mutt

It's not about the mail client!

It was a long struggle to compose a non computing stuff dan end up in a month without posting anything.

Though I had lived in this country in 2008, but I felt in that time the homeless phenomenon was not as apparent as today. I think the economic downfall is the culprit. The economic crisis has triggered social crisis. Today homeless can be easily found in any corner of the city. Fortunately unlike other countries in this continent, this country is pretty warm. Criminal cases and homicides soar in daily news, unlike two years ago when the death of a child became a national issue for months.

Actually the first time I had awareness on this matter was when I visited Verona. We walked around Piazza Erbe, then spotted a nice looking antique building nearby and went there. I saw several homeless there. I wanted to take some pictures, but I just didn't dare to. Suddenly a man shouted and point out to the homeless sleeping there, "This is a living monument of Italy". [He was shouting quite loud so the sound awoke the mutts.]

I thought this only occurs in the poor Italia regions, but in the richest part, this phenomenon occurs as well. I realized it in several last months I lived in Italia. Every time I went home from Trento by train and passed by the small park in front of the station, I saw a group of homeless gathering nearby a car which served meals for them.

Even though the GDP of this country is higher than Italia, actually it is more prone to trouble for it has no strong economic foundation. Economic growth was merely bubble made by construction industries, and now this bubble explodes. It merely has very few strong manufacturing sector as economic support, even though the agricultural is very good for the nice geographical position. Apparently the very long military dictatorship was the culprit of the flaws of economic foundation.

The explosion of the bubble triggered other supporting sector to collaps. The trickle down effect is enormous. Slow but sure the ecomomic contracted, it triggered layoffs, non-performing loan, the plummet of purchasing power, and one of the result of their chained reaction is forcing the people to live on the street.

Everybody in this country is actually covered by social security plan. But the amount which they are received does not guarantee for living properly. It depends on the calculation of how long they actually have ever worked. Even entrepeneurs also get this coverage. They have to report their income and pay monthly social security installments. Sometimes you might notice a small business that apparently unable to cover the daily living cost. Some people suspect that actually they eye for the social security benefit in their retirement age.

Generally the social security benefit will be given after certain year of retiremement age. Therefore until someone reach that year, they cannot get the coverage. It is a pity when somebody have no job but haven't reach the retirement age. There are chances where they'll wait the arrival of this retirement age by being homeless. Recent newspaper draws 4.231.003 people being jobless, it is roughly 10 percent of population. However there is a more scarier figure with regard to the number of jobless among young people. Hopefully the situation will be better soon, so it doesn't bring more people to live on the street in the future.

correct

From a short lecture of this guy, which was very interesting, I tried to crawl internet further.
Taken from the site of weakmemory:

Multiprocessors are now dominant, but real multiprocessors do not provide the sequentially consistent memory that is assumed by most work on semantics and verification. Instead, they have subtle relaxed (or weak) memory models, usually described only in ambiguous (and sometimes flawed) prose, leading to widespread confusion.

Very scary short information. In fact processors specification which is written on their manual are usually written in obscured sentence, instead of in mathematical notation. There are several reasons for that, either they are simply bug, accommodating future changes or avoid patent infringement.

So the lesson from this is to make sure that your code is robust against this obscure features, particularly when you have to deal with critical software.

last posting on this year, and again about computer? what a pity!

Urban Hiking

Yesterday we went hiking to Cercedilla. Very nice, particularly after this very tough week.

I learnt important quote. In hiking sometimes I should look back, watching beautiful scene that I've passed, that might be unseen when I moved advance. I may thankful for how far I have hiked and arrive to certain point, then finally conclude that I shall also reach the peak. However sometimes I should not force myself to reach the peak when there's a sign not to do so, for it may endanger myself or ruin the nature. I think life is just like that.

live in dignity

Recent months I learn more about living in "real" neighbourhood, particularly how the chinese live. I wonder how they can survive in this tough days, when even many spaniard cannot resist. Chinese live their life as merchant, small merchant of food particularly that try to provide daily needs for people who are too busy or lazy to go to the supermarket, or provide stuffs during holidays(yes, they're never closed, unless once during general strike). In the beginning I wonder how they live against cruel supermarket price and very small captive market, but they make it. Their price is more expensive so it is unlikely that people will buy something there unless they don't have any choice, this chinese shops are really helpful actually.

Unlike other immigrants ethnic, chinese live in dignity, live upon their own business. They live really tough life, instead of obtain cheaper reseller price, they merely shop in cheap supermarket with ordinary retail price, and carefully pick the items which are in discount or membership sale program. Once I examined how one of them shop, incredible!, they check each item which are listed on the sale program one by one, take them (sometime all of these sale item).

they're great.

Nice Lattice theorem tutorial

http://www.iseclab.org/people/enji/infosys/lattice_tutorial.html

Configuration for 'optimal' eco performance linux on USB disk

It has been around 1 year I've been using my USB-disk linux installation as my main computing platform. Generally it is slow, particularly for writing. I even feel it runs much slower during shutdown. Just like general flash-disk devices, USB-disks have limited read-write lifetime, therefore I try to minimize any access to the disk. The idea is maximizing the usage of memory for read-write operations that occur very often.
Here are my configuration:

1. /tmp. This directory is used for temporary read-write by default. I think in some distro this directory is put on memory by default when there are vast amount of memory. I also put the cache of favorite application there. Add a starting script on /etc/rcS.d/. Copy from one of it, change the name into Ssomething and modify the content as the following:

   
   ...
   ### END INIT INFO
   
   . /lib/init/vars.sh
   . /lib/lsb/init-functions
   
   make_tmp() {
   #preparing /tmp
   mkdir /dev/shm/tmp
   chmod 777 /dev/shm/tmp
   #we also prepare the browsers cache
   mkdir /dev/shm/tmp/google-chrome
   chmod 777  /dev/shm/tmp/google-chrome
   mkdir /dev/shm/tmp/epiphany
   chmod 777 /dev/shm/tmp/epiphany
   }
   case "$1" in
   start)
     # Using 'no !=' instead of 'yes =' to make sure async nfs
     # mounting is the default even without a value in
     # /etc/default/rcS
   make_tmp
   ;;
   ...

   Note: I usually use those two browser, haven't found out where are the cache of opera nor firefox/iceweasel.
   
2. Swap file. Never ever use the flash disk as swap file/swap partition, I think it will shortened the lifespan of the disk a lot. I use my unused VGA memory as my swap file. The script is following. Note that sometime you need to run it twice, I don't know why.
   

   modprobe slram map=VRAM,0xc4000000,+0x0c000000
   modprobe mtdblock
   mkswap /dev/mtdblock0
   swapon /dev/mtdblock0
   swapon -s



3. Installation cache and configuration (/var/cache/apt/) can be put on external disk and make a symlink to its proper directory
   

Warning: you must aware that having cache on memory may cause your computer runs out of memory, and using VGA card as swap file is unsafe.

CUPS page size error on HP laserjet

From today's experience, I found that it might be caused by wrong PCL option. When I chose PCL6 the page size printed was only halfsized. But after I chose PCL4/5 it was OK.

Printing using command line is the following(watch out the CAPITAL P for specifying page!):
For two sides:

lp -d dest_print -o media=a4 -o sides=two-sided-long-edge -P 1-3 file.pdf

For two sides, each side two pages (for this setting the page numbering is strange, e.g. for printing page 1 to 8 you write -P 1-4, for 15-22 write -P 8-11, and the sides SHORT option is important to prevent having upside down pages):

lp -d dest_print -o media=a4 -o sides=two-sided-short-edge -o number-up=2  -P 1-4 file.pdf