Alcides Fonseca

Peter Saint-Andre posts about the way he sees governments: something abstract that is powered by individuals that believe in it, just like religions.

The authority of a particular religion’s god derives from an asserted monopoly over divinity (thou shalt share in the divine only through participation in this church). The authority of a particular country’s government derives from an asserted monopoly over power (thou shalt have strength only through participation in this government department or function). On this theory, the goodness or power of the people (i.e., ultimately of individuals) comes about only through the grace of the monopolists — not from the inborn features, acquired customs, and hard work of the people.

I oppose the monopolists. I think that divinity and power, properly defined, are all and only individual, and that institutions derive their just divinity and power from the individuals who participate in those institutions.

The Bird and The Bee – Again & Again

Já não metia aqui música há muito tempo. Obrigado à cientista por me lembrar.

This is not a post complaining about gmail’s downtime. It’s about their response.

I happen to follow Google’s Official Blog they published a small text about this incident.

First, it was written by the guy directly responsible for this. Not some PR guys trying to reduce the problem, but the guy who as the ass on the line here. This is a huge difference.

And he focus on the right thing: explaining users that this is not usual, but happened and they are doing their best to a) make it work again and b) find the problem. Although sometimes a) requires b), their priority is clear. They also understand that businesses and people depend on their service, and take that into account.

One of the best responses I saw to a downtime, and by the biggest player.

Also on this subject, take a look at Gary’s video on turning negatives into positives.

Cara ASAE,

Parece que multaram uma empresa por ter um site com a funcionalidade de Convidar um Amigo.. Ora os CTT, cujo principal accionista é o Estado fez exactamente o mesmo no passatempo Amigos ViaCTT, também não deveriam ser multados?

Assim como todos os sites portugueses que façam uso de sistema de referral. E ainda me têm de explicar como é que isto é um esquema em pirâmide, havendo apenas descontos nos respectivos serviços/produtos?

I never got into this podcast/video cast thing. It takes more attention that I want to give it, since I’m always doing something else in my computer apart from listening to audio.

Tiago writes more about this problem and I totally agree with him.

I guess this is why I didn’t go with Rails ;)

Giant Robo – The Day Earth Stood Still is a OVA from the original Giant Robo manga¹. The plot is set in a alternate future where all the energy is supplied by a miraculous Shizuma Driva that replaced Fossil fuels when renewable sources weren’t successful. Apart from that interesting idea (and the problems that it brought), GR is a mecha anime and the main characters have super powers.

Giant Robo has been called “one of the true timeless classics of Anime”, an epic in the vein of Homer’s Iliad and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Mike Crandol of Anime News Network says Imagawa “takes the best of the old and mixes it with the best of the new to create the definitive giant robot story.” John Huxley of Anime Boredom concludes the series is “the super robot show as it was in your mind’s eye, a perfect combination of the old without the disappointment of reality.”

I wouldn’t go that far, but it is indeed an epic anime.

¹ Doesn’t have anything to do with homonymous movie

“From a distance, when you think of anarchists you think of big boots and fighting with policemen,” he says. “But all the ones I’ve met have been very nice, very committed people. They believe in something and they want to find love, just like everyone else. Why would that surprise anyone?”

Anarchists deserve a Valentine’s day too.

New House

Right now I am moving and cleaning stuff. For a start, I am moving places for a while. I am sleeping and working in the old house (since the new one doesn’t have a proper internet connection yet, blame PT. With that, I will also be setting up a new network on the new house, with my foneras spreading the internet around the house.

New Server

The second thing I am doing is migrating my dreamhost account to a VPS at Flosoft. Although Slicehost’s admin panel is better, I’m going to pay for this one, so I’m giving it a try. For now the domain stuff is not going as smooth as I did in the past, so I’m considering moving all my domains to name.com and redirect the DNS from there to the VPS. You may expect some problems in alcidesfonseca.com, ideias3.com, pythonlovers.com and movio.com in the next week.

New OS X install

The third thing is my macbook. As anyone new to OS X, I installed a lot of junk and I find most of them useless. Also, I want to do a new directory structure, so I installed Leopard from the start. I saved stuff to my external disk and I can access the old stuff in the TimeMachine too.

Here’s a list of the software I installed:

General

• AdiumX
• Mail.app plugins:
  • Letterbox
  • GPGMail
• Safari (or Nightly Webkit)
  • Glims
• MarcoPolo
• Transmission

Dev

• Textmate
• MacPorts
  • sudo port install git-core
• Pip (For Python)

I also installed Netbeans, since I am using it for a project, but I don’t find it essential.

New Layout

I am thinking about redesigning this wiki, as well as alcidesfonseca.com but I gotta find some free time first. I gotta try some Webkit and Mozilla specific effects just for fun.

If you do have any suggestion, just shoot

Netbeans is a Java IDE that also supports Python, Ruby, C++, Javascript, and a few more. It’s a bit faster than eclipse and has a GUI generator.

Resources:

• OS X look in the development build
• OS X style for 6.5
• Dark theme

Troubleshooting

• Making a Netbeans class project into an executable

Estas últimas notícias do BE realmente vieram a confirmar que eles devem mesmo andar a fumar umas coisa esquesitas.

Primeiro Ana Drago defende que se deve aumentar o salário mínimo e as pensões na sua moção. Concordo com o facto que o desemprego vai ser o maior problema nos próximos tempos, mas se se vão aumentar os gastos com os subsídios de desemprego, porque vamos ainda gastar mais dinheiro com o salário mínimo e com as pensões. Onde se vai buscar então o dinheiro para isso? Ou ele é infinito e ninguém me avisou?

Depois no discurso de Francisco Louçã, ele afirma que é necessário proíbir o despedimento por empresas com resultados. Ora a ele ter um partido jeitosinho não lhe chega, e quer também mandar em todas as empresas? Claro que é uma decisão de cada uma. Com a crise os portugueses têm de apertar o cinto e reduzir os custos, mas as empresas já não? Claro que as empresas para manterem os resultados poderão ter de reduzir o pessoal, mas cada uma é que sabe.

E Franciso Louçã tenta convencer-nos de que o dinheiro não importa, mas sim o trabalho que este é que move o país. Ora o dinheiro é apenas uma forma de quantificar o trabalho que é feito, assim como muitas outras coisas. O dinheiro transforma-se em trabalho e vice-versa, regendo-se pela lei da oferta e da procura.

Em relação à privatização. Existirem concessões/privatizações não impede necessariamente que os Portugueses não tenham direito à Saúde, à Educação, à Energia… As regulamentações de cada área servem exactamente para isso. E acredito que fosse funcionar até melhor, pois as empresas preocupam-se mais com a eficiência e eficácia do que muitos serviços públicos. E aqui não me refiro aos lucros gerados pelos aumentos de produtividade, mas resultados nos clientes satisfeitos.

Seems like Bill Gates is not the only one to have a foundation that cares about education, but George Lucas has has one¹. I discovered in its website a terrific presentation on the new way education and businesses should look at collaboration and the profile they should be looking for.

Just a couple of notes from the presentation: First a portfolio is way more important than résumés. The latter reveals what you could do while the former tells what you have really done. When I was watching it, I heard a phrase that really expresses what an innovator is:

“the core skill of innovators is error-recovery, not failure-avoidance”

¹ Rich guys always need to reduce taxes, that’s why every soccer player in Europe has one.

Python’s use of indentation comes directly from ABC, but this idea didn’t originate with ABC—it had already been promoted by Donald Knuth and was a well-known concept of programming style. (The occam programming language also used it.) However, ABC’s authors did invent the use of the colon that separates the lead-in clause from the indented block. After early user testing without the colon, it was discovered that the meaning of the indentation was unclear to beginners being taught the first steps of programming. The addition of the colon clarified it significantly: the colon somehow draws attention to what follows and ties the phrases before and after it together in just the right way.

Guido in The History of Python

The colon in identation is one of my doubts for my casual language.

A programming language that I am starting to work in.

It aims to be human-readable, DSLable like Ruby, use identation like Python, be functional like Scala and some stuff from Javascript.

Resources:

• An early study on syntax

Segunda-feira, o dia ideal para começar a trabalhar, right? Não. O dia de manhã era para ir a junta de freguesia com o Diogo tratar de nos recensearmos para podermos votar¹. Uma pessoa acorda cedinho (10h) vai até a outra casa buscar o carro e vai buscar o outro futuro eleitor.

Depois de 15 minutos a espera e quase a adormecer no carro, ele lá telefona a informar que agora o recenseamento eleitoral é feito automaticamente. Pediu-me os dados, inseriu num site todo catita em asp.net e aquilo deu os dados que preciso para votar.

Fiquei um misto de contente, por já estar despachado, e de frustrado porque podia tar muito bem na cama sem me preocupar com isto. Melhor divulgação da próxima vez quando tiverem iniciativas porreiras, ok?

¹ Sim, só o vou fazer aos 20 anos, porque quando fiz 18 já não aceitavam registos por causa das eleições para a legalização do aborto.

I haven’t seen such a good epic tale in a long time. This movie is about the invention of the Singijeon, a weapon that, along with strategy, gave Korea the victory against China, when in minority.

And the love story there works perfectly and I’m not just saying this because I have a soft heart.

I’m so damn lucky! I decide to switch back to delicious after more than a year using ma.gnolia because of their OpenID support. Unfortunately OpenID is not taking off as it should have, so I decided to use the one with the best user interface, so I went back and imported all my ma.gnolia bookmarks into delicious.

Looks like today it went down with data corruption and loss. I’m so damn lucky!

A while ago I read an interesting article about MDIs in Mac OS. OS X is design to have multiple documents in it’s own window, and exposé and spaces behave according to that pattern. An exception (by Apple itself) is the tabbed Safari.

Users that have a lot of windows opened at the same time really enjoy having tabs, and it was a huge success in Mozilla Suite and it also worked out pretty good in Safari. So why did they broke their own rule?

I decide to give single-page windows a try. I usually have only a couple of tabs open, but when reading feeds I end up with more than 20, being my “todo list”. I am also a mouse-user. I do use shortcuts, but when reading, my right hand is scrolling the page in my mouse.

I was expecting a few advantages from this new way of using Safari. Having pages in one window each would allow me to switch pages by their content, and not only their title as I would in tabs. I would also be able to minimize it to the dock for later reading. In the end, I never minimized any page (as I don’t use that feature at all) and I spend more time looking for the right page than with tabs, since exposé makes different arrangements with the same windows, depending on the active one.

At first, using windows as the same as tabs, but when I started working with the keyboard, everything changed. To open a new tab I was used to type cmd+T with just the left hand, now I have to use both hands to type cmd+N, which sucks since I want to be able to use the mouse with the other hand. Another issue with shortcuts was the navigation between open websites. I switch tabs by using cmd+shift+arrow keys. With windows, I have to cycle them with cmd+shift+` [1] so there’s no back and forth.

Since I have a black macbook, I am only equipped with an integrated graphics card, which is perfectly fine for its purpose, but with more than 15 windows, exposé was breaking a little. And I looove exposé so much, I can’t bare it to slow down, so with all of this in mind, I switched back to tabs after a couple of days.

If this is something that interests you, make sure to check the How do People Use Tabs presentation.

¹ Yep, seems like apple doesn’t care a little about people who don’t use US/UK keyboards.

O Senhor Obama ainda não tinha assumido o cargo, e já estava a mudar o mundo. Há poucos dias o Vaticano começou a olhar para a web social e criou o seu canal no youtube.

Já em Portugal, temos a nossa presidência a seguir o exemplo, criando uma conta no Twitter e no Sapo Vídeos. Eu gostaria era de ver o Mário Soares a fazer o vídeo de apresentação. Gostei deste passo, agora só falta cortar no palavreado e ir directo ao assunto :)

The French state will help provide free newspaper subscriptions to teenagers for their 18th birthdays, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced Friday. But the bigger gift is for France’s ailing print media.

Source: Associated Press

I find it a useful solution for this problem since it may make teens more aware of their citizenship. And they are just applying the trial method that you see everywhere in the industry.

“It is indeed its responsibility … to make sure an independent, free and pluralistic press exists,” he said.

I totally agree. But I have a better solution: don’t support print media at all. If their market is dying, they should adapt to the new one. They have to move on to the online media, and that way you will not only help the press, as well as internet-related industries. Oh, and teens will also access those news because they already have a presence online.

I just added to my applebin folder a new theme for the Mac OS X Terminal: Readable

Just some minor changes from GiovanniStyle