Road Works Ahead

This weblog —and indeed this site— will probably be a lot quieter (than it already has been) for the foreseeable future, as I deal with some personal issues that command my attention IRL.

When I’m done with that, I’ll have to reassess just how much time and energy I want to continue devoting to my “life in the digital plane”, so from now on all bets are off as far as this space is concerned.

All in all, I may keep posting a bit here or even become a lot more prolific at it, I may turn to write about purely tech stuff, I may turn into a duck or a sea-bass, or I may just drop off the map silently.

Life’s just full of sneaky little surprises, isn’t it? (The bastard!)

Lesson Of The Day

Today’s lesson is manyfold:

1. Devel::Size is your friend;
2. Maintaining state across runs of a program is good unless said state is able to keep getting bigger because of circumstances beyond your control;
3. In which case it is a very good idea to keep checking it for size and pruning it whenever you have to…
4. Especially if you launch many many copies of said program in parallel.

Got all that? Good! :-)

T-minus 3 days

The time is almost upon us. Battlestar Galactica’s third season (of the new series) starts this friday and I’ve just managed to watch the last episode of the previous season, plus the webisodes that are already out there.

If you’ve fallen behind, you can catch up to the story so far before plunging in to the good stuff ahead.

Let’s blow out some toasters!

The Search is on, powered by KinoSearch

In between the “real” coding I did this weekend, I found a bit of time to finally hack on this site’s search and now, lo and behold! you have a search box on the sidebar. Yay!

The search is powered by KinoSearch (a system I had already talked about previously) and I must say I’m as impressed now as I was when I first tried it out.

Not only is it fast, but it is also ridiculously easy to work with. I still want to add a few functionalities to the site and I expect each new addition to take all of oh… 10 minutes or so to be hooked up to the search function. :-)

True, it takes up a bit of disk space but then “disk space is cheap” and you do get your space’s worth with stuff like lightning fast searching with highlighting. And no, you don’t feel the speed all that much, but that’s entirely my plugin’s code fault. It still needs a bit of love before it responds as it should.

Now let’s see how it holds up to the test of real-world usage. I’m pretty confident it will do nicely.

Loose weight they say…

“You should loose weight” they say. “It’ll be good for you!” they say. “You’ll thank yourself later” they say. “It’s the healthy thing to do” they say.

And sou you do it and you keep on doing it even a little bit beyond that. And then you’re in tip top shape.

And then you have to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe because your clothes don’t freaking fit you anymore. Argh!

Not that I have anything against new clothes (I don’t have anything special for them either) but the shopping… Actually going out to stores, trying out clothes, marking up all the changes that need to be done, having to go back and get them after the changes have been done and trying them out again…

D4 p41|\|!

Home alone

I’m home alone this weekend (and most of the coming week), as Tuxa is in the Açores on business.

So what does this mean?
Well, first off it means that I have already posted twice on the blog.
Then it means that I’m preparing to spend the whole weekend programming (working and hacking).

It’s a terrible day outside, rainy and foggy (and remember this isn’t the UK or anything like that so this actually counts as bad weather) and it feels like just the perfect kind of day to fill up a huge mug with a good tea blend and code the day away.

Boy, what I geek I am…

It Always Comes As A Surprise

It really is true that we are our own worst critics.

This past week when I set up to produce the latest episode of my podcast I had a couple of ideas about possible line-ups for the show but when I finally set down to record it none of them felt quite right.
The line-ups are OK, but I find that I need to be on the right mood for each show’s selection or it just doesn’t come out right.

Anyway, after digging around a bit on my covers collection and fiddling around on my notebook for episode concepts I hadn’t worked on yet, I decided it was high time I did the “They Do It To Themselves” episode. On this show I featured only artists covering their own songs. An obvious criterium if you think about it, but one I felt could produce something interesting.

Well, I recorded the show, got it into my iPod for the “routine inspection” the next day and I left with mixed feelings about it.
On one side I felt like it was a fun and entertaining show but on the other I felt like it wasn’t really quite up to par with the other episodes and I wasn’t quite sure if people would actually like it (and by people I mean “a fair number of people”, there are always those who don’t like a given episode, it’s just the way it works).

On the next day I listened to the show on the car, while driving to work and I felt like it wasn’t really all that great, I felt like I hadn’t done quite what I expected to do with it when I first thought up the concept a while back and I was almost sure most people wouldn’t like it.
But then I didn’t have the time to go over and record a whole new show, so I decided to just put it out and roll with it (I had already missed the previous week’s show —for the first time— so I didn’t want to delay it again).

And then the comments started coming in (mostly private comments, people still don’t use the blog comments much on this podcast) and I found out that mostly they loved it!
I received more enthusiastic comments about this show than I had received in a month or so. And even if the last few weeks have been slow due to people being away on vacation, the intensity of the comments was really an indicator that they really really liked it!

I almost didn’t release it and now people are loving it. Go figure!
I must listen to it again in a few weeks and judge it with a fresh ear myself and see what it is about it that tickles so many people’s fancies.

Heh…

Have been to the European Open Source Convention 2006 (EuroOSCON 2006)

Well that’s it, the EuroOSCON 2006 is nearly over (I’m at the last talk I plan to attend right now) and it has been good.

I’ve put a few notes of some of the talks I attended in my [/notebook] and while they’re basically just that —notes taken during a lecture— maybe someone will be interested in them.

I’m flying home today and I’ll be arriving late (technically I’m betting that I’ll arrive tomorrow) so I’ll miss my podcast day. Oh well…

This is at as far as conferences go this year and I must say that for my particular needs YAPC::Europe::2006 was actually a bit better than EuroOSCON 2006.

Technorati Tags: EuroOSCON, EuroOSCON06, EuroOSCON2006, Conference, OpenSource

Day 4 of the European Open Source Convention 2006

These are the notes I’ve taken during the talks on the fourth and final day of the 2006 edition of the O’Reilly European Open Source Convention (better known as EuroOSCON 2006).

You can get to the index page for my notes on this conference here.

The Conway channel

Speaker: Damian Conway

List::Maker

• In Perl6 we have @bitmap = (0) x 256;_ becomes _@bitmap = 0 xx 256; and many other things, but for Perl5 we have List::Maker

• for (<@list>)

• for (< ^@list> ) (count down)

• my @list = <1, 4, ..30: !/13/>; (1 to 30, 3 by 3, but not 13)

• my @list = <yada yeda 'hello world' hello>;

• my @list = < 46d >;

• Extensible by using the add_handler funcion

• New version up on CPAN in a day or two

Contextual::Return

• Designed to solve the wantarray problem

Examples:

use Contextual::return;
sub yada (){
    ...
    if (LIST) return X;
    if (ARRAY) return Y;
}


...
return
    LIST { @list }
    BOOL { 1 }
    STR { "hello" }
    VOID { die "huh?" }

• return FAIL; => if it is called in a BOOLEAN context return undef, else die. This means that open FH 'file'; now dies (as it should) because I’m not checking the return value

Douglas Engelbart’s Hyperscope: Taking Web collaboration to the Next Level using Ajax and Dojo

Speaker: Brad Neuberg

• Augmenting The Human Intellect - Paper to read (1962!!)

• Tools for thinking:

  • Language ( 40,000 years? )
  • Writing ( 3,500 - 6,000 years? )
  • Computers ( >= 1950 )

• Systems Thinking

  • Tools
  • Humans
  • Training (no training is good, implicit training should suffice, but training get you further, faster)
  • Language (a way of conveying symbols, not just words)
  • Methodology (take what you’ve already got and use it in new ways)

• Capabilities (all 5 parts of the systems have capabilities)

  • Can be broken down
  • Work together
  • Some are more core than others

• Look at tools and humans holistically

• http://hyperscope.org/

Technorati Tags: EuroOSCON, EuroOSCON06, EuroOSCON2006

Day 3 of the European Open Source Convention 2006

These are the notes I’ve taken during the talks on the third day of the 2006 edition of the O’Reilly European Open Source Convention (better known as EuroOSCON 2006).

You can get to the index page for my notes on this conference here.

Jabber: the state of the bulb

Speaker: Peter Saint-Andre

• Jabber is powered by streaming XML
• Streaming bits on real time everywhere, more like a real-time Internet-supported application server really
• Use your own namespaces to send/receive most anything you want
• All open-standards

Dare, Care & Share

Speaker: Tor Nørretranders

Defending the hard path

• Why do people choose to do something that is inherently difficult? (Especially if they choose to do it because it is difficult…)
• Potlatch - The ritual of showing your strength (a village/tribal chief’s strength) by giving gifts, especially gifts which create waste, which are resource-limited. He who could waste the most was the strongest
• Wasting will advertise your resources
• The natural world works like this also, see the ugly (dangerous) feathers on the peacock’s tail
• The handicap principle states this same notion (this principle was mathematically proved on the basis that “genes that go for a silly, costly display have a better chance of reproducing”)
• Taking something difficult which someone has already done and doing it in a slightly more difficult way will, therefore, make you more appreciated. This will spawn multiple derivations from the original thing and lead to greater “evolution”

Why did the Web create a gift economy?

• Hau - The spirit of the gift. Gifts create societies and relationships.
• A gift creates a “debt” of sorts because the hau (the spirit of the gift) will always be trying to get back at the gift giver. In an economic exchange, in contrast, people pay for the good so there is no sense of “obligation” afterwards
• We live in a market economy with huge pockets of gift economy:
  • family
  • neighbourhood
  • friends
  • colleagues
  • …
• Most of our daily life is centered around the gift economy, as opposed to the market economy
• On an economy of scarcity you show your strength by owning, knowing, closing, etc; on an abundance economy you show strength by giving, showing, sharing

Technorati Tags: EuroOSCON, EuroOSCON06, EuroOSCON2006

Moved again

I’ve moved my blog (again) to include it in my new (more structured and integrated) site.

You can read about the reasons, process, new system etc right over here.

Welcome to the all-new NunoNunes.org.

Well… ok, not all new then, I didn’t actually change the layout design, that’l come next.

Day 2 of the European Open Source Convention 2006

These are the notes I’ve taken during the talks on the second day of the 2006 edition of the O’Reilly European Open Source Convention (better known as EuroOSCON 2006).

You can get to the index page for my notes on this conference here.

Microformats: Web of Data

Speaker: Brian Suda

(missed some of the initial content, must link to slides which are on-line on the speaker’s website)

• Microformats are “people first, machines, second”
• Embedded in HTML “overloading” the tags that are already there

Compound Microformats

• hCard: Information on people
• hCalendar: Information about events (calendaring)
• hAtom: Information about feeds
• hReview: Reviewing events, etc…
• hResume: Your resume

Why encode things in HTML directly?

(Ex: hAtom) If it is in HTML it is easier to later convert it to other things, the semantics are all in HTML, human-readable, and then a “semantic cook” comes in and transforms it into whatever you want

Provides “Unix piping for the Web”:

• HTML | WebService |
• HTML | Tidy | Proxy Service | Mapping
• HTML | …

Basically allows us to maintain everything (people, calendars, …) in a single format —HTML— by “overloading” the HTML markup elements such as span, class, …

Project honsting on Google Code

Speaker: Greg Stein

Google Code

• Up now:

  • Simple interface, no advertising
  • Gmail-like issue tracking
  • Scalable Subversion repository (supported on bigtable)

• Coming soon:

  • File Downloads
  • Issue change notifications
  • …

Cool Tools for Geographic Applications

Speaker: Schuyler Erle

http://labs.metacarta.com/

Using MetaCarta technology for nothing (or close to).

• GIS and the Neogeographer: Neogeography is not GIS, it is about GPS, Google Maps, Mashups, etc

OpenLayers

http://openlayers.org/

• API for building web map apps
• AJAX
• Open source

Gutenkarte (Using GeoParser)

Gutenkarte GeoParser

• Taking text (like a Gutenberg project book), feed it to a GeoParser API, getting the place names out of the text and producing a map with all those places marked (with, for example, name sizes linked to the frequency with which each name is referred to)

The Google Data API

Speaker: Frank Mantek

http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/

• Data presented in ATOM and RSS formats

Google kinds

• Calendar provides:
  • event
  • time
  • status
  • …

Queries

• REST filter model
• Returns items

Writing

• Update: “POST” to an URI
• Delete: “DELETE” to an URI
• Insert: “PUT” to an URI

Technorati Tags: EuroOSCON, EuroOSCON06, EuroOSCON2006

Day 1 of the European Open Source Convention 2006

These are the notes I’ve taken during the tutorials on the first day of the 2006 edition of the O’Reilly European Open Source Convention (better known as EuroOSCON 2006).

You can get to the index page for my notes on this conference here.

Tutorial - Datawarehousing with MySQL

Speaker: John Paul Ashenfelter

Presentation notes

• It is mandatory to talk to everyone involved and make them agree (or at least understand what they consider) to the common terms. Each person may have a different idea of what something like an “order” means. You must make them agree to a single, common definition.

• Metadata is king!

• Most of the work is business stuff, not technical…

• Dimension tables may be huge (as in tens or maybe even more than 100 columns). This is normal even if it feels really wrong to the database guy in us and the benefits are worth it. In this case “redundant is good”.

• Federated tables exist since MySQL 5.0.3 and provide “link”-like access between tables.

• “Archive” table type (engine ?) compresses the data on the fly with zlib. It is extremely bad for data warehousing usage because every search implies a full-table scan as there it implements no indexes.

• UUID() function - may be used instead of a simple sequence and generates universally unique IDs.

• PostgreSQL has an OLAP engine (table type?) and so it may be more interesting than MySQL for some types of usage.

Tutorial - Creating Passionate Users

Speaker: Kathy Sierra

What is a passionate user and why does it matter?

• People are only passionate if they are really good at it. Passion creates a higher resolution experience (passionate people experience things much deeper and get a whole lot more out of things they’re passionate about)

• The goal: try to get the users through the following milestones as fast as possible: beginner (sucks), regular (OK), expert (passionate, high-resolution experience). One big problem is that regular users tend to stay there, tend not to upgrade (makes them get back in the beginner “suck” zone) and companies tend to think it is OK to have most users as regular users

• People are/become passionate about the goal (making images, skiing, …), not the tool (photoshop, the skis, …). “What can I do with this” vs “How do I use this”

• Creating passionate users does not necessarily mean that you mak them kick ass in your product. You can teach/help them get better at something tangentially related to your product and if they get really good at it, they’ll end up being passionate about your product. See “Misattribution of arousal” (the brain relates a good/bad feeling to everything that’s related to the experience —the whole context— not just to the thing/action itself)

What is in the way?

• The brain’s irracional “crap filter” still thinks that things like programming languages, subjects, etc are really not important, for it the really important things are saving our live from tigers or reproducing.

• What does the brain care about?

  • Anything unexpected
  • Anything not quite right
  • Anything different
  • Anything scary
  • Anything exhilarating (either if we’re doing it or just watching)
  • Beauty
  • Young/innocent/helpless
  • Playing
  • Faces (especially reactions)
  • Unresolved situations (curiosity)

• What does the brain not care and forget?

  • Anxiety/stress

• So you have to link things that the brain cares about to the things you want it to pay attention to

• Simple example: “conversational beats formal” every time! Why? There is no definite answer to that question yet, but the current hypothesis is that when the tone is conversational the brain is tricked into thinking that he is taking part in a conversation and he is wired to participate in it and so it pays attention

How do we do that?

• You need to talk to the brain, not just the mind

• Create a compelling “vision” for what it will feel like when the user is kicking ass in it’s activity. “Why is it worth going through the pain of being a novice and regular user until I get to expert user?”. Before the user uses the product he must know why that is cool

• Is there a clear path to being an expert user? Are we helping them getting there? Do they see that there is a path and a way?

• “Why?”, “Who cares?” “So what?”: when you answer all those questions you can answer your user’s questions about why they should use your application/product

• Documentation and information transference:

  • You can give either facts, information or understanding, but not all three at once!
  • Words + Pictures > Words
  • …

Who can help you help your users learn?

• Communities

Keeping users engaged

• If users are to become power users then they have to stay with it. We must try to keep them interested, get them and keep them as much as possible in a flow state

• The flow state (“I’m in the flow!”) requires a linear relationship between challenge and knowledge and skill

• Many things create arousal in the brain (discovery, challenge, narrative, growth, thrill, sensation, …)

• We must not break the flow of the users. We must enchant the users and keep them enchanted.

• What breaks the flow? Microsoft Bob, complicated dials, weird menus…

• Create a continuing challenge to the users, creating “levels” (or making them very explicit if they already exists implicitly) so that they can see and feel their evolution

• User Experience Spiral: Interaction -> Payoff -> Motivation benefit -> Back to Interaction

• The Tribe: passionate users create “tribes” that they feel proud of announcing to the world that they belong to. T-shirt first development (make sure you have ways for your users to state their tribe)

• Giving users something to talk about. Easter eggs, The Dark Side Of The Rainbow… Give experienced users some knowledge that makes them “something more” than others. “Insider information” is social currency.

• Community: Passion builds community and community builds passion.

Technorati Tags: EuroOSCON, EuroOSCON06, EuroOSCON2006

Notes on the European Open Source Convention 2006

These are the notes I’ve taken during and about the 2006 edition of the O’Reilly European Open Source Convention (better known as EuroOSCON 2006).

They are really just unstructured tidbits to help me recall things latter on, when I’m going over the materials, but it may have some sort of value for someone else…

• Day 1 - Tutorial day
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4

Technorati Tags: EuroOSCON, EuroOSCON06, EuroOSCON2006

Blosxom plugin for Haloscan feedback system

This is a plugin that I concocted for enabling the usage of the Haloscan on a Blosxom site.

It is perfectly possible to add this functionality just by tweaking the flavour templates, of course, but this makes it easier to use and also makes it possible to port existing sites to Blosxom and easily maintain the comments that may already exist.

It also allows for the individual turning on or off of both comments and trackbacks on a per-story basis.

I’ll probably add a zipped file with the plugin somewhere on the site, but for now the code is displayed right here on this page.

# Blosxom Plugin: haloscan
# Author: Nuno Nunes (nuno@nunonunes.org)
# Version: v0.02  2006-09-15
# Documentation: See the relevant sections of this file or type: perldoc haloscan

package haloscan;

# --- Configurable varables -------------------
#
# What is your account name on haloscan (the one that should appear
# on the javascript in the 'head' section of the HTML page)?
$haloscan_id = 'nunonunes' unless defined $haloscan_id;
#
# Message to display if comments are not allowed on a story.
$comments_closed_message = 'Comments are closed for this page'
  unless defined $comments_closed_message;
#
# Message to display if trackbacks are not allowed on a story.
$trackbacks_closed_message = 'Trackbacks are closed for this page'
  unless defined $trackbacks_closed_message;
#
# ---------------------------------------------

# Use $haloscan::head in your head template.
# Use $haloscan::comments and $haloscan::trackbakcs in your story template.

#use strict;
use vars qw{ $header $comments $trackbacks };

sub start {
  1;
}

sub head {
  my ($pkg, $dir, $head_ref) = @_;

  $header = qq{<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.haloscan.com/load/$haloscan_id"> </script>};

  1;
}

sub story {
  my ($pkg, $path, $filename, $story_ref, $title_ref, $body_ref) = @_;

  my $story_id = $permalink::story;
  $story_id =~ s/$blosxom::url//;

  $story_id = $meta::haloscanstoryid
    if defined $meta::haloscanstoryid;

  my $comments_allowed = 1;
  $comments_allowed = 0
    if (defined $meta::haloscancomments && $meta::haloscancomments =~ /^n/i);
  my $trackbacks_allowed = 1;
  $trackbacks_allowed = 0 
    if (defined $meta::haloscantrackbacks && $meta::haloscantrackbacks =~ /^n/i);

  if ($comments_allowed) {
    $comments = qq{<a href="javascript:HaloScan('$story_id');"><script type="text/javascript">postCount('$story_id');</script></a>};
  }
  else {
    $comments = $comments_closed_message;
  };

  if ($trackbacks_allowed) {
    $trackbacks = qq{<a href="javascript:HaloScanTB('$story_id');"><script type="text/javascript">postCountTB('$story_id');</script></a>};
  }
  else {
    $trackbacks = $trackbacks_closed_message;
  };



  1;
}

1;

=head1 NAME

Blosxom Plug-in: haloscan


=head1 SYNOPSIS

Integrates the comment and trackback service provided by Haloscan 
(http://haloscan.com/) into blosxom.

Requires the permalink plugin and knows how to work with the meta plugin
if it is installed.

=head1 INSTALLATION

Fill in the configurable variables according to the instructions and
put the file in your plugin directory (just like any other plugin).

If you whish to use the meta plugin together with this one make sure
that the it is run before this one (renaming meta to 00meta and this
one to 99haloscan does the trick --read the bloxsom plugin documentation
if you need further assistance).

You need to have the pemalink plugin installed for this one to work and
it must run before this one does. You can use the same scheme as defined
for the meta plugin to that effect.

=head1 CONFIGURATION

Fill in the variables in the Configurable varables section of this file
according with the descriptions (which should hopefully be self-explanatory)
and if you have any doubts check out the usage section bellow.

=head1 USAGE

After having set up an account on Haloscan and filled in all the variables to
be configured just put the $haloscan::header in your head flavour template
anywhere inside the HEAD HTML element.

Then, on your story flavour template, drop the $haloscan::comments and
$haloscan::trackbacks variables wherever you want them to appear and that's it!

Both comments and trackbacks are enabled by default for all stories.
Should you wish to control this behaviour, you can do so on a story-by-story
basis using the meta plugin and assigning the meta-variables
meta-haloscancomments and meta-haloscantrackbacks variables as exemplified
below:

----------
My great story's name
meta-haloscancomments: no
meta-haloscantrackbacks: yes
meta-haloscanstoryid: 1115

This is a really interesting story...
----------

For any one of the meta-haloscancomments and meta-haloscantrackbacks variables,
any value starting with the letter n turns it off and anything else (including
not setting the vriable at all) turns it on.

The meta-haloscanstoryid variable allows you to retain story IDs for specific 
stories in case you're porting from a different blogging system or if you want 
your Haloscan story IDs to be generated some other way.

These three variables (meta-haloscancomments, meta-haloscantrackbacks and 
meta-haloscanstoryid) are optional.

=head1 BUGS

Bug reports and comments may be sent to blosxom_haloscan.feedback@nunonunes.org.

=head1 CHANGELOG

2006-09-16 - Added the ability to import storyIDs from a meta-variable.
2006-09-15 - First implementation.


=head1 LICENSE

This Blosxom Plug-in
Copyright 2006, Nuno Nunes

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL
THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR
OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,
ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Movabletype 2 blosxom

“Can this be true? Is this guy talking about moving away from Movabletype and into Blosxom in this day and age?”

I sure am and I did do it. If you want to know more about the move just read on!

Simplicity. That’s the name of the game.

Movabletype is a fine platform for blogging, to be sure —I’ve used it for my blog for many years now and I still use it for some other blogs I’m involved with on a technical decision-making capacity— but I’ve gotten a little fed-up with a few things about the way it works.

Complexity

First off, Movabletype is very complex, and getting more so as time goes by.
Each new version adds more features and, of course, introduces the added complexity necessary to support those features.

Blosxom is a script and a bunch of (totally optional, of course) plugins written in Perl (yes, this brings out the rabid squirrel in me).

Spam

This is an indirect problem. Spam —both on comments and track-backs alike— is a plague that infests all types of blogs and Six Appart do their best to cope with it, but at the end of the day the solutions they provide all depend on a lot of work for their users, either because people have to always catch up with their software’s latest release (or else lose the protection afforded by the previous version) or because even if users are in fact on the cutting edge, there is still the inherent mechanism of detection and protection that is built upon users being spammed, acting on it and that information being fed back to a master server and then scattered to other users so as to allow these later ones to be protected from the new spam.
Anyway it is always a lot of work for people getting targeted with new spam waves (as I find myself being for some reason I cannot fathom —it’s not as if I am a big time blogger or anything like that)…

This problem got so annoying in fact, that I decided to “outsource” the feature to professionals and right now I’m using Haloscan for all my feedback, both comment and track-backs.
Of course this could be easily integrated on my Movabletype platform, but if I’m not going to use this feature than it stops counting as a factor for the platform.

Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade

The Movabletype upgrade cycle I’ve mentioned before is annoying for multiple reasons. Not only because I have to do it in order to get the latest spam-protection afforded by the platform I can’t just let the software be, but also because each new version traditionally brings along with it a new licensing model that get closer each time to losing the free customers’ bit, which is definitely a must for me.

Local vs Remote

One of my main reasons for wanting to change platforms is the model that Movabletype (and most other blogging packages out there) follow of a server hosted somewhere which not only displays the content but is also used for editing it.
This is fine for a lot of uses but I don’t like to have to be on-line to edit my blog. I know there are several programs that allow me to create and edit content off-line and later “replay” the actions on to the server (I actually use one of them, namely ecto), but this only allows me to edit the content and preview it for HTML entity correction sort of thing, not for real publishing as it will appear later on the server.

Also the fact is that I still feel a lot more confortable just editing text files around (be it in my laptop or in the server via ssh) and I do believe this kind of interaction with the site will allow me to write if not more stuff, than at the very least better stuff —more thought out and relevant.

So for all these reasons and more, I’m now on Blosxom and, so far, I’m quite pleased.

Quick notes on some Perl gems

As I mentioned yesterday, a few packages caught my attention during the last few days at YAPC and yesterday during the afternoon and evening I took advantage of it being a lighter day (conference-wise) and decided to check out two of them.

First off a took a look at Plagger. Now instead of using the handy pre-packaged versions out there, I went the “fanatic CPAN hardcore user” way (as the author puts it) and let me tell you, you have to have at least some degree of fanaticism to go through with it alright! Oh and it is true what was said during the conference: installing Plagger —the CPAN way— sure does keep your computer warm! :-)

But hey, I got through with it and then it was all a matter of trying out a few configuration recipes to get the hang of things and after that mashing some options together to see how it all worked out.

And let me tell you, it works out beautifully! Plagger is so powerful it is hard to describe and the plugin system wins out yet again. You can setup an aggregator to feed you news and events to your email in a couple of minutes, full of bells and whistles. Oh and doing a “plannet” type of site couldn’t be easier! Put that together with a myriad notification systems (IRC, Growl, …) and a powerful filtering system and, well, it really rocks!

The only problem I see with it is that you do have to occasionally look at the source code of some modules to really understand what’s going on there and what you can actually do with them. Documentation is something that this project sorely needs and I fear that until there is such documentation it will continue to be mostly the province of Perl hackers!

If you wish to take a look at the presentation on the subject given at YAPC, you can find it here and be sure to check out the neat examples which work (almost!) out of the box.
Also check out the architecture of the thing, it really helps you figure out how to use things to create the specific aggregator you wish.

The other piece of Perl I tried out yesterday was KinoSearch.

I’ve had the need for search on a site come up a little while ago but hadn’t yet had the opportunity of going through the available modules on CPAN and now it seems like I won’t need to. Yay YAPC! :-)

I was fortunate enough to attend two talks on the subject and from the first one I got the feeling that there were two packages which could possibly interest me —Search::Xapian and KinoSearch. It seems like Search::Xapian is the more powerful of the two but it lacks in documentation and is really hard to use.

Then there was the second talk which focused specifically on KinoSearch and I was amazed at what I saw there, so I decided to go and try it out.

Installing it was a breeze (straight out of CPAN, of course) and using it was ridiculously easy!
I mean, I just copied and pasted the examples straight out of perldoc, tweaked what I needed to in order for my case to work (fortunately I have a fairly up-to-date copy of the site on my laptop), ran it and voilá! A fully working (fast!) index of the whole site!

Now of course they were right in the presentation when they said it can be a bit of a hog when it comes to disk space —it took 2.6M to index a full 2.7M of text!!— but then I used it straight out of the examples so maybe I can get it to be a bit more civil disk space-wise with a bit more tweaking…

And now to get some breakfast, pack my stuff and go out to see a bit more of the city until it is time to get on the train to Stratford for the rest of the vacation. Oh I see it’s raining quite a bit out there… How very typical! :-)

YAPC stuff

This is just a quick post with a list of cool stuff I found out about (or was reminded of) during YAPC::EU::2006 and will want to review later, in no particular order.

• Parrot is coming along quite nicely to the point where there is now some sort of light at the end of the tunnel;
• CPANPlus
• Searching with Perl is hot right now - Search::Xapian and KinoSearch
• Test::Class rules (re-read Perl Testing book, chapter 8)
• Test::WWW:::Selenium looks very nice
• Plagger is looking very, very good!

Lots more to report when I digest my notes but this is the list that comes to mind right now.

Technorati Tags: Perl, YAPC

All packed up, ready to fly

Everything is packed, all the gear is checked, I’m all set for tomorrow’s flight to London, England.

I’ll be spending Monday and Tuesday in London with my wife —Tuxa, then I’ll leave her with her brother Tuesday evening and catch a train to Birmingham where I’ll attend YAPC::Europe::2006. I expect to have lots of fun there.

Then Saturday we’ll both catch our trains to Stratford-Upon-Avon and we’ll linger around for a few (hopefully) nice and relaxing days, before heading out to London where we’ll catch our plane back to Portugal on Wednesday.

In the end it was actually a lucy break that I booked the wrong flight into London, as it gives me an extra day there to wind down before heading out to the conference (that and the fact that we’re celebrating a kind of anniversary of our own, Tuxa and I, so we’ll just extend the celebrations to cover our days abroad). ;-)

Anyway, I’m all set here, so I’ll just have the rest of the day to geek out a bit (Tuxa is having dinner with a few of her girl friends which leaves me home alone tonight) and to set me in the right kind of mood to get through all of the utter nonsense I expect to be put through tomorrow at the airport and during the flight.

New comment system

Ever since I turned off comments on this weblog people have actually been complaining to me about it.
Incredible, I get no comments (appart from spam, of course) for such a long time and then, just as I turn the system off, that’s when people want to give feedback…

Of well, such is human nature and such are the applications of Murphy’s Law to our lives and so on.

So both as a stop-gap until the new system is in place and also a a test to the system, all the feedback on this weblog (both comments and trackbacks) are now supported by Haloscan.

That’s right, I’m finaly caving in and outsourcing all the drudgery of dealing with lowest life-form on the Internet —spammers.

Let’s see how that goes, but I feel I must warn you that I did the conversion of the whole system in less than an hour and so I fully expect things to be broken here and there and I ask you to kindly point them out to me as you find them, please.

The templates are getting incredibly kludgy and unmanageable, of course, and so it really is time for a big overhaul to the weblog and maybe even the whole site?

I’ve been flirting with a radically different publishing system for the whole shebang but I just don’t know if I’m prepared for the radical change it would entail in my web-publishing habits.
But then again a radical change would probably be “a good thing” so I don’t know…

Apple lock-in

This is just me joining the chorus of people complaining about Apple’s lock-in strategies on their products, so if you’re not into that stuff, please disregard this post and move on.

Last night I finished what I hope will be the last version of my January snow trip’s movie.

It took me hours to edit the thing and it is by far the most complex and time consuming edit I’ve ever made.

In the end I distilled some 60-70 minutes of footage to a 14 minutes, 45 seconds movie with the most amount of cuts I have ever made in my life (although yes, I’m nothing more than an amateur).

And now that I’ve done it and I’m almost at the point of burning the DVDs (right after I hex-edit the .IFO files for wide-screen correctness, oh well…) I feel that queasiness in the pit of my stomach that if I ever want to go back and re-cut any of the film I’m essentially dead in the water.

You see, for a number of reasons (including having started the editing phase during the event itself and having nothing but my trusty old iBook G3 with me), I’ve edited the video on iMovie and the soundtrack on Garage Band.
So what this means is that I can’t get anything remotely like an EDL out of it and ,as such, I can’t ever go back and get the project together again unless I keep the huge project files (and the footage I captured) and I keep it up-to-date to the most recent versions of iMovie.

Of course, had I done this on Final Cut, I’d be in the clear (as much as possible, anyway), but this way I just know that if my DVDs ever break, my movie, as I know it now, will essentially be gone.

And I just shudder at that prospect. Not that this is award-winning material, not by a long shot, but it really matters to me.

Oh well, yet another reason to upgrade my laptop to something that can run Final Cut, right? :-)

Technorati Tags: editing, mac, video

Sparqling FoaF

Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about things related to the “Semantic Web”.

This sudden new interest came about during a conversation I was having with José Castro (leader of Lisbon.pm) in which he was telling me about his plans for a service he would like to provide in the Lisbon.pm homepage: he would like to be able to automatically list all the CPAN modules “owned” by the group’s mongers.

As we started talking about this, we concluded right away that in order to achieve that goal we needed a list of all the members and their respective PAUSE accounts and instead of listing that information on a file somewhere we wanted to use something a little more dynamic. This meant that each member would have to host a file (probably some sort of XML formated file) somewhere on the web (maybe even on the group’s server if needed) where {s}he stated something about h[er|im]self, which the software than runs the site would parse and then take the necessary steps to gather the rest of the information from CPAN based on that.

Well, José was thinking about using something along the lines of what the London.pm group uses (apparently they went through a similar process some time ago). They developed a XML vocabulary that they use for this purpose.

All well and good but really it felt a bit like re-inventing the wheel to me. The thing is that I had had conversations like this before, although in different contexts, and lately I have, by some twist of fate, been listening to a lot of recorded presentations around the Semantic Web, FoaF, SPARQL and the like to pass up such a good opportunity.

In fact it was Melo who first got me onto the FoaF stuff some time ago and the notion basically lay dormant in the back of my mind just waiting for an opportunity to be used.

So what am I on about with this FoaF, SPARQL and Semantic Web stuff?

Very simply put (very simply, go and look at the websites I link to or google for it if you want to know more), all of this enables machines to gather information about resources on the web —and even things off the web, like people and information about them— and structure it into something that can be automatically manipulated and from which inferences can be made automatically.

FoaF (an acronym for Friend-of-a-Friend) allows people to state things about themselves, their web-based resources, their relationships to other people or other resources, etc.
Now FoaF is very useful for this project as a descriptive language, but it is still just a piece of XML that just sits there waiting to be parsed and we all know how fun it is to parse XML, right?

Enter SPARQL, a query language designed to be “the query language for the web” which basically allows us to query multiple data sources of various formats and get back the results we need. It was a happy coincidence indeed that just as I was preparing to write down the extensions I would need to the existing Perl FoaF parser I happened to listen to an interview with Elias Torres about SPARQL and how it applies to a lot of the things I need right now.

But wait, all that is quite a mouth-full but what does it actually mean for this specific context?

Well, it means that if all the mongers who are interested create a FoaF file about themselves where they state that they have a PAUSE account with ID “FOO”, then we can build a program in the server that goes out, queries the FoaF file of each monger, checks to see if that file references any PAUSE account and, if so, then it goes out to CPAN, gets the list of modules owned by that account and does whatever we decide that we want to do with it.

Right, that’s the easy stuff done right there, figuring out which parts should be used. Now for the real fun part…

First off I had to make sure the technology was all there to begin with. The Semantic Web has been in gaseous state for much too long and I had to make sure that it wasn’t all just vapour anymore.

So I went out and tried to find out about FoaF and in the process even created my own personal FoaF file. Not bad at all, it seems that this part, at least, is good enough to go (even if some of the name spaces it uses are still in experimental stages —deemed unstable).

Then I decided to look at extracting the information without writing a specific-purpose XML parser. As I said earlier, there is a module out there that does that, but it only supports part of what I needed and I decided that, should I take that route, I had to write down a couple of extensions to it.

But then I heard the interview with Elias Torres and decided to give SPARQL a look.

It was just a matter of hopping over to http://sparql.org/ and trying out the SPARQLer demo with my own FoaF file and validating that I could indeed effortlessly get out some of the information I needed and then realizing that there are already some Perl modules for using SPARQL out there on CPAN.

All I have to do now is look into those modules to see how usable they are and with any luck I should have something knocked together real soon (or maybe not that soon, SPARQL doesn’t quite seem to be a trivial language to master).

I’ll try and write up some notes on the process as I go along and maybe even do a more structured article on the whole semantic web thing and how it fits into our solution for the article section of the Lisbon.pm’s site (assuming there will be one… José, are you listening?). ;-)

Absent-minded me gained an extra day in London

I’ve just realized that when I booked all the flights and hotels for the upcoming UK foray I made a slight mistake.

I booked a hotel for me for the duration of the YAPC::EU conference in Birmingham, another hotel for my wife and my brother-in-law for their stay in London during the conference, a B&B in Stratford-upon-Avon for me and my wife for our mini vacation after the conference and the flights to and from London.

All well and good, except…

It turns out that I booked our flight to London (my wife and mine only) one day too soon!
We were supposed to fly over on a Tuesday and I booked the flight for Monday. My brother in law who booked his own flights is going over on Tuesday as scheduled.

And, as it turns out, re-booking the flight would be so damned expensive that I just settled for booking an extra day at the hotel in London before leaving for Birmingham.

Oh, what a disappointment this turned out to be, a hole extra day in London with Tuxa. Tsk, Tsk…

It wasn’t on purpose. No really, it wasn’t! :-)

On monkeys and writing (and, especially, on reading)

One of these evenings, as I was driving home and listening to my back-queue of podcasts, as usual, a thought came to me which I found both strikingly obvious and interesting enough for having “discovered” it “independently” that I should share it here.

I was listening to a music podcast in which each episode is themed and listeners contribute a song and an introduction for each one, and this particular episode was based on the subject of “war and peace”. One of the contributors quoted Sun Tzu in his famous work “The Art Of War” and for some reason my mind drifted at that point as I was trying to remember the particular quote he was reading.

I couldn’t remember it and it bothered me that it should be so, and then I started getting all introspective and philosophical and realised that the thing that bothered me about it was that I though this particular work should be remembered and “digested” properly and I clearly hadn’t done it.

But then I usually forget most things I read anyway, having such a terrible memory, what I do retain is the basic ideia behind the work, so why did I feel like this particular piece of writing should get different treatment than the rest?
Especially given that almost everything that it says is mostly obvious if you think about it for a couple of minutes…

And then it hit me: “Aha! Yes, that’s it, ‘a couple of minutes’ , that’s the key to this problem!” though I, deep in introspection as I swerved desperately to avoid the pedestrian that for some strange reason was in front of my car. Well, maybe not so strange a reason, after all that was the sidewalk I had gotten myself into in my reverie…
(Yes, I’m joking, no this didn’t happen, no you don’t need to be on the lookout when I get my car into the street).

But seriously, it’s the “couple of minutes” thing that took me aback.
The thing I realised then was that nowadays writing comes easy. In fact communicating in almost every form is easy and cheap and so people communicate anything that comes to their minds and are done with it. Not unlike the famous horde of monkeys (you know the ones, they are supposed to have written all of Shakespeare’s works while he cooled down in the shade with all the damsels…).

And because of the relative low cost of communicating, which makes for a lot of “low-quality” stuff being communicated, people also tend to consume stuff in passing.
I read things (books, articles, whatever) and get the gist of it or the fundamental ideas of it but that’s it, I’ll keep the ideas or refute them and get on with things because chances are that if the subject is important enough someone will write about it again and I’ll come across it an read it and things will get shaped in my head through quick exposures to different angles.

But of course things where very different in the past and certainly so when Sun Tzu wrote “The Art Of War”. In those days communicating was a costly business and not many people (in fact only a select minority) could do it, and even then at somewhat of an expense, so people didn’t just write whatever came into their minds; in fact they thought long and hard about things and only when they concluded that they had reached a decision or had come to a conclusion of merit would they decide to write it down and compile it with other thoughts of importance in order for other people to be able to benefit from the expensive thought process the author had gone through.

The net result of this, of course, is that things written down on older days are a product of deep thought and are refined and polished ideas whose meaning and importance are far greater than the spurious thoughts that just come into the head of Mr. John Doe and which he dutifully splashes on his LiveJournal.
And so the things written down in days of old should be read with careful attention and with a few cycles to spare to it, instead of consumed on the run while you guzzle up your morning caffeinated beverage of choice.

And that’s what was bothering me about not remembering the quote that was being read. If I didn’t remember it that means that I didn’t pay enough attention when I was reading the book and if I didn’t pay attention then I couldn’t possibly have soaked up all that it had to offer.
And yes, almost everything in there seems rather trivial and common-sense to us but if you take the words as something more carefully chosen to convey a certain thought or meaning then you will probably gain some insight into the full story that is being told, instead of just the mere sentence that is being read.

Is this even making any kind of sense to anyone else but me?

Well anyway these where the thoughts that grabbed my attention that fine August evening while driving home and caused me to not pay attention and not assimilate anything else that was being said on the other podcasts.

And just so you know I’m not a complete hypocrite, the obvious irony of me jutting down this entry off the hand of my cuff is not wasted on me. In fact I think it just helps drive the point home rather nicely.

Symmetry

Today was the first time I ever ate sashimi.

Today was the last time I’ll ever eat sashimi.

Don’t you just love symmetry? Life is so neat that way…

Spam (is it just me or is this getting old?)

Comment spam has increased a lot recently and I have better things to do than deal with it so starting now comments are closed —just as trackbacks have been for quite some time now— and will predictably remain so until I switch my blogging system.

How long will that take? Well, it’s anyone’s guess actually, but anyway that’s the best I can do for now.

So if you feel a sudden and uncontrollable urge to send some feedback my way regarding any of the rants I take on here just shoot me an email. You know the address, blog at the domain this blog is hosted at, but just the final part (the nunonunes dot org bit).

And now back to our regularly scheduled content.

Read me a story?

I’ve recently found out about Cory Doctorow’s Podcast (via the latest TWiT) and being somewhat of a fan of his writings, I decided to check it out.

So I went there and downloaded the 4 latest episodes, which together cover a full new story that Cory had just finished writing.

In the podcast he essentially reads us the story and I find it extremely amusing and entertaining to be read a story first-hand, by the author himself.

He makes it quite clear that he considers the work still very rough but I kind of like to hear it almost as it first come out onto the paper, I find it very genuine this way. And, of course, something “quite rough” from an author such as Cory is always light years ahead of the “finished” work most of us could ever produce anyway so it’s all a bit relative, isn’t it? ;-)

Needless to say, I am now subscribed to yet another podcast and eagerly await further fiction to be seamlessly delivered to my iPod one of these days.

Technorati Tags: fiction, podcast

10 Kg

Yep, 10Kg, that’s how much weight I’ve lost recently.

Why? Well, because I was getting to be an overweight geek, despite all my half-assed efforts to turn up the exercise —it just won’t happen! :-)

Overweight to about 7-8Kg in fact. So what did I do? Well, I finally caved in to my wife’s requests and decided to take care of it.

After making that decision I talked to my uncle who’s recently lost something like 20Kg (!!) and asked for his advice which, like any good engineer’s advice, is plain common sense.

The magic formula (heh) is simple: ingest less calories than you spend in order to reduce body mass and then start ingesting a bit more to maintain it. Also, if you want to help the weight loss process, make sure you burn up more calories than usual, faster.

So after a full two months of sensible eating (absolutely no candy, no sugary drinks, no alcohol, no fats, no more than 100g of meat or fish a day, eating regularly thru-out the day and a few other obvious measures) aided by a daily walk or jog of at least 6-7 Kms I’ve come to weigh 10Kg less than I started out with.

Then I stopped the daily exercise and eased up on the eating regime to see how it would work out and now that I’m eating comfortably (I was never a big eater to start with, so that helps, of course) ;-) and haven’t exercised for a few weeks, I’ve settled in a nice weight (I’ve gained an average of 1,5Kg during these weeks but it varies daily, of course).

Now that I’ve gotten to where I want to settle from now on, I’ll just keep on monitoring the weight and being mildly careful with my intake (as I’ve been on the last few weeks) and that’s it.

All it took was a little self-discipline to follow my eating regime with absolute strictness for a couple of months (and let me tell you, it’s not me I have to worry about here, it’s other people around me who get so uncomfortable with my “diet” that they’ll constantly try to make me break it. Funny, huh?) and then a little care afterwards to keep up the shape.

It’s not rocket science, it wasn’t that hard and it sure was no drama. Like everything else in life, all it took was to make the decision to do something about it, make a plan and then to go for it.

And in the end I’m not doing any great sacrifices on my daily life, I’m just eating sensibly. After all, when was the last time I had to stock up on calories to push through a tough winter of walking around fleeing tigers and hunting bears for food? ;-)

Multicamera editing in Final Cut

I’m back at Final Cut.

After reading some stuff on film editing it sure is a lot easier to figure the software out. I guess it is true that this is professional software and it is not that easy to just take it up and start editing away…

Anyway I took it up again because I have an event filmed from which I want to make a DVD and I had access to two tapes from different people, both of which had some kind of problems with it so even if I wanted to (and I didn’t) I couldn’t just cop out and use only one of them for the whole event. Consumer-grade mini-DV cameras absolutely suck in low-light conditions

So I just read through the FCP manual where it regards to creating, manipulating and editing multiclips and then after I had all of the clips synchronized into different angles of the same clip I just edited it like one would a live show with multiple cameras’ signals coming in. It just rocks!

Of course, manually synching different video feeds when you have no strong visual or audio clues (like a clacker for example, which I now do get the need for, by the way…) is a pain and the only thing that made it easier on me was that fortunately one of the persons filming the event left the camera on for the whole duration so I had a continuos video feed to synch up the other person’s interrupted footage.

All in all I haven’t finished editing everything yet but the main event clip (the only one which is multi-angle) is coming along quite nicely indeed, even if I do only have a rough edit so far.

Which reminds me: making rough edits with highly reduced resolution footage and then re-importing everything at full res just for the final edit and export is just great! The speed with which I can now work is amazing and then I’ll just have to do minor tweaks with the full resolution footage. Heaven! :-)

Technorati Tags: video, editing

About NunoNunes.org

Hi!

My name is Nuno Nunes and this (as the name implies) is my personal website.

As such the content of the whole site is provided under the following DISCLAIMER:

This site is strictly personal and has no affiliation whatsoever with any
of my former, current of future employers. Everything and anything I write
or provide in this site is either mine to give away, in the public domain, 
or it is presented with permission from the author.

If there is anything in here that you find violates these statements, I’d very much like to hear about it, so please drop me a line.

Anyway, in here I put up everything I feel like sharing or things I want to have available over the Internet for my own usage.

Feel free to poke around and come back if you like what you see, but please don’t use my pictures without asking me. If you do ask I’ll probably let you use them, but if you use them without permission and I find out about it, I’ll be really annoyed and do whatever I can to stop you from using them. I’m not a professional (or even a good) photographer but I do like to keep track of what my work is used for.

This site is (and probably always will be) a work in progress. If you are into that sort of thing you can check out the list of things to do.

Technical details (a.k.a. the geeky bit)

This site is served by an Apache web server from a collection of static files, previously generated by Blosxom.

Syndicating this site

This site provides several syndication feeds that you may wish to use.

At the present I provide ATOM) and RSS 2.0) feeds and each format is made explicit in the links below.

• Whole site: (ATOM, RSS2)
• Just the weblog (Nowhereland): (ATOM, RSS2)
• Just the projects: (ATOM, RSS2)
• Just the notebook: (ATOM, RSS2)

So what’s this about a notebook, then?

Welcome to my digital notebook.

I am Nuno and this section of the site is where I write down things that I want to remember later on.

The information stored in here is mostly relevant to me and it is therefore available to the world with no guarantees. I guess it goes without saying that some parts of the notebook are not accessible to the general public, as indeed other parts of my site. If you are family or a friend and would like to have access to anything in here which you don’t currently have (or even if you are none of those but would still like to look into something which is barred to you and think you may be able to make a good case for it) do drop me a line and I’ll get you setup with an account.

Please note that because English is not my native tongue, there are parts of this information repository which are written in Portuguese, most notably information which I imported from previous incarnations of my site, but also some things which only make sense to maintain in Portuguese.

Having said all that, if you find anything useful in here that’s great, enjoy!

Not Found

Hello.

The page you’re looking for does not exist in this site.
Please use the navigation tools available to find your way into something you like.

Thanks!

Nowhereland - nunonunes.org weblog

This is my weblog.

It started out in 2002 (actually it was in 2001, but I’ve lost the very first posts since) and in here I keep a record of many things related to me, my life and my interests.

Contacting the author of this site

If you wish to get in touch with me you can try and reach me by the following methods (although I don’t promise I’ll always respond to instant messages from unknown people):

• Email: site-feedback@nunonunes.org
• Jabber (a.k.a. Google Talk): nuno@nunonunes.org

Projects by Nuno Nunes

In this section of the site I maintain pages and information related to various projects that I will find myself involved with.

The site itself is a project, of course, and other that that most things are of a software nature.

Events and anecdotes related to the development of the projects and other tangentially related information will most likely appear in the relevant weblog section.

About me

tl;dr: Hello, my name is Nuno and I’m a computer (and Internet) geek, systems architect, occasional programmer, hobbyist robot maker and all-around tech enthusiast. I love learning new things, I’m addicted to music and I love the sun.

If you want to know a bit more read on.

The geeky part

Most of my coding has been done in Perl and I have, in the past, been fairly active in the community, having been a member of the Lisbon Perl Mongers, founding member of the (now defunct) Cascais Perl Mongers and former vice-president of the Portuguese Perl Programmers Association—APPP, of which I was also a founding member.
I’ve enjoyed going to a few YAPCs, London Perl Workshops, and even one of the first Perl-devoted Geek Cruises. That last one was particularly fun!

I have a passion for learning. Since the end of 2011 I’ve been acting on my interest for Artificial Intelligence and robotics (something I merely grazed over while at university, oh-so long ago) and I’ve been taking up some of the inaugural courses offered by udacity and coursera on several subjects related to those topics.

These courses have been a great inspiration and lots of fun and some of the stuff I learn from them ends up being put use in a few personal projects I manage to nudge along from time to time.
These range from building simple arduino-based robots, to maintaining the external community memory system and information harvesting and classification systems for a bunch of friendly lobsters I hang out with, which gather occasionally IRL for beers and a nice chat about the impending technological Singularity.

I also write about the said Singularity at the OneOverZero blog.

Some metadata about me and my web presence is encoded in my FoaF file.
If you want to send me an encrypted message you can do so by using pgp. You will find my public key here (or in any number of the public Keyservers out there).

The serious (meaning “work-related”) part

I suppose some context about my professional endeavors is in order, so here it goes: I’ve been working at ISPs for more than 10 years (I’ve been part of the IP global team and as of 2012 I am working at Optimus’ ISP). It pays the bills, but it’s also fun, for the most part. This has allowed me to get comfortable with lots of technologies at an interesting scale, such as authentication mechanisms (Radius and DHCP), DNS, XMPP, PubSub systems, SQL and noSQL databases, etc.
I do like to design and deploy stuff such as real-time, high-availability services, specifically tailored to handle large volumes of queries in a very time-sensitive environment. Problems regarding big data and time sensitive information are yummy stuff!

The so called “real life”

Besides the all the web and technology related stuff I also like to do many other things in real life.

I love reading and I think e-readers are the best thing to have come along since the invention of the wheel. They allow me to take however many book I wish with me at no weight or volume penalty and allow me to easily get a quick read in during my daily commutes or my vacation time.

I am tea lover. I mainly like black and green teas, though, not the herbal ones.

I like to try to surf once in a while—and at the rate I do it, I’ll probably get good at it when I’m old and grey, but hey, it is great fun!
I try to keep fit and that involves hitting the gym regularly and the occasional jog.
I also can’t wait for the ski season to come around each year, even though I have to travel quite a bit to get to the snow. I have the beach and the sun where I live, but definitely not the snow.

Ever since I can remember being me I’ve had music in my head and in my life. I love to listen to it, I’m always studying and learning about it and I sometimes even try to write some of it. Now if I could actually get good at it, I’d be a much happier man.

Whenever I can I like to travel out of my country and get to know different places and people. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had the chance to get to know a bit of the world, but there’s still so much to be seen!

The sea and the sun make and break my moods. “Because I want to know”/”Because I want to learn” are usually the best reasons. I believe that people are basically good. I’m fairly good at turning lemons into lemonade.

To-Dos on this site

Even after I’ve managed to port my sites over to Blosxom and I was pleased enough with the result to launch it to the public, I still couldn’t really say that everything was up to par as far as what I wanted to do with this site.

This page presents a list of things I still need to work on and is my personal to-do list for the nunonunes.org site.

I fully expect that this list will never be over, but it’s nice to have a place to go over and see what I can work on next when the spare time comes…

So, here is the list:

• Fix the RSS 2.0 feed generating plugin (“enclosures”) and make it behave appropriately with post dates that are not UTC (as is the case on my site!);
• Check the weblog entries from 2002 (and early 2003) for formating —many will have become one huge string of text with all the conversions they already went through;
• Sift through all the articles and change the following items:
  • Turn all the HTML-like links into Markdown-like ones;
  • Find out all the links to earlier articles and change them to reflect the new location;
• Add support for an “updated” attribute to each article (in addition to the current “crated on”).

The big purge

Following the unrecoverable crash of Lemming’s (my iBook) hardrive and it’s replacement, I now have a 4-year old iBook G3 900MHz with t 80G hard-drive. Not bad he?

Of course this forced upgrade comes in a specially bad time when I am anticipating the second generation of the MacBook line in order to get me one of the 13’ ones but then, when is an hardware failure of this magnitude ever convenient?

Replacing the drive was especially fun (not!) and it shows the computer’s age and the prowess of Apple’s engineers that they could stuff all those components (which weren’t as miniaturized as they are now, not by a long shot) inside such a small space and still make the laptop as sturdy as it is!

Anyway, the really hard part os all if this was loosing data. Yes, I know I should backup everything important very often. I know it should be done religiously and without fail. I know. I don’t do it.

In the end I could recover most of my stuff from old backups and replication points here and there but not all of it. I made the bed, I’ll lay on it.

Especially funny was the way I recovered all my contact and calendar data. I simply synched and merged everything I had on my cell phone and my Palm. So now I have lots of duplicates and I lost some info (the Mac apps keep a lot more information that any of these devices) but I still have an (old) copy of the info on another Mac so I’ll probably be able to complement it pretty well and loose only a small portion of the data in the end.

So maybe now I’ll do something to the effect of ticking the “Buy Backup External Hard-drive” item off my to-do list…

But not all of it was bad, I lost my recent RSS subscriptions and after dropping the ones I had dropped already along the way I got to a decent number of feeds again so this purge may not have been all that bad… Plus, you can’t beat the feeling of a fresh install. Pure joy!

Technorati Tags: ibook

The Pixies

Let me get this out of the way first: I’m biased. I’m a huge Pixies fan and I freely admit it, OK?

Well then, now that that’s out of the way… :-)

Yesterday’s concert was simply superb. I had such a good time it was unbelievable!

It went down as it usually does with them: get on stage, play all the songs end-to-end, note-perfect and completely ignore the audience (except for Kim’s timid attempts at a few “thank yous” and “hellos” barely audible above the applause and cheers). Nothing’s changed in that respect.

The only gripes I have about the concert are the encore’s choice of song (Here Comes Your Man for an audience of essentially hard-core fans is a bad, bad choice…) and the fact that they didn’t play The Happening but Hey! (pardon the pun), you can’t have everything and they did play something like an hour and a half almost non-stop.

Some kids were going on, after the show, about how they will never again go to see any dinosaurs’ concerts and how they didn’t like the show all that much. Well, I can totally understand where they’re coming from —from a show or entertainment point of view it was a very poor concert— but these are The Pixies, what in the world did they expect?

Also I must say I rather liked the band that opened up the show. I’d never heard of them before and only just found out their name: The Vicious 5, a Portuguese band from Lisbon who played for some 20-odd minutes and gave a show far more envolved than the Pixies themselves. Very noisy rock mind you, but very well played.

Technorati Tags: concert, live, music, pixies, shows

Shameful pleasures

Yay! I made it to this week’s Contrast Podcast!

So now you can get over there and see what I admit to listening in my younger days… And you might as well listen to it because it is all good!

PS - If you can’t find my contribution there look for it under “Nuno from Undercover Songs” ;-)

The horror

First came the freeze.

No warning, no previous failures, no noise, nothing that could have warned me about it. In fact, I have a small app running continuously on the background checking the disk via S.M.A.R.T. and it never said a thing.

Nevertheless… it froze. Weird. But then I was just setting up a iSight camera for the first time so the thought was pretty obvious “What, firewire crashes? USB I’m used to but firewire? Come on!”

Then came the hard reboot. Ssh’ing into the machine was impossible so it was finger on the button for a while until it powered down.

And, finally, understanding dawned. It wouldn’t boot. It would just sit there making all those clunking noises and then give up and show me the icon for “so where’s my disk then?”

Yup, for all my efforts up until now it seems that my trusty old lemming (the iBook) is in dire need of a new hard drive. The last desperate attempt will be latter today at home, but I’m not holding my breath.

Sniff!

Music, conferences and everything

The long, pregnant silence… :-)

This is a summary of what I’ve been up to recently and what I expect to be up to in the near future.

I’ve been on vacation for the past two weeks and it accounts for some of the down-time.

I did manage to be “semi-active” and pre-produced and launched two episodes of the Undercover Songs podcast during that time. I even replied to some comments on the blog.

Got a submission in for the next episode of the Contrast podcast. I missed the one about the best Beatles Covers because the submissions where held during my vacation —and I did have a few very good ones— so to make up for it I exposed one of the skeletons I’ve held in my closet for the past years and contributed with one of the songs I liked when I was 16. It will be episode 16 and it should be out by next tuesday if all goes well.

It is now only a matter of bureaucracy inside my company for me to become registered as an attendee at the upcoming EuroOSCON2006 conference. It promises to be both a lot of fun and also a very fruitful event. I can hardly wait for it.

It is also a matter of bureaucracy the registration for the YAPC::Europe::2006 conference. I’ll be enjoying the rest of this year’s vacations in the UK at that time and I decided to go to the conference at Birmingham and then meet up with my wife for a week in Statford-upon-Avon and it’s whereabouts.

During my vacation I finished reading Cut by Cut and I must say I really enjoyed it. It is really more of a handbook for the film editor but I learned a lot from it about what goes on in the editing room of a film or video and I think I’ll enjoy reading In The Blink of an Eye all the more for it (if I can get a copy of it that is, Amazon has been delaying delivery due to stock failure for weeks and weeks…)

The thing that got left behind was the foray into Cocoa programming, since I only did some small advancements into the Programming in Objective-C book and just when it is getting good… Oh well, I’ll get to it eventually.

Technorati Tags: conferences, music, podcast, video

No more TV for me… for a while at least

Well, after a gruesome struggle to get my cable TV service back up I just threw in the towel and called it quits. It’s been so long since we’ve had a month without problems that even my wife got fed up with it.

I can’t possibly explain the sense of relief I feel at not having to wait for the monthly bill to find out what outrageous mistake they are going to make this time around.

So I’m essentially TV-free and expect to continue so for a good few months until the competition offers up it’s services in my area and I decide to give them a try.

Until then I can still catch the news on the four public channels that I will always get and it’s going to be DVD movie, TV series in digital format and videoblog show bonanza for a good while.

I actually feel like singing! :-)

(Humming) heaven, I’n in heaven…

Technorati Tags: portugal, tvcabo

Sights and sounds from Parque das Nações

Last weekend I went for a little walk in Parque das Nações and took my camcorder with me.

It’s been a long time since I posted any videos and, in fact, since I’ve done any video editing at all, even for my personal film projects.

So I decided that regardless of what I would capture I would make a videoblog of it.

Luckily there was a setup of a few musical instruments for people to experiment and play with with and, even if I didn’t get any decent footage of the instruments themselves (duh!) I did get to record some nice sounds from them to be the base of the whole video.

Here it is then, sights and sounds from Parque das Nações:

Elogio à TVCabo

Bom, na sequência da minha mais recente aventura com a TVCabo resolvi tomar uma atitude diferente e mais saudável face à minha situação e tentar procurar a parte positiva da coisa.

E não é que com essa nova perspectiva consegui, hoje mesmo, encontrar um facto maravilhoso sobre essa bem-amada empresa?

Não me contive e tive de lhes enviar uma mensagem para expressar o meu agrado e, como consumidor consciente dos seus deveres, achei que era minha obrigação espalhar a palavra por todos quantos conseguisse.

Aqui está, então, uma cópia da minha mais recente mensagem para o serviço de atendimento a clientes da TVCabo.

Exmos Srs.

Venho por este meio congratulá-los por, uma vez mais, corresponderem por inteiro às expectativas dos vossos clientes.

Mas deixem-me elaborar um pouco sobre a razão desta mensagem e da minha congratulação: os vossos serviços efectuaram uma marcação de uma visita à minha residência. O objectivo dessa visita era o de verificarem presencialmente que estou realmente sem serviço de qualquer tipo, para além dos 4 canais básicos em analógico (neste momento há já dois meses). A marcação foi feita há duas semanas pois eu (por incrível que pareça) não tenho disponibilidade para estar uma manhã ou tarde inteira à espera dos vossos técnicos em casa e, obviamente, um caso de falta de serviço de um mês e meio não é de todo preocupante nem prioritário. Sendo assim lá marcaram a visita para hoje entre as 19h00 e as 20h30.

Eis que chegou o dia da visita e, como esperado os vossos serviços técnicos resolveram não aparecer.
Mas melhor ainda do que isso, não deram qualquer indicação de que iriam faltar e nem sequer fizeram qualquer diligência no sentido de re-marcar a visita para uma altura mais conveniente aos vossos pobres técnicos.

Assim não me resta mais que render-me (uma vez mais) à evidência que a TVCabo é, efectivamente, a empresa Portuguesa mais coerente que alguma vez existiu. É deveras impressionante o modo como durante tantos anos e em diversos locais conseguem manter exactamente o mesmo nível de serviço e atenção para com os vossos clientes. Qualquer outra empresa com o vosso historial teria, por esta altura, alterado os seus princípios e valores e, em consequência, o seu relacionamento com os clientes e o nível de serviço a eles prestado. Por essa mesma razão o méritos da vossa empresa é ainda maior e devo dizer que estou rendido.

Penso que concordarão comigo que a vossa equipa está deveras de parabéns e sugiro humildemente que preparem uma campanha alargada de comunicação e celebração do facto de serem sem dúvida a empresa mais coerente e fiável deste nosso país.

Posto tudo isto, é com algumas reservas que volto a relembrar-vos que estou sem serviço há dois meses e que, caso pretendam desviar-se um pouco da vossa norma, podem contactar-me para marcar uma nova visita.
Essa visita poderá ser efectuada todos os dias de semana a partir das 19h00 ou no fim-de-semana em qualquer hora, de acordo com a vossa conveniência.

O facto de eu estar a fazer um reply ao email referente ao ticket inicial deste caso e, portanto, a incluir o número do ticket no subject garante que os vossos serviços podem ter acesso imediato a todos os meus dados mas, como habitualmente, fico na expectativa de receber mais um email vosso explicando que para dar seguimento ao meu pedido terei de vos enviar (pela N-ésima vez) os meus dados de cliente. Nem eu esperaria, aliás, outra coisa dos vossos serviços e confesso que ficarei bastante desiludido se este facto não se verificar.

Despeço-me, então, com o maior apreço pelos senhores e pelo serviço que prestam e dou-me mais uma vez por muito feliz pelo facto de não ter qualquer alternativa ao vosso serviço na zona da minha residência actual.

Melhores cumprimentos, Nuno Nunes

PS- Após a composição desta mensagem apercebi-me que não posso deixar de fazer a minha parte para espalhar os elogios à vossa empresa, pelo que os informo que se pretenderem assistir à imortalização destes meus elogios poderão encontrar uma cópia deste email on-line e em permanência no seguinte URL: http://local.nunonunes.org/weblog/storiesthoughtsandrants/elogioa_tvcabo Afinal, todos temos de fazer a nossa parte…

Ed Harcourt at Santiago Alquimista

Last evening Ed Harcourt did a show at Santiago Alquimista.

I went to the concert without having the faintest idea about who he was or what kind of music he played. Tuxa Heard a couple of his songs on the radio and liked it and so we decided to give it a shot.

Well, after the fact I must say I’m more than pleased I went. I really liked the show, technical problems and memory faults and all. The only thing that bugged me was that this guy showed up almost an hour late, so that the show started nearly at 23h00 on a Sunday…

This is a kind of performer that I don’t get to see much of nowadays, the singer-songwriter who does it all by himself on stage, plays lots of instruments and fiercely loves his piano. And a really powerful voice to boot!

The songs themselves are all over the map, from the pure sentimental, to the mellow to the noisy rock-style songs. Oh and the loops, we mustn’t forget about that because even if (as he said) it is not terribly original, it still is great fun to watch it be done and to listen to it.

Now that I’ve done a little research I found out that this guy already has 5 albums. He slipped right under my radar until now, but not anymore. Well, at least not for live shows as I don’t really know how I’ll feel about listening to a full record of him…
Anyway, live and on stage he rules!

Oh and another thing: this was the first time I’ve ever been to Santiago Alquimista and I must say I absolutely loved it!
The whole concept is great, the theatre/concert/show/bar hall. And the physical space itself, very roomy, very aired (huge windows for all the smoke to go out of), very small (it tops up at 200 people and yesterday there were far fewer people than that which made it all the better for this particular concert)…

I definitely must track down what goes on in there in the future because it just lends itself to the type of shows that I enjoy the most.

I took a few pictures of the show with my cell phone (my my, how I’ve fallen for this one…). They’re at Flickr.

Technorati Tags: music, live shows

X-Men III: The Last Stand

Could someone please just take Brett Ratner and somehow make sure he just can’t get anywhere near a movie studio again in the future? Ever? Please? Seriously!

Call it a merciful act. Merciful on all of us!

I think this strip sums it up pretty well.

Spreading the disease / Mixed feelings

Yesterday when I was about to post the latest episode of the Undercover Songs podcast I had really mixed feelings about it. Was it too dark and brooding? Was it too creepy? Was it too strange? Was it OK?

In the end I decided to just post it and stop thinking too much about it.

Well, today I’ve been receiving feedback on it and no one tells me that they thought the show was “OK” or “good”. No, what people tell me is either that this is by far the best show I’ve ever produced or else that they don’t really know if they liked it because it left them feeling strange and unsettled.

So I guess I was right all along to post this episode, that was exactly the sort of feeling I got from those songs.

Now the question that comes to mind is: but is that a good thing?

Music does indeed rule!

Technorati Tags: music

Dead beat

That’s what I feel like today, dead beat.

After a week which has been particularly tiresome I get a day like this…

I got up really early in the morning to get to the airport and wait inside of a plane for almost an extra hour for the food to get on board, which was bad.

During the flight I got to finish up most of the editing I still needed to do on the new episode of the podcast, which was good.

Got to Paris and went straight to a meeting which lasted the rest of the day (even lunch was had in the meeting room), which was exhausting.

Left the meeting and went straight to the airport to wait for yet another extra hour to board the plane (never even knew why), which was infuriating.

During the flight back finished editing the podcast and drafted up the post for the blog, which was made out of sheer dedication and the strongest desire not to miss the (self-imposed) dead-line.

Got home and posted the new episode, which was nice.

Now to eat and get some sleep because tomorrow is friday and I’ll have to get up extra early (again) to beat the traffic to get to the office, which will surely be almost impossible.

Thank God it’s (almost) Friday! I don’t think I could stand much more of a week like this one

As coisas que se fazem no escritório…

Hoje ganhei um chocolate!

E não, isso não seria nada de especial, se não fosse o modo como o ganhei.

O dia de hoje promete… :-)

Update: Título devidamente corrigido de acordo com o comentário do fornecedor dos chocolates. Afinal, não se pode irritar uma pessoa destas, certo?

Note to self #2 - Yes, skiing is different, stupid!

Many moons ago (I forget exactly how many… maybe 5-6 years ago, how many moons is that?) anyway, a long time ago I was an average skater. I wasn’t doing many stunts or going for the speed prizes, but I could hold my own on a controlled environment.
But then my wife had a semi-serious accident while skating and a lot of other, unrelated things happened in my life and the rollerblades got left in the garage for a long time.

And in that time I learned to ski and got rather proficient at it.

So this evening when I decided that today was the day I’d take out my blades and go for a short spin near the beach at Oeiras I expected it to be a bit rough. I’m older, heavier, I got pear-shapped and my reflexes aren’t exactly what they used to be, so I was thoroughly prepared to have to start from scratch.
What I wasn’t counting on, though, was that I didn’t exactly forget all the moves. In fact I forgot some of them, of course, but others I just replaced them with ski moves. And you know what? They are totally different!

Yes, braking with your skates has absolutely nothing to do with braking with your skis. This is obvious to me, I understand perfectly well the logic and the physics behind each set of movements but the problem is that my muscle memory does not. And it is in charge when I’m skating, not my analytical brain.

So there were a few close-calls, but nothing too serious. Mostly because I was so embarrassingly slow after the first descent has put me in touch with my current reality, that I even think some joggers were sniggering behind me as they approached and then decided not to over-take me. I had my headphones on, but I could tell. How nice of them. The bastards! :-)

Still, my back is making me remember that mountain-biking and rollerblading aren’t exactly the best sports for it and so tomorrow, if I can get off work early enough, I think I’ll go for a swim instead.

My my, aren’t I busy?

Note to self - check the frigging weather before leaving the house, will you?

Making a comeback to mountain biking after more than 2 years of inactivity by going to Sintra on a day with temperatures in excess of 30 degrees Centigrade before 11AM is not the brightest of ideas. Climbing Sintra is not an easy task on the best of days when I’m in top shape, let alone on a scorching day like today…

After a measly 10Km into the mountain I had to turn back and (after a substantial amount of rest) fly downhill to my car. But that part, at least, was a lot of fun! :-)

Lots of pampering the muscles will ensue (i.e. sprawling in the couch with the laptop or a good book).

Technorati Tags: moutain biking, sintra, sports

New episode of the Undercover Songs podcast

Get it while it’s hot, the first regular episode of the Undercover Songs podcast is out.

It’s actually been very fun doing this and I’m enjoying it more and more. I’m also learning a thing or two about producing an audio show.

We are aiming at having it out on thursdays so that people get it to listen to on the weekend. Hope I can keep that schedule.

Technorati Tags: cover, podcast, song

Fuming!

Boy I’m mad… So mad I just have to vent here!

If you are in a good mood, just skip this entry, it is not a pleasant one…

TVCabo, the main Portuguese Cable-TV company —and the only one to service my area as far as Cable or ADSL-TV is concerned— usually has terrible service. This is a given. But this time they’ve reached new heights!

It’s been 5-6 months now that I haven’t had decent service with either the wrong group of channels being provided or else just a minor set and always with huge billing mistakes.

Well for the last month I’ve just been getting 4 channels, the basic 4 that they are required by law to provide everyone, I think, and this is because of a screw-up between their billing and call-center staff (again!) which triggered the cancelation of my service.

Well today I got home to find a shinny new bill from them, billing me for the month’s service.

Argh! Please, please, someone give me an alternative to these incompetent asses! Please!

One whole month with only the basic service (which is totally free, mind you) and I still get billed!

Oh well, I’ll still have to delve in this long enough to write a letter to the entity that represents the customers in the PT group (Provedor do Cliente) and then I’ll just have to forget about it until next month probably…

Now if I could just give the final push in convincing my wife that we really don’t need cable TV at all… Ahh, getting rid of these morons once and for all… Ahh, the bliss…

There now, I’m feeling much better. You were very brave for reading (if you got this far). I applaud you! :-)

PS- Comments are off in this post, it is just too easy for this entry to become cluttered with loads of comments (rightfully) bashing TVCabo and there are already numerous sites out there that do that very well.

Yet another blog I’m involved with…

Sheesh, it just never stops these days! :-)

Well, but in this case I’m more of a helper/facilitator than an actual regular poster.

So without further ado, ladies and gentleman: Today was the official launch of the Lisbon Perl Mongers’ blog at lisbon.pm.org/blog.
This blog will be dedicated to news and activities of the group and therefore, the content will be mainly in Portuguese with possibly a few posts in English (when it is justifiable).

There’s not much there yet, but our fearsome leader will surely fill it to the brim with usefull news and bits of information, so stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: Perl, Lisbon.pm

Fun with music

Six days ago me and Fred where chatting about a particular cover song I had found and how funny it was when one of us (Fred I think) suggested half-jokingly that, given our love of covers, we should make a podcast about it.

You see, we have both got an interesting collection of covers and we usually point each other to particular good or funny ones so why shouldn’t we share this with everyone?

Well, it took us 5 days from that point to getting it all setup and the first episode produced and posted.

So if you like covers and you have an open mind :-) just go over to the Undercover Songs Podcast site and take a listen to Episode 0.

This has the potential to be a very funny project. Let’s see how it turns out…

Let the wait begin

That’s it, I’m upgrading my trusty old laptop. I’m getting one of these.

Now it’s only a matter of waiting endless months until I can get my hands on a model which won’t have the add-ons I wanted, but which I’ll accept anyway due to the withdrawal symptoms I’ll be showing by then.

The specs are very good and the price is well within what I expected, how could I resist? :-)

Faster than a speeding bullet?

Amazing, I’ve just received a package from Amazon with a partial delivery of an order that I placed yesterday.
But that’s not even the amazing part, what really struck me as awesome was that I received the package before I received the email warning about the shipping was sent!
Way to go Amazon! :-)

This means that my newest trilogy is now complete (Anderson’s “Step into Xcode: Mac OS X Development”, Kochan’s “Programming in Objective C”, and Hillegass’ “Cocoa: Programming for OS X “).
And the pile keeps on growing…

Barcelona photos

I’ve posted the first batch of photos from the recent vacation in Barcelona up on Flickr.

For now they only cover part of the first day but the rest will follow soon enough.

The photoset is here and the slideshow version (flickr’s) is here.

As usual, it is best viewed on a Mac, on a PC the colors are rather drab.

Barcelona, Music, Weblogs…

Today I’m in Barcelona.
I’m here until next Wednesday celebrating my wedding anniversary. Well, when it comes to traveling we need little prompting and every little excuse does the trick.
So far the city appears to be everything I expected of it and even though we only had part of the afternoon and evening to wander around, we already got a good grip on it and we now have our bearings and a plan!
Oh and there’s free WiFi in the hotel room. On a three-star hotel! Being a strong tourism-oriented city does have it’s advantages…

On the flight over I had some time to mull over a few things I’ve had on my mind for a while, including the urge I’ve been feeling to get a bit more active regarding music.
Not writing or playing it, that is something I know will not happen during my (so called) “active life”, but the concepts of mp3 blogs, thematic podcasts and so on are really warming up to me.
In fact I’ve already thought of a good concept to get me into in and it was mainly this concept that I developed a bit more on the plane.
Maybe I’ll have something related to music on my site shortly. Or then again maybe not… I’m really undecided about this one. What I do know is that I do like to be regularly active on some level in my “cyber life”.
But the fact remains that even if I sometimes like to write, I can then go long periods of time without posting a thing.
And I like to make photographs most of the time (although these days I post it to flickr only, I haven’t gotten around to integrating my iSpy gallery into this blog as I wanted to do for a long time), but not all the time.
And video is something which I also like to do but which I don’t have the time or energy to do in any meaningful kind of way.
So I guess I should just collect it all (written text, photo, video, audio) into my weblog instead of breaking it up into different “sections” of the site (or, even worse, have it all scattered around the Internet), because that way I will always be kind of active on the same place instead of being really irregularly active on lots of different ones.

Changes they are a-coming, only very slowly, veeery slooowly (as usual).

Finding music, mp3 blogs and the Contrast Podcast

I really like music.

In fact I spend the vast majority of my time listening to it. I’m lucky enough that I can listen to it at work most times and at home or in the car something’s always playing.

When at work (where I have great bandwidth and I’m usually seated at my desk for the whole day) I like to either listen to my Pandora “Radios” or, when I can spare a few brain cycles to do it, I follow my music blogs on my aggregator and read up on and listen to the songs that are posted by the various blog authors.

This process of listening to music from mp3 blogs is something that I find particularly enjoyable. Not only do I get some context or maybe even a story related to each song, but I also get to find out about some real gems which I would never in my life find out about otherwise.

My current mp3 blogroll is getting to be quite extensive and at this time I follow up on these blogs:

• FLUXBLOG
• Spoilt Victorian Child
• Said the Gramophone
• Copy, Right?
• Mocking Music
• music (for robots)
• Music For Kids Who Can’t Read Good
• Two and 1/2 Pounds of Bacon
• Obscure Sound
• Another Form of Relief

I particularly like the most cover-focused blogs, some covers and versions that are out there are simply sublime or outrageously funny.

Anyway a few days ago I had the pleasant surprise of finding out in one of the mp3 blogs that there was a new podcast around with a very intriguing theme.

The Contrast Podcast is a music podcast which has the following rules: each episode has a clearly defined theme; and the author invites other mp3 blog or podcast authors to submit a song each, along with a voice intro about it.
The result is a podcast where one can listen to lots of the types of songs that float around the mp3 blogs I follow and the stories and explanations about each song are also there by the voice of the authors themselves.

I’ve listened to the 3 episodes that are out there and I absolutely loved it. So I thought I just couldn’t let it slip by without a reference. Especially since a few people already asked me for the link (after I’ve evangelized them about it, of course).

Go listen to it. It’s good!

Stuff

Where to begin?

Well, I suppose I can start with the iPod camera connected that I tried out today for the first time. The person who lent me the tiny device swears by it and I must say I’m fairly impressed.
It is slow as molasses of course (to borrow a phrase from Rui) due to my camera’s blazing fast (not!) USB 1 connector but it does get the job done (i.e., it stores the files pristine and doesn’t muck around with them).
The thing that would make it better for me would be to be able to read the JPEG which is embedded in my Canon-RAW files and display it the same way it does for JPEG photos, but that’s somewhat unnecessary for my purposes. I think it does it for the Canon EOS 20D photos but not for my 10D.
So when I get my own connector I’ll basically gain an external storage device (external to the camera, that is), which I always carry around with me anyway, with a fair amount of free space in it (my 60G iPod still has around 13G free). Good for those occasions when I go out and don’t want to take the laptop with me. Hey, it can happen!

Visio, Xfig, Open Office Draw and friends: byte my shinny metal err… OK, that’s the wrong phrase here but well… Some things just feel better done the old fashioned way and planning furniture arrangement for a new home is one of them.
Taking the ruler and drawing out everything, cutting the furniture prototypes out of yellow post-it paper… I stopped just short of drawing the main features of the room in china ink. It feels great to do something like this with something other than a mouse or a digitizer board.
Guess I’m just an old-geezer me…

On an unrelated note: Adobe Lightroom really, really rocks!

On an even more unrelated note: expect some action on the portuguese PERL arena anytime soon. Things are afoot which should be exciting for anyone interested in the community aspect of the language. Hum… Does this phrase sound weird to me only? Oh well…

See? What other title could I get this post? Well, I could think of something better, were I not half dead from a two-week spree of hard problems at work and tripping on a great big migraine.
So there!

Skiing closer to home

I found a place to ski nearer to home, in Spain, which looks very promising.

Contrary to Portugal’s only offering (Serra da Estrela) which has several drawbacks —most importantly the miniscule nature of the trails— this one appears to have decent skiable slopes and is only about 5 hours or so from Lisbon.

I’m trying to set up a weekend trip there to test it out. It seems I may stop being constrained to one week a year of snow fun. Yay!

Going to the doctor is good for you

In more ways than one…

Today I went to the doctor for my biyearly allergies checkup and, as usual, I got stuck in the waiting room for hours.

The good part about it was that I took my laptop and cell phone with me and I ended up finishing the serializer part of the Flickr-Tools project.
It can now get the full photo collection of a user, in chunks, and give it out as a serializer to the user, without him being aware that much fetching is (potentially) going on in the background.

Now all that I’m lacking is the support for the new authentication method (essentially I need to read up on the whole frob passing stuff and I need a way for users to do the first authentication) and I’ll release it to the world.

What’s that I hear? “But wasn’t that supposed to be done weeks ago?” well yes but you know, I love the swoshing sound of deadlines going past so much that I’d do just about anything to get it… :-)

China in glorious full colour

So the trip to China has been postponed until next year (best case). Until then I can at least take consolation in looking at some pictures to build up the anticipation (as if I needed more of it). Oh well…

I’ve become one of them

Oh. My. God!

I’ve become one of them! I’ve actually sent out an invitation for someone to link to me on LinkedIn.

What is this world coming to? :-)

Return to the real life

Just came back from the ski trip to Andorra last Sunday to an interesting start of a week.

• First off no one got hurt in the snow. I didn’t sprain, break or otherwise incapacitate any part of my body while skiing. This is the second year in a row so I’m starting to think the ski-jinx may have passed. Huzza!
  I have very few pictures to deal with and a little video footage which is already half edited so that shouldn’t take too long to get through either;

• I started to make an effort in order to normalize my working hours (given the impending change of corporate entity I work for to one which is notoriously anal-retentive about these things) and I must say that the change is surprisingly welcome. We’ll see just how easily (or how hard) old habits die…

• Found out about goPod and set my iPod free. At last I can hear my music above the noisy background of my workplace. At last I’m free to go deaf if I should so desire. The French government can very well sod off with their stupid restrictions being inflicted on the rest of Europe;

• Appart from that, the much talked about takeover bid from Sonae over Portugal Telecom is turning into a great spectator sport from where I’m standing.

Good times, indeed!

The last tidbit of work on Flickr-Tools just before going away on vacation

After having pushed myself to work a bit harder on the Flickr-Tools project and trying to get a new version out before the end of January (which is shot, by the way), I finally have a preliminary version of the Flickr::Person::photos() method working! Urrah!

So you can now use this method and get back the first 100 photos of a particular person. After that first batch of 100 photos it just stops giving you new stuff and closes up shop but it is rather nice to have it this far along because now adding the rest of the necessary functionality is a breeze.

If for some reason you are totally unable to wait for the final release 0.3 and want to start playing around with it right now you can check it out on my darcs projects site.

The wheel of life

Round and round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows…

(In wich I discuss several random matters that have come to my mind of late.)

It seems I may be getting good at evaluating and making predictions about (other people’s) relationships.
This is not only weird and unexpected but it is also rather creepy…

Last evening I watched (maybe for the 10th time or so) “Broadway Danny Rose” with Tuxa.
I really like that film. In fact I really like most of Woody’s films and as I was chating with Tuxa about the film after it had ended, we came to the conclusion that none of us know anyone else who really likes Woody’s films the way we do.
I know people who dislike them, some with more intensity than others, I know people who are indifferent to them and I know people who think they are, on the whole “OK films”, but no one I know actually loves Woody Allen’s work.
In truth, I know maybe a couple of people who might like them, with whom I haven’t ever discussed it, so maybe there’s a couple of exceptions lurking around… Maybe.
How weird is that? Or, if it comes to that, how weird am I? :-)

Today at lunch (after dutifully having been to the pool for my daily workout in preparation for the upcoming sky week) I was listening to a podcast from IT Conversations with a presentation from Accelerating Change 2005, delivered by Jamais Cascio, entitled “Personal Memory Assistants”.
Now, I had already listened to part of this talk in the past, can’t remember when, so the topic was familiar, but only today did I catch the whole story and I found that it touched me in a way I can’t quite figure out yet.
In a nutshell I took these passages from the talk’s page on the IT Conversation’s site (and I don’t intend to substitute your listening to the presentation, quite the contrary, do go and listen to it):

…There will be an opportunity to view and save everything we do. This is monitoring on a huge scale but we will do it willingly. Moreover, the sheer size of the numbers of people involved will overwhelm any attempts to use this monitoring in a ‘Big Brother’ way….

…In opposition to standard notions of surveillance, this will see the emergence of ‘sousveillance’; individual citizens keeping a technologically watchful eye on the people in charge. This will not apply solely to the> political sphere, however, as the ability to share a treasured moment with a loved one or to capture a fleeting moment of beauty will add a new dimension to personal relationships.

…What’s needed is a TiVo for your personal life and there are already technical solutions available. These capabilities will come at a cost, however. Not only will we have to learn to cope with a staggering lack of privacy but also to overcome the fact that most relationships, whether personal or business, rely to a certain extent on the misremembering of certain events.

The geek in me can see it coming easily enough, most of the components are already here and whatever is left will come by sooner or later, no doubt about that, and I find it fascinating on a pure technological level.
On a personal level, however, I’m just not sure whether I find this too scary or if it is more like something approaching heaven; The fact that I have terrible memory and am easily distracted dictates that I must always try to make notes of whatever seems important at the time, lest I loose it altogether and so an automatic record of my life would be invaluable to me. On the other hand, everyone forgets things and some things are meant to be forgotten and are better that way. Could we cope with perfect memory? Worse still, could we cope with everyone else having perfect memory?
Anyway, the author of the talk does have a valid point: one way, maybe the most effective way, to deal with invasions to our privacy from “above” is to flood the networks with data, that way everyone is under su[r|ous]vaillance and no one is actually under su[r|ous]vaillance…
These are indeed interesting times we are living in.

The end of the road

Well, this is it.
I’ve officially reached the end of the road. OK, not me exactly, but my trusty old iBook.
Yes, sad as it is, it seems that all of the apps on the new iLife ‘06 require a PowerPC G4 to work.

And my well-loved lemming is a measly PowerPC G3 900Mhz.

This is too bad as this laptop is my main workhorse for video and photo editing while I’m on the road.
At home I have the iMac with it’s glorious 20’ display and the G5 inside it, but on the road I can do everything I want with my good old iBook.

So I’ve come to a dead-end, as far as application upgrades are concerned, on my current Mac laptop.
It’s not as if I didn’t see it coming, and I do intend to upgrade my laptop when the second generation of Macintels comes around (I never liked being a paying hardware beta-tester and first-generation is always first-generation). I’ll thoroughly enjoy the speed-up, for sure, but until then iMovie ‘05, iPhoto ‘05 and Photoshop CS are good enough. Heck, the photoshop part is even overkill if I’m honest about it… :-)

Up to speed

Yesterday was a good day overall…

I finished reading all the important mailing lists and personal mail I had stacked for the last 3-4 weeks. Now on to catch up on the RSS feeds (read all looks deliciously appealing for the most of it).

There was, of course, the mwsf, with some good announcements, but especially the announcement of the new Macbook Pro (worst name ever, maybe?). So we’re finally going to have decent Apple laptops (and no I don’t count your Dell laptop running OSX an Apple laptop, OK?)… Now to wait for a 12’ version and we’ll see…

And best of all (it’s just so easy to make me a happy boy…) this morning I had a new firmware update for my iPod which got the smart playlists working again (self-updating, that is). Yay!

Oh and I finally got a few minutes to launch and try out a few features of Adobe’s Lightroom. Man, it rocks! Mind you, I haven’t tried Apple’s Aperture yet, but however good it might be, Lightroom is looking pretty much like the best thing to have come by since sliced bread as far as my digital photography workflow is concerned. You can tell it is still a Beta but already I’d use it everyday without a second thought… If it only ran on my G3 laptop… Yeah, I know, I’ll really have to upgrade. Just not this year, this is a bad baad year for that. <sigh>

Darcs projects site

Trying to not get too stale on my developments (OK, I’m way beyond that, I know…) and because people are actively asking me to add features to the Flickr-Tools distribution and, better yet, some are actually offering to send in patches (hurra!) I’ve decided it was high time I put up some sort of project archive on-line.

So after a little tinkering, darcs.nunonunes.org is now on-line and open for business, default css and all!

In the future I might setup a trac site also but for now darcsweb is what I have available.

So now that you know where to get it go crazy with the patches!

(Actually this is a few days old, but I never got around to posting it…)

What I did and what I didn’t do

I’m a tech guy, an engineer, I like complicated things, I like to understand what goes on behind the scenes and I do understand that, sometimes, things are hard to make easy.

But I’m also someone who has to use the Internet and I’m also a consumer and much as I do realize the difficulty of some things there is just no excuse for some of the things that go on out there…

Case in point: Symantec’s Norton Anti-virus renewal process.

I was at my parent’s and, as usual, whenever I or my brothers go over and there is something to do or fix on the computer we do it for them. No big deal.

This time around my Mom’s laptop’s anti-virus software was close to expiring it’s license so it needed to be renewed. My Mom decided to ask my Dad to do it (typical) and he decided to wait for a son to go over and do it (also typical).

So I was the lucky one, and when I got there and logged on to Windows XP, sure enough, the anti-virus status box popped-up warning me that the subscription expiry date was close at hand and asked me if I wished to renew it.

Well, I did, so I clicked on the link and followed the wizard until I came to the box where I had to put in the product key. My Dad dutifully gave me the printout he had made of it and I typed it in.

Only to be told it was invalid. Nice…

So after working at it for a while, trying all sorts of different goes at it and reading the FAQs and support documents on the site, it became apparent that Symantec would not let me renew my subscription for a product from 2004 easily and the best chance I’d have would be to upgrade the product to the latest version.

Fishy but I went along with it, I didn’t need the aggravation, so I went to the on-line store and began the purchasing process.

I tried to buy it with a credit card but I had so many server errors that I was on the verge of quitting when… Lo and behold, they support payments through PayPal. Well, that’s nice, I didn’t need to break out my credit card, I just clicked on the PayPal link and payed for the thing, upgrade to the newest version, download checkout, all good… Or not!

So the PayPal payment went ahead as expected, but when I got redirected to the Symantec store things blew up and my order got stuck.

Great… Back to PayPal to confirm that the transaction had been processed. Indeed it had.

So, as per instructions on the Symantec site and on the transaction confirmation email, I did an order search on the Symantec store and found my transaction, apparently complete, but no download link. And in the small letters in the bottom it does say that a transaction which didn’t go through OK until the end may then take up to 24hours to be reconciled and fully processed.

So let’s recapitulate on what I did, shall we?

• I did try and renew the subscription for the service, but was unable to do it because of a software failure to recognize a perfectly valid product key;
• I did try to renew on the website, but was unable to do so because of an arbitrary decision from Symantec that products from 2 years ago are no longer supported (hum… one year lifecycle… what the hell is the point of a renewal then?);
• I did try to pay with my credit card, but was unable to do so because of problems with the store;
• I did try to pay by PayPal and was able to do so, but the order got botched and I am now in a waiting period to see if I can actually get the product I payed for (at this point I’m hedging my bets…)

Now what I did not do was to go out on the net and get me a working renewal code for free and used it. It would have taken me, oh maybe 10 minutes to do it and I wouldn’t have lost the time and the patience with it I had to spend with the freaking Symantec site.

Sometimes you have to wonder… Do these companies really want our business? And, even more important, do they deserve it?

On the many uses of a blog (or I’m back, hopefully for a long time…)

One of these days I had a revelation.

As with most revelations it was really nothing that far out or extraordinary. It was something pretty basic, which was staring me in the face, but I still needed that moment of recognition in order to really get it.

As is readily apparent, I haven’t been writing here all that much. In fact I’ve been almost completely absent for quite some time now.

The reasons are many and varied, of course, but there is one main reason which is not something I’m particularly proud of… The fact is that I tend to write less when something is wrong or worrying me.

In fact in the last few months something has been on my mind, something which annoys me a lot and I get so frustrated by it that I stop myself from writing, lest I start to pour out my bad humor and get people down for no real reason. Its like they say: “If you don’t have anything nice to say you’d better not say anything at all”. I’m a big believer in that motto (hard as it may be for my friends to believe that!)

But anyway, things are better now. Everything is pretty much the same, but I’ve taken a few resolutions which will make things better and the simple fact that I made them is enough for me to feel better, the major stress factor being, essentially, gone, but you know how it is: it is far easier to break a good habit than it is to get back into it, right?

So while I have occasionally though about starting to write again, I just never got around to it. And, much to my surprise, a few people have actually asked me about my weblog and if I was still out there (as is readily apparent from one of the latest entries). But I never really took it for what it meant, until yesterday a close friend of mine asked me if I was dead to my blog.

Why was he asking that, I asked back, I haven’t been writing, sure, but so what?

“Well”, he told me, “it is just a shame because I used to follow your blog to know what you’re up to and now I can’t”.

And that’s when it struck me: that’s why I started blogging in the first place all those years back, this is not (just) a tech journal or a interesting fact gatherer, it is also a means and a place to keep in touch with people. Actually to let people who care about me know what I’m doing and thinking even when we can’t be as close as we’d like on a daily basis. It is also a plain old journal of my (real) life.

People had asked me about it, sure, but it took a good friend giving me the hint for the message to get across… Man, I can be so dense sometimes…

So thank you, I needed that! :-)

This is not a new year’s resolution, partly because I haven’t made any and also because I don’t believe in them, but I do promise (to myself) that I will try and keep writing something to the public part of the site, in whatever form this blog may take in the future (hint, hint!)