Aprender fora da Universidade sobre a importância das actividades extracurriculares.
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)
(Algumas das caixas do CD podem estar danificadas, confirmo mediante o caso)
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:
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.