Originally posted October 12, 2009:

If you’re tired of using ‘prefix’ notation in the weblistener, we’ve got the perfect function for you.

CALC easily handles the more common ‘infix’ notation.

For example in the weblistener you can now type in something like this:

(calc “1-8+22″)

and you’ll get back

> 15

Or in the VPL, it would look like this:

Biduran a.k.a alergi a.k.a galigata a.k.a bentol-bentol, sebuah bentuk alergi yang sangat mengganggu. Dalam hidup saya dua kali mengalami biduran. Yang pertama biduran karena mengkonsumsi kepala (hanya kepala) Udang, biduran menyerang di seluruh penjuru tubuh (penjuru mata angin kalah deh pokoknya) kalau sampai termakan kepala si-Udang. Selelap apapun tidur saya, biduran itu pasti dengan sukses membangunkan. Papi (ayah saya-red) selalu dengan mengusapkan air peresan Asam Jawa, dan biduran pun tidak lama akhirnya sirna. Tapi peresan Asem Jawa hanya mengilangkan biduran dan tidak membuat antibodi sehingga saya kuat makan kepala Udang (sekali lagi hanya kepala). Sejalan dengan waktu, biduran karena kepala Udang sembuh dengan sendirinya. Hal ini terbukti karena saya pernah dengan nekatnya makan kepala Udang Galah dan tidak muncul apa-apa.

Yang jadi masalah itu adalah biduran saya yang kedua, penyebabnya karena udara dingin. Biduran yang satu ini muncul di pertengahan 2008, dulu tidak terlalu sering. Biduran muncul hanya pada saat saya turing saja, yang selama perjalanan kena hujan dan juga dikarenakan karet pelindung (decker-red) yang terlalu nge-pressed ke kulit. Tapi satu bulan belakangan ini biduran saya sangat parah, bahkan tidur diruangan AC pun saya kena biduran dan dulu yang sebentar kena sinar matahari or hanya kena udara panas langsung hilang–sekarang biduran tersebut lama hilangnya.

Pada awalnya saya selalu mengkonsumsi Incidal, tapi setelah saya pikir-pikir dengan semakin saya sering saya mengkonsumsi obat tersebut rasa kergantungan semakin tinggi. Akhirnya saya mendapat informasi bahwa Biduran karena dingin itu disebabkan kurang kalsium dan saya dianjurkan mengkonsumsi Calc (Kalak-Red).

Tapi ini tidak dianjurkan untuk dikonsumsi dalam jumlah banyak, karena hyper-calcium bisa menyebabkan gangguan di Ginjal. Clac sebutir sangat murah, untuk per-20 butir hanya 3000 rupiah dan dapat dibeli bebas. Tapi asli saya tidak berani merekomendasikan Calc, pertama karena saya belum merasakan hasil significam dari mengkonsumsi Calc (padahal sudah habis 10 butir) kedua karena masalah hyper-Calcium itu.

Salah satu yang mungkin masuk akal untuk dicoba, dengan mencari (mengeluarkan-red) keringat sebanyak-banyaknya. Keringat keluar dengan membawa serta toxic yang ada didalam tubuh CMIIW. Bisa jadi Biduran itu penyebabnya karena kadar toxic yang cukup tinggi, dan Kepala Udang atau Dingin hanya pemicu saja. Masuk akalnya, keringat keluar karena badan panas bukan? yang panti biduran karena kedinginan tidak akan keluar pada saat kita kepanasan toh?? IMHO

Tapi ada satu statement yang membuat saya sangat dongkol, saya pernah mencoba berobat ke dokter. jawaban sang Dokter yang terdengar sinis

Saya: “dok, bagaimana cara supaya biduran saya gak kambuh?”

Dokter: “Ya gak usah kena dingin!!”

Bagaimana gak dongkol Sob, kalo menghindari Kepala Udang itu hal mudah. Nah Menghindari udara dingin? kalau matahari ada remote control mungkin bisa.

related Pages is here (WP-nya Mbak NiningDewi-Red).

A chapa “Levante! É tempo de fazer tempo”, venceu a eleição para a próxima gestão do CALC. A apuração ocorreu ontem, no Departamento de Jornalismo e Editoração (CJE), com a presença da comissão eleitoral e de membros das duas chapas. A gestão assumirá no dia 20 de novembro.

Foram 415 estudantes que depositaram seus votos nas urnas. Este foi o maior quórum registrado desde 2004, quando cerca de 800 ecanos votaram. Nos últimos quatro anos não houve disputa entre chapas e o quórum nas eleições ficava em torno dos 100 votos. Neste ano, a disputa se deu entre as chapas “Levante! É tempo de fazer tempo” e “Tudo Que Tranca Trinca”.

A chapa vencedora recebeu 344 votos, porém quatro foram impugnados por falta de identificação correta. A “Tudo Que Tranca Trinca” recebeu 70 votos. Na urna que recebeu votos dos estudantes de Artes Plásticas, Artes Cênicas, Música, Artes Dramáticas e Audiovisual, foram computados 40 votos para a “Tudo Que Tranca Trinca” e 83 para a “Levante!”. Na urna que recebeu votos dos estudantes de Biblioteconomia, Jornalismo, Editoração, Publicidade, Relações Públicas e Turismo foram 261 contra 30. Houve apenas um voto nulo.

As propostas das duas chapas podem ser conferidas em seus blogs:

Levante! É tempo de fazer tempo

TudoQueTrancaTrinca

ECAtlética

A Atlética também passou por processo eleitoral. A única chapa inscrita, “Jaque Preto”, recebeu 240 votos, e 29 foram nulos.

Call for Presentations
Due date: February 12, 2010

  The Colorado Academic Library Consortium Summit planning committee seeks proposals for presentation and poster sessions for the fourth CALC Summit. The Summit will be held at the Sheraton Denver West Hotel (6th Ave & Union) on May 20-21, 2010.
Collaborate Like You Mean It!

We’ve all heard that collaboration is important, but how can academic libraries forge lasting, effective partnerships both within and outside their institutions? What makes some partnerships succeed, and others fail?

Come share your successes, failures, research, and innovative ideas related to academic library collaboration. We’re particularly interested in proposals that address:
• Collaboration to expand library services or improve student success
• Collaboration to develop Web 2.0 applications
• Strategies for building and maintaining partnerships
• Inter-institutional collaboration
• Institutional barriers to collaborative efforts, and how to overcome them
• Assessing the success of collaborative efforts
• Collaboration with non-library partners
Presentation Options:

1. Concurrent Presentations:
A speaker or team of speakers presents for 45 or 75 minutes, with a 15-minute Q&A session after the presentation. Presentations that involve discussion, audience participation, or activities are strongly encouraged.

2. Poster Sessions:
A graphical presentation (paper or digital) of research results, case studies, projects, or ideas. Poster presenters will discuss their work with attendees during the poster session time slot.

Details:
Presentation and poster proposals will be reviewed and competitively selected by a committee of academic librarians.

Proposal Requirements:
• Names and full contact information of presenter(s)
• Title of presentation or digital poster session
• Abstract and brief outline (200 words max)
• Desired presentation length (45 or 75 minutes) or poster session
Submit proposals using this online form:

Proposals are due by February 12, 2010. You’ll be notified about the status of your proposal by March 12, 2010.

For more information visit www.calcweb.org or email jay.devaughn@ccaurora.edu
Sponsored by:
CALC – Colorado Academic Library Consortium
CLiC – Colorado Library Consortium
CoALA – Association of Colorado Libraries – Academic Division

Até amanhã as urnas para votar para a próxima gestão do CALC estarão abertas. Não se esqueça de votar! Após cinco anos, este é o primeiro em que haverá disputa de chapas na ECA para o centro acadêmico. É um momento histórico na ECA e um avanço na democracia da nossa escola. Participe!

Você, que é estudante de algum curso de Comunicação, poderá votar na urna instalada no prédio do CCA, nos horários: das 11h às 14h e das 18h às 21h.

Você, que é estudante de algum curso de Artes, poderá votar na urna instalada no prédio do Teatro-Laboratório, nos horários: das 10h às 13h e das 15h às 19h.

Conheça o programa das chapas:

TudoQueTrancaTrinca: tudoquetrancatrinca.wordpress.com

Levante! É tempo de fazer tempo: chapalevante2010.wordpress.com

* Atualizado às 17h58.

This is an update on our bash command line calculator posted a few days ago — except for the fact that this time we’ll use awk to do the calculation instead of bc. As I mentioned in that post, you may use python or ruby (irb) to do the same thing, but these tricks may be useful if you don’t ruby or python installed (bc and awk, in general, come by default in any Unix or GNU/Linux distro).

First, create (or rewrite if you used our last trick) function “?”  as follows and put it in your ~/.bashrc file:

and make sure to reload your ~/.bashrc file (do the similar thing if you're using any other shell). [NOTE: ZSH does not like ``?'' as a function, so you might consider replacing it with something reasonable, e.g., ``compute'']


Now, if you want to calculate an expression, do it, for example, as

and don’t forget the quotes.

.

The advantage of this over bc is that you can use more arithmetic and trigonometric functions (link):

              atan2(y,x)     Arctan of y/x between -pi and pi.

	      cos(x)	     Cosine function, x in radians.

	      exp(x)	     Exponential function.

	      int(x)	     Returns x truncated towards zero.

	      log(x)	     Natural logarithm.

	      rand()	     Returns a random number between zero and one.

	      sin(x)	     Sine function, x in radians.

	      sqrt(x)	     Returns square root of x.

.
You may include variables as well in the function definition itself:

where we have defined the variable pi and degree (such that tan(pi/4.0) = 1.0 and pi radians is equivalent to 180 degrees) to be used later, e.g.

and I’m sure that you’ll get -1 and 0 (within the machine precision), respectively, as the answer!

(You may find some more interesting calculator related tricks posted in this blog scattered in different pages)

Credit: here and here (via LifeHacker).

UPDATE: I just realized that I can use the calc package (besides bc, awk, python and irb) to do the command line math wizardry more efficiently (and let’s take that as the end to this command line calculator series!). It has a larger set of built-in functions. You may grab the source code from the maintainer’s website and follow my instructions to install it on your system [although binaries are also readily available, e.g. apcalc package for Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)].

Just add

alias calc ‘awk “BEGIN{ print \!:1 }”;’

to your .alias or whatever-your-default-shell-file-is file.

Restart the terminal.

Example usage:

• calc 4*4

Though, it gets a bit cluttery if you want to use parenthesis.

• calc “1000000\*\(1.45\+6.2\)\/100″

You need to put the whole expression in double quotes and use the escape character “\” for every symbol (*,/,),(,+,-) you use in the expression.

But in the end, it works!

Update 1:

Just add

   alias calc ‘echo "\!:*" | bc -l’

to your .alias or whatever-your-default-shell-file-is file.

Restart the terminal.

Example usage:

• calc 4*4
• calc 1000000*(6.2+1.45)/100
• calc 4^4 ( calculation of powers also works using bc! )

References: 1 2

Sorry to say this, but i think the GNOME Shell (short: GS) looks totally senseless to me. There is not much you can do with it, it reminds me a bit on a mix of the Windows Start button and the Exposé from Macos X. Or add Novells “great” idea of a new Windows XP like menu.

It make me a bit angry to see intelligent people put together so much crap – overloaded menus, lists of applications or lists of recent documents. And then add to all this some animated smooth switching, which eats up some working time.

I am not at all impressed of GS. The opposit. i dnt get the point where it helps me. Similar thought as with GNOME DO. I always used Alt+F2 if I wanted to quick start an application without the terminal. I am not against making that kond of starter better – or if you add that somehow also in the panel. But the gnome shell adds a lot of things to the screen which I never used.

Has starting an application ever been a problem to one of you? Or opening a file? Or moving windows between workspaces?

Maybe I am noit the typical user, but when it comes to what I do often I could not comprehend this to one document or one application. I will try to compile what is important from my viewpoint:

1. Integration of applications. So like lets assume GNOME is a desktop – I dont want to waste my time knowing about applications. I expect the desktop to know which applications to know for what I plan to do. This is also true for actions like attaching files to mails or saving attachments  (which is a real pain)
2. I do get messages. And I like the desktop to save and sort them from me and allow me to manage them, copy them, add notes to them, move them from one application to the other (add a link from jabber to my bookmarks or to a mail) Messages for me are
   • Emails, Jabber-Messages, forum posts, RSS Feeds
   • System Messages, Application Messages
   • System protocols,…
3. What is a task? This is like visitting a website or checking my mail, or sending a mail – or working on some documents. There are documents that I do read often and some I only write once – and others I need ot send often. There is no such thing as “Recent Documentes”. What is this? Recently read, recently written or recently sent? Like you have a protocol that you want to send to a bunch of people.
4. Another problem is finding documents. This is a problem of the place or also the keyword. It would be necessary to be able to tag documents or even categorize them -  making the location secondary. Do I need to know where a document is saved? No – I can leave it to the system where a document resided. What I need is to find it, when I need it. Beagle a s a desktop search also needs some functionality – but sure its as well important to find bookmarks and contents of web pages. Sometimes I need to find a web page where I have read some stuff. Integrating a web based search might help – but my desktop needs to save some search results as I dont want to use Google or Yahoo more than needed.
5. Essentially there is Reading, Writing/Editing , Receiving, Sending of documents and messages. My take on this is, that with the classical object oriented model put into place into a desktop this would be a great thing. If you ask me why I would not have that much of an idea – I really think we do not start with a new GUI. What we would want is a combined effort to redefine the underlying structure and to work out new models of interaction between applications. And we would also need some serious applications which allow navigation into their functions from outside. I mean it must be possible to start an office application with the exact task that I am planing to do. It cant be the way that you start an appication and then need to find out yourself. The desktop should provide an interface to do what you want – and the applications should be the working horses. Right now applications like Firefox or OpenOffice.org are dominating everything and you need to do everything inside of them.

I dont think we will see such things from classical desktops. The GNOME shell is nothing new – its because people still think in the same categories. If GS is what GNOME 3.0 (Topaz) will be I sure will leave GNOME behind.

I have see that Windows XP now sells a tabbed interface as their own invention. Bravo GNOME – leave it to Microsoft to integrate that. I am sure now GNOME will try to copy – because before nobody at GNOME really cared to make applications ready for tabbed interfaces. I have used some tabbed window managers in the past and found the whole idea great – just that I dod not want to switch to tabbed only – and did not want to configure those managers by hand. Regards to Microsoft who just did, what GNOME thought was too innovative for their users. When MS does it, or Apple GNOME follows, but never leads the way. Just my impression. I still love my current interface because it remindes me still (but less and less) of my old Mac OS 7.x interface. I hat that they removed the application switcher applet at the default place on the right side of the panel (just where it was in the Mac Finder). Now what is dominant is that I need to shut down the computer, switch users or change my status. I really do all those things not more than 1-2 times a day – so I have removed Ubuntus “great” FUSA (fast user switch applet). And I constantly ask myself why all the things I need are removed while at the same time more and ore crap is added.

Sorry for not sounding nice. You see I have not written a lot of stuff in this blog for a while. I have watched things develop and have written more  in german in other blogs about other stuff.

I am in the mood to switch to a distribution with  a clean layout – that does not do experiments (hey, where did they dump the whole default desktop search thing?) other than Ubuntu. I need a work environment right now. Fedora is trying to be innovative too – there is currently no distributions which tries to bring you the best of open source on a stable basis. Maybe there is some Ubuntu clone I havent tried yet? I am ok if a distribution adds some innovative new desktop as an option and allows me to test it. But what I hate is when GNOME and Ubuntu make experiments and use us users as a testbed.

And I would love to have a defauilt mail program based on GNOME which does not such. Currently Evolutions sucks big time. Its absolutely unusable – I am currently using Thunderbird 3 beta4 and its really, really nice. Why does Ubuntu continue to suggest Evolution as the default option? At the same time I currently do not use Epiphany instead of Firefox because I always had some stability issues in the Ubuntu packages – and I was waiting for Epiphany-Webkit becoming ready. Currently that did not work out for me and I also found out that Firefox was not a second slower than Epiphany.

I still think Epi is the cooles browser, but it lacks integration and support from GNOME, same is still true for Gnumeric and Abiword. Some days ago I witnessed how Gnumeric taking just a few seconds opening a 1.5 MB Excel file, while OO.orgs calc took 4 minutes.

There is so much good in GNOME, but thinks do not work out well. Other applications do get more money and attention and now get more ahead of GNOMEs applications. There comes the day where OO.orgs Calc will open that file faster than Gnumeric. And then having GNOME not supporting Gnumeric because of it lacks behind OO.org will become the self fulfilling prophecy.

What I would like to see is a new GNOME initiative outside the old GNOME community but which like to bring money and attention back to all the good GNOME stuff – and not running after some mobile devices and the newest hype.