Chama-se simplesmente “Champions League”, a composição é de Tony Britten, embora seja largamente baseada no hino de coroação “Zadok, o Padre” de Handel.

Aqui fica a música e a letra:

Ce sont les meilleures équipes
Es sind die allerbesten Mannschaften
The main event
Die Meister
Die Besten
Les grandes équipes
The champions

Une grande réunion
Eine grosse sportliche Veranstaltung
The main event
Ils sont les meilleurs
Sie sind die Besten
These are the champions
Die Meister
Die Besten
Les grandes équipes
The champions

Die Meister
Die Besten
Les grandes équipes
The champions

Ah, e para amanhã, Força SLB!!!

First things first, after using the strategy (am I really using this word? Isn’t workaround much more accurate) Gustavo mentioned, I managed to reduce my Firefox footprint to only (am I really using this word?) 150 Mb. I’m currently using 2 windows and a total of 6 tabs. Two major things have happened after I changed the browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers parameter:

1 – Both “Mem Usage” and “VM Size” went drastically down (to about a half).
2 – “VM Size” approached “Mem Usage” while previously it was much bigger.

1 allows us to reach the La Palisse conclusion that if you disable Firefox’s Back-Forward caching you save memory. It also suggests that this Back-Forward cache works in a very weird way that makes it use much more memory than you would expect.
2 suggests that Firefox does leak a lot of memory if you leave it on for days (which I do regularly). Why? To answer this we need really to look deep into the subject.

This is what I think of it all:

Firefox uses something they call a Back-Forward cache. This means that a number of pages you have seen are kept at hand when you “leave” them in order to speed up successive accesses made particularly by using the “Back” and “Forward” browser buttons (by the way, what does it mean to you to “leave” a webpage? Closing it? Stop looking at it? Remember that an HTTP request is episodic -> you send it, the server sends you the document, end of story. The rest is up to the browser.).

It is important to notice that this cache is not per-tab (see the final Edit in this post).

According to the same source, the Firefox configuration parameter browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers is defaulted to “-1″, which instructs it to use a sensible table associating Total RAM Size with the Number Of Pages cached by this feature. This table is so sensible that if you happen to have only 32Mb of RAM, it causes 0 pages to be cached. Sensible indeed. This number grows as your RAM grows, quite sensibly, until you get to those lucky guys who have 1Gb and more of RAM. Those guys get to have 8 pages cached. For 1Gb+, Mozilla apparently thought that 8 was good enough and nobody would be interested in caching more than 8 pages anyway…

In my case, I have 512Mb of RAM, I get 5 cached pages. If you recall, this is not per-tab, which means that I can have 100 tabs and I only get 5 cached pages (this is perfectly fine, any other way would probably yield catastrophe). This also means that in theory I can leave Firefox on for a month, use it intensively, and I will never have more than 5 cached pages. Fine. And 5 pages is usually absolutely nothing in terms of occupied memory. At this point, I would like to say that claiming that this “feature” has anything to do with a big footprint largely puzzles me. If it works as it’s explained in the above source, I don’t understand how one thing influences the other to such a huge extent.

But I’m getting away from my goal. Why is it then that the fact that “VM Size” approaches “Mem Usage” if you disable this Back-Forward cache suggests that Firefox does leak a lot of memory if you leave it on for days.

What are “VM Size” and “Mem Usage”? In this context, they are designations created by Microsoft in its “Windows Task Manager”. A bit loosely, but trusting the Task Manager help, it seems that “Mem Usage” represents the amount of RAM currently occupied by the process. As you should know from Operating Systems 101, Computer Architecture 101 and such other wonderful subjects, this is NOT the actual size of the process – how big it is – because some of it will usually be resting on your hard drive because your OS noticed that you hadn’t used some parts of it for a while. Your process is split, some parts in central memory, others in secondary memory. “VM Size”, meaning Virtual Memory Size, I trust, gives us the actual size of the process, how big it is. And the problem, recall, is that my Firefox instance is currently occupying more than 160 Mb of my RAM, i.e., has a “VM Size” of 160 Mb.

One of the consequences of this is that if you don’t use a program for a while but still keep it running, “Mem Usage” will go down while “VM Size” will usually stay more or less where it was. How much “Mem Usage” goes down depends on what is considered “necessary” to be in memory for a given process at a given time.

The fact that “Mem Usage” and “VM Size” are similar can mean one of two things:

- that the process is currently being used
- that the OS isn’t being able to identify pieces of the program that are suitable to be written out of memory and to disk

(to be continued…)

200+ Mb just for what’s in central memory and a total of 300+ Mb sounds like a “bit” too much for me. Even if you read lousy excuses like this, I don’t think this can be called quality software.

(I have 3 windows and a total of 5 tabs open but this firefox instance has been running for several days)

Yesterday I finally saw the, by now famous, 2004 movie by Paul Haggis, Crash.
There’s no mistaking it as one of the best movies of this young century and I’ll be secretly pushing for it on Oscar night.

Counting on a vast and competent cast, Crash reminds us at times of P. T. Andersson’s Magnolia albeit profiting a lot on the shorter duration and the popularity, universality and reality of its central theme: racism.

Through the eyes of several different characters living their daily routines in modern Los Angeles, the viewer is constantly confronted with examples of intolerance. Haggis opts for a magnificent approach at times showing us the pitfalls of intolerance and at times the immense advantages of rennouncing it.

Crash should not be confused with other more naive movies about the subject. Especially because it contains a delightful detail, which is the altruistic and brutally realistic idea of the pervasiness of racism and intolerance and what I like to term as the “wholeness of human character”, that is, the conclusion that no human being is only “good” or only “bad”, this meaning actually that “good” people, or people as so perceived, will end up doing very “bad” deeds and “bad” people, or people as so perceived, will end up saving the day.

In the end, Crash is thus also a movie about the randomness of life and human deeds. What Kundera would call The Lightness Of Being.

Tagline: “You think you know who you are. You have no idea.”


import os

P.S.: Eu até indentava isto em condições mas a maneira como o WordPress trata (ou não trata) os espaços em branco é odiosa. Detesto este editor… Chamar a isto WYSIWYG é brincadeira certamente. Quando muito é WYSIWWW – What you see is what we want ou WYSIWYGBPDUWS – What you see is what you get, but please don’t use white spaces. O mais correcto mesmo é WYSIWYGBOAYCTSBAWTIWBDFWYWS – what you see is what you get but only after you click the Save button, at which time it will become different from what you were seeing

- Oh, não – respondeu Mersault.

Continuaram a andar, e Mersault conservava a mão entre os cabelos quentes e a nuca macia de Marthe.

- Gostas de mim? – disse ela, logo a seguir.

Mersault, mais animado, respondeu com uma gargalhada:

- Ora aí está uma pergunta muito séria…

- Mas responde…

- Ora, vejamos. As pessoas da nossa idade não se amam. Simpatiza-se, mais nada. É mais tarde, quando nos sentimos velhos e impotentes, que podemos amar. Na nossa idade, julgamos que gostamos. Mais nada.

It’s Monday, the sun is shining and the weekend has left a panoply of flavors, sights and sounds carved onto my senses.

Yes, it’s been hectic. Friday night started with dinner at a Japanese restaurant in San Giovanni. My first time at such a place, with a group of 10 friends. A crowd, as international as they come. 2 Portuguese, 3 Germans, 2 Italians, 1 Spanish, 1 Finnish, 1 French and 1 Cambodian.

As funny as a Japanese speaking Italian might be, I can’t say the food calls for a quick return. I really didn’t like it and it was funny to see that one of my friends, who doesn’t even like fish, thoroughly enjoyed it while me, a fish lover, had such a difficult time savoring the sushi, the maki and the saké.

After dinner we went to a nearby pub where we had trouble finding room for so many people. After some time, though, we finally got hold of three tables and we ended up meeting a very drunk and obnoxious Finnish couple who I convinced to sing the Finnish national anthem for us. And so they did, kind of…

Bed came at 5 in the morning and the phone rang at 12. Me and another friend had two tickets for the Italy-England 6 Nations Rugby match. The game was only at 5 but we started on at 2 cause we had some intermediate stops and a lot of walking to do.

We left the car in Anagnina and took the metro to Barberini where we picked up the tickets. Then we walked all the way to the stadium, heading first towards the S. Trinitá ai Monti church, down the Spanish steps, into Piazza di Spagna, through Via Babuino and on to Piazza Del Poppolo, incredibly full of beer-drinking, red and white English fans. Then, Flaminia all the way to the stadium.

15 minutes prior to the game we take our seats in the Stadio Flaminio, the teams come in, the English sing “Sweet Chariot”, the national anthems play, God saves the Queen, gli Italiani sono pronti alla morte and it’s kick-off!

55 minutes of a close match and a final strong half-hour by Her Majesty’s players yield a predictable 31-16 victory for England.

The A metro line in Rome has been closing at 9 due to construction works for a long time now. This is a big pain and as we had a restaurant reservation for the night we had to go all the way back to Anagnina to pick up the car. But before getting on the metro at Spagna we took a stroll down the great Via del Corso checking out the movies playing in original language (one of the few places in Rome that does this) and looking for a McDonalds. 7 o’ clock, we hadn’t had lunch, we were starving…

The problem was that my friend had the idea of going into one of the large book & CD/DVD shops in Via del Corso and this is always bad news for my wallet. The end result: 5 new CDs for 55 Euros. I finally bought “Early Days & Later Days” by Led Zeppelin, two cheap albums from The Smiths, “The Singles” from The Clash and a double Jazz CD for 5 Euros. It has Coltrane, Duke, Miles, Ella, Satchmo, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Astrud Gilberto, George Benson, Dizzie Gillespie, Nat King and Natalie Cole, and a lot more. For 5 Euros, it was a sure buy. I have most of the songs already, but for 5 Euros, what the heck!? By the time we got out there wasn’t even enough time for the burger.
After the uneventful ride back to the car (if you don’t count the lady who got her fingers stuck on the door), off we went back for Pizza near Via Veneto and Trevi. Saturday night Roman traffic is lunatic as usual, and we did see two or three accidents involving motorbikes, of course, but other than that, it wasn’t as impossible as I expected.

The difference between a Pizza SuperTelevisione and a Pizza Televisione is one egg and one Euro. But since the previous evening we paid 5 Euros for a chestnut, an orange and a nut each one filled with icecream and all three trespassed by a stick, one Euro for an egg is quite normal…

I made it back home at around midnight thirty but didn’t go to sleep until three, not sure why. Me and another friend had planned to go skiing early on Sunday morning. I said wake up at 8, he said 9, we agreed. I woke up at 10:30 and got to his place at 11. We headed to Ovindoli, on the way to Pescara, about one and a half hours from where we live, to the sound of Led’s Immigrant Song, Whole Lotta Love and Stairway to Heaven. What sound!!

It was our ski debut and it was every bit as disastrous as “debut” and “ski” in the same sentence might suggest. I soon had to put my snow chains on because I couldn’t move the car anywhere. We parked, went back to rent some skis and found out that the place where we should go was after where we had parked. Walking with skis on your back is not an easy thing and as we passed the car again, we thought it was better to get on it and drive to the always elusive big car park. Surprisingly, there really was a big car park and it was easy to find a spot. We finally started dressing for the adventure and my friend struggled for a while with the incredibly heavy boots. Meanwhile, I took pictures.

I fell getting on the elevator, enjoyed the ride up and fell 10 or so more times after we started descending, only to find out that I had lost my car keys in one of the falls. I guess some people might have panicked, but I’m so used to losing things and/or getting robbed that it’s become second nature and I don’t care anymore. Losing your car keys somewhere in the snow, 200Km from home, probably meant having to spend the night around there or convincing somebody to take us back to Rome where I could go fetch the spare key. And then, of course, going back to Ovindoli, get the car and return. I get tired just thinking about it.

Anyway, one of the things I’ve learned is that when you lose something, the best way to get it back is to look for it. Duh, right? Well, let’s just say that it’s more important than it sounds. I put my skis down in the mountain (just left them there) and walked slowly back to the elevator searching for the key. I didn’t find it. Meanwhile, my friend, unaware of any of this, had already tumbled is way down and was waiting, and waiting some more, for me. I then decided to tumble my own way back to him, tell him of our little problem – which he took rather well too -, finally get the damned passes and work our way up another elevator and down another slope back to where we had started. My idea was to talk to the lady in the beggining to see if she knew anything about my key.

We made complete fools of ourselves in this second elevator. It was one of those you stick between your legs and then just go with it to the top. We never made it past the first kick. We couldn’t balance at all. We were advised to take the slower moving walkway instead. We didn’t even know there was one, otherwise the embarassment would have been saved.

We must have gotten up there at around 15:45 and I went tumbling ahead down the slope to see about the keys. When I arrived, always looking under the elevator, it was past 16 and the elevators close at 16. The lady was already leaving and I again left the skis lying around and started running after her. Of course you can’t really run with those boots. So, I just walked as fast as I could and got to her as she was entering her car. I told her about our situation, she called the main ticket office (where we had just come from) and someone had delivered my key there. She agreed to take me with her on her car and after a very slow trip (driving on snow is very dangerous…) I had my key.

She then tried to drive me back to where my friend and my skis were. In the end she couldn’t because she didn’t have snow chains and the car was thrashing all over the place. I told her I didn’t mind walking the rest of the way (even if the temperature was -6) and we finally said goodbye, as I thanked her for the huge help. In our chit-chat I found lots of interesting stuff about her. Namely, she is the owner of the whole thing (elevators, cabins, you name it) and she prefers beach and sea to mountains and snow and is thus quite fed up with that place. We talked about meeting the next time I go there, which will be soon.

When I returned to my friend and the skis, it was starting to get dark and we knew we didn’t have much time to play anymore. We just tried some more techniques (yeah, right) in a small area and took the last pictures.

We returned the skis and finally ate something in the day, at 6 o’ clock. I had brought some sausages, some bread and some fruit but all of it was either mashed or frozen. We ate it anyway. During the trip back home my friend commented that it was lucky that we had gotten the key back. I argued that luck doesn’t have much to do with it. It’s all about making an effort about your stuff. It’s happened to me several times and when he thought about it, he also had two or three such examples. Finding stuff is the most natural final step after you have lost them.

Back at my friend’s house, he prepared a meat meal for us which landed right on the spot. We then watched some movies I’m not going to talk about and checked some of the Serie A and Winter Olympics results.

At 1 in the morning, I finally managed to beat inertia, get up from the couch and drive back home to my bed, for the most peaceful of sleeps…

Growing up taught by that implacable teacher called society, man learns that men are insensitive and women are wells of purity. That men are morally corrupt, sole guilty part of the widest spread of phenomenons: adultery. That women are the passive part in the game of love.

In that grueling period called adolescence, man starts becoming aware of the evident contradictions between his inner, genuine world, his true feelings, and the picture forced upon him. He finds out he has feelings, that the wells of women are more shallow than he might have thought.

Man is then brutally confronted, through one or two heartbreaks, with the inevitable conclusion. The inevitable conclusion that love is an illusion.

Driven by an unstoppable force, he gives himself up completely to the woman he thinks he loves. He writes her romantic words, gives her flowers, makes vows, promises and inevitably makes the ultimate mistake of hastily telling her he loves her. By doing so, he gives up his last power and becomes a puppet in her hands. Only self-respect, self-estime and, allas, time can heal him after the inexorable chain of events thus produced has come to a halt. The halt being the conclusion that love is an illusion.

Introspection takes over. The truth becomes clear. The romantic was after all the insensitive one. The well of purity is empty of it. Full instead of doubt and will for challenge, for games, for a fight. Full not of irrational feelings but of rational choices aimed only at personal interest.

Man, finally convinced that he has always been more romantic than women, is then presented with a dilemma. Remain so, deceiving himself by believing in falsities, and risking a life of ever-returning suffering; or learn and become stiff as a stick, sensitive as a stone. Becoming, rather sadly, what society always told him he was.

Round is the process, round is this essay. For the inevitable conclusion is that love is an illusion.