Alcides Fonseca

This movie started wonderfully by the sound of Every You, Every Me dos Placebo and then it just seemed like it was some kind of American Pie, but there was something there. That something turned out to be a really good story specially with all the crazy plans each had after another.

The ending was really awesome (by the sound of The Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve) and it totally non-expected, unlike the climax.

The Soundtrack is probably the best I’ve seen in a movie, with all the good songs of the late 90ies. I even let it play through the credits just to listen to Secretly by Skunk Anansie.

This was Yet Another Trip we made while in Sweden. We took the train to Oslo (50€ round-trip). We were told that one day would be enough, so we got there at 10 and the train back home would be at 6pm. We walked around, following the river and we found a big touch screen with Google Maps loaded with Points of Interest to visit.

But nothing was better than our analog map, that took us to the University, to the Royal Palace, a couple of Churches and the Parliament, but this time we didn’t enter. And we also visited the National Art History Museum that looked like a miniature of Copenhagen’s. The price was the same: free.

Finally we had time to walk around the downtown of Oslo and also around the city (even went to a cemetery![1]) since we had time to kill. I have to say the city is very poor compared to the other I visited, and the most interesting thing I’ve saw were several buildings in irregular shapes, made all of glass. But then again, you also have them around the other cities I visited.

¹In the Nordic countries, graveyards are beautiful gardens open for everyone to visit.

Há uns tempos o Luís Pedro convidou-me para integrar o Centro Social um daqueles blogs da moda política (e do quotidiano), com vários autores, tipo o delito de opinião, o jugular e outros tantos.

Já andava a pensar em algum tempo em separar a política deste bliki e aproveitei esta oportunidade para o fazer. E é de salientar dizer que alinhei porque O Centro Social não tem qualquer orientação partidária. É apenas um espaço comum para vários autores com diferentes backgrounds e ideologias.

Tenciono também manter um diário dessas minhas escritas no Estado Quo e de outras que se enquadrem no género.

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs is what I call Yet Another Kid Animation movie, just like Planet 51 I half-saw. Could have been way better, just by improving the plot, but they are getting out of ideas.

Anyway, it’s a nice movie to watch with kids or your other half.

I first met the Dorian Gray character in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and I was intrigued specially by this character. A couple of months ago I saw the book in Sweden, but I already had too much to bring home in my suitcase, so I left it for some other time.

Then I knew about the movie and this week I finally managed to watch it and the result was quite good. Like the cast pretty much and some of the decay scenes turned out quite shocking. Highly recommend it.

Spoiler: What most surprised me was the fact that he lived pretty much what he would have lived if he had not that special ability.

During my Erasmus, I crossed the Arctic Circle and settled for a week in the town of Kiruna, in Northern Sweden. From Göteborg we took the train (with sleep cabins) that took 20 hours to get there.

The first day we went dog sleighing across Kiruna woods and on top of the river, and on the way back we rode snow mobiles. It’s way more exciting to ride one of those at 60km/h than my lousy old car at 140! And in the middle of nothing, we saw a glimpse of the Northern Lights.

The next days we went to the Kirunavaara mines, where we learned a lot about how it works, to the Ice Hotel, yep an hotel that is only made of ice and snow (and “snice”) and has to be rebuilt every year. Finally we got the chance of meeting some natives, the Sami People and learnt a lot about them.

On our free time we did snowboard, sleighing down a really high slope and walked across the town. We learnt that because of the mining, the ground is becoming unstable and the city will have to be moved, little by little. Plans have been in place for 20 years, but only now they are starting to run out of time and speeding up the process.

An awesome week with a lot of friends, snow and fun!

Façam este Jogo do Acordo Ortográfico, disponibilizado pelo Sapo e pelo Instituto de Linguística Teórica e Computacional (via André Torgal) e vejam se não ficam com uma cara de WTF?

Não vou ser eu a adaptar-me aos brasileiros. Se os idiomas têm de seguir caminhos diferentes, que o façam. Até fico orgulhoso por eles que aplicam a criatividade numa nova língua. Eu cá sigo o meu/nosso caminho.

For those of you interested in Interaction Design, Usability, User Experience and so on, I’m recommending UxLx, an user experience focused conference (plus workshops!) with the top-notch speakers available world-wide. If you’re into this sort of things, chances are that the authors of your favorite books on this subject will be presenting. This is an excellent opportunity not just to learn and network, but also to visit the beautiful city of Lisbon.

Also, make sure to follow the conference on Twitter since they are still announcing new speakers, sessions and giving away some books signed by the authors, just like Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks That Work that I’ve just won.

Following my post on the importance of Flash and other plugins, I must add that one of the things they can do is to add more languages to the client-side of the web. Silverlight adds support to IronPython and IronRuby to the browser and Gestalt makes it really simple and javascript-like.

Another feature in the gestalt project is the HTML5 video player for Internet Explorer, via Silverlight. It might require the installation of a plugin (hey, 99% of the users¹ already have at least one installed), but makes the html5 video tag work on the most infamous browser out there. This is an example of using a plugin to extend the capabilities of the browser, even for embracing open standards.

¹Or whatever are the stats for Adobe Flash on desktop computers.

Taking advantage of the being in Sweden for a limited time, we decided to visit København. We went by train, which turned out to be really cheap compared to traveling inside Portugal. Thanks to Dopplr, I got a recommendation for a hotel, which was really good.

We started to visit Christiania, a small self-proclaimed independent state (but currently under Danish law) inside the city. It looked like an hippy camp from the 80s with a lot of graffiti’s and stands selling drugs¹. Before living I decided to ask about it to a woman that had been working there for over 20 years and we had a nice chat about it, and learned a lot (way better than wikipedia!).

We then visited a lot of places, saw a lot of churches, we went up to the Round Tower, which I recommend, since you have an overview of the city, with some posters pointing out the most important buildings. It also had a tiny museum about Tycho Brahe that was explained in the Tycho Brahe Planetarium the following day. Both included the tools Brahe used to make his astronomical observations. And in the planetarium I got to launch a spaceship.

During the trip we went to a couple of museums, but skipped the Danish Design Center for lack of time. We visited the combo of Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Museum and the Hans Christian Andersen Museum and while the first one was well made (considering I wan’t interested in the theme²) the second one was kind of poor, given the importance of the author. After that we went to see the Little Mermaid Statue and it was a disappointment: it was really far away from the centre (and we walked, it was night and really cold!) and it was a small statue of a girl on the rocks with her legs melting. Not worth it.

We still got to visit the National Museum that had a lot of exhibitions, from the awesome Danish pre-history to the contemporary Denmark and still got to see most of the Ethnographical collection. What I loved the most was the early natives’ mythology and the price: it was free!

But the most amusing moment of the trip was when we wanted to visit the Royal Palace and they said there were no guided tours that day, but if we wanted to see we could enter. We went through a side-door and it was like an airport, with metal detectors, bag x-rays and all of that. It was the most secure palace I had seen so far. We climbed 5 levels of stairs to find a small corridor. Naif enough, we started to look at the paintings, thinking it was a very lousy palace when the security guard told us to go through a door. “Oh, the real palace!” I though. But the result was a live session of an audition with a Minister in the official parliament.

Awesome 2-day trip and we can say we saw most of the tourist points, and learned quite a lot about the city.

¹No I didn’t buy or consume any. Straight-edge.

²The most amusing part was discovering that Brahe had a silver nose and also crossing a bridge full of spinning effects to make you fall.

Not-that-small disclaimer: I use a black macbook as my main machine, and every time a webpage has some flash video/animation, the fans start to make a really loud noise and most of the times it breaks (some weeks ago it would crash Safari). As developer I’ve used Flash in the past, and it’s an experience far from enjoyable.

John Nack complains of the hate Flash is getting from the open standards people and tries to explain how it works. Despite the above disclaimer, I agree with him, and find Flash even more important.

Regarding the Mac OS problem, as Nack said only around 5% of the market share. Of course it’s not as important to Adobe as to work on Windows, but as this changes as more people buy Macs (check Apple’s numbers on this), Adobe will work on this issue and improve the quality of the plugin on Mac OS (don’t forget quite a few CS owners are Mac-centric designers, developers and artists). As for the iPhone/iPod/iPad, I believe that Apple is trying to prevent Adobe to prevail on the mobile, leaving space for Apple to expand.

Open Standards take time, everyone knows it. And Macromedia/Adobe was right about moving Flash forward in the proprietary road. As Nack said, the success of youtube and video online was only possible at that time thanks to Flash. Of course now standards are catching up, and it’s possible to do video in HTML5, but Flash is in the exact same position as Gears.

The difference is that Google gave up on Gears but thankfully I don’t see Adobe doing anything similar anytime soon. They will continue to keep technology ahead of browsers (and open standards) making their plugin useful. Thinks like Webcam/Microphone/Streaming are not yet available in browsers, they need external plugin support (being Flash, Silverlight, Google Video Plugin or even some Active X thingy).

Technology will evolve (and browsers will become more important as we move to (More-)Web Oses) and plugins will bring them into the browser, then browsers will incorporate them as new technology raises and is embraced by plugins. This lifecycle will allow plugins to survive. Of course they will have to bet on the right features.

Rethink Scholarship via Guspim.

Também com as datas todas, fica-se sem saber como está a infra-estrutura da TDT, já que entre Junho 2008, aquando atribuição à PT e Abril 2009, não se fez nada. De qualquer das formas é apenas mais uma manobra de matar o mercado. Ganha-se concursos, perde-se uns cobres com o mesmo, mas secou-se qualquer mercado que poderia derivar dai…

Ler o artigo completo na TheNextWeb.

O senhor Manuel foi emigrante e quis reviver com a neta a viagem de dez horas que fez do Bombarral para Vilar Formoso, quando tentou o “salto” para a França em 1968. Pensando que hoje a coisa era mais rápida, nem consultou horários e apresentou-se na estação do Bombarral para o comboio das oito da manhã.

Aventurou-se e demorou 14 horas. A viagem que, 40 anos antes, realizara com um único transbordo teve de ser feita agora com – pasme-se! – cinco comboios.

(Via Ana Margarida Craveiro)

Realmente nunca me atraiu muito andar de comboio em Portugal. Na viagem que mais faço Coimbra-Lisboa fica mais barato encher um carrito com 3, 4 ou 5 cromos do que irmos todos de comboio. Ah, e se quiser ir a algum concerto ou espectáculo à capital (sim, há coisas que faltam na província) não há comboios a horas decentes para a volta.

Since I was a kid, I’ve been crazy about time traveling movies, just any scifi geek. If you think this movie has anything to do with Back to the Future, forget it. The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story in which the two main characters have different timelines (and the viewer has a third one).

Time-travelling wise, the movie is very inconsistent and not appealing (although they got the being naked part right), but it works as a love story where there is an opposing force in between. I haven’t seen it, but I would say it should feel like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. And it’s not an “and they lived happily ever after” story (well, it depends on which timeline you are in….), which takes it to a different level.

500 Days of Summer is a boy-meets-girl kind of movie, but that is not a love story. But it’s a story and it’s about love. And a really nice movie that reminded of 40 days and 40 nights but without any sex. In fact is the only movie I’ve seen in quite a few years without a sex scene. So it’s possible to film good movies without any nudity.

Oh and the cast for the girl was quite good! As for him, I was always wondering if he was some kind of alien, dunno why…

When I first designed this website one and half year ago, I had already implemented HTML5 navigation tags, but left them commented because of some IE issues not parsing the unknown elements. Soon after, I found a solution, but I was too busy to bring it to work. Finally I did it today, with some extra changes, like removing all the JS from this page.

While reading the HTML5 spec, I found out about new elements that are really specific¹ and it’s taking html5 in a new direction, I believe. Someday HTML5 will be as specific (or even more) than LaTeX, and we all know what it means. It could be used for more serious stuff, as long as you are able to use a couple of tags to do the essential.

If there is some kind of content that could be inside a tag (say a cite or a kbd), is it wrong if I just forget about it, and use more basic elements (div or span) to do the same? I ask this because current fast-markup languages like textile or markdown don’t support a lot of html5 features (nor you want them to). Of course you can write the tags yourself, but that would break the purpose of using such languages to ease the editing by non-tech people. The same question goes for using CKeditor and TinyMCE.

¹And still, I couldn’t find a location tag for representing geo coordinates. Disappointing, since I was expecting it to be somehow included with the geo location API.

I own the domain PythonLovers.com since July 2007 and it has been running a planet for python-related blogs. I am terminating that project and I’m willing to sell the domain.

For Python related things, I’m selling it at 25 euros.

For Adult-Industry projects, the price is 100 euros, since they make a lot of money, and it’s an hell of a domain for some niches of that industry.

In any case, you can contact me on my email me@alcidesfonseca.com

But that does not justify a new version of Python. Instead they could have added a strict mode and let the old code run emulated. They could have expanded that strict mode to allow access to new features of the language, add support for compiler optimizations and so much more. (JavaScript is currently getting such a strict mode).

A nice post to add to my own complaints about python 3.

Por diversas razões, este ano não irei organizar o Take Off, sendo que as principais é eu não andar por Portugal e achar que este tipo de conferência sobre _Inovação e Empreendedorismo _ já não vende. E por vender, não quero dizer que eu não faça dinheiro com isso, até porque só me dá prejuízo organizar o evento (mas uma satisfação bastante grande). O objectivo sempre foi reunir empreendedores nas diversas fases e partilhar ideias e experiências. E quando comecei a organizar em 2007 não existia o panorama nacional que existe agora, logo vejo menos necessidade para uma conferência nestes moldes. E tendo em conta o ano passado, acho que o público concorda.

Este ano só no meu departamento já existiram duas mini-conferências semelhantes e outras iniciativas no mesmo tema, e certamente estão a existir mais por Portugal, afinal o empreendedorismo está na moda.

Gostaria então de deixar algumas sugestões para quem gosta desta área: O blog Ineo, uma iniciativa da jeKnowledge especificamente sobre este assunto por diferentes pontos de vista. Em termos de eventos, vai realizar-se já dia 13 Portugal Empreendedor, um dos tais eventos da moda (e para ir de fato e gravata), mas tem nomes interessantes. Se são mais informais deverão ter o já usual Barcamp, que só perderia por motivos de força maior. Já para Maio vão ter a SWiTCH que poderá vir a revelar-se interessante. Finalmente outro blog a seguir é o StartU, uma iniciativa para promover a comunicação e a comunidade de startups, empreendedores, malta com iniciativa, etc…

E eu gosto de pensar que o Take Off teve algum impacto. Juntou algumas das pessoas por trás do StartU, divulgou o coworking ( e já existem três espaços em Portugal), e apoiou a ideia do Mário Valente de lançar uma empresa de Seed Capital. E foram empreendedores de longa data como ele, o Celso Martinho ou o Gonçalo Quadros que vieram partilhar a sua experiência conosco. Tivemos também o Jorge Figueira, Francisco Banha, o Vitor Santos, o Pedro Custódio e o Armando Alves a mostrar-nos outras perspectivas sobre inovação. E tivemos inúmeros startupers a partilhar a sua experiência, aos quais agradeço a todos.

Como nota final, apesar de não organizar o Take Off, não quer dizer que fique parado e estou já a pensar noutras coisas ;)