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”).