Alcides Fonseca

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!

When developing REST APIs, HTTPClient is a great help for mac developers like me. It gives you the power of cURL and other libraries, but with a Mac GUI. You can set headers and params for PUT, GET, POST, HEAD and DELETE requests.

One of the problems I had were the Django error messages that were HTML formatted. HTTPClient only shows the source code, so I had a little trouble decoding those messages. Getting an optional WebKit View there was one of my ideas to first nail Cocoa and ObjC programming.

Looks like Steven Osborn already did that, and now everyone can enjoy those changes.

For a while, I’ve started to buy books in English only (except for the on-going collections), but I’m somehow disappointed with their physical format. The books (at least the ones I buy in Fnac¹) are small and bulky, pocketbook style.

I have a hard time actually reading those books, not for the content but for the way I have to hold the book. And in the end, it will always look really used and the cover gets all wrinkled.

I don’t really care about having an album CD or Vinyl record, but I do about owning a book, and having it in my shelf. But the problems it is causing for me makes me doubt.

I have ever lived in the same city and I only had to carry all my books once, a few months ago when I moved places. It was not complicated, since I moved to only two streets away. But I might be moving to another city or even country in the future (I’d really want to try) and it will be painful to let my books go, or just a pain in the *** to move it all.

I am really considering getting a Kindle or something like that, that would actually be handy and comfortable.

¹ I would link to their site, but it sucks like hell. Go to a store near you, if you can.

I’m a huge fan of the Stargate Series. I’ve watched the movie, SG-Atlantis and now marathoning through SG-1 (currently S4). I got really upset when I found out Atlantis was being canceled, but now that the new SG-Universe trailer is released, I have more hopes (too bad the “across the universe with a falling-apart spaceship” already happened in Atlantis” plot).

Having a programming background, I find CSS a bit limited in my developing workflow. It does not ease the structural organization, and DRY concepts I’m used to. And the expression is now considered evil!

I have found LESS, a super-set of CSS that fits my needs, specially the use of variables, since I repeat the same color over and over again in my code, and I want to change it in just one place.

The main problem is that it requires code to be compiled (or interpreted) to CSS. It is not a big problem in my sinatra development, but there isn’t such a plugin for Django written in Python. It could be compiled via the command-line, but typing runserver wouldn’t do the trick then.

I really wish CSS evolves along with browser support, at least for the use of variables, that I miss like hell!

Humanity doesn’t have a nice future from now on. Smart people stop having children while dumbasses have one after another. While homo sapiens de-evolute, an average soldier and a prostitute hibernate due to a unsuccessful military project (Think Futurama’s Fry). When they woke up 500 years in the future, society is dumb as hell and the average soldier is the smartest man on earth (for good and evil). As for the prostitute, almost nothing changed.

It’s a nice adventure in the future, a future that resembled Wall-E’s, and among some dumb-dumb-dumb stuff, the way they handle the rest of the world is entertaining, and I really rolled on the floor when he did his Scoffield-trick to break jail.

Oh, and the end is predicable, amused me nevertheless.

Newspaper Club is a project that aims to give everyone the chance to make their own newspaper with content from online sources, in paper.

They are still developing their system, and blogging it!, and the biggest problem in my opinion has already being mentioned there: printers aren’t prepared to print such small numbers of each edition. But luckily they realize it’s the future and are willingly to try work it out.

When ebook readers are starting to get to alpha-geeks (and some targeting newspapers, like Amazon Kingle DX) it’s surprising to see some paper love around geeks.

Não sou propriamente fã de Miguel Sousa Tavares, mas adorei ler a crónica desta semana no Expresso (via @pfig) sobre as apostas dos governos em matéria de transportes e inovação.

Battle for the Sun is the newest album from Placebo. I’ve been a fan of the band since I’ve first listened to Special K (9 years ago) and this one is pretty good. I’d recommend this For what it’s worth and Battle for the Sun.

Karas (Corvo, em Português) é um OVA de 6 episódios lançada também em dois filmes de 3 episódios cada.

Para além dos humanos, em cada cidade existem também demónios (Yōkai), embora que não sejam normalmente vistos. No entanto existe um pequeno grupo, os Mikura que começam a atacar hospitais para se alimentarem de sangue humano. Esse grupo é liderado por Eko, o Karas da cidade desde o Período Edo. Karas é o protector da cidade, um humano que ganha poderes especiais ao ser escolhido pela Yurine, o espírito que representa a vontade das ruas.

Esses ataques começam a preocupar a população, ao ponto de criarem um grupo na polícia para investigar esses casos paranormais, e isso traduz-se numa nova Yurine e num novo Karas, que vai tentar proteger a cidade do seu predecessor.

A primeira parte do Anime integra-nos no cenário: os ataques dos Mikura, os primeiros confrontos entre os Karas, a forma como os humanos lidam com estes incidentes. Isto faria-nos esperar que a segunda parte fosse o desenlace da história, com uma batalha épica, mas o que encontramos é um aproximação mais profunda a cada um dos elementos da história e um final bastante inesperado! (Raro nos dias que correm)

Apesar de bastante interessante a história, grande parte do valor desta OVA é o estilo usado. A cidade é mostrada como sombria, lembrando Gotham City, e os personagens são vistos de forma séria, sem os chibis tradicionais do anime. Finalmente, Karas conta com a melhor integração de CGI que já vi alguma vez em anime! Nas cenas de batalha envolvendo um Karas, os efeitos 3D são aplicados de forma a fazerem parte do desenho anime, e não uma mudança brusca. Juntamente com o resto do filme, fazem uma OVA a não perder.

5 years ago my internet history would reveal a list of online-communities to which I belonged. Each community website was a CMS (PHPNuke, phpBB with a lot of plugins, or e107 if I was the admin) and had all the content related to that theme. The latest news, the downloads (or torrent) section, a forum for us to discuss stuff, a gallery, some articles and miscellaneous things that vary from scene to scene.

Today I get all my downloads from ThePirateBay (at least until now), all my news from Google Reader, I write all my long stuff in my blog (wether it is portuguese politics, music or even geeky posts), I write all my short stuff to twitter, and all my photos to flickr. Although there are tagging capabilities, you cannot group people and friends, so you share everything that matters to a specific group. The sense of online communities is dying with these services.

The only service in which communities play an important role is the one that survived from the Ice Age of the Internet: Email. I subscribe to a few mailing-lists and almost all of them are themed. I really want communities back, and services that empower them. The Internet is either getting Semantic and abstracting a lot of stuff, or it is going back from services to hosted applications.

I do miss the way I met new people with the same interests. Much more personal than adding the people facebook suggested you.

For those using twitter there are three main ways of representing a retweet:

RT @person: original twit

original twit (via @person)

♺ @person: original twit

The last one is clearly the shortest one (in twitter size does matter), and it’s the one I don’t really use. And I use the other two for different purposes, and I propose people do the same, since it makes easier to understand what kind of twit it is. The first form is used when you write exactly the same twit without change. The second form is used when I want to re-share a link (but could be other thing) and I add or modify the comment, but still want to credit the author.

What do you think?

Placebo – English Summer Rain

Um excelente texto humorístico sobre o sistema de educação se fosse aplicado 20 séculos antes.

Houvesse mais Anas (via @laginha) conta a aventura de uma Ana que se sentiu humilhada pelas praxes.

Ana Sofia Damião foi obrigada a suportar uma série de humilhações durante a praxe no Instituto Piaget de Macedo de Cavaleiros.

Foi obrigada? Tipo contra a sua vontade? Não tinha um telefone para chamar a Polícia no momento? Não conseguiu fugir ou chamar alguém? Ou se calhar não foi bem contra a sua vontade.

Depois de apresentar uma queixa à direcção e a resposta ter sido basicamente a indiferença, avançou com uma queixa-crime contra os agressores, tendo acabado por perder porque o Tribunal de Macedo de Cavaleiros achou que como não se tinha declarado “anti-praxe”, deveria obeceder às leis da praxe.

Mas considerando que foi mesmo obrigada, porque apresentou queixa à direcção da escola, e não directamente à polícia? E o tribunal dar aquela resposta ou indica que o tribunal é mesmo estúpido, ou que afinal ela não realizou as actividades contra a sua vontade…

Felizmente a Ana Sofia não baixou os baços e avançou com uma queixa contra a Direcção do Instituto, acabando este por ser obrigado – depois de vários recursos e chegando ao Supremo Tribunal – a assumir que protegia a violência dentro de portas e que legitimava as práticas da praxe, e a arcar com a responsabilidade.

Mas que culpa tem a Direcção? Os abusos foram feitos por alunos, eles é que devem responder perante o Tribunal. Quanto muito o Instituto deveria ter reencaminhado a aluna à polícia.

Se toda a gente que se sente agredida, humilhada, insultada pelas praxes tivesse a coragem e a persistência da Ana, isto não resistia.

Se toda a gente que se sente agredida, humilhada e insultada pelas praxes tivesse a coragem e persistência de a ignorar e recusar, situações destas provavelmente não aconteceriam. Se não concordam, não façam.

ART && CODE Symposium: Hackety Hack, why the lucky stiff from STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on Vimeo.

Famous why the lucky stiff presents on Hackety Hack and teaching code to kids. I really believe programs should be more human-friendly, mostly in a way a kid could play with it. You can read about in one of his blog entry.

When I moved all my stuff from Dreamhost to this VPS in slicehost, one thing that stopped working was the blog before this one. I started that one at alcides.ideias3.com and later moved to alcidesfonseca.com. It was my 7th or so blog, and as all the other ones, all hand-coded by me.

I wrote it as a demo project for my micro-web-framework pungi including features like cgi helpers, templates, html helpers and a ORM. I don’t know why (and I really did my best to figure it out) but it doesn’t work on the new box. Well, if I run python index.py in the shell, it prints the right html, but not via Apache.

Well, I wanted that archive online, so I did a little hack just to view the content using Sinatra (Ruby). I migrated the MySQL database to sqlite3 using a script I tweaked. The database schema was already defined, and I didn’t want to be changing it, so I needed a ORM that would fit just nice. DataMapper did the thing just well, and most of my pungi conventions applied to DM except for N-N relationships where I had plural nouns for foreign keys. The solution was really trivial, just override the foreign-key child id and it was working almost out of the box.

Thanks to simple things, I was able to get my old blog back online as an archive.