cloud goes social

What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger – Friedrich Nietzsche

Cazzo, Vittu, Foda-se, Scheiße, 狗屁 – Claudio

For those of you not knowing what such quotes may refer to, and for those who do, here is an explanation of the facts, as they’ve happened in chronological order. Or thought so

I do understand that my narrative skills aren’t the best, so for anyone that might be really bored you can jump to the last part!

Thursday – 30th of April – 15.00/2.30

After a tiring week of lessons and exercises at ETH João and Claudio set off to the center of Zürich to buy chocolate. More chocolate. Claudio has tickets to reach his girlfriend, Eppi, in Finland, the day afterwards, the 1st of May.
The weather is fine, a bit cloudy, once home, where Mike was waiting for them, the trio sets off to kick a few times the ball in the nearby park, and then to program a mysterious iPhone application which will see the light in the future.
At around 19.00 João and Claudio decide that it’s about time to bring the luggage to the Airport for a night-before-check-in (which is definitely a very good option for all the people who have their flight early in the morning). After the operation yielded successful results the duo went on to the Chinese restaurant where they decided to grab some food for the soirée.
NOTE: João paid the dinner since Claudio has been helping him the whole previous afternoon being the best money-investor for his reach family (all fake, ETH Human Resources Management course project)

Home again, the trio reformed, dinner is served and eaten, followed by the delicious apple-lime-sugar (re)mix © by João.
Cards are now entering the scene, with a few fast matches of Briscola, and some tricks done (and later explained) by João.

The second part of the evening, beside occupying the same time as the previous spots fewer activities, first the last Lost episode has been watched by the full trio (yes, they are fan of the series) and then João brought up a cool opensource FPS, Warsow, which kept the three guys busy until around 3 in the night.
With very few hours of sleep ahead, Claudio decides to take home João and get some rest before the trip. Or so he thought….

Night – 1th of April – 2.30/4.00

To take João home, Claudio, the driver, needed a car, which he has, parked outside home. Apart from a working car, he needed a license, which he has, safely stored in his wallet. Which he has … Or no, he had. You guessed right, the wallet was nowhere to be found. Not in the house (which Mike has been scanning inch-by-inch), not in the car (which João scanned centimeter-by-centimeter), not in the streets, neither from car to home, nor from Chinese (closed at 24.00) to car park (scanned by Claudio & João meter-by-meter).

With his plane leaving in just hours (2, roughly) Claudio lost his hope to find the wallet. But he didn’t lost hope to reach Eppi, in Finland. Here comes the telephone aid:

1. 117 – the police national emergency number. A friendly voice answers in German (terror!) but then after the start-question: “Sprächen Sie English, Franzosich öder Italienish?” and the comforting answer: “Italiano” the issue is solved. Well, the language issue. The police-guy was actually answering from Ticino (Southern part of Switzerland) and redirected Claudio to the kantonpolizei of Zürich.
2. kantonpolizei – the police for the Canton of Zürich. A not-so-friendly voice answers in German (terror!) and refuses to speak any other language than Deutch (abyssal terror!!!). Asking help from Mike (he’s supposed to know German, but he roughly manages) Claudio manages to explain that he lost his wallet, and needs to take a plane morgen (aka: tomorrow). The guy redirects Claudio to the Flüghafen polizei.
3. Flüghafen polizei – the police of the Airport of Zürich. A sleepy voice answers in German (terror!) but manages to speak English. The problem is explained and a solution is proposed: get to the police asap and get a paper stating that the ID card has been lost. As a substitute the permit issued by the Stadt Opfikon (where I’m living) will be used to identify myself. The flights will be Shengen-bounded so it shouldn’t be a problem

Morning – 1th of April 4.00/5.00

The two iron-forged guys, João and Claudio , leave Mike behind and rush to the airport, where, after some waiting and a grumpy almost-sleepy-badly-awaken police officer fills in the report and gives it to Claudio with the comment: “they won’t let you board the flight”

Back home, Mike is in bed, sleeping and dreaming about jumping sheeps overflowing the maximum integer size, Claudio takes a quick shower while João chats with some Portugues friends still awake.
The time has come. The two heroes reach the airfield, and João gifts lends Claudio some money for the trip, Claudio advances to the gates of heaven the passport check and passes through, without any inconvenience.

João brings back the car to my place and gets some rest. He deserved it!

The holiday

All goes fine, from Zürich to Düsseldorf and then to Helsinki, final destination Loviisa and all the way back. The small holiday has been a charm, a needed refreshening time with lovely people. No troubles encountered at any passport check, nor at at the check-in on the way home (apart from weird looks from the woman at the counter). The wallet was found by João at the Chinese restaurant on the 1st of May, at 11.00, the opening hour. Life is happy, once more.

Conclusion

All is good what ends up being good. And this adventure definitely ended up being good. The sleeping time wasted was gained back with some extra sleeping the following days, and for sure the duo João – Claudio proved to be strong and compact, a good friendship, bound to last for a long time being. I would like to thank João for showing me how good friends can be, Mike for helping out whenever he could, Eveliina for always having encouraging words whenever they’re needed and overall life for giving me adventures and opportunities which should be lived through to learn how to live better and always managing through whatever hard or complicated issues come up.

As for the two quotations, the first looks obvious, the second is a collection of swear words in all the languages related to the posting: Italian, Finnish, Portuguese, German and Chinese, in no relevant order.

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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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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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:

1. Go to the webpage of the radio – http://www.triplem.com.au/sydney
2. Find the ‘listen online’ button
   
   

   Listen Online Example for TripleM

3. 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
4. Search for something like:
   asx
   Or alternatively if you don’t find any entry:
   embed
5. 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.asx

   If 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

6. 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

7. 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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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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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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