Erlang is a concurrent programming language, used a lot in distributed sistems.
Erlang is a concurrent programming language, used a lot in distributed sistems.
Sempre achei que as bolsas eram muito fraquinhas, e que as empresas pagam mais por trabalhos que acabam por ser menos complexos. Fica assim pouco incentivo à investigação que não o gosto pessoal.
Fica um artigo bastante bom sobre as bolsas pagas aos cientistas.
Ligo a televisão hoje (já não a ligava à valentes semanas) e deparo-me com a Manuela Moura Guedes muito mais gorda e deforme a entrevistar o Presidente para a Autoridade Nacional da Regulação da Comunicação Social.
Podem ver aqui a entrevista bastante cómica. Eu não consigo porque eles teimam em usar o RealMedia plugin…
Não percebo nada de política é um excelente post de Luís Miguel Sequeira, enorme (verdadeiramente enorme) mas tem qualidade ao quadrado. Para quem não gosta de política, mas especialmente para aqueles que se queixam do Governo a torto e a direito.
Se virem que não têm tempo para o ler, substituam a secção de política do vosso jornal por este post. Mesmo que por 6 meses.
Vale mesmo a pena!
So SHiFT stands for Social and Human Ideas for Technology and it is a great event in the areas of Interaction, Social Design, Usability, Web, Mobile, etc…
I’d like to start this post by thanking SAPO who gently offered free tickets to Portuguese students, which includes me. Unfortunately I could only attend on the last day (damn you school!) and this is some ideas I got from the day.
Although short, this presentation focused the need of bringing online experiences (like the prosumer) to urban design, in his case a project where we gathered graffiti writers from Bairro Alto in workshops and practicing in a way that benefits themselves and the community around them. Surely a project to follow!
I managed to get the end of Brian Suda’s presentation on microformats, and I noted down about the Long Now Foundation, that uses 5 digits in the year representation. 02008 has a different impression in people than 2008: the first makes our lifetime really small in scale than the second one.
h3. Delphine Ménard – Catching up with the cultural gapIn general, this talk mentioned the need for specific attention to the cultural gap between different cultures that interact with each others all the time. And even when you’re on the web, you have to be really careful with localization and, if you can, adapt the site to each cultural/linguistic community (pt-PT, pt-BR, en-UK, en-US, etc…) and not just in language, but sometimes in content or even in the business logic. Different users from different places may expect your service to work in different ways, so you should aim for the stereotype and then improve with the feedback you get.
In 2030 the portable computer is expected to store 1 Petabyte (1.000.000 Gb), so that’s going to be a lot of data. In order for that data to make sense and be useful for us we must be able to visualize, navigate and manage that non-ending information. That’s the motto for his project VisualComplexity.com where he tries to gather different kinds of visualizations of data, and tries to match the ones that help us to understand each subject or relationship better. The presentation was full of examples you’ll be able to see in the powerpoint later.
Ending the morning sessions, Susana gave an interesting talk on how including usability in your development may not only improve the quality of your software, but also reduce your costs ( money and time included). This works pretty well if you are using an agile methodology since you can run usability tests whenever you have some valuable piece done. This way users can evaluate what you have already done, and give you information right from the start of things that you may not doing properly instead of only mentioning when the product is done, and you waste a lot of time going back, correcting and redoing the whole project. However, you should keep in mind that bringing the user into the developing process may be complicated since they don’t work the same way as developers do, and may make your life harder.
Everyone wants to be a rockstar. Even if they don’t have a clue about how to play music (which is my case1). And you don’t have to know how to play the guitar, you just have to work as a rock band would do. Each rock band has a manager, that handles the secondary stuff to allow each band member to do what they do best. And then there is the coolness factor, since you can get fans not only be playing very well in your field, but also by worrying about your users concerns (the example of Nokia being the greener of the telephone manufactures). One other thing your company can learn from rock bands is to have groupies, that elite group of fans that really worships your music, and works as a wonderful marketing machine (here, the obvious example of Apple).
I got to see the end of Fred’s presentation that fitted quite well in this theme, since we (developers) should not only aim for what our user needs right now, but what they might need, and achieve that coolness through the quality of service.
This slot gave me an hard choice, and I ended up not seeing Tara Hunt even if a few meters away, but I related more to the problems of the Online Culture in the education of teenagers. Being a teenager myself2 and having given a few classes to younger students, I really understood the problems that exist between the parents and teachers that don’t get this computer stuff, and teenagers avid for exploring this new world. Neglecting an important part of their children’s life is not the best approach, since communicating online brings the same dangers (and maybe some more) than communicating in the real world. Parents and Teachers should be aware of the culture that exists online (not necessarily to be a part of it) in order to educate teenagers to interact and socialize safely in the Internet.
I got to ride a Segway for the first time, and even though it’s amazing how that thing works so well, the ratio price/what you can use it for is not that good.
I’d like to thank the organization for the great event that happened, bringing world-class speakers (and even attendees) to our country that resulted in this wonderful gathering of ideas and people.
Oh, you were looking for pictures, right? There you go!
See you next year!
1 In fact, apart from school, I had piano lessons for 4 years, and if I get in front of my keyboards, I don’t know what key should I play.
2 Even if only for a month or so now.
Internet is not totally free since you have to follow the rules of the country you’re in. So here’s a question raised when writing this:
In a hypothetical situation, if I’m in Spain accessing my VPN in Portugal and publishing a post in my blog that is hosted in the USA, but the database where the content is stored is in Canada. Which laws should my post follow, since they vary from country to country? Spanish (where I’m writing the post), USA (where the content is distributed to others, or all of them?
So my wrist is hurting again, so I’ve been restraining myself from firing up Textmate and being productive.
In the list of things to do that didn’t include using the keyboard/mouse there was trying a new stand for my macbook. The current solution (using the macbook box) was not perfect, since the macbook was getting too hot.
Across my feeds, I found out that NYC Resistor are selling a cardbox stand cut with their laser machine in etsy. Since they don’t export to Portugal, I decided to copycat them and make my own.
The materials: a few foldable cardboxes I had in my bedroom for storing books
The tools: Two scissors (the regular one sucked, so I used a larger one)
The manual: This is not some IKEA product, so I had to try to replicate the original. The first prototype wasn’t that good. I had to give it another horizontal support so it could support my macbook. I found two other major flaws in the stand: the thingies on the edge were too small, and the support was too high (it balanced a lot).
In my second try, i opted for resistance instead of beauty. The result was quite impressive. I doubt it will last more than a month, but it was cool to do nevertheless.
Looks like I’ve got back to using the keyboard now, damn it!
XMPP is the standard for real-time communication. There is also xmpp-im implemented on top, that is used in Jabber and GoogleTalk, but you can also use XMPP for other ends, such as PubSub.
Clients:
Servers:
Resources:
I’ve finally got to watch the IronMan movie yesterday. Everybody at the time said the picture really rocked and it was a great movie, but I must disagree. Why?
Because I may have been one of the few that watched last year’s (2007) The Invincible Iron Man which tells the same story, but with Mandarin (his archenemy) instead of the terrorists. And from then on it’s a total different story. Knowing IronMan like I did, the movie was not according to what I knew before and for any Marvel fan, it was disappointing.1
And in the end, Tony admitting that he is IronMan? C’mon guys!
I’m giving up on Marvel’s movie adaptations and stick to old school cartoons. I just don’t read the comics anymore because they’re fucking expensive here!
1 Ok, it had the great special effects, but missed a few hot chicks
Mário wrote a post that could be written by me (except I haven’t met him live), and I’d like to quote a couple of things:
Secondly, please respect the freedom of choice. The freedom to use whatever we want to use.
This is the fucking more important thing you should learn form that post. This is why I don’t believe in the Free Software as in “All software should be opensourced and free to change, distribute and so.”. This is one of the things I’m not happy with GPL. They claim it’s totally free, but it isn’t. If you want to make any change to it, you have to make those changes available to everybody. That’s why in my personal opensource projects, I use the WTFPL.
Free software doesn’t need proprietary software to fail so it can thrive. Both can coexist.
I’ve been saying this shit right from the start, actually I’ve said it: “I believe both OpenSource and Proprietary Software should co-exist.” And they called me nuts. A friend of mine, who really supports OpenSource model, justifies that he doesn’t contribute because that doesn’t pay the bills at the end of the day, and he doesn’t want to do any more development outside of his working day. And I’m understanding that.
Oh, just as a final note: this post was written on the same day I wrote an memo for a school assignment trying to convince the Justice Ministry to change to Free Software. (With started to happen a while ago)
After some steps to embrace the OpenSource model, specially thanks to IronRuby and IronPython projects, the day has come.
Microsoft is shipping OpenSource tools as part of one of their products: jQuery will be part in ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio, with Intellisense support!
This is great news not because of jQuery itself (nevertheless, my congratulations to John Resig’s team), but because Microsoft is selling a product together with OpenSource code. This has been battled with a lot of effort by the IronPython and Ruby teams. For instance, IronPython is OpenSource, but cannot accept contributions from the community (in source code, bug reports are welcome). And until today, I thought they were doing the same approach with the JS toolkit for ASP.NET.
There’s this project Gimme ECMAScript (or Javascript if you prefer) library designed to make working with “everyone’s favorite scripting language” fun again!_ It is OpenSource, but since it was made by Microsoft:
Due to some licensing restrictions, code contributions from the community will not be accepted, however the Gimme source code is completely free and open to all who wish to view it and learn from it.
I’m glad Scottgu decided not to go with Gimme but with jQuery. (nothing against Gimme, but the community around jQuery is so much wider) This is the real step that tell us that Microsoft is really changing!
The other thing is we’ve integrated 3-D effects in Flash Player 10, so you can now do 3-D transformations and you can have a lot of great 3-D control, and across CS4 3-D is a pervasive element of the tooling. Even within Photoshop you can bring in a 3-D model now and you can actually paint in 3-D on the model. And that is amazing to see that work.
So if you are using Creative Suite and using Dreamweaver and you want to understand how your Web page is going to actually look across browsers, you used to have to have all the different browsers on your computer and run Linux, Macintosh and Windows to test your pages. It was a pretty laborious process. So what we’re doing now is we’re hosting a browser testing solution or a way to simulate what the browsers look like. That’s an example of how we’re providing services with the tools and that’s a big shift in how we’re actually building our software now. We’re really embracing hosted services.
I think the amount of innovation that we were trying to do with ECMAScript 4 perhaps was too big of a leap for some and they wanted to see a more collaborative approach on that. So the standards process is a collaborative one where there are lots of points of view. And we’re happy to continue working in the process to advance ECMAScript. But we’re hoping that innovation can happen faster and that we can raise the level of scripting on the Web.
So with Thermo we’re enabling you to take your visual assets that you’ve drawn in a creative tool like Photoshop and you can actually select the items that you drew in Photoshop and you can turn them into interactive items just by clicking on an item and saying “make this a button” or “make this a scroll bar.” (…) And you’re able to connect those components through drag-and-drop. So without writing any code, you’re able to create the interactivity of your application.
There’s something called scene carving that is now incorporated into our tools. (…) And that allows you to re-size an image. And that not just to make an image smaller, it will remove parts of the image that aren’t as important as other parts. So you can re-size something and it will drop out some background scenery and keep the people in the picture.
Also in terms of the Web runtime there’s research going on in performance and virtual machines, just-in-time compilers, etc.
Source: eWeek
I’ll give a prize to those who can perform Rock Movement Number #4
The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop? – Larry Ellison
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Via Fábio Pedrosa
Na sequência do concurso de empreendedorismo ARRISCA Coimbra 2008, o Gats juntamente com a AAC tem organizado uma série de workshops sobre empreendedorismo. Convidado pelo Miguel da jeefeuc fui hoje à sala de formação do IPN para assistir ao evento.
Gostaria apenas de notar que apesar de aceitar a falta de pausas (devido as restrições de tempo), as cadeiras do auditório eram bastante desconfortáveis e ainda agora me doem as costas.
Seguem de seguida as minhas notas sobre o evento. Foram 3 paineis de dois oradores cada, e intervenções de 20 minutos. A participação da audiência foi miníma.
Miguel Júdice, administrador do Grupo Quinta das Lágrimas
João Paulo Craveiro, Presidente da Sociedade de Reabilitação Urbana Coimbra Viva.
A apresentação foi muito fraca, porque limitou-se a ler um texto escrito, e basicamente veio vender o seu peixe.
Em relação ao discurso que o Presidente da República deu hoje na ONU:
MJ:
JPC:
Jorge Figueira, do Gabinete de Apoio às Transferências do Saber da Universidade de Coimbra, apresentou o concurso arrisca, e falou sobre como estruturar um plano de negócios. Este pode ser usado tanto para comunicação externa (novos elementos ou investidores), ou como ferramenta de orientação e planeamento interna.
Assim que tiver acesso, coloco online.
Nuno Gomes, da BIC Minho
Ernesto Vieira, do Grupo Auto-Sueco
Bruno Carvalho, gestor da Active Space Technologies
1 Concordo com o Vitor Santos da Microsoft, em que o empreendedorismo não se pode ensinar apenas nas Universidades. Nessa altura já é tarde de mais. Deve-se começar na escola logo desde o ensino básico.
Agradeço as ofertas dos portáteis às crianças que podiam ser meus filhos, penso sinceramente que iremos colher os benefícios de tal medida a médio prazo, mas pedia encarecidamente que não se esquecessem da minha geração, aquela que faz parte da grande fatia do trabalho precário em Portugal, aquela onde os licenciados que tiraram o seus cursos contra as politicas anti-educativas da altura andam a receber a recibos verdes o pão nosso de poucos dias
So after my first real project in ASP.NET 2.0, I’ve never touched ASP.NET again. It’s simply ugly. And coding for the web in a language like C#, or Java is really a PITA. I just want my logic explained, and it’s one of the reasons for Ruby on Rails success.
But today Microsoft has made a small step that may make me experiment some stuff in their web technology again:
This afternoon we released a refresh of our DLR/IronPython support for ASP.NET, now called “ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support”, on our CodePlex site.
This means I will be able to do MVC web applications in Python (or Ruby). This is their response to the RoR success. Of course I like Django the most and I may even use it in the MS stack. This because the Microsoft teams for the IronRuby and IronPython are working to get Rails and Django working in their platforms, which is a really cool thing coming from the company that we all know well.
I know this blog is very technological centered with a bit of politics here and there, but today I’m inspired and I’ll write a bit about TV shows.
When i was a kid (and I had no internet) I was a TV-o-holic. And even today, I find a good show as much art as any regular book I read. My problem is that there are a lot of shows, and I don’t have the time to watch them all. Ok, I have, but I’m not like Laginha because I like to use my free time to learn and improve my skills.
So this is week is the reentré of the season, and there were quite a few shows starting. In my list there was Big Bang Theory, Prison Break S3 and later today Fringe. Stargate Atlantis is pending the download of Season 4 ;) And Heroes is not high priority right now. Maybe later.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that I can categorize shows into three kinds. The ones which episodes are (almost) independent, like Friends, Simpsons or Big Bang Theory. That ones you can see one alone that it won’t be a problem, and you don’t have to follow it.
The, there are the series that you follow, but they are not that dependent on the rest of the episodes. I’d include Fringe in this one, and maybe SGA.
The last one are the all-in-a-row shows. 24 is the best example of this. I cannot watch it weekly. It drives me nuts. 24 hours watching 24 rocks1. I’m watching the third season of Prison Break weekly and I’m hating it. And I’m not sure if I can wait until the end, since I’ll get spoilers all the time :/
1 It’s not really 24 hours, since episodes last 45 minutes since the commercials are cut off in the bittorrent channel ;)
Na sequência da carta enviada pelo Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior dirigida ao Presidente do Conselho de Reitores no passado dia 10 de Setembro, repudiando de forma veemente a prática das praxes académicas infligidas aos estudantes que ingressam no Ensino Superior, e dando conta da intenção de responsabilizar civil e criminalmente, por acção e por omissão, os órgãos próprios da instituição sempre que se demonstre a existência de práticas ofensivas para os estudantes, fica decidido:
- Não reconhecer legitimidade a qualquer auto-denominada comissão de praxe, proibindo as actividades que neste momento lhes estão associadas nos campi da Alameda e do Taguspark;
- Proibir a prática de praxes académicas nos campi da Alameda e do Taguspark, qualquer que seja a forma como são organizadas.
Qualquer violação a esta directiva deverá ser comunicada ao Conselho Directivo da Escola, que agirá em conformidade, não estando excluída a possibilidade de abertura de um processo disciplinar ao(s) elemento(s) prevaricador(es)
Fonte: @miguelpais e mais uns poucos via Twitter
Ao contrário do que devem estar a pensar, aqui o Alcides anti-praxe não está de acordo com a medida tomada. De facto acho uma estupidez.
Eu não estou dentro do assunto, mas suponho que esta decisão tenha sido tomada no seguimento das informações passadas pelo Ministério do Ensino Superior. Logo a melhor solução é proibir a praxe por completo???
Ora o que é exactamente a praxe? É um código de conduta que tem como objectivo integrar os alunos, ou uma qualquer outra descrição tão abstracta quanto isto? Vão proibir qualquer acolhimento de novos alunos?
I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it. – Voltaire
Eu não concordo com a praxe e acho que não é necessária para a integração dos alunos, e que tem até aspectos negativos em várias situações. No entanto a solução não é proíbi-la! Isso só lhe dá mais identidade e ainda mais força. Os alunos é que têm de perceber isso por eles próprios. Não obrigados pela instituição.
De facto, o texto foi infeliz. Deviam ter escrito algo como o que o Nuno Job escreveu no blog:
A participação nas actividades com significado académico ou sócio-cultural, integradas no acolhimento aos novos alunos, tem carácter voluntário, pelo que nenhuma forma de coacção física ou psicológica deve ser permitida nas instalações da Universidade.
Não são autorizadas em nenhuma circunstância, manifestações de acolhimento, fora do Programa de Acolhimento aos Novos Alunos, que perturbem o normal funcionamento das actividades da Universidade.
Isto faria sentido, até porque sei de vários casos em que os alunos querem ir as aulas, mas são obrigados a faltarem para ir a praxe com os doutores. Durante o tempo lectivo era de evitar. Agora fora dele, não vejo porque não possam fazer as figuras parvas que se voluntariarem para fazer. Claro que nesse caso a culpa tb é dos caloiros que não sabem dizer que não. Mas muitos têm medo que depois não possam vestir o traje, de que tanto se orgulham. O que, já agora, não tem lógica nenhuma. Qualquer aluno, mesmo que não ligue a praxe, pode usar o traje sem problema nenhum.