NunoNunes.org

Assorted Cool Technology - 2012-02-04

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:40:00 +0000

I’ve been wanting to get a place where I can post simple links, accompanied by some small observations about random cool stuff and quite frankly I think this blog is the right place to do it.
There is the OneOverZero blog, where I write about singularity-related topics, but I wanted to write about (or rather, link to) more than just singularity-related stuff. I want to start collecting links to things that are just cool to look at. And that’s why I’ve decided to try and keep a kind of journal of those things right here.
Lots of good intentions, let’s see how long I can keep it up.

Flying stuff

A few weeks ago the robots dreams blog posted an article about an autonomous quad copter demonstration video, with a few links to relevant sources that really got my will to build one of these things going. Luckily (?) for me I am fully aware of just how many side projects I’ve gotten myself into lately and how much I don’t have time for something like this. For now. :-)
But anyway, do watch this video of ongoing riots, captured by a Polish quad builder.

Also regarding quad copters (aren’t they just the coolest things?), I’ve posted a link at the OneOverZero blog regarding a quad rotor swarm demonstration video. My views about it are explained on the post and, really, need not be repeated here, just watch it and you’ll get what the excitement is all about.

The robot invasion

If there’s one topic of technology I’ve always been in love with it has to be robots. And lately I’ve been paying a little more attention to it on a few fronts, from building a few tentative arduino-based experiments, to getting back to studying and playing around with AI.

So when I got word of the new NAO, the humanoid robot from Aldebaran Robotics (which you have to love, if only just for their name) I was quick to register for access to the developers kit and the community resources.
Unfortunately that’s about as far as I will go regarding this beautiful piece of tech, because the price of the robot, even for individual developers, is way out of what I can reasonably justify before myself for a hobby.

Lastly, I’ve finally gotten around to watching some of the videos from 2011’s Google IO conference and I was particularly struck by the Cloud Robotics session. First off, the quick presentation they give of ROS is very well structured and useful. I’d never delved into it before, but just from that talk I was surprised to find out that ROS is, at it’s heart, a “simple” message routing system. The way that it allows for the whole robot to be a highly-distributed system is very interesting. And then, the integration with android seems to be getting in place really well.
I am aware of a few other initiatives of taking your robots to the cloud, but this seems to be one with a real future. As long as Google keeps interested in it and doesn’t forget about it as it’s done with so many other projects.

Grande Auditório - Um podcast da Gulbenkian Música

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:48:00 +0000

Descobri muito recentemente, completamente por acaso, uma pérola que quero partilhar.

Embora não consiga devotar o tempo que gostaria a concertos e actividades musicais semelhantes (e quem é que consegue?), faço questão de pelo menos me manter minimamente informado do que vai acontecendo à minha volta, por forma a evitar falhar aqueles concertos “imperdíveis”. Naturalmente também tento descobrir música nova interessante (nova para mim, bem ententido), mas essa parte é, claro está, muito mais dificil.

Uma das minhas fontes de informação nesta área é a mailing list da Gulbenkian Música, que me dá a conhecer regularmente a programação mensal desta entidade.
Essa mailing list é-me muito útil, mas tem um senão: na programação da Gulbenkian Música são incluídos muitos autores/peças/intérpretes/orquestras/etc que eu não conheço. O que, à partida, seria uma coisa óptima, porque me daria a possibilidade de os vir a conhecer, se eu tivesse o tempo necessário, quando recebo o mail, para ir investigar cada um dos intérpretes ou obras lá incluídos e seleccionar os que me parecem mais interessantes. Claro que na realidade eu raramente consigo fazer esta pesquisa e acabo invariavelmente por perder belissimas oportunidades de vir a conhecer música muito boa.

E é aqui que entra a minha recente descoberta dos podcasts da Gulbenkian Música. Em particular do podcast “Grande Auditório”.
Neste podcast semanal, é apresentado o programa musical da semana seguinte do grande auditório da Fundação Gulbenkian. Nele são referidos não só os concertos, mas também outras actividades relacionadas, como sejam filmes passados nesse espaço.
Mas, mais importante do que listar as actividades da semana, no podcast são apresentados os intérpretes e compositores dos concertos, os realizadores dos filmes e por aí fora, e são passadas (na íntegra) peças que serão interpretadas nos concertos ou que fazem parte das bandas sonoras dos filmes.

Ou seja, toda a pesquisa que eu adoraria fazer semanalmente está condensada neste podcast.
Acho que esta é uma ideia brilhante e que é muito bem executada, resultando numa utilização excelente do meio podcast.
É com muito gosto que digo à Gulbenkian Música (e em particular à equipa Jorge Rodrigues e Tiago Jónatas) um grande “Bravo!” e obrigado.

Singularity, robots and all that jazz

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:46:00 +0000

This is a cross-post from another blog—OneOverZero—where I write (somewhat infrequently) about Singularity topics in general.
In it I mostly link to other interesting articles, and I want to keep some of my posts for future reference, so I’ll be copying them over to this site.

Before I get to the latest post, here are a few of the interesting posts/links I wrote about there:

And now, for the cross-post.

Thoughts on “The Future of Moral Machines”

Today we’re coming back to the topic of ethics and morality.

It is not a commonly accepted fact that there is a real need for serious thought and debate over the subject of “synthetic” moral agents. Many people and institutions still regard this issue as something of an esoteric topic that the techies have dreamed up in their wildest dreams and not something that will ever impact society at large, at least not for the foreseeable future.

Still, there are a number of people who take this issue very seriously indeed and today we point you to an article about it: The Future of Moral Machines. In it the author, a self professed Singularity-sceptic (and co-author of a book on this very subject), makes the point that regardless of the Singularity issue, the fact remains that robots moving around in the physical space and interacting with humans are something that will inevitably become more and more common and that many of these machines will necessarily be making operational decisions that will impact humans in very serious (and potentially very dangerous) ways. It will, therefore, be necessary for us to provide these machines with ways to evaluate their actions in light of doing “good” or “bad” by us humans.

The machines, the article argues, will be autonomous, not in a human sense (they will not be self-aware or have freedom of will-in fact, they will have no will whatsoever), but they will be autonomous in the operational sense. This “engineers’ autonomy” will make for the absolute necessity of some kind of “functional morality” that tries to “make autonomous agents better at adjusting their actions to human norms”.

The article is somewhat long, but the viewpoints and arguments are very compelling and I urge you to read it in full. I just can’t resist quoting one final passage that I found particularly inspiring:

The different kinds of rigor provided by philosophers and engineers are both needed to inform the construction of machines that, when embedded in well-designed systems of human-machine interaction, produce morally reasonable decisions even in situations where Asimov’s laws would produce deadlock.

While I do not share the author’s skepticism towards the Singularity, I find the notion of a “functional morality” to be a very interesting and, really, very important one. Here is a topic into which we can (and I think we should) make headway today, regardless of what the future brings, because Singularity or no Singularity, one thing is certain (as the author posits): short of a cataclysmic event at a global scale, robots will be all around, and so we’d better make sure they understand our ways, our needs and our frailties so that they are able to deal with us without causing us harm. Wether they end up being conscious entities, or mere mindless tools, it behoves us, as their creators, to provide them with that knowledge.

Going to Codebits 2011

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 09:43:00 +0100

Sapo Codebits 2011 edition. I’ll be there. After having attended last year’s event I can only say that I can’t wait!

Week In Music - 07 to 13 November 2010

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 19:00:30 +0000

This week in music was dominated by a couple of new discoveries: Frank Zappa and Wim Mertens. Also, I listened to a few more songs/artists a bit more intently and so they’re present in the playlist as well.

The playlist

This week’s music is available as an 8tracks playlist.

The boring bit

Zappa is a well known musician (composer, guitarist, record producer and lots more) which is largely unknown to me. My music teacher, being a fan of the man and his work, often mentions Zappa songs when looking for examples of many issues in music theory. This week he directed me to a few specific songs for me to listen to and analyze.
And so it is that I am now starting to discover Zappa’s music, years after he passed away. I’m starting out with just a few songs, looking for specific elements in them, such as “The Black Page Drum Solo”, or “Let’s Move To Cleveland”. I’m looking at elements of rhythm in the drums, just in case you’re curious. :-)
One thing I’ve always been partial to is live performances and there is ample material from Zappa for me to sink my teeth into as I go on (“Zappa in New York” is sounding really good).

Wim Mertens is another recent discovery. I went to a live show here in Lisbon, this very week, and I was hooked. My friend João is a long-time fan and he’d told me about Wim already, but I’d just never got around to actually listening to anything of his until the show.
I must say his singing is somewhat unusual and, as far as I can tell, this concert was very different from the usual ones in that the piano took somewhat of a second stage to the violin. Nevertheless I loved the concert and I’m loving the album that João lent me afterwards —”Epic That Never Was”, a live album recorded in a concert in Lisbon. It is way much more piano solo-oriented than the concert was and so far I’m loving it.
For a taste of what the show was like you can watch this video of Wim Mertens and Tatiana Samouil playing “The Belly Of An Architect”.

The rest of the playlist comprises a bunch of unrelated songs:
There’s a couple of songs I am working on right now by the Dave Matthews Band; Then there’s an artist I recently started listening to more intently, due to this post by Célia Ventura—Galt MacDermot—; and finally, to round things off (and to make the minimum 8 tracks for the playlist), an old favourite of mine that came up on a shuffle sequence and I really liked to listen to again—Billy Joel’s “Got To Begin Again”.

The song list

Diary 2010-05-27 - Recent concerts

Thu, 27 May 2010 11:25:00 +0100

The two concerts I attended most recently were A Silent Film at the Aula Magna and Grizzly Bear at the Coliseu.

I enjoyed both shows very much and there were a few pleasant similarities between them (for me, at least): I didn’t know the bands all that well, but having come across their songs I decided that it would be good to check them out live and so I bought the tickets without exactly being a huge fan of either; I really liked both bands live on stage (and this is by far my favourite way of getting to know new bands and new music) even though they are quite different from each other; the music they both make is, as I’d hoped, quite good and, at the very least, quite promising; both bands’ vibe was excellent and they put on a terrific show, made the concert-goers feel really good and made everyone really get into it.

But there’s one thing that was very much different between them. One thing that is a major aspect of any concert and that, unfortunately, goes wrong on the majority of shows I attend (on a trend that is getting steadily worse from year to year): sound quality and especially sound volume.

On the A Silent Film show the volume was so loud that nobody there could possibly enjoy all the nuances of the music they were playing. It was physically impossible to really get into the music. I left with a ringing in my ears and the feeling that had I seen them in their rehearsal room I would have enjoyed their music a whole lot more (and not because I’d be closer to the band, but simply due to the fact that the sound would have been much better than what we got at the Aula Magna).
This is a real shame, as the band (once again) is really good on stage and they do put on a very good show, not to mention the fact that Robert Stevenson has some pretty impressive vocal stunts, which I could not, for the life of me, appreciate in the middle of that wall of —not sound, but noise.
I think it’s a shame that the sound engineers seem to conspire to sabotage them (and almost everyone else, for that matter) by squeezing every possible decibel out of the speakers. But guess what: raw power is not what it’s all about and too much loudness is actually detrimental to our ability to enjoy the music!

Now the Grizzly Bear show was another matter altogether.
The band was just as good on stage (in their own, very different style, of course), they were into it and into the crowd, just like A Silent Film were, but they had surprisingly good sound. And I say “surprisingly” because I’ve been to my fair share of shows on that venue and the sound quality usually sucks in a huge way. But not so this time.
The sound was not so loud as to give us pain in the ears, so we actually got to listen to and really enjoy the music. Granted, there could have been some adjustments made to the sound setup of the softer, wind instruments (flute, sax, clarinet,) but then I think that room is not all that great in terms of acoustics and the fact is that other than that small detail, everything else was very well set up. I could hear all the subtle vocal harmonies really clearly, I could hear the lute as clear as is if was being played right there before me on an empty and silent room, but I could still listen to and feel the powerful guitar, bass and drum sounds.
This is not consensual, as some of the people that were with me complained that the vibration they felt coming from the drums and the bass notes on the keyboards were too much for them, but for me, it was an almost perfect sound setup. Something I don’t experience all that often any more.
I left the venue with my ears clean, without any ringing in them and totally won over to the band’s music. But also very pleased with the overall show. I definitely had a good time. And I feel really sorry that the ringing in my ears didn’t allow me to get away from the A Silent Film show with such satisfaction. They surely deserved it.

Lifestream down

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:16:00 +0000

I’ve posted about the lifestream concept before and I’ve even implemented such a stream for myself.

My lifestream feed was supported by Storytlr.com and it worked rather well, actually, but Storytlr decided, a while ago, to call it quits and yesterday they shut down their servers.
As such I went through all of the links on the site that referenced that stream and deleted them.

Now, to my utter surprise, I find out that some people were actually following that stream. They’ve asked me about it and why it started giving them an error page.
Amazed I am, yes… :-)

I currently have nothing that can substitute the Storytlr feed. Yes, they did put up their code for other people to use if they wish, and there are other alternatives out there, but what I would like was for something that would be at least as flexible and as “hands-off” as the Storytlr service was, and that I haven’t been able to find out (maybe due to lack of trying hard enough).
So for now I’ll redirect the lifestream.nunonunes.org domain back to the nunonunes.org site and if and when I find an alternative I’ll point it back there.

But the question lingers in my mind, what exactly did you like so much about the lifestream that made you follow it instead of any other feed I have (say my Friendfeed or Google Buzz feed)? I’d really like to know so that I can look for a suitable alternative.

Anyway, thank you all for following.

Google Accounts and the induced schizophrenia

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:08:00 +0000

I have one Google apps account for my domain (nunonunes.org) and in it I have my canonical email account. Associated with this account I have the XMPP (google talk) address, the Google Docs stuff (where I keep the pdfs, spreadsheets and whatnot) and my Calendar and “official” Contacts list.

Then I have another totally separate Google account (a plain one, not on my own domain) where I have my Google Reader, Latitude and a few other bits and pieces such as Blogger, Google Wave and so on. Also, because of the social nature of some of these services, I must maintain a separate Contacts list on this account. This Contacts info is not synced to the main Contacts list because, well, there simply is no (sane/safe) way to do it.

Do you see a problem here? Do you?
Also, can you see how the new Google Buzz exacerbates this problem?

Just yesterday a friend was telling me how he wished Google had a tool to merge all the multiple accounts he has on it due to the services they’ve been acquiring over the years.
Me, I’d like to have a single account for all of the Google stuff on my own domain.

Come on Google, it is high time you let me merge my accounts or, at the very least, allow me to have something as obvious as a reader feature on my apps account!
Buying companies left and right, launching new products and disrupting the markets is all very well and lots of fun, sure, but how about a little love for those who want, who really want to use your stuff in a productive and sane way?
This schizophrenia you are inducing in my on-line presence is really becoming a major nuisance. People don’t know whether to look up my own address or the address of the “fake” account and are sometimes not even sure how to get in touch with me on the web (on your services).

This is just shoddy on your part Google. I know it must take a bit of effort to get this particular bit together, but if anyone has the talent and resources to do this in a heartbeat, folded and with both arms tied behind your backs, you are it!

End rant.

Diary 2010-01-29 - On reading

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:39:00 +0000

Reading is something I’ve enjoyed doing since I was a boy. It is not something that I’ve done consistently along my life, but those periods when I read the least were (usually) not particularly good ones and I didn’t read mostly because I just couldn’t find the time to do it.
Sure, I’ve always had a pile of books on my nightstand from which I would, on those occasions, pick one and start to have a go at it, until I fell asleep within a couple of minutes. At most.
Reading in bed, whenever I’m overly tired, just doesn’t work.

These last few years have been one of those spells when I hardly picked up a book. I didn’t stop buying them, though, I just stopped reading them, which had the effect of turning the to-read pile into a to-read shelve and then two to-read shelves.
In all honesty, I must say that I didn’t completely stop reading, I just stopped reading anything that was not technical and directly related to work. (One of the biggest advantages of being an engineer is that you never really stop reading and learning.)
This state of affairs lasted until a few months ago, when I decided to effect a few changes in my life which indirectly contributed to me having time to read again. Specifically, I started taking the train to work. Which turned a two to three hour daily drive into a 2 and a half daily commute.

So now I find myself reading again and, as I was discussing with a friend a few days ago, it feels like I got re-acquainted with a long-lost, but dear friend of mine. One which I’d missed so much!
The pile of books I have on the shelves is rather diversified and so far I’ve delved with much gusto into such topics as finance, historical fiction, randomicity ad uncertainty, pop anthropology, neuroscience, ancient treatises on the Bushido and Zen, science fiction, architecture and design…

I dourly missed my story telling friends and, thankfully, the pile of new stuff is still pretty big (and I still want to re-read lots of stuff,) so even if I were to stop buying new books now, I’d still be settled for a long time to come.

New comment system - take 2

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:03:00 +0000

This post is just a quick heads-up (and a test actually) for the fact that I’ve switched the comment-handling system on this site again.
This time not because of spam, but because my previous “provider” —Haloscan— is going for a paid service and I’ve always used it for free and I can’t even remotely begin to justify paying for this functionality on this site. There are other reasons for switching, but this was the one that made me jump to attention and just do it.

Therefore, as you may notice, this site’s comments are now handled by the Disqus system.

Due to the nature of the writing here (more of a record of my findings, thoughts, etc,) I’m not overly concerned with losing the old comments with this transition (after all I have gone down this road before and I could never bring the previous comments along on the two or three migrations that this site has undergone anyway), but I will in time look into the possibility of importing the old comments into the new system.

That is all, the irregular programming will now continue as scheduled.

Google Wave - my take on it

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:30:00 +0000

This is a short series of essays on how I have been using Google Wave in the few weeks since I’ve got my invite and why I think it is a great tool for collaborating.
This started out as an idea for a single blog post, but as I began outlining it and fleshing out the sections I wanted to write, it soon became too big for a single article and so I decided to split it into a few different ones so as to make each part bite-sized, making the whole thing easier to read and spreading it out over time a bit.

I’ll use this first article to keep track of all the subsequent ones, so as to turn it into a kind of index of the whole series (look for it at the end of this post).

My feeling so far can be summed up in like this: I really like wave!
I’ve been wanting a product like this for a long, long time and I’ve been using things like Google Docs for some of the purposes I now use wave for, but some things have been lacking all along.
I always knew what I wanted out of such a product (I’ve worked on a prototype of a system loosely resembling part of what wave is many years ago, on my last years at university, and I’ve been pinning for something like this to show up ever since then) and now, after using wave for a while, I find that it fulfills my needs quite nicely.

It is still not all there, of course (and I will address this on an upcoming article,) but it is on the right track.

This, then, is why I love Google Wave and why I think it is a product with great, great potential.
In the rest of the series I’ll describe some of my best use cases, interesting ways I found to use it and what I still feel is lacking.

Hope you enjoy it! (And no, at this time I have no invites to hand out, sorry.) :-)

Part 1 — Google Wave - what it is and isn’t
Part 2 — Google Wave - how I use it

Google taking over - now for the calendar and contacts

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:10:00 +0100

Trusting Google with an even bigger part of my on-line life.

The background

For quite some time now I’ve been slowly handing my life over to Google.
In 2005 I started by entrusting it with the access stats of my site.
Then in 2007 I made the big move of having it handle my mail by way of supporting my domain in Google Apps. This also meant that I automatically gained XMPP accounts (or Google Talk accounts if you prefer) for the accounts on my own domain.
By early 2008 I tried (without success) to have Google support my calendars and contacts and by late 2008 even my feed reading needs were taken over by the big G.

The old setup

Thus far I’d been using a system based on my own server at home which basically consisted of using MAC OS X’s iCal for the calendar and Address Book for the contact management.

One of the most obvious and important features I absolutely had to have was full two-way integration (i.e. synchronization) with my phone which, with my recent acquisition of the HTC smartphone, meant that I had to install a program that provided an ActiveSync interface to the MAC OS X sync service. I found that “The Missing Sync” by mark/space was ideally suited to this end and I was a happy user for quite some time.
Apple’s products work great and are more than sufficient for my needs, and I grew ever more fond of the features they provided and which Google Calendar and Gmail contacts’ support sorely lacked.

Time passes… And since I’m not eaten by a Grue I keep looking around for alternatives.
Not that I dislike my old setup all that much, but I’d rather have something that automatically synchronizes over-the-air (thus releasing me from the need to dock my phone at home and only then have it synched-up) and that would let me edit my appointments even if I can’t use my phone at that particular time and I’m not home (I grew fed up with running VNC over my home ADSL line, especially since it’s reliability is less than stellar). Also I’ve grown way too tired of managing my own infrastructure. Life’s too short to waste it managing servers, connections and stuff. I’m old, I want things to “just work”. Preferably by magic. Or something undistinguishable from it.

Are we there yet?

It has been apparent for some time now that Google is starting to pay much more attention to the needs of the “enterprise users”. Indeed it has been wooing the corporate folks with increasingly better features in it’s Google Apps offering, for example, and quite recently I came across news of it offering nice ways for the suit-and-tie crowd to connect their Outlook clients to Gmail’s servers (or something to that effect).
This got me thinking that it was high time that I went over to the admin pages of my Google Apps account and looked around for new stuff that might have popped up in the mean time.

And lo-and-behold, we now have the ability to sync up a mobile device both with Google Calendar and Gmail (for the contacts). This sync service is provided for a number of platforms which I already new about, but what struck me the most was that they provided an ActiveSync server for the users to sync up with.
Woha! The announcement of this feature must have slipped by me some time ago, but this means that I can now sync my phone effortlessly with Google’s services. Over the air. “Magically”.
This together with the fact that Google Calendar’s been getting pretty decent lately (feature- and stability-wise) and that Gmail’s handling of the contact’s information got a really nice bump (feature-wise) some time ago means that it was indeed high time I gave it another go. And a rather serious one at that. Even with all the warnings that Google plasters in our face when we go through all the hoops of activating the sync service. What can I say, I like to live dangerously.
Well… No, not really, I’m just rather lazy and I’d much rather the good folk at Google deal with supporting the servers than having to do it myself. :-)

The new (currently under evaluation, but looking rather good) setup

So now the time has come to finally switch over my calendar and contact management system to Google’s care.
I then proceeded to subscribe my external calendars on my Google Calendar, exported my own calendars from my server at home and imported them into my own calendar at Google, cleaned-out the mess that was my contacts list at my main Gmail account (and did so by nuking it entirely, a move which, in hind-sight, was not all that smart, as it forced me to re-request the authorization for every XMPP contact on my pidgin roster, but I digress), exported my contacts from my address book at home and imported them, nice and clean, into my Gmail account.
I then proceeded to zero out my phone (first sync is always a bitch if you have information on both sides, I’d rather not risk it. Well, that’s not entirely true, I did risk it and ended up with loads of duplicate information, so the second time-around I just nuked the phone’s data and was done with it) and sync it with my Google Apps accounts.

And I found…

Bliss!

So far I’m rather impressed with the result. I’ve been toying around with changing things on the phone and on the web interface and so far all is smooth sailing. What small differences I’ve noticed from my previous experience with data synching are easily overlooked for the benefits I get from this setup.

As it would happen, just this morning the “sync” link on my Google Calendar page stopped working (which got me worried about the possibility that the service might be pulled off the air), but then this afternoon the link returned and, with it, a new calendar emerged automatically on the “My Calendars” list —the “Tasks” calendar— together with the “Tasks NEW!” link on the top of the page.
Now Google Calendar’s documentation on synching (the link which disappeared temporarily) clearly states that Google’s sync service only supports calendar and contact data, not tasks, but maybe this is up-and-coming soon? Not that I care really, I never used tasks all that much and for the really important stuff I’m perfectly happy with using Hiveminder anyway.

So now I’ve taken the plunge and switched to using Google’s services to manage my contacts and calendars and I’ll force myself to keep at it for a few days until I reach a final decision on whether I should keep it up or drop it and roll back to my previous solution.
Please, please, let it work! I really want to drop the home server and this is a huge step in that direction!

Please note that I’ve enabled the testing of Beta(er?) features for my Google Apps, something that more sane (or less risk-inclined) people may not want to do and some of the stuff I described surely falls under this category.

Lifestream

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:37:00 +0100

The Lifestream concept is one that appeals to me in a really strong way.
I have (like most people) loads of content I produce on-line almost every single day of my life —of which this weblog is the least part, actually— and (if only for my own sake) I’d really like to have the possibility of reviewing it in a time-line and aggregate fashion. This is a need I’ve felt for a long, long time, since before the “Lifestream” term was even coined.

Now this concept has been gaining some attention from many people (as it obviously would) and a few services have appeared that address this need in different ways.

My own forays into using these services have been somewhat limited. I’ve been using my FriendFeed account as a kind of content aggregator which can produce a kind of lifestream (which powers the side-bar mini-lifestream gadget that I currently —as of this writing— have on the weblog pages) and that has been going well for the most part.

More recently, however, the concept has been gaining even more traction (as demonstrated by the amount of content generated on the lifestream blog) and a few services have surfaced which are even better suited to this end.
After having messed around briefly with a couple-three of them I seem to have settled —for now at least— on the Storytlr one and I must say I’m quite impressed.

The design is not all there yet (and knowing me it will be a long, long time before it is), but you can take a peek at it at http://lifestream.nunonunes.org/. Neat, heh?

Update on March 2, 2010: Storytlr has shut it’s servers down and discontinued the service. The lifestream links have been removed from my site today. Read more about this move here

AnyEvent goodness

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:24:00 +0100

AnyEvent and all of it’s associated modules are my new best friends. In particular AnyEvent::Mojo.

I’m running it over libev (by way of EV) and it seems pretty impressive so far.

There, I’ve blogged again. :-)

It’s the globalization. Or something…

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:42:00 +0100

I’ve recently been in the market for a new compact point-and-shoot camera so I did the rounds and decided that I should get Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX500.

To that effect I went over to a FNAC store, on my lunch break yesterday, to see if they had it available for sale. It turns out they did not have it in the store, but there was another FNAC store nearby which had it in stock and they could transfer it to the store went to for my convenience. It would take 3 working days for the camera to get there and the price was X.

Fair enough, but I decided that maybe I should look around at some on-line stores and do some price comparison, so I took a peek at the usual suspects and ended up ordering it from Expansys.

The order was placed yesterday during the afternoon.

It took Expansys slightly over 18 hours to deliver the camera to me (all the way over from Marseille, France to Lisbon, Portugal) at slightly over two-thirds of the price that FNAC was asking for it.

Yes, it’s the globalization, I guess.