Alcides Fonseca

6 years later and two VPS later, I decided it was time to leave Phusion Passenger.

I was experience several downtimes due to database (both mariadb and mysql) crashes. It turns out the database could not recover because ruby was occupying the whole memory (512Mb on DigitalOcean). The solution was to shut down apache, then start the database, and finally start apache again. But this would only work for a couple of days.

I decided to move all my django sites to WSGI (yes, I was deploying django apps using passenger) and ported a sinatra app to django (thanks to legacy database support) just so I could get rid of ruby.

It all works well now. But in the meanwhile, I went to read Passenger’s source code and I am currently considering forking and removing everything ruby from it. Just an apache2 module that would automatically handle wsgi, avoiding 4 lines of apache config per project. It can be done, I am just not sure it is worth the time. Maybe it would help other people with plain-simple deploying on Apache/NGINX?

If you connect a Bq Aquaris 4.5 (or any other model from bq) to your windows/mac/linux, it won’t show in adb, Android Studio or Xamarin.

The solution is to add the VendorID to a certain file. My VendorID is 0x2a47 and you can get yours from Apple Menu > About This Mac -> System Report -> Usb -> Bq Aquaris 4.5 -> VendorID.

Then append that Vendor id to the following file: ~/.android/adb_usb.ini. Restart your adb server and it should work.

sudo adb kill-server; sudo adb start-server

No final da semana passada, nós (Condominio Criativo) ajudámos a organizar o hacklathon do RAW OpenData, organizado pelo IPN para promover o uso de OpenData.

Os Datasets

Para o efeito reunimos datasets para serem trabalhados na hacklathon. Estão todos listados no CKAN do IPN sobre ImproveCoimbra e Universidade de Coimbra.

Da Universidade de Coimbra, através da vice-reitora Clara Almeida Sousa, disponibilizámos um excel que serve de base ao UC em Números, o arquivo fotográfico usado na candidatura à UNESCO e a API do Agenda7. Isto tudo em 1 mês de trabalho.

Os Projectos

Das menos de 20 horas disponíveis para trabalhar nos projectos (onde se encaixava uma noite que supostamente era para ser dormida), durante a latada (alunos com outras prioridades) e durante a semana (os ex-alunos estavam no emprego), saíram 3 projectos e 2 ideias para projectos.

O primeiro projecto consiste numa visualização dos alunos, docentes e pessoal não docente de cada faculdade. Feito em D3.js pelo Hugo Besteiro.

O segundo projecto é um site informativo sobre diferentes características de Coimbra que tentam promover a cidade como um bom sítio para estudar. Reúne informações de diferentes fontes, incluindo dados da universidade, rendas, cafés wifi, eventos, etc…

O terceiro projecto consiste numa aplicação mobile (mockups) e uma aplicação web (funcional) que pretendem ser a forma de aceder a um conjunto de eventos (Agenda7 para começar, mas incorporaria outras fontes) directamente no telemóvel. Permite a filtragem inteligente de eventos relevantes, e de avisos de eventos que sejam do interesse do utilizador. Um ponto fundamental da solução é que mostra os eventos de acordo com a distância geográfica, algo que não é muito utilizado hoje em dia.

O Rant

Por ajudar a organizar, entenda-se fazer o máximo num orçamento limitado. Uma das coisas em que tivemos de cortar foi nos prémios. E no entanto imagino o dinheiro que foi gasto em trazer oradores, e que os convidados gastaram às respectivas organizações para assistirem à conferência.

Eu não sou da área financeira, mas a minha proposta de orçamentos para projectos de open-data é a seguinte:

• 10% Divulgação e Sensibilização. Eventos como estes são necessários, sobretudo para fazer divulgação de resultados passados (algo que faltou aqui). No entanto deve ser uma fatia muito reduzida.
• 50% Abertura de Dados. Os três datasets da UC que conseguimos arranjar em 3 meses foi algo limitado e feito a custo 0. Seria interessante abrir uma quantidade maiores de dados, algo que precisaria de esforço técnico e orçamento para ser executado.
• 40% Estimulo (leia-se prémios, sobretudo se monetários) para developers usarem os dados. E isto é o ponto chave. São as aplicações (e eventuais negócios) que saírem daqui que vão servir de cartão de visita para outras instituições abrirem os seus dados. Sensibilizar com exemplos concretos e de sucesso funciona muito melhor, do que palestras generalistas.

At its core, the [Swift] language is designed to eliminate bugs, but not in the academic way that, say, Haskell eliminates bugs by preventing normal people from writing code in it.

— Swift Impressions

O governo voltou atrás e vai lançar apoiar mais bolsas individuais num acréscimo de 300 a 350 bolsas..

A ABIC reclama que o número não é suficiente, e apenas os que pedirem reavaliação serão considerados.

Para mim isto não é suficiente. O problema de fundo continua por resolver.

Continua a não haver uma transparência na política científica em Portugal. Não se fazem remendos como estes. Definem-se áreas em que apostar, calendarização para calls nos diferentes tipos de apoio.

Os centros de investigação, empresas e universidades não estão a ser consultados para determinação dessa política de investimento.

Tirando os felizes 350 contemplados, o sistema científico nacional continua desnorteado e dependente sobretudo de fundos europeus e não nacionais. O que não seria um problema tão grande, se a regulamentação de bolsas e do estatuto bolseiro não fosse da responsabilidade da FCT e do Governo.

Everyone and their dog in the Startup world should read this:

Waffle’s 2014

Venture Capital and their eagerness to own the next Facebook has made them blind. They are throwing away money at stupid ideas, or event at cool domains without ideas.

Please make your idea work without any funding at first. In Computer Businesses, things are cheap to make. VCs, please focus on things that have real value, and not only in the VC Round A, Series B bubble world.

Three weeks before launching its new line of products, the Surface design team took a trip to Pasadena, CA, where they held a 3 day workshop with renowned design school Art Center College of Design.

The group of 11 students chosen for the workshop were the first people outside of Microsoft to see a new accessory the design team has been working on: a music attachment that clicks into a Surface and allows users to easily remix music. They asked the students: what else would you want to attach to a Surface? They code named these attachments blades.

Lawmakers seek to ban google glass on the road

This is relevant and huge. While google is pushing legislation to allow for self-driven cars, lawmakers are trying to avoid google glasses on drivers. Which I guess it’s an improvement over text-and-driving, since Google Glass can filter those for you, and has a text-to-speech system, like siri or some cars.

Before you start: backup your database. Even if you are not experience any issue.

When migrating a redmine database between two servers, the encodings got screwed even though both databases were using UTF-8 (the lingua franca of the web that was supposed to avoid this kind of problems).

Anyway, the trick is to make sure you have every table defined as UTF-8.

The problem is that the content of the database is still fucked up. To solve this, you can use the following script that uses triple convert (latin1 -> binary -> utf8) on every column of every table in the database.

I usually follow American TV shows to the point that I have the dates and times of their airing on my calendar. Lately there have been some British productions that have caught my eye, and these three are all in the same period, something that might be in vogue over there.

Downton Abbey is a drama about an aristocrat family and their servants facing the new century and the new British social structure and lifestyle. Things like the automobile, the telephone, WWI and the Irish revolution are some of the events that the family has endured through the show. I usually don’t like these kind of dramas, but after one or two episodes I wanted to know more about the characters that I ended up watching the two first seasons in two days.

Upstairs Downstairs is also about the difference between aristocrats and their servants in the same period. Despite considering it a Downton copycat, being more fast-paced, I ended up enjoying the show.

Parade’s End is also set in the same period as the other two, but focus on the matrimonial (and extra-matrimonial) affairs of Mr and Mrs Tietjens (Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall). Rebecca Hall plays a hell of a character, and was the reason I made it though the first episode. I don’t regret watching the rest of the show.

This is very important to coordinate systems used to map the height of the ground, because the idea of quantified ‘height’ implies that there is a level surface somewhere below us which has zero height. Even statements about relative height imply extended level surfaces. When we casually say ‘Point A is higher than point B’, what we really mean is ‘The level surface passing through point A, if extended, would pass above point B’ So to accurately quantify the height difference between A and B, we would need to know the shape of the level surface passing through point A. In fact we choose a general ‘reference level surface’ of zero height covering the whole country to which we can refer all our measured heights. This reference level surface is not flat!

— A guide to coordinate systems in Great Britain

On 24 January 1918 Lenin signed a decree that moved the brand-new Soviet Union from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. In order to bridge the 14-day gap between Julian and Gregorian, 1-13 February 1918 were omitted, so that 31 January was directly followed by 14 February.

— Making safe for historians

In “I scanned %g directories”, you’d expect “directories” to be in the accusative case (since it is the direct object in the sentnce) and the plural number, except where $directory_count is 1, then you’d expect the singular, of course. Just like Latin or German. But! Where $directory_count % 10 is 1 (“%” for modulo, remember), assuming $directory count is an integer, and except where $directory_count % 100 is 11, “directories” is forced to become grammatically singular, which means it gets the ending for the accusative singular.

— A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen To You

People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.

— Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

Conway’s Game of Life, emulated in Conway’s Game of Life

For those of you without an iPad, a recent iPhone and without iCloud, here are the useful new features of Mountain Lion:

• Being able to use two (or more) harddrives as Time Machine.

Yep, that’s the only new interesting thing.

I am making myself available to fill in the shoes of RIM CEO’s for one day. Here’s what I would do:

I would drop the development of the QNX OS and all related systems. The following would be bad for me as a customer, but it makes all sense for RIM. Just fork the Android source tree into a new distribution (but keep updating with upstream) and focus on what RIM is known for:

• Security.
  • Make storage and communication encrypted.
  • Replace google’s services (Gmail, Google Calendar, ...) with RIM’s services, and allow for companies to host them.
  • Make Storage automatically backed up on the RIM/Hosted cloud. Even better: make shared folders like dropbox. Everything encrypted again.
• Administrative tasks
  • Give admins great tools to manage hundreds of blackberrydroids easily.
  • Create a BBAppStore in which apps must be signed by RIM and must follow some standards like encryption, no external communication, etc… (Apps would not be bought individually for $0.99, but rather in bulk for several android terminals at once)
• Communication
  • Make the phones a really damn good email machine. Add a physical keyboard, improve the UI, but make email really easy on the phone. Just like IM.
  • Integrate VOIP really well as if there was no difference between the GSM and VOIP/Skype whatever. This would be a major selling point for companies.
• Office Integration
  • Develop great office suite apps (Word, Excel, Calendar, Mail)
  • Make a great printer (or adapter) that makes printing Documents really easy.
  • Same for scanning. Maybe using the camera and OCR.
  • Integrate well with a projector. People should be able to present with a tablet/phone and no cables.

Today Google discontinued their Social Graph API. For those who didn’t know it, you gave it an url that represented someone (my website, my twitter or facebook account) and it returned all your other URLs (my blog, last.fm, openid, youtube, among many other services) and also URLs for all my friends from all those social networks.

Social Graph API was a way of getting all your presences in the internet and also your friends. This was important for instance, when you signed up for a new account on a yet-another-social-network, it could import all your friends without asking for any permission. Games could suggest your friends as opponents. And services could get updates from all your accounts.

Technically, this was achieved using XFN (a micro-format), FOAF and a few other technologies. This is still possible to do today, but the service provided by Google had the advantage of using their super-duper-make-everything-fast-cache and actually query several URLs in useful time.

But I do understand why Social Graph API didn’t caught up. In 2007, everyone had 1001 profiles. Their photos were on Flickr, videos on Youtube, blogs on wordpresses/blogspot, microblogs on twitter, and so on. Social networks were popping up for everything thing you could think of.

And then Facebook became popular. In one page, you can have your photos, status updates, videos, games you play, and so on. And with a good permission system. I can share some photos with my friends, but not the world. This gave control to the user, and removed information from the public knowledge, and therefore from Social Graph API’s reach.

Users want control over what they share, and I am totally on board with that¹. I am just sorry that all services are being provided by one company and it increases our dependency on Facebook. I wonder how long will it take for someone to improve the experience and create a new exodus from Facebook to a new platform with other advantages. An no, it won’t be Google Plus.

¹Although one should never forget that your trusted contacts can share what you did with the world.

There has some buzz about Reading the source code on the interwebz lately.

As someone who teaches Computer Science, I find that most students finish their degrees without having read a single line of code that was not written by themselves, group partner or professor. And given the huge amount of good-quality open source code on the internet this is a very disappointed fact.

In fact, when they find an error on a 3rd party software (being a dependency, middleware or just a library) they simply block and cannot advance. For instance, when debugging a stack-trace in a Java project, once the methods reach out of the scope of their project and belong to something else, they stop debugging and don’t try to understand what is happening underneath.

And in my experience situations where the answer is not in the documentation, but in the source code, happen at least once a month. In fact, I have up reading the documentation for most libraries in Python or Ruby. I end up just browsing the source to learn how to work with them, it’s must faster for me. Unless they have some really complex algorithm, and then the documentation is a pre-requisite to the source code.

I do miss the excitement you used to get when buying a new machine; these days (post-SSD) new purchases are more often about adjusting to a new set of compromises than getting something objectively better.

— Phil Hagelberg’s The Setup

This is exactly why I downgraded to a Macbook Air. And why a lot of folks are downgrading to iPads.

A notícia recente de que o “Copismo” é uma religião oficial da Suécia surpreendeu-me. Na Suécia o movimento pirata e defensor dos direitos dos consumidores contra copyrights tem sido pioneiro no mundo e até bastante sóbrio. Esta notícia chega um pouco ao ridículo.

Até que li o artigo de Rick Falkvinge, o fundador do partido pirate. A ideia é usar a lei relativa ao sigilo profissional, nomeadamente à confessão religiosa. Todas as partes envolvidas numa cópia ou remix de obras passa a ter o estatuto de sigilo.

Isto faz com que qualquer site/tracker/isp que releve dados de utilizadores à polícia, não só anula esse material como prova em tribunal. E vai ainda mais longe: relevar dados sobre utilizadores a fazer cópias passa a ser crime.

Por um lado acho que foi bem jogado esta acção de forma a usar os bylaws para proteger aquilo em que acreditam (quase como se fosse uma religião). Por outro lado, mostra algo em que acredito: a legislação deve ignorar a religião, não a deve considerar nem para novas regras nem para excepções a regras.