Windows is HARD

2012-12-25 09:21

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:

Plug it in
Get the autostart window
Start the installer
Click Next a few times
Reboot
Start the client to connect
Click on the "world" icon
Wait a little
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:

Plug it in
Say I am in Argentina
Say it's a Claro 3G service
Go to Network Indicator
Click on "Claro 3G"
Wait a little
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.

Walking or Running in The Rain

2012-12-21 15:45

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.

Nikola Wordpress Importer Improvements

2012-12-20 12:53

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.

Rst2pdf 0.93 released

2012-12-18 16:58

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)

Nikola is Python 2 1/2 ready

2012-12-17 16:20

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.

Ralsina.Me — El sitio web de Roberto Alsina