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The large scale selective waste routing process congregates a lot of information and is subject to a huge number of constraints, which makes it a hard problem to solve by exact methods.

This project is based on a real case scenario for one of the most important selective waste Portuguese operators.

We focus on the Vehicle Routing Problem optimization using heuristics. The estimation of the solid waste generation is based on a model using demographic and economic data.

Preliminary results will be presented and discussed.

Keywords: Environmental Management, Routing, Forecasting

That’s the abstract that has been accepted in the 24th European Conference on Operational Research, Euro XXIV Lisbon.

It’s a three day (July 12 – 14 2010) event where I expect to learn a lot and present, for the first time, my almost finished master thesis.

Euro 2010 Lisbon here I go!

Everybody know how useful Dropbox is (up to 10Gb free web-disk with amazing sync capabilities), I wanted to install it on a Ubuntu Server remotely (over a ssh connection) to automatically copy my backups to a external server.

I was having some trouble but after some digging I found the way (sources: here and here).

Here is a quick to do list and the commands you have to run to do it.

Install Dropbox

Delete any version of Dropbox on your computer, download and untar the Dropbox daemon to your home folder:

cd ~
rm -rf .dropbox* Dropbox
wget http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/17/dropbox-lnx.x86-0.7.110.tar.gz
tar xzf dropbox-lnx.x86-0.7.110.tar.gz

Start the “.dropbox-dist/dropbox” executable from the terminal:

.dropbox-dist/dropbox

Copy and paste the link the Dropbox daemon gives you, into the web browser on your local computer.
Once the DB client is linked to the correct account, shut it down and start it in the background:

nohup .dropbox-dist/dropboxd &

Add Dropbox to system startup

Create a startup script:

sudo nano /etc/init.d/dropbox

Copy the text below to the new file you have created:

# chkconfig: 345 85 15
# description: Startup script for dropbox daemon
#
# processname: dropboxd
# pidfile: /var/run/dropbox.pid
#
# Source function library.
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

DROPBOX_USERS=”user1 user2″

prog=dropboxd
lockfile=${LOCKFILE-/var/lock/subsys/dropbox}
RETVAL=0

start() {
echo -n $”Starting $prog”
for dbuser in $DROPBOX_USERS; do
daemon –user $dbuser /home/$dbuser/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
done

RETVAL=$?
echo
[ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch ${lockfile}
return $RETVAL
}

stop() {
echo -n $”Stopping $prog”
for dbuser in $DROPBOX_USERS; do
killproc /home/$dbuser/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
done
RETVAL=$?
echo
[ $RETVAL = 0 ] && rm -f ${lockfile} ${pidfile}
}

# See how we were called.
case “$1″ in
start)
start
;;
stop)
stop
;;
restart)
stop
start
;;
*)
echo $”Usage: $prog {start|stop|restart}”
RETVAL=3
esac

exit $RETVAL

Change above the DROPBOX_USERS to include all users that want to run dropboxd (separated by spaces), and save the file.
Make the script executable:

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/dropbox

Add the script to the startup scripts:

sudo update-rc.d dropbox defaults

And it’s done! But if after this you want to manually start, stop or restart…

Manually start Dropbox

To start the service manually, run:

/etc/init.d/dropbox start

To stop it, run:

/etc/init.d/dropbox stop

To restart it, run:

/etc/init.d/dropbox restart

You can also check running status with:

/etc/init.d/dropbox status

Any doubt or suggestion feel free to ask!

Last week when I was at the airport waiting for a flight home I decided to buy a book to pass the time, the books in english weren’t much but then I found this book: The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich.

Since I didn’t know anything about the history of one of the most used social networks I decided to buy it and I have to say I like the book, I agree with Kevin Spacey it’s “pure summer fun.. juicy, fast-paced, unputdownable”. After reading the title and starting reading the book you start looking for the genius that’s easy to find, Mark it’s a geek, a genius, no doubt about it, but the betrayal that’s a whole other story.

I recommend you read it and after that let me know if you look to facebook the same way you did, as Mark once said ”I’m CEO – Bitch.” so he can do whatever he wants with our information. To protect our privacy I suggest you subscribe the Facebook Protest and on June 6  refrain from ALL facebook related activity.

I used iStat Menus 2 to easily control the CPU, memory and network usage, but out of the blue iStat Menus 3 stops being freeware so I had to look for an alternative because I won’t pay $16 for a non essencial software.

I start looking and I found MenuMeters, it’s almost as good as iStat Menus (it lacks the date & time and the temperature features) but it’s free and it gets the job done.

For now I’m satisfied but do you know anything better?

PS: Just a quick tip if you are looking for freeware apps for Mac OS X, here is a good list.

It’s time to change my desktop wallpaper and for that, as I mentioned before, I go to Social wallpapering but today I wanted a different place so I remembered a project of a colleague that I didn’t had the to time to explore.

The project is Imaginartpt it’s a nice place with good high resolution wallpapers, I recommend you give it a try.