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Archive for April, 2009
Childish games, smells, tastes
Apr 24th
After working (almost) the whole night on the AOS (Advanced Operating System) course we went to eat a big fat focaccia, @Il Pentagramma, Zürich!
Guess what was found there, by João? BIG BABOL! I hadn’t eaten them since ages, let’s say 10!! I used to chew a lot of them when I was a kid and a little guy.
Big Chewy Chewingum
Of course immediately between us, friends, started the balloons-fight. Walking around the center and making big-shocking-pink balloons! Just like the old days!
You can see my friend João doing one, while on the tram 11 heading towards Oerlikon!
João on the tram
For a simple silly sequence you can have a look at my DA deviation
Ah, well, so many memories brought back by the chewy experience, and now my facial muscles are all sore! :P
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Life away
Apr 20th
Living away from home spots, as many other things, two faces of a coin. Let’s try and make a list, or just write down what comes to my mind!
From Como to Zürich, the center of Europe
I’m living in Zürich, Switzerland, away from Como, Italy. The distance is not prohibitive, around 3 hours and a half by car (no speeding!) and three hours and something by train. Nice!
THE GOOD
- Parents – living alone, well, with two other pals (colleague of studies and adventures), surely has as a pro the fact that parents aren’t around. Want to sty up until 3A.M. or eat at 14:00? No problem!
- Cooking – having a passion for it really makes me experiment a lot!
- Inhabitants – staying around with friends who share common interests can’t be beaten!
THE BAD
- Ironing – probably the worst part of it all. It takes much time, things never come out as pretty as mom does them and burns are always behind the corner
THE UGLY
- House cleaning – it’s not a very bad part, but it’s a really repetitive job, therefore becomes boring (spicing it up with music and jokes while hoovering or washing the floor and toilets it’s good and alleviates the boredom)
- Foodshopping – not that bad, but man, it eats up time, much time. And without having a car around makes it a bit heavy, at times. Well, when we have to get the milk at least!
Have any suggestion for the list? I’ll be more than happy to update the list, if your comments apply to me as well! Let me know, I’m interested!
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Webradios on OSX: guide to easy listening
Apr 17th
I’m a huge fan of some radios which I’ve been listening to in my life. For example, while driving in Italy I usually listen to virginradio, while being in Sydney I used to listen to tripleM, both of which usually air good rock music without too much DJs and ads.
YES! I want to listen to music, not ads or people speaking!
Thankfully most radio stations nowadays also spot an internet streaming. Nightmarefully usually it’s a flash or WMP (Windows Media Player) streaming. Being a MacOSX user (mostly) or a Linux user (always – mostly: so basically the time I’m not on MacOSX) I found both formats bad. The first because it works once and not the other time, the second because while more or less working with Quicktime (+ some weird nasty plugin [flip4Mac])
ATTEMPTED SOLUTION
What I usually do is easy – with example:
- Go to the webpage of the radio – http://www.triplem.com.au/sydney
- Find the ‘listen online’ button
Listen Online Example for TripleM
- Open up the source code for the page that the ‘listen online’ opens up (usually they use pop-ups windows for such streamings) when there’s some kind of streaming going on
- Search for something like:
asx
Or alternatively if you don’t find any entry:
embed -
If in the step before you found the asx copy all the link, following our example:
... id="WMPlayer" name="WMPlayer" src="http://resources.triplem.com.au/listenfeed/2mmmlivestream.asx" type="video/quicktime" ...
let’s copy:
http://resources.triplem.com.au/listenfeed/2mmmlivestream.asxIf instead in the step before we found the embed keyword let’s look around it to find something like:
... <EMBED type="application/x-mplayer2" pluginspage="http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/MediaPlayer/" SRC="http://151.1.245.1/20" name="nnrVideoPlayer" autostart="1" width="400" height="70" showcontrols="1"> </EMBED> ...
around the code there should be the src tag, such as in the example. Let’s therefore copy:
http://151.1.245.1/20 -
Open your favorite video/audio player, not iTunes, such as VLC and search for something called like ‘Open Network’. In our example, using VLC it’s: File->Open Network… or even faster the shortcut ⌘N and paste what you just copied:
The right place to paste the information copied
- Press OK and after some buffering time you should be listening to your favorite radio! And without any ads or needing to keep your browser or anything!
This is clearly and hack solution which may work for you or not. If you have problems with your radio streaming and the above solution don’t hesitate to contact me and I’ll look into it (whenever I’ll find some time).
Hope it helped!
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TIME protocol on MacOSX
Apr 15th
Recently in the Advanced Operating System course, at ETH (Systems) I’ve struggled upon the TIME protocol (not NTP). The problem was simple: get a TIME protocol server that could respond to the SLUG2 (friendly called by me and my project partner SLUT) when ‘she’ was needing a reply (for some randomness, apparently).
Since MacOSX doesn’t provide any such thing, I settled on the task and here’s the result:
Server side:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import time
from socket import *
def server(host="", port=37):
sock = socket (AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM)
sock.bind ((host, port))
print "listening on port %s (%s)" % (port, `host`)
while 1:
# Block waiting for packet.
data, address = sock.recvfrom(256)
print "Client sent:", data
print "Client at:", address
# Got a packet, reply to address packet came from.
sock.sendto(time.time(),address)
if __name__ == "__main__":
server("", 37)
Client side (just to test that the server is actually working)
#!/usr/bin/env python
import socket
port=37
clisocket = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
while 1:
data = raw_input("Type something: ")
if data:
clisocket.sendto(data, ("127.0.0.1", port))
# Block waiting for reply.
data, address = clisocket.recvfrom(256)
print "Server sent time:", data
else:
break
clisocket.close()
This code (and any other that might be present on this blog) should be taken with a good grain of salt. It seems to do what it’s supposed to do. So if you’re in an emergency, trying to find a TIME protocol server to make it answer your client needs, here it is. Fiddle with it as much as you want. And don’t hesitate to comment with good and bad news about it.
The code and the issue have been tested on MacOSX 10.5.6
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Hello world!
Apr 15th
Good morning/afternoon/evening/(night?)!
I’m starting this new blog because, as the name implies, I’m going social. I’ve always been close on myself, not going on Facebook, not going on Twitter, not going anywhere! ;)
This is all going to change. Stay tuned (who?) for news about, well, everything! Music, Movies, Computers, Travels, \ldots (or for the others: …)
Sorry for my English, which is not my mother-tongue!
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