A nice warm Sunday afternoon, I wanted something cold to drink and a good book to read in my garden. I glanced at my pile of books beside the door, the books I grab to read in the train to my office, a pile of 8 books. Then I remembered I had a few books in the library I wanted to read, another pile, 10 books. As I went down and put them all over the table, I realised I had a few books more in the computer room, 3 books.
Interesting things to know before going to Iceland As you may remember, Laia and myself went to Iceland for a 2 and half weeks trip last June-July. It was a wonderful experience, managed by the wonderful (and helpful!) people at Nordic Visitor. This is the first post in a series named Things you should read before travelling to Iceland. In these posts I will cover the following (I will add links to the individual posts here as I write them, bookmark this page!
Yacas is an advanced computer algebra system, with its own programming language and a lot of handful operators available.
It comes handy when you need to do that odd symbolic computation which is too big to handle by hand (or you are plain lazy).
By looking at the wikipedia entry, I discovered an startling truth: as of 2009, yacas is no longer maintained.
I should have guessed, because yacas does not compile out of the box (the program needed to generate the manuals does not compile), and this led to some naïve patching (just removing all instances of said program…).
A month ago, Oscar del Ben posted an interesting tip in his blog to take power naps when you are feeling tired, How to Get a Quick 5-10 Minutes Nap Without Using an Alarm Clock. His idea is simple: pick a spoon on your hand. Once you fall asleep, your grip will relax, the spoon falls and you awaken with the sound. I found it amusing and interesting, as I am one of those types who feel really well after a 10 minutes nap.
Last Tuesday I made the move. I ditched Ubuntu and installed Arch Linux in my Acer Aspire One. After my post Linux is a time killer (which attracted a lot of attention, and didn’t really carry the message I wanted) I got a lot of comments to think about. The two most suggested Linux distributions were Debian/unstable and Arch Linux. Well, maybe Arch Linux was not that talked about, but the following comment bought me out:
I have a problem: I know quite a lot different programming languages (you can read my list of the best 9 books I have read about programming), but I am proficient only in two. I’d love to choose a few to concentrate and build my skills up, but I don’t know which. Read on for background and possible candidates.
Since I discovered there were different programming languages, I’ve liked learning different ones.