Alcides Fonseca

Dave Winer writes about the need to rethink conferences

“Why are you going to that conference?” asks Jack.

“Just to hang out with the people,” says Jill.

It’s a cliche and nothing new. As long as I’ve been going to conferences, almost 30 years, that’s what people say, and do. Everyone’s in the room for the first few speeches and panels, but their eyes are fixed on their laptops. And after an hour or so, most of the people are out in the hallway.

I have a mixed experience regarding conferences. The Scientific ones I get to go are almost empty. Maybe because the speakers are professors or researches who usually aren’t that good in stage. But sometimes you do get lucky and some conference gets interesting (WMSU). Then you have the commercial ones (I’ve been only at TechEd2007 Barcelona and Techdays08 in which the hallways were empty! Yeah, some of the presentations were boring, but people just moved to the next room where the presentation was going better). Then you have misc conferences under some topic ( Technology, Design, Entrepreneurship, etc..) and those I’ve attended were cool enough for people to be there and focused!

I don’t have that feeling that conferences are boring, but that maybe just me. Unconferences are becoming quite popular, but I don’t think that will make traditional conferences go away. I really think the format of Take Off is the best for that content (although I may have to rethink the schedule) and maybe a panel after lunch would be interesting. If you think otherwise, be free to contact me with any alternatives.

Also regarding conferences, Seth Godin rants about organizers spending too much time thanking people. I disagree with him about this. I believe it’s important to let people know who made that event possible. Maybe it’s an organization, and you can’t have a photo (or maybe you can) or it’s a sponsor, and without them your conference would suck, and you should really give them some prime time, even if it’s only in the “thank you” form. Of course, you shouldn’t spend more than 2 minutes in this, but you shouldn’t replace it with some photo slideshow!

Look ay Yahoo today, not only the lost their ‘chi’, it is reacting to outside forces and have no control over their destiny. Some 40 to 50 senior executives and engineers have left Yahoo since the beginning of the year – at a pace that appears to have accelerated in the last few weeks. At least five key executives, including Vish Makhijani, senior vice president of Yahoo’s search group, and Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of the company’s network division, were reported to have resigned this week. Microsoft is making some smart ‘Tai Chi” moves, whether they get Yahoo or not does not matter. Even if they don’t get Yahoo, they have done so much damage to Yahoo that drastically reduced their threat to Microsoft…all without spending a penny. That’s a good move. In an effort to highlight its efforts to recruit engineers with Internet search expertise, Microsoft this week placed an ad in the San Jose Mercury News, based next door to Yahoo’s hometown of Sunnyvale, Calif. Either I have the company, or I get its brains. I am good with both.

Source: Innovation Playground

When it comes to blog engines, everyone thinks about Worpress. I’ve worked with it a few times and it’s nice, but it could be so much simpler! Well, I found that solution: Chyrp. A small and simples MVC-like blog engine. It is the old PHP+MySQL combo, which is perfectly fine for the purpose (means I could deploy it in almost every webserver without any hassle).

It does not have the community that Wordpress has, but I was really happy with the pluggins in the website. Comments, Textile/Markdown, Analytics, Gravatar and even a Tumbler package that allow you to have your own tumblr. OpenID is the only thing that seems to be missing.

Oh, and for you geeks, the GPL code is hosted at GitHub ;)

If I ever go back to a blog, I’ll definitely think about using Chyrp.

Associação Académica de Coimbra (AAC) estima que cerca de 2700 estudantes possam vir a ser excluídos da Universidade de Coimbra (UC) no próximo ano lectivo, no âmbito do regime de prescrições da instituição. A reitoria da UC diz que é “prematuro” adiantar qualquer número, mas acrescenta já ter começado a contactar todos os estudantes que estão numa “situação de risco”. A situação da UC não é única no país, embora cada universidade tenha um regime de prescrições próprio.

Na Universidade Nova de Lisboa, por exemplo, onde cada faculdade tem regras próprias, o reitor António Rendas prevê que o número de alunos em risco de exclusão no próximo ano lectivo seja “seguramente inferior a 2 mil”. “Estamos a acompanhar o assunto, mas não prevejo um problema muito grave”, afirma.
No caso da Universidade do Porto (UP), o regulamento de prescrições foi aprovado em 2007, mas só entrará em vigor de forma plena no final do próximo ano lectivo. Maria de Lurdes Fernandes, vice-reitora da UP, afirma que este período de transição teve por objectivo dar “tempo aos alunos para se adaptarem às novas regras”. No entanto, admite que no próximo ano lectivo “entre 5 a 10 por cento dos alunos” de licenciaturas da UP – 1100 a 2200 estudantes – possam ser excluídos. “Esperamos que, entretanto, muitos destes alunos consigam melhorar a sua situação escolar”, afirma, acrescentando que a UP criou a possibilidade de os estudantes se inscrevem em mais de 60 créditos por ano para poderem melhorar a situação escolar.

Estas normas, que definem o número mínimo de disciplinas ou créditos que os alunos têm de realizar por ano, resultam da Lei de Bases do Financiamento do Ensino Superior, de 2003. As regras de exclusão variam consoante a instituição, mas as soluções mais comuns apontam para um limite máximo de seis inscrições para os alunos completarem três ou três anos e meio do curso. É o que sucede em Coimbra e no Porto.

De acordo com o presidente da AAC, André Oliveira, a estimativa de 2700 alunos resulta de números fornecidos à associação pelos serviços académicos da UC. Ontem, a reitoria da UC fez saber, através do gabinete de imprensa, que os casos correspondem a situações de “diferente gravidade”. Alguns alunos estarão dependentes da realização de uma cadeira até ao final do ano para poderem continuar a estudar. Até ao termo do ano lectivo, a reitoria admite a possibilidade de se realizarem épocas especiais de exames para estes alunos.

Fonte:¹ Público 21.06.2008, André Jegundo (via Que Universidade?)

Devo ser dos poucos que fica feliz com estas notícias. No meu departamento (desta mesma Universidade) farto-me de ver flyers de manifestação contra as prescrições. Mas as prescrições são uma coisa boa! É estas novas normas que impedem que os alunos andem a anos e anos sem fazer cadeiras, ou a fazer muito poucas. Estas pessoas, a meu ver, deviam abrir os olhos para a vida e aperceber-se que o Ensino Superior não é para elas. Eu sei que o país precisa de aumentar o número de licenciados para um índice qualquer da União Europeia, mas também é preciso manter um certo nível de qualidade no ensino. Não acho bem os meus impostos serem usados para financiar parte dos anos que estes calões andam por aqui nas festas académicas!

¹ Não sei até que ponto é ilegal estar a copiar para aqui o texto da versão online. Mas para me aliviar a consciência, se gostam de estar a par destas notícias relativas a educação, comprem o Público ;)

Dear Vodafone ( or maybe someone who works there ) and other Telcos:

After proving they are looking up to the web with OpenID, Orange is offering APIs for accessing some of their services (sms, contacts, location). I really wished I had something like that in Portugal.

Please?

Source: @als

Now, there has been some controversy concerning the bundles, boiling down to whether it is a good deal for the developers. After all this, I can’t say that the issue has been fully resolved in my mind but I’ll try to at least clarify the real issues at stake. I want this to be useful to other devs who are considering participating in bundle promotions without resorting to any demagoguery.

Paul Kim, On Software Bundles – Great piece about bundles like the current MacHeist and how that affects indie mac developers.

Versions is a OS X GUI for Subversion. And I proudly say that is partly work of a Portuguese developer.

Versions is very powerful¹ and elegant GUI for SVN. makes it easier to see changes over the time, and even diffs. This is not the best approach for SVN, in my opinion.

Using Versions (or any other GUI like RapidSVN, which is opensource, or so…) is another distraction in your workflow while working. The best solution I see (and that I use) is having SVN integrated with your File Explorer (being TortoiseSVN for Explorer in Windows or SCPlugin for Finder in MacOS. This way, when I’m working with files, I am using the file explorer and that’s where I want to rearrange folders, delete stuff add folders.

Other situation where I also need to take SVN actions is the IDE/Editor that I am using. In my case Textmate, and sometimes Eclipse. I hit the save shortcut combo almost everytime I change a line, but the real saves are when I commit to the repository. And I want that power inside the editor, not in another window. That’s why I find that SVN is meant to be inside your workflow tools, and not in some stand-alone app.

¹ A lot of people I know would just reply ‘Not as powerful as the command-line’. Which is true, but there’s a compromise between features and easy-to-use, since this this product is not targeting hackers, but designers/webdesigners/webdevelopers (or just devigners)

When I moved to this wiki, I had the problem to keep the old links from being broken. I learnt that lesson, and me being a innovative guy (which means I keep doing and changing stuff over here), I now moved the wiki to this subdomain and alcidesfonseca.com redirects here now.

This simple change broke all my authentication through OpenID. The authentication works, but the url verified is now wiki.alcidesfonseca.com, that is not the one associated with my account. This thing really worries me. So, heres the workflow:

Consumer -> http://alcidesfonseca.com -> http://wiki.alcidesfonseca.com -> http://alcides.myopenid.com

And if I can authenticate against my provider (MyOpenID), I prove that I am wiki.alcidesfonseca.com, but not alcidesfonseca.com. Wouldn’t it make sense to prove that I am also alcidesfonseca.com since I am the url that is redirected to?

As for now, I guess I’ll have to make some simple placeholder with HTML headers. BTW, have you checked http://stream.alcidesfonseca.com?

Remember that little mashup I released almost an year ago ? Well, I found out that now there is a pro version called BuzzNumbers. This media analyzer thing is going to turn out a great business like I though that time.

John Resig posted about the State of The Art in terms of embedding javascript in other languages. I was glad to see that there was one Python related project: Python-SpiderMonkey. Then a nice hack idea popped in my head: now I can do JavaScript Server-Side like I want!

So if you want, you can download my Javascript implementation of a simple CGI script in Python where you can access GET, POST, SERVER and COOKIES variables through request.get, request.post, request.server and request.cookies (also have request.post_files, but I haven’t tested uploading files). This is based on my previous work in pungi. And you also have a new File class (with read, write, readlines and close methods) as well as Sqlite (a wrapper for SQLite3 databases, with only the query method). This is the basics that allow you to write your first webapplication based on Javascript.

If you wish, you can download it and test it yourself. I guarantee nothing!

• Install Pyrex (sudo easy_install pyrex)
• Install Python-SpiderMonkey ( SVN checkout and sudo python setup.py install
• Copy the jsrocks folder to your htdocs. Keep in mind you need mod_rewrite and .htaccess files enabled.
• Just visit /jsrocks/ and /jsrocks/test (which call index.js and test.js)

NOTE! This is just a hack to prove it could be possible. Using an interpreted script to call another interpreter is not the best idea. Oh, and through CGI even less plausible (fastCGI is more admissible though). I believe that something like mod_js is a better approach (although last time I checked it lacked File IO and Database connections). Google (Steve Yegge) apparently likes the idea of using Rhino, which I don’t like that much.

code_swarm – Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

Great clip showing off Python’s evolution (based on commit information). Really cool!

You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon, the small icon you see in your browser next to the URL or in your bookmarks list. Some people have wondered why we changed our favicon — after all, we hadn’t in 8.5 years(!). The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those, but we’ve also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set.

Source: Official Google Blog

So it was not for Children Day’s, it is in fact, because the iPhone, Google has changed the favicon. After 8.5 years with a pretty good icon, they are changing to a worst one, because of the damn phone that’s changing the industry.

Update: Looks like the Google Reader favicon that is loaded in Safari is the 32×32 version (that is targeting the iPhone), slightly different from the traditional shown in Firefox and other browsers.

BusinessWeek published an article about Nokia’s position about OpenSource.. The business world is not leaving all their closed policy (DRM, IP, Sim locks, etc…) and if OpenSource wants to have a major role in mobile devices they have to start accepting how telcos work.

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(Via OpenGardens) This is a great presentation from MTV where they show a few statistics that prove that young people are spending less time in front of TV and more and more on the Internet, mainly social networks. I guess some Portuguese companies should take a look at this presentation and start changing the way they work.

Last week I borrowed a Lego Mindstorms NXT Educational Set from the Physics Department to use in the last class I’m giving to 13 year old kids about programming with Python.

First of all, I dealed with the hardware and spend about one hour assembling bricks like I used to do…. 10 years ago. Lego rocks! Since I hadn’t much time to spend with it, I followed the Tripod model, but in the end I realized I didn’t had the extended set, so I started to invent, like it is supposed to! Here’s the final result:

Now the software: I could let kids use the programming GUI, but I don’t like it very much, and the purpose of the whole course was about coding, so I wanted Python. Since the robot cannot run Python itself, I was running the program in my macbook that would remote control it.

The “NXT Python library is really helpful”, but OS X requires a little hack on the bluetooth module, so this page explains it all.

So I did two programs: One to remote control the NXT with my Wiimote. With the arrow keys, I can control it’s moves, the minus/plus allows me to control the speed, which is very useful when turning! And when it bumps something, The wiimote rumbles and lights up the LEDs for each active sensor.

The second program, just makes the robot wander around and when bumps something, he turns a bit. That’s enough for it to spend some time by itself :)

You can download the source code (with all the necessary libraries, that you must sudo python setup.py install inside each dir).

James Governor has a nice post on some stories about OpenSource interop and Standards inside Microsoft.

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

If this is an option, why there isn’t a checkbox in the preferences for this? I bet I’m not the only want to want this behavior. And seems like it doesn’t work in Safari 4 preview.

“Save this page as a standalone web app” will bring the fluid/prism/air competition to the “OS side” (Microsoft/Apple/Linux).

In his TechEd 2008 presentation, John Lam (my favourite Microsoft employee, responsible for IronRuby and OpenSource Ambassador inside Microsoft) demoed his HTML5 Canvas Element Silverlight adapter that might be an interesting way of running Processing.js in Internet Explorer ;)

No, I’m not buying that Macbook Air thingy… (sigh) After some ranting and disillusions about Python GUI’s, I gave Adobe Air a try and did Yet Another Twitter Client in 1 hour, 37 lines of JS, 23 of HTML and 28 of CSS. So damn simple!

And the next day, I was exploring Dashboard Widgets (for a project, not that I use it, which I don’t) and I copied pasted the code, added the icons and the Info.plist and voilá, it worked without changing a line of code! It’s really Java’s idea of write once, run everywhere (I am assuming it runs in linux, since only advanced features are not implemented yet).

My next projects that include a desktop app, will be written in Adobe Air, despite my love for Python. (Javascript is my #2 programming language). And writing UIs in HTML+CSS is much more fun than wxWidgets, Tk, GTK and even WinForms!

Since I’ve updated my website to a bliki, I’ve missed having comments a lot! It’s no fun to not know what your readers think of your content (even if it’s negative, as long as they aren’t rude).

Well, some folks have put some pressure on me to enable comments here, something I’ve been wanting to do for sometime now, but I have other priorities in my todo list. So I enabled disqus, which is a really simple commenting system.

However I am not happy with this solution. First: It’s a JavaScript widget. I want to read comments on my Windows Mobile device. So I need a hardcoded solution. And second, it doesn’t work well with OpenIDs. I want to be able to blacklist some OpenIDs if I want to, and also have some authentication system (although it’s very easy to set up an anonymous provider.

At last, I’m not sure if I want my wiki pages to have comments. Maybe I’ll have comments only for blog entries. It’s something to think in the next month or so. In the meanwhile, feel free to use the current disqus system.