Just for reference, this is really useful: Update Apr 20, 2012 @ 16:54: As pointed in a comment by Timo Juhani Lindfors, if some_command exits early and the interval is long, another process can reuse its process number and get killed once the sleep runs out. Does anybody know a better way of doing that without using timeout from coreutils (better yet: using just bash)?

You know the drill. Official announcement is here (or here in portuguese). Anybody planning to drop by FISL13 should submit a key.

OK, this is not another post on how to use Mutt and Gmail. This is just to comment on a feature I found in Mutt that was not obvious, and that helped me to stop running my own anti-spam tool. So, for a number of reasons, my company stop filtering spams. I was setting up dspam to take over that job when I decided that it was just too much pain for a single account. Besides, although I am spammed a lot, I would never possibly be more efficient than Gmail anti-spam, given the load of emails their users classify everyday. I am not migrating my old emails over to Gmail, though. And I am pretty comfortable with my current email work-flow I am simply not going to use a webmail (even one as powerful as Gmail). OK, I am using GNOME 3 after being a Fluxbox and Bluetile user, but everything has a limit But how to keep the best of both worlds? And, more important, how to do that with minimum disruption of what I already have (my own IMAP server and Mutt managing my account there as spoolfile)? The answer is a little known trick using the mailboxes directive in .muttrc. This directive accepts a fully-qualified imap mailbox address. So I just added something like: and added some shortcuts to save email from my inbox to that mailbox (the same as train-as-spam) and to rescue email from it (the same as train-as-ham): and that was it. In my IMAP machine I got a fetchmail downloading emails from Gmail s INBOX so I can get trained-as-ham and new emails (all emails arrive first in my Gmail account) into my IMAP server. All my sieve rules are in place and nothing changed in my email work-flow. It s been working flawlessly for a week now. The only drawbacks are (1) Gmail knowing everything that arrives to me (not a big deal, since unencrypted emails aren t private anyway), and (2) not getting the spam-count once Mutt is run: I have to change into that mailbox to log-in to Gmail. Update: Mar 30, 2012 @ 18:15: I just found out that drawback number (2) above can be fixed by adding the following to .muttrc:

I am one of those people that like to map Fx keys to special functions. After all, that s what F-unction keys are for, right? So, one of the first things I do once I have to configure a new Desktop is disable F10-capture by gnome-terminal. It has been working flawlessly, until I begin using GNOME3. No matter what, F10 was still being captured. I found that this is a bug and that adding the following: to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css serves as a workaround. Hope this helps people with the same problem.

You might know that I am testing GNOME 3. So far, so good. I was a little annoyed by the not-obvious and undocumented have-to-add-user-to-pulse-and-pulse-access procedure and the keyboard-shortcut-settings-bad-design-bug, but now sound works and my usual shortcuts are in-place I found myself liking the environment, but not sure about why I was liking it. I was always a minimalist user. At one time I convinced myself X11 (or Xorg) served as a terminal multiplexer but now, GNOME 3 is changing that with its unobstructiveness (is there such a word?). One thing that might be selling GNOME 3 to me is that it resembles Vim, my beloved text-editor and multipurpose IDE. Just think about the Overview mode as a command-mode in Vim. While working in Vim, I focus in one thing at a time, and everytime I want to do some meta thing, I Escape to the command-mode. It s just the same in GNOME 3: Overview let me do meta things and gives me the whole power of the Desktop in one screen. I am not sure I am going to keep GNOME 3 But thinking it s like Vim is a compelling argument.

Ten years ago I was a fan of NEXTSTEP desktops and a die hard user of Window Maker. I love dockapps, and used to collect them. Things changed, and, as I moved from Desktops to Laptops, I began using simpler Window Managers. The powerful keyboard-shortcuts Fluxbox along with its capability to join windows with tabbing won me over and I began using it in my Laptop, while preserving Window Maker in my Desktop. In time, Fluxbox were used in both sides. Then the netbooks came and I bought an EeePC. The screen was so small that even the non-obstructive nature of Fluxbox were not enough. I began to try tiling window managers and I settle for Awesome. I was using Fluxbox in my Desktop and my Laptop, but Awesome was running in my Netbook. Tiling was making a lot of more sense and I could be productive, even in a small Netbook. Eventually, I started using Bluetile in my Laptop. Also, Bluetile was written in Haskell, and I was interested in Functional Languages by that time Now I got a new Laptop, and, since it features a Realtek 8191SE Wi-fi card, I had to install Wheezy (in my laptop, I usually run stable). Wheezy comes with the new GNOME 3 desktop, of which I read a lot. I decided to give it a try. I am missing advanced tiling (it seems that GNOME3 tiling works just in the side-by-side approach) and I also think that creating custom launchers should be improved but so far I am not disliking it, which is a good step toward adopting it. I ll give it a week to convince me. Let s see how it works its charm on me

I was playing with my new Laptop (a Philco 14E-P686WP) that comes with (argh!) Windows 7. I was gathering information in order to avoid surprises with regards to drivers and hardware-compatibility so I can proceed with the Debian installation By doing that with a new machine, I, usually, peek and poke everywhere, including the Recovery System. I was shocked to find out that this (argh) Windows 7 laptop has a bootable recovery partition loaded with a customized Debian just to run Partclone which installs a Windows factory image. I was about to take some pictures of the process, but I managed to find some in a forum post. Debian is being used to re-install (argh) Windows How sad is that!

Just as I promised yesterday, I pushed a new git repo with my fork of the tool I used to migrate my old Mephisto blog to this new WordPress one. I forked because the tool have not worked the first time. First of all, I was missing uuidtools gem, and to install it would be a pain inside the jail system I used to run my blog. Too much trouble just to get a UUID we can get by other means so I just added an environment variable UUIDGEN anyone can use to point to a tool to do the job. I know this have performance implications, but I am not talking about 10-thousand entries Then, I found out that, for some odd reason I still have to understand, WordPress was cutting my articles everytime it read a character. I could study the subject, but I just added a #gsub in mephisto-to-wxr code and moved on. I was about to remove it from the repo, but I left it there since it could help other people. Also, since there might be other similar occurrences, leaving it there serves as a heads up. Also, I added support for Categories and Tags to mephisto-to-wxr, that seemed to be limitedly accepted (I translated Mephisto Sections into WordPress Categories). All other activities were just clean-up. That tool generated a .WXR with all the articles and comments from my Mephisto blog. Everything I had to do was import it using WordPress import tool.

MJ Ray has said that he needs occasionally to concatenate MP3 files and he wants those files to be free of junk in their middle. There are some nice things to say about this problem:

• Just using cat with MP3 files work because those files are headerless : the metadata in form of ID3v 1,2 tags is an addendum to the format. MP3 is also a format that can be conveniently used without containers/wrappers.That is not the case with AAC files, in general: AAC files that are not inside a container (e.g., Matroska or MPEG 4) are usually useless, unless you know (and can inform) some properties of them to th software that you are using. This is especially the case with AAC files that were compressed with some advanced things like spectral band replication (SBR).
• The tags for MP3 files (at least those in ID3v2) are supposed to be unsynchronized , so as to not be interpreted as audio data. What this means is that some byte sequences (a byte 255 followed by a byte with value at least 224) that are allowed as audio to say hey, I am a marker, process the
  next chunk of data, now have to be escaped if they are present in tags (so that you don t listen to garbage in the middle of a file i.e., you don t play the tag).

Related to this second point, the MPEG standards have a guideline that, if some data is not known by a decoder, for resilience purposes, it should be ignored. This obviously allows some newer features to be
implemented in a backwards-compatible manner and is nice. In other words, decoders should just skip those data and be done with it. Also regarding the second point, apparently, some versions of popular music players/manipulators have problems with unsynchronized data. There are many tools that one can use for removing unwanted, unsynchronized data from an MP3 file. For instance, you can use mp3diags, which is already conveniently packaged in Debian s repository. It is a recommended program for those purposes, indeed. There is another tool that serves that purpose as a side effect: mp3packer. Its purpose is, naively speaking, to losslessly shuffle the data inside an MP3 file so that it can be stored with fewer bits (saving more space for portable players, for instance). In the process of regenerating a new MP3 file, it discards some junk data and solves the original problem. Despite not being part of our repository yet, it is already packaged and
even a RFP bug exists.

I'm at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly, 2010, the biggest gethering of European geoscientists, in Vienna, May 2-7. This is my first time here and its huge: over 9000 participants. Merely finding the talks and posters is a challenge (they supply a USB stick with the abstracts and agendas as they can't print them all! The first day I spent mostly at the exoplanet stream (and putting up my own poster). Some neat stuff on show: summaries by Borucki on Keplers findings (on the Hot Jupiters they found :" these things glow like a blast furnace; forget life"). He points out that when they look for Earth sized planets, radial velocity confirmation would take 1000s of hours on 10M telescopes - so it won't happen. hmm. Steve Unwin on SIM: neat astrometric mission for planet hunting and galaxy measurement. A targeted mission list, unlike the Gaia survey; to fly in 2016 if the Decadal survey says yes. 20% of time available under the general observer program, so get proposals ready ? Nestest poster idea: Anomalous night-time temps on Mars, Gonzales et al.. Finding hot spots on Arsia Mons, a volcano. Explained by air rising from 100km long lava tubes. We've seen pit entrances to caves on Mars with HiRISE, etc. here they model heat output from a pit entrace/exit and imply 100km caves. Oh to go exploring... Tinetti points out that we lack proper spectra, both experimental and theoretical, for high temperature and pressure gases such as methane, etc. Hmm, I know a group in Galway that might be able to help ... Helmut Lammer raised an interesting point at the poster session, that many groups ignore the stellar wind when looking at H2 atmospheres around exoplanets. Theis grossly inflates the apparent H2 atmosphere. Without taking this into acount it would be easy to mistake H2 detections with a Neptune-like atmosphere. He points to a 1.7M UV telescope that the Russians are planning to launch that would help do UV measurements when Hubble is gone. Lena Noack gave a talk on convection in tidally-locked planets (with related poster Low-lid formation on Super-Earths and implications for the habitability of Super-Earths and Sub-Earths). They argue that no covection can be expected in the mantle, and hence no geodynamo or magnetosphere. This could be a problem for holding an atmosphere. Time to check for planetary magnetic fields. Break out the polarimeter ? Oh, and it seems that That Damned Volcano is closing Irish airspace on Tuesday. Might be an idea to go to the meeting about it. Hope it clears by Friday ... Tags conference, astronomy

I'm at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly, 2010, the biggest gethering of European geoscientists, in Vienna, May 2-7. This is my first time here and its huge: over 9000 participants. Merely finding the talks and posters is a challenge (they supply a USB stick with the abstracts and agendas as they can't print them all! The first day I spent mostly at the exoplanet stream (and putting up my own poster). Some neat stuff on show: summaries by Borucki on Keplers findings (on the Hot Jupiters they found :" these things glow like a blast furnace; forget life"). He points out that when they look for Earth sized planets, radial velocity confirmation would take 1000s of hours on 10M telescopes - so it won't happen. hmm. Steve Unwin on SIM: neat astrometric mission for planet hunting and galaxy measurement. A targeted mission list, unlike the Gaia survey; to fly in 2016 if the Decadal survey says yes. 20% of time available under the general observer program, so get proposals ready ? Nestest poster idea: Anomalous night-time temps on Mars, Gonzales et al.. Finding hot spots on Arsia Mons, a volcano. Explained by air rising from 100km long lava tubes. We've seen pit entrances to caves on Mars with HiRISE, etc. here they model heat output from a pit entrace/exit and imply 100km caves. Oh to go exploring... Tinetti points out that we lack proper spectra, both experimental and theoretical, for high temperature and pressure gases such as methane, etc. Hmm, I know a group in Galway that might be able to help ... Helmut Lammer raised an interesting point at the poster session, that many groups ignore the stellar wind when looking at H2 atmospheres around exoplanets. Theis grossly inflates the apparent H2 atmosphere. Without taking this into acount it would be easy to mistake H2 detections with a Neptune-like atmosphere. He points to a 1.7M UV telescope that the Russians are planning to launch that would help do UV measurements when Hubble is gone. Lena Noack gave a talk on convection in tidally-locked planets (with related poster Low-lid formation on Super-Earths and implications for the habitability of Super-Earths and Sub-Earths). They argue that no covection can be expected in the mantle, and hence no geodynamo or magnetosphere. This could be a problem for holding an atmosphere. Time to check for planetary magnetic fields. Break out the polarimeter ? Oh, and it seems that That Damned Volcano is closing Irish airspace on Tuesday. Might be an idea to go to the meeting about it. Hope it clears by Friday ... Tags conference, astronomy

Being a chess player (not a very good one), I ve always been intrigued by Swiss Tournaments. They are so practical, and ensure that even a lowsy player like myself, can play the same number of rounds as any other player. That s being inclusive! I ve played some knock-out tournaments (to me it meant being kicked off in the second or third round), and, given their nature, not-so-good players tend not to attend these tournaments (since their fun will, almost surely, end before long). Well, to solve a very similar problem, but not in any game championship, a co-worker suggested we could use a Swiss Tournament system. I liked the idea, but not being sure it could really solve the problem, I had to quickly implement something to test our data with so Ruby to the rescue! In no time we were up and running, and apart from minor issues that were being fixed along the way, I guess it s a pretty good implementation. You can checkout the code to get a feel of it. Of course, it doesn t follow any rules from any Chess or Go association (Wikipedia, after all, was my guide here), but it serves our goal. Being a proof-of-concept code, feel free to improve it (just tell me about it, will you?).

Why is it so hard for non-programmers to understand mutex locks? No I am not asking non-programmers to understand programming at all. But concepts that we use in programming that came from real-life in the first place? Come on Programmers learned from real-life, not the other way around! Let me explain: at the hospital, after a not so clever renovation, we ended up with an employee restroom that is far from work place (in fact, almost in another department). Most of the times it is occupied So it takes a trip to the restroom just to learn that it cannot be used at that moment! In a busy morning, one of those trips is just what one can do! As a programmer I suggested a mutex lock: change the restroom door lock and make only one copy of the key, that should be kept in a common place and returned after being used. If you want to use the restroom and it s occupied, just learning the key is not there is enough to save a useless trip. Come on that is not a hard concept! As I said, we, programmers, learned it from real-life, in settings just as the one I described above! Well, I just got the key ( acquired the lock , in programmer speech) and went to the restroom. When I unlocked the door I was surprised by someone already using it! How embarassing! Someone had the smart idea of making a copy of the key! What part of the mutex concept did people not understand? Luckily, most computational mutex algorithms prevent lock cloning ... :-)

The day before yesterday I learned that a fellow Debian Developer was visiting Porto Alegre Federal University to do some work on Parallel Computing: Vincent Danjean. People from local user group organized a last minute get-together at Cavanhas (that served as last meeting of the year) and we had the most pleasant time. Guaraldo registered the moment with his cellphone camera: Vincent is flying back to France today or tomorrow. Hope he had a great time in Porto Alegre and have a safe trip back home.

The day before yesterday I learned that a fellow Debian Developer was visiting Porto Alegre Federal University to do some work on Parallel Computing: Vincent Danjean. People from local user group organized a last minute get-together at Cavanhas (that served as last meeting of the year) and we had the most pleasant time. Guaraldo registered the moment with his cellphone camera: Vincent is flying back to France today or tomorrow. Hope he had a great time in Porto Alegre and have a safe trip back home.

I know it has been a long time since my last post. I am sorry about that, but life has it s complications every now and then (as you know)... Well, on to the article. Recently I had to reimplement in C a prefork server I wrote in Ruby for an internal project at Propus. Not that the Ruby version wasn t enough (after all, although being in Ruby, I was using Unix plumbing, much in the fashion Ryan tell us about in the now famous I like Unicorn because it s Unix article)... The problem is that, in one of our clients, the only version available for Ruby was 1.8.1. Yeah I know But we were not allowed to upgrade and, although it didn t seem at first, the same server presented a nasty memory leak in 1.8.1 that was not present in 1.8.7 and 1.9.1. I still don t know where the problem is I suspect some of the C-to-Ruby glues around TCP sockets might be blamed, but after a couple of days trying to figure it out, I decided it was easier just to reimplement it using C. It actually took less than a day to get the C version going nothing fancy and, apart from memory footprint, just the same functionality and about the same speed of the Ruby version. But it was enough to remind me I really don t like all the scaffolding one has to raise in order to make something useful in C. It s not just a matter of SLOC (of course, C version was more than 3 times longer than Ruby one)... I am talking about all the manual memory management, pointer operations and the disgusting experience of dealing with strings in C. I know some people are addicted to that sort of thing like heroin, but to me it just slows development. This experience made me think about learning a second compiled programming language. I do some Perl, a lot of Python and (of course) most of my work in Ruby, but those are all interpreted languages. For compiled languages I always resorted to C So I am officially looking for a language to learn. So far, the best candidates are OCaml (I got a little excited about JoCaml a few months ago, now I might get serious about it), Haskell, Lisp, Objective-C, Ada, and Vala. Of these, I ve been reading a lot about OCaml It seems a fine and expressive language, with decent foundations, object-oriented extension, broad standard library and (with JoCaml) concurrency Also it might give me the proper excuse to finally wrap my mind around a functional language! People keep me pointing to Java and Erlang Well for using Java I would much prefer using JRuby. Erlang, ITOH, has a weird syntax (at least to me) and it seems much of what makes it great will, eventually, be part of Ruby (or already is using libraries) either that or I ll just wait for Reia to be ready. Besides, neither can be compiled to native code (ok, that argument can be stretched both ways, so just ignore it). So, what do you think? Any advice?

Just a quick update: XMPP4R-Observable is now on GemCutter. That s due to GitHub disabling gem building, and although everybody can get the source from GitHub as usual, those who want to quickly install it using Rubygems can do:

bash$ gem install xmpp4r-observable -s http://gemcutter.org

Happy Hacking.

This is not another rant to praise one in spite of the other (an everybody knows I love Ruby, so it would not be impartial), but sometimes people seems to live in another world and do things for the wrong reasons. I just read this blog post by Kanwei Li in which he gives 2 or 3 reasons he ditched Ruby in favor of Python. First of all, both are great languages and, although I favor Ruby, I use Python for some projects and they are not all that different. Of course, everyone is free to choose which language one favors, but Kanwei seems to be ditching Ruby out of not knowing much about it, or out of preferring one style over the other His first reason is that in Python white spaces matter. I used to think this is just a matter of style, but every now and then mandatory alignment hurts me (just try to put together a code generator and you ll notice it). Although my code is always correctly aligned, I like that it s done so because I want it that way, and not because some language demands it. Rants and more rants have been written about Python s mandatory alignment (or other languages lack of it), and I am not going through all of it Just I don t think it s a good reason to ditch Ruby After, he makes a big deal out of Ruby s ternary if. As written by him, he prefers

#python
if len(a) > 0:
        v = a[0]
        a = a[1:]
else:
        v = None

over Ruby s ternary if

#ruby
v = a.empty? ? a.shift : nil

Hey! Come on Ruby s ternary if is not mandatory It was copied from C just as a syntax sugar. You can do without it, just as in Python:

#ruby
if ! a.empty?
    v = a.shift
else
    v = nil
end

Better yet! you can use if s return as v value:

#ruby
v = if ! a.empty?
    a.shift
else
    nil
end

How beautiful is that! Python lacked ternary if for a long time, and when it finally acquired one via PEP 308 its syntax was made different from every other language! Although I don t think that is a problem, some people might think it would be better not reinventing the wheel. Next, Kanwei goes over a famous problem of Ruby: the lack of a sum method for Array. I admit it s strange, but that is completely coherent: Ruby s Arrays are ordered collection of objects and not mathematical arrays. How do you sum objects that are not numbers? Many different people will have many different answers to that, so Ruby leaves this decision for the programmer and provides basic methods to deal with collections of anything (that can be used to apply sum to numbers, if wished). So, in Ruby you have to use Array#inject to perform a sum:

[1,2,3].inject(0)    sum, value  sum + value  

Array#inject (actually Enumerable#inject) was borrowed from Smalltalk and allows you to loop through an array, building up an accumulator value as you go. When it s done, the final value of this accumulator is returned. Very useful for combining array elements, whether by summing them, building up a pretty display string, whatever. In the example above, I am initializing the accumulator with 0. If you use Array to mathematical operations and you want your arrays to work that way, you can always add a sum method to Array class:

class Array
    def sum
        self.inject(0)  sum, value  sum + value 
    end
end

Maybe it would be better if you just use Arrays as containers (as it was intended to) and implement that sum inside your own class I completely agree with Reg Braithwaite here. Kanwei also mention Python is faster than Ruby. That is true, but was more true some time ago. First of all, Python is older and has had more time to improve its speed. Ruby, ITOH, just now acquired a good VM and improvements to it finally can run parallel to improvements in the language itself, so I am expecting this to be less true every release. Python is already not getting much faster between releases, unlike Ruby (the differences between 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 are really impressive!). IMHO this is not a good reason to choose one instead of the other: if you really need speed, go for C :-) Now this is something I find interesting Kanwei has mentioned: Python is more production ready . He argues that Google is using it, so it must be good. Well I cannot argue against that: Google is really using Python. But IBM, Oracle, EA, Cisco, Siemens, etc are using Ruby so that is just a matter of preferring one or another company. Both are production ready I agree, though, that Ruby 1.9.1 has many differences from 1.8.7, and that that may be seen as some inconsistency, but Python also has changed a lot since its 2.0 version, for that matter. And the changes to Ruby brought many benefits I think they worth it. At last, Kanwei compares Python and Ruby docstrings. Here I also have to agree with him: Ruby docstrings sucks. Actually that s why everybody uses rdoc instead (and that is much more powerful than Python s docstrings). Again, I don t think that is reason enough to ditch Ruby (actually, the existence of rdoc, rubygems & friends should bring people to Ruby instead), but that is a matter of personal taste. Surely, Kanwei s reasons were easy to argue against. There are areas were Python shines much more than Ruby (and vice-versa), but those Kanwei mentioned are not among them. I think both languages are powerful enough, and both are way better than Perl or PHP, so either one you choose would be fine. Better if you don t have to choose and use both ;). If you have to, ITOH, pay more attention on how you feel while coding in each one, and not to some cheap reasons such as above. If you are a programmer, what matters most is that you ll spend a lot of time coding with any given language let that be something pleasant then.

I like building tests for my code. That is not an old habit, it s just something I ve been developing in the recent months or some few years. No, I am not doing TDD (although that doesn t sound like a bad idea): I just build tests after I code as a safeguard to be sure I haven t broken anything. I suspect there are more programmers like myself than those using tests as part of a TDD (BDD, SDD, etc) approach, but that is just an opinion. Well I just recently became found of code coverage estimates and tools, and rcov is such a nice tool that sometimes I just find myself building tests just to please it. I also suspect there are at least a bunch of people that do the same. Here are the results of the test coverage of one of my projects:

spectra@rohan:~/work/xmpp4r-observable$ rake rcov
(in /home/spectra/work/xmpp4r-observable)
rm -r coverage
Loaded suite /usr/bin/rcov
Started
........................
Finished in 70.995814 seconds.
24 tests, 97 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
+----------------------------------------------------+-------+-------+--------+
                   File                                Lines    LOC     COV    
+----------------------------------------------------+-------+-------+--------+
 lib/xmpp4r-observable.rb                                648     414    61.4%  
 lib/thread_store.rb                                      58      39    87.2%  
 lib/observable_thing.rb                                 187     118    91.5%  
+----------------------------------------------------+-------+-------+--------+
 Total                                                   893     571    69.4%  
+----------------------------------------------------+-------+-------+--------+
69.4%   3 file(s)   893 Lines   571 LOC
spectra@rohan:~/work/xmpp4r-observable$

Sure it s tempting to get more of lib/xmpp4r-observable.rb covered, isn t it?

About four months ago I described how my EeePC survived the spilling of orange juice over its keyboard. No! I never spilled anything on it again, if that s what you re thinking But I noticed that some keys (those that got more juice on) began to malfunction. At the beginning I paid no attention to it, hoping that it would just go away, but, eventually, they just stop working And those are not just unimportant keys I am talking about arrows and the forward-slash (/) keys in the lower right corner of the keyboard!!! How could I survive without those keys, without a quick access to my bash history and vim search? Well, I began googling around and found some good advice. Everything that made sense regarding how to cleanup my keyboard I compiled and, when I was enough confident it would work, I just follow the procedure I ve devised. This is what I did:

1. After turning it off and removing the battery, I removed the keyboard. Check the instructions I linked in my previous article for some pictures on how to do it.
2. I poured 500 mL of distilled water in a clean plastic box (I bought 1L for BRL 20 at a local pharmacy), added enough dish detergent to make some foam (I was careful to select a non-biodegradable one) and drowned the whole keyboard in the solution.
3. For the next 30 minutes I pressed and released the affected keys over and over again. My intention was to dissolve anything that might have remained from the orange juice.
4. I left it soaking in the solution for the next 12 hours.
5. The next day I got the keyboard out of the solution and used current tap water to remove any detergent still left in it. This might have took about 10 minutes.
6. Our tap water is really clean, but its hard, and I would not like to remove any juice from the keyboard just to add some minerals that might have the same effect, so after I was certain all the detergent was removed, I left the keyboard in the remaining of the distilled water for another 12 hour soak.
7. After that I just removed the keyboard from the soak, dried it a little bit using a paper towel and left it to air-dry (away from the sun). I don t remember how long it took, but I believe not more than 4 hours Those were hot days Anyway, I was really sure it was dry.

When I plugged it back, surprise! All keys are working again! Of course, that was just what worked for me Best advice still is: Keep liquids away your EeePC!