I am on va­ca­tion, by the sea. So, I don't have my usu­al in­ter­net con­nec­tiv­i­ty. I de­cid­ed to buy a 3G mo­dem and de­cid­ed pure­ly based on price, end­ing up with a ZTE mo­dem pro­vid­ed by Claro.

On Win­dows, it works well enough:

1. Plug it in

2. Get the au­­tostart win­­dow

3. Start the in­­stal­l­er

4. Click Next a few times

5. Re­­boot

6. Start the client to con­nect

7. Click on the "world" icon

8. Wait a lit­­tle

9. In­­ter­net!

I tried it on win­dows first be­cause I as­sumed it would work on my wife's com­put­er, and I could do an ad-hoc wifi net­work so I could con­nect mine. Well, no.

So I tried it on Ubun­tu. It does work too:

1. Plug it in

2. Say I am in Ar­­gen­ti­­na

3. Say it's a Claro 3G ser­vice

4. Go to Net­­work In­­di­­ca­­tor

5. Click on "Claro 3G"

6. Wait a lit­­tle

7. In­­ter­net!

And yes, I can do an ad-hoc con­nec­tion and pro­vide ser­vice to ev­ery­one else. Plus I don't have an un­clos­able win­dow lay­ing around all the time.

I al­ways am amazed by peo­ple sug­gest­ing that walk­ing in the rain keeps you dry­er than run­ning. Just saw an an­swer to this. Check it out, it's nice:

I have al­so seen it de­bunked ex­per­i­men­tal­ly, by Myth­Buster­s. But let's try a dif­fer­ent ap­proach: in­tu­itive math. In­tu­itive math is tricky be­cause it usu­al­ly is wrong, but hey, it's fun.

Ap­par­ent­ly, we all agree that how wet you get cor­re­lates to your speed. Oth­er­wise, the ques­tion is point­less be­cause the an­swer is "walk or run, but take an um­brel­la", while true, is cheat­ing, right?

So, for those slow­er-is-­bet­ter pro­po­nents: go and walk very, very, very slow­ly. You may no­tice that you end com­plete­ly soaked be­fore you fin­ish walk­ing. If you did­n't, you are still walk­ing too fast.

On the oth­er hand, if you were to go at 1000000 km/h we all agree you would on­ly get some drops in your frontside, right? Which would not soak you. Right? And most im­por­tant­ly, is con­stant re­gard­less of your speed, be­cause it's just the av­er­age amount of wa­ter con­tained in a man-shaped prism from point A to point B, and you get that wa­ter in your front if you go slow any­way.

As­sum­ing the speed/­soak­i­ness curve is rough­ly monotonous, it's clear that the max­i­mum soak­i­ness is when you go slow­est.

If it's not monotonous, then the ques­tion is rough­ly unan­swer­able, since it would in­volve there is an op­ti­mal speed and it's worse to go ei­ther faster or slow­er than that, which means the an­swer is some­thing like "jog" which is not what you wan­t.

So, go fast, go dry.

Thanks to hav­ing users try­ing to ac­tu­al­ly im­port da­ta from word­press, the word­press im­porter plug­in for Niko­la, my stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor got a cou­ple of new fea­tures.

• It will try to main­­tain your URLs via redi­rects

  If your post was in /2012/1/2/a-­­post/ and now it will be in /post­s/a-­­post.html it will cre­ate a re­di­rect from the for­mer to the lat­ter.

• url_map for com­­ment mi­­gra­­tion

  It will cre­ate a CSV file con­­tain­ing the old,new full URLs so that you can move your dis­­qus threads to the right places.

Al­so, mas­ter works with do­cu­tils 0.10 which broke in the last re­lease.

For these rea­son­s, there will be a 5.0.1 re­lease to­day or to­mor­row.

PS: if you want to see a few sites us­ing Niko­la, now you can.

A bit ahead of sched­ule, I just up­load­ed ver­sion 0.93 of rst2pdf a tool to con­vert re­struc­tured text in­to PDF files.

Here are some of the changes in this ver­sion:

• Fixed Is­­sue 447: Dou­ble-sid­ed al­ways starts on the right (By Rob Lud­wick)

  • Re­­­moved --­­­first-­­­page-even as it was not used any­where.

  • Added --­­­first-­­­page-on-right

• Fixed Is­­sue 464: sup­­port align­­ment via :class: in im­age di­rec­­tives.

• Fixed Is­­sue 482: Line blocks with in­­­den­t­ed parts get ex­­tra­ne­ous spac­ing

• Fixed Is­­sue 470: Sup­­port for :tar­get: in fig­ures.

• New style "im­age" to be ap­­plied to im­age di­rec­­tives.

• Fixed Is­­sue 485: Bet­ter styling sup­­port for fig­ures/im­ages (s­­pace­Be­­fore/After)

• Sup­­port rst2pdf [inf [out­f]] syn­­tax to be more com­­pat­i­ble with rst2*

• Im­­ple­­men­t­ed Is­­sue 389: New --strip-ele­­men­t-with­­-­­class op­­tion

• Fixed Is­­sue 474: Cel­l­Style1 is not there in re­­port­lab 2.6

• Re­­moved de­­fault pad­d­ing from De­layedTable, which looked bad on head­­er­s/­­foot­er­s.

• Im­prove­­ments to the math di­rec­­tive (font col­or and size)

• Bet­ter sup­­port for styling lit­er­al­s.

• Fixed Is­­sue 454 (S­­plit­t­ing fail­ure)

• Re­­gressed Is­­sue 374 (some lit­er­al blocks get over­s­plit)

• Switched from svglib to svg2rlg

• Re­­moved uni­­con­ver­­tor sup­­port

• Fixed Is­­sue 477: Sink foot­note sep­a­ra­­tor (patch by aser­­max)

• Fixed Is­­sue 473: Sup­­port "code" di­rec­­tive like an alias of code-block.

• Fixed Is­­sue 472: Im­­ple­­men­t­ed My­Im­age._un­Re­stric­t­­Size

• Fixed Is­­sue 471: Re­spect class in lineblock­­s.

• Fixed Is­­sue 455: New pisa/x­ht­m­l2pdf has very dif­fer­­ent im­­ports

• Marked Is­­sue 358 as fixed.

• Fixed Is­­sue 410: al­ways in­­­clude full lines in code-blocks (m­­mueller patch)

On my free time, lunch hours, and such I have been tweak­ing Niko­la, my stat­ic site gen­er­a­tor to make it python 3 friend­ly. Well, I some­what-ac­ci­den­tal­ly-my-­dog-­made-me-­do-it may have com­mit­ted a lot of that in­to mas­ter.

So, right now, things may be some­what bro­ken on python2 and some­what work­ing a lit­tle on python3.

In any case, feel free to try it out, and let me know what to fix.