Alcides Fonseca

Droplr seems to be a new application for sharing files easily for your Mac. It is in private beta, so I’m gonna show you a easy way of sharing files using Tarpipe and a small utility for OS X I wrote, Dropipe.

Create a Tarpipe Account

Head over to tarpipe.com and signup with your OpenID or your Google account. So no filling forms, just use an account you have with a previous web service.

After you create your account, you can create a workflow and you might do something like this:

This one just accepts a picture and send it to flickr (with title and tags) and then posts the link to Twitter. Tarpipe offers you a wide range of connectors for different webservices. Or you can just use the email connector if you just want to send to someone else.

Important! Be sure to select “REST API” in the dropdown before saving the workflow. After that, just copy the string token underneath, or keep the window open.

Using Dropipe

Head over to the Dropipe page and download it. Just drag the app to your Applications Folder, or your Desktop like I did. You might even want to add it to your dock so you always have it visible.

Now just drag some picture onto the Dropipe icon and it will ask you for the token string. This will only happen in the first time you open it. If you want to use multiple workflows, just install another Dropipe and rename it to your favorite name.

Then it will ask you for the title and description of the file. Just give it a title and the tags in the description and that’s it!

Check your upload history.

Tarpipe has an activity tab where you can see what you have uploaded and to which services it was sent. So you always know how your Dropipe was used.

People old enough should remember a time where half of the internet had this kind of gifs announcing a future website in that place (many of them never changed until someone forgot to renew the domain). Someone saved an archive of a large collection of under construction gifs.

As for our time, someone should be saving those “Coming soon…” webpage that is the under construction of now. Oh wait, someone already is!

There’s a dentist that goes to chicago to sell the head of his neighbor to the mafia. His neighbor is an hitman that the dentist’s wife hires to kill him. He screws with the hitman’s wife that everyone (including the hitman) wants to kill. The hitman gets friends with the dentist and the wife of the latter has to hire another assassin: the dentist assistance that is a fan of the hitman and is accepted as his apprentice. The wife then hires some random dude.

I could tell you who dies (or not), but I’m not the kind of guy that would spoil you the fun!

If you watch The Big Bang Theory, you already know the first part of this music, but I recommend you hear it all. It’s so fantastic and inspiring!

Optimizing for your software project becoming big is the same as optimizing a car to hit a rock wall – you are optimizing for failure

Ola Bini on how you should think about small working pieces of software at a time, and make sure they work well, and they work together with others. This way your project won’t become as big as if you were planing it to be right from the start.

Sell the Vatican, Feed the World. So obvious, why didn’t they think about it?

Barack Obama receives the award as a recognition of potential, of which some has already been realized. It is not unprecedented, but it is not usual. I don’t doubt that Barack Obama would like a Nobel Peace Prize, but being the person that he is, I highly suspect that he would have enjoyed one awarded on the basis of acheived results rather than potential much more.

Jesper defending that Obama deserved to be nominated, but not the winner. I agree with him, and I think Nobel prizes shouldn’t be given for the potential, but for the achieved results.

Everything Will Be OK is a 16 minutes long animated short film by Don Hertzfeldt. It is the first chapter of a planned three-part story about Bill, a guy who appears to have a mental disorder.

I really enjoyed the movie, and I can’t wait to watch the second and third parts.

Oh, and it’s online if you don’t feel like downloading.

So Microsoft/Danger lost all the data from their sidekick clients (contacts, photos, calendars, todos, etc…) and although those things might happen (although Microsoft should know how to keep the data safe and redundant) the fact that their service doesn’t allow you to export/sync the data stopped everyone from keeping their own backups.

Christopher Blizzard explains the problem quite well :

This is what bothers me about devices like the Sidekick and services like Facebook. Data goes in and it doesn’t come out. (In Facebook’s case you “own your own data” but if you pull it out it comes with usage restrictions so it’s essentially useless. You can’t use it to sync to another data source or another service. The rhetoric there doesn’t match the actual terms of service.) It means you can’t make backups and you can’t get to the point where you have a single set of data because you’re syncing with a bunch of services.

Lock-in by effect or lock-in by design isn’t something that any of us should be tolerating, but we do. In our cell phones, in our web services – lots of places. But we should be aware. Sometimes someone makes a mistake that affects tends of thousands or hundreds of thousands of us. And because of early decisions we’re not able to recover from it in a decentralized manner.

Turning boring stairs in an awesome piano that makes people forget about the escalator.

I’ve only been in Sweden for a month and awesome things are already happening. Here’s the recipe if you want to know how they did it

There are a lot of ingredients that might or might not go into the winning formula that brings concurrent programming to the mainstream. This is a very brief run-through of as many as I can think of.

Tim Bray writes about some aspects of Functional Programming and how they contribute to solve the concurrency problem.

Também me parece um pouco estranho este conceito de meter o dinheiro dos contribuintes em empresas de capital de “risco” que não gostam de correr riscos. “Ai eu não gosto e não posso correr riscos com o dinheiro dos investidores”. OK, tudo bem. “Ai é dinheiro dos contribuintes? Então bora lá correr riscos!!”. Se uma empresa de capital de risco tem uma oportunidade de investir numa empresa correndo riscos tendo a hipótese de ganhar uma pipa de massa, porque é que precisa da ajuda do Estado para correr o risco? Se não quer correr o risco mas o Estado acha que deve investir em empresas com risco, então é mais simples dar o dinheiro directo às empresas e não pagar comissões e partilha de lucros.

Excelente post do Mário Valente sobre o estado do Capital de Risco em Portugal com que eu concordo plenamente.

In Slow Leopard you can’t open MKV files, even if you have Perian installed, so here’s the solution. Usual disclaimer: Works on my machine™.

1. Install Perian, if you haven’t already
2. open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.quicktime.plugin.preferences.plist in the terminal, or just use the finder.
3. Expand WebPluginMIMETypes
4. Copy video/x-m4v
5. Having WebPluginMIMETypes selected, right-click and paste.
6. Rename that child to video/x-matroska
7. Expand it, then expand WebPluginExtensions and rename Item 0’s value to mkv
8. Close and now QuickTime X accepts mkv files.

De tudo o que se recebe da comunicação social, esta é a imagem que o PSD deu a conhecer recentemente.. Falta sobretudo um líder que recupere a credibilidade que tem faltado ao PSD desde a saída de Durão.

During his keynote, he extended an invitation to any open source application to submit their software for testing by user-experience experts. The sessions would be recorded for posterity, and the developer would not be able to interact with the user. “‘If the developer is in the room, they have to say nothing. It’s the shut the f*** up protocol,’ Shuttleworth said. ‘You sit and watch someone struggle with the software that you’ve so lovingly produced.’”

Mark Shuttleworth is the men! I think Linux (or just any OpenSource software) should improve their usability and so does Mark Shuttleworth.

The irony here, as I see it, is that an old, insecure feature Microsoft built to try to beat Netscape is now being used by Microsoft’s biggest current rival to patch IE. The upside for developers is that Microsoft is going to have a hard time killing Chrome Frame because it actually does the right thing — it’s not hacking IE via undocumented APIs or unscrupulous haxie-like code injection. They used Microsoft’s own well-documented and fully supported platform to do this. Bravo indeed, Google.

Interesting insight and some technical stuff on Google Chrome Frame.

Via what consumes me.

It’s really easy to spot if an interface was made by a programmer, or by someone who really cares about human-machine interaction. Here are 7 obvious signs and I’ve seen almost all of them in some software I’ve used, or even in some small projects I made.

Of course not all the projects have a budget for an interface designer, but not all programs are professional, right?

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Date With the Night, found in Sandra’s Playlist.