Alcides Fonseca

Suggestion by BB.

Note: I’m not posting anymore because of a) lack of time (see my flickr for the why) and b) i’m moving to a new bliki and it’s set that I won’t be importing this posts (mainly because I was too dumb when I started it).

For those of you who don’t know TarPipe, it is a web application that makes it easier to create your workflows on the web. This workflow above just receives via the API a title and a photo and uploads it to Photobucket (which sucks, but a Flickr Connector, among others, is being released very soon) and the enters the image link in my flickr account. Right now Tarpipe hasn’t launched yet, but I have access to developer’s preview (which you may also ask) and I have played with it’s API.

So I picked my language of choice: Python and I made a library to access TarPipe API from Python. And it’s as easy as:

sudo easy_install tarpipe-python
python

And then

import tarpipe
t = tarpipe.TarPipe(token="your workflow token")
t.upload(title="hello from python",body="testing TarPipe from Python",image="/Users/youruser/Images/test.png")

As simple as that. The project is hosted at Google Code (you can checkout from the svn if you want). And it’s licensed under LGPL, which will deserve a post later on.

This shirt explains it all. (Via Paulo Abreu)

I’ve been reading tons of reactions to the launch of the latest best-game-ever GTA IV. I liked Penny Arcade’s the most. And real geeks are also impressed by GoogleMaps-powered Liberty City Map. It is a nice mashup indeed.

Today Luís remembered me of Google Drive where you could drive a little yellow car around the world in real streets. Then it hit me: What about joining the two of then, add some extra features, and get a javascript web-based GTA game, with the top-view, just like the original one (which I’m a fan of!).

Someone with a lot of free time? Anyone? Maybe you?

So Twitter is leaving Rails and I bet Rails programmers are not happy with this. Their #1 success application at a large scale is leaving the building. I guess now it’s more difficult for them to persuade businesses to start using Ruby on Rails.

One the other hand, Jaiku is moving in to Google App Engine and I guess they’re using Python. They’re minimizing the risk of scaling issues (something they could have learned form Twitter’s success). I still wonder what’s the key think that makes them working on Jaiku. Is it Android? Or some killer-feature?

I feel pity for this desktop of mine. It has suffered a lot when it comes to OSes. So I had installed Mac OS x86 perfectly working, but I wanted to play Trackmania Nations Forever. As I wasn’t doing any work on the desktop, no problem, let’s format this.

First choice: Windows Server 2008. I heard it was more stable than Vista and it ran Trackmania pretty nice. The installation was one of the smoothest I have ever experienced. But I was almost giving up on this OS when I had to set for the first time the Administrator password. Whatever password I inserted, it always gave me the following error: “Your password doesn’t match the length, complexity or the history required by this computer” (or something like that). WTF??? Luckily Bruno gave me the solution: You need both upper and lower-case and numbers in your password. Mr. Server2008 Usability Guy should be punished for this one! Once inside, I installed the Desktop Experience and Wireless packages. Reboot. Another reboot. Nothing… I couldn’t access any of those features. And no wireless. Now what? Let’s see what’s new in Ubuntu 8.04.

Installing Hardy Heron was OK until the disk partitioning thing. By default it would erase all my disk. I had a Storage partition with all the documents I need. So I had to go to advanced. There I had to delete the old Windows partition (this was ok). But I hadn’t a button called “Install Ubuntu in free space”. I knew that I had to format a swap and a EXT3 partitions. But my father wouldn’t. One thing to improve Canonical guys ;) Now, inside the OS, it was similar to the previous version, including that reddish-brown color of the Human theme. One thing that I was glad to see is that now Ubuntu handles the 1280×1024 resolution in my screen. Sweet! Another thing that I missed, and since Ubuntu’s windows manager is a copy of Windows (that I understand to ease the switch), is the lack of closing the window by double-clicking on the icon. I have used it since Windows 3.1! Oh and it couldn’t authenticate in my WEP-protected wireless. I could have changed it to WPA, since all the computers in the house support it, but unfortunately I could play Trackmania in Ubuntu as I wished.

All of this OSes failed the Audio. Ubuntu couldn’t fetch the right drivers, don’t know why (in the last version it worked fine). And even in Vista I had to install the codecs from the official site and even a patch. Manufacturers and OSes should improve this experience. Each OS would have a repository of drivers that would be searched each time a new device is connected. XP had this, but it didn’t work. Vista has this working fine, but I had a few problems with Asus hardware. As for Vista, everything just works, which is fine. Except for the fact that is ugly as hell and isn’t straightforward. I just can’t go back from the Mac to this :/ And having a desktop only to play Trackmania… sucks!

A final note about Windows vs Mac OS X: Although many would say OS X is way better than Windows, I don’t think that’s such a big difference (and I’m comparing to Windows XP). There are only two things that I really miss: Spaces. It has changed my way of organizing windows and for me that’s a really cool thing. And I’ve tested a few solutions for Virtual Desktops on Windows and they suck. The second change is the most anoying thing for switchers: the keyboard layout, specially how cmd replaces your windows/ubuntu ctrl. For years I would use my little finger to press control and then use the S, X, C, V or whatever key I wanted. For about 6 months I have used Mac OS as my main os and using your thumb to press cmd and the other fingers to press the other key is a lot better for your wrists! And I don’t want to miss that.

How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary by Robert L Read, is a wonderful short book every programmer should read. You’ll get an idea of the skills you should improve in the different stages of your path through programming. And I love the fact that there is no code there, not even one programming language name mentioned! And he goes through Debugging, Unit Testing and so. And you’ll read it incredible fast!

Why Johnny Can’t Scale is a post on why Twitter can’t scale as it should and a small rant on Ruby on Rails. You should read it along with the debate in the comments between Michael Galpin and DHH himself.

Fencing in the habitat – doing things right and getting the accessibility wrong is a presentation by Christian Heilmann on accessibility on the web. And I love how you can get the idea by just reading the slides. A must for webdevelopers!

I now have 3 virtual machines on my Macbook. Ubuntu, XP and Vista. Now that I got Matlab for UNIX, I almost don’t use them any more, only for some testing purposes. And having them on my 160Gb harddrive sucks! And I’m not buying a portable external disk (I am buying a 500gb external storage with ethernet interface to backup all the family pcs, and finally use Time Machine). So I want to adopt another solution. I have a regular desktop running Mac OS x86 right now (but I will soon install Windows Server 2008 to play the recently launched TrackMania Nations Forever) Linux sucks there since I cannot have 1280×1024 resolution in my screen.

So my idea is to run my virtual machines in my desktop and access them remotely via RDP or VNC, since I also want to run a Ubuntu virtual machine. The problem here is that I want them to be active only when I’m connected to them. I need them to use 1024 of my 2Gb RAM memory, and I can’t have two switched on at the same time.

So dear lazy web, is there any simple and free (since I’m a student and not want to make profit of this) solution for this?

So Twitter is the internet application of the moment. The so called IRC of the web 2.0 has got the internet junkies Geeks 2.0 and also coming to regular people’s life.

There is an enourmous discussion on whether Twitter is useful or not. Some turn it off to get work done, others delete their account because it’s killing their blogging to then go back and realize they can’t live without it.

Now 37 signals, the company behind Backpack (and some others) and also Ruby on Rails is getting their Twitter-clone applied to entrepises ready. They’re naming it In/Out and they’ve been using it internally for the last year. Why do I call it a twitter clone? Because it allows you to update your status on What are you doing so your workmates know at any time what is keeping you busy. I love their idea of charging companies for such an idea!

Puppets doing JRuby

I grew up more a less at the same time as Nintendo’s GameBoy, so computer games were not that awkward to me. The first game that I was really amazed by was TIM (The Incredible Machine). For those of you who don’t know it, it was a simple game where you had to make a lot of elements like balls, balloons, candles, strings, cats, mice, electrical stuff, etc.. to work together in order to achieve a goal each level. If somehow I got that game again, I’d spend one month having all that fun again! Like I never had with games like Warcraft or Counter-Strike!

Sometime ago a friend showed me Armadillo Run a game of the same type, but more focused on physics and structures. Not as much fun as TIM. But after that a new game was being blogged about everywhere: Crayon Physics. It doesn’t have as many features as TIM, but it has a bonus: you get to draw your components. If you need a ball or a box, you have to draw it! I loved it!

But the demo was a bit short and the real stuff isn’t here yet… Nevertheless I found a flash game exactly the same, and with pins and hinges that gave it a brand new sense. I’ve finished it and now I’ve improving the number of moves per level.

You should REALLY try it!

I sincerely believe Dynamic Languages are the future. Once people start learning these languages, they’ll hardly go back. I know a lot of guys, like me, to whom programming in C, Java or C# is painful. Most of people won’t learn any of this “new” (they’re so damn old!) languages. If you think right, they make you more productive!

So why Python? Well, I’ve spend many years coding PHP and I don’t want to do that again! (I know I will, and because it will the best choice, but I won’t have the same feeling as in coding Python). As for PERL, it is really good for those who learned it years ago. Nobody learns it nowadays. Ruby and Python are as powerful as Perl, and much more readable. As for Ruby, it is indeed a powerful language. I happen to love some of its features, but the simplicity of Python rocks my world. Ruby is almost used with Rails, which I also like, but it alone can’t make me change my language. Of course there is Shoes also, but that’s just for fun.

In Python I have all another world. I also have webdev with Django (which fits my specific needs better than rails) and I also have scripting and desktop apps. Do you know that a lot of the frontend of the applications you use daily in Linux distros like Ubuntu are mostly written in Python?

But the best is yet to come. I believe Python will be the next big languages. Not for developers (who will use something like Javascript with a bit of Ruby), but for PowerUsers. Society is getting more into computers and kids can now learn advanced stuff faster. In a few years, all software should be scriptable, and regular people will make small python scripts to change the way each program flows. And that’s what will Python be for. So if you do software development, you can see how easy it is to allow such thing in .NET.

I would also recommend reading Gobán Saor’s post on Python the new VBA which details more of this idea.

I am a Python addicted :/

alcides$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
 125 cd
 100 python
  78 ls
  33 clear;
  23 ssh
  16 ipy
  15 ping
  10 sudo
  10 rm
  10 easy_install

Jet – Rip it Up

From time to time I freak out about Windows Live Messenger also known as MSN Messenger. First is one centralized system. Everything depends on Microsoft. They’re servers are down. No MSN for anyone. They said you can only have 150 contacts in one account, you have to have two so you can connect all your friends. Then they said you were allowed 300, it was nice but at that point, you also had more than 300 contacts. After that they increased the limit to 1000 and that was enougth for some years. Then you reach the limit and have to clean up your contact list. I know you can have more than 1000 now, but I don’t know how much.

Now I get another stupid error: I got too many groups on my messenger list. Grrr I HATE YOU MSN! Only if my hot friends would change to Jabber as everyone should… MSN can’t even let me be logged in in two different computers :(

In the last days I found myself doing over and over the same combo: rating a music 5 starts in iTunes and then loving it in Last.fm, so as any Software Developer, I automated the process:

tell application "iTunes"
	set rating of current track to 100
end tell

tell application "Last.fm" to activate
tell application "System Events"
	key code 76 using command down
end tell

tell application "System Events"
	set visible of process "Last.fm" to false
end tell

Saved as a application in my AppleBin directory, and now I just use spotlight to reach it (Sorry, but I can’t get used to quicksilver…)

And I just love reading AppleScript! As for writing, it sucks :/

On my talk at TechDays2008, I noticed the audience was looking more to integrate IronPython/IronRuby on their existing C# apps, than using it as a standalone language. In order to get one of this two languages in your application is to host a DLR engine.

It’s very easy to do this, so easy I guess it will be be used, even when it’s not the best solution (just an hintch). As usual, Michael Foord puts it plain simple, with a couple of examples for you to get started.

This is a great excuse to start allowing scripting over you application, using one (or even both!) of this great languages! As I mentioned in my presentation, there are power users who would want to code something in this languages (that are really, really simple!) and start using the full power of your application!

GreenDay – Minority

First the Australian WiMax pioneer says it’s a disaster and now Tata Communications announce they're rolling out contrywide WiMax… I’m getting confused now :/

When everybody talks about URLs and how you can associate all your stuff to a personal URL (through OpenID, microformats, etc…), it looks like in Japan they are already leaving URLs behind and they’re just using search engine keywords in their advertising. This is not a new thing, I remember a lot of movie posters not having the URL, but the AOL keyword. That was pretty useless in Portugal, since AOL has no presence here, and I can’t remember SAPO doing anything like this. Even I used this strategy! I was in doubt whether should buy this domain or not. I wouldn’t give out my old address to people, I’d just tell them to google “alcides fonseca” and thanks to the SEO magic of having a rare name, it works :)

However, this is something I wouldn’t suggest unless you have the KEYWORD.com domain. Search engines don’t always display the search results in the same order, so imagine you have a company, and some guy writes a bad review and he’s a SEO expert. Whenever a customer would search for your keyword, his bad review will be the first result! You don’t want this, do you? And guess that one of your competitors buys an advertising link in some Search Engine that displays first when search for your keywords? I wouldn’t like that too…

Even when “good” domain names are becoming rare and expensive, and “Big Mamas Bakery” looks more catchy than http://www.big-mamas-bakery.com, making sure that all your possible clients end up in the right place it’s very important!

After developing software for some time now, I feel like I should mention the software that most helped me until now. This is just a personal opinion, so don’t start flamming me for this, okay? Well, although I use Notepad++ and Textmate for writing code, I’m not talking about neither, and I’m not going to talk about Visual Studio which is a great IDE, and a wonderful tool for designing desktop applications. The best software that has helped me in my programming until now was… Fireworks, that’s right! Macromedia’s, now Adobe’s software for designing web graphics.

So howcome a designer application has helped in your programming? Well, I don’t do low-level programming, my focus in on web programming, so the interface is very important. I find Fireworks the most useful tool because it allows me to get some graphics done very fast and easily, so I can focus on what I really want: to code.

So why Fireworks and not Photoshop? Photoshop is indeed more powerful that Fireworks, but it is also more complex, and I’m not a designer, I just want quick icons, or logos, or some fancy artwork for my software, I don’t want to make some artistic and amazing drawings. And right now, I can archieve everything in Fireworks you can in Photoshop. The only feature I miss is Brushes, but I can emulate it using some workarounds that take too much time.

This is one of the features Adobe could add to Fireworks. I’ve been using it since the MX 2002 version through the MX 2004 and CS3 and I find no real difference between them. Couldn’t they just spend some time on this wonderful product? Of course it doesn’t sell like Photoshop and is maybe overpriced for its target audience, but I’m sure they can manage it… I’m sure there are other Fireworks lovers around wishing for this too…

PS: Ok, I had to ruin my first linkless post with some sort of interesting link. Here it is: Fireworks is a great prototyping tool for interaction desginers

Yahoo has lanched Fire Eagle, a way of providing your location to several services. Good news to Python Hackers, Steve Marshall has published his bindings to the Fire Eagle API. Also in the Python world, Simon Willison has done a really cool mashup envolving FireEagle and Wikipedia (along with some Google Stuff) sticking it all inside a Django Project. And he also explains how he made it.

Among the best of the web I found a link to Richard Crowley’s blog. I found there three cool hacks, specially the last two. The first is PownceFS and implementation of your Pownce friends archives as a filesystem. Systems like this and like DropBox, that connect the desktop and the web are stuff that I believe in. Oh, and take a look at TarPipe when it comes out (or earlier at Take Off!).

The other two are some UserScripts to improve you Google Reader experience. I use it as the my major source of information (email being only for private stuff and twitter… you can’t really call it information, can you?) but I archive stuff in my delicious account, so now I have what I’ve been looking for in a while: being able to bookmark posts directly to Delicious inside Google Reader.

The last one, is another script to see that original link for that post but inside GoogleReader, which I find very handy to comment a post, or see some youtube video GReader insists on not parsing.

OPM – Heaven is a Halfpipe

VCS are a must for my projects. I need to be able to get old versions or have a place where I can easily sync the project with some friends. Until now I have been using subversion that fits my needs, but everyone is saying that “git”: is so cool and everyone is migrating their repositories to git. I’m not the guy to follow the flock, so I took the change in helping Nuno on his project to try out git. I simply did one countdown snippet to add to a form, you may use it anywhere you want, just keep in mind it depends on Prototype.

While SVN comes with OS X, git doesn’t, so I recomend using this installer to get git going on. Works on both Tiger and Leopard.

I later found out of a bundle to textmate (since I’m an avid user of SVNmate) here. I just couldn’t find it in the first place, because I use GetBundle bundle to manage them, and it wasn’t in the list (Mercurial and Bazaar are!) so I’d suggest Tim to submit it to the macromates repository.

There is also a nice interface to see the last changes called GitNub. Just remember to upgrade to RubyCocoa 0.13.0.

And now just use the magical workflow:

git clone *repository url*
*make your changes*
git add .
git commit -a -m "*alterações feitas*"
git push

The diference here is that you can commit to your own repository, and then after submit your changes to the main repository. This is great in the point that it let’s you have your own repository offline (that would have been useful yesterday when ideias3 was offline). It also encourages people to clone the repository and take the project in diferent directions and then merge it all together. This is somehow possible in SVN using branching and merging, but it is so complicated I have never branched anything in my life!

However I am sticking to SVN for now. Why? First because I don’t want to worry about managing my own git server (I do have one server that I could use for this, but most of people won’t). I know there are some cool stuff out there like GitHub or Rep.or.cz or even Gitorious but I like to keep some of my stuff private. And Dreamhost has in their control panel, a very simple and sweet SVN manager. Second, my university workgroup runs different OSes. I am running MacOS X now (but I do use Windows a lot), one mate runs Windows and the other Ubuntu. So we need something that works fine in all those platforms, and I’ve heard git sucks in Windows. I haven’t really tested that out, but the major issue is lack of integration with the OS. We don’t really like to do everything on the command line. I know I’m weird, but what can you do about it? I love Tortoise-SVN (windows) and SCPlugin (Mac). There is some KDE cool integration and for Gnome, there is one buggy one, but we’re using RapidSVN for now. Oh, and Eclipse support too. Git doesn’t have none of this for now. And I’ll keep waiting. Then I will migrate to Git.

In this holidays I’ve spend some time hacking my OS setup. My Windows XP install had more than two years. And it was still solid without virus or spyware, and It has never seen any anti-virus or so. So guys who say proudly that you Macs or your Linuxes don’t get virus… Well, so doesn’t my Windows!

However I had installed a lot of stuff I don’t use anymore and I find faster to just format it and install a new one. One of my rules when setting up a new computer is to make two partitions. One for the OS and programs, and the other for data. So whenever I have to format it, I don’t have to bother with backups.

I decided to give Vista SP1 a try, since it might not be as hard to use as RTM, but I decided to test os x86 in between. Last time I didn’t have success last time.

Specs:
- Asus P5LD2 SE
- Intel Pentium D
- Asus EN6600 Silent
- Asus WL-167g (wireless dongle)

I installed KALYWAY LEO 10.5.1 intel SSE2 SSE3 and everythin just worked out of the box, except for Wireless and Audio. Better than last time (in which I had no wired network, so no internet at all). Luckly there were guides to install ALC882 (the codec I was missing for audio) and also an hack for Ralink Wireless Driver in order to my Wireless dongle to work, and after some hacks it worked! I felt like installing linux, but with success!

So now I have one and a half Mac, since I don’t get the same experience as with my MacBook, but I get much more integration between the two! I am even using teleport to control my macbook from the desktop. It works really well without any hard configuration or hacking like I had to do with Synergy that made me let it go.

At the moment I am installing Windows Vista on a virtual Machine in my desktop, but It is being really CPU intensive. I bet I’ll return to XP in a matter of weeks!

One of the comics I read daily, this time mocking with USA‘s weird paid health care. If you are an American, please come and visit Portugal, use our free health care, and have this in mind in the coming elections.

Until now, all flash files were save in a binary .fla file. Seems like CS4 will bring a new format .xfl that is a zip file with all the components of the movie and a xml manifest. This will improve it’s interoperability with third parties like image and video editors, or even opensource flash editors.

Together with Microsoft’s OOXML (even with all those OOXML vs ODF issues, it’s still plain XML) it will allow a next generation versioning systems (who know Git with a tortoiseSVN-like interface, or even better) and a cool Office/Flash/Imaging Diff tool. And merged with a web-based editor would be perfect for non-geek end users. You might read more about this on my guest post over PauloQuerido’s.

Opera’s Chris Mills writes a great article titled Coding for the mobile web which I heavily recommend for any of you who is interested in developing websites targeting mobile devices, or just any webdesigner/webdeveloper in general, because you should make sure your website runs on mobile devices too.

In this article I learned something that I find amazing I didn’t know before: the fact that some mobile browsers, like Opera Mini in this case, work through a proxy system. This is, when you navigate to alcidesfonseca.com, you’re going for a opera script that fetches this website and formats it in a way it fits perfectly your browser (and saves you bandwidth costs!). I must say I’m admired! From the use I gave to Opera Mini, the speed didn’t make me think there was an external proxy doing this!

An excelent mixture of the Mars Volta with Fantasia’s Bald Mountain sequence.

Let’s start by big G, they’ve released the Google Contacts API. They’re second to Microsoft who have already did the same, in order to avoid situations where you have to give your email password to social networks, so they can import your contacts. A nice step, I just wish applications start to implement both of the APIs right away.

Now Apple, that has released the SDK for iPhone along with some news like exchange support and so. Like many noticed, they are targeting now the Business market with Air and this iPhone update (only possible to Microsoft new interoperability promise) and I guess they will make greater moves into that area in about one year or so. Regarding their store, they are being selfish and they are going to pay that price very soon. If they have hacked dotMac, won’t they be able to hack iPhone, and create a uTunes where you can get cracked software? And I bet a few developers will prefer this one!

Flock 1.1 was released. I have a bittersweet relationship with Flock. It used to be my main browser, but being an programmer I have some needs Flock doesn’t fulfill (not talking about Firebug). However if I only used the browser for social stuff like twittering, facebook, flickr, del.icio.us and have a wordpress blog, it would be perfect, just perfect.

With the release of Silverlight2b1, a few apps from partners are being shown up, and I really liked TextGlow, a online viewer of docx documents. That made me thing. Currently Office Online doesn’t have a collaborative tool. That makes ALL the difference when comparing to Google Apps. I believe the reason they’ve not released it yet is because they’re getting something really powerful built on Silverlight2. I can’t wait to try it out!

First of all, it ¹ was an excellent keynote! Not that b.o.r.i.n.g keynote I’ve seen in TechEd Barcelona (Somasegar simply doesn’t have that charisma it needs to make an hell of a presentation!). And I deeply liked this keynote. Not that always-the-same keynote Mr Jobs does all the time²! They really called people to show interesting stuff made in their technologies.

From Ozzie’s talk, you get one thing: Microsoft is definitely moving from a software products to software services. I see them in 8–9 years to let go Office (the desktop app) and provide Office Online only. It has not been talking, but it’s a great solution against the piracy their been experimenting.

They did the right thing for standards, that’s true. However I will never forget that they did it one version later. IE7 would be the perfect version to make the move.

Improved scripting performance. That just the natural evolution, no big deal. It’s around the same values as the last firefox and webkit.

They also fulfilled one item of my ie8 wishlist, the HTML5 partial rendering. That’s the only nice thing I’ve seen.

Built-in developer tools. Everyone LOVES firebug. That’s just a copycat.

WebSlices. Have you heard of Safari’s WebClip? No special markup needed! They wanted to get in the microformats world, but I don’ think it was the best way.

Activities. This is the one point they wanted to integrate the social web in the browser. Although WebServices/Activities have a nice and easy spec, that’s again the wrong approach in my opinion. Search is already handled by OpenSearch and all the interactive context should be handled by microformats. Which I haven’t heard of in the entire keynote (and hSlice doesn’t count!).

Microsoft talks all the time about innovation, but the truth is I haven’t seen any in IE8. Has anyone noticed that the interface is exactly the same as IE7? Even the searchbox is the same! I really hope that changes until the Gold.

Just bare with some quick notes about SilverLight2. They’re focusing it in video, that’s what I learn from the news. They also showed some RIA examples, but does anyone see any real advantage comparing to Flex? Apart from being .NET? Me neither. The only thing I really wanted from Silverlight is years away: 3D. Is even any Silverlight Papervision3d clone around?

Oh wait, there was one lovely thing I predicted: Silverlight went mobile and also for Nokia’s. That’s the only way I’m gonna be using Silverlight for now.

¹ Silverlight apps have the same problem as Flash. You cannot easily have a direct URI for each page. Microsoft should have made it better for Mix Sessions!

² Before you zealot guys start to call me a Microsoft clone, I proudly own a macbook, and I wouldn't trade it for any other laptop running XP or Vista!

Oh boy! This brings back some memories of last year’s bus rides…

Well, tomorrow in MIX08 keynote, Dean is going to talk about IE8 and even show it (rumors say at this time there is already a private beta program running).

The IE8 team (and some other guys at MS) noticed that the webdesigners and developers didn’t particularly like the IE8 behavior towards standards, and with MIX coming up, they definitely want to please designers, so yesterday they changed their minds and IE8 will follow the standards rendering the pages for default. This is a huge news! When everybody says that Apple listen to their users (regarding 10.5.2), Microsoft does the same about their ever-hated browser.

There is also one thing I guess their going to announce tomorrow: the fact IE8 will ship with the silverlight plugin. Everyone is expecting this, but it’s their way of convincing more designers to enter the silverlight wave. And Apple will also announce the same for Safari in next mac event…

After yesterday’s announcement, I’m already please with Microsoft, but there are a few things that would make me even more happier. First it would be the Microformats UI. After Mozilla dropping microformat UI support for Firefox3, this would be an excellent news to higher IE in people’s consideration.

Another news I would love to see is the OpenID support. Right now, I get the feeling Microsoft is becoming a security freak. They already have Cardspace support, but for regular internet surfers, they will only use it, if attached to an OpenID. So we could expect a Cardspace+OpenID support, but I guess not now.

The final feature, and this one would be the one I would really fall in love with MS, but I know it’s impossible, is the HTML5 (even if partial) rendering support. There are already a few folks wearing html5, so it would help people to move forward, and even pressure the standardization process.

That’s true, I’m finally learning Django. Since I haven’t had no big website until now, I’ve been using my microwebframework pungi. But for large websites I feel the need for something more powerful and scalable.

I’ve been following (well, almost) the tutorial on the website adapting it to my needs. I’ve now reached the template part and I wondering if Django’s default template system is the best approach. I am pretty familiar with HTML and I even find it natural to write using XML tags, but I’m not sure if this is the best approach.

I’ve been looking for some alternatives (Yeah, Django is great because you can use whatever template language you want without any trouble!) and I found Brevé, a python DSL (or little language) for HTML generation. Writing Python is so much simple than the weird XML syntax. But I’m already used to HTML, so I got a problem here. And I believe there would be a more pythonic way of representing HTML. I feel ruby’s HTML generation in the CGI module (scroll down to “Print http header and html”) more readable than python lists. But okay that’s just my personal opinion.

I also took a look at PyMeld. Not quite a template language, but a way of manipulating HTML, that would have the same effect, but I believe Django’s template system is easier.

I could also use a client-side javascript template system, like MV suggests but I think neither me nor the world is ready for such thing.

So what would you choose if you were me?

and more: SMSing all the girls in a bar, Some innofensive pranks in work, Some bridging hacking, Some trainplaying, Yet another trainplaying, The Remote Controlled Porshe and Some autocue hints.

Really amazing!

Community & Customer Service – The video of an interesting talk with Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress, Gina Bianchini from Ning, Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency and Patty Roll from Timbuk2.

Ruby and RDF - What about creating RDF statements using Ruby's beatiful syntax?

Why Joost will loose to Miro – A nice article showing why in the near future Miro is the best choice for P2P video.

Why I Unfollow People Who Use Hashtags On Twitter – A negative view of Twitter microformat Hashtags. I do use them sometimes, but most of the time, I guess I’ll agree with Dave Coustan.

DataPortability and me, JB – Another video by John Breslin on DataPortability and a bit of RDF and SioC. I really liked it!

That’s what we’re living for…

Oh, and if you’re wondering what the heck is spidey doing there, this is from the SpiderMan movie OST.

This is, when you use cool stuff like AJAX, that empowers your website, you should take into consideration all the problems that it might cause, specially cross-site scripting.

I’ve been subscribing an interesting blog on security, GNUCitizen. I really enjoyed the Pownce Exploit they did, and shows that you might not be secure in all those websites you visit.

Oh, and you should really take a look at their introductory presentation on client side security.

I spend this weekend lost in Zambujeira do Mar in the MSP Team Building event. There were a few talks given by some folks at Microsoft, CanalUp, Sociedade Ponto Verde, Associação Terra dos Sonhos and NetJovens. All of them excellent, and I got some interesting contacts for some future activities I’m planing. Spending time with the rest of the MSPs was pretty good too, maybe apart from the CC, BCC and Rodeo ;)

Now, to the missed news:

First, Adobe Air 1.0 and Flex3.0 released. Since I’m probably doing my multimedia project in Air, this is a great news! But there is still no signs of a Linux client… This was something you could expect from Microsoft, but from Adobe doesn’t matter that much…

Second, Python 2.5.2 is out, just a bug-fix version.

Third, Oscars sucked once more this year. I can’t really enjoy the kind of movies that win year after year… I guess I’ll jut ignore them from now on…

Those who can read XFN already know I have a crush on Leah Culver, but there is one cute geek girl coming into my life: It’s just too bad she plays WoW.

Veronica Belmont brings to me Daily Mahalo, a nice (video)podcast I subscribe. Today she interviewed a few independent game makers at GDC. There are some neat concepts! Not much of a 3D fan, I really liked the last one.

I must say I love XNA! I like making games. I do not like C++ low-level programming. When I was (am?) a kid, I did some stupid games with Game Maker 6. I did all those games without a line of code! I really like that. XNA brings that concept, but to professional (and casual) game developers. Of course you have to write code, but only the logic you need. Under XNA there are all those low-level functions you don’t want to be writing and debugging.

Yesterday John Schappert revealed a bit of XNA future in the GDC. They want to have the “Youtube for gamers” (seems like Nintendo wants too with WiiWare) and their also targeting mobile devices. He showed a Zune running a XNA game!

That made me thinking… Will Zune be a competitor against PSP and DS? And will the iPhone/iPod Touch with the soon-to-be-released SDK also join this market? And where the Windows Mobile stands in this scenario?

Since this one is no longer available (if anyone has it, please tell me!) I reposted the original music video to prove Tokyo Hotel is for pussies!

Ornatos Violeta – Ouvi Dizer

Ps: quem se lembra daquele logo da TVI?

In the US and some other countries, tipping is almost mandatory and represents the major income for waiters and several other professions. If it works there, why shouldn’t it work on the Internet?

Well, Alper and some friends decided to make it true and have launched recently their startup. TipIt.to is a simple way of donating whatever you want, even cents to some website. That way you could surf the web, express you tips to this and that website, and when it reaches some value like 10€, pay it all. It might look a small account to you, but website owners will certainly like all those small tips together.

I really like this system and that’s the way I could see the Internet flowing. I also like advertising, but in some cases it’s just too intrusive. I would like to set like 10 euros per month to spend on Internet sites that make my life easier (or happier!) and give them away per cents, according to how much I like the websites. It would be awesome for OpenSource projects and for Music Artists, since I may want to download their music from some P2P network illegally and be able to contribute to the author.

But working with money online is not easy. There are a lot of suspicious users that don’t trust their money to anyone. This might be a problem. Another one is the social culture. Tipping do vary from region to region and it might work fine in the US, in Europe it might not, we’ll see…

Whenever I connect my WM6.1 HTC TyTN to my Mac, SyncMate just goes spinning his beachball without stopping… I really wanted to sync my PDA with my Macbook, so I got a way of doing it with the latest version: RC2.

I opened SyncMate.app in Finder, looked in the Resources folder and found a sweet Smartphone2005.arm.cab! So I sent it to the windows mobile (I used my windows desktop, but you can send by email or web) and I installed the driver. Then clicked in the home icon and allowed my Macbook to sync with it and enabled autostart.

Next, I added the IP of my PDA to Syncmate and he did the rest! I have all the syncing now and wireless! I just ask for a Tasks plugin for the final version, since it’s the thing that I miss the most!

I couldn’t decide between this song and The 80ies! They’re both awesome and I picked this one because of the video. If this songs were released in the US, I bet they’d be two enormous hits!

PS: I also bought a wiimote (I wouldn’t give that much money for just a console) so I guess come posts about hacking the wiimote in Windows, MacOS, Python and IronPython will be here in no time. For now, let’s sleep :)

Although I don’t agree with all she says (she’s a bit extreme in some points) the general idea is true and I guess people should see this movie and think about it.

Here at home my folks do buy a lot of stuff that aren’t needed, and accumulate somewhere until we change houses… Or trash them. I don’t. I simply don’t like buying and carrying stuff around. I buy only what I do need and I’m very happy about it :) You should try it too (and you do save some money you can spend in ephemeral good stuff like dinners and going to the movies or travels or so).

Down to Earth from Titan A.E. OST, one of my favorite movies!

We have old Gravatar, hAvatar, pAvatar (discussed here) and now we have Openvatar.

This last one is based on OpenID, but uses email as the identifier… This makes no sense!(Read comments) and is centralized! OpenID is all about using your own URL as you main identity (although email seems possible too) so you should fetch your avatar based on your URL. Both pAvatar and hAvatar do that correctly, but hAvatar uses another piece of technology I love (and makes all sense together with OpenID) that are the microformats (hCard in this case).

So I’d like all this not-that-good solutions to stop coming, and that we all focus on adopting the one that makes sense to the majority of people.

I don’t care much about the end of the fiscal year (or the beginning of a new one) since nothing changes in my daily life. There is however big differences for me when I change semesters. I have a small holiday between them (this year was just a weekend…) and I start having a new schedule and different stuff to do. So my Second Term main resolution is to pay more attention to my health.

Since I have felt some pains in my wrists, I am now more aware of office ergonomics: sitting correctly and having my hands in the right position. I also borrowed a Trackball from a friend, since I’ve read it’s better than mouse, but although after one hour I was completely used to it, I actually work with two computers, so having a trackball and a mouse confuses me. I guess I’ll stick to mouses for the time being. Oh and that white wired trackball doesn’t fit my black wireless desktop.

Another big change is that I am walking everyday to school. I used to take a bus or take a friends ride, but now even if I have it, I’m walking… And I’m not even taking the shortest path (I never liked Dijkstra anyway). And my faithful TyTN with a 2GB filled with MP3s is my dearest friend every morning.

A few months ago I moved to GMail and Google Reader for my main information needs: email and RSS feeds. I now have 3 computers (windows desktop, macbook and HTC TyTN) in which I sync Outlook, Mail.app and WM email client through Gmail’s IMAP. And in Gmail I have my @gmail.com account, me@alcidesfonseca.com and my student email account. So Gmail works both as a aggregator for my emails and as a web interface when I’m not in my computers or in restricted WiFi networks.

However I’m not satisfied with my current situation. Seems like Gmail has an intelligent algorithm for setting the frequency for fetching you POP3 external accounts based on your email frequency. I find myself going to settings windows and force POP3 fetching manually. But this is not pratical! Sometimes I even go to the webmail version of the original email account when I know I should have received an email.

Of course I could set up the POP3 accounts in my clients, but it’s not the same since I need syncing between them, and I like Gmail’s interface (and that’s whats keeping so many people addicted to it). And I could make my other emails redirect to my gmail account, but after some stories about “lost” emails in gmail a year ago, I like to keep my emails in other servers.

I guess they just fit their computing power to the users needs. If I get one email per day, they’re fetching it one or two times per day. If I get one per minute, it fetches every 5 minutes or so. In the beginning I had a five minute frequency that I consider normal, but in the last days, I get “Last checked: 50 minutes ago.” messages. I can’t get a email half an hour after it was sent to me! I should be able to define my maximum delay for emails. Even if I got one email per day, it might be urgent and I need it 5 minutes after it was sent!

And I’m not the only one complaining about this. Does anyone have a script that simulates the manual fetch? It would be really useful!

John Gruber shared his thoughts on why Apple doesn’t want Flash on the iPhone and I believe that this should be reason for Microsoft to get Silverlight on the Mobile world.

In Microsoft’s events I’ve seen that they are trying to get people to use Silverlight (until now, they’ve failed in my opinion. Only a bunch of their partners is using it in the real world). In terms of results, you can achieve the same with Flash and all designers know it already. They believe it will be used because their desktops apps will also be built with the same technology (XAML), but I also haven’t seen those yet… Who knows if MIX08 will bring some big news?

Back to the mobile world, Microsoft is loosing to Apple’s iPhone mainly due to the user interface everybody complains on Windows Mobile. Nokia, LG and others are already following iPhone’s design patterns, and even the Android has some similarities. Yes, the “G Phone” that will be the main competitor for the Windows Mobile, since it will run on the same mobile (HTC and others). There are even some plugins to make WM more user friendly.

So I guess WM7 (or 6.5?) should have this astonishing interface and Silverlight based and if possible making it available to the Android Phones and even Symbian. That’s how they could make Silverlight a ubiquitous platform.

Digimon – Kick it up! – Grande música! E é um anime que me traz boas recordações :)

Following this two posts, I’ve found Steve Yegge’s Drunken Blog Rants™, a re-edition of his 2004–2005 blog posts that I recommend to every Computer Science guy.

I want to focus two of his posts. The first, The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions, in which he recommends five topics on phone screen interviews and just like Daniel Tenner’s they are interesting from both student/employee and employer points of view. Are you even capable of giving the right answers?

The second one is about Being the Averagest and how most of the programmers are just average and don’t try to improve their skills, they just go as they need. An excellent read and it also gives you some interesting tips ;)

After I read that OpenStruct was now in Ruby core, I had to do it in Python:

class OpenStruct:
	def __init__(self, **dic):
		self.__dict__.update(dic)
	def __getattr__(self, i):
		if i in self.__dict__:
			return self.__dict__[i]
		else:
			raise AttributeError, i
	def __setattr__(self,i,v):
		if i in self.__dict__:
			self.__dict__[i] = v
		else:
			self.__dict__.update({i:v})

o = OpenStruct(b=2)
o.a=1
print o.a,o.b

Will they take it into the Python core? Nooo, but is cool to code nevertheless, and may be used sometimes :)

I’m a huge fan of both The Mars Volta and At The Drive-In and Omar, is the author of most of its music.

His most recent album, Calibration is now available at Napster and iTunes Store. It was inside Apple’s player (for Windows btw) that I knew of this news.

Now the question, where can I buy this album DRM free?

Update At mTraks! DRM free and pretty cool! Just a tip, if you want to buy something, just move to the USA or Canada ;)

Neil has this great post on how take advantage of the full capabilities of modern browsers to improve the user experience. I just love the OpenID provider example since I’m in the long process of implementing OpenID comments in this blog.

Oh, and I am thinking of making possible to receive updates to comments through Jabber…

Yeah, there’s missing only Microsoft for having all the buzzwords in this post’s title. But I won’t be discussing that polemical bid.

Yahoo has launched their 0penID support and I hope the beta there means it’s going to be improved!

I’m doing some OpenID-related stuff and I’m wondering if I should recommend Yahoo as a OpenID provider. First of all, you need to activate OpenID in you account (just like with Blogger). So allowing the users just to enter their URLs and login would be perfect, but I guess they are just doing this for some stats or so. But for regular users having to active something may make them think twice (could be good or not).

One thing that a multi-website entity like yahoo did was to allow users to choose their OpenID url. So I can pick between me.yahoo.com/alcides and my flickr URL. That’s very sweet from Yahoo since they are admitting having flickr in your URL is cooler than the crazy Yahoo. But I find a problem here. Isn’t the “id” in OpenID for identity? http://flickr.com/photos/alcidesfonseca doesn’t have anything to do with my identity, it’s just a place to display my photos. But http://flickr.com/people/alcidesfonseca does! It has all my personal information, even my hCard! So, Mr Yahoo/Flickr Folks, why do we use the photos page instead of our profile page? I know you have a rel=“me” link to the profile page, but it’s just not the same thing!

I’m sure all of you who have tried Ubuntu or other user friendly linux distro in the last years have enjoyed how easy is to install new software. First, because it’s free. Second, because it’s not painful. Any user can Add/Remove software though this simple GUI. And terminal geeks can also with apt-get command (or whatever package manager you use in your distro). Well, I believe this is another concept Microsoft should import to Windows, but adapting to their users needs.

To begin with, Windows 7 should come with a proper folder structure (Vista improved a bit, but I’m still stuck with Program Files and Programas and other stuff). I really love how Apple have done it with the OS X. Second, get a new MSI kind of files, that include dependencies. In today’s world it’s a must! If I develop a IronPython software (I assume Windows 7 wouldn’t come with IronPython, which is disappointing, but expectable from MS), I want it to be downloaded and installed automatically (and no damn Next,Next,Next processes! Just a big Install and a small Advanced buttons). I’m aware there is win-get but that’s just a non-usable patch to our problem here.

The new idea here is to bring commercial software to this environment. You could browser a list of opensource, freeware, shareware and paid software by your needs. And you could buy the latest game, or that productivity software you need, right in some desktop app. Ok, the idea is not so new, since Apple is selling iPod games via the iTunes Store. So may I expect this idea to be implemented in the back soon? Macports can’t really do it for regular users.

Back to my idea, this would be the right way of fighting the software piracy. People download software through bittorrent, emule or another P2P technology faster than they move their asses to some software store. You just have to make that process damn easy. And indie companies would win also, since if their software is worth it, it will be voted or recommended to other users. Oh, and sysadmins would also be able to remotely install some software in all the N machines they’re responsable for.

Yeah, you know it’s one fine day!

Ideias3 is now one year old and this weblog will also be in a few days. Since its beginning, I’ve been using it as the center of my web activity. It has my hCard, it is my OpenId, it has my XFN friend list, it has me links to all my social profiles. Although typing in your browser’s address bar “alcides fonseca” would return this website, I guess that having my identity outside ideias3 was important, and now my web presence is pointing to alcidesfonseca.com.

Although the old url is still active and redirecting to here, I’d appreciate you link to this new address now. I’ve just changed a few lines in a few templates (and APML and FOAF) and this line helped a lot regarding the database. Now I am in the quest of changing all my web profiles with the new email and website. I’m curious to see how technorati deals with it.

Changing your personal details everywhere is always painful (I’m hating it, and I’m fearing changing my address when I move to my new house two streets away from current one) but I believe the social web may help this. I had this conversation with Bruno and I guess it could work in a year or so: I have a new email and url. I change my hCard in this new website. I ping technorati’s kitchen or pingerati for both urls. Both those services propagate the pings to popular services like twitter, flickr, etc… They notice that alcides.ideias3.com is redirecting to a new url, so they change it from my profile, and then they update my details from the hCard, since I use alcidesfonseca.com as my main identity page (or as my OpenId). And that way, everything is updated everywhere, with just one change and one ping!

Just a final note: I now enter my email address without any spam protection. I guess it is already somewhere in the web my plain email address, so I don't care anymore. Gmail works fine as a Spam blocker (I've stopped using my MSN address because I still get too much spam).

Brad has announced Google’s Social Graph API. It is indeed cool, but not that amazing. There are a lot of FOAF and XFN parsers around, but being able to poll the web cache they have for google search. This really gets your requests time down to one (the API). Of course, now you don’t get real-time parsing. I really hope Google will work with Technorati’s Kitchen Ping Service but it’s more probable that they launch their own microformat search.

So what’s the feature I miss so much? Contact merger. When I ask for my friends I get this huge list of all my contacts in all my social networks. But I have friends that are in more than one social network, and then being repeated there. It’s possible to merge them, but I would require the maximum of N-1 queries extra from the API. This will really slow it down for friendly people like me. Can’t powerful Google support this in its API?

The first one is not a tech one, but still geeky. Randall Munroe is the author of xkcd, a fantastic comic about romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

The second one is indeed technical. Håkon Lie and Michael Day present PrinceXML and CSS design for printing. A really cool presentation to learn a bit how to style you webpages to generate an handsome print layout or PDF file.

It’s ironic, when Python tries to get rid of lambda expressions, it’s when Java sees the light (and after C#).

I can’t wait to see what they’ll borrow from dynamic languages next (and I mean having lambda inside OOP code, and not lambda expressions themselves).

Morcheeba feat Slick Rick – Woman lose weight

Hail king of the python parsers! Will you (or anyone who is cool enough) port Mofo (and Hpricot) to Python?

Until now, there was already this one that I couldn’t even put to work. And its old and lacks of many microformats.

I have found this one in beta but it has too many dependencies and sucks to have that all in shared hosting :/

I am really liking Mofo, but not liking ruby that much! But fits in all my current projects (I won’t release its source so you wont make fun of my ugly code!)

Maximum the Hormone – Zetsubou Billy