaod speed
was ~80 Kbps.
I tried changing mirror servers before
discovering the ethernet port was to blame..
Once internet was set up properly, configuring Arch went well and quickly.
I should remark it was necessary to configure the following
with some special care:
choosing fast mirror servers (may use either ping or
reflector)
add EFI entry to motherboard NVRAM to boot new system
configure GRUB such as:GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true ;GRUB_DEFAULT=saved ;GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="loglevel=3 sysrq_always_enabled=true";
Linux has now dropped support for the scrollback buffer since 5.9
add users to correct groups (sys, log, games, bumblebee, rfkill, wheel, adm)
networkmanager with systemd
bumblebee with systemd
tlp with systemd
timedatectl set-ntp true for time sync
localectl set-x11-keymap br abnt2
install yay
enable bitmap fonts cd /etc/fonts/conf.d ;ln -s ../conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf
install xos-terminus and run update font cache fc-cache
I made a list with packages I like to have installed.
The list contains some package groups such as base, base-devel,
xfce4, xfce4-goodies, xorg and xorg-apps
(beware of xorg-drivers, only install what is/if really needed).
Other packages are required by my current hardware (Intel+NVIDIA)
or are optional.
Check my complete package list here.
I can confirm losing some more important files from
within the last 3 months without a backup.. Hopefully I will be able to
restore the missing information and files but that will take
all day long tomorrow.
One day later..
About 21 hours after accidentaly removing all my important files,
I have got a round-working Arch Linux system and
restored most of my files.
Nothing really important was lost.
That was a breeze to reinstall Arch Linux.
I will need updating my backup script because
pacman lists did not contain all
packages from my older system..
Other times I misused `rm`
In 2019 I used rm when cleaning up some old backups and removed a unique backup copy of documents and photos from about 2005. I had more backups of that in two other old HDDs, however I lent both HDDs to my cousin to use with her laptop and both of them wore out, one after the other! I was not able to recover files from them. Lessons: three backups may not be enough. Do not lend media that holds important stuff to you.
Just a few months back, I run rm at my user directory and lost all personal files. There was a recent backup but I had to rewrite some important documents that needed to be up-to-date. Lesson: always be sure about your glob.
In recollection, twice I was using vifm
(a command line file manager)
with a hack to automatically changing
to its last directory on exit.
I am modifying that hack for something safer and that
will not let me get used to changing directories
automatically when exiting vifm.
I did it again.. I was testing a script at a dedicated temp directory.
I opened many terminal windows at once and was doing too many tests quickly.
I opened another terminal window and forgot it was not at the temp directory.
I run rm *.txt~*archInstall* and removed 7 files from $HOME
(I was messing with this script)..
Fortunately, it only removed some of the .txt files, which I was able to
recover all except one and maybe another one may be outdated a little
from my last backup in December.
I have been trying to follow a tip from Aurelio Jargas
that is to try and always use a glob that more than just *..
Fig 3.
I am feeling like Homer Simpson tonight (again).
#17 - Podcast Episode 3
Notas sobre os assuntos abordados
no terceiro episódio do podcast. Lembramos que o áudio dos espisódios
do podcast é em bom Português!
Are we at a bitcoin topping right now ($18,362.66) ? Probably yes and it is foolish to buy up here
See also fun cartoons (Looney Tunes, Taz Mania, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner and Tom & Jerry) at Warner Bros Kids
Saved for next episodes (?) :
*
Sending letters to important institutes, universities and authorities
working with Covid vaccine (such as the state Governor)
to offer my service as a volunteer for one or two months
in the fight against Covid infection;
unfortunately, some answers came back saying
they are not accepting volunteers right now, however there is
a surprising answer from the Governor..
Being an biology activist of science for the sake of public welfare and information
Episode quote
An Act
Imagine one act
was all the Universe
And all Eternity
was to analyse that
Ideally:
Perfect acts
Good consequences
Beware of madness
Um Ato
Imagine que um ato
fosse tudo do Universo
Se teria toda a
Eternidade para
Analisá-lo
Idealmente:
Ato perfeito
Consequências boas
Cuidado com a loucura
#16 - Biology for Cynics 0 - Saving the Wrong Species
Com a série Biologia para Cínicos,
espero pode apresentar uma visão mais seca e mais dura da realidade
da disciplina de ciências, porém mais próxima da relidade
do que muitos livros e instituições ensinam por aí.
There are many illusions about biology.
I understand that is partly so because commoners are
too passionate about Nature. In contrast, professional biologists
ought to be cold and rational about Nature, but not all of them are,
either.
Today I saw an ad on TV about protecting wildlife, such as birds
and other animals of the forest. The ad said Nature does not need us
but we (humans) need Nature.
Well, I may disagree.
We are part of Nature, we are the effect
of climate and other conditions on Earth which allowed human beings
to develop.
There is no reason at all
to think animals (rational or not) in the universe are alike
earthbound ones.
Cities and buildings are also natural. I dislike the word natural
because it does not make much sense nor does it make things clearer in a
wider analysis. That word is just an umbrella wording
(and misused nowadays) but obviously I understand
commoners will use that in opposition to man-made stuff.
Why do commoners want to keep all species and avoid
any and all species going extinct?
That is nonsensical!
New species are emerging all the time (why not?) as well as
many others are going extinct all the time.
Who can say an older species is better than a new species?
And what is better in this case, anyways?
Newer species may emerge because environmental conditions changed.
Animals usually have a very specific niche or a house
in the environment. If their house does not provide conditions,
new species will evolve to take that place! There is no vacuum in nature.
Not a few times
I have seen reports of sightings of animals long thought to have
gone extinct!
That kind of news is actually much common if you start noticing them..
New species may eventually be more fit than older ones.
Thus, the value for the environment of new versus extinct species
may not change at different times (even if environment changes, too).
Also, species of a niche may change by random drift, meaning
older and newer species are equivalent and that is just by
random chance one goes extinct while the other occupies its place.
Is that better means more fit? If so, the better
for the environment means the more fit species.
On the other hand, if better means more useful, humans may
be the best, then.
Humans shall prove very useful for maintaining our
natural world. When we move from Earth, someday, we will take
animals, bacteria and viruses with us to new worlds.
In the meantime, humans will strive to keep species which
are useful for them, such as cattle, and will keep the
ecosystem required by them and by ourselves.
Human relation with the environment will improve
over time as humans get more comfortable and have got time
to think about other beings. Do not ignore humans fought
natural forces all along to avoid being crushed by them.
Also, at our modern world, most world population
is very very poor and may not even have water or food to keep
their health.
Check the
environmental curve of Kuznets,
which is, unfortunately, badly interpreted by modern biologists
because they do not seem to understand that
what is pollution for one species is food for others, a cycle.
Plants will actually use sulfur and nitrogen from car and factory exhaust!
Phosphorus from smoke can also be used by trees.
See for example
(a) or
(local copy),
(b),
(c),
(d) and
(e).
That is too bold a claim trees clean the air, as
some papers deem, but my point is just trees do use some sulfur, nitrogen
and other elements
from air pollution for their own benefit. Also note some researches
are performed only under laboratory conditions which exacerbate
normal pollution levels by a lot, which conclusions may be off from
what happens in nature.
Carbon is food for photosynthetic organisms as they embody
carbon from the atmosphere into their body to grow. That is basic
plant physiology.
That is
actually quite fascinating if you can reckon life is not under
our control and life is too pungent and cannot be detained on Earth.
Carbon is funny. More specifically, its bonds with other chemical
elements give it extreme flexibility at earthly conditions.
I hope to write a little article about how the carbon atom originated
life someday but
I am still appreciating just how funny an element that is..
Carbon is like Lego® pieces and if you can
roll them enough with other elements, they will interact and
nucleate into ever more complex pieces and eventually life forms.
If people love life and all species, then they must love the bacteria
and viruses, too. Why not?
I suspect commoners love some furry animals
and their love gets weaker the more genetically apart species
are from humans. I cannot blame them!
That is plain there are thousands of other planets supporting life
throughout Milk Way. There is no reason to think
life on Earth is better or worse than any other life in the universe.
In my head, generically, they all have got about the same value.
So why humans are
so worried about protecting all species on Earth but ourselves?
It does not matter at all in the greater scheme of things..
Microorganisms are much more important than animals. The energy flux
of the living start with photosynthetic and chemosynthetic life.
The frog, the bird, the lion.. They are not more
important than photosynthetic life so why do commoners want to
protect organisms that matter the least to Earth environment?
The frog, the bird, the lion and humans may get extinct and it will not
matter much or for long to our ecosystems. New species will
promptly take their place as long as the basal energy availability
is intact. Over time, even complex body schemes may evolve from
single cell organisms but more complex or rational life
may not necessarily develop.
#15 - Moved on
Fig 1.
Hubble eXtreme Deep Field.
Thousands of galaxies are seen when Hubble pointed its
camera to an unseemingly dark spot in the space.
Local copy of image here.
(credit: Hubble Space Telescope)
#14 - Topics and Notes for Podcast Première and Episode 2
Notas sobre alguns assuntos que discorreremos no primeiro podcast
que pretendemos estreiar no final do mês (ou um pouco antes).
O podcast será em português, apesar que a maioria das notas de pauta
estão em inglês (alguns links de notícias em português).
O podcast também será postado no meu canal do youtube.
Assuntos não abordados neste podcast serão reservados para os
próximos episódios.
Notes about some subjects I am planning on talking about in
the podcast premiere. The podcast will be in Portuguese
however most notes are in English below.
This podcast will also be posted at my youtube channel
and is expect to go on air by the end of the month.
Subjects not met in this episode will be saved for the next ones.
See the podcast index here (currently at the blog portal).
The interviewer tried to start the conversation with hope but
I am not sure Sir Attenborough managed to to inspire her very much.
Also noteworthy how other people on the beginning of the podcasts
already forecast grievance only.
Sir Attenborough says he is not an economist, which is fine IMHO,
however nothing stands in the way of his learning some of that.
When he says we need to curb capitalism, what does that really
mean? That does not mean anything. Beware of vague expressions.
Usage of drones instead of narrow-angle lenses to film walruses
made them afraid and led them to falling off a cliff. Note that
the polar bear which was at the scene is only partly to blame
for the tragedy. If no drones were around, probably walruses
would not just fall off the cliff.
Hunger is really worrying. Perhaps total world production of food
is enough for all human beings, however there is a big problem
with distributions systems. There are not enough distribution.
We need more roads to take food (and fuel and technology) to
those who live in very difficult places to access and cheap
fuel.
Comments on the almost year-long transpolar-turned-peripolar
expedition of Mosaic on the German ice breaker Polarstern.
A copy of the forum thread in
plain formatted txt can be found here.
The Mosaic expedition tried to follow the steps of the
Nansen's Fram expedition
(1893–1896), which aimed to reaching the geographical North Pole.
This article
says Mosaic Polarstern reached geographical North Pole, however
the forum logs say closest approach to North Pole was 166.3 km,
information from post on February 26th from young ice.
After the originally planned floe was abandoned during the covid
pandemics, in search for a new floe they crossed the North Pole
on August 19th, but that was a detour and not in the original
plans of the expedition.
A lot of public money was spent in this expedition, however
the scientific groups released little data and there was not a
centralised data or information supplier other than the
kindergarten-like portal
(entering deprecation as soon as
the expedition was over last month).
Most available info is spread across blog and social media posts.
Official scientific papers with data from Mosaic expedition are
planned to be released by 2023! IMHO, data should have been
streamed live from the ship and everyone should be able to get
that and do their won research, why not?!
Brazilian legislation makes it hard for cabotage type of navigation.
Cabotage navigation would allow transporting a lot more resources
along the very extensive coast of Brazil. Railroad development
has been stagnant for decades in Brazil. Cabotage is not the
silver bullet for the transport problems but would greatly help
and reduce road transport.
The Brazilian govt says Brazil is lagging 8 years behind in
genomic research. Thus, now they want to sequence 100 thousand
Brazilian genomes (who must have some sort of rare disease)
in the next four years with
spending of R$600mi
(US$~107mi) and be the leading country in that field of research.
Does that make sense?
Some ethical and financial problems arise. For example,
the project first aim is to generate a said 'reference' genome
of the Brazilian people. Perhaps they could generate a reference
genome for peoples from Iceland, Norway and Japan, but hardly
Brazil due to its great population miscegenation. There are lots
of gene sequences or genome assemblies from people with rare
diseases available
in publicly accessible data banks
and I reckon a research group could obtain more whole genomes
from specific public-restricted banks.
If Brazil groups cannot advance in genomics with data already
available, they will hardly advance with 100 thousand more
genomes because data is not automatic information!
An account of the early life of Jesse Livermore, the Boy Plunger,
as a stock operator. In this book, Livermore character wears the
pseudonym Livingstone.
Ugly talks about the risk US regulatory entities present
for Bitfinex and thus blocking US citizens (and many more)
from dealing with them, see also
Americans Trading on BitMEX/Bitfinex.
The problem with the BitMEX case is the US govt has not got
jurisdiction power over BitMEX however the US govt wants
everybody under their dirty thumbs.
Tip from Ugly: evading taxes is illegal, however
avoiding them is legal.
Dica do Ugly: sonegação de impostos é
ilegal, porém evitá-los (elisão fiscal) é legal.
BRL Bitcoin has broken highs from 2017
On the 17th of December 2017, bitcoin
reached BRL 65,952 (almost 66K Brazilian Reais).
On the 17th of August 2020, a new all time high
reached BRL 68,695.
I sync Arch Linux with the monthly repo (snapshot of the 1st of a month)
from ALA.
However, sometimes even the monthly repo snapshot (which is used
to generate the official Arch Linux install iso image) is not 100%
stable for my specific hardware and thus I need to try and
sync again some days later..
For example, what I do when there is news such as
nvidia 455.28 is incompatible with linux = 5.9 recently?
I do not agree a rolling release distribution requires the user
to update constantly as a rule.
Working with bitcoin private keys
How to set up a computer with a safe digital environment
and how to try and leave no records.
use a dedicated computer with a free operating system, such as Linux distributions or BSD clones; there is no need to keep it up-to-date, one may use a snapshot of os and download a full copy of the official repos (usually below 50GB), for eg.
wget -r -np -e robots=off "http://manjaro.c3sl.ufpr.br/stable/"
avoid connecting to the internet while working with privy keys
(i) use an encrypted disk, (ii) an encrypted user account
or at the very minimum
(iii) do encrypt files holding the privy keys with eg.
gpg -c --personal-cipher-preferences CAMELLIA192 [FILE..]
. List cypher algos with gpg --version.
Do make a backup of original files as some
gpg versions may overwrite them!
remove automatic unencrypted backups made by text editors
avoid automatic backups by text editors (also swap and undoes),
for example,
add a modeline to files opened by vi(m):
# vim:nobackup noundofile
(maybe leave noswapfile out)
overwrite and remove temporary or old files with shred -n1 -uv [FILE..]
make backups of your encrypted files
tip from
bitconheiros,
user may use Tails operating system, but personally
I reckon that is not necessary if you pay attention
to my tips above
Bitcoin price in BRL is at new All Time Highs.
On 25th Sep 2020 it broke to
75,216 BRL,
going above 17th Dec 201766,066 BRL/BTC price.
Fig 1.
The number of days from the previous bottom to the
halving is equal to the number of days from the halving
to the next top...
(credit: @zorgoi and @Pladizow)
Compulsory vaccination: is reinforcement of a covid vaccine feasible?
While OMS says SARS-CoV2 vaccine will be widely available only in 2022,
is that fair that whoever is not able to get vaccinated
until then should stay at home, isolated?
There are many bad points about compulsory vaccination:
SARS-CoV2 vaccines are still under testing, nobody know if they are effective
As for all vaccines however small there is a chance of collateral effects; that is a risk a person must decide to take or not
Universality passes through the self first; in Japan, use of masks is to protect one self, the extended benefit of protecting others is only secondary and not as powerful as self protection
The person may not even get into contact with the virus in her lifetime
If a person is not able to get a vaccine, should he be discriminated?
I reckon that when a person is diagnosed with covid or any other
contagious disease, he should stay at home but we cannot
make people stay at home or discriminate them when they are
not infected.
The fears they are trying to mitigate with mandatory vaccination
cannot be universal rule itself: imagine now that we must get
a shot of vaccine for every possible disease because we must
protect "others"?
Update on 03-nov-2020
If youtube analytics is saying the truth to me,
most listeners of the podcast drop before the 40min mark.
That does not mean I should dumb down the content or shorten it
for the sake of what most users do. However
that was already a plan to make 40min podcasts so that
is the goal next time. Maybe I will aim at 35min so I am sure
to never run out of content!
I plan on recording another podcast episode only just before
New Year's day or Christmas. Let's see.
#13 - Saving Bugs and Other Animals
I took the car and headed to university yesterday, about a 40-minute ride.
Walking about, I found a little centipede about 6 centimetres long
squashed down by half onto one paved walkway. It was moving its little
antenna quickly. Desperately, I reckoned.
Someone had walked and stepped on the posterior half of the
little creature body. What to do? Seeing that little thing hapless
mounts to much more suffering in my head than it probably should.
I have been more sensitive to animal pain as of late because one
of my friends was having a troubling time thinking about animal
suffering, specially cattle suffering, and also my father
touched on this meaty subject this year (or last year?), so we have
been thinking about that a little more over the course of the
last months..
Should I put an end to the little creature suffering?
I have done such deeming merciful acts in the past
when I was a kid or teen, and they never felt right..
For some years, I had Aikido classes with the Buddhist monk at the
temple in little town we lived back then. He mentioned
many frogs would appear after a rainy day. I asked him if I could
have some for generic experimentation. I actually had already
prepared somewhat and had
asked my dentist for some vials of injecting anaesthetics, of which
he gave me about 20 (incredibly!), so I was up to no good..
Sensei (the monk) thought it over for a while and
decided to dissuade me from this idea of experimenting with living
animals (vivisection). He said something that has clung to me ever since,
he said any animal would prefer to live a little longer in any case.
I was never a killer of animals. I had a friend who was kind of bad
with animals, he and another one who lived in at the same street would
shoot down dove birds with slingshots in front of me and I always
found that cruel.. They would eat some of the hunt and I heard more
than once from different people these doves are yummy..
Sometimes they would kill only to practice their slingshot skills.
If I have to, I will smack cockroaches and mosquitoes, specially if
these creatures annoy me.
During master course,
I run many rounds of experiments at the biochemistry lab and
consumed 80+ rats, total.
That is interesting my co-workers seemed always willing to
kill rats under my project, so I would always let them do it for me.
One of my co-workers under the PhD programme who was a religious fellow
dealt with a lot of personal trouble about sacrificing rats for
experimentation at the lab.
At the same time he was always willing to sacrifice rats under
my name.
At the period of time, as I lived in the neighbourhood of the university,
I would go treat my rats during experimentation periods everyday by
morning. When there was no experiment, I would usually go to the lab
to prepare something, clean up or use the internet even during
weekends, bank holidays, Christmas, New Year and in the last year
the Carnaval. I would always check the animal room and fill up the
water bottles of whoever rat was there.
I got to know the people form the Central Animal Facility of the university
who apparently liked my dealing with rats and so I could have extra rats
if I needed them (sometimes some co-workers would need extra rats
and would take mine).
I also changed a very bright light to a very dim light at the lab
animal room (bioterium) after detecting a possible lack of animal
well-being of the rats immediately below this very bright incandescent
light bulb..
Fig 1. Cartoon of laboratory rats running an experiment..
I much prefer to be the rescuer outside research.
I did many glorious rescues of bugs
that were drowning in bad waters and I could help them over the years
(including some cute bugs from the privy). I cannot save all bugs
from drowning and it certainly does not make a difference for the
species as an entity, I definitely got stung more than once trying to
save bees at the pool, but I changed the future of those bugs I saved,
right?!
Life seems to be very common, not rare, not special and trivial
when we look at that from zoomed out perspectives.
However, life becomes incredible the more we zoom in.
What I mean is, certain things
have no meaning, purpose or benefit for the grand scheme of things
but they make more sense in smaller scales
(when we get closer to the subject matter).
So I decided to remove the little half-crushed centipede to the grass.
I reckon that he would prefer to spend his time over the soil
instead of the pavement. It also makes more sense that he is in contact
with more natural structures.
That was more sad than needed be. I myself crushed many ants
on those same paved walkways nights before.
Later that day , I was crossing a road on the opposite side of the
university and found a beautiful centipede also crossing the road.
I thought better to save it from cars so I hunkered down
and tried to grab it delicately when a car came headed for us.
I would not have more than a few seconds and the damn animal was
avoiding my fingers, so I grabbed it against its will, got
out of the road and placed it on the grass nearby (no stinging!).
That really reminded me of a reasonably funny episode of a series named
1000 Dumb Ways to Die,
in which a vegan or hipster girl was driving along when she found
a dead animal on the road and stopped to try and help it.
She started crying when she saw the animal was dead, she was desperate
by its side when another can came and killed her, too.
That is like Darwin Awards. LOL
Anyway, a little more seriously, I have got some tips for when
you see an animal crossing the road ahead:
Limit driving speed
It makes sense to driving slower when passing in
an area one knows has got frequent animal crossings.
I like to drive at below 80km/h on the highway.
Not everyone is patient at the wheel and I know
that is not possible to drive at such intermediary speeds
at all times, but it has become clear to me animals tend
to have a clean escape when the car speed is at about 60km/h
(~38miles/h) at the highway.
If the car is too much faster, the driver cannot slow down
adequately or on time. Animals are not used to super high
speed in nature, so they don't realise the car is
approaching much faster than normal speeds,
nor can they run away at enough speed to get out of they road.
Slow down or stop the damn car!
This is extremely risky for the driver. However, usually
the driver has got some moments to make a decision and
looking at the rear mirror is, hopefully, a habit.
In case there is sufficient long space until the car at
the rear, the driver may choose to slow down to give
the animal a chance to run away or finish crossing the highway.
In the city, usually the driver is at slower speeds and
it may be safe to stop the car if needed.
I have seen many people that simply don't stop the car
for animals!!
That is very sad, sometimes just braking a little would save
cats and dogs..
Use headlight signalling and Horn
Some animals don't care about the horn blow but will
unfreeze and respond if one toggles high/low headlights.
When I see any animal on the road, ideally I do many things at once
(which became more natural over practice) :
I check the rear mirror, pull the brakes a little, blow the horn
and toggle headlights. If that is completely safe and necessary,
I may stop the car, too.
#12 - Spell Checking Programmes
Escolhendo entre alguns programas para conferir a ortografia disponíveis
no Linux e algumas dicas para usá-los.
That came the time to run the spell checker on all my website pages.
There were many errors. Spell checking is very important.
Just this week
fraud was discovered
in the candidate for a position in the Supreme Court (STF) in Brazil.
The fraud suspicion was confirmed because even bad orthography was
copied from a lawyer's articles to the Supreme Court nominee
master degree dissertation! His former supervisor said the university
will need reviewing his thesis again due to the facts exposed in the media.
He has just recently completed his PhD degree in Universidad de Salamanca
(Spain), but has not published his thesis yet.
It is speculated the nominee has not completed formal postdoctoral
work as written nis his curriculum, either.
Here are some tips of what spell checkers I am using.
Hunspell is the most popular spellchecking library.
It is included in OpenOffice, LibreOffice and it appears
to be included in Firefox and Chrome, too.
The difference in popularity may also have to do with fear of
copyright law enforcement amongst other things.
Even though Stallman said it was OK for GNU Aspell to use a copyrighted
word list for the English language, there seems to be a message in
the mailing lists with some worries from one developer about the case..
See the
mailing list
and the follow-up message.
Hunspell is based on Myspell. Myspell was created as a simple spell checker for use in OpenOffice. Myspell’s affix support was merged into Aspell 0.60 so Hunspell and Aspell can use the same affix file to some extent.
Hunspell has better support for language peculiarities including compounding and complex morphology. However the Hunspell (v1.7.0) utility currently has problems with apostrophe (') in words.
Aspell generally has better suggestions for non-phonetic langauges such as English and French. Aspell suggestion speed also tends to be significantly faster than Hunspell. For a comparison of suggestion quality and speed see http://aspell.net/test/.
Hunspell supports setting multiple dictionaries at once while
Aspell requires the user to create a custom dictionary. For example
merging en_US with en_UK and pt_BR dictionaries.
Sincerely, if there is that option in Aspell, I could not find it.
I found
this page
with a little how to get word lists from the dictionary .rws files,
but that is just an example link, I don't know if that is the best tutorial
over there if you are really going to do it.
However,
since different languages have different suggestions strategies and affix rules this is a non-trivial task.
Afixing rules are used to generate inflection lists, for example.
One alternative for Aspell is to list all words of a document that are
wrong in one language with the option list, pipe to another
instance of Aspell which will list all words that cannot be found in
the dictionary of another language, such as
$ aspell --dict-dir=/usr/lib/aspell-0.60/ --lang=pt-BR list <index.html | sort -u | aspell list
The only problem here is that you cannot know what line number the wrong
word is. See also
this blog post
which details on the same workaround example.
For checking spelling of a single word, I wrote this shell function.
While not ideal it should work for multi language checking if you
don't mind some verbose scat:
Both Aspell and Hunspell command line interfaces are good and a clean
way to fixing bad words in multiple or single files.
If you use Vim beware about losing its undoes for files edited with
the spell checker default interfaces!
Vim spell checker
In order to avoid losing Vim undoes it is best to use Vim built-in
spell checker. I remember configuring my .vimrc with some extra
dictionaries knowing that would be useful at some point.
But as said, I have got the poor habit of not using spell checker,
hopefully we will change that now!
I got a
medical terms wordlist
and placed it at file path
~/.vim/spell/medicalterms-en.
Then I set the following in my .vimrc:
" ~/.vimrc
"spelling check
"dictionaries
set spelllang=en_gb,pt_br,medicalterms-en
"custom dictionary
set spellfile=~/.vim/spell/en.utf-8.add
The filename of the custom dictionary is en.utf-8.add because
a dictionary starting with en will be read for all
variants of English (I haven't got the reference but
that is what I can remember).
Vim help page from :help spell cites en-rare and medical_ca
dictionaries but I could not find wordlists for them on the
internet so far.
Setting the spellfile property (custom words) is not as important
as setting at least one main language for the spelllang property
in .vimrc, however you can just set vim for a single session with:
:setlocal spell spelllang=en_us
If you don't care the setting applies only to current buffer,
you can use :set spell and :set nospell
to disable.
Other than configuration, usage is very simple. Perhaps the most
important shortcut for the spelling function is z=
when cursor is on a highlighted (bad) word. It will prompt the
user to pick a suggestion from a list.
Other useful shortcuts are ]s to go to the next misspelled
word and [s to go backwards. More on usage on vim help
:help spell-quickstart or from
this tutorial.
The user will end up composing a custom dictionary with words she uses
the most, such as frequent proper names and particular expressions
of her labour niche.
zg Add word under the cursor as a good word to the first name in 'spellfile'.
:spellr[rare]! {word} Add {word} as a rare word to the internal word list, similar to |zW|.
I reckon that checking spelling and grammar should happen
in-flight for simple mistakes or after the text is complete
in order to avoid breaking the trail of thoughts while writing.
Running the spell checker is a habit to be acquired! ;]
#11 - Blogs and Books
Tenho lido muitas notícias e visto vídeos porém tomam muito tempo que
eu poderia estar usando para estudar algo mais produtivo:
a lei ambiental brasileira!
E toda ela, inclusive. Sabendo primeiro a lei seca, esse
conhecimento abrirá portas de emprego tanto públicos como privados.
Pretendo enquanto ler alguns blogs de biologia para me animar nas
próximas semanas, vou me organizar, compilar as leis e
começar a estudá-las com mais foco..
Since this blog started, I have been searching for other biology blogs,
web tips and such.
Many blogs are seemingly abandoned or perhaps their authors could not
keep up with posting frequency but nonetheless plan to update them later..
It was possible to find many short blogs, which I tried to promptly
read or skim through, and some longer ones, which will demand more time.
Below is a short list of the blogs I want to take my time and
explore in the following weeks.
There are some books in bookshelves and in boxes to avoid
their collecting dust. Most of my books are second-hand although there
are a few which cost a lot. It took many years to grow my personal
library. As I still have not read all of them, I have been avoiding
to buy more books; now I try to download those books I want to keep.
Until recently, I mostly read news sites, forums, tutorials websites,
manuals or university-related papers on the internet,
so I did not read a physical book from head to tail regularly lately..
The problem is there is so much diverse types of text I read on the
internet of which much is absolutely garbage, like for example politics.
That can and should be avoided because that takes so much of my time.
I will not digress much but I will only say YouTube videos
have drawn a terrible token on me, too, time-wise..
I want to change that, revert to spending my time reading and dreaming
about how I could accomplish things eventually in the
future with good company from the book author and their ideas flowing
in my mind..
Nothing better than to carefully choose a book for reading. There are
so many good books to choose from written over millennia..
Think about that!
Some of my books
The most relevant literature I must take is also the most boring:
environmental law. And all of Brazil environmental law is important.
Since I got my master's degree, I got to know bitcoin and did not study
environmental law very much.. Finance was a universe I was not familiar
with. Indeed most of my initial investment capital was brutally scammed
in the first months and only now, almost two years and a half later,
is that I am barely on the green (up eight percent total)..
But I cannot be too hard on myself as there was absolutely no one
to help me learning crypto and finance in general and I was on my own.
I reckon this enterprise will prove a lot more profitable over time
and I will have got some sound money.
That only will not make me rich. That is why I need focus on environmental
law so I can try and get a good public gov't or private job position.
Ted Nelson talks about generalistimos
in one of his videos. His first advice is to know the law, specially
if you want to be a consultant.
So my plans are to keep on reading those biology blogs to get some
inspiration instead of "news" or YouTube videos, compile and study
all the environmental law. Not easy but that is what I need do.
Also, this time of year until December is a great window for sending
curriculum to private companies. I did that already soon after
I got my master's degree and was unsuccessful but that is a good
idea to try again (and again next year!).
#10 - Flying Memphis Belle, a B-17 Air Fortress
Esta é uma história sobre algumas aventuras do Sr. Walter
nos tempos da guerra em que completou missões perigosas.
Alguma hora, traduziremos este texto para o português.
Mr Walter "Blaacky" Schwartz is a USA citizen. The young American
man studied and graduated as a photographic engineer at
the United States Army request and cost. He was trained
and refined his skills to do it right: press the shutter at the
perfect timing and capture the moment of the strike.
Although Mr Schwartz preferred not to reveal what institution he
received training, he carries the name of at least one very famous
camera maker company in his diploma.
The first story is about a mission over the eye of a hurricane, at a
very high altitude to be able take photos for a weather committee of
scientists. At the time we talked, he reasoned about one elegant and
simple definition for the purpose of narrow-angle lenses: it was to go
in pursuit of further detail of the subject when it was not convenient
to go closer, of course. Another group of men could never have passed
as near a spiralling rotatory to death and return home with mission
accomplished but those men in the crew.
One of the most admirable trace of character of Mr Walter was his
courage in face of such dangerous situations. While he talked about
those remembrances, we would not quiver his voice. His life stories
are truly fascinating.
Another one of his military stories he could and was willing
to share is as follows.
He was sent to one military missions aboard the Memphis Belle
bomber craft.
It was the first heavy bomber to return to the US after
completing 25 successful missions during the Second World War in Europe.
The Memphis Belle is
an American icon,
it represents sacrifice and what Americans will do to protect their freedom.
The mission started upon arrival of the crew members at the War Front,
located somewhere in the coast range of England. The Air Front was composed
of dozens of wings and for this mission, as many as 35 aircrafts would
campaign together. The air front faced France and Germany, territories
which were taken by the enemy at the Second World War. All crew members
were gathered with the group commander at the target map room. It was
where they were informed the whereabouts and objectives the commission
was to carry out for the first time. All crew members synchronised their
wrist watches, just before the little spare time they had before lift off.
The spirits of them were high, expectant and hopeful. Many soldiers went
to see the base priest for their prayers.
The aircraft he was sent to board was a B-17 heavy bomber craft,
a B-17 made by Boeing and was propelled by four engines.
The particular design
made it possible for the aircraft sustain flight
even when severely damaged.
It had a big wing which could bear many
holes..
It had a nearly frameless clear-view nose, which was
transparent and bore the pilot stick panel, sharing the tight
space alongside one head gunner. Most of the 10-men crew were gunners,
positioned at specific angles to cover most attack angles. Each gunner
had a radius range of 1,000 yards frontward and adding all gunner posts,
they were protected almost 360 degrees. Others would take care of the bombs
to be dropped. There was one chief bomb engineer at the wing formation
who would decide the precise moment of bomb release, after which every
other bomber group crew would release their bomb load in sequence.
The air formation provided them even more protection at altitude of
25 thousand feet (7.6 kilometres approximately).
About a week and a half after the crew finished their
25th mission, they were visited by
the King and Queen on the 26th of May 1943.
That is thought
the pilot, Robert Morgan, named the craft
Memphis Belle for his Memphis sweetheart, Margaret Polk.
There were other markings,
such as Irene underneath the window of the radio operator
Hanson and the name Virginia on the right-hand side
where the waist gunner position was.
The very well-known nose art was a drawing of 25 bombs, represneting
25 succesful missions, and some stars over the bombs, representing
when the Bell was a lead in the attack formation.
There were some swastikas around the aircraft
around mid to late May that year.
Soon after,
the aircraft had it's 26th mission
while still in the 91st Bomb Group.
The markings changed over time.
Mr Schwartz said his aircraft was not carrying bombs, his mission
was to take photographs, footage of the mission execution.
Outside the Memphis Belle, many black specks were part of the scenario
and were increasing. These were the result of detonation of anti-air
missiles shot from ground territory.
They were always apprehensive and concerned,
or scared, because the flak was coming up, the blue black puff
of seemingly innocent smoke is a bomb exploding.
If that blew near to the wing, it would take the whole wing off.
At that height, the enemy aim was very bad and
most missiles would dischard before hitting the
aircrafts, but many discharged close enough to the formation that many
aircrafts had missing parts. Some of B-17 downed and others were out of
sight into enemy territory. It was time to hold strong, keep to the
Formation. The crew was plenty busy.
The American crew knew that if the German bombardiers ceased firing,
enemy aircrafts would soon come firing from any side in the sky.
All anticipation culminated in the most important moment of the mission
and their their sole purpose: drop the bombs and check whether they hit
the targets. The targets were usually buildings and facilities that upon
destroyal would warrant devastating political and economical impact.
Bombs dropped and the photograph plates were exposed. At that point,
the first half of the mission had been done. It was the most important
part but also the easiest, as they took the enemy by surprise upon
arrival. The second part was most dangerous, the crew would try and
return to the air base.
With the expertise of all men aboard, and some luck, they all landed
well enough. Many of the return crew members who landed were badly
injured, some dead and others intact. All of them, without exception,
held strong to their honour and returned to America with glory.
All survivor soldiers were received back with the utmost respect and
love from their compatriots and friends. Those soldiers would be
recognized for their impetuous spirits and firm minds. They would now
return home and train new people, tell them what happened at the
war front and how that was done.
By JSN
interview and first draft around 2013-2014
text updated on 2020
in memoriam of Walter Schwartz
Em anos anteriores o lema na imprensa era Amazônia em Chamas!.
Este ano estamos vendo Pantanal em Chamas!..
Há a formação de uma
La Niña fraca
no oceano Pacífico,
e a região ~sudoeste do Brasil ficou mais seca, enquanto que
a região ~nordeste (provavelmente cerrado) e também a Amazônia
ficaram mais úmidas.
Decidi fazer uma lista genérica com possíveis causas naturais de incêndios
florestais pois a imprensa parece saber somente de uma
(incêndios criminosos), mas há uma literatura enquanto que
enterrada pelo tempo,
rica em informações relevantes, e muitas vezes, revelantes.
There started again the annual talk of forest fires!
In the last two years, the headlines were Amazon is on fire!
and now they are Pantanal is on fire!.
For those who are not familiar with what a Pantanal is, it is
actually a Brazilian ecosystem, which terrais flood in the
rain season and dry up in the dry season, so there are many bogs
and meandering rivers.
We are currently in the dry season! Also, this year it seems we are
having a weak La Niña,
which makes the Pantanal region (and where I live, some further south
at the Capricorn Tropical Line), drier.
On the other hand, the Amazon, cerrado and thereabouts in the
northeast region, are in their turn more humid, and of course
there are less forest fires there than the previous years.
I have been reading some material about fire management and found
some very good Brazilian and Portuguese papers and documents.
Specially, Portugal has got competent technical knowledge on the subject.
In one the of the papers,
after explaining Portugal fire index system through history (from ~1960),
the author acknowledges the index could be far more useful for society
if forest and fire management could make use of it!
I decided to start compiling a list of causes of forest fires
other than criminal human or indigenous activity,
which seems to be the only
cause of forest fires the media knows and talks about.
This is a general list, forests may be more prone
to some causes than others depending on geography and other factors.
That is a shame I did not start making this list a few days ago,
now it is rather hard to find some of the references and
I can't be 100% sure about some technical wording,
so while not ideal, I will link to similar references,
leave them without reference or remove the item from the list eventually.
Deve-se distinguir claramente a diferença entre uso da terra e
desmatamento. Todo desmatamento é uma forma de uso da terra,
mas nem todo uso da terra é um desmatamento. Deve-se portanto,
quantificar separadamente uso da terra e desmatamento. As áreas
agrícolas (uso da terra) fora da região do domínìo da floresta
tropical úmida que ocorre nas regiões de savana (cerrado,
campos cerrados) dos estados periféricos da Amazônia Legal
(Mato Grosso, Tocantins, Pará, Maranhão) não devem ser consideradas
como áreas desmatadas e não o foram neste relatório. [..]
CONTRARY to widespread belief, evidence is mounting that pre-Columbian America
was not a pristine wilderness inhabited by people who lived in such harmony with
nature that they left it unmarked. Instead, many scientists now say, the
original Americans powerfully transformed their landscape in ways both
destructive and benign -- just like modern people.
[...] more extensive fires on the alluvial islands of the middle
Rio Negro were those of the 1925/26 El Niño year, witnessed
and poetically described by Marchesi (1975): Thunder and
lightning appeared every day without rain. Then the great forest
fires began. Flames crossed from one side of the river to
the other... Dense smoke covered the entire region, eclipsing
thesolar disk. It was night for us too on the upper Rio Negro
where the fire had not yet arrived. Weasked ourselves
if it weren’t the end of the world. Finally, in early April
after 100 days of drought unlike any known before, a tempest struck.
Fire triangle
Fig 1. This triangle is used throughout many booklets
about fire, and it draws attention the fact that is
composed of only three (essential) parts: oxidizer, heat and fuel.
(credit: University of South Carolina)
#8 - Good References, a Structure to Climb
Google has got a nice feature for defining a search date range.
I always use that for checking papers, articles and
writings in general.
Older papers are usually
better written and more thoughtful.
Some general problems become bolder as telecommunication
technology evolves. Communication and data publishing
changed dramatically, in such a way it is reaches a bigger proportion
of people in less time.
It may be appropriately to say a more fluid mode as opposed
to crystallise thoughts or rationales. Perhaps that
would be called a more
fluid reality by Zygmunt Bauman..
To publishing an article on the internet, if one has got
some basic connections,
writing a piece and publishing that can be an almost immediate event.
Even unthoughtful one-liners can mess up general opinion. Take
Brazil's
president Bolsonaro,
whose sons publish a lot of obscenities
in his name
and in the name of the Republic at Twitter.
That is how people are getting used to ever more, writing very short
text. Incomplete text should be called note and as such a collection
of notes are
not organised very much, by definition.
Also, size of a text does not mean it is better or worse than
a shorter text, although usually the shorter the harder to
understand.
There is too much of the same ideas, ever poorer modification
of existing bases for some unhelpful sophistication of one own
creativity.
That may not be a new problem, however that is for certain more common
now quantitatively than before, when a researcher wants to
conform to general opinion, fearing cuts in research budgets
or even salary.
An overflow of limits means the paper may be under serious
methodological problems when that suffices to say
there is consensus
and one's research confirms consensus.
Consensus should not be more important than a very well defined and
rational function, which leverages logical deduction
of further general aspects.
I reckon Einstein's genius may be
in great part due to the fact
of the environment he was brought up in,
and also because of his acknowledgement
and decision of
developing on top of very important
primitives defined by other scientists.
Synthesis is harder than analysis,
one needs a general understanding of
the overall picture and be able to
remove noise from what is really important.
I am not sure it is healthy to long to be like
Einstein. Francis Crick and Ken Thompson would
agree. Ken would probably also say to
just do your own thing, no need to have got
bigger perspectives
than what is feasible at the time.
I fear this post has developed into something
else than the title may strictly suggest.
Indeed writing about Einstein made me
question what are my objectives with this
website and my youtube channel, anyways?
Too much thinking, I will just leave it at that for now.
News about the website. I changed website structure
a little more. There are two important directories
in the website structure which are the graphics 'gfx'
and resources 'res' directories. The res directory will
hold anything that is not graphical, such as audio
or text, although PDFs could arguably be placed
in the gfx directory, too.
A robots.txt file was added to the home page directory.
It has not got much, of importance only a pointer to a
sitemap file.
I am using two scripts from Poor Man's Webmaster Tools
to make a sitemap.txt and a sitemap.html files.
While I will soon link the sitemap.html to visitors
in the home page, Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search, DuckDuckGo
and other engines will actually prefer to read
a sitemap.xml file, because it can hold some
information about the links, such as last update time,
update frequency and priority (this latter is not currently
consumed by Google bots as explicitly said in Google's website).
It was not much hard to make the third sitemap script
which generates a xml file last night, although it took
me approximately 2-3 hours to write it.. Here is a
static copy of the script.
Although I will be improving it over time, it may
serve as an example for some other person
who reads this here.
The sitemap.xml
file should actually be uploaded to these search engines
(they have got a form for that), but I reckon if you are
patient, you can just add the sitemap pointer to the robots.txt
and the robots will eventually reach that.
#7 - CSS é Legal!
Today I am with a hangover from last night. That was not much fun, just
spent money I should rather have saved..
After waking up, I was watching some videos os CSS frameworks and got
a comment from
Theo Dondé.
He visited my webpage and said it was simple. Also,
he told me to use Google's Materialize CSS framework.
After some reading, I opted for the W3.CSS, which is simpler, lighter,
faster and W3 seems to be a much better organisation than Google, plus
W3 documentation is excellent and I really want to have the least to
do with Google..
It was a good surprise to actually be able to
use CSS frameworks!
Fig 1. Me sinto como a Rê Bordosa hoje..
I feel like her today..
(credit: angeli)
Ontem de noite e hoje não foi um dia muito agradável.. Dei um escorregão,
sai para me divertir, gastei um bom dinheiro que poderia ter economizado!
Hoje, amanheci com a rebordosa.
Passei o dia vendo uns vídeos sobre frameworks, ou estruturas
pré-definidas para formatação dá página com CSS.. fiz um comentário no
canal do
Theo Dondé,
ele foi legal comigo, falou que que meu site estava legal mas era simples.
Ele deu uma dica, para eu usar o
framework Materialize
desenvolvido pelo "Goo"-gle, daí achei, porra
o cara tá achando que eu dou conta de usar um framework de CSS?
Fiquei lisonjeado... Sem querer, comecei a procurar sobre esse assunto
e achei o
Bootstrap,
que parece ser o mais popular, o tal do Materialize e o
W3.CSS.
Curti o W3.CSS pois ele é mais simples, não usa muito jquery e nem javascript,
e parece ser um sucessor do Materialize.
Fiquei surpreso e feliz de ter realmente conseguido usar o
frameworks de CSS para refazer
a página de apresentação do Blog.
Os estilos de CSS da homepage mesmo estou fazendo
na unha para ir aprendendo..
Os Frameworks
Bootstrap
Dá para fazer muitas coisas, pode ser comparativamente
menos organizado ou restritivo do que o Materialize, então
depende muito do bom-senso do web designer para que o
layout do site fique legal. Os estilos são do tipo flat
e almost flat, este último fica muito bom com layout
de sites minimalistas!
Materialize
Ele é mais restritivo, normativo que o Bootstrap, então uma vez
que tu consiga montar o site com ele, o site deve estar bonito
e alinhado.
A paleta de cores do Materialize é de objetos do nosso dia a dia,
como um amarelo da placa de trânsito. Outra característica dele
é o uso de bastante sombras.
W3.CSS
Baseia-se nas cores do Materialize e também no estilo
de material design, também do Google. É mais
simples, tem menos funções, mas é mais leve e muito
rápido (pelo menos a versão 4 é!) e não requer jquery
e nem javascript.. Mas também dá para adicionar javascript,
por exemplo, , se quiser, para uma
apresentação de slides.
#6 - More Web Master Resources
I reckon having a website for link collection is a good reason
for having a website. I started a new column on the website home page,
called The Fool Environmentalist which is supposed to be a
list with links and very short comments about some important
point. Google News always sends me good and bad articles that
I should be collecting for personal reference.. Internet news
are easy to read but very hard to keep track and
organise them. Google does not help, sometimes even Firefox
isn't!
The Guardian has been very disappointing for the last decade.
Too many news about how humanity is headed to total environmental
disaster.. Generically, not only The Guardian here,
what they completely mess up is the sense of cause and effect.
Human beings are living on Earth because
the Environment has allowed all conditions for our development
and survival at this precisa moment,
so we are actually an effect of natural forces. To think that we
are the cause and source of natural order is very naive.
We may as well be, however it seems more overwhelming that
what little humans can do is due to workings of a much greater order.
And here order means simply physical laws. Indeed, order
can emerge from chaos and they are really not different things.
We may talk more about complex systems in due time.
I did a rewrite of a shell script
to deal with updating the website blog section. I found a very
useful sed command which allowed me to write simple template html
pages to merge with the actual post content
(from
Stack Overflow).
$ sed '2 r file2.txt' file1.txt
The first sed command adds text from file2.txt into file1.txt
after a specific line (in that case, line #2).
The following commands are more interesting as they add text from
file2.txt after a matched pattern. file2.txt can be /dev/stdin!
Also, if you want to modify the target file,
you can use flag -i:
$ sed '/^PATTERN/ r file2.txt' file1.txt
$ sed -i '/^PATTERN/ r /dev/stdin' file1.txt
I was working on the HTML and CSS code of the website for the past days.
Yesterday, I got some code snippets from
W3
and made the home page responsive.
It is using Flexbox, which, by the way, is not compatible with
IE 10 and earlier..
I installed various web browsers available in the Arch Linux official
repos:
aur/tor-browser
aur/google-chrome
community/otter-browser
community/opera
community/netsurf
community/elinks
extra/w3m
extra/lynx
extra/konqueror
extra/firefox
extra/epiphany
extra/chromium
core/links
It is a good idea to check your website with all of these browsers.
I personally like to using W3M, however I am not that familiar with
all shortcuts yet. On the other hang, Links and ELinks are
easy to use to even have got GUI versions! They are useful for
navigating to many websites, though not all.
Specially useful is the Netsurf browser, which uses a simple engine
and is akin in rendering to a version of IE 10 or thereabouts..
You can test your website with a different browser (cross-browser testing)
at
Browserling, too.
That is also good idea to check the code with an
HTML validator
and a
CSS validator.
They give you a code snippet to generate a validator logo at your
website, however if you tested your HTTP version of the website,
the code generated will make web browsers throw
supposed errors of unsafe images when accessing it with HTTPS.
In Linux, I found a very good HTML linter called tidy
available in the extra repo in Arch Linux. There is a good CSS linter,
albeit harder to use and requires some manual configuration is
Stylelint,
available in the community repo.
Check the stylelint-config-standard package, too.
Otherwise install via npm, check package instructions.
Lastly, you can check website performance with
GTmetrix,
a tip from
Chris Titus Tech.
It seems one of the most important optimisations you can do is
improve image sizes, if your webpage is too large. My
home page has approximately 200KB with images as of today..
PS: these webbrowser add-ons are almost essential webmaster tools,
check
Web Developer
which adds a toolbar button with various web developer tools and
HTTP Header Live
which displays the HTTP headers.
#5 - Using Poor Man's Web Master Tools
Falando um pouco da descoberta das ferramentes em shell do site
Poor Man's Web Master Tools
e como isso me aliviou e me motivou a tentar escrever uns scripts
para gerenciar a área do blog..
IMPORTANTE: parece que o site do PMWMT está fora do ar??
Espero que não tenha parado de vez (dead link?)..
Se o link não voltar, ainda bem que há
uma cópia na Wayback machine.
Searching for personal website tips or something,
I found some really interesting stuff. For example,
this website
talks about website cracking and hackery in general, which I found very amusing..
Anyways, it seems that indeed a webmaster needs to deal with
some data base and layout management. He could avoid them by using
Jekyll
or
WordPress,
or if he knows some programming, he can try and manage his website
all by himself. Reading Jekyll documentation,
it seems to deal with three types of web pages:
normal pages, usually not correlated to each other;
blog posts and a blog home page;
somewhat related pages, which they call collections.
I reckon that for unrelated and individual pages, it is a plus
if we can craft them manually.
There are so many structural HTML tags which can be used that
I doubt Jekyll
can apply half of them from a marked down text.. That seems
incompatible: either use a mark up or a mark down language.
Such intricate structures can one make with HTML tagging,
although much is condemned to null or discreet rendering
by web browsers at this present time..
About the second bullet point, the blog portal and
individual post management can be a hassle. It is easy if you
just write in a single page, which gets ever longer. However, if
you want to point to individual posts only, then you should also
have got individual pages for them.
Jekyll (and other static webpage generators) uses
a lot of databases, and that is not the easiest to
familiarise with its defaults structures, although I am
sure you can customise almost everything..
At this point, I was almost overwhelmed and giving up
on trying to create my own tools for the job of managing
a post database.. Most surprisingly, I found the
Poor Man's Web Master Tools
(PMWMT) and some silly scripts for maintaining a static website.
Do note the referred scripts are shell scripts.
I was most delighted!
IMPORTANT: It seems the website for PMWMT is down, hopefully that is
temporary..
If the link does not come online again, we still have got
a copy from Wayback machine.
Much refreshed and elated, I got to work on my previous shell script,
which dealt only badly with concatenating all blog post into
a single page.
Some template files were created. One holds most of
HEAD and HEADER contents while the other
most of the BODY and FOOTER contents.
Now, article text is written in HTML but are written in individual
files and only contains some metatags in a HEAD section
and a ARTICLE section, which are then merged with the
templates to generate a complete individual page for the post.
Finally, a function that merges all article sections of individual
posts into a long page with all posts.
There is a hard corner which is to fix all locally relative resource
dirpaths in src tags, for example for images or gifs.
Here, I had to think long and hard and created another directory
at the root of the blog directory called res/ for resources,
as it cannot be called gfx for graphics because I will be
linking txt plain text, as well. When all resources moved there,
I was able to use sed to remove '../' references in these fields..
The third bullet of the list above seems irrelevant as a worry now.
Either we can specially craft individual webpages or use the same
blog system for an eventual collection of related pages..
There are still some improvements or features to implement for
my own use, that is a way to automatically update the website portal
blog post section and the blog portal with latest post titles..
That should not be too hard to do with some shell scripting
and sed..
You can check a script snapshot
in this link.
I will be improving that over time, but I provide it here just so
as a reference of what can be done for the reader.
Although I am not currently using PMWMT's code
(I am writing my own), reading those scripts are a blow of fresh air..
When I next write a script for generating a sitemap.xml file,
I may use some of PMWMT code, though..
There may be a vague resemblance of functionality with
Luke Smith's lb and sup,
a blog script and site updater he wrote for his own blog. However,
he does not seem to care about adding metatags to blog posts, such
as keywords.. Other blogs could use their post categories as
keyword metatags..
Just for the record, there are two more scripts o deal with website
or blogging. The first one is
Roman Zolotarev's ss5,
which is a static site generator written in shell.
There is also
Slackjeff's hacktuite,
a shell script that makes a static microblog.
Fig 1. Logo from the Silly Software company,
provider of PMWMT and other interesting software.
PS: package tree can also make a directory (and file)
listing in HTML with option -H. One can use flag -P
to search for filetypes and flag -I to ignore some files.
It must be run at the root directory of the website. Example:
Depois de ver dar uma olhada melhor no
blog do Luke Smith,
estou pensando em copiar algumas seções,
como por exemplo, inaugurar um podcast em
Português. Definitivamente, o meu conteúdo vai ter que ser
espalhado em duas línguas. Veja, por exemplo, meu canal
canal no YouTube,
totalmente em português.. A ideia de um podcast é muito boa pois
abre uma avenida de possibilidades, além de ser mais fácil de gravar,
quem sabe um episódio por mês.. Aguardem..
Luke Smith's blog
has nice posts about his website development.
Specially, today, I was reading
the very first posts, from may 2008, and he states preference for
a minimalist website. There is also depth to his website, browsing it
I could find many links to different sections of his website: video,
podcast and rss feed. He has got even a forum, which I avoided entering
so far, may check it later. That LARBS
distribution seems
to have many users. I would't dare using it, because that would be
one more layer -- instead of having to learn how to configure
the tools themselves, I would have to learn how to configure his
LARBS tools.. And I just found how convoluted his
distro design might be, look at how redundant is this directory
structure, which he cites in this post
in which you navigate downwards levels until you can find the distro
default configuration file at
~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf.
His website has very interesting ideas, pages and depth to content.
Specially, the podcast section got my attention. I already have got a
YouTube channel
(in portuguese),
and some faithful followers, even though I advertise that channel as
a B-side channel, meaning produced with
as little time as would afford that..
However, a podcast, in which only
the voice is the most important piece of the play, seems like good fun.
That is easier to record, easy to upload, easy to download..
It can have high quality sound as any mobile phone
has great microphone, much different from my computer microphone
used for producing my youtube channel content!
It would make sense to have my podcast in portuguese, which means
effectively splitting content in two languages in this website.
Production would be slower, one episode a month. And I could have
co-hosts or interviews, chatting with other cool people, so
that is a big opened avenue.
#3 - Blog Design
I am reading a lot of HTML code from other personal blogs/websites..
I am seeing all those blogs I collected over the years
in a new perspective. Some of these blogs are from people with
information technology backgrounds, and yet they seem to use Jekyll
or some other layout programmes, such as WordPress to generate pages.
See
Aurelio Jargas' website.
Aurelio is using Jekyll now, however it was possible
to find a
very early webpage of his Brazilian music group called
DUMBS
written, presumably, by himself. The webpage seems to have started
with a simple, cool design (and one picture of the band!),
which was soon after buried under a lot of litter (gifs, pictures),
which would leave important information out of sight.
Sometime later, Aurelio writes in the website logs that the page was
slow to load, too! We can compare with the
music band final website
he maintains as memoir of good times to this date.
There is no convincing me any of these programmes end up
being easier to learn and use than to make your own webpages with
good HTML and CSS code. The principle still ought to be
a clean website with good content is superior than busy and
heavy websites.
It is clear that if a website grows, it starts to getting harder
to maintain the pages. However, CSS style sheets may prove
very handy for changing formatting of a series of posts.
While HTML structures the text, CSS will style it.
Not everything can be done with CSS but I reckon much can be done
without need of a complete rewrite of the website. Plus,
sed can be very useful in changing whole sections of HTML documents.
Bash may not be the most recommended language for maintenance of
a very large website, perhaps, however bash is already
helping me
with compiling the
All posts
page.
Every blog post has got its own manually-crafted
HTML page, with many logical tags which may serve to present this same
content in different ways for different people, for example, for
the visually impaired or the people in the future,
whenever in time.
Aurelio's writing style can be funny and that keeps the
reader interested. I shall try to keep this website
light-spirited, too..
For now, I cannot grow this website too much without further
defining and deciding on its basic structure. For that, I may even
make some drawings on paper and try to implement that structure
in HTML code..
#2 - English & Português
Como comento bastante nos parágrafos abaixo, é complicado eu replicar
o mesmo conteúdo em português e inglês. Apesar
da intenção deste site ser para anotações de pesquisas e ideas,
assim como coleção de listas de links de referência para uso
pessoal em momento futuro, também é para ser compartilhado
com interessados, e seria uma pena não usar o Inglês para tentar
atingir o maior número de pessoas ao redor do mundo.
De modo que decidi escrever os textos em qualquer língua,
porém sem compromissos ou promessas.
Há um texto meu em português com memórias e algumas histórias
de minhas aventuras no Japão, onde cursei um ano e meio do
ensino médio na escola internato
Meitoku Gijuku,
o que mudou muito o meu caráter e meu modo de ver as coisas..
Veja
O Espelho de Jamil.
no blog d'A Viagem de ShigeS.
This is the last day of August. Today, I am trying to consolidate
my health-wise plans for September. My routine needs improvement,
it is already much better than it was between 2014-2017, but
sometimes I fail my plans and that may lead me to some bad days
too easily. That is what needs improvement, more resistance
to a routine which can keep my frustrations in check.
Anyways, Luke Smith has got a video in which he explains how
he manages his website. he has got a cloud Debian server server
in which 'nginx' is installed.. The programme is called 'engine ex'
and is a web server. In this website, I am doing everything
manually and carefully, for example, all subdirectories will need have
an index.html file in order for their contents not to be visible
as raw file hierarch, even if that must be a 403-forbidden-type
index.html..
There are other more important steps I could do at leisure first,
for example, renting a custom domain for the website and
a better place to host that than GitHub..
An important point is to decide what language this website
will be. I reckon that would be a shame not to use English as
a practical means for exposing content to the wide world web,
however most people I know speak only Portuguese. There is just
so much time and effort I can put into this website, and as
much of the purpose of creating this is for my recordings of
research and ideas, collating references and links for
easily accessing them later, just as much my intent is to share
and spread these writings with everyone else.
That leaves me in a difficult position but it is decided I will
write in whichever language, but I cannot promise as much content
in both languages. I hope this is may serve as stimulus for those
who would like to read more of my posts. It may also be useful,
there may be some information I would rather not expose in either
English or Portuguese..
I know a little Japanese, too. That was the biggest movement
of my life when I went to Japan and lived in
Meitoku Gijuku,
a boarding school, for one year and a half. There is a long
recollection text in portuguese I wrote just before leaving
Japan. That is hosted online at the blog A Viagem de ShigueS
O Espelho de Jamil.
Fig 1. Otsukaresama! We got to the top of the mountain
in new year's day (1st January 2006)
just to watch the sun rise. The group
was about 8 people, two were Americans and all others,
except me, were Japanese. I knew half of those people
with whom we had celebrated new year's evening the night
before together.
(credit: personal archive)
Fig 2. Meitoku Gijuku Junior & Senior High School
promotional banner.
(credit: meitoku gijuku website)
#1 - Sync an HTML Blog!
The first post of this website is to sync its code to GitHub.
I started learning shell scripting about one year and three months
ago and simple html code seems a good next choice because of its
usefulness.
Watching
m1xolyd1an
videos about Bitcoin got me excited about html. He uses
JavaScript and NodeJS, I reckon, to do maths to
hash Bitcoin addresses
and some html, too.
Plus, it struck me just the other day I could make my father,
who is a lawyer, a website (he said he has got one but I could not
find it on the internet).
Also, a friend of mine asked me to help him make a website last
year and I could not be helpful (he has got a very stylish website
now, he paid a professional, which I am glad for!).
Next step, I will detach this post from the front page -- ok!
This post will have to become a rough draft for an html post skeleton
for future posts..
A very good website structure is needed to be able to scale the amount
of code without much frustration..
Setting meta tags for <head> seems to be
majorly important.. Interestingly, Luke Smith webpage has got almost
no meta tags.. Actually, many websites don't seem to care about html
tags at all, with the exception of the charset and http-equiv
attributes.
It has been a few days since I started studying html for this website
project. Now I am checking lots of websites source code. In Firefox, just
press <CTR+U> to see the source code.
This website may seem already abandoned, but in fact, I have been putting
some effort in writing good source html code in the three pages this web site has
already got. Specially, I was worried about the meta tags, and now many
important ones are added to the <head> section of the pages.
A visitor counter is added to the home page, but visibility
is not enabled and I am not sure whether leaving it on is any good,
because I cannot be sure what external scripts they may
be running with my visitors, plus as I will access my website
the most frequently, probably it will count only my own traffic..
That would be very similar to GitHub traffic to my repos,
though I am not 100% sure,
much of the traffic GitHub shows me in the insight section seems to be from
myself when re-cloning own repos to update them.. Sometimes it is clear
there is some traffic not from me, though..
I had to finally deal with solving a problem with my vim configuration..
The problem was using a parentheses colourising plugin from Luochen1990
called
rainbow,
which just messed up my syntax highlighting.. I removed
it and now set to using kien's
rainbow parentheses
which is a little harder to use and has got a hidden command RainbowParenthesesLoadChevrons
but that, I am mostly sure, is to avoid new users enabling it with
incompatible language highlighters on. For example,
the rainbow chevrons option must not be enabled when html syntax
highlighting is also enabled, unless you want to break the html syntax
highlighters..
Also, installed mattn's vim-emmets
plugin, which really helps with writing html tags.. I actually found
that on Arch Linux User Repository (AUR) .
I am being careful to writing these canonical html source pages
because if I do hurry up and write bad html sources, I would need
rewriting them later at some point. When my studying of
Dan's Web Tips is finished (see reference above), I will be ready..
Fig 1. What about html in how to meet lads?
(credit: kris krüg)
PS: I have included a google analytics script in the home page
and will leave that on for some time, just to see how that works
for now.
I checked Dan's web tips website and he has got an analytics/statistics
script, so maybe that is not 100% an evil thing to do.. He also seems
to have had a simple visitor counter before that, which is now
commented out in the page HTML code.. I checked and it reached
38000+ hits before being commented out in favor of his new analytics
script..
PPS: it seems that the bad thing is not really getting website
guest statistics as much as showing ads! Content quality may
decrease when all the author wants is the advertisement revenue..
For example,
youtube incites vlog authors to make any type of content in
large quantities in order to have channel monetisation via
ad views..
PPPS: one of the trackers I was testing uses a third-party
services matomo [[dot]] org
which seems a very suspicious company. As their advertising
of user information collection and selling is so outspoken in their
website, I am removing it.. I will leave Google Analytics, though.