llongi's blog

A few computer & programming books suggestions:

• C Programming: A Modern Approach, 2nd edition, by K.N. King - awesome C book, it really goes over the whole language logically, is updated to the C99 standard, and is awesome as a reference too, I consider this my bible
• The Art of Multiprocessor Programming, 1st edition, by M. Herlihy & N. Shavit - all you ever wanted to know about parallel programming, including lock-free data structures, examples are in Java
• Digital Design and Computer Architecture, 1st edition, by D. Harris and S.Harris - great book about how your processor is actually designed, what it's made up of, ...
• Algorithms in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference, 1st edition, by G. Heineman, G. Pollice and S. Selkow - great reference book for most common algorithms
• Thinking in Java, 4th edition, by Bruce Eckel - great Java programming book, covers Java 1.5/1.6, a free version of the 3rd edition is available
• Effective Java: A Programming Language Guide, 2nd edition, by Joshua Bloch - tips & tricks to become a better Java developer, very recommended

And a few fantasy books suggestions, as we all like to relax from time to time and escape into slightly more adventurous and magical worlds:

• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien - seriously, if you've never read this, buy it immediately, it's one of the best books ever written
• The Mistborn Trilogy, by Brandon Sanderson - awesome, totally new supernatural way to do things, kick-ass heroine, and surprising twists at every turn of the page
• The Belgariad and The Mallorean, by David Eddings - 10 books total, a classic epic fantasy series, with magic, evil gods, a company of heroes, ...
• The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher - contemporary fantasy series, set in Chicago, lots of creatures populate our world here, currently book 12 is out, up to 11 in paperback

Went to the Warm-Up party at ETHZ's StuZ² yesterday evening, not that bad, but not really that great either, the place was a bit cramped at times and they really need to add some better ventilation system, it was stifling inside most of the time!
Now a study-laden week-end is awaiting me, yay...
Next week:

• Thursday, ESF 2010 at ETH Hönggerberg, biggest swiss students party, everyone who doesn't know what to do that evening, go there!
• Friday, Inkognito 2010 at Härterei, it's our students association's semester-party

Again this year I'll be present at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, along with a bunch of friends. I've been to 23C3, 25C3 and now it's time for 27C3. I really hope that it's gonne be awesome like the last times, the venue is really great, and the talks are usually very interesting and diverse. This year they changed how tickets are handled, but that shouldn't be a problem.

Let's get back to blogging a little, now that I have some more time... ;)
Last saturday I went to FrOSCamp 2010 at ETH Zürich (my former college). The conference was quite good with a few interesting talks, but it could have been publicized better, me and a friend of mine just got wind of it by chance thanks to some online article, there was no info-mail to Computer Science students for example, which could have helped increase the turnout...
After the last talk me and a friend, who's just transferred from Lugano (TI) to Zürich to complete his Master of Informatics in Distributed Systems at ETHZ, went to the Rote Fabrik for a night of partying. We choose the place pretty randomly, and since we never went there before, we didn't know what to expect at all. And oh boy, did we choose well! The place is really awesome, it's an old factory made of red bricks (hence the name "Rote Fabrik"), it subscribes to the "alternative" theme, for example to enter you have to climb over the fence. Quite fun! Inside the area there's a restaurant, several bars and several venues for music. The whole place was well kept and very clean, and the food was very good. Normal-to-low prices for Zürich standards.
We first caught the tail of a show by "Tim & Puma Mimi", it's basically a swiss dude playing flute and electronic music, and a japanese girl singing japanese vocals over it; it was... different, but really cool, and they had a few very good songs.
Later the main event was a rock-concert by "The Maccabees" in the big hall, which was really good, but I personally preferred the opening band "Jamaica", they really had some awesome music there!
Getting back home was quite an odissey too, as I managed to pretty much miss all the connections I could miss and ended up waiting around for trains and stuff for hours, need to plan that better next time.
And there will be a next time, as I really was positively impressed by the venue!

I've left ETH Zürich behind me, as I really didn't feel their theory-heavy curriculum to be right for me, and I'm now a student at the University of Zürich, following the "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science RO 2008" courses, specializing in "Software-Systems", which I hope will be a much more practice-oriented course.
The first year is together with the students specializing in "Business Informatics", so I also have a few business-related classes, such as Financial Accounting and IT in Companies, which I don't mind, as I find them quite interesting and useful. After the first week I can honestly say I like the place, there's a very friendly athmosphere and I've met a lot of nice and fun new people.

I'm officially retiring as a Gentoo developer, simply because I've not really done anything in the last year and will not be getting back into the swing of things anytime in the future, so I feel it's time to retire.
It's been a fun 4.5 years, even if I wasn't present much as developer in the last 1.5 years, and I will definitely continue using Gentoo as my distribution of choice, nothing will change that. I've had the honor of getting to know some amazing people during those years, and improve a lot of my skills and competences, and for that I'm grateful. See you all around!

Happy New Year people!!!
Let's hope for a great 2010.

Merry Christmas everyone, have a happy time!

I'll try to blog again more often, so that at least I'll have a log of my life, more or less. ;)

Yesterday (Tuesday) evening I and a couple of friends (Flavio, Andrea and Dersim) went to ExpoVina 2009 in Zürich, a big wine exposition held on 12 boats anchored at the Bürkliplatz port.
We arrived at around 1700 and stayed till about 1920, sampling wines from different countries, regions and producers. I particularly appreciated the selection of sweet wines from Bindella, as I love sweet and dessert wines, and ordered a few right away, their VinSanto "Dolce Sinfonia" and the "Brachetto d'Aqui" were incredibly good. We also sampled a few wines from Valais, Switzerland, (Favre, Dubois), which were quite good, but I didn't order any of those, as they are relatively easy to find here, and I actually know the Favre Caves in Sion personally, as I was there with the military during my Fourier advancement course, and later with my father. They make quite good white wine, such as the Petite Arvine. Being a fan of sweet wines, I also couldn't resist ordering a few bottles of Samos, a very sweet Greek wine, by Keel. We also had our first taste of Spanish wine, from Casa del Vino, they were quite different from the usual Italian wines we were accustomed to, but quite good nonetheless. The people manning the stand were also very polite and helpful, telling us the differences and histories of the various wines as we sampled them, and offering us samples from all regions and types of wines they had. One of the friends with me then told us another guy we know (Simone) already was here a few days ago, and recommended to try the Port wines from Amarela, which we did. Most of us had no particular experience with Port wines at all, so the guy there helped us choose, and we all were pleasantly surprised, ordering a few bottles of Ruby Reserva and Finest Reserve. To conclude the wine-tasting evening, we enjoyed a few Italian red wines at Weibel, and had a nice discussion with the Italian guy there. All in all a very nice event, which I'll be sure to go again next year.
After that we hooked up with a few other friends (albeit we were ~20 minutes late, sorry guys!) and went to eat Sushi at Nooch. I quite enjoy Asian food, and this was my first time eating Sushi, and I must say it was very good, but I still prefer all the fried Chinese food and stuff. ;)
After that we all went home, and me and Flavio watched another episode of "My name is Earl", it's a really hilarious show that I recommend to anyone. :D Yo, have a good day!

I'm finally back on the net, after not having any internet access at my new apartment in Zürich after I moved there. I now started my bachelor studies at the ETH Zürich, of course in Computer Science, though there's a little bit too much maths right now for me to be really excited about it, future semesters will be better I hope. So I'll try to get back to a few Gentoo things in the near future, now that I also finally fixed up my main dev system (which had its disk die just before I moved)... Still this blog entrys main focus is to tell you the name of a package I discovered today:

app-misc/tmux

After reinstalling this system I, as always before, emerged screen to take care of my detached terminal needs, I always had the problem with backspace not working correctly from the desktop, which I was never able to fix correctly, but it was bearable. This time it seems something else went wrong too, and inside my screen sessions it didn't source .bashrc or .bash_profile (which sources .bashrc), even if the shell was correctly set to a bash login shell...
So, while perusing Gentoo Wiki's Screen TIPs to see if anyone had seen something like this, at the end of that page I came across the mention of tmux, a "simple, modern, BSD-licensed alternative to GNU Screen".
Seeing that it only depends on ncurses (which is usually installed everywhere), and was only like 100kb of source, I installed it and tried it out. I have to say I'm impressed, this little tool does everything I did with screen too (mainly just having multiple, detached terminals and resuming them, which is probably no "advanced screen usage", but what most people will likely need), backspace works without any fiddling, the Bash stuff is correctly sourced, and the few commands are easy to adapt to, here a little overview:

• tmux - Starts a new tmux session
• CTRL-b d - Press CTRL-b, then d, to detach the terminal
• tmux a - Reattach to the detached terminal

Still, read man tmux to get the full overview, and then happily emerge -C screen, as I just did.