Organização

Acabei de dar alguma organização ao nowhereland.
Desde que importei todas as entradas do meu weblog antigo para aqui ainda não tinha organizado coom deve ser as categorias.
Hoje re-factorizei-as, dei-lhes descrições e mudei os nomes coerentes com a linguagem em que são primariamente criados artigos em cada uma.
Para além disso criei a categoria Adventures-in-MacLand onde vou relatar as minhas experiências com o iBook que está para chegar.
Acho que está mais fácil encontrar as coisas, agora ainda me falta mudar os templates das páginas dos arquivos e fica tudo OK.
Bem, quer dizer, em termos do nowhereland (o weblog) pois em relação ao site a única coisa que sei é que não quero o design assim como está! :-)

Macintoys

Boy oh boy, I’m this close to buying one of these…

Yes an iBook, I am really looking forward to having a laptop which fulfills these requirements:

1. Light;
2. Small;
3. Runs Unix;
4. Deals with Micro$oft Office documents natively (no more dual-boot stuff);
5. Has zero-administration (or as near as it gets);
6. Has lots of software for everything I might think of;
7. And it actually runs out of the box, without too much tweaking;
8. But lets me play around with it if I feel like it (hence Unix);
9. Let’s me install and develop in Perl, Apache, Mason, mod_perl, PHP…
10. Is really just a no-brainer as far as networking is concerned (wired and wireless);
11. Has great multimedia capabilities;

Well, I’ve just been to YAPC::EU (in case you haven’t noticed it yet! :-)) and from what I saw there I really got convinced about the parts that I was more sceptical about from the specs above.

So that’s it, when I buy me a laptop it will be a Mac, and since it really is against my religion spending money in laptoys I could never justify to myself buying a PowerBook, so an iBook it is!
Now to choose from 12’ (which I can loose inside my backpack! YES!) or 14’ (more screen real-estate but bigger and heavier machine).

Oh well, in technology we trust. I do anyway…

Artistas na família!

O meu irmão Pedro pediu-me ajuda com a fotografia dele e indicou-me o site onde está a colocar algumas fotos on-line.
Bom, em termos de laboratório a P&B até lhe posso dar umas dicas e poupar-lhe alguma tempo de aprendizagem e frustrações com erros básicos, mas em termos de fotografia geral não me parece que tenha nada para lhe ensinar, bem pelo contrário…
Isto é uma coisa que ou se tem ou só se vai lá com muito trabalho. Eu preciso de muito trabalho e não tenho tempo para ele, mas o Pedro não me parece que vá precisar de se esforçar muito…
(Mas não fiques demasiado convencido, ainda tens de melhorar umas coisinhas! :-)).

YAPC::europe - The Day After

It’s over. It hardly seems like it’s been 3 days, it went by really fast.

Anyway here are some concluding remarks about the whole event.

Bear in mind though that before this edition of YAPC the only other Perl-related event I’ve ever attended was Perlwhirl 2000 whose context was really quite different so my experience is limited as is my base for comparisons.

First off a word about the organization: from my point of view they were great!
They were really helpful with my group’s needs for receipts for our company, the site had all the information I ever needed and then some, they mostly kept to the schedule and gave ample warning about changes, the location was very well adapted to the event (and I know they had to fight to the very last minute with all kinds of bureaucracy with the venue) and they were very friendly and helpful. Oh and while I heard some people complaining, I always had great connectivity throughout the whole event (apart for 3 short instances when we lost our connection to the outside world). The location, apart from being really well suited to this kind of event, was really beautiful (as most things are in Paris) and I only have 2 observations to make: 1-the chairs were really uncomfortable and 2-there should have been more power plugs available.
All things considered, I rate this as an all around great job!

As for the talks, well, some were great, some were mostly boring and some were just plain entertaining.
Tutorial day (Day 1 - wednesday) was fully Dominus day for me and was probably the most rewarding day, technically speaking.
The second day was a bit odd, I skipped from track to track as there was no one track which definitely got my attention. It was the most exhausting day and there were good talks and some weaker talks.
On the last day It was mainly parrot, parrot, parrot, so a great day, technically-wise.

The point is that there were a few really excellent talks from a technical stand point, there were some good talks from the entertainment-value stand point but there were also some weak or boring talks.

So what made the good talks good and the boring talks boring?
For me the pattern was more or less evident, especially where the pure technical talks were concerned: the good ones explained one good concept and then proceeded to demonstrate with bits of code without going too deep in the code. We can all analyze code on our own after being taught about the underlying ideas or techniques and after being pointed out the most important and difficult bits in it. After this concept was assimilated the speaker then proceeded to the next concept and so on; The weaker or more boring talks were mostly about one or two topics only and after maybe 5 minutes of interesting and novel stuff then proceeded to dissect masses of code and we got lots of explanations about the internals of functions or scripts or even about API calls that anyone could dive into for themselves whenever they wanted to.

Then there was the community side of all of this.
We had some talks that were there just for the entertainment value. Clearly the “Perl6 ideas stolen from Japanese” or the “All I Need to know about Perl Programming I learned from Fairy Tales”, just to name a few, were not there for our technical benefit, and yet they were some of my favorite talks.
Why? Because they allowed people to thing of other things, to broaden their views on Perl and to laugh a little about something that we all tend to take too seriously sometimes.
As MJD said we are sometimes too closed in on ourselves as a community and it is good to look outside and expand our horizons.
Actually the whole event is based around building a strong sense of community and it still makes me proud to see how the merit system of recognition works inside the community and how people are just so nice and relaxed towards one another.

Well, that’s it really, these are my thoughts on what I think was a really great event and I sure look forward to the next one.

My company paid for all the costs associated with my going to the event (and 3 other colleagues of mine) so eventually (time and laziness permitting) I will make a small summary presentation about what I saw and learned in this event. If I do I will make it available to anyone interested.

So as the pink guys say: “Eiffel sucks, Perl rules!”.

PS - While yesterday I left Paris under light rain today I’m writing this on the beach. It’s good to be home! :-)

YAPC::Europe - Day 3 - Afternoon

Back after a long lunch for the great lightning talks, what we can see of them since we must leave at 16h30 to catch the plain.

YAPC::Europe - Day 3 - Morning

And we’re off!

Man, I’m definnitelly going to miss this copious ammounts of chévre cheese in the morning every day but anyway, on to the good (i.e. geeky) stuff…

Another beautifull day in Paris (not like yesterday) and we are already stuck in the basement for the talks! :-)

Today I’ll mostly be in O”Reilly room for the parrot talks.

So for starters we have a last minute change in the programme (OK, last second, even the organizers still don’t know about it so…) and we start with

• Dan Sugalski’s “Parrot in a nutshell” on what parrot is and why we want it;

followed by

• Toetsch’s “Of Ops and Mops - or how the code gets executed” on how code gets executed in parrot as opposed to the current way with demonstrations and speed comparisons between perl5, python and perl over parrot which could knock your socks off;

then

• Léon Brocard’s “Little Languages in Parrot” describes what (little) languages are already supported in parrot and why it is kool to write your own little language on it.

Cofee Break!

• Pauley’s “Perl6 ideas stolen from Japanese” explains why ruby is a great language and why perl6 will be better still. Essentially it talks about what features perl6 will have that were stollen from ruby and most importantly, from japanese (can you spell conspiracy theory?)

Mental note from previous talk: Japanese seems to be pretty cool but you have to be really realy patient to learn it…

and back to

• Dan Sugalski’s “The State of Parrot” which is self describing, I should expect…

YAPC::Europe - Day 2 - afternoon

Aah, the beauty of french food!! :-D

And here we are getting back to the conference:

Ok, the afternoon will be spent (until the coffee break at least) on testland.

Starting with:

Test Driven Development in Perl: Where the speaker talks about why testing is good (for 4 slides), and then the slides end and he sits and starts coding tests. Kool!
Random interesting thought on the talk: If you write your tests before doing the code (in the beginning of the project) it ends up being your formal specification, written in a language the computer and you both understand. Latter on the same “document” will be used to prove tht your code actually meets the specifications! How kool is that?

Followed by:

Fowler’s “Building Testing Tools”: Test::More, Test::Builder and related stuff;

and then

Thomas Maier’s “CLI Automatic Test” on automating regression tests on CLI programs with Perl (Expect stuff and the like).

Coffee break (and a welcome one, the chairs are really awfull in all the rooms…).

Hukins’ “Choosing A Templating System For Your Web Project”: Choosing a templating systems focused on all the people who will use the system as opposed to choosing it based on the technical merits of one system over another;

then

Jacobsson’s “Visual Effects - Exploring Imager.pm’s dynamic filter loading mechanism” a very fun way of doing very kool things with images with Perl. Just for the kicks. Now, this presentation had the extreme geek value of being fully cotroled by the mobile phone of the speaker, not to mention the awsome effects and graphics he did for it! Bluetooth is a beautifull thing when used right.

followed by

Karasik’s “Image processing in Perl graphic applications”: Two part presentation with the first part focusing on Prima (multi-platform 2D image processing toolkit) and the second on image processing in Perl;

and as this is a big afternoon with lots of small talks I still went to see

Berezin’s “Many modules, three Perls and one UNIX”: On maintaining the 3 versions of Perl on FreeBSD - the differences between them and how they affect FreeBSD Perl. Also CPAN vs. the ports collection (BSDPAN);

and finally, on to

Boumans’ “20 Things You May Not Know About Perl”: Basically an extended lightning talk about obscure, funny, usefull things about Perl.

Yes, it was a really long day! :-)

Just in case someone whishes to see the talks summary, authors’ bios or anything else about the conference, I repeat the URL here: http://yapc.mongueurs.net/.

Paris by late afternoon

Como já deve ser óbvio por agora estou em Paris no YAPC::Europe 2003, uma conferência de Perl.

As conferências acabam pelas 18h00 e, pelo menos ontem, não havia nada de interessante para fazer depois (pub crawl pelas ruas de Paris com todos estes geeks não era algo que me atraísse particularmente…), logo fomos 3 dar umas voltas por aí.

Metro até à Escola Militar e depois foi a voltinha habitual a pé: Champs de Mars acima até à Torre Eiffell (que aparentemente e apesar do incêndio de anteontem, está a aceitar visitantes até ao último andar), Palácio de Chaillot, Arco do Triunfo, Champs Elisées até meio e jantar no Léons.

Nesta altura do ano é engraçado fazer este passeio, sobretudo porque a esta hora há montes de gente a fazer piqueniques e a jogar futebol e râgueby no relvado do Champs de Mars e montes de skaters et al no Palácio de Chaillot.

São as vistas habituais de Paris no verão — mas que são sempre engraçadas para estrangeiros — do pessoal a beber uma garrafa de vinho sentados na relva descalços. É um outro espírito.
E o Léon’s… Que posso dizer para além de que foi mais um verdadeiro pigout de mexilhões e que fiz mais um fã! (o Bruno).

O Vasco vai ficar cá para o fim-de-semana e tentei dar-lhe umas indicações do que ver, mas como é que se pode escolher o que ver em Paris em dois dias?? É complicadíssimo mesmo…
Se não estivesse cá estado nunca ia ficar cheio de pena de não ter mais tempo para visitar a cidade, assim é um (muitíssimo breve) reencontro o que já não é mau.

YAPC::Europe - day 2 - morning

And where back for another round!

Today I diversified:

• Before the coffee break:
  • Szabo’s “Debugging Perl - using the available debuggers”: Light introduction to debugging in Perl, from simple print statements through the Data::Dumper, the perl internal debuger (perl -d - at some extent) and ptkdb;
  • Christoffel’s “Visualizing Data with Curses.pm and Tk::Text”: Again light introduction to using Curses and Tk::Text to display data in a more “human readable way”. Essencialy we where shown the basic functions and ways to put things on the screen where we want them;
  • Quelin’s “Polyglot Perl” - The same source file used by Perl, C, C++, Python, Befunge, Brainfuck, Ook and Javascript. And it actually works! :-)
• Before Lunch:
  • Guttman’s ” Better Perl Code in 65 Minutes”: Man, I’ve heard all of this many, many times and I still think everyone (including me, of course) should get a lecture like this every 6 months or so… Essencially the dos and don’ts of programming, and also some things I didn’t know or have already long forgoten…
• and on to
  • Stray Toaster’s “All I Need to know about Perl Programming I learned from Fairy Tales” - I wont writeup all the topics but it is true, it all came from fairy tales!

YAPC::Europe - day 1 - afternoon

Well, it turns out I was wrong and there is room for everyone in “Tricks of the Wizard” by M. J. Dominus. Kool!
Aparently we’re in for another trip in glob-land. And of course getting to see the wizzard with his wizzard hat (picture up later, sorry) is always worth seing… :-)

Coffee break update

So we did globs, skipped ties due to timming contraints and are now in the happy land of autoload which is a really fun place!
Kool thing to check out which I didn’t know about: great uses of the magic-goto (as opposed to the evil-goto everyone knows about).
I think this talk is available on MJD’s site http://perl.plover.com/

12 talks by MJD

The last talk was a of 12 lightning talks, namely:

1. the coolest perl project I ever did: analizyng quilt patterns and impressing girls;
2. on forking: avoiding unnecessary shell calls may not always be such a good idea;
3. new versions: why must I release new versions of software which is good just to make it look alive?
4. subclassing: on the difficulties of subclassing and what could be done about it;
5. getting help from strangers: horror emails asking for help;
6. how to progress: on getting smarter and a better programmer;
7. np-complete problems: what they are, why they are important and how you can tackle some of them;
8. why I hate strict: why do you use strict when you don’t know what it does and don’t need it?
9. on fish: what is so wrong about helping people directly on IRC? Sometimes we can just give them the fish…
10. why lisp will never win: how lisp people just spend their time talking about perl and in denial of lisp’s shortcommings
11. on “strongly typed” languages: what this really means (or: it’s N meanings for N different people);
12. a message to the aliens: the message sent from the arecibo space telescope to the aliens.

YAPC::Europe - Day 1

Well, first off I’m on a battery-chalenged laptop and don’t have power everywhere so updates will be sporadic but I’ll try and write up interesting points (for a given value of interesting - namely mine) whenever I can.

First talk of the day: M. J. Dominus’ “Iterators and Generators”.
This talk is very similar to one I attended about 2 years ago (update: actualy it was PerlWhirl 2000, so it was 3 years ago… gosh!) on PerlWhirl only somewhat updated.
The funny thing about it is that M.J.D. still uses the closure approach instead of turning to a full OO approach…
True, he does make it pretty clear that you can turn it into an OO program trivially and he even points to ways to do it but I guess the wizzard just can’t leave the cool stuff behind him! :-)

Later on he did get on to full OO examples.

Update: OK, the contents got different towards the end of the talk, it starts similar to the old one but then turns out quite diferent (and interesting, of course).
Can’t wait for the “Tricks of the Wizard” talk later this afternoon (assuming I’ll be able to get in, it has a limited number of seats…

URL to remember: http://perl.plover.com/book/

YAPC::Europe - Day 0

Arrived in Paris an about 19h00, found the geeks at the meeting point at around 21h00 and got to the pub for dinner.

Nice French food (I really kind of missed it, didn’t notice how much until today, though. I think I’ll eat only salads and cheese as long as I’m here!).

Got tired of the pub and went for a stroll and a coffee on a nice café, from which we got thrown out a little before 01h00.

Oh well, tomorrow the conference starts at 9h00 anyway…

Apparently there where some problems with the WiFi network they are going to have at the conference site but everything is expected to be up and running by tomorrow morning so hopefully I’ll get to blog this first thing in the morning.

The hotel doesn’t have any kind of network access in the rooms (wired or wireless) and the access they give you is just ridiculously expensive so this sucks a bit.

Update (OK, the WiFi network really works! :-D).

The CLI is your friend - even with images

It’s good to know that there are people who have seen the light and realize that there still is nothing quite like the good old Command Line Interface for dealing with… well, almost everything that can be done in a repetitive manner. And that they know that this applies to everything including image manipulation (video also, but this is not my main point right now).

Now ImageMagick is something which is vital for me in managing my digital pictures collection and in preparing on-line albums and trip logs. It is simple to use and oh so powerful but it is all done in the CLI.

Well, it does have a GUI (TK maybe? I forget) but I’ve never felt the need for it because it is just far more simple and efficient to just write something like: “for a in *.jpg ; do convert -geometry 800x800 $a $a ; done” and get all my pictures in x800 or 800x.

Yes, it’s that simple and this article gives a very good idea of what can be done. Of course, there is a whole lot more you can do with ImageMagick than the article says, but it gives a pretty good first approach to it.

You gotta love it!

Wonderful working environments

I rarely complain about my company and my working environment because it is just plainly great (no, I’m not being paid or in any way forced into saying this, it is just my honest opinion, and yes, it does have it’s woes but then what doesn’t?) but just like everyone I hear horror stories frequently. And of course in Portugal things are hard in ways which are different than the USA or any other country.

But then when you read something like this you really, really start thinking things aren’t nearly as bad as they could be!

The last line of the Email is superb: “We want you to work hard at eBay, and enjoy your work.”. Well, It’s good to know that, imagine if they didn’t want their employees to enjoy their work…

But then, this could be a joke. Oh please, let it be a joke!

Vidocq

Nem sei bem como descrever este filme…

Para começar acho que é melhor dizer que gosto bastante da generalidade do cinema de Hollywood pelo seu entertainment value (com algumas excepções que valem por mais do que isso), agora a verdade é que o cinema europeu, quando é bom, é mesmo Muito Bom!

E o Vidocq é um bom exemplo: a fotografia está simplesmente espectacular, a acção não pára, o enredo (e aqui desconfio que a personagem e a sua história não são originais para o filme, mas não tenho a certeza) é fabuloso e os actores são soberbos…

Digamos que é um filme que nos deixa completamente satisfeitos!

Aliás, é tão bom que o pormenor de ser falado em francês nem me chateou nada e isso costuma ser um grande turn-off para mim.

YAPC::Europe 2003

Y-o, Y-o to YAPC::Europe in Paris I’ll go. Tra-la-la-la-la…
OK, I just couldn’t resist! :-)
I’m really excited about it and expect to be heavily spamed with updates right here.

A confirmação

E pronto, já tinha encontrado aqui (e comentei aqui) quem se tenha dado mal com firmware beta e não oficial, mas agora temos a confirmação. Valeu-lhe a sorte!

Mas claro, sem mexer não se aprende, e quando se quer mais funcionalidades sem comprar hardware novo (vem-me à cabeça a minha drive de DVD que vinha estúpidamente bloqueada à zona, pfffs)…

E no caso extremo de estragar mesmo o hardware: pronto, lá temos de o substituir por um novo e com mais features. É duro, mas tem de ser!

Assustador…

Aqui está uma ideia perfeitamente assustadora…
Não tanto a ideia em si, mas o facto de uma pessoa como o Zawodny ter sequer sentido a necessidade de pensar nela.

Excerto:

“I’ve been deleting more and more spam comments from my blog recently. I’m this close to hacking MT to call SpamAssassin before allowing a comment to actually post.”.

De qualquer modo o SpamAssassin é, indubitavelmente, um dos produtos de software que mais faz pela minha produtividade…

Syndigator - another release

Another minor release of syndigator. Read about it here.
Also, I’m asking for suggestions and opinions on there to add to syndigator.

It is really difficult for me to think of things which are both useful and easy to use.
Mostly I just want stuff that is either really complicated to develop (like synchronizing multiple “frontends” with a common “storage” and “state maintainer”) or that requires resources not commonly available to the average user (like having access to your own always-on server with a database for example).
So while I still want the “geek” features to be implemented, they will take some time to think about and to develop and in the mean time I’d like to add some more features that a regular user would like to have.

Particularly difficult for me is the user interface and user-friendly part of it. Well, not to me exactly, since I’m not the Gtk programmer, but to the development group on the whole.
We are all geeks, and that makes our judgment of a user-interface skewed to say the least. Also, the fact that we have watched this product grow makes us fully aware of it’s behavior and all the reasons for it to be like it is so for us it is not easy to think “what would the average user think about this” or “where would an average user expect to find a button that would do this or that”…

Oh well, suggestions are very welcome in the syndigator blog.

[The links mentioned on the previous paragraphs were removed because the site they referenced no longer exists.]

Passa a lata das meias, por favor…

Durante o meu round diário dos blogs encontrei este artigo sobre estas meias em spray.
Vou dizer outra vez de um modo mais legível: meias em spray.
E é mesmo a sério, tem direito a notícia na BBC News e tudo.
Afinal o Obelix não tinha razão, afinal são os Japoneses que estão loucos! :-)

A câmara perfeita do dia

Já se sabe que qualquer opinião sobre hardware está potencialmente ultrapassada no momento em que é expressa, mas correndo esse risco tenho que dizer que em termos de features geekoides esta câmara é a que melhor se aproxima daquilo que realmente se quer: Wi-Fi / Bluetooth para mandar as fotos para o portatil sem ter de ligar fios e GPS para guardar logo a informação geográfica na foto. É o nirvana.

Ou quase: pelo que me parece esta máquina ainda só pode levar um cartão de cada vez…

Mas estamos perto.. Muito perto!

Oceanário - 5 anos depois

Fui ontem , pela primeira vez, ao Oceanário de Lisboa, quase 5 anos depois de ter sido inaugurado. Durante a Expo98 recusei-me a estar mais do que um tempo razoável em qualquer fila e as do Oceanário batiam records…
Depois há sempre qualquer coisa para fazer e a única vez que tentei lá ir as filas ainda eram enormes - foi num fim-de-semana de bom tempo no meio do inverno, é natural.

Bom, é sempre animador ver que algumas das estruturas do Parque das Nações continuam a ser usadas e a atrair muita gente tanto tempo depois da Expo.

A visita ao Oceanário foi um bocado um anti-climax porque 5 anos a ouvir toda a gente a dizer como aquilo é tudo enorme e espectacular e fabuloso e etc e tal cria uma certa expectativa à qual, francamente, é muito difícil corresponder, mas exageros à parte o Oceanário está mesmo muito bem conseguido e é um sítio que sabe muito bem visitar. Talvez fora dos fins-de-semana até seja melhor, pois é provavel que nessa altura uma pessoa se possa sentar à beira do aquário e ficar um bocado em sossego a apreciar os peixes sem as inúmeras excursões a passar constantemente. :-)

Ah e uma das razões mais fortes para ter ido este fim-de-semana em particular foi apanhar a exposição fabulosa de fotos sub-aquáticas de David Doubilet e mesmo que fosse só por isso valia bem a pena ter ido lá!

Chocante!

Aparentemente Deus tem mesmo muito mau feitio.

Mudanças de visual

Pois é o visual do nowhereland mudou. E vai mudar ainda mais para se adequar melhor ao visual que quero dar ao nunonunes.org como um todo, mas para já as mudanças mais significativas foram:
* Inclusão do logotipo de nunonunes.org no banner (na página principal para já, o resto vem depois); * Desapareceu o calendário (por muito giro que fosse não era realmente útil); * Desapareceu a lista de weblogs (eu leio muito mais weblogs do que aqueles que lá estavam e não faz sentido listá-los aqui, o melhor mesmo é esperar que o syndigator tenha um export to opml a funcionar e colocar um link para essa lista completa de feeds que leio aqui);

O que ainda falta fazer é essencialmente: * Mudar todos os templates das outras páginas para o mesmo look; * Decidir como quero colocar os links para os arquivos (que não é decididamente como estão agora); * Acrescentar o sistema de navegação dinâmico do resto do site à barra de links do weblog (ou seja, integrar Mason com o weblog da maneira mais simples possível); * Continuar a martelar a CSS do site até estar como quero (ajudava se eu tivesse uma ideia melhor definida do que é que eu quero, mas enfim… :) ); * Decidir que partes do site vão ficar em inglês e que partes vão ficar em português e (caso enverede por aí) criar as versões bi-lingues do que fôr relevante.

Busy boy!

Dia do quê??

Admito: eu recebo os maravilhosos SMS da Optimus de “Novidades”.
Sim, sempre fui demasiado preguiçoso para descobrir como faço para deixar de estar na lista de distribuição desses SMS.
Não, não gosto de os receber, mas também não me chateam assim tanto…
E de vez em quando aparecem umas pérolas que justificam tudo…
Como a de hoje:
“No dia mundial dos Ovnis testamos o seu nível de cepticismo: envie um SMS para blah, blah, blah…”
Alô?!?!?

Gestão de filmes

Depois de procurar um pouco por sistemas de gestão de colecções de filmes (via web, vai estar disponibilizado em breve no meu site) encontrei o VideoDB que é uma verdadeira pérola!

Apesar de ser em PHP (o que vai dificultar um pouco a integração no meu site que é essencialmente construído com Mason) vale bem a pena o esforço adicional. E como ele ainda não tem internacionalização para português estou a traduzi-lo para ver se o pacote de pt é incluído na próxima distribuição.