Back in London

The advantage of leaving early for a short flight is that you get to spend almost the whole day at the destination. The disadvantage, of course is that not only do you have to actually fly (which messes me up no end and I hate it) but you compound it with having to wake up at an ungodly hour (which in my case messes me up even more if it is at all possible). All of this gives me really mixed feelings about it because while it does gain me one day to tour around it also makes it a less than stelar day so… I don’t know, the jury is still out on this one.

So even though the weather was far better than I could have hopped for for this time of the year, today was a day of headaches and shivers which made me think my body was actively trying to not let me fall sick just yet. But then I may just be the flying and the waking up ridiculously early. I can only hope so, otherwise the rest of the stay will be a lot less enjoyable.

Tuxa on the other hand is definitely getting worse. After spending the last two days at home trying to beat the flu she looked like she was really going to do it but I guess the day took it’s toll on her and when the sun went down (at an whooping 16h30) her throat just gave up on her and now, not only is it hurting a lot, but it also decided to deprive her of her voice. And the cold itself also decided to charge in so there will be no partying and watching the fireworks at the Eye at midnight. Oh well, I’m not a party animal at all anyway, I just hope she gets better so she doesn’t end up spending her London days sick and in bed…

Anyway we did make the most of the day and since every store will probably be closed this weekend we decided to leave the parks and so on for the weekend and just tour the city streets today.

And so it was that we finally found where Whitard is (we lost track of it since last time we where in London and we couldn’t find it in Covent Garden and assumed it had moved out from there. I could have sworn it was not there the last time…) and we got to buy lots and lots of teas and even some related utensils. So that was really cool.

Another great thing we got to do today was to visit the Apple store. Great store, very much like the one in the New York Soho (and almost all the others I guess), very big, very clean, very white, very trendy and filled with great (and great-looking) technology.
I finally got to handle a Photo iPod and it just proved me right in my opinion of it: anyone considering using it view their photos or to show them to their friends on that screen is just crazy. So it’s only real use (for the photo part only, of course) is as an extremely portable slide-show machine with an easy interface to your TV. That way people can carry their thousands of photos over to their friends’ and bore them to death with pictures of their vacation or their children, on their own TV, that much more easily. But it is just so horribly overpriced for that!

Hopefully tomorrow Tuxa will be in better shape so that we can go watch the new year’s parade and hang around the gardens and so on. Then on sunday we are going to try and visit Oxford. I’ve never been there and would really like to get to know it.

Pub food is still great, Guiness is still the only beer I can ever enjoy, Starbucks has definitely got something to do with mushrooms since it continues to crop up just about everywhere and even though there are Internet cafés or bars with Internet access in virtually every corner of (this part of the) city I don’t have any wireless hotspots accessible from my hotel room (at all, open or closed). I do have “high speed Internet access” in my room but at the rates they charge… I don’t think so, I’m not that crazy! So this post will be made available at a later time.

Return of the Post-It

Literally, the square, yellow kind.

Since maybe last weekend I have noticed that I don’t have my Palm with me everyday when I get to work but I haven’t remembered to look for it at home so while I have misplaced it I have been making do with the other tools I have on my Mac.

The problem arises when I have absolutely nothing prepared for the trip tomorrow and I have a ton of stuff to do today before getting home and then some.

So what can I rely on to remember everything I have to do? You got it: the good old Post-Its stuck on the wallet and on the car dashboard.

I am indeed my father’s child, that I am!

PS: Using my memory is not an option as a 60% rate of failure is totally not acceptable in this case! ;-)

Bits and Pieces

The last days have been kind of hectic.
On one side things at work have been really agitated, on the other people in my family are getting sick all around and I end up having to lend a few hands here and there on the spare time (which is quite dilapidated to begin with).

Still, tomorrow I fly to dear old London for a few days so things can only get better. Unless I fall sick during that time. Which is quite possible. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. Or lay on that sick-bed. Or whatever.

The Elric Saga is quite interesting, although it does show some signs of age. It surely doesn’t pack quite a punch nowadays —with all that’s been written in the mean time— as it must have when it was written, but I can see why people consider it “essential reading” and I tend to agree. Just make sure you read it early in your fantasy fiction forays or it will loose some of it’s sparkle.

Never assume the code works 100% of the time. When in doubt double check and above all look at the source. It is quite possible the thing you are trying to implement is already there, only hidden behind some undocumented option which is not mentioned anywhere. At all. Except in the code! Private joke, some people will get this, the others may safely ignore it.

Still haven’t had the time to deal with the x-mas pictures, neither this year’s nor past editions.

Still, the turtle moves.

Christmas wrap-up

In english because I feel like it, no other particular reason at all… It should be in portuguese but there you have it.

So anyway, christmas has come and gone. The old book queue is considerable fatter, I’m finally going to have the pleasure of reading Michael Moorcock —more specifically, the Elric saga (a terrible flaw in my book culture, I know, I’m working on it).

Not many photos, I was too lazy for it and anyway I’m really not into the indoor-events-type of photography (nor do I have the right equipment) and Vasco and Tuxa did all the honors on that department so I was off the hook. I did, however, do a collection of photos of all the present wrappings we did since 1998 and I will put it up in a few days (after new-year’s) so that should be nice. This is relevant because we always wrap all of our presents ourselves and we always come up with something special every year so it has become a tradition waiting to see what we did with the presents every christmas.

And speaking of presents, this was a very unusual year in one respect: we did actually finish up with the shopping and wrapping well in advance of the 24th, which led us to a really stress-free christmas. The first one in many, many years. I still can’t believe it myself, how good that felt! :-)

Appart from that, it was nice to see all the families together (as usual), there where far too many presents being exchanged, there was far, far too much food being wolfed down and things went generally very well.

Now on to the next event —new year’s— which will be especially pleasant for me and Tuxa this year since we are going to spend it in London. Yay! If only for a few short days. Hiss!

O Yin e o Yang

O bom

O bom é que ontem acabámos finalmente de fazer os embrulhos para os presentes de Natal deste ano.

Os presentes de Natal são uma tradição familiar que eu “herdei” da Tuxa. Todos os anos os presentes são embrulhados de uma forma totalmente original e personalizada. O problema é que o excesso de criatividade costuma gerar uma quantidade de trabalho absurda com isto, mas é encarado como diversão… :-)

Este ano até nem foi dos piores em termos de dificuldade e de trabalho necessário, até porque temos menos presentes para embrulhar (história comprida, em que não vou entrar agora) e como começámos muito mais cedo do que o habitual conseguimos evitar a maratona do dia 24 de Dezembro.

Claro que ainda não posso disponibilizar fotos porque os embrulhos são surpresa para quem os recebe (e eu tenho a veleidade de acreditar que alguma dessas pessoas pode ler isto…), mas vou colocar isso no álbum depois do Natal. Aliás, vou até fazer uma coisa que já pensei várias vezes e nunca cheguei a fazer, que é disponibilizar um registo fotográfico dos embrulhos ao longo dos anos. Há coisas verdadeiramente elaboradas. E giras!

O mau

O mau foi ter feito o exame médico de rotina no emprego e ter recebido um relatório oftalmológico que diz que perdi acuidade visual ao perto de forma significativa.

Não é que seja surpresa, dificilmente poderia ter deixado de me aperceber disto, claro, mas ouvir isto de um médico e ler no relatório torna a coisa mais “oficial” e, logo, mais real.

Apesar de já usar óculos há muito tempo sempre vi bem (outra história complicada, não tenho nada do que é habitual e sempre tive visão excelente ao perto e apenas meia dioptria ao longe num olho) e o facto de as horas brutais de computador estarem finalmente a apanhar-me na curva deixa-me um bocado triste.

A pdi é tramada.

E agora toca a sair mais cedo para ir a uma consulta médica. Estava a falar mesmo de quê? Ah pois, a pdi… Certo…

Sharing media on the Mac

With the new dream machine at home (yes, I know I’m wearing it thin, but we all know this will pass soon as the new iMac now with turbo-overdrive comes along, so I must seize the opportunity while it lasts) ;-) I have finally setup a nice multi-user desktop environment for me and my wife.

And, of course, no such setup would complete without sharing the massive music and pictures collection.

But this poses a bit of a challenge as the default Mac apps (iTunes and iPhoto) don’t do this very well. They both assume that every user has his/her own library and sharing is only done while they are on-line and running the corresponding application.

Dumb!

Well, after doing a bit of research and thinking about it for a bit I decided to take care of it.

The results are OK (while not brilliant) and I decided to do a couple of how-tos on the process.

The how-tos are not terribly original and due credit is given therein.

So now there are yet two more tutorials around on “how to share an iTunes library between users on the same machine” and “how to share an iPhoto library between users on the same machine”. Referenced here for posterity.

Revolution

Applications don’t bounce on the dock anymore, they just launch instantaneously (even Photoshop).

Quicksilver starts in under 2 seconds and when I press the magic-key combo to call upon it, it immediately awaits my command. Oh and it finds and does whatever I want it to do before I have time to blink (i.e. Quicksilver just became useful).

Neverwinter Nights runs beautifully with every graphical bell and whistle turned on and with a pornographically high resolution. It is fast and gorgeous.

Homeworld 2 is just indescribable. Pure beauty.

Yes, the new iMac changed my life. ;-)

It is done!

It was true!

This is what is on the trunk of my car right now:

[Once upon a time there was a nifty picture here of a iMac box. Unfortunately it has gone and joined the celestial bit-choir.]

In case it isn’t clearly visible, :-) inside the box is a brand new iMac G5 20’ beauty.

And it will stay in the box for today as I’m already committed to lots of other stuff for tonight.

Marry Christmas to me, with a little help from my friend Blue! Thanks dude! :-)

The Call…

I’ve just got the call.

If all goes well it will happen today. Actually it is today or back to the waiting list.

All must go well.

Oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please!

Webcomic roll-call

Another de-stresser post.

So last night, while trying to grok Neverwinter connections again (in the slim hope that I will soon have a 20’ iMac and some free time to actually play Neverwinter Nights on-line) I came across a new(-ish) webcomic to add to my daily dose: Dire Destiny - a fantasy webcomic which, so far, is very much going the hack’n’slash way.

So the list of daily webcomics is now as follows:

• Calvin and Hobbes - Reruns, sure, but a classic;
• Dilbert - Sometimes more inspired, sometimes less but still a must;
• Garfield - A good candidate to slide off the list sometime soon;
• Snoopy - Oldies but goodies. Mostly;
• User Friendly - Some plots are good, others are utterly brilliant;
• Megatokyo - I love this stuff, but the lack of pace nearly kills it, which is a damn shame;
• pVp - What can I say? Geek-gamer life as it truly is. You don’t get your gamer friend? Read this, you will!
• Dire Destiny - The newcomer. A trip down memory lane to my role playing days. It shows great promise.

Not much is different from my roll-call, only Down-time was dropped due to it’s sloooooooow pace. Let’s see how the list checks out in the future.

Natal

Todos os (muitos) presentes estão comprados há já algum tempo.

Os embrulhos (especiais e diferentes todos os anos) estão planeados há muito tempo.

Os primeiros embrulhos foram feitos este fim-de-semana e, pela amostra, o resto não deverá demorar mais do que um dia inteiro de fim-de-semana e mais umas 3 ou 4 noites de semana (um record, geralmente metemo-nos a fazer embrulhos tão complicados que passamos dias e dias às voltas para os terminar a todos).

Se tudo continuar assim não vamos ter de fazer absolutamente nada relativamente a presentes no dia 24.

Estou a adorar um Natal sem stress. Quem diria que podia ser tão bom? :-)

The creative process of coding

You have a problem to solve.

You get the problem in your head and mull over it for a while, trying to consider all the angles.

You then consider the alternative ways you have to solve it. Like a good little programmer you think about what every possible alternative has going for and against it.

You start to make some tests and experiment a bit.

You make up your mind. This is “The Way” you say. You know what you are talking about, you’ve considered it, you covered all aspects, you tried it out you are in control, you are “the man”!

So now all you have to do is implement the thing and get on with your life.

And so you do it.

Only it doesn’t quite come together as you expected it.

Still, you know this is “The Way”, so you toil on, on the face of adversity and you make it work.

Well… Almost, it still doesn’t quite work. And what you ended up doing to the poor code? Man, you should be arrested! Beware the style police, you may never be able to show your face again to your fellow coders…

So you pause and think about it. You know you’ve messed up the implementation somehow, but how?

And one day you are hit on the head by a shovel (weeeell… it feels like it anyway) and you realize: “OMG, what was I thinking??” (yes, in your desperation you start talking like a l33t t33n, go figure…). The way to solve the problem, the better way, has just snuck up on you and is there in your brain, staring at you, making fun of you, calling you stupid and other less family-blog friendly names…

So you go back, undo all the code murdering you’ve done and put in the new, oh so elegant solution.

Of course it works first time, it is fast, it is clean, it is extendable and it has the new super-duper GTI engine!

Well, it was obvious, wasn’t it? It was staring you in the face all that time. Still you had to go and spend all that time and do all that dirty work just to get to it.

And now that you’ve been through all that you just can’t help yourself jumping on to the next challenge. Only this time you’re going to get it right, plan better and the good, clean solution is going to be implemented first. Now you know better.

Or do you?

God, I love being a geek!

Spam… Are we getting tired of this yet?

Well… I am, most definitely!

Yesterday evening my server got hit by a big volley of almost 600 comments and this afternoon another one of over 400 comments.

That’s it, I’m really going to have to do something about this.

First of all I’m leaving Movable Type. Not that MT in itself is the cause of all the spam I’m getting, but it does help, and since I am going to shake things up a bit I might as well go full length and move to something that suits my needs a bit more closely. You’ll see how in a while.

Then I’m going to implement two defense mechanisms on my new blogging platform: people who are authenticated may post straight ahead (I plan to support both users of my own site and TypePad-authenticated users), comments from people who are not authenticated will be moderated.

This makes me really sad, but I just can’t keep on spending this kind of time managing the garbage these morons leave on my site and I’m not even taking into account the bandwidth they take up…

Now I just have to find the time to set up the new platform and especially to make the transition as painless as possible. Of particular importance is the fact that permalinks should continue to be so, even though I’m changing platforms. I think I know how to make this work and if I can I will do it. Like I said, it’s all a matter of time.

So really this is a “thank you” post to all the lowly life-forms out there who have increasingly spammed my site for forcing me to overcome my basic laziness and get on with changing things like I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time now.

Oh, but you can still drop dead any time now, that would be just fine by me.

Heating up the place

Today I had to stay at home in the morning, there was a problem with the central heating in my apartment and I had to wait for the repair guy to come and fix it.

Nothing particularly noteworthy about it. Until I started asking him some questions about the system, that is.

You see, I have a thermostat control for the thing but it is located on the wrong place entirely (I won’t go into that now, trust me on this one) and I also wanted to fit it with a time-control mechanism. You know, the kind where you can program it to turn on at a certain time and turn off at another time and so on.

So what’s so remarkable about this you may ask? And you do have a point, it doesn’t look interesting. And neither was his answer which was basically that I had to get an electrical contractor to do it as it was not something the heating company does as it basically amounts to closing a circuit when you want the heater on and opening it when you want it off. He also said that I can just replace my current thermostat with one which not only does the… er… thermostat thingie, but also has a timer built in for programming. He even told me where to get one, but I wasn’t really listening at this point.

No, I wasn’t listening at all. And that’s because I was mulling over the fact that the whole heater control circuit revolves around opening or closing a simple one line circuit. One wire-end at one side and another wire-end at the other side… Connect them if you want the heater on, disconnect them if you want the heater off… Can you say X10??

Must… resist… temptation… to… wire… up… the… whole… house!

Danças de salão

Uma actividade que comecei relativamente tarde, com a Tuxa, também grande fã.

Estilos

Entende-se por danças de salão um conjunto de estilos ou ritmos divididos em vários grupos:

• Latinos:
  • salsa;
  • merengue;
  • cha cha cha;
  • passo doble;
  • rumba quadrada;
  • samba;
• Clássicos modernos:
  • valsa inglesa (ou simplesmente valsa);
  • valsa vienense;
  • jive;
  • tango;
  • quickstep;
  • slow fox.

Locais onde dançar

Todos os estilos

• Trópico de Dança - Este grupo organiza (entre outras coisas) noites mensais de dança, de todos os estilos de dança de salão e também de alguns estilos Africanos (bem dispensáveis na minha opinião, mas enfim) nas instalações da AERLIS, em Oeiras, junto ao Parque dos Poetas. O croqui do local está aqui;
• Barrio Latino Café - Essencialmente salsa, com um pouco de merengue à mistura e também alguns outros ritmos. Fica no Parque das Nações, junto à FIL, no lado Norte;
• Dançarte - Jantar e dança. Um restaurante com uma pista de dança bastante boa e música ao vivo. Também tem escola de dança própria. Localizado no Lourel, Sintra.

Histórico de exames e eventos

Iniciei-me nas danças de salão durante o ano lectivo de 2003/2004, no Centro de Ténis de Oeiras. No ano de 2004/2005 passei para o Centro de Dança de Oeiras. Neste ano comecei a ter exames regulares.

• Janeiro 2005, CDO - Cha-Cha-Cha, Paso Doble, Tango;
• Abril 2005, CDO - Jive, Valsa, Quickstep;
• Abril 2005, U.K.A. - Cha-Cha-Cha, Valsa.

Outras páginas e recursos vários

• U.K.A. - United Kingdom Alliance of Professional Teachers of Dancing - Entidade que examina e avalia os alunos das escolas em que tenho tido aulas.

Times ahead

By the way, fully expect an increase in bursts of posts about life in general and nothing in particular, and then, possibly, long(ish) periods of silence. This will probably happen as I use this weblog as a vent for frustrations relating to… let’s say, less interesting times, professionally speaking.

Then again, it might just spike my interest in filling up the site (mainly the wiki). Who knows?

Not now!

It was predictable. I saw it coming and I just knew it would work out like this. I had no illusions whatsoever about it. And that it happened!

Some time ago I cleaned out my “later” bookmarks folder and sent everything on it to my (then fresh new) del.icio.us account.

And after a few days I had gone through it and brought the total of items “to see later” down from a whooping 121 to a manageable 10 or so.
And life was bliss and I could keep up with stuff I come across in the vast interweb (heh) mostly at home in the evenings.

But I knew. I just knew. The danger lurked all around. The old monster was not dead, it was dormant, sleeping, biding it’s time to come back at me when I least suspected it.

And so it is that, once again, I have nearly 100 items in my later section of del.icio.us.
Yes, I knew it would happen. It was only a matter of time. Isn’t it great to know yourself?

<sigh!>

Ainda a mania dos telemóveis

Afinal não sou só eu que acha ridícula esta mania dos telemóveis em tudo o que é concertos (e o Fred, claro que até respondeu ao meu post).

Geração duh. Indeed!

Ena pá, dois posts de seguida na mesma onda… Quem não me conhecer até fica a pensar que os 31 me estão a pesar…

Mas não, não é isso, eu sempre soube que a minha geração é a melhor que já existiu, e todas as outras a seguir estão irremediavelmente perdidas e condenadas a ficar sempre atrás. É um facto da vida. :-)

Musiquinhas cotas

Descobri, graças a uns amigos das aulas de dança, que no bar do Inatel em Oeiras (no passeio marítimo) há um senhor que às quintas-feiras toca ao vivo.

Agora bares com música ao vivo há muitos. Não que eu seja grande frequentador, sou mais de ficar em casa agarrado ao computador ou a ler ou assim, mas também verdade seja dita que não conheço assim tantos sítios que realmente me atraiam… Mas adiante, não é isto que eu quero dizer.

O que este bar tem de particular, ou melhor, o que o músico tem de particular é o repertório. É que não se adequa claramente àquilo que se espera de um bar moderno ou jovem, não. O senhor toca coisas como Paul Simon, James Taylor, Don McLean, Rod Stewart (gasp! há sempre qualquer coisa que estraga o arranjinho…) e até músicas dele (mas que podiam perfeitamente ser de um Zeca Afonso). Ou seja, aquelas músicas que os meus pais ouviam quando eu era novo e que ainda hoje acabo por ouvir de vez em quando em casa. Aliás, diga-se de passagem que eu conhecia quase tudo o que ele tocou, excepção feita a um blues que eu quase juro que deve ser Eric Clapton, mas que não posso confirmar porque realmente acho que nunca tinha ouvido.

Clara e assumidamente música de cotas. Mas muito fixe naquele ambiente. E na realidade eu, em termos musicais, oiço (e aprecio) quase tudo.

Pelo que me apercebi ele vai estar por lá mais um mês (era suposto ser apenas durante o verão, mas as pessoas continuam a ir lá e ele está a prolongar a estação). Acho que ganhei programa para as próximas quintas-feiras à noite. E, ainda por cima, até o horário é fixe: das 21h30 às 23h00, mesmo bom para me levantar cedo e ir ao ginásio à sexta de manhã! (Enfim, a mentalização é tudo, não é?)

On the whole song rating business or “boy am I complicated!”

How people can actually rate their songs and keep playlists of things they like is, quite frankly, beyond me.

Oh I do rate all my songs in iTunes, and I do have my playlists. But the thing is that after I rated a song I keep constantly updating it’s rating. It is a never-ending process.

It just seems that there is no way on earth I can be absolutely accurate about how much I like a song. There are many, many examples of songs which have swung from 4 starts to 2 and then back to 3 or 4. The songs don’t change, of course, but my mood does.

And this is only on a small, day-to-day scale, let alone songs or albums I absolutely adored a few years back and I just can’t stand now.

So when I hear people talking about the “album of their lives” or their “favorite song of all time” or how great their playlists are and how they only have music they absolutely love on their iPod and how all those songs are their absolute favorite I actually envy them.

The closest thing I’ve ever come to this bliss is to have “mood” playlists, one kind of playlist for when I’m coding and need the power jolt, another one for when I’m really happy, yet another for when I’m angry, another for when I’m depressed and so on. And the most peculiar thing about this is that when I listen to one of the playlists which I’m not in the mood to hear, I hate it and actually hate most of the songs in it. And yet they are usually rated 4 or above (nothing gets on a playlist with a rating bellow 4) so I do love them when I’m in the right mood.

So, again, my point is: how can people just rate a song and put it on a “favorites” playlist and actually listen to it all the time, no matter what, and like it? Boy I wish I could…

Music blogs

The (not so) new generation of music blogs or mp3 blogs or whatever you may call it are indeed a great idea.

With the right setup you can spend part of your (working) day listening to new music with just a few clicks of the mouse.

The concept is very simple: mp3 tracks which are presented as samples of a band’s work or album and which are available for a limited time-span so as not to irate the RIAA gods (or is it demons?).

I’ve had a leg up from Fred on catching up on the interesting blogs and even though I’ve only started “tuning in” a couple of days ago I’ve already discovered quite a few good songs and bands that show great promise.

Radio Paradise and DI’s Chillout are really getting some strong competition these days.

Spam

Nearly 600 spam posts from the same guy between midnight and two o’clock tonight.

Guess I will have to consider more carefully making the comment system fully moderated.

It’s just sad.

darcs

darcs is a version control system touted by it’s author as “a replacement for CVS”.

From the project’s page:

darcs is decentralized, based on a “theory of patches” with roots in quantum mechanics.

Groovy!

It includes a CGI interface that allows browsing of the repository via the Internet.

Resources

• Homepage;
• The wiki;
• Using Darcs for CVS addicts.

My notes on darcs

These notes where taken either through the documentation reading process or through its usage.

Off-line operation and branch philosophy

Each copy of the source is a fully functional branch or every copy of your source code is a full repository. This allows for developing off-line and totally experimental branches with full darcs functionality available and later, if so desired these changes are then merged in with the other repositories.

The contrast with CVS is very clear in that in CVS there is only one master repository and each local copy is check-out once and all check-ins and so on must be performed with on-line access to the repository.

The theory of patches behind darcs

The philosophy behind darcs is that of patches. Each patch has some meta-information associated with it and this enables some advanced manipulation of the repository and the patches. The basic premisses behind the patches formalism are the following:

1. Every patch is invertible;
2. Sequential patches may be re-ordered but there may be dependencies between patches which may affect this re-ordering property;
3. Parallel patches (in different parallel trees) can be merged, and the result of a set of merges is independent of the order in which the merges are performed.

Layers of a versioning tool

1. The ability to manipulate changes. This one is central and fundamental do darcs;
2. A database system to keep track of the changes. In darcs this consists of an ordered list of patches (and the patches themselves), one per file;
3. A distribution system for the changes. the system for achieving this depends on a dumb server (Apache or some sort of NetworkFileSystem) for pulling patches but uses a more reliable/secure mechanism (scp or GPG-signed email messages) when pushing patches in.

Feature short-list

• Local record changes: A record is equivalent to a CVS checkin and it is always done locally obviating the need for network access or even a special disconnected mode;

CVS to darcs command correspondence

Meme du jour

The llama song is so last week…

The meme of the moment just has to be the banana phone. Even though it is old, it is always a classic!

Get re-acquainted with these and more boingboing’s earworm zen story.

Cascais.pm is alive!

Finaly, after a looong wait (since Yapc::Europe::2004 actually), Cascais.pm has come through.

Now it is time for me and Paulo to start getting the content together on the site and finding people to join the cause on that particular neck of the woods.

But the question that comes to mind is: Can you code Perl on the beach?

Extend your Ethernet

This weekend I got my hands on a couple of Corinex wall mounts and decided to test out how power-line Ethernet would pan out on my home.

My setup is particular in that I would want to use it to connect my attic with my main floor and I have X10 devices on the attic, so I was interested in checking out how power-line Ethernet and X10 would get along together on the same installation.

It turns out they get along famously, and even going through another phase into the attic I could still get 12Mbps out of the 14Mbps theoretical maximum for this equipment.

Apparently I can get my PVR in the attic and have the main server in the office do the file serving without having to worry about Wi-Fi connectivity.

Ping

Hello world,
I’m still here, despite the silence.

Lots of stuff happening which should have been mentioned as they were happening but where not. So I’ll do a short recap here and, most assuredly, leave almost half of it out but hey, that’s life in blog-land…

Automobile fun

Finally got my car re-shaped and re-painted after having bashed two doors in in my most recent vacation.
It sounds pretty awful when I put it this way but it really wasn’t, there where just some scratches and it had a little bit bashed in, but I live near the sea and I don’t like rusty cars and anyway the car is new so to the shop it went and out it came looking like new.

Now the funny thing is that while my new car (Ford Focus C-Max) was getting painted I got a little Ford Fiesta from the car shop to drive around. I’ve had a Fiesta a while ago and my wife currently has one herself but after four years driving a Renault Clio and now with the big C-Max I had almost forgotten how fun it is to drive the Fiesta. It may be small, it may have a weak engine and so on but it is just so much fun!
I think it has something to do with the way you are seated so low (as in near the road) and the way the engine, while weak, is just so nervous (it doesn’t get you high speeds but it sure gets you to it’s top speed fast). And the way it starts to slide while curving but in a thoroughly controlled way. And surely the way you feel the speed in it plays a huge part too, when you are going at 100Km/h you feel like you’re doing maybe 150Km/h. What a fantastic car!

I guess I’d better stop now before I say something that really gets me in trouble in the (very unlikely) event that Tuxa stumbles upon this… ;-)

But the fun is over anyway, my big C-Max is back and now I have to be really careful not to go over 140Km/h when I’m just trying to cruise lazily along the high-way…

#0000ff

The woes of corporate life in the tech-industry or “The Blue Packet”.
A satire by Rui of the product development cycle in the mobile industry which resonates altogether too much with the real life of many a person I know…

Hang on to your hats

Fedora Core 3 is out (we’ve had it mirrored for a few days now but only got the go-ahead to make it public late monday just like all the mirrors out there).
I’ve pretty much dropped Linux on the desktop after getting my Mac but I still have a RedHat9-based desktop at home which I sometimes fire up as it is the only way I currently have to get music from my MP3 collection into the house music system.
As such I haven’t tried it myself (it will be some time before I start upgrading the servers, I’m not that crazy) but as always people are searing at it and people are swearing by it.
I’ve actually looked a bit at the Evolution version which comes with it and it does look good but then some people are really having a hard time with it so I’ll just let it roll for a while…

Our numbers are growing each day

Yet another big mouth which, for the time being, prefers to remain anonymous.
He’s trying to get the hang of this blogging thingie. Will it last? Will he like it? Will it be a hit?
Who knows? As long as he has fun that’s the point of it, right?
Good luck to you Mr. Blue.
Oh yes, it’s in portuguese only (at least for now).

Get thee behind me…

Someone who has nothing better to do is tempting me with a possible price reduction on a Canon EF 17-40 f/4L USM lens (which is already on my wishlist so he knows I’m vulnerable to his fiendish attacks).
Yes you, you know who you are… Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?
This is starting to look like an arms race! (Private joke, sorry everyone else).

Assorted temptations

As if that wasn’t enough, Melo found out about a whole lot of nice, bright and shinny toys to spend our hard earned money on. <sigh…>

Well then, that’s it for now. Isn’t my life interesting? :-)

Growl

I can’t believe it took me this long to try out something that most everyone who has already tried has been praising so highly!

You know how it sucks that each and every application you have, and which needs to get your attention sometimes, has it’s own mechanism to do so?
I get annoyed by it constantly and I hate the lack of uniformity and especially the way some apps don’t allow me to configure the way I want it to talk to me.

What would be nice was for the system to provide a generic notification mechanism, with an open interface that all applications could use and which could be configured at the system level, both for the notification method and appearance but also for each individual application.

Well, Growl does just that! And even though it can be improved it already does a bang-up job.

Baptizado do Diogo

Foi ontem (7 de Novembro) o baptizado do Diogo (o meu primeiro sobrinho).

De cada vez que há um acontecimento mais importante referente a ele eu apercebo-me que ainda não me entrou por completo o significado total do Diogo ter nascido.

Os meus pais são avós. Os meus tios são tios-avós. Os meus avós são bisavós!!

How cool is that? :-):w

Tim Booth at the Aula Magna

Just came back from the concert.

First off I just have to say that I like Tim Booth a lot. And I liked James a lot too (probably even more). And they (James) have been to Portugal more times than I care to remember. And I managed to miss every single one of their concerts. Every. Single. One. That’s what being young, broke and stupid does to you.
Well then, now that that’s out of the way let’s get on with it.

This concert was based mainly on Tim’s new album, Bone, a few tracks from his previous one, Booth and the Bad Angel (made by him and Angelo Badalamenti —that’s right the one from Twin Peaks and so on— and which I still like even better than Bone) and a couple of songs from James.

The concert was great, albeit starting almost an hour late. I’m definitely getting old as this things just piss me off. Actually no, I’ve always hated this kind of thing. Not in another type of concert like in a festival or something like that where you expect it to happen and don’t care at that point, but in a single, booked concert? Almost an hour? Come on!

Still they did get there and they did put on a show. And what a show! This is clearly a band made up of people who know their stuff. Tim is a great composer, this is well known (and I’m not counting tastes here, if you hate it, you hate it) and also a great performer, but the rest of the band is more than capable of carrying their own weight around him. The playing was almost flawless during the whole show and even the hardest vocals were always right on the stop. Just great!

As I said the musics that were played were mostly from Tim’s two latest albums (heh, just can’t bring myself around to say latest CDs… Guess it is just as well I don’t say latest records. If you don’t know what the heck I’m on about you’re too young, go read some Marilyn Manson reviews now, shoo!) but there was still a great rendition of Laid and another mind shattering version of Sometimes. But the best part was that they did not play Sit Down, despite the shrieking pleas from some half crazed girl on the middle of the room! :-)

All in all a great (almost) hour and a half concert with a very simple lineup (one guitar, one bass guitar, one keyboard and one guy on main vocals), very loud sound, lots of distortion on the guitars… Sometimes it sounded like the good old rock concerts of my youth. Sometimes it was just so soft. Other times the vocals just filled the room all by themselves. A great time all around.

And I like the Aula Magna room more and more each time. This time there was even a girl siting a few sits over with a great big SLR camera and a great big lens on it, shooting almost in front of everyone (not to mention all the point-and-shoots and the cell-phone cameras) and no one bothered her. Now this was frustrating as I was in the front row of the “normal” seats (not the doctorate chairs but right behind them) and I could have got some beautiful shots from that position. Oh well, maybe next time I’ll remember.

I’ve been real lucky lately regarding concerts. Almost every one I’ve been to has been great, as opposed to last year when I had some big disappointments. Either I’m getting better at picking them (and people who offer me the tickets —as was the case this time— too) or I’ve just has plain dumb luck. Either way, let the good times roll! :-)

Feriado

A mudança de hora é uma chatice e uma estupidez de todo o tamanho. às cinco e meia da tarde é praticamente de noite e ainda vamos perder um bom bocado de dia até ao pico do Inverno.

E agora o meu (fabuloso) dia de feriado:

Estou inscrito no ginásio Solinca há quase um ano. No início, com o objectivo de me pôr em forma para a época de ski, fui bastante assíduo. Mal sabia que não iria poder ir esquiar nesse ano, mas adiante. Passado esse período inicial e visto que eu detesto o ginásio, comecei a ir cada vez menos.
Hoje voltei ao ginásio de manhã, após uns meses largos de ausência e aconteceu uma coisa que certamente não haverá muita gente com quem se tenha passado o mesmo: quando cheguei ao ginásio e fui procurar a minha ficha com os esquemas que estava a seguir não a encontrei no lugar. Quando pedi a um dos monitores para ver o que se passava fiquei a saber que como já não aparecia por lá há tanto tempo a minha ficha foi retirada e “expirou”. Tenho de fazer a avaliação de novo. Não uma reavaliação, mas uma avaliação de primeira vez. De novo!
Se me preocupasse o suficiente com isso isto seria embaraçoso! :-)

Bom, de tarde fomos aproveitar o sol (que tivemos a sorte incrível de ter hoje e que não se deve repetir muito mais vezes este ano) até à Costa da Caparica e depois ao Guincho.

Entretanto as tentativas de encontrar um cinema com a versão original do Shark Tale a horas interessantes falhou redondamente. Acho que se quisermos ver esse filme vamos ter de ir para Lisboa ou então contentarmo-nos com a versão dobrada.
Claro que há sempre o DVD dentro de algum tempo, mas a Tuxa gostava mesmo de ir ao cinema vê-lo e desta vez sabia bem não perder o filme como de costume…

Moon shots

Tonight there was a big (although not full) moon right in front of my living room’s balcony.
This prompted me to try something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: take some pictures of the moon as seen through Tuxa’s telescope.

This is a small and weak telescope but I does allow a great view of the moons surface even with the smallest lens (the one I used for the shots.

Of course I don’t have a camera adapter for the telescope (yet…) so I ended up trying my luck with a really flimsy setup: I put the telescope on its tripod pointing at the moon and used the angular eye piece so that the piece was pointing back and upwards but very low (due to the moon being really high in the sky). I then setup my EOS 10D camera on it’s own (very old and broken but still serviceable in controlled conditions) tripod and got the lens as close to the telescope’s eye piece as I possibly could.

Then I just fired away a few shots and after checking out the results I wasn’t too disappointed (considering the precarious conditions I to take them in).

[There where a couple of examples here, but unfortunately the photos got lost in the way.]

I just wish I had remembered to clean out the telescope’s lens… :-)

Estado de bacalhau

Hoje estou como o bacalhau: de molho.

Desculpas antecipadas a toda a gente com quem estive ontem, muitos de vocês se seguirão… :-(

Bom, vou ali fazer um chá e já volto.

It’s a geek thing…

Consider this:

• I know 5 geeks who are looking for a wiki-type CMS for their personal usage (either they have one which they have outgrown or they are looking for a new thing, but this is irrelevant);
• One of them (1!!) is looking at what is out there and considering what best suits him. His approach is to find a good enough tool, use it and take it from there, making his changes to the tool if and when they are necessary;
• The other three (4!!) have looked around and are now at different stages of… rolling out their own.

So out of a (not so) random sample of 6 geeks (I’m including me here), two are using or planing to use something which is out there, changing and developing it as needed and four have just dove right on and are either planing or developing their own wiki implementation.

I’ve heard about diversity fostering quality but this is ridiculous! :)
I mean, how soon will any of them have anything to show for it? Come to think of it how many of them will actually get anywhere? This will be interesting to follow…

But even more importantly, after having developed all the basic features of any wiki (cross-referencing, indexing, editing, versioning, automagic linking, etc., etc.) will they have the patience to then implement all the really new and extra cool features they are envisioning?
Because if they don’t they’ll just end up with yet another mediocre-featured wiki on their hands.

The good part is that someone could then take it and develop the rest into a new and great wiki. But then someone who could do this will probably prefer to do everything from the beginning.

You see, it’s a geek thing!

Ah, it’s great being a geek, just think of all the new and exciting versions of the wheel we will have to look forward to in the coming years! :D

This evening was not devoted to…

Unlike most geeks I know around here I didn’t spend my evening mucking around Apple’s site drooling over the new (and extremely cool) iPod photo or spending obscene amounts of money on Apple’s new iTunes music store in Portugal.

The fact is that the iPod photo looks like it could very well be an alternative to the Delkin Picture Pad but I still have to look into it a lot deeper to make that decision.
Still, from what I’ve seen of the price point it came out at in the USA (and guessing what it will cost in Europe) I would much more easily fork out for one of these than for a standard (music-only) iPod. Yes, that’s right, I don’t actually own one! :-)

And as for the Portuguese iTMS, well, it is cool, but I don’t think I will be a very good customer there just yet. I still have a strong physical relationship with CDs…
Then again if that is ever going to change than this is a perfect way to go about it!

But anyway my evening was spent (the geek-side of it) playing around with Eclipse (the IDE) on my iBook (it looks so much better than it did when I last looked at it some 2 years ago!) and iView Media Pro which is looking like it will replace iPhoto as my photo management application on the desktop. The testing is underway and it is nearly finished indexing my photo storage (an SMB drive) with its 7400-plus pictures (mainly in Canon RAW format). It took something like two and a half hours but even while it is indexing everything moving about on the catalog and looking at pictures and picture information is blazing fast comparing with my 3500-plus local pictures in iPhoto. It’s not even fair!

Update: Yep, it was too good to be true, after nearly 3 hours indexing all those pictures (and doing a pretty good job of it) iView Media Pro just went bang at the very end not having saved the catalog, of course. <sigh>

CVS - Concurrent Versions System

CVS is a version control system, that is, a system you can use to record the history of your files and it’s changes.
This system is usually applied to software development in order to maintain history of the evolution of the source code.

CVS allows you to easily retrieve old versions of each file that is under it’s control.

In order to save space on the disk and for the sake of efficiency, instead of saving every version of every file you have ever created, CVS stores all the versions of a file in a single file, with some extra data in it so that it only stores the differences between versions.

CVS also helps when a group of people is working on the same project. Usually every developer works in his own directory, and CVS merges the work when each developer is done.

As good and widely used as it is, CVS has it’s limitations and it is a rather old system which already shows it’s age.

There are currently a number of systems being developed in order to replace it and a few other systems are already there for some time now. Some (but only a few) interesting alternatives to CVS are ARCH, Subversion and darcs.

Resources

• Online CVS usage and administration manual;
• Running arbitrary scripts under CVS;
• CVS Magic: bringing files back to life;
• Open Source development with CVS - The on-line version of the excellent book by the same name.

So can you or can’t you dodge a Magic Missile?

This is the question hounding the minds of [A]D&D’s players for millennia. Or something approaching that.

Well now, thanks to the Binary Bonsai I know.

And you can know too since I couldn’t resist downloading a copy and keeping it for posterity, so if you want to know the answer brace yourself and get this (8.5MB) .wmv clip with the answer (or just get it from the Bonsai if my puny little ADSL line is too clogged for you).

[Update: It turns out that after a few years I managed to get a grip and deleted the file. It was funny, though. :-)]

Automobile tips

I am almost completely ignorant when it comes to cars. Engines, mechanics, the electric system… All of it is a big black box to me. And I like it that way!

The car is first, foremost and last of all a means of getting from A to B with the most possible comfort and the minimal possible hassle.

I do like to have a lot of features in my cars, but that’s just because of the aforementioned comfort, not for the features’ sake.

Even so, we must sometimes know more that we wished we had to and this is where I collect those (unfortunately) necessary pieces of information.

Jump starting a car with a dead battery

This happened to me once and I had to find out the correct procedure to do it. If I ever need to do it again here is how to do it safely:

1. Turn off both cars;
2. Turn off each and every electrical part of each car;
3. Plug in the red wire to the positive (+) pin of the dead battery;
4. Plug in the other end of the red wire to the positive (+) pin of the good battery;
5. Plug in the black wire to the negative (-) pin of the good battery;
6. Plug in the other end of the black wire to a clean metal part of the car with the dead battery. This metal part should be on the engine block to provide good grounding. Avoid connecting the wire to the negative (-) pin of the dead battery directly as this is what causes the greatest risk of explosion;
7. Turn on the car with the good battery;
8. Wait for at least 5 minutes in order to let the dead battery charge a little and give you a hand starting the other car;
9. Turn on the car with the dead battery. If it doesn’t turn on on the first 2 or 3 attempts wait a bit longer. Leave the car on for the rest of the procedure;
10. Disconnect the black wire from the car with the dead battery;
11. Disconnect the other end of the black wire from the car with the good battery;
12. Disconnect the red wire from the car with the good battery;
13. Disconnect the other end of the red wire from the car with the dead battery;
14. Leave the car with the dead battery running for as long as possible (ideally something like an hour or so) so that the battery has a chance to charge.

The wiki

It lives!

There is a saying in Portugal (I’m guessing there is an equivalent saying for most languages but I just don’t know what the English version of it goes like) that says something about the perfect being an enemy of the good.

What it means is that sometimes you just have to go with what is good (… enough) and leave what is perfect for a later time.

This is what I’ve decided to do with the wiki on NunoNunes.org.

It is not done, it is not really ready for the “big time” but it is there, I can (and do) put information in it and I can (and do) use it to retrieve it later. So it is a lot more useful to me if I have it linked in from the main navigation bar as it should be.

There are a lot of details to cover, there is need for a major design overhaul (… or is there…) and this will probably not be the wiki-platform that I will say I’m fully satisfied with, but it is there and it does the job. And it does it quite well actually.

So that’s it, I welcome the latest member of the NunoNunes.org site: the wiki! :-)

[Update: The wiki has, in the mean time, been de-activated.]

Gelado de noz com azeite

Esta sobremesa foi algo que eu experimentei num restaurante de um hotel em Madrid e que nem sei bem o que me deu para a ter pedido logo para começar…

A receita vai parecer bastante estranha (e é extremamente simples) mas, se for feita como deve ser, é simplesmente deliciosa!

Essencialmente a receita consiste nos seguintes passos:

• Fazer uma bola grande de gelado de noz (preferencialmente sem pedaços, mas se não houver alternativa não é grave) e cobri-la com pedaços de sal grosso;
• Colocar a bola de gelado numa taça relativamente pequena;
• Deitar azeite bom e à temperatura ambiente na taça (sem ser por cima da bola) até ficar a cobrir cerca de um quinto da bola. A quantidade de azeite é difícil de determinar e é crucial para a sobremesa, pelo que tem de se experimentar até acertar;
• Preparar previamente um pedaço de chocolate quente (do tipo de cobertura tradicional de gelado com chocolate quente) e servir numa taça à parte.

E pronto, serve-se assim e (no meu caso, pelo menos) deita-se o chocolate quente por cima imediatamente antes de comer.

As quantidades de sal e azeite podem variar muito com o gosto pessoal, pelo que terá de se experimentar fazer algumas vezes e ir afinando até se obter o resultado pretendido.

The Antipope de Robert Rankin

Primeiro livro da trilogia de Brentford.

Embora seja muitas vezes comparado com Terry Prattchet não acho semelhanças de maior entre os dois. O tipo de humor de Rankin é diferente, mais acutilante, pelo menos neste primeiro livro, e mais impregnado de referências claramente inglesas às quais é mais difícil chegar. O setting também não me é dos mais apelativos, embora claro que seja impossível comparar seja o que for com o genial discworld.

O livro é interessante, mas não é um block-buster, no entanto a série promete, sobretudo depois de amadurecer um pouco. Vamos ver nos livros seguintes. Os livros iniciais do discworld também não são propriamente os melhores da série…

• Livro: The Antipope
• Autor: Robert Rankin

Night Watch de Terry Prattchet

Estava em pre-order há uns meses, pelo que se pode dizer que sim, sou um fã! Mas independentemente disso, este livro é talvez, dos melhores da série da Watch.
Claro que tem de se gostar da série, e há muito quem não goste, mas pessoalmente acho que a City Watch, as Bruxas e a Morte andam taco-a-taco nas melhores séries do discworld.

Parece que com este livro a série discworld ganha um fôlego que aparentemente tinha perdido nos últimos livros.

Recomendado a conhecedores mas para iniciantes tenho as minhas dúvidas…

• Livro: Night Watch
• Autor: Terry Prattchet

Cryptonomicon de Neal Stephenson

Uau! Que livro fabuloso.

É bastante denso e é preciso coragem para passar o primeiro quarto do livro. Uma pessoa pode facilmente desesperar com a quantidade de informação que é despejada nesta parte e com a quantidade de factos e pessoas que aparecem completamente out of the blue e, aparentemente, sem relação nenhuma. Mas quem perseverar tem pela frente uma bela recompensa.

O livro é, como já disse, um pouco denso e é, talvez, um pouco difícil de seguir para uma pessoa menos inclinada para questões técnico-cientificas, mas para quem conseguir seguir a história é fabuloso. Não é demasiado rebuscado nem negro, mantém uma coerência histórica notável (para um romance, claro que isto não é um compêndio de história) e o argumento é retorcido até ao final. A acção é constante e, no geral, é um livro que nos deixa “satisfeitos” com a sensação de uma boa leitura.

• Livro: Cryptonomicon
• Autor: Neal Stephenson

The Code Book de Simon Singh

Uma perspectiva histórica da evolução da criptografia e das técnicas associadas ao secretismo ao longo dos tempos.

O livro contém partes técnicas bastante detalhadas mas escritas de forma a serem bastante acessíveis até para pessoas de fora do meio.

Muito bem conseguido, o livro torna-se uma leitura interessante e, por virtude das partes de história, bastante leve.

• Livro: The Code Book
• Autor: Simon Singh

Fermat’s Last Theorem de Simon Singh

Boa leitura. Embora não chegue bem ao nível do Code Book lê-se bem e sem grande necessidade de conhecimentos profundos de matemática.

Quem percebe de matemática e queira saber com mais detalhe a história completa da prova deste teorema terá de seguir as sugestões de leitura aqui apresentadas (que parecem cobrir bastante bem o assunto), quem pretenda simplesmente ler o livro pelo prazer de saber coisas ficará bem servido. No entanto parece-me que o autor preferiu tomar o caminho de tentar contar a história num estilo demasiado romanceado e eu duvido que alguém que queira simplesmente ler um bom romance se vire para este livro.

• Livro: Fermat’s Last Theorem
• Autor: Simon Singh

Burning Chrome de William Gibson

Embora não tenha a fama do Neuromancer acaba por ser uma leitura de qualidade superior.
Composto por uma série de short stories de pura ficção científica, tem 3 histórias passadas no Sprawl e 7 outras que exploram temas que vão desde a aventura espacial Soviética (sim, o livro está bastante desactualizado) ;-) até às alucinações de um fotógrafo on the road no interior dos EUA.

Muito interessante, com histórias de leitura rápida e compulsiva é um livro leve e de fácil leitura.

Autor: William Gibson

The Difference Engine de William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

Só para quem gostar muito do género.

A leitura é um bocado difícil e o livro torna-se maçudo muito rapidamente. A parte mais interessante é a da acção que se passa mais ou menos no meio do livro, mas para chegar até lá temos de passar por partes confusas e desinteressantes e depois da acção o resto do livro parece um bocado forçado, como se ele devesse ter menos um terço do que tem na realidade.

Claro que há os admiradores que adoram este livro, mas para os típicos fans de FC é melhor ter muito cuidado…

Autores: William Gibson e Bruce Sterling

Happy birthday

Today I’ll get off work earlier because it is my wife’s birthday.

So I’ll just repeat it here once more: Happy Birthday Tuxa!

Although… Come to think of it I don’t have to wish anything, I’ll just have to make sure she does get it. :-)

AdiumX - one less icon in the dock

For a long time now I’ve been using Proteus and iChat for my instant messaging needs. It is a very good multi-protocol client with a lot of nice features and a interface I rather like.
But even so I started having some issues with it and it started bugging me enough to make me look at alternatives.

So last week I got Adium and I’ve been using it since then to really get the feel for it.
Of course since neither of these clients supported .MAC accounts I still had to use iChat for those contacts, but I was used to it so no problem there.

What I found was that Adium is also a very good multi-protocol client, with a set of features which paralleled those of Proteus and a bit more stable on the Jabber accounts (although still not perfect). The only feature I had on Proteus and lost on Adium which made a difference for me was the ability to group accounts under a single contact (an actual person) and have it decide which account or protocol to use to get in touch with that person without bothering me with the details.

This was the state of things until this morning when I found out there was a new version of Adium around. When I started reading the release notes (yes I actually do read them) I couldn’t believe my eyes: not only did it get the ability to group accounts under a single contact but it also now supports the .MAC protocol and Rendezvous-based messaging.
This means I can now group all the accounts I have for a person (Yahoo!, MSN, .MAC, Jabber, ICQ, etc.) on a single IM client and have only that client open, without the need for iChat as an extra icon on the dock.

Hurra! This looks like it will be my client of choice for the time to come. At least until iChat get Jabber support, that is, then I’ll have to re-evaluate.

Perspective

One of the best strips I’ve seen in a while, and a new one too (for me at least). I am quite versed in Calvin and Hobbes and I don’t recall ever having read this one.

It’s all a matter of perspective I guess. And scale. Yup, scale.

Probing patterns on nunonunes.org

I obviously have iptables running on my gateway at home (where this site is hosted) and I filter everything I am not expecting to receive.

One thing I’ve noticed while making the usual round over the log files is that I have a really high incidence of attempts to reach services which I do not provide and which are, therefore, blocked.

So some time ago I decided to graph it on mrtg.

This is the result so far. The values are in incidents per minute, not per second, but even so this is high.

[Image lost to the ages, but it was impressive. Honest!]

The next step is to try and graph HTTP exploit attempts. If I dare to do it, that is…

The geek-phone

Rui has sent the usual provocative link.
But this time it got me, I must admit I fell for it, damn it! :-)

Well, it would be kind of kool to be able to run a top on your phone, but then again, named??

Domingo de manhã

O pequeno-almoço de hoje consistiu de sumo de fruta, chá, ovos quentes e torradas com manteiga, queijo, mel e compotas.

O Outono tem realmente coisas boas, já sentia a falta destes pequenos almoços de Domingo mais aconchegantes.

Última aula de vela

Hoje sim, foi um dia de vela mais a sério.

Para começar o mar estava bastante picado (o que é mau, fomos os únicos veleiros na água num local onde costumam haver montes de barcos). Depois o vento estava bem forte. E ainda apanhámos uma bela chuvada.

Entrámos logo de vela grande totalmente rizada e estai de tempo e fizémos apenas mareações muito simples e seguras para não haver azares. Aliás só saímos para o mar devido à insistência dos monitores, porque o resto do pessoal, incluíndo o barco de apoio achava que, apesar de perfeitamente navegável, iria ser um bocado duro.

Depois do almoço é que já não deu para nos fazermos ao mar e fomos apenas recolher os barcos.

Mas a verdade é que é muitíssimo mais interessante velejar assim do que com vento fraco.

Hoje já me soube muito bem as minhas botas e o corta-vento pesado. Ainda assim cheguei totalmente molhado a terra.

E agora para o aperfeiçoamento.

More on server upgrade

While I was at it I installed mod_gzip on this server.

I played around a bit with the configuration and I think I got it right and everything is OK, but if you notice anything unusual let me know, please.

Update: now on the RSS feeds too. Duh!

Upgrades

Trying to compile php-curl into PHP resulted in a major upgrade to this site’s structure.

It is now using Apache 1.3.31 and PHP 4.3.9.

This was definitely not a planed upgrade and some down time was experienced. Also some major headaches as I was trying to maintain my legacy configuration from the past several years. Only when I decided to take the server down, move it to the side and do a fresh install did I get it running as I wanted it to.

So on the whole this is good news. I think…

Oh and in the end I did get php-curl working. Good for me, he?

Update: It turns out spending too much time playing around with Apache’s configuration and modules got to me. I didn’t want to compile modcurl_ into my PHP, I wanted to compile php-curl. Duh! Thanks to Melo for asking about mod_curl, thus making me aware of the mistake. It is corrected in the body of the post.

Dia da recolha anual de pinhas

Aproveitámos o dia estar bom para não fazer absolutamente nada de produtivo.

Levantámo-nos tarde, fomos tomar o pequeno almoço ao café que fica por baixo da casa nova do Paulo (tem o que são provavelmente as melhores torradas que á comi fora de casa, em grandes fatias de pão saloio —as “torradas caseiras”) e fomos até à Ericeira passear e almoçámos por lá.

Na volta lembrámo-nos que está na altura apanha anual de pinhas para a lareira e a salamandra. É sempre melhor do que apenas lenha miúda e nós consumimos sempre muito. O problema é que só nos costumamos lembrar destas coisas quando já caíram as primeiras chuvadas do Outono e as pinhas que apanhamos já costumam estar meio húmidas.

Mas este ano não! Encontrámos montes de pinhas, perfeitamente secas e em óptimo estado na estrada para a Barragem do Rio da Mula.
Já no ano passado tínhamos apanhado umas quantas lá e outras mais acima na serra (isto é tudo na serra de Sintra, para quem não conhece), mas foram muito menos e um pouco húmidas.
Este ano foi um regalo, prevê-se um Inverno em grande conforto cá em casa! ;-)

Todos para barlavento para equilibrar o barco! Estamos a adornar muito! Vamos parar para rizar as velas! Orça já!

Tudo isto foi o que não se ouviu hoje no mar.

De manhã o vento começou muito fraco e, mal saímos da barra, fomos arrastados pela corrente, fortíssima, até quase a Carcavelos. OK, não foi bem, mas quase…

Depois o vento levantou um bocadito, mas ainda estivemos umas boas 2 horas para subir o que tínhamos descido logo no início.

O que vale é que depois ainda tivémos talvez umas horita de vento decente. A Tuxa foi no lugar do timoneiro bastante tempo, com pouco vento, mas ainda assim fez tantas viragens de bordo que já está especialista.
O mesmo não se pode dizer de mim que acabei por pegar no leme quando havia um pouco mais de vento, mas por pouco tempo. Logo depois de passar para o leme o vento caíu e foi toda a gente para terra almoçar.

De tarde foi a desgraça total: sem vento absolutamente nenhum acabámos por ir (a motor) até ao farol do Bugio tomar uns banhos de mar e de sol.

Esta parte até nem foi má de todo, mas claro que toda a gente preferia estar a velejar! E como seria de esperar, quando acabámos de desaparelhar os barcos e estávamos a vir embora lá se levanta um belo vento. Bah!

Mas mesmo assim o resultado final foi o mesmo da semana passada: ficámos tão podres depois de tanto tempo no mar que nem conseguimos ir à noite de dança mensal do Trópico de Dança…
Enfim, acho que o resto do pessoal da dança nos perdoará. :-)

Diana Krall at the Coliseu de Lisboa

Friday night, as an appetizer for the weekend I went to see Diana Krall at the Coliseu de Lisboa.

I like Diana a lot, even though heavy jazz music is not my strongest point —I just don’t understand a lot of it. This concert was heavily jazzy so it wasn’t exactly one of my all-time favorites but still I had a great time and I quite liked to hear her sing and play live.

Even with a big cold she managed to sing exquisitely and she is very entertaining on stage. Not by doing crazy or flamboyant stuff, but by simply talking with the public in a simple, direct and friendly manner.

I did get the feeling she would be more at home (and I would probably enjoy it a whole lot more) on a small club with a lot less people watching but this was not bad at all!

A great start for the weekend, even if I had to get up today really early to go sailing.

del.icio.us API is, indeed, in flux

I guess this has been happening for a couple of days now (maybe more?), but the API was slightly changed and functions like “posts/recent” are not returning what they should. The “extended” field of the responses just mimics the “description” field now.

This is why the listing of links in my homepage is kind of weird with the description exactly equal to the title. Still, it does show that they are working on the API which can only mean good things are coming! (We hope…) ;-)

[Update:] Things are really moving in there. The API is acting as it should again.

HHGTTG - now in realtime

Just found out last night that even those of us who are not in range of a BBC radio 4 transmitter can still listen to it live.

What that means is that we can listen to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy episodes in real time instead of having to wait until after the repetition on thursday for it to be available on the web.

All you have to do is go to “the page” and click on either the “listen live” link or the “Radio Player” button. It is broadcasting to the net 24x7!

So yes Melo, there is a point in having the original episodes airing dates on the ICS calendar —removed the old out-dated link— with a warning before.

I just knew it would come in handy! :-)

Geocaching - the logs

Since I am stuck at home waiting for a friend to come and give me a lift to work (I have no keys to my own garage… Don’t ask), I decided to finally log my cache hunts this summer: LandMania and As pozas de Riocaldo.

Look for the log by gambuzino.

Journey of the Sorcerer across the Galaxy

As some of you may know by now I’m a big fan of Douglas Adams. In particular I like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy very much. Both the printed and the radio version. The TV version a bit less so.

I know the radio episodes of the first two series quite well as I sometimes listen to them on my car on the way home. Now I don’t actually know why , but I’ve always assumed the introduction music for the episodes was an original.

Cut to YAPC::Europe::2004 where a speaker (in a lightning talk, if I’m not mistaken) demonstrated a clever usage of Perl scripts for controlling it’s Xmms while listening to an Internet radio station.

The radio station the speaker used as an example was Radio Paradise. After the conference I’ve started listening to it out of curiosity and I actually ended up liking it quite a lot and I’ve been spending my days connected to it.

So now the funniest thing happens: I am working along, listening to the radio when suddenly I start to hear the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Or rather, the musical intro to it.

And then I find out that no, it isn’t actually the intro to another episode but rather a music by The Eagles which is called “Journey of the Sorcerer”. Complete with the high pitched ending of the chorus section and all, the one that sounds just like the eighties high tech type sound that fitted so well in the radio episodes.

Funny old world, isn’t it?

Velejar

Velejar não e tão fácil como parece.

Tive ontem a segunda aula de vela (a primeira foi há 15 dias e faltei à segunda por estar em Belfast nesse fim-de-semana na sequência do YAPC) e confirmei o que já tinha achado da primeira vez.

Não que tenha havido nada de particularmente desastroso desta vez (como na primeira aula em que adornei tanto logo na primeira viragem de bordo que meti água e só não nos virámos devido à rápida reacção de todo o resto da tripulação) mas desta vez fomos dar a volta ao farol do Bugio e já deu para sentir um bocado do que é a corrente brutal do estuário do Tejo e a ondulação do mar. Fomos sem a monitora (os dois monitores foram acompanhando de longe no barco de apoio) e foi realmente… emocionante!

Desta vez já sabia os termos e o que estava a fazer (contraste total com a primeira aula em que a monitora nos dizia para fazermos coisas que eu tinha ouvido pela primeira vez há umas horas e não conseguia obviamente lembrar o que eram - daí as emoções fortes).

Assim este dia já correu bem melhor, mesmo com a ondulação, corrente, vento um bocadito mais forte, etc. e foi bastante divertido.

Mas mesmo assim continuo a achar que a vela não é propriamente um desporto fácil. E ainda não estou convencido que o mar é realmente o meu ambiente…

O facto de este curso ser intensivo também não ajuda nada, a carga horária que devia ser dispersa por 10 semanas é condensada em 5, o que faz com que estejamos no mar das 9h30 às 16h00 —o que dá mais tempo para cada um de nós fazer de timoneiro— mas também faz com que apenas tenhamos efectivamente 5 saídas para a água.
A vantagem dos cursos normais é que, apesar de termos menos tempo em cada dia temos muitos mais dias de aulas, pelo que nos podemos ir adaptando melhor ao ambiente do mar.
Enfim, não se pode ter tudo…

E claro que depois de tanto tempo no mar, a dar no duro, com um almoço muito sumário (afinal podemos virar com muita facilidade) e um pequeno almoço quase inexistente chegamos a casa, tomamos um banho e comemos e estamos prontos para cair na cama. Só que isto são umas 18h00, não é propriamente hora de ir para a cama num sábado!
Por outro lado esta semana também foi mais puxada por ter voltado a ter a aulas de dança na sexta à noite… Mas por outro lado ainda, é assim que vai ser até ao final do curso…
Já não sou claramente o jovenzinho fogoso que fui em tempos.

The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, The Tertiary Phase, Episode 1

In Real Audio, and WMP (5.1) or plain stereo. You’ll find it here.

Go get it soon, it will change next week.

Rant on the abuses of language

General practitioners’ style warning: this is a rant. A bad one, I’m in a bad mood today and I will vent in here about something totally weird. You may be offended by what I will say. But only if you are an idiot. :-)

Today I woke up in a bad mood. Sleeping too little does that to me. So maybe I shouldn’t have staid up so late watching Farscape episodes, but you know how it is in seasons transitions, it builds up and you can’t stop watching. And then the first episode of the new season comes along and boy is it anti-climatic! Anyway, I set myself up for that one as I know full well how that goes but hey, that’s life.

So, then, something happened this morning related to PDAs (more on that later on another post I’m letting mature in my head at this time) and it (combined with lack of sleep) got me in a bad mood. This in turn, combined with a really weird though association (you gotta love the human brain) turned my venting needs towards the topic which I will finally expose (to the two of you who made it this far).

So what’s this rant about after all? Let’s not start that way, let’s start with what it is not about: it is not about smokers. It may sound like it but it’s not. This is not about people how smoke in general, what it is about is people how smoke and don’t have the guts to admit it and abuse and distort words and language to hide that fact.

I could say that it is about stupid people. I could. But I won’t because I know an awful lot of people that do exactly what I’m on about and I don’t want to offend them so I’ll try and hold my tongue here… ;-)

Still a bit more of disclaimer to get things very clear: I’m not implying in any way that smokers are idiots or anything like that. Idiots exist everywhere and my problem is with them, not with smokers.

And so here it comes, hang on for the ride…

There are people who smoke. It’s their right (in some countries, anyway, but let’s not get sucked into that right now). There are people who have cut down on smoking. I know a lot of people who fall into this category. Good for them (or not, whatever). There are people who have quit smoking. They are close relatives to Sasquatch and probably live right up there with him. (Can you see where this is going yet?)

The above three-group category relates to the people I know myself and to my own experience. I know a lot of people who smoke, I know a lot of people who have cut down on their smoking and I don’t know a soul who has quit smoking.

Oh, I know a lot of people who claim they quit, yes, but I don’t know a single one who has actually done it. Sure, there are many reports of friends of cousins of colleague’s acquaintances who have quit smoking. Sometimes spectacularly so (from 20 packets a day to zero in one night) but just like Sasquatch everyone know of someone who knows of someone who has seen it, but no one has actually seen it themselves!

Now why does this bother me? Consider this example conversation which I have had or heard far too many times for my tastes:

[ Lots of irrelevant conversation about how this person doesn’t do this or that ]
- Who me? Oh no, I don’t smoke.
- Really? Well you could have fooled me… So what’s that burning cylinder in your hand then?
- What this? Oh no, this is not smoking, it’s just a one-time cig… You know for old times sake.
- So you’re telling me you don’t smoke while you puff away on a cigarette right in front of me?
- It’s not like that… See, I quit!
- You did, did you?
- Sure! back in the old days I used to smoke <insert absurd amount here> packets a day. Now that was smoking. This is just a loose cigarette I do once in a while.
- Once in a while? So this isn’t actually your first since you “quit”?
- Yes it is! Well… Actually no, I sometimes smoke one, but just when I’m at a party… Or out with my friends… But I never buy them anymore so it doesn’t count.

Excuse me?? You never buy it so it doesn’t count??

Now see, this just ticks me off! It is just plain abuse of the language.

Words are important. They have meanings which, while a bit flexible, are fixed and exist for good reason. So we can communicate. So when did “quit” become “quit more or less sometimes well you know what I mean”?

(This is going to embarrass me later but…) this kinda reminds me of the original Karate Kid movie when Mr. Miagi tells Daniel something along the lines of “You either karate do or you karate don’t, there is no karate so-so…”

And that is how it is with smoking you either smoke or you quit and now you don’t. The logic of the word “quit” is not fuzzy, it’s meaning is not unclear, it is very precise. If you quit you don’t smoke. Ever. Until you pick up a cigar again and then you smoke again, it’s that simple.

If you do smoke but only just a cigarette a month or so then congratulations, you’ve cut down on your smoking quite significantly. Maybe to the point when you are no longer loosing years of live every day (or something like that). Maybe even to the point when it stopped being harmful to you (though not to others).
Once again I say: congratulations, you’ve cut down. But you have not quit you have not stopped smoking! You didn’t!

And that’s OK, it’s your choice and I couldn’t care less but please, please don’t come on all high and mighty talking about how you used to be the biggest, baddest smoker this side of El-Paso and quit smoking just like that and all the other smokers are in for a lot of suffering if they ever try to quit and how strong willed you were and blady, blady, blah. You haven’t quit! And if you have to keep bringing up the issue and talking about it than maybe you are just not OK with it yourself, huh?

Anyway, maybe it is the geek in me that makes me this annoyed at it but I find it really stupid that people distort words to cover up for their lack of determination or for feeling like a looser for not being able to do something. It really does.
Like I said, words are important, they are the basis of human communication and it is incredibly stupid to abuse them to excuse and justify your own flaws.

Once again, maybe this is because I’m a geek and I’m going out on a limb here and exaggerate the heck out of this to make my point even more clear, but when I write this:

for $i in (0 to 9) {
    print "$i\n";
};

I don’t mean to write this:

for $i more-or-less-in (0 to 9) {
    print-something-approximately-like "$i\n";
};

And I certainly don’t expect the output to be something like this:

0
1
3
5
6
7
8

Why not? Because I was precise in my instructions and the one interpreting them was also precise in it.

But humans are not like computers, human language has lots of flexibility and nuances that make it very rich and very interesting and very powerful and very easy to be abused. All of these nuances and flexibility are explored in many wondrous and marvelous ways in fiction, poetry, plays, (intelligent) conversations and many other forms. But then all of these forms of exploration of the language have one thing in common: they respect the basic unit, they respect words and their meaning. The playing around is usually done by means of sentence structure, the choice of words to use, the choice of words not to use, even by using shady and often unused meanings of the words but not by outright misusing them and using to say something that is just not true.

Don’t this people have dictionaries? Or are they just so ashamed to be failing at what they set out to accomplish that they need to outright lie in order to feel good about themselves? And don’t they understand that either way other people usually just don’t care? I know I don’t. I really don’t, just as long as you don’t smoke in my face go ahead and smoke all you want but for heaven’s sake don’t lie about it and (more to the point) if you have to lie about it than just lie, don’t abuse words to do it for you!

See, I told this was a bad rant… ;-)

THE HITCHHICKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY on BBC Radio 4

It has started this week.

I don’t get the BBC Radio 4 here so I’ll just listen to the episodes on-line.

Now being the ever forgetful person I am I had to setup a reminder to go get each episode.

And while I was at it why not do it the right way and share it with people to boot?

Go get it —removed the old and out-dated feed— in ICS format. Leave the notifications on if you want to be reminded before the start of each episode and be aware of the 7-day download period for each episode.

Enjoy! :-)

Cleaned out my “later” bookmarks folder

Unbelievable! I’ve transfered all the bookmarks I had gathered in the “later” folder to del.icio.us and even after having cleaned-up some 20-30 bookmarks I still ended up with 121 items.

And that’s just the “later” folder!

Oh yes, the “later” folder is the folder where I bookmark everything that I find or I am pointed to which I find interesting enough to read, but not now.
I guess everybody has a way of dealing with these things. I just hated loosing track of them just because now was not a good time to go and see them but having gathered more than 100 items to look over in about a month or so is just ludicrous!

Lets see how I will fare with del.icio.us.

del.icio.us

Incredible as it may seem I’ve been totally unaware of del.icio.us until today.

Actually that’s not entirely true, I’ve been aware of it as I’ve seen it mentioned in several places but I never took the time to see just what it was and so I’ve never groked it until this afternoon when Melo showed it to me in all it’s glory.

I am mighty suspicious of everything that describes itself as “social something-or-other” and that’s probably the reason I’ve never felt the urge to look into it more seriously. People were talking about this new “social link software” and it drove me off but now that someone actually showed me what it does and how useful it may be I like it.

The concept of managing URLs in a browser-independent way is appealing to be sure but being tied to an external site with only HTTP access to it made me shy away from previous attempts at link- or bookmark-gathering sites.

In comes del.icio.us with it’s wonderful API, open to users since the beginning (or so I’m told) and which is even more wonderfully and conveniently wrapped in the Net-Delicious perl module distribution.
I may have found my link management solution.

The beauty of it derives almost entirely from it’s API, since it allows me to seamlessly integrate my links in my site and make the fact that I am using del.icio.us to manage them totally transparent.
If I ever want to change the way I’m doing it all I have to do is implement the link support some other way (or support it in some other service with an equivalent API) and the visitors to my site won’t be able to tell the difference.

What I gain out of using del.icio.us is something that resembles what I would like to have for bookmark management a whole lot better than any browser I know does (I just click on the “Post to Delicious” bookmarklet instead of clicking on the “Bookmark” button), a better search engine for my links/bookmarks, the tagging system for correlation of links and the added bonus of the information on link popularity (amusing if not all that important).

Just to get a taste of it I’ve added some links to my account and created a very small script that gathers my latest links hourly and displays them on my main page,
Things are looking good.

Gmail invitations

Maybe I should come by there more often… I’ve just noticed I have 6 invitations to Gmail piled up and most everyone I know who would like to have one already has it.

Any takers? It’s FIFO.

YAPC::EU::2004 so far

Well, so far a good conference all around.

Maybe not quite as good as last year, for me at least, due to less speakers (not as many “star speakers” as last year for sure and less speakers in general).

So far the organization is very good so no faults there at all.

Also a lot of repeated talks from last year, I’ve already taken a number of them so it was a bit easier to decide what to see…

Having a good time though.

Must go now, I’ll update it… sometime.

Comment Spam and other woes

More than forty (yes forty!!) spam comments on this weblog alone in the mere seven days I’ve been gone and off-line.
And I’m not an A-list blogger, far from it in fact.
Also the comments were posted all over the weblog, ranging from posts made more than two years ago to posts made last week.
I’d really hate to close the comments on old posts because sometimes (rarely, yes, but sometimes) I do get relevant comments in some of them, but this is getting ridiculous!
Maybe it’s time to investigate moderation for times when I’m away. Or even always. I’m not partial to a system like TypeKey which forces you to create an account elsewhere in order to post on my weblog but the mixed approach of Movabletype 3 (either authenticate via TypeKey or else get moderated) may be the way to go.
Maybe I have to think about upgrading my Movabletype installation a bit more seriously…

Oh, and I came back home to a powered-down server due to a prolonged power-failure that outlasted my puny UPS (the poor neighbors had to hear it beep to death…) and a deep-fried USB hub which means no goodies attached to the server (even the keyboard, mouse and UPS data connection have to multi-task now). That’s what you get with more than one year old or so PCs with only two USB ports.
Bah, humbug!

De férias

Voltei ontem a casa de uma semana no parque natural da Peneda-Gerês.
O Parque continua continua uma maravilha, como me lembrava após muitos anos sem lá ter voltado. Apenas tivemos azar com o tempo que não ajudou muito —todos os dias tivemos direito a, no mínimo, uns chuviscos ligeiros e no máximo chuva torrencial.
Terei fotos on-line brevemente, quando tiver paciência para o fazer.

Durante esta estadia pelo norte tive oportunidade de me estrear no geocaching e embora os resultados não se possam considerar brilhantes (encontrei uma em duas) valeu a pena.
Registos dos acontecimentos no geocaching.com, procurar pelo utilizador gambuzino (daqui a um dia ou dois, ainda não tenho lá nada…)

Hoje, e para dar boa continuação às férias, tive a primeira aula do curso de vela ligeira.
Para começar há que dizer que a barreira da linguagem é realmente elevada, dar-nos uma horita de nomenclatura totalmente estranha, meia dúzia de nós, procedimento para aparelhar um barco e mandar-nos para a água na esperança de que quando estamos já ao leme nos lembremos do que raio significa “orçar” ou “caçar a vela de estai” é um bocado puxado.
O resultado é que, pelo menos neste primeiro dia, foi só asneiras a bordo.
Mas não deixa de ser muito giro navegar à vela e só tenho pena de não poder estar cá no próximo sábado para a segunda aula.
Quanto tempo mais durará este balanço que sinto? Até que não sabe nada mal :-)

YAPC::Europe::2004

It’s in Belfast and I’m going to attend (again).

I’ve never been to Belfast before so it is nice that the stay will be extended until Sunday.
Also Tuxa is coming along for the ride, so it should be a great time.
Geeking (huh?) and traveling, my two favorite pastimes, together. Looks like a lot of fun.

GPS

I’ve finally decided to do something about getting my GPS (Garmin GPS III) to work with my iBook (in anticipation of my coming vacation when I’ll see if I finally go hunt some caches).

Of course I bought the compulsory Keyspan USB Serial adapter and it really works like a charm. It does give me one more item to lug around on my back-pack though so I’m guessing I’ll eventually end up buying a Bluetooth-enabled GPS and be done with it but for now it will do.

I also bought MacGPSPro and so far (although I’ve only done a few tests with it) it seems to be all I could want.

Good service for Apple

Getting my iBook was difficult. Stock problems, delays, you know, the usual at Casa de Mac.
Then there was the ultimate challenge of getting my Portuguese keyboard and the airport card. That took a really long time.
But then that is old news, and not just in this corner of the world.

So when the time came to get my iBook serviced because of a hardware problem I got really, really scared.

Alas I was in for a big surprise and a good one at that!

See, the iBook has a nice round battery lock near the battery itself in the back of the laptop. This little lock with the coin-slot is surrounded by a nice round little plastic piece which is nested in the case itself.
And it was the nice round little plastic part that broke and had to be replaced.
“No problem, they can probably replace just that little part”, though I in my innocence.
Well, it turns out I was wrong, the whole lower case had to be replaced so I really had to bring it in and get it done by a certified servicing agent.
OK, I’ll just scoop up the purchase bill and let it be replaced under the warranty. If I can find the bill, that is…
Sure enough I found it, exactly one year and five days after the purchase. Five days… Oh well, I braced myself and prepared for the pocket drainage that was sure to ensue.

Surprise number one: as of April 2003 Apple’s warranty against manufacture defects lasts for two years, not one, they just forgot to update the documentation in time. So my iBook was covered. Great!

Then there was the timing factor. How much time was I going to be without my Mac? Actually it took three days to get the replacement part and another day to replace it in the laptop for a grand total of four days. Which is not really all that bad in itself but it is gets even better.

Surprise number two: I didn’t actually have to leave the iBook there for the three days it took to get the part, they called me when they got it and only then did I take the iBook to them.
Better yet, I took it to them one day in the afternoon and went round to collect it again the next day in the morning so I ended up without my laptop only for a night.

How’s that for good service?
I’m so used to bad service that this was indeed a refreshing change and I think it deserves mentioning.
Full marks go to Interlog for all this and Apple should know what great service their partner in Portugal provides to their users.

Good job, guys!

Sidestepping the issue… Sort of…

That’s it, I’ve decided to stop trying to make it work correctly in Internet Exploder. It’s just not worth it, I’d have to put design elements in the HTML instead of leaving it all to CSS and I’m totally against that.

So I’ve decided instead to warn IE users and try to help them out of their (probably unknown) state of darkness.

So from today on visitors using IE will get this nice warning on the context-menu bar to the right:

[This image was lost to the ages. It was a cool one, though. :-)]

This will let them know of their plight and, at the same time, offer them a helping hand out of their misery.

Actually this screenshot illustrates some of the problems with IE, for example note how the border around the content part is totally opaque instead of the nice transparent graded shadow. Note also the ugly fat orange bar just below the menu item (About).

If these complaints strike you as surprising then you must be an Internet Exploder user who has probably thought that I must have been crazy to switch my design to this ugly mess.

Well, now you know better, go get firefox or any other standards-compliant browser and open yourself to a whole new world where web pages look the way they are supposed to.

On the road (yet again)

There is talk already of the next big trip.

The prospects of next year seeing us back to the american continent are looking quite good - 2005 may be the year of the Canadian cross-country, coast-to-coast road trip.

I’m already amassing information for this trip on the wiki. When it (finally) comes into public service I’ll link to the relevant page.

I guess Ireland will have to wait a bit longer, but it will be for a good cause! :-)

The photolog sections…

… are in dire need of revision; Not only are the existing ones totally inadequate, they are also too few.

The problem is that it is much more fun to browse around in the huge backlog of pictures, revisit the ones that look more promising and choose some of them to put on-line than it is to get lost in administrative details like these.

Come to think of it playing around with old (and not so old) pictures and, generally speaking, creating content is much more fun than kicking the site into some kind of shape… I still have to address not only the sections of the photolog (that’s easy!) but I also have to hammer the wiki into shape so that I can finally integrate it into the main site, deal with the exploder problems with the site’s CSS and coax the photo album software into the same design as the rest.

It will take me quite a bit of time and this is not a pleasurable prospect, but it must be done or else I won’t have a decent place to show off the content that I like so much to create.

Night photography with high ISO values

One of the advantages of digital photography is that you can use a different ISO setting for each shot without having to change rolls.

Until now I had never even touched the ISO setting but last week I decided to try my EOS 10D with a high ISO value just to see how it handled, so I took a few shots at night at Paço de Arcos beach (a regular evening strolling spot) and the results aren’t half bad.
Some of them can be seen here in the photolog.

[Or could be seen there in the photolog, as it no longer exists and I’ve lost the photographs in the mean time.]

Of course there is quite a bit of color noise, but that is to be expected and, in some cases, it ads to the picture.
Overall the quality is very interesting and I find the 10D handles itself very well in low light conditions. Better than in extremely bright ones. Funny that.

Now I must start thinking about a tripod for night photos. I’ve had my sights on a number of pictures I’d like to try one of these days, but all of them would need low ISO settings and high exposure times so a tripod is a must. The problem is that I just know I’m too lazy to drag a tripod with me on other, more casual occasions and buying a tripod just for a couple of pictures now and then is a bummer…

CSS - Cascading Stylesheets

A great way of solving the web design problem (the one that comes with it being impossible to be done right with HTML).

External resources

These are the resources I’ve found on the web while looking for… well, for them actually!

Examples

• CSS Zen Garden - Probably the largest (and arguably the best) showcase of CSS’ power;
• CSS Edge - Some beautiful examples.
• Tantek Çelik’s examples - Examples and filters (CSS Hacks)
• A quick and dirty CSS hack: PNG backgrounds

Code and tutorials

• Slants - Hard to use it in real life but neat all the same…
• Sliding doors - Cool things to do with tabs;
• Fast rollovers;
• Lists - and lists, and lists and …
• Rounded corners - Yes, it uses images, that’s life;
• Mini tabs - Very useful. Be sure to follow the link to the article explaining about this technique;
• W3schools CSS tutorial;
• Strategies for Long-Term CSS Hack Management;
• Alternate stylesheets;
• Site In An Hour - Making Simple Work of Complex CSS Layouts.

Tools

• CSS Outline - Three amazingly useful bookmarklets to help debug CSS code. It’s a real must-have for anyone writing CSS. Really!
• Css Hack - Wiki page on all things related to CSS Hacks.

Better days will come

Hopefully I’ll soon get the time to start working on nunonunes.org again.

The design needs to be adjusted because of the usual browser discrepancies (I don’t expect it to be a major problem, though) and then I need to finally set-up the photo galleries section and, most importantly, the Wiki behind the rest of the site.

Gallery is looking really good right now simply because of the very useful plugin for iPhoto. Hey, these things count, you know?

The Wiki will probably start up as a Tikiwiki because: a) I’ve already have some information on it, from my tests and everyday general note taking on it and b) it is just simpler to start with because it has everything you could think of and then some.

Both of these options will be up for revision in the (probably not-so-near) future when I re-evaluate my needs and think about making something more specific to address them, but until then I want to have something to get me by.

Oh and I got a real favicon.ico in place so my RSS feed reader (as well the the browsers) now see them.

The much-talked about already Stairway to Heaven

I do try to avoid the link-blog syndrome, but some things are really worth mentioning.
Like “The Stairway Suite” page which describes itself as “Stairway to Heaven, as Schubert wrote it”.
And it’s not only Schubert at that, you have an impressive array of potential composers for this work such as Holst, Bizet or Beethoven, just to cherry-pick a few.

So what’s this all about? Well, I’ll just transcribe the site’s own words here as they tell it all really:

The Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven” is a rock classic for some critics. Whether or not you agree, its notoriety is assured by the thousands of would-be guitarists who can play the first dozen bars badly: it is to the guitar what “Chopsticks” is to the piano. But what if Jimmy Page & Robert Plant hadn’t written it? What if it had been written for orchestra in the 19th or 20th centuries? For a publicity stunt, “The Stairway Suite” was commissioned by the University of New South Wales Orchestra and written by Joe Wolfe.

Anyone who has ever spent any time at all in a guitar shop (and belongs to a certain generation) knows exactly what they mean when they refer to the plague of the would-be guitar players who decided to try out a guitar and would invariably torture those first bars of Stairway to Heaven out of the instrument and into the innocent ears of everyone around them.
It got so bad that it even led to that scene in Wayne’s World when Wayne (or was it Garth? Gees, it was a long time ago) is working on a music instrument store and has to enforce a sign that forbids playing this song when trying out guitars.
But I digress…

The point of this post is to tell you to go to the site and listen to the MP3 samples available there. They are really very good, all of them.
I especially like the Glenn Miller version and grand finale, but that’s just personal preference.

Enjoy.

A psicologia das estações

Hoje de manhã fui até Lisboa, levar a Tuxa ao emprego. Como é natural numa manhã de Agosto havia pouca gente na estrada, maravilha.
Ao contrário do que é normal as praias não estavam cheias. Mas para isto há uma boa razão: o mau tempo que temos tido, supostamente devido ao tal furacão que chegou cá já desfeito.

Agora, aquilo que me chamou a atenção foi o facto de haver alguém na praia. E não era assim tão pouca gente.

Sendo este um país de clima ameno, as pessoas consideram (normalmente) dias como os de hoje como sendo dias de “mau tempo”.
Mas ainda assim, estando nós hoje longe do calor que é habitual haver no verão, as pessoas foram para a praia (em menor número, sim, mas foram).
O que me leva a pensar que realmente a questão da adequação das condições climatéricas a certas actividades é muito mais subjectiva do que se quer perceber.

Ou seja, quando em Abril ou, por vezes, até em Março eu (e sobretudo a Tuxa) fazemos praia é vulgar haver as maiores reacções de espanto (“O quê praia? Já?” ou “Bem, deviam estar mortinhos pela praia para fazer uma coisa dessas…” ou até “Mas vocês estão doidos?!”) quando na realidade o que nós fizemos foi aproveitar aqueles dias maravilhosos que por vezes ocorrem nessa altura. Ao contrário, por exemplo, das pessoas que foram hoje para a praia, num dia bem fresco, totalmente nublado e chuvoso.

Qual é a diferença então? Simples: é que hoje é dia 11 de Agosto, pleno verão. E no verão faz-se praia. E Março/Abril é inverno e no inverno veste-se roupa quente e vai-se ao centro comercial ou fica-se em casa, mas peloamordedeus não se faz praia! Não é adequado…

É engraçada a psicologia das estações… :-)

We live, we get older, we get wiser. Or: Mac OS X 10.3.5 is out

Yes, Mac OS X’s latest Update (10.3.5) is out since yesterday.

No, I haven’t updated yet.

This is probably the first time I’m not one of the early-adopters of an OS upgrade. Like I said, we get older and wiser. And we learn that if the upgrade is good enough it will still be available in a couple of days. If it has serious flaws they will be corrected inside that time-frame and another update will be issued. If it has critical flaws it will be pulled from the update site and I’ll be a happier man not having installed it.

Yep, all things considered I think I can survive with my geek’s self-esteem quite intact without been a guinea-pig for Apple yet again. I’ve been lucky so far, even with the updates that got pulled out, but luck runs out sooner or latter and If I wanted the hassle I’d have stayed in the Linux world.

Things are looking good, though.

Now to immerse myself in other things to avoid thinking too much about it and falling into temptation. I’ve been a geek for too long you see… :-)

Coding aids

Quite a few hours of PHP coding done today.
And today’s (particularly prolific) session is sponsored by Elvis Costello’s North and Morrissey’s You Are The Quarry.
Both excellent, but North is particularly wonderful. You may ask the neighbors, they heard it all, I’m sure, both Elvis and me singing. I guess I just got carried away… ;-)

After all this years music is still the hands down number one helper when I’m coding. Quite amusing that, given that I’m usually also singing along which might indicate that I was not all that concentrated on the coding. Quite the opposite happens though.

And who would have thought that VoodooPad would also be this handy as a coding helper?

Now I’m going out into the world for a while. Be back later for some more.

Intervenções de madrugada

Ah, as intervenções de madrugada quando a única coisa que me calha a mim é ficar a olhar para os logs à espera que algo aconteça apenas para prevenir o caso em que possam surgir problemas…

Alguém tem uns palitos que empreste, para os olhos?

Being connected - communicating and organizing my life on the Internet

There are two somewhat old posts on Pedro’s weblog which got me thinking about some stuff that affect my daily life but to which I never gave that much thought. At least not structured thought.

The posts are about IM usage (Yahoo!’s in particular) and Orkut (and how it could ever be made useful).

So these are just some loosely coupled thoughts that I’ve had on those and other related subjects, and I present them separately, although on a broader view they are connected. Anyway, enough of the philosophical mumbo-jumbo and on with what’s on my mind…

First up: Instant Messaging

This part is quite dear to me. I use it every day both for work and for my personal relations and I don’t think I could go back to living without it anymore.
Sometimes you just can’t beat it for being in touch with a group of people scattered across the world. You might be doing business with them, asking for their advice, doing some debugging with them. Or you may be coordinating development with people who are far away. Or you may just use to for getting a quick question answered. Or for getting asked a quick question.
In fact it also helps me to be in touch with people who are real close to me (geographically speaking) too. Of course Email is invaluable for many things but sometimes (many times actually) a quick chat can save a ton of Email and hassle. And IRC is just too crowded and not private enough.
And it sure beats the phone when it comes to staying in touch with people. I just don’t call my friends all that much, never have. But it is just oh so easy to drop them a line on IM…
Oh yeah, and companies with an Internet connection can save a bundle in telephone bills if they just give their employees permission to use IM for their communications, but that’s something that is just too hard to get across…

Now, when people think of IM many think of Yahoo! Messenger. Most of my contacts use Yahoo! and people just love it.
I am not particularly favorable to it but in order to be accessible to everyone I have my Yahoo! account. And my AOL account. And my ICQ account. And my Hotmail account. Each one of these I use for IM only.
The point is that I have to talk to these people no matter what mechanism they use so I just use a multi-protocol client and get it over with.

Or try to get it over with, because some people are just plain unreasonable…
An so yes, I agree that Yahoo!’s common practice of changing the protocol in order to lock out other people’s software (despite their claim that it is done because of security concerns nobody really believes them) is ludicrous and in the long run bad for the company itself. People who take the time to think about it know this so maybe it is a matter of time before something changes in there. Or, more to the point, stops changing… ;-)

Still on the IM subject, I must admit that I am a big fan of Jabber because it is open, very modular, well designed, etc, and with the IETF giving it a big thumbs-up I see it sticking around for a long time but I don’t expect everyone to start using it tomorrow, so I have my jabber accounts alongside all my other IM accounts and if and when the day comes when I have no contacts on any of the other protocols I’ll just switch them off and be happy with it.

Second part: Contact management

The second part concerns managing my contacts.
It is no secret by now that I am a recent convert of the Mac clan. Also, I have been using some kind or other of PalmOS powered device for years to manage… well, my life, really.
With the advent of bluetooth-enabled mobile phones (and with a little help from iSync or some other mechanism) I now have all my contacts managed on and shared between all these devices.
But this is still not enough. Because when I think about contact management I think about managing all the information I have about each contact, and it involves the traditional address, phone number and email address, but also the IM IDs (probably multiple per person), birthdays, web pages and hosts of other bits and pieces of information.

Now I’ve never really groked social network software in general and Orkut in particular, but Pedro’s post got me thinking that maybe if, in fact, Orkut (or any other software of the kind) opened up access to it’s data via some kind of API it could then be put to good use.
It could be the base of contact management and it’s information could be integrated with whichever relevant applications you could think of. Pedro suggests exporting the birthdays into iCalendar and the IM addresses into your IM client and I think this is a good example, but it could be much more. Why not have Address Book (or a similar application) knowing about your Orkut (or similar service) account and getting information from it and letting you manage the information on it from it’s own interface? These are, of course, just some examples, I’m sure it could go much, much deeper than that.

Obviously there are more people looking at ways of making Orkut and the like useful and while some ideas are a bit far-fetched for me, like letting your friends edit your weblog some others are really cool and useful like using you Orkut (or some-such) friend list in order to white-list your Email. This last one has a particular appeal to me because this is exactly the kind of thing that I find logical. If they are your friends they should be able to get their mail to you. Of course there are some problems to be solved, address spoofing coming to mind instantaneously, but we’ll deal with them eventually.

Conclusion? What conclusion?

So how can all of this be made to work together to further our quality of living? Tall order, huh? ;-)
I’m not entirely sure and that is why this post is just a collection of loosely coupled thoughts (as I said in the begging, remember? Well, if you got this far you probably do…), but I do feel that there is a lot of potential for evolution along the lines of:

• Integration between reputation or friends networks and contact management (my address book knows who is my friend and to what degree);
• Integration between the said networks and automatic assignment of importance to communications between me and each contact (if I’ve never met him his messages are surely less important —to me— than those of my close friends);
• Mechanisms that use that importance factor in order to filter, sort and present those communications to me when and where it is most appropriate (if he is just a loose acquaintance and I’m on “really don’t disturb” mode don’t let him bug me now, keep it until later, but always let my wife through, no matter what);
• Integration of the communication channels and methods (I know the person has several Email accounts, several IM accounts, a mobile phone number, etc, keep that in mind);
• Mechanisms that automatically decide (or help to decide) which particular channel or method is more appropriate in order to reach a given contact at a given moment (remember all those accounts and communication methods I know about the person? Use whichever you want, just get the message through, I couldn’t care less if you use SMS, IM, Email or whatever).

Ah, it’s good to dream, isn’t it? And the best part is that all of this is technically quite easy to achieve. The worst part, however, is that the political and economical obstacles could prove very strong so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Recent upgrades and other stuff

Well, things have been happening and pilling up so here’s a quick catcher-up:

• After so many years away I’m back to PHP. I got involved in helping out in a project for a site which requires PHP and mysql. The mysql part is almost trivial, but the site is a bit complex and it is very important that there are no security holes in it so it is going to take some attention. Funny how it turns out really, I started out my web programming languages (ugh!) romance with a brief encounter with perl, switched to PHP and stuck with it for a while and after that got back into perl for a good number of years, and that is where I am now. To go back to PHP at this point is rather funny. Still it feels good not to let the knowledge just whither away;

• After my (not-so-recent) car upgrade I have finally installed a hands-free kit on the new one. And the great thing about it is that it is a blue-tooth solution so in theory (it pays to be careful with this kind of statements!) :-) I am now able to switch mobile phones to my heart’s content and, as long as all my phones support the hands-free or head-set blue-tooth profile I’ll never have to switch the car hands-free kit. Very good use of technology indeed. Oh and I am using the Sony-Ericsson HCB-30 kit, if you’re interested in knowing and so far (3 days usage) it is doing quite nicely, thank you very much.

• Almost forgot about this one but speaking of mobile phones, the Sony-Ericsson t68i was put aside to use as a backup when my company got me a new t630. I’m not sure whether I’ve mentioned this before and I can’t be bothered to look for it now, but I do like this phone. The camera positively sucks but I’ve never been one to like camera-phones anyway (just search my weblog, you’ll see what I mean) but other than that I’ve yet to crash the phone and the blue-tooth behaves much, much better than that of the t68i. I loved the t68i but I do acknowledge that the t630 is quite an improvement. Not only in reliability, but also in usability, responsiveness and the all-around handling of it.

That’s it for now, more geekly news as they appear.

Laptop goodies wish list

Lately I’ve been discussing with some friends what kind of new features the next generation of laptops will bring.
Not things like more memory or huge disks, that is a given, but things would make the same kind of impact as the DVD-recorder or the integrated Wi-Fi or Bluetooth did.
Opinions are hard to give since we really can’t foresee how things will change. One year ago (more or less) it was more or less apparent that the main revolution would be wireless ubiquity, but now we are a bit hard-pressed to come up with the next killer tech.

But we did come up with some things, even if they already exist in one way or another.
And one of the things I see coming (and would rather enjoy myself to tell the truth) would be built-in cameras with decent image quality in every laptop. Not the kind you use to take pictures of your surroundings but a fixed camera that points straight at the user and that would be used in video-conference (much like the integrated microphone that most laptops have nowadays).
I know that some of Sony’s Vaios laptops have had this for years, but I am talking mass-market here and the Vaio, sexy as it is, is still a niche-market product.
Now the funny part of it is that we had this conversations oh, a week or two ago and today I got pointed at this piece of news which comes along to prove that we weren’t all that off the mark.
Very nice. I wonder how long until Apple starts integrating something like this on their excellent laptops? Probably ages I would guess…

Oh well, good things loom ahead of us.

Now the other feature I would love to have would be for my laptop to have a built-in GPS receiver. Yes, I know, probably not much market for it so not much chance of it happening, but still I would rather like it.

Validation

The easy part is done.
The main pages of all the components already validate on both the HTML and the CSS validators.
So now everything that doesn’t go according to plan must really be the fault of the browser, right? Heh… :-)

The changes involved where somewhat substantial, I really missed the part of the “id” being unique and the “class” being a “common” “id”. Obvious, right? duh!
But the interestingly surprising part was that even though they where substantial they weren’t all that hard to do.
Lets hear it for well structured code!

Tomorrow I’ll start changing parts of the design to a table-based one. It kind-a breaks my heart to have to do this, but I guess I have no choice. Well, not one that would be easy enough anyway.

Making a copy of an audio CD on my iBook.

Today, for the first time, I had to duplicate an audio CD on my iBook.
My server’s CD writer has been shot for quite some time now and I haven’t yet had the need to do this kind of thing so I had no idea how to go about it.
Well, obviously I knew I could use cdda2wav and cdrecord just like on the Linux server, but I knew there had to be a way to do it which was more Mac-oriented (i.e. a mouse-engineering approach).
It turns out there is such a way but, contrary to what I’ve come to expect from this platform, it is not all that obvious, it doesn’t even involve the Disk Utility, but instead iTunes and some preferences tweaking.
I guess they don’t like people duplicating disks, but I don’t like using my original discs on the car stereo either…

So I googled for it and I came up with one page that explained how to do it in several ways, including the good old-fashioned mouse-engineering way.

Since the page is rather long and contains loads of other stuff I’ll summarize it here for future reference:

• Insert the original disk on the drive and either wait for iTunes to open automatically or fire it up yourself;
• Open the preferences page of iTunes and on the Importing pane choose “Import Using: AIFF Encoder”;
• Still in the preferences go to the Burning pane and choose “Disk Format: Audio CD”, “Gap Between Songs: none” and de-select “Use Sound Check”;
• Import the CD in the usual way;
• Insert the blank CD on the drive;
• Burn the CD on the usual way;
• Delete the songs from iTunes and if you really want them on your Mac import them again with your preferred encoder which probably compresses them and doesn’t waste so much space.

This procedure is a bit more detailed than the one on the page I mentioned earlier and it does work for me.
You get an identical copy of the CD that’s even recognizable on CDDB.

Surprise, surprise, Internet Exploder borks it…

Well, I’ve been trying the site out and so far:

• tried it on Safari and it works great. But then it should, since I developed for it;
• tried it in FireFox for Macintosh and it looks great with one minor hitch I will have to look into: the navigation on the right (context-dependent navigation) sometimes gets one or more extra lines between the “boxes” and sometimes even loses the line at the bottom. It may be a badly designed CSS but I really don’t think so and since it is only FireFox that does this I’m blaming the browser for now. But I do keep an open mind! :-)
• tried it in Opera for Linux and it works great except for the relative positioning of the pictures and the text in the main picture list. That’s it, I’m leaving CSS to where it matters and sticking to tables here, I’m mainly interested in having the site working, I don’t want to spend ages just tweaking CSS in order to get what is, essentially, a tabular content right. I really wish I didn’t have to do this but I’m fed up with it;
• then I tried it on Internet Exploder 6. Oh my GOD! I don’t even know where to begin! As usual it must be the rest of the world’s fault, but the fact is that every other browser did it (mostly) right but Exploder didn’t seem to be able to center the pages, to deal with invisible PNGs, to position the navigation buttons consistently, why even the background image of the header only appears on some sections of the site and the code used to render it is exactly the same!

So basically what I’m saying is: everything is as expected, nothing too alarming but I will have to take drastic steps to deal with Exploder. Man this just plainly and utterly sucks! I don’t want to spend any more time on looks and design than I absolutely have to, I want to start writing stuff on my wiki, but this looks like it is going to last for a while… :-(

New look, new sections

I’ve been thinking about what to do with this site for a while. Not just the weblog but the whole of nunonunes.org.

My main concern was about the content and the type of things I will want to put up in here. Then I thought about integration of all the sections and finally a little about the design.
Now I’m not in the least an artist and I am really bad at design. But I didn’t like it the way it was before so I had to do something.

As for the content I’ve decided that for now I’ll want to have a weblog, a photolog separated from the weblog, a photo gallery and, maybe most important, the rest of the site is going to be one big wiki.

So I had to start somewhere and I’ve already covered the weblog and photolog. I’m using Movabletype 2.64 for both of them and I don’t anticipate a move to version 3 anytime soon, but that may change as new plugins start to appear for that version.

Overall the HTML generation is quite acceptable to me, to the point where I can view the whole site perfectly well without any CSS whatsoever. This was my first goal and I think I’ve achieved it by now.

Then I just added some CSS on top of it to make the design part. It isn’t exactly a piece of art, but I don’t think it sucks heavily either.
I decided to make it viewable in 12’ screens without side-scrolling so it is just a little over 800 pixels wide.
I’m not exactly an expert on CSS and there are probably a few major problems with the site right now. In fact I launched this new look without even trying it out on an Internet Exploder but I do have the HTML pinned down (for the most part) so I’m not overly concerned about the rest. I’ll just have to find me a good designer to tweak the CSS for me or maybe create a whole new look and apply that over the existing HTML, no sweat.

The photolog is a first experience as I like to sometimes post pictures just out of the blue and I don’t think it is a good idea to put that kind of content on the weblog. It already has a few pictures which I used mainly to test out the way the site would handle like but I expect to have more content as time progresses and especially I hope to pin down the sections. As of right now all the existing sections are there only for the tests I made and I’ll have to see how the content evolves in order to figure out what sections make the most sense.

Now overall there is one item which really baffles me and that is typing. Not typing entries, mind you, but the art of choosing the right type-face for each portion of the site.
I am fully aware that the right type at the right place makes all the difference in the world, but I am utterly ignorant as to type choices so I’ll have to play around a bit more until I find something I can really enjoy.

Right now I just wanted to put something up and use it for a bit to see how I feel about it and we’ll see how it goes.

As for the missing sections of the site, well, I’m still not sure what I’ll use for the photo gallery section, I’ve discussed it here somewhat in the past and there is a new possibility in the horizon -photobuilder- and as for the wiki I had my mind set on tikiwiki until a few days ago, even knowing it was clearly overkill and maybe a bit more work than it would be worth, but then Melo got me looking at kwiki again. When I last looked at it it was still only CGI::Kwiki and it was a rough sketch of what it is today, but now it looks just right for integration in my site and so, soooo flexible…

So expect the odd broken link in the immediate future and if someone out there has a windows machine and can test out the main sections of the site I’d love to hear from you. Really, I’ve come to the point where I don’t have a single windows machine available that easily.
I’ll iron out all the small problems I expect to appear and when that’s finished I’ll start taking care of the wiki section and I guess I’ll leave the photo gallery for later.
I could have waited a bit longer for the design to settle down and to integrate the wiki before putting this new version up but it will take a while for me to do that and I do think it’s best to put something up and iron it out later than it is to delay further.

On with the show, then…

Faster photo downloads

Up until now I’ve used either my camera’s built-in USB interface or my USB card reader to download my digital photos.
With the 128MB memory stick I use in my Sony DSC-P5 this works great but with the 512MB CF cards on my Canon EOS 10D this tend to be a bit more troublesome.
The epitome of this troubles came about during my recent Scottish trip when I needed to download one and some days two full CF cards each night and, because I didn’t bring my USB card reader I spent almost two hours in the process of downloading these cards and the Sony’s memory stick (my wife used this camera).

So I decided it was time to put an end to this suffering and today (at long last) I bought a SanDisk ImageMate FireWire CF reader.
Granted it is not as functional as the Dazzle USB Multi-card reader, but my main problem is with the CF cards the Canon fills up, not with the small memory stick and the new CF reader is so small and lightweight I’ll carry it just about anywhere with me.

So then I had to make some measurements to justify this purchase to myself (yes, you guessed it: I’m an engineer!).
And the numbers are quite impressive.

First I shot some photos around and filled a 512MB CF card (a SanDisk ultra II) with roughly 477MB worth of images.
Then I downloaded the images with each of the three methods.

The numbers are presented below and, I think, speak for themselves, but before we get into them I would just like to make a quick note regarding the method of downloading them from the camera. It is a fact that this method involves using software to get the images from the camera and this software does some computing and, therefore, introduces some delay in the process, but the fact is that this is Canons own software and I’m not aware of any other software which reduces the downloading time significantly. I can shave off a few minutes with other programs but it really is beside the point when you look at the other numbers.

So now for the number-crushing geeks out there here it is:

• Downloading straight from the camera using Canon’s Image Browser: 2738 seconds (roughly 45 minutes);
• Downloading with the Dazzle USB multi-card reader: 573 seconds (a little under 10 minutes);
• Downloading with the SanDisk ImageMate FireWire CF reader: 81 seconds (a little under one and a half minutes).

Need I say more?

Na esplanada

Nesta altura do ano está-se muito bem a almoçar numa esplanada da Expo. Ambiente agradável, muito menos gente do que o é costume e se for com boa companhia ainda melhor.
Pena mesmo é ser tão longe para mim…

iTunes and the Party Shuffle algorithm

Maybe it’s just me but isn’t it just plain weird that the Party Shuffle algorithm of iTunes chooses to play the exact same song twice in a row?

And no, I don’t have multiple copies of it in my disk.

The song is rated 4 starts and I have the “Play higher rated songs more often” option turned on but I do have a lot of high-rated songs (makes sense, right? duh…) and I do have nearly 800 songs in my library at this time (after a most drastic spring cleaning).

Oh well, things will improve in time, I guess.

Diogo

A vida às vezes é muito injusta.

Parabéns Diogo.
Pelo primeiro mês e por teres continuado sempre a lutar.

Parece que em breve te vamos poder conhecer.
Mal posso esperar!

Upcoming changes

I’ve been very silent here lately for a very good reason. Actually for a number of good reasons, but the most interesting one is that my “blogging” time is limited and I have to make some choices sometimes.
So right now I’m more dedicated to the form rather than to the content.

What this means is that I have been working hard on nunonunes.org’s design lately and, therefore, haven’t had all that time to blog or worry about the content.
It’s simple, when your time is limited you either do design or you do content, one or the other.
And since my main target is usually content I have decided to do a major revamp now and get it over with never to worry about it again. For the next year or so. I hope… :-)

But seriously, I am really tired of the weblog’s look and I never quite got the rest of the site to look any good. So for some time now I’ve taken everything off-line except for the weblog and I have been working on making something which is clean, easy on the eyes, organized and consistent across the whole of nunonunes.org.

So far the major design decisions are taken, the weblog is almost done, the photoblog (yes, I couldn’t resist making one -if for nothing else then at least to spare my usual readers the download of all the pictures I sometimes throw here) is coming along nicely (if I do say so myself) and a couple of other pages are well thought over. The hardest part will be integrating the wiki into all this.

Yes, the site will be wiki-based. I’m not going into that right now (too late for that, I had a long day) but that is the only way I see it really taking off.
Now I would prefer to use some sort of wiki I could consider a good bet for the future but it hasn’t been written yet and I am not about to wait for me or someone else to write one so, for now, I’ll just make do with the one I found most promising so far - tikiwiki.
The bad news is that I haven’t even begun to look at how I can integrate it. The good news is that nowadays everything can be integrated, it is just a matter of effort, and the features it provides are very good for what I want to do so that’s that.

On the (more traditional) photo-album front things are still a bit shaky. Album is a very acceptable bare-bones possibility, I’ve used it somewhat and like it’s simplicity, but it does lack in some useful features. Gallery is more powerful, but it is a bit too much web-oriented. IDS is a bit too much on some issues and not quite enough on some others. Yes, I know I’m very picky but: “It’s my site and I do what I want to, do what I want to, do what I want to. You would do too if it bellonged to you!” (So now I’ve lost the two readers who have gotten this far. Great work Nuno!).

What I would really like to have was a system based on a number of ideas I’ve already discussed a bit. Since having written about them I’ve polished things a bit and I now know pretty much what I would like this system to do and it will feed both the photoblog, all the pictures used on the weblog or other pages on the site and the photo-album, but again, if I wait until I write it I’ll never have the site up and running, so for now I’ll go with one of the former contestants (or some other I find along the way) and we’ll see how my system develops.

OK, I’m tired, off to bed now. Hope to have at least a part of the new site up until the end of the week. Once again, lets see how it goes.

Up, up and awaaay!

Again the space elevator story.

Things haven’t changed much since the last time this issue was mentioned, but it seems the subject is far from being dropped.

Now even more “experts” are meeting and beginning to tackle the issues, one by one.

It seems we only need to solve a lot of major technical issues to get to the political issues and then the economic issues (or is it the other way around?).

Still, there is no doubt that the whole space elevator concept is cool and if the technical issues are indeed solved it could prove to be very interesting, economically speaking.

Yes, I know, political issues will most likely make the whole project flounder. But we can still dream, right?

Random geekness

Well, sometimes I just feel like it and this is one of those times.

So here goes:

• Get your Monty Python’s Holly Grail costumes here, complete with helmets and swords. And if you doubt that it is real, just check the last picture at the bottom of the page. A group of fans bought the full gear and are posing for it. Neat! Especially the robes, really beautiful. Can I hold myself from buying one? My oh my, it would be really difficult to explain, that one… :-)

• Just saw this on someone’s .sig and rolled over laughing. Yes, it’s extremely geeky but I find it extremely funny, especially since we have a history of singing variations from that same song here at work sometimes. Well, anyways, here it is. Are you ready for the anti-climax? “Old MacDonald had a PC, with EIA I/O”. So what? I think it’s funny!

• People are starting to “find” and install Tiger all over the place. I’m not going to! I’ve just got tired of installing the OS du jour and having to deal with every little quirk it has. So I’m simply going to wait until the official release (and even then I’m probably going to hold off until the first update comes out). Let the kewl kids do the bug hunting and fixing, I’m getting too old for that stuff. Sad isn’t it, when you start to value your life more than the geekness in things?

• Also, people are drooling all over PLC. It looks like it will save a few cables, leaving only the ones you just can’t live without (the power cables). Once I have a few more reports about it I might get interested but for me, at least for now, Wi-Fi still looks better. Although both can surely coexist.

• There are already a few services out there who are taking a shot at this and so far I am using Mimír and having a great experience with it. The service I’m talking about (one which I fell in love with) consists in the (rather obvious) mixing of RSS and IM. Mimír in particular uses jabber to deliver news in real time. I just login to a web page where I can choose from a number of feeds available (more may be available on request) and then whenever any of those feeds get updated I get an instant message with the source, the item’s URL and the description of the item. Contrary to what I feared it doesn’t really spam the hell out of me and it is really useful. Highly recommended.

• It’s been a fruitfull day up until now, but now I’m betting it gets better, as I’m going to read the (much anticipated) fourth chapter of Designing the Band - the essays about the design process by Keith Robinson. Funny how I’ve actually been looking forward to it. It’s not anything remotely related to my job or anything I ever did or knew but I find it strangely compelling to be on par with what’s going on in the design world. Me of all people, who cannot draw or design a single line to save my life… Go figure… :-)

• Oh, but before I go I just got word (ain’t IM grand?) of a way of using external programs to “filter” text in gui text boxes in OS X and the most remarkable thing is achieved by piping the text to xvi (or your editor of choice) and then getting the text you edited back when you are finished with it as explained in this particular comment. Bloody brilliant! Of course what I really would like is for it to work with vim, not xvi, but Pedro is already on it, so it shouldn’t take long…

Glub, glub…

A parte boa de ir nadar depois da hora tradicional de almoço é que já não ha quase ninguém na piscina e consegue-se ter uma pista só para nós. Fixe! :-)

Já me tinha esquecido como era bom nadar no Estádio Nacional… Agora é só recuperar a forma perdida entretanto, normalmente fazia entre 1.500 e 2.000 metros em 45-50 minutos, hoje nadei meia hora e fiz uns míseros 700 metros.

Por outro lado com este esforço (que já não é normal) e o parco almoço que se seguiu devo ter dado cabo da barriguinha…

Olha não, ainda não foi desta. Bolas!

Almoço vegetariano

Atenção: publicidade, descarada!

As minhas deambulações pela cozinha vegetariana têm-me trazido algumas surpresas, umas boas, outras más e outras que mais vale esquecer.
Mas hoje ao almoço tive a melhor experiência de cozinha vegetariana até hoje.

Fui almoçar ao “Tudo Verde” no Centro Comunitário de Carnaxide, um restaurante/mini-mercado vegetariano de que já tinha ouvido falar várias vezes mas onde curiosamente ainda não tinha ido comer.

Lá optei por um combinado (prato regular, não era especial do dia) que me deixou deliciado.

A composição é simples: Requeijão, raspas de maçã (montes delas - devia ser uma maçã inteira pelo menos), raspas de cenoura (poucas) e arroz integral.

O arroz servido quente, tudo o resto frio. Come-se tudo misturado.

Maravilhoso!

E Pixies, como foi?

Enquanto estive de férias houve apenas uma coisa que realmente me fez ter pena de não estar em Portugal: o concerto de Pixies no Superbock, Super Rock.

Entretanto como estive mesmo noutra dimensão até me esqueci deste pormenor até agora.

Já perguntei por aí como foi o concerto mas gostava de ter mais opiniões.

E então? Temos banda outra vez ou é mais uma daquelas reuniões de “vamos lá tocar umas cenas antigas para sacar mais uns cobres aos saudosistas”?

Disguising mobile phone antennas

Companies are finding (controversial) ways to disguise mobile phone antennas.

So OK, it is a good ideia to disguise them but the “Jesus on the antenna” design is way overboard!

Read about it here.

Are we feeling silly yet?

gmail and the balance of the universe

Something must be right with the universe when I get my gmail invitation on this particular day.
Then again after the account creation I got a server error and haven’t been able to login since, so the balance is not all there.
It’s a good thing I have my yoga class today, when I get home everything should be working… ;)

Update: Yep, it is working. All the good names were taken so it is gambuzino at you.know.what (no point asking for more automated spam, is there?).

Airport connectivity

Every airport should be just like this one.
In Schippol (spelling?) airport in Amsterdam all you have to do if you have a laptop and want wireless connectivity is push a button on a touch-screen, swipe your credit card and voilá - day-long connectivity for 10 euros.
Easy, affordable and really, really high speed.
Ah, being connected again. Importing my mail right now to read on the next flight.
Geek happiness! :)

Fim de férias

Duas semanas sem conectividade.
Amanhã espero poder ligar-me no aeroporto de Amsterdão onde devemos passar cerca de 4 horas (se tudo correr bem desta vez, claro).
Só nessa altura vou fazer todos os posts que tenho pendentes.
A Escócia é algo de maravilhoso, 15 dias não foi propriamente pouco, mas não parámos em nenhum lado, andámos sempre na estrada. No final ficámos com um belo roteiro de sítios onde quero voltar sem falta um dia.
As fotos irão aparecer aos poucos. Não sei ao certo onde, mas vão aparecer.

O lado certo

Conduzir pela esquerda nem é assim tão mau. É esquisito, mas não é muito mau.
Mau mesmo é conduzir com o volante à direita do carro.

A noção que se tem do espaço e equilíbrio do carro são totalmente contrariadas, é estranhíssimo contar com um comportamento em curva e, de repente, apercebermo-nos que o peso todo do carro está do lado errado!

E as mudanças? Não só se torna impossível saber em que mudança estamos apenas por tocar na manete e perceber exactamente onde ela está como se torna uma aventura tentar, por exemplo, fazer um arranque um bocado mais rápido, com a mão na manete, e ir metendo 1-2-3 em sequência rápida. Elas não entram! A mão esquerda não foi feita para estas coisas!!

Ah pois, é verdade, terminou a nossa estadia em Edimburgo e já nos fizemos à estrada.

E entretanto recebi ontem a notícia: já sou tio! O Diogo resolveu não esperar o tempo todo e nascer sem eu estar lá, o malandro… ;)

Edimburgo

Edimburgo é fixe.

As malas chegaram ontem à noite ao hotel. É sempre bom quando a nossa bagagem vem connosco de férias.

Para não variar fartámo-nos de andar por Edimburgo. É uma cidade mesmo simpática e mesmo sendo domingo consegue-se visitar muito bem. O tempo também ajudou, acho que o famoso mau tempo escocês é um mito.

Vimos o Harry Potter ao final da tarde (aproveitámos para descansar um bocado os pés).

Será que cheguei aos 31 anos para finalmente começar a apreciar cerveja? Mas por outro lado as cervejas que se bebem por aqui não têm nada a ver com as que se bebem em Portugal, isso é um facto…”

Agora ainda mais perigoso, cuidado, muito cuidado Manuelito!

Sim, muito mais perigoso mesmo, o avião que devíamos ter apanhado para Edimburgo teve problemas e tiveram de utilizar outro mais pequeno. Resultado: fomos passados para um voo mais tardio. Nós e mais um grupo de pessoas.

Agora a parte gira é que nós chegámos, mas as malas estão em Amsterdão. O que vale é que houve mais gente nesta situação e, pela reacção do pessoal do aeroporto de Edimburgo e até do Hotel isto é uma situação vulgar. Nice, huh?

Com sorte ainda temos as malas hoje, vamos lá ver…

O iBook parece ter sobrevivido, estou a criar esta entrada nele e até agora não desatou a deitar faíscas ou fumo, por isso parece-me bem, vou deixá-lo a trabalhar para gerar calor e ajudar a secar totalmente o interior.

Edimburgo parece ser uma cidade lindíssima, muito pacífica (para uma capital, claro) e acolhedora, até agora as pessoas foram todas muito simpáticas e corteses para connosco.

Talvez vamos ver o Harry Potter amanhã. :)

OK, está na hora de comer para depois ir dormir cedo porque já estamos acordados desde as 3h30 e para além das viagens e secas nos aeroportos já palmilhámos um bom bocado da cidade hoje.

PS- Vou mesmo ter de comprar mais memória para a máquina fotográfica. Ou então deixar de tirar fotos em RAW… Ná, mais memória!

Emoções fortes

Um voo a uma hora destas, a senhora do check-in que não percebeu que íamos fazer ligação para Edimburgo e, portanto, não fez o check-in total nosso nem das bagagens (mas também àquela hora ate se compreende) e um banho de água no Mac ligado estão a tornar esta viagem num acontecimento altamente emocionante…

Agora vamos ter festa em Amsterdão com a bagagem e logo à noite quando tiver coragem para voltar a ligar o Mac vai ser outra emoção.

É uma experiência nova levantar o teclado do iBook para poder ensopar a água que está por baixo com lenço de papel…

De resto (e pelo menos) continua a ser muito bom voar pela KLM mesmo, o serviço é bem melhor que o de qualquer outra companhia que já tenha experimentado.

Tá quase!

Mais um post sem substância, apenas quero testar o Azure para fazer posts em caso de “emergência”.

Logo às 4h30 :( vou para a Escócia. Yes! :)

CVS magic - bringing files back to life

So the time comes when you want to get a file back from the dead. You’ve deleted it in the past because you were positive you wouldn’t need it but, lo and behold, you need it again now.

That’s OK, you just go into the repository and move the file from the Attic back to the “live” directory and you’re done, right?
Not quite…

Actually when you “cvs remove” a file CVS not only moves it into the Attic but also makes a new revision of the file and marks it as “dead”.

Here is how it might look:

head    1.10;
access;
symbols;
locks; strict;
comment @# @;

1.10
date    2004.04.14.13.20.08;    author admin;   state dead;
branches;
next    1.9;

1.9
date    2003.12.09.20.36.05;    author admin;   state Exp;
branches;
next    1.8;

... ... ...

So you see that the file was in version 1.9 and then it was removed and gained a new version (1.10) and is now dead (state dead;).

OK, now what?

Well, here’s how you go about bringing the file back into working shape:

1. Go into the working copy of the project

   cd ~/my_project
   

2. Issue the following command to recover the file

   cvs -Q update -p -r 1.9 foo.pl > foo.pl
   

3. Add the file (again)

   cvs add foo.pl
   

4. Commit it cvs ci -m “back from the dead” foo.pl

And you’re done.

The thing that still bugs me is that you have to delve into the repository to find out the last revision the file had before deletion but so far I couldn’t find a better way to do it.

Kudos to Melo who is always surrounded by nice books like the one this tip came from - Open Source Development with CVS.

Party Shuffle

The Party Shuffle is hands down the most welcome feature of iTunes in recent months.

I’ve gotten so used to it I just about stopped listening to any other playlists.

Right now it’s playing Alone In Kyoto from the album Talkie Walkie by AIR (and yes, this information was automatically generated by ecto. Gotta love that).

Let’s hear it for absolutely non-substantial posts! Yeah!

But at least you know I’m still alive…

Ena pá, venho da festa…

Ou melhor, venho do barco, mas é como se fosse da festa. ;)

[Neste artigo existiram em tempos um conjunto de fotografias que entretanto se perderam.]

É verdade fui mesmo navegar no Wilma

Embora com relativamente pouco vento conseguimos içar velas e velejar

Sao uns 12 metros de barco

E apesar de haver bastante relax

Ainda me fartei de fazer coisas a bordo, por isso estou mesmo estafado.
Logo vou mas é para a cama e mais tarde quando tiver o site mais arrumado ponho as fotos mais interessantes on-line numa galeria própria.

Agora a primeira impressão sobre esta história de velejar é simples de dar: fabuloso!

So what is *your* OS like?

Everyone and his mother has already mentioned this but I’m a “me too” kind of guy sometimes and this is just too funny (and strikes too close to home) to ignore.

So what am I talking about? Charles Miller has a couple of articles in his weblog where he explains (and very convincingly so) why Microsoft is a cheap whore, Apple is a lover and Linux a psychotic ex.

The creepy thing about this is that on some higher level he is right on the money. Funny old world, heh?

Ecto

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve always used Movable Type’s web interface to manage all aspects of my weblog, including all of the editing and posting of entries and drafts.

Pedro, however, being a newcomer to the world of weblogging is in love with Ecto and so has been harassing me to try it out. ;-)

Well, I’ve had problems with version 1.1.5 because of character encoding issues (which, by the way, are not really Ecto’s fault, it is Movable Type who is in the wrong here but Ecto had to adapt, of course) but now they are completely solved and so I’m giving Ecto a spin.

So far I’m very well impressed with it, it gives the user a very powerful and very easy to use interface to his/her weblog and that’s no easy feat (powerful and easy are almost always at opposite ends of the application characteristics spectrum).

Also it’s integration with MAC OS X’s applications (so far iTunes and iPhoto) do come in handy.
The iTunes integration is more of a toy and the default output (creating a link to an Amazon.com search on the author) is more of a curiosity than a really useful feature. Yes, I know it can be changed but this is a Mac for crying out loud, give me sensible defaults! Kidding, OK? :-)
Now the iPhoto integration is a real interesting thing. It allows the user to upload pictures straight from his/hers iPhoto collection without ever opening iPhoto and then you can even scale the original, create a thumbnail, customise it’s positioning, border, margin, even convert the picture format! This is something I’ll surely appreciate having (at least until such time as my incredibly useful and sexy photography collection manager is in place).

And that’s it for now, but for the finishing touch, the piece de resistence if you will, here’s one of Ecto’s defaults HTML snippets:

[Posted with ecto]

Now ain’t that a nice thing?

Navegar fora da web - é possível!

Amanhã vou fazer o meu baptismo de mar. Na realidade não sei se lhe devo chamar baptismo de mar, já andei em barcos a motor e até num grande paquete de cruzeiro…

OK, pronto, baptismo de vela.

Amanhã vou velejar pela primeira vez graças ao convite de um amigo, vamos um grupo razoável de pessoas, incluindo eu a Tuxa e o Paulinho.
O barco é um veleiro de cruzeiro, de seu nome Wilma, e pertence a um grupo chamado Meridiano 10.

Caso me dê bem e caso haja vento e caso a coisa corra mesmo muito bem e caso haja oportunidade para o fazer vou tentar tirar umas fotos e “postar” (argh!) aqui.

O final de tarde de amanhã promete! :-)

Por outro lado à noite temos reunião de condomínio. Acho que é um indicador inconfundível da harmonia cósmica, uma coisa potencialmente muito agradável e outra certamente entediante e/ou irritante de morte (fica como exercício para o leitor decidir qual é qual).

Moblogging

Pedro discusses moblogging and asks for ideas (actually he asks for the ” spec of the ultimate moblogging app” - fat chance) ;) for an application.

Well, I’ve always “mobloged”, simply because I’ve had a Palm and GPRS connectivity for over a year and since I’ve always used the weblog’s web interface for managing my weblog and for posting entries this was just a natural thing to do.

So yeah, if you consider posting pictures remotely then it might become a big deal but for standard “text” blogging I don’t get what all the fuss is about.
Apparently people are talking about moblogging but are in fact referring to a specific way of moblogging which is based in MMS or email messages.
Now people get this: moblogging is Mobile Blogging it has no ties whatsoever with the underlying transport mechanism you use to post your stuff.

Having said that and answering Pedro, I don’t have a spec for the ultimate app (far from it) but I do have a couple of ideas:

• Make it as secure as the user wishes: when parsing messages you can either post it immediately, hold it for approval by a moderator, or implement a simple authentication mechanism where the user might be forced to add a line with a username/password pair for the entry to be posted, otherwise it will be added to the moderation queue (this is weak but better than nothing and you can still add things like PGP validation if you are dealing with mail messages). But in the end leave the security model to use up to the user;
• Allow for mixed posts: make it possible to receive and post a message consisting of both pictures and text. Using email for this is trivial, but MMS messages with multi-part content should also be allowed (hell we all know MMS is simply mail in disguise anyway…).

More ideas will come to me in time, no doubt, I’ll track back Pedro’s entry when they do.

Lego Rubik’s Cube solver - for real

I just couldn’t resist this one so this is yet another “Wow!” post.

Check out JP Brown’s Serious LEGO - CubeSolver where you can find the description of how JP Brown built an actual Lego device that solves the Rubik’s Cube problem.
And I mean solve it physically, in the 3D-universe. I guess you have to go see it.

This is just so cool for an engineer/geek-type that I cannot even begin to describe it. Snif! ;)

O tal licor de morango…

…é uma verdadeira delícia!

Mas também é uma bomba alcoólica pelo que tive de me ficar pela prova moderada depois do almoço. Afinal estou a trabalhar, ainda que seja sexta-feira… ;)

A receita é da Sara e recomenda-se.

Thoughts on organizing a digital photograph collection

(I definitely must get me some (any!) sort of Wiki set-up for me, this doesn’t strictly belong in a weblog but on a Wiki page where I can expand on it.)

Be warned, these are just my unsorted and unstructured thoughts about this matter, so it’s long and it may not make perfect sense all the way…

What I’ve got covered

I’ve been thinking about a way to store my digital photographs. I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while now but each week that passes the problem gets worse and worse.

Right now I’ve got the part about the digital workflow covered (until I think of something better, that is, but for now it works), including storing the “digital negatives”, backing them up and creating the contact-sheets to find pictures at a later time.
The process is mostly finished in my head and it will be smoothed out as I go through it until it settles on something that I am absolutely conformable with and at that stage I’ll probably write it down and be happy with it.

Didn’t I take a picture of a nice boat, oh, 3 years ago?

What bothers me now is the “finding photographs latter” part.
The contact-sheets are a good idea for silver- (actually celluloid-) based photography, sure, but is it really adequate for digital photography?
I mean, the photos are all on a digital medium, shouldn’t it be easier and isn’t it more logical to use some digital tool to review and find them?

Apart from the quite extensive photograph collection I already have and the cost-issue that comes with printing contact-sheets for every “session” of photographs I make, is it really the best way to find the photographs in the future?

Of course I won’t even dream of cataloguing every single photograph and assign keywords to each and everyone of them —sure, that would be the ideal thing to do but I just know I’ll never have the time to do it, life’s just too short— so what other options are there?

The good-ol’ wish list

Well, I don’t have any answers, but I do have some ideas as to what I’d like to have and what I’ve already figured out about how to do some of it.

And it goes like this:

• I have photographs in jpeg and raw format. Actually I might conceivably have photographs in other formats (tiff for scans from my celluloid photographs, for instance) but the point is that on the web (ah yes, I envision a web-based system) I guess I’ll want to have it all on a jpeg format;

• Also, I know I won’t be using these pictures for any kind of fancy or high-resolution output, they will be used mostly for finding out a certain photograph (or group of photographs that match a certain criteria), browsing through the picture collection or viewing each one on the web (on some album-like site or maybe a photoblog), so I have decided that maintaining on-line versions of 1024x768 pixels (at most, maybe even smaller ones) is more than adequate;

• The points above indicate that a conversion has to occur from the original photograph (hi-resolution jpeg, tiff, raw, whatever) into a lower-resolution jpeg. This is OK, because if I want to process a photograph latter on I have the original to work with;

• I will want to use these pictures on a gallery or photoblog-like site and this implies that even smaller versions will have to exsit (thumbnail sized and medium sized ones). Should I store these on disk or should I create them on-the-fly? Disk, of course, but the storage issue may be a problem… Maybe create these scaled-down versions only for those pictures which will be used on the web? But the master catalogue must have all of them for me to find them so at least the thumbnail ones must be created for all of them. Oh boy…

• Search, don’t catalogue. Meaning, I will have to have some (very easy to use) way of adding some properties to the photographs in order to find them later. I know I said I don’t think I’ll have the time or patience to assign keywords to every photograph, but something as simple as selecting 300 photographs from a trip and adding the keywords “tourism” and “Venice” to them is a lot of help! (No, I’ve never been to Venice, but I’ve been to Venice Beach if that counts…) :). The ideal interface to search for the photographs would then be a search by keyword as opposed to a search by “folder” or by “theme”. Search by time-frame is also a must, of course and even by some EXIF properties, but this is the easy part;

• It must be extremely easy to add lots of photographs to the system and it would be even better if I could add the keywords to all of them at the same time that I import them. All other sizes required for the pictures should be created automatically at the same time.

Finding Nemo

Soooo… Now I just have to find such a system. I won’t even consider writing one until I absolutely run out of options in the open-source world and it will be a shock to me if I really have to do it. Altering something that already exists to suit my needs is quite acceptable, though. Won’t this be fun?

Actually I already have some candidates in mind, but I’ll have to investigate further to see which ones (if any) are the easiest to tweak to do what I want exactly how I want it.

I think I’ll start with photos, a great piece of software I already use by Alex King. I’ve stopped using it for a while now but it was already very good when I looked at it and there where a few more versions released in the meantime. Yes, I think I’ll start there.

But first all these ideas must settle a little more.
I think writing about it helps. Let’s see how it goes. :)

How I am using Movabletype

Mena at Six Apart asked anyone who cared to explain how they where using Movabletype to leave a track-back to this entry on Six Apart’s weblog.

Well, here’s how I use it (on a Movabletype 2.64):

• My personal weblog (one author);
• One personal test weblog (one author);
• A weblog for an open-source project - syndigator (3 authors);
• A weblog for my wife’s readers club - 4 friends who like books and reading (4 authors)

This makes up for the grand total of 4 weblogs and 7 authors.

While I could conceivably pay for the tool, $150 is totally out of the question, all of the weblogs are either personal or used by groups of people who are basically just a group of friends writing software essentially for fun or talking about the books they read.

So this is my “rational, just the facts” type post.

I won’t be migrating to 3.0 soon, it doesn’t bring any major new feature that would be useful for me, it is still unstable (I know people who are using it and it isn’t a rock-free road) and I am definitely not going to be paying that sort of money for a “weblog for friends”-infrastructure.

I like Movabletype a lot, it has a nice structure, I like the fact that it is written in Perl (yes, I know, this is a purely personal opinion) and apparently versions 3.0 upward will bring added security and enhanced performance but there are a lot of viable alternatives so either the licensing scheme is revised or my next upgrade will be into another tool.

One day my whole site will be based on this

Ok, maybe not the whole site, but the bulk of it.

Kiwi is a project of Melo’s which he is discussing actively with some people and there are a lot of good ideas around it.

I can hardly wait for it to come out, but then again we all have our own day-jobs to attend to. ;)

Mais uma vez a PT…

É preciso ter pontaria.

Ando há uns anos convencido que um equipamento que tenho em casa não pode funcionar correctamente por causa de ter uma linha ADSL em casa em vez de uma linha analógica normal.

Hoje finalmente tive um técnico em casa a fazer testes comigo e após cerca de uma hora chegámos à conclusão que esse equipamento e a linha ADSL são incompatíveis.
Em termos de voz corre tudo bem, mas ligar-me à Internet é que foi impossível.
Havia erros de todos os tipos, impossibilidade de autenticar em 90% das tentativas e quando autenticava ou perdia a ligação logo de seguida ou então tinha um packet drop brutal.

E pronto, a conclusão está formada, aprendemos algo com isto, desliga-se o equipamento para não causar problemas no acesso à Internet, pago ao técnico o tempo despendido nos testes e fica tudo bem.

Após o técnico ter ido embora lá fui eu desligar a ligação via netcabo e ligar a boa da linha ADSL.
Só que não funcionava.
Testa isto, verifica aquilo, volta a verificar os cabos…

Espera lá, isto de trabalhar no meu próprio operador tem vantagens: liga-se para o pessoal da rede e pergunta-se se por acaso o incumbente não estará com problemas no ADSL (oferta de bit-stream) na minha zona.

E não é que está mesmo?

Que maravilha, não só invalidaram uma manhã de testes como ainda por cima tive de pagar a um técnico que vai ter de voltar (pagando outra vez, claro) para fazer precisamente os mesmos testes.

Claro que a PT me vai pagar os prejuízos. Claro…

Redundancy in connectivity

Boy it’s good being a geek!

The ADSL link is going to be down for two days (by my own choice - don’t ask) but still I have access (and this site is up) because I have multiple providers and multiple access technologies.

It just gives you a warm fuzzy feeling. :)

Scotland ahoy!

The upcoming Scottish trip planing (what little planing there will be) is coming along nicely.

So far we have the flights and the lodging in Edinburgh booked and tonight we will deal with the car rental.

What is proving to be much more difficult than I thought is booking a night in a castle.

We favour a castle in the eastern coast of Scotland and as near Edinburgh as possible.
This is because we want to stay at the castle early on in the trip in order to be free to roam the rest of the country at our own pace the rest of the time without any date concerns besides getting on the plane back home on time.

Then again we may just as well not book anything and see if we get lucky, but given the restricted number of rooms available in the castles we are aiming at (the elder castles we can find) this does not sound too appealing.

Oh well, lets just see how our luck turns out.

Fedora Core 2 is out in style

In response to certain people who were complaining about me not having any updates for a while I’d like to note (just like everyone else and their mother) that Fedora Core 2 is out.

The best reference to it I can find is here at lwn.net and features such pearls as

Including musical numbers such as “Who Let Fedora Out?” by the Slashdot Men, “The Download Goes On” by Celeron Dion, and “The Hacker in Me” by Shania Sane.

or even

“My mortgage rate was cut in half after I replied to spam using Fedora Core 2!” raves Bo Battipaglia.

Go get it if you’re into it. If you’re not just ignore it. Or something.

Madrugar

Teoricamente sou um madrugador.

Yep, de vez em quando consigo levantar-me cedo e fazer coisas interessantes logo de manhã. E nessas alturas o dia parece que rende mais, e tudo o resto que se diz por aí.

Hoje por exemplo levantei-me às 7h20 e às 7h30 estava na piscina, onde nadei uma hora antes de voltar para o quarto para tomar um duche.
(Nota: estou num hotel, claro, não tenho piscina em casa!) ;)
E soube-me muito bem, consegui fazer desporto e sinto-me bem para enfrentar o resto do dia.

Se conseguisse fazer sempre assim era muito bom.

O problema é que na prática sou um dorminhoco e geralmente é preciso uma grua para me tirar da cama.
Oh well…

Mar de Verão

Hoje o mar está de Verão.

Aliás, o mar já está de Verão há algum tempo (umas poucas semanas).

Mas o que é o mar de Verão?
Boa pergunta.

Eu vivi praticamente toda a minha vida junto ao mar e adoro-o. Ele faz parte integrante (e muito importante) da minha vida e tenho com ele uma relação muito forte. Ao ponto de me fazer considerar verdadeiras loucuras só para poder viver mais próximo dele, mas isto não é assunto para este artigo… ;-)

Há já algumas semanas tivemos uns dias verdadeiramente bons, muita gente foi à praia e andávamos todos de t-shirt e calções. Mas ao passar na marginal num fim-de-semana durante esse período a Tuxa olhou para o mar e disse que “ainda é mar de Inverno”.
Eu compreendi perfeitamente o que ele queria dizer e a conversa ficou por aí, mas o mar estava calmo como um espelho, a água estava relativamente boa e havia bastante gente a tomar banho de mar.

Há coisa de dois fins-de-semana atrás, mais uma vez passando na marginal, a Tuxa diz “já tinha reparado há uns dois dias, o mar já está de Verão”. E o mar estava agitado que se farta e estava inclusivamente um tempo muito frouxo.
Mas ela tinha razão, o mar já estava de Verão, e hoje, por exemplo, o mar está calmo, com uma bela cor e claramente “de Verão”. E vai ficar assim até daqui a uns meses, independentemente das tempestades de primavera que ainda virão por aí.

Então a questão que se coloca é: mas afinal o que é ao certo o “mar de Verão”? Ou o “mar de Inverno” sequer…

Apesar da relação próxima que tenho com o mar não consigo responder a isto.
Não é o estado dele: o mar de verão pode estar a ter uma tempestade medonha, mas ainda é mar de Verão.
Não é a temperatura: há dias no Inverno de mar deliciosamente quente e dias gélidos no Verão. E, aliás, o mar reconhece-se como sendo de Verão ou de Inverno apenas ao olhar para ele…
Não é da cor: as tempestades de verão tornam-no tão cinzento como ele está durante a maioria do Inverno.

Há qualquer coisa que transmite a qualidade de Verão ou de Inverno, que é demasiado subtil para eu perceber ao certo mas que é infalível. Claro que há mares “intermédios”, nota-se quando um mar de Inverno está quase a tornar-se um mar de Verão, mas não se pode dizer que haja realmente mares intermédios, a mudança é demasiado radical.

É a ondulação. É a maneira como o vento causa a ligeira (ou maior) agitação no mar e a maneira como ele reage a esse vento. É (também) a cor, mas não de uma forma óbvia ou quantificável (pelo menos por mim…). É o aroma que vem do mar.

Enfim, não consigo perceber ao certo. Alguém me ajuda?

Improvements to the digital workflow

I’ve just finished printing the first batch of contact sheets for my digital negatives and I must say I am pleased with the results.

Printing at home is something I will never try to do —it just isn’t worth the hassle and I will never get good results with consumer-grade equipment— but I do have a colour ink-jet printer and it does come in handy sometimes.

In this case I use it to print the contact sheets for the digital negatives I store on CDs and on my big (well it doesn’t feel that big now but it did seem huge when I first bought it) hard-drive. I use photoshop’s ContactSheet II “script” to create full A4 contact sheets of all the photographs I put on a folder and then cram as many folders as I can into a master folder and burn a CD with it.

This way I can continue to use my favourite method of organising pictures and finding them later on (I still print contact sheets for my silver-based photography and I guess I always will).

Life is good. Now if I can only buy the definitive hard-drive and never have to upgrade again I’ll be really happy!

Priorities

It’s good to know there are some people who are “worse” than me.

There’s this guy who actually considers making WiFi availability in the waiting room a choosing-factor when switching doctors. No seriously, it’s all here.

I am not alone! :-)

Elvis Costello no Coliseu

Foi no sábado à noite que vi pela primeira vez Elvis Costello ao vivo.
Também é natural, a última vez que esteve em Portugal foi à 25 anos e aos 6 anos de idade não era meu hábito assistir a concertos de música ao vivo… :-)

Não sou conhecedor da obra dele, conheço uma música por outra e gosto, mas fui a este concerto sobretudo para benefício da Tuxa.
No entanto saí de lá convertido.

O concerto teve dois músicos, o Elvis e o pianista actual dele -cujo nome me escapa- e, na sua essência, 3 instrumentos: o piano, a guitarra (sobretudo acústica) e a voz. Houve algumas aparições de outros instrumentos (guitarra eléctrica, harmónica, até acordeão) sempre tocados apenas pelos dois, mas a grande maioria do concerto foi mesmo baseada em piano voz e guitarra.

E em relação à voz há que dizer isto: o concerto teve um pouco mais de duas horas e meia de duração e quase no final, ou seja após estar cerca de duas horas e meia a cantar praticamente sem parar, o Sr. Costello sai da frente do microfone, vem para a beira do palco e canta uma música inteira totalmente sem microfone. E ouvia-se perfeitamente em todo o Coliseu dos Recreios. E não teve uma falha. Ele sabe cantar!

Em relação às músicas, como disse, não sou conhecedor do seu repertório, mas deu para perceber que ele é um compositor genial. Tirando algumas excepções pontuais a música dele é realmente complexa, sem ser inatingível (tipo aquele Jazz que só os conhecedores conseguem perceber e apreciar). O acompanhamento do piano muitas vezes eram verdadeiras peças clássicas que valiam por si só, mas com a voz dele, as letras e até um acompanhamento ou ritmo de guitarra muito simples ficam verdadeiramente geniais. Por outro lado ele tem também música mais experimental que dá muito mais trabalho a digerir. Mas quem é que tem pressa?

Acho que é de certa forma apropriado que eu tenha “descoberto” Elvis Costello num concerto ao vivo, da forma como se fazia estas descobertas “nos bons velhos tempos” (antes das mega-máquinas promocionais das editoras nos enfiarem as bandas que querem pela goela abaixo a toda a hora). Ele é um músico dos “bons velhos tempos”, por isso há uma certa sensação de justiça poética em relação a isso.

Vou ter de começar a coleccionar a discografia dele. O público era composto na maioria por conhecedores e verdadeiros apreciadores e eu percebi porquê.

Elvis Costello: recomenda-se.

Abriu a época dos gelados

Foi hoje a abertura oficial da época dos gelados. E para surpresa nossa descobrimos que o Santini já está aberto.
Oh dia glorioso! :)

Pergunta: Como sabes se és viciada(o) em gelados?
Resposta: Não tens o número de telefone do teu banco ou sequer de todos os teus médicos no palm, mas tens o do Santini!

In deeper

Today I made the arrangements to buy another Mac.
If all goes well by next monday I’ll be the proud owner of an almost new, Dual G4 867Mhz, Superdrive-equipped, Quicksilver edition PowerMac.

Thanks to Vasco (who apparently is a never-ending source of great deals, having found me the great deal I got on the Canon EOS-10D) I got (yet another) great deal on this Mac. It is second hand but in mint condition (some of the cellophane-like protections are still in place).

This will be a “surprise” to my wife so it’s a good thing she never reads this after all… :D

Now there are some deep philosophical questions hounding me, like:

• Am I really ready to loose Linux at home?
• Can I loose Linux at home? More specifically:
  • Can I control my X10 devices from the PowerMac? Even remotely?
  • Is the PowerMac a good machine to be acting as a gateway instead of my current Linux box?
  • Can I control my UPS properly from the PowerMac?
• Do I want to do any of these things or:
  • Should I just leave the Linux box acting as a gateway (and, well a Linux box) and use the PowerMac as a desktop machine and —more importantly— my Photoshop station and digital jukebox?
• If I decide to have a Linux gateway shouldn’t I just buy a smaller, quieter box for that purpose? (this is a no-brainer, of course I should, but it’ll just have to wait, money doesn’t pour in quite that fast…) :)

These and many more questions are to be answered in the coming weeks and months so stay tuned to find out how this exciting drama unfolds!

Rodrigo Leão e amigos

Foi ontem à noite, na Aula Magna, e foi muito bom. Segue-se as minhas notas. Claro, julgavam que se escapavam? :P

Primeiro vieram os Loopless.
Foi a primeira vez que tive qualquer tipo de contacto com esta banda. Aliás desconhecia sequer a sua existência antes.
Após uma breve busca não encontrei nenhum site ou referência mais completa aos Loopless, mas consegui encontrar o link para o disco deles na amazon e uma foto do dito cujo disco:

[A foto perdeu-se no tempo. Era catita…]

Agora que a parte de serviço público está terminada continuemos com a conversa sobre o concerto de ontem.

Os Loopless foram uma agradável surpresa. Embora o seu tipo de música não seja definitivamente a minha onda (trip-hop ou algo semelhante, é um bocado difícil seguir estes nomes) ;) os músicos deram todos um espectáculo excelente e a vocalista tem uma voz fabulosa. Muito bom.

E depois veio o “prato principal”.
Aqui tenho a dizer que Rodrigo Leão ao vivo é, como seria de esperar, uma experiência quase mítica. ;)
Mas a sério, foi um concerto muito bom mesmo, a música nova dele está ao nível do que ele tem feito anteriormente. Gostei muito.
Mas também tive uma pequena desilusão.
OK temos que pôr as coisas em contexto, depois da Teresa Salgueiro vai ser difícil encontrar outra vocalista que consiga satisfazer totalmente, mas…

Aparentemente uma das vocalistas do próximo álbum dele (não é engraçado como eu não deixo de utilizar o termo álbum?) é a Sónia Tavares (sim, a dos The Gift). Eu sou grande fã dos Gift, acho que isso é sobejamente conhecido, mas desta vez fiquei muito desapontado.

A voz da Sónia mal se ouvia e quando se ouvia estava apagada e sem força.
A questão é que eu sei que ela é uma boa cantora e que tem uma voz fabulosa, mas então o que é que aconteceu ontem?
Pode ter sido uma noite má (toda a gente tem), pode ter sido nervoso (depois das tournées que ela já fez? pouco provável), pode ser que este tipo de material não se adeque ao estilo dela (hum… isto já é mais provável), mas seja o que for fiquei muito mal impressionado com o que ouvi ontem e quando me apercebi de quem era a cantora fiquei pasmado.

Mas isso foi o menos, o concerto foi muito bom e proporcionou uma noite muito bem passada.

Como se sentir uma ave rara

Estou neste momento no processo de escolher o modo de transporte do equipamento fotográfico mais laptop.
Como tenho múltiplos problemas nas costas não posso considerar sequer a utilização de um saco de ombro. Basta-me uns 15 minutos com peso ao ombro para ficar com as costas feitas num oito por vários dias, logo esta opção está totalmente fora de questão.
Naturalmente vou optar por uma mochila. Agora não pode ser uma mochila qualquer, tenho alguns requisitos, nomeadamente:

• tem de estar preparada para levar equipamento fotográfico (pelo menos dois corpos reflex, uma point-and-shoot pequena, 2 a 3 lentes “médias” e uma lente grande, flash e fotómetro);
• tem de ter lugar para todos os cabos, cartões de memória, rolos, etc. necessários;
• tem de poder levar um notebook (nesta fase um iBook de 12”, talvez no futuro um powerBook de 15”);
• tem de ter espaço para os cabos, etc. do laptop;
• tem de poder ser utilizada facilmente sem o laptop estar na mochila, sem parecer que levo uma tenda vazia às costas;
• tem de ser o mais pequena possível (tendo em conta tudo o que tem de carregar, claro);
• tem de poder ser levada facilmente em aviões, carros, etc. (ou seja, não quero montes de correias e bolsos em rede exteriores que se prendem em todo o lado);
• tem de ser confortável nas costas para poder ser usada por períodos prolongados;
• tem de ter fácil acesso ao material de fotografia, mesmo se fôr em deterimento do acesso ao laptop.

Postas estas restrições acabei por limitar as opções a 4 concorrentes: Tamrac 5259, Tamrac 759, Lowepro Computrekker AW e Tenba DB-15C.
Esta lista não considera algumas opções muito boas simplesmente por causa de coisas como o tamanho —a ideia não é ir viver para o mato durante uma semana apenas com esta mochila… ;)

Bom, e agora chegamos à parte gira, que é tentar encontrar estas mochilas por terras Lusas…
Isto porque eu realmente gostava de poder olhar para elas antes de me decidir.
E então temos o seguinte cenário: a Computrekker encontro com alguma facilidade e, inclusivamente, já a vi. Parece-me um bocado grande e mal-jeitosa sem o laptop lá dentro, mas tenho de a voltar a avaliar porque já a vi há muito tempo; a DB-15C pode ser interessante mas nem sei se há representante da Tenba em Portugal, eu não encontrei referência a nenhum; as duas Tamrac têm uma história mais engraçada…

Liguei para o representante da Tamrac em Portugal para saber onde poderia encontrar estas mochilas na zona de Lisboa. Muito simpaticamente indicaram-me a Nameloja como a melhor opção pois se não as tivessem poderiam sempre mandar vir.
Encantado da vida lá fui eu à Nameloja. Embora não tivesse conhecimento prévio desta loja pareceu-me, pela breve pesquisa que fiz, ser uma loja de referência e muito respeitada. Ainda por cima é próximo de mim (Centro Cultural de Belém). Óptimo.

A parte hilariante chega quando eu explico o que quero e a senhora (mais uma vez simpaticamente) me diz que não têm mochilas dessas, nunca tiveram, nem sequer têm o catálogo da Tamrac (algum cliente o levou), sem o catálogo não podem fazer a encomenda do material e que talvez para a semana passe lá o vendedor com um catálogo. Mas melhor ainda é o comentário que se seguiu de que como já tinha havido mais uma pessoa a perguntar pelas mochilas talvez já se possa mesmo encomendar então um exemplar de cada para ter na loja.

“Já houve mais uma pessoa a perguntar por elas”. Uau!

PS- A parte chata é que não fiquei nada convencido que a loja vá efectivamente fazer a encomenda. Lá fiquei com um cartão da loja e o conselho tímido de que ligue “daqui a umas duas semanas” para saber alguma coisa. Ora bolas, ainda vou ter de escolher pelas fotos dos sites das mochilas e talvez até ter de mandar vir de fora… :(

Application roll-call

This is what I call a “living entry”. What this means is that I will update it regularly as the need arises.
Or at least I intend to… Let’s see how it pans out.

Well, with my 40GB hard-drive almost full and because I’ve had my iBook for quite a while now and never re-installed it I feel like a big format and re-install process is looming on the horizon.

This will not happen very soon but anyway I though it would be a good idea to list the apps I use and can’t live without right now to help the process when the time comes.

And also because I’m a list geek. So there. :)

So when I do the roll-call on my Mac these apps are the ones that respond:

• The complete iLife suite (without iDVD, no point in it)
• CodeTek Virtual Desktop (may be gone in the future, but for now still essential)
• Quicksilver (lifesaver)
• XCode
• Adobe Photoshop
• iSync
• Palm Desktop
• NetNewsWire
• Psi
• Firefox (I use Safari extensively, but this is essential sometimes)
• BitTorrent client
• DivX plugin for Quicktime
• Quicktime professional
• DNSUpdate (DynamicDNS client)
• FinkComander
• GPGKeys
• iBatt
• Keynote
• MacStumbler
• Microsoft Office X
• PDA SafeID Desktop (Palm application with a desktop interface)
• Real One Player (not very essential, maybe?)
• SplahPhoto (another Palm app with a desktop interface)
• SSHKeychain (absolutely essential)
• SubEthaEdit
• TNEF’s Enough Carbon (sigh…)
• Unison
• VLC (maybe not so essential now, I’ll have to see)
• VNCViewer
• Windows Media Player
• Gnupg
• SideTrack
• Dimensionizer
• WinSwitch (because fast user switching is good but the menu bar item is ridiculously big)

There are lots of other things installed in my laptop right now but I think these are the ones that would make it to a new installation right at the start.

Cell phone photography

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: using a cell-phone or smart-phone or PDA or whatever as a photo camera just doesn’t cut it.

In here two examples of pictures taken with a Sony-Ericsson t68i and the plugable mini-camera.

The resolution is not all bad (640x480) but apart from that you have strong chromatic deviation, spherical aberrations on the picture and lots of other faults.

It just turn’s me off from using it again when I look at pictures like the one below and remember that the walls where plain white and that this was a rather sunny day. And it wasn’t even taken at the end of the day, it was around 14h00 or 15h00. Just look at the colour on those walls!

[Well, now you can’t, because the photo is lost in the big bit-bucket in the sky.]

Oh well, it does give you an easy way to document your life, the picture above was taken on my way back from the usual lunch spot, while the one bellow was taken on a piece of waste-land just opposite said place.

[This photo, too, has gone the way of the Dodo.]

But I’m still not convinced. Might just as well buy a decent point-and-shoot.

They Came And Ate Us…

… and we definitely didn’t like it. Well, I didn’t anyway.

So far I liked most of what I’ve read from Robert Rankin.

I am reading the books in (mostly) chronological order as laid down in the author’s biography.

The 5 books of the “Blessed Trilogy” (5 books in a trilogy, that’s why it is blessed, it has to be a miracle) were rather good, especially considering they were (almost all of them) the first books written by the author. The last one -“The Brentford Chainstore Massacre”- is the least interesting one but it is not all bad nonetheless.

Then came “Armageddon: The Musical” which, despite having a good premise as a starting point didn’t quite make the mark. But that’s OK, sometimes you get some books which are weaker in a series and it is to be expected, you can’t keep a good run forever, etc., etc.

But then it was time to read “They Came And Ate Us - Armageddon II: The B Movie” and man, did it go downhill!

Granted, the man is no Terry Pratchett and we can’t expect the same kind of “endurance” from him. Even the genre is different, but come on, you just can’t call yourself a comic genius and expect to get away with everything you throw at us based on that!

The book started out OK and went along great until roughly the middle where it started to go downhill.
But this one went a lot lower than the previous one did.
There is a more or less clear point where the author simply looses control over the plot and the characters and tries to get away with it by pretending he just wanted to turn it to some nonsensical joke.

Well, guess what: not everyone is a John Cleese and even he couldn’t get away with some of the stuff he created sometimes…

It’s really sad to see such a promising concept die because of a lack of inspiration or whatever happened there.
The ending (and I’m being generous here, the decline starts well before the ending) doesn’t have a shred of logic and the worst is that it isn’t even funny. It looks like something that was hammered together in 30 minutes just to meet the stinking deadline and let the author get on with his life.

I’m disappointed. Very much so. And I still have “The Suburban Book Of The Dead - Armageddon III: The Remake” on my queue. If it turns out to be as bad as this one I might just give up on Rankin. Which would be a shame, but there you have it, I just feel awful to be taking the (precious) time to read this over things like Quicksilver, just to name an example.

Digital workflow and other digital photography goodies

I’ve found this really interesting article: “Rob Galbraith DPI: Sports Illustrated’s digital workflow” via ongoing.

The sheer volume of shots these guys have to process is amazing and the tools they use to tackle it are incredibly simple (from a computer geek’s point-of-view). It is very instructive to see how they cope with it and there are some very good ideas in there.

Also of great interest is a link in the article to the Sports Illustrated Photo site where they have lots of useful information. In my case the most relevant part is the Suggested settings for the Canon EOS 10D. Very interesting indeed for the digital photography lover.

Tou acabado…

Tou velho e acabado. Completamente!

Quando alguém me diz que se está a inscrever numa maratona de BTT com esta altímetria assim na boa, como se fosse um passeiozinho ali ao lado eu sei que estou totalmente acabado.

Pronto, ele não disse que era um passeio, mas reparem bem na parte entre os 50km e os 75km… É a Serra de S. Mamede!

Ou ele é doido ou eu sou realmente um fraco. Ou as duas coisas.

Acho que vou para a cama ponderar sobre o assunto… ;-)

As ondas da Consolação

[Em tempos existiu aqui uma foto. Agora já não.]

A praia da consolação no Sábado.
Apesar do aspecto delicioso do mar ainda está um frio proibitivo.
Pena…

Crédito onde ele é devido: esta foto não é minha, é da Tuxa.

Fim-de-semana de Yoga

Estou este fim-de-semana em Peniche no “Encontro Nacional de Yoga com o Mestre”.

Sexta-feira houve palestras e prática até à 1h30 (de Sábado), depois no Sábado começámos logo com prática às 6h45. Amanhã, Domingo promete ser igual…

Tudo isto é muito giro e muito bom, mas quem puder vá avisando “o chefe” que eu provavelmente vou ficar a hibernar durante uns 2 ou 3 dias na semana que vem! ;)

Update:
Ora bem, uma prática de 4 horas no Sábado de tarde, mais demonstrações e palestras no Sábado de noite e prática de novo no Domingo às 6h45. Claro que esta última já foi contemplada à distância, da bela da caminha, porque já não fui!
O resumo do fim-de-semana… Bom, foi instrutivo e muito interessante. Ainda não estou convencido que o Yoga seja um caminho a tomar mais a sério no meu caso. Para já continuo com o “Yoga de ginásio”. Vamos andando e vamos vendo.

Ah grande Paulo!

Não costumo linkar artigos muitas vezes sem dar a minha opinião sobre eles, mas aqui não há mais nada a dizer.

É Paulo Querido vs. Bin Laden.

Ah grande Paulo!

A9: searching by Amazon

It seems I’m a late comer but this is still noteworthy: A9 is here!

And what, pray, is A9?

So glad you asked! A9 is Amazon’s search portal. And (get this) it is powered by Google - complete with AdWords listings for search results and all!

This will surely cause some stir on the search world but for the user it is a very useful new service. Not because of the web-search as we already have Google for that and in this case the results are exactly the same, but because it combines the web-search function with Amazon’s own “Search Inside the Book” technology and (even more importantly) their book database.

When Amazon first came up with their “Search Inside the Book” programme and started scanning in and indexing their book inventory many people wondered how this new source of (huge amounts of) information could fit in with the information already on the web.
Could this be the answer? It seems very rational, Google (or whomever takes the crown in that battle, my bets are on Google just now) indexes the web and Amazon indexes the written books. And then you have a single interface to search both. Neat, huh?

Anyway, try out A9 and don’t forget to open the “Book Results” tab to the right or you will miss the whole point of this service! ;)

Páscoa no Alentejo

Ao contrário do que é habitual a Páscoa este ano foi passada no Alentejo, no monte dos meus pais.
Foram três dias de puro relax e como de costume o Alentejo na primavera é algo de incrivelmente belo!
Vou ter achar uma maneira mais definitiva de colocar fotos on-line (provavelmente passando por refazer o site definitivamente num wiki, mas isso é assunto para outro artigo), por isso, para já, fica aqui apenas uma amostra.

[E havia de facto uma bonita foto aqui, mas infelizmente esta perdeu-se nos tempos.] Rio Guadiana perto da aldeia da Estrela.

Também levámos as bicicletas e descobrimos uma série de trilhos aparentemente fabulosos para BTT nas imediações da barragem do Lucefécite. Sempre achei que os trilhos à volta da barragem seriam muito pequenos e sem grande interesse, mas como ambos estamos totalmente fora de forma achámos que seria um bom começo e tivemos uma bela surpresa.
Felizmente levei o GPS e marquei todo o percurso que fizemos. Assim quer no verão quer no inverno (altura em que os níveis da barragem variam tanto que poderemos facilmente perder os trilhos) vamos sempre saber onde procurar o caminho.

O pior foi a volta: esta semana está a revelar-se bastante puxada e ainda nem consegui escrever nada aqui…
Também é o que dá não ter conectividade no monte (nem rede móvel), mas sempre se descansa! ;)

Twinkle twinkle little… eye?

Now this is just plain strange.

Jewellery implants in the eye to get an extra gleam may be just a tad too much. My skin gets crawling just thinking about it.

But then he does make a good point about a heads-up display implant in one’s cornea. In the future. The far, FAR future! :)

Graffiti na praia

[A foto que aqui estava foi indevidamente reciclada algures no percurso deste site.]

As cores da praia da Parede: graffiti na parede, chapéus, mesas e cadeiras verdes.
No verão isto costuma estar um bocado mais cheio de gente… :)

Maré baixa na Parede

[A foto que estava associada a este artigo foi perdida no passado.]

A praia da Parede com a maré baixa.
Estes fundos duros com a maré alta proporcionam umas belas ondas.

Apanhando polvos

[A foto que estava neste artigo foi perdida nos tempos.]

Na praia da Parede é frequente ver apanhadores de polvos, pescadores e apanhadores de marisco na água logo pela manhã quando a maré está baixa.
Esta foto já foi tirada mais a meio da manhã e ainda lá havia uns 2 ou 3 resistentes.

MT-Blacklist seems to be holding it’s own

After only a little more than 24 hours on duty, MT-Blacklist has already caught and prevented the posting of 8 spam comments.

If you take into consideration that this is an extremely low volume weblog 8 attempts in a period of roughly 24 hours is really a lot.

God, I hate spam…

Yes, yes, I know, we all do.

Muppet-mania

Ofereceram-me o The Very Best Of The Muppet Show e já quase acabei de o ver.

Os sketches estão bem escolhidos e gosto bastante do formato escolhido para os mostrar (parecido com um episódio). É quase impossível (para mim seria-o mesmo) escolher os melhores sketches de sempre do Muppet Show, mas acho que concordo com quase todos os escolhidos neste DVD.

Agora o que realmente faz o DVD brilhar é o documentário “Of Muppets and Men”. São cerca de 50 minutos de making of e behind-the-scenes que são francamente muito bons. É dos melhores documentários do género que já vi e o DVD vale tanto por este documentário como pelos sketches em sí.

Aviso à navegação: este DVD (e o segundo volume) não têm nada a ver com as versões de “O melhor dos Marretas” que se vendem por cá, eu tenho essas versões e não há comparação possível, a abordagem é totalmente diferente. E já agora, estes DVDs (Os “Very Best Of…”) não têm legendas em língua nenhuma).

Making Google sniff around for you

This is turning out to be a very prolific day here at my weblog…

I’ve just come across this little beauty on Google weblog.

Google Web Alerts is a (Beta) service that essentially puts the Google Bot searching the Web for you. And every time it finds something that matches your query it sends you an E-mail telling you about it.

Now, I’m not even going to start talking about the implications of using this service as regarding privacy issues, many many people will surely jump at this from that point of view.

What I find really exciting is the power it gives you to continually search the web and dig for whatever meets your fancy, and the fact that getting the Google Bot to do it for you is awesome. They are the number one search engine.

Still Orkut, but what’s the point?

Everyday I get connected to more friends at Orkut, and my approach to it is purely re-active: I don’t invite people to be my friends, people invite me.

So the service is popular, that’s a fact.

But…

What’s the freaking point?!?

Guess I’m just grumpy. Getting older does that to you.

Syndigator in numbers

Since my conversion I’ve effectively stopped using Syndigator but since this project is still close to my heart (and because I’m a friend of the developers - this helps a lot, of course) I keep a close watch on what’s going on with it and even do some of the boring tasks related to new releases (like dealing with the freshmeat page) out of the kindness of my heart… :)

Syndigator is about to have a new release which will mark the port to Gtk2 and I went around to it’s project page on SourceForge and, while I was at it, took a look at the statistics page.

Now this project is totally and completely based on it’s authors’ free time and is, in fact, a hobby of theirs. So are a lot of other open-source projects. But in this case there has been close to no effort spent in publicising it to the world at large.
There have been some initial posts on some weblogs, there is the mandatory Freshmeat page and some word-of-mouth was used, but other than that (and after the initial surge) things have mostly been very quiet on the “trumpet blowing” front.

So why all this now? Because what I saw on the numbers is quite intriguing (for me at least) and bodes very well indeed for the whole venture.
The project is close to one year old and apart from the total redesign of it’s web page (kindly maintained by a most welcome volunteer) there haven’t been any major changes to it and still we are steadily above the 6.000 pageviews/month and have been above the 10.000 mark since December 2003.
Now this may not seem to be very relevant but when I look at the number of downloads per month I see that we are above 400 a month since January 2004 and steadily rising. On the last days we have been well over 10 downloads a day. Now remember, nothing new has happened in terms of releases for quite some time now and absolutely no effort has been made from any of us in order to make Syndigator more widely known.

This leads me to the conclusion that the software is indeed:
a) good software
b) useful
c) better than the alternatives

Don’t get me wrong, I know these figures are puny on an all-time great-opensource-software scale, but for such a modest project to fair this well is something very enjoyable to watch indeed.

Kudos to Bruno and Paulo (who has to get a page on the web for pity’s sake!) ;) for a good job!

Google and the future

Well, apparently I was wrong to doubt it, GMail is real.

And I’ve found this amazing blog entry which is not specifically about GMail but rather makes some very interesting conjectures about what Google is, what they have and what they can do with it.

Very well written and though-out, make sure you go read it.

Spam… Ainda e sempre!

Eu sei que toda a gente anda a falar de spam nos comentários dos weblogs há muito tempo. Até eu já me queixei disso, mas nessa altura tinha um ou dois comentários por semana. E já achava chato.

Entretanto na última semana tenho tido qualquer coisa como 9 ou 10 comentários de spam por dia!
Já estava a dar em doido e claro tive de deixar de ser preguiçoso e instalar o maravilhoso MT-Blacklist.

Mas que descanso!

Se por acaso tentarem fazer post ou ping e receberem uma mensagem a dizer que o post é negado por causa do conteúdo ser duvidoso podem agradecer aos atrasados mentais dos spammers e avisar-me que eu abro uma excepçãozinha para vocês, OK?

Enfim, é uma tristeza…

Aventuras fotográficas de um fim-de-semana de primavera

Este sábado estive, pela primeira vez desde há muito tempo, o dia inteiro de t-shirt. Finalmente está mesmo um tempo totalmente primaveril. E como recebi o fabuloso “the photoshop cs book for digital photographers” recentemente tratei de lhe dar uso.

Aproveitei o passeio que dei no sábado, pela muralha do Estoril, para fazer umas fotos e depois, no resto do fim-de-semana, experimentei algumas técnicas do livro.

Para já ainda estou muito dividido em relação à maioria do conteúdo do livro…
Uma coisa é limpar umas manchas causadas por uma lente suja ou corrigir um pixelizado exagerado causado por uma medição incorrecta da máquina devido à falta de luz, por exemplo, mas fazer as alterações que o livro ensina a todas as fotografias é realmente outra coisa muito diferente.
Não é que essas alterações não fiquem bem ou não produzam imagens muito agradáveis, mas a questão é que isso já não é fotografia como eu a entendo. Nestes casos já estamos mais no domínio da imagem digital como imagem (ou objecto de arte) em sí e não como fotografia.
De qualquer modo conseguem-se fazer coisas sem dúvida muito interessantes se decidirmos seguir por esse caminho e o photoshop é realmente imbatível.
Passei tanto tempo a dizer que o gimp era um mundo (e é, não haja dúvida) e agora vejo pelos meus próprios olhos que o photoshop está a anos-luz de distância…

Uma coisa interessante que percebi durante este primeiro contacto mais a sério com a edição digital de imagem é que o pessoal que anda nestas coisas (artistas gráficos et al) têm toda a razão para andarem sempre a queixar-se das diferenças entre plataformas e da dificuldade que há em afinar as imagens para ficarem bem em todo o lado.
É impossível! Se editar a foto no monitor externo até ficar mesmo bem, passo-a para o monitor do portátil e está totalmente diferente. E quando a reduzo para mostrar na web então? E quando a vejo num browser diferente? Argh! É impossível ter uma imagem que seja vista de modo igual em todo o lado, por isso desisti totalmente desse intento. Quem quiser ver as imagens como deve ser arranje um monitor devidamente calibrado e utilize um software que respeite o perfil de côr embebido nas imagens e pronto!

Enfim, aqui estão algumas brincadeiras deste fim-de-semana, só pelo gozo da coisa:

[As fotos referidas a seguir foram, infelizmente, perdidas em alguma migração deste site.]

Um canto do sótão no sábado de manhã.

Visão parcial de uma casa vista da muralha do Estoril, junto à pria do Tamariz.

Pedras no mar vistas da muralha.

Rocha avermelhada a sair do mar.

Restaurante na praia do Tamariz.

Palacete no topo da praia da Poça.

To be or not to be…

This could prove to be the best April’s fool prank I’ve ever heard about.

Some say it is a prank, others say that it is real.

Anyway, I’m talking about the revolutionary Google announncement about gmail.

The thing is that the lunar jobs are obviously a fake so is this gmail thing a bluff then or real?

Can it ever be real?

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god! :D

I’ve even heard the news today on a national radio here in Portugal (Antena 3).

If this turns out to be a joke it will have been one of the finest and best staged ones I’ve ever heard, but if it turns out to be real… I can’t even begin to imagine the impact it will have on so many levels!

Google definitely rocks, even on things other than searching.

Mais um para o grupo…

… dos endividados compulsivos.

O Paulo obteve hoje a aprovação para o crédito habitação para comprar a sua primeira casa.
Mais um endividado até ao fim da vida. Parabéns, bem vindo ao clube!

São estas coisas que me fazem sentir cada vez mais cota. Isto e o que vai acontecer amanhã! ;)

Sailing through the information

It’s funny how sometimes new things appear that are so similar to each other and they come out at almost the same time.

Just today I found two great new sites (or should I call them web applications?) that deal with visually navigating through information (a lot of it).

The first one is musicplasma.
In it you search for a music artist or band and it then shows you a graphical representation of other artists/bands which are “connected” or “close” to it and their relative “popularity”. The meaning of “connected”, “close” or “popular” are very loosely defined in the help section and I suspect are heavily dependant on the amazon sales list (the site seems to be fully implemented over amazon’s web services and the discography section sends you to the amazon’s buying page for each album. Oops, did I say album? Gosh, I might just as well have said record… I meant CD, sorry… :)).
A very interesting approach to the problem of searching for music under certain constraints.
Fred pointed me to this one.

The second site I found out about today was newsmap.
This one (ab)uses Google News and

provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

It takes some getting used to and works better when you actually change the default settings to only include topics that interest you (otherwise it is just too much information at once, even in this form. Unless you have something like a 23’ cinema display, in which case I hate you and don’t care about you anyway! ;)).
This one was brought to my attention via boingboing.

The musicplasma still feels like a (great looking) toy, because you get lost pretty quickly in the navigation and end up not buying anything, and you can’t choose (for example) which amazon site you would like to use to base your searches on, while the newsmap is a bit unusable due to too much information displayed on a (potentially) small space but it is rather interesting how this kind of things are not any longer just found on academia but are finding their way into the sights of the general public.

Each day more people see it

Simon Willison discusses Conferences with Macs and makes a point that iChat, Rendezvous, SubEthaEdit, EtherPEG and some other apps are turning the Mac laptops into the ultimate geek-conference-weapon of choice.

While I agree with him wholeheartedly, he also makes a very interesting point about how he remembers “hearing Mac owners complain of being treated like second-class citizens” and how he doesn’t feel like that today.

I think it was true that Mac users were second-class citizens in the past, and I blame that mainly on Apple’s approach to the marketplace. The way Apple over-priced their products just because they “looked nicer” was completely surreal but nowadays I think Mac laptops are really an almost unbeatable proposition on a feature-by-feature comparison with wintel-based laptops.

The introduction of Mac OS X also gave rise to a whole new wave of power-users who love the Unix OS (with all that’s good about it -I won’t keep beating on a dead horse here) but like to have a really nice and functional UI. And yes, gnome is almost there, but it has been almost there for quite a while now and OS X is already there for a long time and is really infinitely better right now, so deal with it!

Also, what I feel mostly today from the non-Mac crowd whenever I go to a conference or meeting with my iBook is a mix of curiosity and/or envy.
People are either curious because they like (or violently dislike, some things never change ;) ) the design of the laptop or because they heard something about those Mac-thingies and would like to know it better; and then they are jealous because all the Mac-heads there are having a good old time using everything that Simon talks about and then some.

It improves productivity, gives me great liberty to roam-around (I have -and absolutely love- the 12’ version), gives me seamless access to whatever wireless networks are available and has a bunch of really cool applications which aren’t available (for the most part) on other platforms and even if they are, are not nearly as widely used and so are not nearly as useful.

I used to bring my wintel-laptpo to meetings and feel that it was useful. Now I bring my iBook and find it indispensable!

But then again, I’m in love with my Mac, so take it as you wish… :)

Dificuldades de comunicação

É engraçadíssimo de ver pessoas de países diferentes, que falam línguas diferentes tentar entender-se numa discussão técnica utilizando uma terceira lingua.

A lingua utilizada na comunicação é, na maioria das vezes, o Inglês, claro, mas a habilidade de cada uma das partes para falar esses Inglês leva a situações perfeitamente hilariantes.

Uma coisa são Portugueses a (tentar) falar Inglês (e estou a referir-me a pessoas que não são muito fluentes, que infelizmente é a maioria dos casos). Estes e os Espanhóis geralmente entendem-se porque dão calinadas muito parecidas (embora as diferenças de pronúncia possam ser importantes ao ponto de não se perceber nenhum deles, mas enfim).

Depois temos o caso dos Franceses (mais uma vez aqueles que não são muito fluentes), Aqui quem não tem conhecimentos rudimentares de Francês está irremediavelmente perdido. E a pronuncia… “Gud moaning!”

Mas o primeiro prémio vai indiscutivelmente para os Chineses. Estes até conhecem a lingua, ou seja, são relativamente fluentes, mas a pronúncia e a maneira como (não) separam as palavras… Cruzes!

Agora o mais engraçado de tudo é ver Portugueses com um mau Inglês a tentar comunicar relativamente a questões técnicas detalhadas com um Chinês que até sabe estruturar as frases e articular o discurso relativamente bem mas que não percebe (claro) as marteladas que os Portugueses dão no Inglês baseados no “aportuguesamento” habitual.

Ah as delícias da comunicação internacional… :)

A Tempestade

Foi no domingo que fui ver A Tempestade de Shakespeare.
Embora esta peça tenha estado imenso tempo no S. Luis só agora a fui ver, numa reposição de dois dias apenas em Sintra, no Centro Cultural Olga Cadaval.

Geralmente ver (ou melhor ouvir) Shakespeare traduzido causa uma sensação estranha, mas neste caso não tinha lido nem ouvido o original pelo que não me incomodou minimamente.
E, também por isso, não me causou nenhuma estranheza as liberdades artísticas que tomaram com a história.
O que sei é que no final de contas gostei bastante do que vi. A peça está muito bem conseguida, os actores são todos muito bons e acabei por passar um bom bocado a assistir às quase duas horas e meia de espectáculo (sem intervalo).

Em resumo: gostei, ainda bem que fui ver antes da peça deixar de ser representada de todo.

Mais uma vez graças à Carmen… Obrigado! :)

Quicksilver - the Mac kind

No, not the novel, much as I like it…

This Quicksilver is a keyboard-driven launcher on steroids which, apparently, has been talked about by just about everyone lately, but which I haven’t come across until now.

Since everyone and his mother are talking about it I will abstain from commenting heavily on it and will just make a quick note to the effect that this is the first keyboard-driven launcher I found worth using (I’ve only used TigerLaunch up until now and it seems it’s days may be numbered).

One important piece of information regarding this most excellent software is the great tutorial gracefully presented to us by Dan Dickinson.

Go Blacktree!

Rocha na praia

[A fotografia que aqui se encontrava perdeu-se no tempo.]

Rocha no mar em frente à praia da Rocha - Algarve.
A textura do mar estava mesmo estranha, não é um problema de cor na foto.

Mantra do dia

Não me vou deixar irritar por questões estúpidas de trabalho, não compensa…
Não me vou deixar irritar por questões estúpidas de trabalho, não compensa…
Não me vou deixar irritar por questões estúpidas de trabalho, não compensa…
Não me vou deixar irritar por questões estúpidas de trabalho, não compensa…
—repeat ad infinitum—

E esta não é válida só para mim… ;)

E agora de volta à nossa emissão regular: yes, amanhã é fim-de-semana!

Lost in translation e outras histórias

Ainda consegui apanhar o Lost in translation este fim-de-semana. Tive sorte.
Gostei bastante do filme, achei-o interessante, original e muito divertido mas não acho de modo nenhum que mereça um Oscar seja do que for.

Mas como alguém que eu conheço disse (e muito bem): “sempre que tiveres a tentação de dar alguma legitimidade aos Oscares lembra-te do Titanic”.

Já agora, o Quicksilver parece ser tudo aquilo que esperava dele e talvez até mais.
Estava um bocado cansado de Robert Rankin (li o Armageddon: The Musical e logo de seguida comecei o They Came and Ate Us - Armageddon II: The B-movie que ainda não acabei) e então resolvi atacar já o Quicksilver (mesmo passando à frente do Monstrous regiment, estava mesmo curioso!).
Não alheio a este aumento da curiosidade foi a descoberta (via Fred) do Metaweb - um site wiki-like originalmente sobre o Quicksilver e afins (como o perfeitamente genial Cryptonomicon) mas que está a derivar (no bom estilo wiki) para tudo o que alguém se lembre de acrescentar.

Fotografia digital

Pensava eu que o laboratório “analógico” de preto e branco tinha muito que saber e aprender…

O laboratório digital, pelo que já me apercebi, tem tanto que saber que nem sei bem por onde hei-de começar!
O photoshop só por si já é um mundo, mas se começar ainda pelo mais básico como o tratamento e extracção das fotos em RAW, ajuste de white balance, acerto da gama do monitor, etc, etc, etc, já vou ter pano para mangas.

E isto já pressupõe que saiba utilizar a máquina na totalidade o que está longe de ser verdade.

Quem diria que a fotografia se poderia revelar tão geekoide?

Experimentei hoje processar uma foto segundo o workflow descrito nas dicas de fotografia digital do The Digital Picture e fiquei bastante contente com o resultado, mas só o número de workflows que já encontrei é enorme e isto sem saber praticamente nada de photoshop.

Enfim, chega por hoje, já é tarde. Acho que dava jeito umas férias só para me dedicar a isto… Vou ter de ver os safaris/cruzeiros/viagens dedicadas a fotografia digital com mais atenção… Olha que bela desculpa! ;)

Virtual desktops?

Coming from a Linux world I always needed virtual desktops to be able to function in any kind of productive way.

One of the first things I installed on my new Mac was the CodeTek VirtualDesktop which as virtual desktops go is a definite winner.

Now for one reason or another, mostly due to space constrains on my laptop’s screen when I’m using it away from my desks (i.e. without the extra external screen), I find myself using the Mac without the virtual desktops and managing to work quite well.

Actually, even with a second display I am using the Mac more and more without virtual desktops and it actually works!

Exposé and the F11 (get everything out of the screen until I launch or call something) are very useful and I can have everything I need right on the desktop without the need to look for it on the other desktops.

I may come to surprise myself real soon and stop using virtual desktops altogether.

It seems I may as well surrender, I seem to be on the process of being assimilated.

More on the good uses of flash

Fred got this page on my sights yesterday and I must say that tokyoplastic is indeed something to inspire everyone on how to make simple yet excellently designed pages.

The drum machine is beautiful and so simple…

The other link (I’m sorry I don’t know the name of the page, my Japanese is… inexistent) shows a collection of elements which are also beautiful and which are “a collection of ongoing personal design collaborations in abstract graphic art”.

Yes, it’s all flash so you do need a moderately good processor and you also need a good set of speakers (preferably with a powerful bass) to fully enjoy the site, but it is well worth the 15 minutes or so you spend poking around in it.

Ronda do fim-de-semana

Fui ver o “Big Fish” ontem. Gostei muito do filme, como já esperava aliás, sou fã do Tim Burton e gosto de quase todos os filmes dele. Este é muito diferente dos outros filmes, mas por outro lado ele já fez muita coisa diferente, por isso não é de estranhar.
A história é interessante, as personagens são muito giras e acho que o que mais me agradou no filme foi o facto dele viver à base da história e das personagens. Seria muito fácil um filme destes ter-se perdido num turbilhão de efeitos especiais, muito fácil mesmo; mas não, o filme é claramente motivado e direccionado para as personagens e a história. E é muito bom.

Na sexta fui ver o “Minha Linda Senhora” (adaptação teatral em português do “My Fair Lady”) ao Teatro Politeama. A peça é uma adaptação muitíssimo fiel do filme.
Está bastante bem conseguida, as músicas e tudo (muito importante, sendo a peça um musical). Os actores em geral são muito bons, a nível de cenários e adereços tudo impecável. Mas também, não é nada que não fosse de esperar de um Filipe La Féria, sobretudo se contarmos com os meios que consegue mobilizar.
A única razão de queixa que tenho tem a ver com os assentos. Não só são todos ao mesmo nível —o que faz com que as pessoas que estejam um bocado mais para trás não vejam a peça se apanharem alguém um pouco mais alto do que elas à sua frente— como as cadeiras são duras como sei lá. Fiquei cheio de dores nas costas o fim-de-semana todo por causa das quase 3 horas que passei sentado naquelas malditas cadeiras!

Jovem, vem saltar connosco!

O Vasco apareceu por cá hoje com o seu novo iBook G4 12” para instalar umas coisas e aprender umas dicas.

Mais um convertido.

É assustadoramente fácil convencer as pessoas a comprar laptops da Apple, a única coisa que se tem de fazer é mostrar-lhes o nosso e deixá-los usá-lo um bocado. Não é preciso fazer qualquer esforço, nem sequer ter intenção de os convencer. É realmente incrível.

Agora fico mesmo na expectativa da altura em que ele comprar a sua Canon EOS 10D e é, claramente, apenas uma questão de tempo! ;-)

Cheers

Na SIC Gold.
O Cheers.

Boa!

Pavões

Estava eu hoje a jantar e a ver um bocado de televisão —coisa rara, mas por vezes compensa como foi o caso de hoje— quando me deparo num canal qualquer (não me lembro qual) com um clip adaptado para uma música que não é relevante para o caso mas cujas cenas me deixaram a pensar.

O clip passa-se todo à volta de um bando (?) de pavões num ambiente que se não é o habitat natural deles deve andar muito perto.
Agora a parte que mais me impressionou foi ver aquelas criaturas a voar.

Um pavão é um bicho grande. Em terra já é impressionante e quem já viu um com as penas todas fechadas (estou a falar essencialmente dos machos) sabe que eles ficam com uma “vassoura” enorme pendente para trás.
Agora imagine-se um bicho desses (e por sinal um bem grandinho mesmo para a espécie) a voar!
Não só o porte dele é imponente como a envergadura e o comprimento (devido às penas do rabo) são verdadeiramente impressionantes. É quase como ver uma asa-delta a voar. E para além disso é muito bonito de se ver.

E agora pergunto-me eu: onde será que esses bichos se dão? Calculo que para a Ásia…
Vou ter de investigar pois depois da viagem à Escócia, mais tarde neste ano, vou ficar com poucos destinos pendentes da minha lista mais a longo prazo (assim de repente apenas me lembro da Irlanda que a Tuxa já quer conhecer à bastante tempo).

Bom, lá vou ter de googlar (eek) isto no fim-de-semana. Tem de ser! ;)

Finally back on the ‘net

And so it was the on the 5th iteration they got it right.

Each time I opened a report with the operator something changed and they just closed the ticket without ever testing or asking me if things where OK. Sometimes they just plain got it worse. Amazing!

So, as a recap, the sequence of events went like this and remember —each new event was triggered by me opening a trouble-ticket because as far as they were concerned everything was just a-OK after their intervention:

1. No voice, huge packet drop on Internet;
2. Voice OK, no Internet;
3. No voice or Internet;
4. Voice OK, no Internet;
5. Both voice and Internet OK.

Now put in a 2 to 3 day delay between each intervention because they where just too overworked (gee, I wonder why, they only had to look into my case 5 times to get it right) and you get a great week and a half of no service mainly due to gross incompetence. The original problem was just bad luck, it happens, sometimes DSLAM ports just go berserk, but after that they had to waste their time for 4 more times to get this damned thing fixed.

I especially liked the times when they left me without voice service and just thought that everything was OK and closed the ticket.

Someone must be doing a killing over closed trouble tickets. Maybe that someone is paid by the ticked?

Or maybe I’m just bad-tempered…

Hare Hare Krishna

Encontrei uma procissão de Hare Krishnas nas ruas de Londres no sábado à noite. Nunca tinha assistido a uma procissão destas ao vivo e devo dizer que fiquei mesmo muito (bem) impressionado.

Independentemente da questão de fé e daquilo em que se acredite há que admitir uma coisa: aquela gente estava mesmo mas mesmo a divertir-se! Havia uma alegria imensa em todas as pessoas que participavam (e que não eram assim tão poucas, novas e velhas e de ambos os sexos).
Eles estavam mesmo contentes de estar a fazer o que faziam e aquela procissão era uma verdadeira festa.

Tal e qual como as procissões católicas as quais, na sua maioria, é praticamente impossível distinguir de um funeral…
Mas haja circunspecção, afinal a religião é um assunto muito sério, demasiado sério para nos divertirmos enquanto atendemos às nossas obrigações.

Enfim…

Weekend in London town

I love London. I really don’t know why, I just know that I do.
So even with a full weekend of cloudy and cold weather I still loved being there.
And of course I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures, I have been there so many times that it wears out a bit but even so I did get some shots I find interesting in some way or another.
And since I don’t feel like going to bed just yet you, dear reader, will suffer through it if you wish to read the whole article.
Remember I am on an ADSL line and it will be slow!
So for the brave souls amongst you read on and see the photos, totally unedited (that will come later), directly from the camera and through convert just to get them small enough to be managed.

[All of the photos got lost in time. Sorry about that.]

First off a boat in Little Venice which acted as a puppet theatre:

A touch of yellow and red on an otherwise almost grey scenario:

Yes, it was that cold, I had to buy a hat!

Sunset at Hyde Park:

“All the ducks are swimming in the water”:

And I do mean all. Dear God, it’s an invasion! Ducks at dusk!

The day after, in St. James’ Park, still more ducks. They are everywhere…

Ah the Horse Guards, maybe they can save us from the ducks? If they are there, that is…

The sky was still bleak as can be but I do love those buildings:

The sky was getting darker and it was growing even colder (it rained later in the day), but did I mention I love those buildings?

Still with me? Boy you sure are persistent!
Well, no more photos for you, you may go in peace.
See what happens when I get no connectivity at home? I get to do this kind of things…

OK, the show’s over, nothing more to see run along now. Shoo!

Yes, it is still down

Well, I turned the cable backup connection off because it was getting to the point where it would cost me a small fortune to have it on while the carrier guys are toying around with my connection. I have a subscription which is time-based and that suits me fine for a backup (I pay zero for it when I don’t use it and when I need it I assume it will not be for long — huge mistake!).

The carrier guys are really a piece of work: Sunday the 8th I report a problem on my line, no voice service and a huge frame drop on the Internet service, Wednesday the 11th they finally get around to it and solve my voice problem but leave me without Internet access (apparently they switched the DSLAM port where my connection was terminating and configured that port to the wrong Internet operator). Then Sunday the 15th I get home from a 3 day trip and find I have no voice or Internet service again. Today I have voice service (1 day delay, they sure are outdoing themselves!) but no Internet service.

God how I love Portugal Telecom…

Connectivity Problems and Other Stories

Still not OK.

The line is now OK, I have voice service (they had to switch the port on the DSLAM) but they configured the new port for internet access via another ISP (strangely enough their own ISP, how could the incumbent operator ever think people would have service via another ISP?).
Apparently this new ticket is going to have a 3 day wait just like the other one. And no, the fact that this is technically still the same problem and so it should get priority treatment doesn’t seem to mean a damn thing to them.

Oh well, the cable service I still subscribe out of a mixture of economics, laziness and a vague notion of backup connectivity paid off after all!
The thing is that this connectivity is costing me way much more than the ADSL line.

On a brighter note I’m off to London for the weekend! Of course leaving on a 8h30 plane with the now usual 1h30 hour earlier check-in is not something I look forward to but still it looks like it is going to be a great weekend!

Oh and I got invited to orkut. It looks like the mere mortals are starting to get in! :)
The service appears to be far from brilliant though, for the last 2 hours it’s been on and off and the mail messages take forever to be sent but still it will be fun to poke around, see how it works and then forget all about it in a week or two like every other social networking experience out there.

Oh and I mustn’t forget: tiki definitively rules!

My weekend ADSL nightmare

This is a picture of my weekend:

nfn@Lemming(~)$ ping www.novis.pt
PING www.novis.pt (195.23.106.76): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=154.952 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=159.791 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=158.265 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=6 ttl=56 time=171.032 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=7 ttl=56 time=147.826 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=8 ttl=56 time=161.321 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=12 ttl=56 time=171.104 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=13 ttl=56 time=166.376 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=14 ttl=56 time=176.152 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=15 ttl=56 time=151.192 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=16 ttl=56 time=149.649 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=21 ttl=56 time=154.966 ms
64 bytes from 195.23.106.76: icmp_seq=22 ttl=56 time=178.145 ms
^C
--- www.novis.pt ping statistics ---
23 packets transmitted, 13 packets received, 43% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 147.826/161.597/178.145 ms

Considering this is an ADSL connection and the voice component doesn’t work at all I think should count myself lucky to have any kind of connectivity at all but still it doesn’t do much to lift my spirits.
Oh well, the problem is reported, a trouble ticket is open on the infrastructure provider, now let’s see how long they take to solve the problem.
Can’t help feeling someone just got a new phone line installed and the installer just gave my line a yank. It has happened before…

If you happened to try and access this site over the weekend you probably couldn’t. Now you know why.

Discoveries over the weekend

Apart from having finished yet another chapter of my current book on Cocoa programming, this weekend was good for two more reasons (and I’m not counting the fact that SCO was thrown off the map ;)):

1. I’ve found out about TikiWiki.
   True it’s not perl and I’m considerable more proficient at it than at php, but php is a good language for web development and the sheer number of supporters of Tiki is overwhelming. Also it really has everything I ever needed to maintain a full website.
   I’ve always liked the wiki concept as a cms but there where always two factors that kept me from using it on my site: wiki words are just ugly to use on a general site and everyone is able to edit and delete anything. Tiki provides answers to both these issues and then some…
   Go check it out, but make time for it because it is really huge! Well worth it though.
2. Camelbones is back! Yay!!
   OK, I’ve had problems installing the new version because I had the previous one installed and I’ve upgraded my OS from Panther to Jaguar and perl changed with this upgrade and the installer was not smart enough to see this but it was smart enough to see that this was an upgrade and not a fresh install…
   Bugger. Still, I think I’ll just take the lazy way out and simply compile everything from source and that’s it, I have not patience to go after all the distro files and deleting them by hand.

All in all a very nice weekend!

Sessão dupla de cinema

Bem, não exactamente sessão dupla, mas sim dois filmes num fim-de-semana o que para mim é uma extravagância enorme! :)

No sábado fui ver o Último Samurai que é exactamente o tipo de filme que se esperava.
Um filme de um herói americano passado num ambiente diferente e com cenas realmente interessantes, incluindo as de batalha. É um filme engraçado de se ver.

No domingo lá fui ver o Sorriso de Mona Lisa.
Bom… Há filmes ligeiros, sobretudo comédias românticas que, apesar de não serem profundos nem terem propriamente grandes mensagens por trás são bastante engraçados e divertem bastante. São os “filminhos da treta” que gosto bastante de ver pelo puro factor de divertimento. E aplico o termo “filminhos da treta” com todo o apreço que tenho por eles, não é um termo depreciativo nem por sombras.
Depois há os filmes sérios, com uma mensagem ou uma história profunda e importante que passam uma mensagem e que muitas vezes são bastante pesados. Estes também são filmes que costumo gostar de ver.
E depois há as coisas como o Mona Lisa Smile…

Acho que o que me irrita mais neste filme é que ele não tem uma história coesa e interessante o suficiente para ser um bom “filminho da treta” mas tem claramente pretensões de ser um filme “sério”. E falha redondamente!
Agora que o vi nem consigo pensar o que terá passado pela cabeça dos críticos que o consideraram um Clube dos Poetas Mortos no feminino. Sim claro, temos de dar um desconto, afinal são críticos de cinema, mas mesmo assim?!?
As personagens são todas apresentadas pela rama, mesmo as principais, a história é apresentada como uma série de fragmentos mais ou menos isolados, a relação entre a professora e as alunas não é levada a um ponto em que fiquemos com uma sensação de conhecimento ou cumplicidade, a relação entre as amigas (alunas) idem, a relação entre os professores idem…
A sensação com que fiquei é que resolveram pegar numa série de clichés e factos sobejamente conhecidos e enfiá-los num filme, seja lá como for, na esperança que um monte de mensagens já mais do que conhecidas e massacradas na cabeça das pessoas fizesse ressonância algures no seu subconsciente e que estas considerassem o filme como algo de maravilhoso e revelador. Mas não foi feito nenhum esforço válido para dar substância ou suporte a qualquer uma dessas mensagens.

Enfim, acho que sou demasiado exigente (leia-se esquisito), mas eu já vou tão pouco ao cinema que me chateia um bocado quando apanho coisas destas…

Amazon vs Kazaa vs Netflix

You know technology is definitely getting interesting when an article on a respectable publication like The Register (take that with your chosen amount of salt) makes a comparison between movie delivery time and the contestants are: Netflix -a DVD rental company with a very unique rental method-; Amazon -well, we all know this one, right?- and Kazaa.

Yes, Kazaa! Can you believe it? No? Well, here is a sample, but you can just as well read the article:

“No, it is a simple fact that at the moment Netflix takes between one-to-three days to get any given film to a home in the US, and this is largely due to the fact that the US is such a large geography. If a similar service was launched in parts of Europe, even the local postal service could deliver packets next day.

If we compare this with both Amazon and Kazaa, it compares well.”

If you are curious but have no patience or time to read the whole article it discusses the Netflix’s model of DVD rental and how it gives VoD (Video on Demand) over broadband connections a run for it’s money.

American Mars Rover Missions Weblog

I’ve been trying to avoid simply posting links here but this deserves to be mentioned.

I’ve been following the American mars rover missions from a number of sources, but more and more I’m using the Mars Rover Mission Blog as my primary source of information.

It is complete, updated with a regularity which is compatible with my viewing time constrains and the comments by the author of the weblog are usually interesting.

Good show James, keep up the excellent work!

Daily dose of on-line fun

There has been a recent addition to my daily dose of fun on the net when, quite by chance, I’ve found out about the Down-time Manga.
So far it shows great promise, even if the story is still somewhat incipient and the story-line doesn’t seem very well defined, but then this maybe because I’m just not used to the characters and the story universe.
The drawing style is not one of my favourites but the story potential more than makes up for it so let’s wait and see where it goes from here.

Ever since Megatokyo started going downhill in terms of story development and especially the cadence with which new episodes come by I haven’t found anything new really worth seeing but maybe down-time will turn out to be a good replacement.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Megatokyo! It’s been brilliant from the beginning and it is probably one of the most satisfying stories I’ve ever followed on-line but nowadays we get more and more interludes and less and less story. I know the guy is just so busy with the dead-treeware edition and promotion of the manga itself that something has to give. Unfortunately for us what gave in was the development of the story itself.
An unfortunate side-effect of this is that the story doesn’t have the same feeling it had in the beginning. It should be a fast-paced, action-full almost manic chain of events on one level and (probably) a really weird love story on another but when you get one episode every once in a while the feeling of continuity just isn’t there and you have to go back just to remember what the hell happened last.
This is not a complaint, it is just a statement. I’m really very sorry that the business side of it got in the way of a really great manga, but that is the way of it, everyone has to make a living, right? :)

Other than Megatokyo I usually follow some other comics/mangas I grew to like.
All of them have their ups and downs which leads to periods when some of them are really great to follow and other periods when there’s nothing really interesting happening at all in any given comic but with a big enough assortment you usually have at least one or two good stories going on at any given time which is a good thing!
But then again none of the others even gets close to Megatokyo. If only it would once again pick up it’s pace… Maybe when the second book craze dyes down a bit (it just got released) we’ll get lucky… Maybe.

Anyway, this is my current list of daily fun:
Calvin and Hobbes
Dilbert
Garfield
Snoopy
User Friendly
Megatokyo
Down-time

Enguiçado

Afinal não vou mesmo esquiar este ano.
O joelho até recuperou bem (aparentemente está a 100%), mas eu não vou ter disponibilidade para tirar esses dias.

Para o próximo ano deve correr melhor.

Espero!!

Expansão

Nem sei bem o que dizer. Recebi hoje a notícia de que vou ser tio! O Pedro (o meu irmão do meio) e a Margarida vão ser pais já em Junho.
A notícia foi totalmente inesperada, uma grande surpresa.
E por isso nem sei bem o que dizer. Mas é algo do género: Uau! Que fixe!
É o primeiro bébé da geração dos irmãos e cunhados e, claro, é a primeira vez que vou ser tio.
Nem sei bem o que esperar, mas vai ser cá uma viagem…
Agora é só esperar que corra tudo bem!
Muitos parabéns e muita coragem aos futuros pais!
Pois… E a minha mãe vai ficar positivamente histérica de alegria. Oh lá se vai!! :)

Update: É verdade, já me esquecia, é menino. Na grande tradição da minha família, aliás (3 irmãos pela minha mãe e 2 irmãos pelo meu tio). No use fighting it…

A Bíblia no IRC

Pode-se lêr aqui as transcrições das sessões de IRC correspondentes aos acontecimentos descritos na Bíblia, desde a génese até à cruficicação (embora faltem alguns pedaços, mas está a ser actualizado com o que falta).

Mais um recurso valiosíssimo para a humanidade…

Best Headlines

Found it in alexking.org the best headlines of some publications.

Some perls of wisdom lurking in there… Not!

On the go

I may have found the weblogging tool for the Palm…

This is being created on Azure for the Palm and so far it looks really nice.

The only potencial downside is that it runs on Java. So I finally have it on my Palm.

Passagem de ano - o síndroma do teenager reprimido

(Por alguma razão tinha este artigo em draft à umas semanas e nunca mais me lembrei dele… Enfim, algo fora de prazo cá vai ele!)

Tenho lido em vários sítios muita gente a revoltar-se contra os hábitos de comemoração da passagem de ano.
As pessoas têem-se declarado contra as festas, as borgas, as demonstrações públicas de folia e a alegria a granel. Mas mais ainda têem-se demonstrado revoltadas contra o facto da euforia ou alegria desmedida ser vista como obrigatória nestes casos.

Segue-se mais um pensamento sobre o assunto à laia de desabafo…

O que acho curioso, sobretudo quando continuo a lêr coisas destas passados já 15 dias do evento, é que na grande maioria dos casos as pessoas acabam por confessar que sim senhor, mais uma vez foram para a festarola do bairro, cidade, discoteca, clube, <insira aqui a associação favorita> deles. Quer as pessoas que eu conheço e com quem falei directamente quer as outras que fazem posts nos seus blogs, páginas, etc têem este comportamento.

Muita gente tem vindo a declarar nos últimos anos ser contra toda a histeria colectiva que envolve a passagem de ano.
É cada vez mais frequente lêr-se ou ouvir-se dizer que “não gosto de me sentir feliz por obrigação” ou “só porque o ano muda não acho normal toda a gente juntar-se para ouvir música má e passar a noite aos pulos” e coisas do género. Parece-me que é moda ser contra tudo isto.
E digo que parece moda porque apesar de muita gente se dizer contra é frequente encontrar essas mesmas pessoas a fazer precisamente aquilo que dizem achar uma coisa sem sentido.

Porquê?

A minha teoria é que toda esta gente sofre do síndroma do teenager reprimido.
Elaborando um pouco mais: toda a gente já foi teenager (duh!). E a maioria dos teenagers (no meu tempo pelo menos era assim, mas hoje como o mundo está perdido e a juventude está toda irremediavelmente corrompida pode não se dar este caso :) ) tem sérios problemas em conseguir uma grande liberdade em termos de horários de saídas nocturnas.
Então todos os pretextos para se poder saír com os amigos à vontade são bons, mas há uns melhores que os outros. E historicamente a passagem de ano é “O” pretexto. É preciso ser um pai muito cruel para não deixar saír o puto na noite de passagem de ano!
Dada esta envolvente é óbvio que a noite de passagem de ano só pode ser uma noite fabulosa e claro que uma pessoa se sente realmente eufórica e com vontade de beber, dançar, gritar, e tudo mais a que tem direito e com todos os amigos ainda por cima!
É uma festa e pêras, está-se mesmo muito bem disposto e tudo o mais mas na realidade isto não tem nada a ver com o calendário e tudo a ver com a oportunidade de estar com os amigos numa grande festa.
E então até a porcaria da música brasileira mais rasca parece uma maravilha, sobretudo depois dos primeiros copos, mas adiante…

Conforme as pessoas crescem e vão ganhando a sua independência as limitações à sua liberdade vão-se atenuando e já se consegue saír com os amigos quase sempre que se quer. Mas as festas da passagem de ano continuam a ser religiosamente um marco, afinal estas sempre foram umas festas de arromba e tem de se manter essas boas tradições.
Só que já não é o mesmo, pois não?

E o que acontece quando invariavelmente se chega àquela fase da vida em que já se está farto de festas e borgas e copos a torto e a direito e estas coisas já têem de ter algo mais por trás para valer a pena?
Bom aí a coisa complica-se porque se, por exemplo, estamos a fazer uma despedida de solteiro então há algo que motiva o pessoal a fazer mesmo uma festa a sério, afinal o gajo vai-se casar, temos de partilhar a alegria com ele e temos de o tramar seja como fôr para ver se ele não consegue aparecer amanhã no casório.
Ou se por acaso encontramos uns amigos que não víamos há N tempo e acabamos por ficar na farra até altas horas é muito bom.
Mas o que raio justifica a audição até à demência das brasileiradas rascas e as brincadeiras imbecis com os martelinhos e os papelinhos e os chapéus infantis? Nada!

Mas espera lá, nada não! Há uma tradição de N anos de uma pessoa saír e se divertir imenso na passagem de ano. Fazemos isto desde putos e não vamos parar agora, é um insulto ao grupo!

E pronto, uma pessoa até sabe que vai apanhar uma seca descomunal e que não vai achar piada nenhuma a mais uma festa de passagem de ano mas bolas, não posso deixar os meus amigos ficarem mal, é uma tradição, uma instituição.
Logo queixo-me disso publicamente e digo alto e bom som que não gosto de ser obrigado a estar muito alegre e contente e que não gosto de música foleira e não me apetece passar a noite a fazer figuras tristes (pelo menos não desta maneira) mas não tenho coragem de faltar à festa.

Voilá! É assim que se consegue transformar um monte de pessoas inteligentes em autómatos sem vontade própria e com um gosto aparente doentio por uma diversão muito duvidosa.

Aqui devo refrescar a memória de quem chegou até este ponto do artigo: tudo isto se aplica apenas àquelas pessoas que dizem não gostar das festas de passagem de ano mas que estão lá sempre batidas, nada disto se aplica a quem realmente as aprecia e faz muito bem sim senhor… ;)

Mas acredito que há salvação para nós. Senão vejamos:
também eu não gosto das festas de passagem de ano em geral. E este ano tive uma das melhores passagens de ano de que me lembro.
Em casa, com a Tuxa, uma lareira bem quentinha (estava mesmo frio, sim), um conjunto de queijos bem escolhidos e um belo vinho tinto alentejano (dos meus favoritos).
A contribuição mais significativa que as festas deram este ano para a nossa passagem foi os fogos de artifício de Cascais que ficam sempre bem. ;)

Afinal há esperança!

Receita para o ginásio

Ou: Como aguentar as sessões no ginásio sem morrer de tédio.

Para mim o que parece funcionar é o seguinte:

1. Motivação forte. Aliás, quando acabar o treino específico para o ski vai ser lindo…
2. Muita música. Não pode haver repetições em cada sessão e não há pachorra para mudar as músicas no leitor todos os dias. Para mim 128M utilizados com MP3 a 160kbps parece funcionar, deve durar bem umas 4 a 5 sessões e mesmo que tendo uma repetição no total não é assim tão mau;
3. Música alto. Quanto mais abafar o som ambiente mais fácil é alienar-me totalmente enquanto faço o exercício, sobretudo os 20 (ou mais) minutos de corrida na passadeira. Assim fica mais fácil utilizar esse tempo de uma maneira mais útil e interessante. Hoje resolvi um problema de um algoritmo de catalogação de waypoints que já me andava a chatear há algum tempo! :)
4. Música variada. Quando não me apetece pensar ou já estou cansado ou cheguei a um beco ou assim é sempre melhor concertrar-me na música do que ficar a contar os minutos que já passaram ou que faltam…
5. Ritmo. Música com ritmo rápido para correr e com ritmo mais lento para a musculação. É mais fácil desligar a parte consciente do cérebro das funções de controlo do movimento se tivermos música com um ritmo adequado ao que estamos a fazer. Sobretudo a correr isto é muito importante.

Resumindo: motivação e música, música, música. Assim não custa tanto e aquele tempo já não parece um desperdício tão grande.

E sim, eu sei que não é desperdício, é um investimento na forma, etc, mas enfim, quem percebe percebe quem não percebe: sorte a vossa!

Clips de comédias da BBC

O BBC - Comedy Guide - A Selection of Clips é uma página que tem… Clips!
Em formato RealVideo. E aparentemente com bastantes clips de séries tão interessantes como o Allô Allô, Fawlty Towers, o brilhante Yes Minister ou as várias séries de Blackadder.

Obrigado Boing Boing.

Getting a Nike[PSA Play mp3 player to work with Mac OS X

I did it recently and it sure was no picnic finding out the necessary information so here is how I did it.

First off I checked iTunes’ compatibility chart and, sure enough, the psa[play is supposed to be supported. This means that I expected to plug the player in and get a new icon in iTunes. But it doesn’t work that way and you have to dig into iTunes’ forums to find that out.

Anyway, before getting to that part I tried plugging the player in and nothing happened. As it turned out my player’s firmware had to be upgraded (I’ve had it for a year now) so I had to look around on Nike-Philips’ site for the software to do it.
The actual page is not very easy to find but the link is in there somewhere, so I eventually ended up with the file I needed (psa128max_fum_aen.sit - Mac’s software for the psa[playmax128).

Upgrading the player’s firmware was easy enough but you do need to download and read the Readme file carefully because there are some steps you need to take which are not too obvious.
After downloading and uncompressing the file you install the software and then follow the readme instructions to perform the firmware upgrade.
When you install this software you get two utilities, one that’s used to manage the device’s firmware and another one for formatting the player. You also get a plugin for iTunes which is automatically installed in the right location (as expected).

Well, after that I expected to get a new icon in iTunes when I connected the player, after all I did get the plug-in in the iTunes plugins directory after the software install and it does say in the compatibility chart that iTunes supports the psa[play but it doesn’t work that way.
What happens then is that when you plug the player in you get a new disk mounted in your Mac and you can then drag and drop your mp3 files into it. Even from iTunes you can do that and it will work.
But even though it does work and it is easy enough to use it this way I don’t think Apple is being fair in claiming support for this player in iTunes, it should claim support for it in OS X but not in iTunes.

Anyway this is how it’s done and it does get the player working with your Mac.
If you wish to follow the current threads on this look for it in Apple’s Discussions, under the Support section of the site. There is one going on right now in here.

And now for a small and only loosely related rant: :)
After yesterday’s announcement of the iPod mini how does it look for the psa[play or any other small flash player out there?
In my opinion it still looks good, Apple is way off the mark with the pricing on this baby. I mean come on, with this price and capacity difference between the mini and the standard 15GB iPod who in their right mind would buy a mini? You’re really much better off buying a standard iPod for the price and even the size factor is not really in Apple’s favour. Also the mini is not a flash player, it uses a disk so there is some skipping potential there.
If you want a good mp3 player go for the iPod but if you care about size and skip-free listening (for running or for the gym for example) just go out and buy a smaller flash player.
But then again, while I don’t like buying clearly over-priced stuff, there are a lot of people out there who don’t mind doing it, especially if they are loyal to the brand so I guess we’ll just have to see how it goes…
Me, I’m just happy with my players, both my Tungsten T and my wife’s nike[psa play (yes it’s hers but I’ll be the one using it for gym duty :)).

MacWorld Keynote Speech

I now, I work in the medium, I should be fully aware of the possibilities but still…

I’m following the keynote speech by Steve Jobs on MacWorld. When the speech began I had been watching it for 4 or 5 minutes. And when Steve Jobs gets there he tels us that already there are over 60.000 people watching the feed over the internet.

And the quality… Boy oh boy, this is just amazing!

Back to viewing… ;)

Mudança de planos

Dada a falta de assíduidade que tenho tido na natação resolvi cancelar por agora as aulas, ficando apenas com o horário livre em aberto. Não está mesmo a dar para manter o horário de hora de almoço…

E em relação ao ski, para me pôr em forma precisava de algo mais do que exercícios em casa, logo e por sugestão forte da Tuxa (induzida pela vulomosa barriguinha que tem crescido ao longo dos últimos 5/6 anos) resolvi voltar a inscrever-me num ginásio.

Fui hoje tratar da inscrição e avaliação física no Solinca de Oeiras. Para ginásio não está nada mau, o problema comigo é que eu não gosto mesmo nada de ginásio em sí, mas enfim vamos ver. O principal é ter objectivos e a curto prazo isso está garantido.

Para já começo com treino intensivo para o ski: pernas, abdominais, cardio-vascular e um pouco menos de atenção à parte superior do corpo. Depois desta parte (em que prevejo uma assíduidade elevada) vem o objectivo de longo prazo: perder a tal barriguinha e aí… Bom, vamos ver.

De qualquer modo uma coisa já ficou clara para mim, a época de ski este ano não vai mesmo poder ser já em Janeiro (com muita pena minha), porque o joelho está definitivamente em mau estado (o exercício de hoje demonstrou-o bem), por isso tenho de marcar o ortopedista bem rápido e estou a apontar para final de Fevereiro ou início de Março. Isto assumindo que posso ir à neve de todo, se fôr mais do que uma micro-rotura não sei se poderei esquiar este ano.

Preparing for the ski season

This is something which is still uncertain.

After my knee injury while ice-skating on my last vacation this year’s ski trip (scheduled for the last week of January) may turn out to be just a snow-seing trip, but I still couldn’t get a hold of my orthopaedist so I don’t know for sure just yet. What I do know is that after almost a month I still feel some pain in my knee when I twist it in some ways. I thought the injury was gone but today I knew better…

Anyway, since I’m still really hopeful (and will be until I get a clear NO from the doctor) I am looking for exercises to get me in some kind of shape for that week.

So far I’ve found these sites which look interesting enough (some are actually very similar to mountain biking-specific exercises that I know), but I still have to get into the gym and ask them for some more gym-machine-based exercises and if I don’t mess up the knee during the training weeks I’ll feel fairly confident about taking on the slopes! :)

So for the record (and following years) here are the exercise sites I’ve found out about until now:

• www.durangoorthopedics.com
• www.skihealth.com
• www.everybody.co.nz
• www.ifyouski.com

Adivinha

O que é que se obtém quando se deixa um frasco de fole com fixador durante 2 anos e meio?

Um monte de fixador cristalizado e um frasco com um belo revestimento branco leitoso que nunca mais sai. Ou seja, um frasco para o lixo.

Divertido… Not!