blog/archives/2007/05zack's home pagehttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/archives/2007/05/zack's home pageikiwiki2009-11-28T12:00:16Zcrappy ooimpress styleshttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2007/05/crappy_ooimpress_styles/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2007-05-24T20:56:39Z
<h1>Crappy OpenOffice.org Impress Styles</h1>
<p>The "GNOME suite" (mainly <a href=
"http://www.abisource.com/">AbiWord</a> and <a href=
"http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/">Gnumeric</a>) is quite
nice and I usually prefer it to the bloated <a href=
"http://www.openoffice.org/">OpenOffice.org</a> counterparts.
Unfortunately it is missing a good presenter. Yeah, I know, I
should use beamer, and I fact I often do for academic stuff, but
for quick and dirty presentations, where you care more than you
should about visual aspects and WYSIWYG ... I often resort to
ooimpress.</p>
<p>It is not <em>that</em> bad, if you can stand its memory
consumption and startup time, but for a long time I was convinced
that <em>I</em> was wrong about a feature I was not finding in the
UI. My reading of the ooimpress manual this morning seems to
contradicts this belief.</p>
<p>Here is the simple scenario. I do not play with fonts, the
default styles inherited by the master page are fine. I just want
from time to time to select some text and mark it as "verbatim
text":</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>monospace font</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>remove the bullet/number corresponding to the current outline
level</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>the use cases are those you guessed: markup a shell command, a
command output, or a code snippet. Of course I can't stand doing it
again and again by hand, having to keep in mind each time the font
I chose and its size for ensuring uniformity. I want to use a
style.</p>
<p><em>That's it</em>, nothing less, nothing more. Is it asking too
much?</p>
<p>It seems so. ooimpress supports two kind of styles. One type
(sorry, forgot the name) can be applied to built-in content types,
e.g.: heading1-9, titles, subtitles, .... Changing such a style
will affect all slides. Fair enough, that's good. The other type
can be applied only to "graphics" elements, including text boxes.
Fair enough as well, this way I can change at once all the text
boxes or labels I've used in my document.</p>
<p>But wait ... how can I solve my problem now?</p>
<p>I see only two awful ways:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>devote a high heading level (e.g. 9) to my verbatim text</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>use a graphic style</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>of course, a graphic style can not be applied inside
non-floating text boxes and I do not want to use tons of text
boxes, especially because they are not anchored to ordinary
text</p>
<p>Dear lazyweb, please prove me wrong.</p>
on the power of grillohttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2007/05/on_the_power_of_grillo/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2007-05-21T18:00:12Z
<h1>On the Power of a Blog (and of the Vatican)</h1>
<p>That the Vatican in Italy is a relevant institution able to
(directly or indirectly) influence the media is not a big news,
actually is not even a news. So it does not come as a surprise that
the <a href=
"http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3237027119714361315">BBC
documentary "Sex Crimes and Vatican"</a> about the so called
<a href=
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimen_sollicitationis">Crimen
Sollicitationis</a> (dated 29 September 2006) has never been
mentioned on popular italian newspapers and televisions ... until a
couple of days ago.</p>
<p>So far so "good".</p>
<p>What annoys me quite a bit is that the day after <a href=
"http://www.beppegrillo.it/2007/05/crimen_sollicit.html">Beppe
Grillo posted something on the subject</a> on <a href=
"http://www.beppegrillo.it">his blog</a> (which according to the
author is in the top ten of most read blog on the net, even though
I've never checked the validity of such claim) the news is first on
<a href="http://www.repubblica.it">Repubblica</a>, one of the most
read italian newspaper, and then topic of a national debate for its
possible presentation on an italian tv show, held by <a href=
"http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Santoro">Michele
Santoro</a>.</p>
<p>Come on, of course journalists do not need a blog to get their
news. Someone please make me think something else than that seeing
a post on a popular blog removes the shyness of journalists about
"disclosing" such a news to Italians...</p>
i had a dreamhttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2007/05/i_had_a_dream/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2007-05-03T18:53:20Z
<h1>I'm Going to Play Some Number at the Lotto</h1>
<p>The <a href="http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotto">Lotto Game</a>
is a really popular gambling game in Italy, run by the state
itself. As in all good gambling game: you, the player, <em>can</em>
win a lot of money while who is running the game (the Italian state
in our case) <em>will</em> win a lot of money for sure, no matter
what.</p>
<p>Anyhow, to the facts, it's a well-known folklore that people win
playing Lotto FOR SURE by playing numbers told while dreaming by
parents, friends, kitties, whatever, ... As a scientist, I've no
reason not to trust this folklore, why should I?</p>
<p>As a strange coincidence (another fact that strongly hints I
HAVE TO PLAY), this night I had a dream (well, it was more this
morning while reading the <a href=
"http://planet.debian.org">planet</a>, but it doesn't really
matter..., folklore is folklore!). There were <a href=
"http://www.hogyros.de/?q=node/262">a</a> <a href=
"http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2007/badtech#hddvdstupidity">lot</a>,
<a href=
"http://err.no/personal/blog/tech/2007-05-02-13-57_lucky.html">really</a>
<a href=
"http://blog.halon.org.uk/2007/05/02#hd-dvd-key-button">a</a>
<a href=
"http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2007-05-03-00-52_dear_helpdesk.html">
lot</a> <a href=
"http://www.lupin.org.uk/blog/computing/badwolf.html">of</a>
<a href=
"http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/web/2007050301-magic-numbers.html">
people</a> <a href=
"http://sam.zoy.org/blog/2007-05-03-obligatory-r">whispering</a>
<a href="http://kartikmistry.org/blog/?p=318">this</a> to my
ears:</p>
<pre><code>09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
</code></pre>
<p>well, ok, they aren't in decimal notation, and they aren't even
comprised between 1 and 90, ... but what would you expect from a
bunch of geeks??? They are probably trying to exploit some overflow
in the hands of the <a href=
"http://www.repubblica.it/2005/f/sezioni/cronaca/lotto/lotto/stor_6351760_35110.jpg">
lotto extractor</a> or something like that...</p>
<p>But I won't desist, I'll play those number!</p>
<p>Open questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>on which wheel(s) should I play the numbers?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>how should I handle overflowed numbers? throw them away? modulo
89 operations + 1?</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>any proficient Lotto player to answer them around?</p>