Alcides Fonseca

Underlying the layer of whimsy that permeated his work there was a more serious tone: expression, simplicity, and education. In all of his code, and writing, he was constantly trying to find ways to bring the art of hacking to more people – to younger people – to simplify the complexities that normally permeate development.

John Resign on _why’s disappearance stating Personally, I feel a mixture of joy and amazement..

I actually believe this is a step in his life, so he might return again in more awesomeness!

This holidays were themed by scifi. After SG-1 and in the beginning of BSG, I watched Gattaca [Thanks Té for the suggestion].

The movie is somewhat dark and heavy, almost like Blade Runner. The plot doesn’t include robots, but focuses in genetic manipulation and its effects (subject that is also studied in the Peter F. Hamilton’s books I am reading).

In the future there are two kinds of people, the ones who are born naturally and those who are engineered. The former are discriminated by society for their genetic incapabilities and relinquished to do toilet cleaning for the rest of their days.

The story is about one of the natural born, that tries to fulfill his dream of going to space against all odds.

Checking up on my posts from 2007 I noticed how I would evangelize some technologies as being the next wave of the web, and those should already be mainstream in 2009. Here are my thoughts on the matter, very subjective to my opinion and experiences.

Microformats

In 2009 I see large media websites and social networks to be adopting microformats, but corporate websites and such haven’t really though about it. Webdesigners and Webdevelopers that deserve such titles are already implementing microformats in their pages because it’s really simple to do so.

I believe traditional corporate developers don’t really care about this technologies. They are not a requirement for their projects and therefore not worth the time. A good way of correcting the problem would be to have Java and .NET promote these technologies.

The problem with microformats is not the server implementation. Wordpress alone transforms a lot of websites and blogs into a semantic repository. Long-tail websites like Upcoming and LastFM also provide microformats for their content. The major issue I find is the lack of uses, and browser integration for those.

It’s 2009 and none of the major browsers support the majority of microformats by default. It almost got into FF3 and it’s somehow in IE8, but not at the point people actually use it. Another opportunity would be using hCard information for the default data when you register an account in a new website.

At least uFs are out there just waiting to be used. The reverse would be much worse! We just have to give tools for people and machines to use them.

OpenID

OpenID suffers from the same browser-support problems as microformats, but in this one I agree it’s not browser-ready. There are few mainstream websites that support OpenID, and those that do have faulty implementations (usually the 1 account – 1 openid problem, or the problems in maintaining an UI for both traditional and openid logins).

Websites that support this technology are aimed at geeks or alpha-users go into the trouble of implementing OpenID. Others don’t, and until a perfect UI is reached I wouldn’t do it for a general user target.

OpenID is acceptable in a technical view, but when it comes to implement it may not be that simple (Google itself said they were taking their time to do it) and when it comes to UX the gap may be too big for the mom and dad kind of user.

What I happen to see a lot is twitter/facebook/etc… login option. Since the majority of uber-geeks have accounts in those websites, it’s easier to ask them to login in those websites than rather ask for an URL. You are what?

OpenSearch

OpenSearch hasn’t evolve at all. FF, IE and Opera all support it (safari doesn’t want to loose its simplicity, probably) and popular search engines also offer the description file (as well as this website). Users just don’t use it at all, since it’s easier to use google with one or two extra keywords.

Maybe when Google’s monopoly in online searches is at risk this might change.

OAuth

Of all three, this is the one that is working the best. It’s aimed at tech people, so with a few libraries, it’s a nice way of dealing with authentication of web APIs. I actually think it limits the developer to include a way of accepting the token in a web view, but most developers don’t seem to complain.

Asking for user and password is not secure, and people are starting to know that. Developers know that as well, and therefore want to offer a secure alternative. OAuth is the answer, and it’s looking pretty good. Even in Twitter mashups!

Django for the Desktop is a great way of describing Camelot. It uses SQL-Alchemy for the SQL connection and PyQT for the interface.

I don’t really know why they didn’t go with Django ORM (probably because it’s not released in a standalone form) but the way your code looks is exactly like a django model, and the django admin customizations.

Too bad for the QT dependency for Windows, but it’s still a nice way of developing applications which are just an interface to a database.

Tom Morris write and excellent response (although a bit geeky) to Calanis’ post against the closeness of the iPhone.

I have to agree with Tom, those who buy an iPhone know what they are buying, they know how closed their iPhones (along with data-plans) are. Sure, all phones are closed, from being locked to a network, to block wifi/bluetooth/usb transfers to promote data-plans.

If you’re buying something (as awesome and eye candy as it can be), you must know if you can live with it’s closeness or not.

Each director, including Schmidt, also received a “commemorative gift” in fiscal 2008 valued at $7,580, as well as a cash payment to offset the tax liability of the gift.

Macrumours has a piece on the fact that Eric Schmidt has never received his payments for being a director at Apple. Although I find it interesting, I was amused by the cash payment to compensate the taxes of a gift.

I bet this could make wonders in Portuguese political and sport landscapes.

Richard Jones has posted about using Python’s with keyword for a GUI DSL The idea has already crossed my mind when thinking about Python Universal GUI (still stalled for lack of time, sorry).

This idea could be used for some other cute DSLs in python, since it appears to be the land of ruby only.

Aprender fora da Universidade sobre a importância das actividades extracurriculares.

The Kingdom of Infinite Space is a wonderful book which I can’t categorize. In fact, the best way to present it, it’s by its subtitle: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head.

Raymond Tallis uses his expertise in both medicine and philosophy (we could list many other fields) to be our guide around our head, in all its aspects. From the basic physiology to some philosophical digressions with some light neuroscience, he doesn’t just explain thing to us, but makes us wonder about some things we consider given such as the production os saliva in our mouths. Why do we behave in some ways we can’t control, and how we act in the ones we can control. Above all, why if asked where inside our body where our selves would be, we answer “inside our heads”.

A wonderful book I recommend to anyone curious about their head.

Ricardo Martins’s post (along with several similar ones) about switching to jekyll, a static generator in Rails. Even Jeff Atwood, a windows-centric developer, is a fan of Movable Type, a perl-written static generator blog engine.

The advantages of a static generator for blogs or more static websites are clear: reads are much faster and will help your website survive digg, hacker news and reddit. It will also ease on the CPU and Database.

This wiki runs on Django (source available), so to implement static generation it was clear I should use Jared Kuolt’s staticgenerator app. The documentation is pretty good but I found two small details I should point out.

First, my urls didn’t ended in /, so the generated files didn’t have an extension and weren’t properly served by apache (no mimetype, so html wasn’t processed). When I changed them, static generator considers them a folder, so adds a index.html inside it and it just works (although your WEB_ROOT gets full of junk).

The other problem is that the documentation only mentions nginx configuration, and I am using Passenger under Apache. Which is even more simple, you just have to point WEB_ROOT to the public folder under your project. You can see my settings-prod.py which has all those settings.

I don’t have any popular website under this machine, so I can’t see the results just yet, but I got to get my hands dirty.

Back in the days when I formatted my desktop every week, I tried a lot of linux distros, including SUSE. 6 or so years forward and I haven’t touched any of them. My choice is Ubuntu for both the server and desktop. Mainly for being widespread (and therefore lot of troubleshooting resources, and .deb’s for almost everything out there).

Last week I got back to SUSE because Novell launched SUSE Studio, an online service for building your own configuration. You select the OS you want (OpenSUSE, SUSE Enterprise 10 and 11), the software packages and even your own files. You then download it as a standard ISO, USB image, VMware or XEN virtual machines. You even got the bonus of booting it in their servers, and use a Flash VPS client to try it.

This is an awesome idea that I believe Canonical and even RedHat will mimic sometime soon. This allows businesses and organizations to make their own distros based on a mainstream one, but with the software packages they depend on.

I am personally interested in being able to build custom small and light virtual machines for each of my project, with only the dependencies needed. We are only waiting for Level 1 Virtualization to be mass-deployed.

Another of my interests in the project it to select the software stack for my servers and download the VMWare/Xen image for local testing or for deploying in my VPS host. Actually I believe that such service providers like Amazon, Slicehost, Linode and others should provide a system like this one, but with more OS choices and we could rent it on the fly. I know there are a few companies that have automated setups that can do almost as SUSE Studio, but the VPS on-the-fly would rock.

Novell is really impressing me with this project, and the on-going work with Mono.

SciFi is a futurology practice of telling you the possibilities of our future, an help for us to understand the choices we have today to help us shape the future.

I totally agree with Marcos’s SciFi post and even if it’s not a prediction of the problems we will have, it might work as inspiration for those who develop new technologies.

Since I can remeber I have been using Google Reader as my default feed manager and reader. It works across all my devices (pda, notebook, desktop, and other people’s pc) and I haven’t seen any other option with such a good mobile interface.

I’ve tried a Adobe Air RSS reader that would sync with Google Reader, but it sucked like hell, so I my hopes for this new feature in NetNewsWire were not high.

For the short time of usage I gave it, the sync worked (Haven’t noticed the folder disruption), but it’s not seamless, you know it happens somehow in the background and it takes time (specially when you have got nearly 600 feeds you subscribe to).

Secondly, I have used GReader for years, so I might be biased here, but I find the inline content much more useful than the 3-panel NetNewsWire uses. I use the same view in Mail.app (which I prefer to gmail) since I want to read every email. But in my RSS feed, I just want to skim over the items, and open in a new tab those that are interesting. So I don’t actually read anything in my feed reader, except when in my mobile phone. How would I appreciate the webdesign of some of the blogs I subscribe to?

The last and more important reason I use Google Reader is the social features, that allow me to share news with my friends (and receive those shared by them). This is incredible valuable for me. Until NNW implements the sharing feature, I am not using it. How would I maintain my current position of King of the Reader?

Meses depois de ter mudado de casa, recebi ordens superiores para esvaziar a casa. Fica aqui uma lista de coisas originais que não tenho onde colocar. O preço é igual para todos os items: simplesmente virem-nos buscar.

Duração: Até hoje (31 de Julho)

Software

• Windows Vista Ultimate (levifig)
• Half Life

Hardware

• Torre Compaq Presario com AMD K6-2, leitor de dvd e gravador de CD.
• Monitor 15’‘ CRT Compa Presario

Música

(Algumas das caixas do CD podem estar danificadas, confirmo mediante o caso)

• Gorillaz -Gorillaz (a versão sem as duas faixas bónus, a primeira)
• Guano Apes – Don’t give me names @grandenaboverde
• Guano Apes – Walking on a thin line @grandenaboverde
• The Offspring – Americana
• The Offspring – Conspiracy of One
• Orxestra Pitagórica – a2 + b2 = c2 (não tem a capa da frente, mas isto é um item raro!)

So the Marvel guys are getting some of their hit titles in anime versions. I am finding this somewhat weird and maybe disturbing. I have yet to see a good anime-comics crossover with excellent results.

The IronMan Trailer is OK. A bit of an anime touch, but a american idea after all. If all the productions go like this, I won’t get mad at them, but I don’t see the point of doing this. Even the 90ies TV series were this good, they would only need a bit of a revamp, not the Anime style.

As for Wolverine, the thing has nothing to do with the Wolverine I know. The character, the story, the foes visible in the trailer are all 100% anime. Even the claws! I don’t get the point in this, they could do an awesome anime without even getting into Marvel Universe.

Well, this might be just me, wanting to keep good things in their place.

Hide&Seek Festival is taking place in London’s Southbank Centre starting today. I really wish I could be there to play all those social games. CapeTown would be a must. Also, most of the rules are available with a CC license, so you could gather with some friends and play them.

I am currently reading Peter F. Hamilton’s work and in his Commonwealth universe, each person has a connection to the unisphere, a future version of the internet but connected directly to your brain.

Until such thing is possible, we have to lose concentration on our environment to access the wonders of the worldwide network. Danah Boyd writes about how she prefers to use digital backchannels during presentations.

My colleagues interrupt the talk with questions. (One admits that he asks questions because he’s more interested in talking to the speaker than listening… he also asks questions to stay awake.) I find the interruptions to the speaker to be weirdly inappropriate. I much much prefer to ask questions to Twitter, Wikipedia, and IRC/IM. Let the speaker do her/his thing… let me talk with the audience who is present and those who are not but might have thoughtful feedback. When I’m inspired, I ask questions. When I’m not, I zone out, computer or not.

Being even younger than her and lacking the older traditions, I actually prefer to have a conversation with the speaker, than commenting with the rest of the audience via twitter/wtv. It will only work with small audiences of course, but if that speaker was invited to talk, it’s because he knows (or should know) about the subject, and I want to learn from him not only the contents of his talk, but how that contents should fit my purposes.

There’s no doubt that I barely understood what the speaker was talking about. But during the talk, I had looked up six different concepts he had introduced (thank you Wikipedia), scanned two of the speakers’ papers to try to grok what on earth he was talking about, and used Babelfish to translate the Italian conversations taking place on Twitter and FriendFeed in attempt to understand what was being said. Of course, I had also looked up half the people in the room (including the condescending man next to me) and posted a tweet of my own.

Sure there are a lot of interest things to dig into, but I usually check the bio before the talk, and the “related links” after, and email the speaker if I need to (have done it a few times). Sure there are some immediate online checks you have to do, but they are rare.

Of course I believe having a computer (or any other online-device) is a bonus in any presentation, specially if it’s a class with a boring teacher (or a boring business or marketoid if that fits you).

A lot has been said about the dumped XHTML 2 specs. But the best thing I ever read about it, that’s both correct and clear is this comic. Via @brunofigueiredo

For what it’s worth, I believe the XHTML syntax is better because I believe strict is always better when you write and it makes easy to integrate existing XML tools to generate/read/transform HTML content.

One of the things I don’t like about django is the lack of a decent project folder structure. I know it’s a good thing its flexibility, but the default one is really awkward. There are several problems with it:

• Lack of a default layout for different environments (development, testing, production, and yours).
• Settings require the full path to media directory, and there is no default place.
• I like templates to be at the app-level instead of project-level.

And a few more I’m not remembering now.

To solve these problems, I created a django default template for my projects with my conventions, that you can use or fork to adapt to your own if you want. I could go with a more fancy solution for the environments, but since I don’t have a testing server, the settings-prod works pretty fine. Other option is to check sys.uname to see if it’s running in the production server or not.

Since I got my own VPS, I’ve been deploying django using passenger (including this wiki) and it’s working pretty fine, so I am now using the passenger branch of the layout.

Yet another movie I can’t wait to see!