November 17th, 2008
So here I am, a couple of days after coming back from Sapo Codebits 2008, still feeling a bit off because of the lack of sleep (or the exaggerated amount of sleep I’ve had yesterday and today) but at least, unlike many others, I didn’t catch the flu. All in all, I’ve had an awesome time at Codebits. I met lots of people, found some people I had already met at Takeoff, learned a bunch of stuff and had lots of fun.
As for the workshops and presentations, I didn’t attend everything I wanted to I would just lose myself talking to people. However, I did attend those I though were more important for me (except for the one by Peter Svensson). On the first day I attended the Mário Valente (serverside JS) and Jan Lehnardt (Couch DB) presentations. The first made me realize that Javascript on the server might have some nice advantages to it, but until we don’t have a working implementation and we start seeing things working on the “real world”, I’m still a bit skeptic. As for the second one, it was something I was really looking forward to learn more about, and the presentation convinced me to try and use Couch DB on my project.
On the second day, I attended Celso Pinto (technology at 7Syntax) and Pedro Melo (XMPP) presentations. I think the first one showed that people can really learn from others mistakes (read Twitter) thinking in advance about their platform implementation and it also convinced me even further to try Couch DB. The second one was a really great introduction to XMPP and it’s possibilities (not that I didn’t knew anything about XMPP, but I didn’t really knew much about what you can do with bots) and it nearly convinced me to put aside my project idea and try to do something with XMPP (a frontend for drop.io), but apparently my specific idea was a bit plagued by some XMPP troubles regarding file transfers (but I might still pick up this idea again someday).
The rest of the time was spent trying to work on my project, taking part on Alcides band on the RockBand competition (did we achieve our goal of finishing up last ?), eating pizza (no more please), and of course talking to lots of people. As for my project, I attempted to do something close to Idiomag, but giving a lot more freedom to people when choosing the contents and delivering them in simpler ways. I didn’t finish the project in time because I decided to hack some Django parts to use Couch DB, which took me some time (I didn’t really need Couch DB, but I wanted to use it, just because). But the project isn’t dead and it will move on and show up…some day.
I also didn’t stay for the projects presentation, because since I didn’t have anything “visible” to show and I was really sleepy, so I ended up coming home sooner.
Overall, it was a great event, but I’ll leave here some suggestions for next year:
- More food diversity. Some sandwiches or salads would’ve been nice.
- Better wireless connectivity. Sometimes it felt like the wireless AP’s were struggling with so many connections at once, and the connection would drop really often.
- More real time updates on the blog or the screens about delays and schedule changes
- Also, weren’t we supposed to get some kind of kit ?
Codebits 2008 is over. Now let’s hope Codebits 2009 will be even better !
PS: It seems my prediction of #anita dying out after Codebits is turning out to be true.
Tags: technology, life, anita, codebits, couchdb, django, javascript, sapo
6 Comments »
August 27th, 2008
Yesterday Mozilla introduced Ubiquity. I’m not going to explain here what Ubiquity is, because if you click on the previous link you’ll get a good explanation (don’t forget to watch the video). This post is just to inform everyone that i’ve developed a Ubiquity command which allows posting to Ping.fm.
It’s based on the default Twitter plugin and a bit hackish in the way the user api key is stored, but it works. Please test it and provide feedback.
Also, if you have ideas for Ubiquity itself, don’t forget to go and tell Mozilla about it. Being a heavy Gnome Do user, i have great hopes for this project.
Tags: technology, web, mozilla, pingfm, ubiquity
1 Comment »
August 15th, 2008
I interrupt this never announced blogging hiatus to talk about the Massive Attack show at the Super Bock Surf Fest 2008 at Sagres, Portugal, which was, in one word, awesome.
First of all, i think they risked a lot by playing 7 (that’s right, seven !) new songs at a festival, but i think the overall reaction was great. Personally, i loved the new songs. They have a darker tone than the songs from their latest album, 100th Window, and it reminded me a lot of songs from Mezzanine and Blue Lines, with Del Naja and Daddy G singing a lot. Apparently there have been some youtube videos of these songs around for a while but i didn’t know about this.
The other thing i loved about the show (and i’m not sure if they have done anything like this before) was the “localization” of the stuff they showed on their background video panel (which was not exactly a screen but a sort of panel composed by thousands of small lights which could siplay different colours). Apart from all the weird effects (water ripples, spinning globes, old LCD like stuff), they showed national news in portuguese from that same day (as in a gigantic news ticker) during Inertia Creeps (which had an awesome live performance), and lots of quotes from famous people translated to portuguese during one of the new songs. I don’t think i recall having heard about any band doing anything like this, but given the fact that the band members have always had a word to say in political matters (all that content that was shown had something to do with politics or human rights, except for some of the news items) and have always done impressive stuff with video and other kinds of media (their DOS like website during the 100th Window days was great), i’m not really surprised. This also means they have to redo the content for every show, which shows a great commitment to live shows.
Apart from Massive Attack, i also loved the Dub Pistols show, a band of which i had never heard anything before. The rest of the bands were not really my kind of stuff (reggae mostly, which is the main music type on that fest), and i was there to listen to Massive Attack anyway.
One of those other bands (Morgan Heritage) also did something great while playing their last song, asking everyone to put up their cameras or phones to record a video of the rest of the show and just upload it to the internet. I was behind the majority of the crowd and it was awesome to see thousands of lit up little screens in the darkness of the night. And since my phone battery was nearly dead i couldn’t join everyone else on the recording madness.
Regular blogging will return in a while, not that i have always been anything close to what most people call regular.
Tags: life, music, massive attack, superbock surf fest
1 Comment »
April 23rd, 2008
Tags: music, nineinchnails
Comments Off
April 13th, 2008
Instead of posting that damned shell history meme why can’t people just write posts about the apps they use and why they use it ? It would be so much nicer. Think about it people. Maybe you could even submit some nice articles to sites which need them.
Yes, I’m bored and kinda pissed.
Tags: technology, gnu/linux, memes, rant, shell
1 Comment »
April 3rd, 2008
Did anyone spot one of these ? I’ve been in the Oriente station a few days ago but I didn’t have the luck to spot them.
Update:
That link doesn’t seem to be working right now, try this one (which doesn’t have all the pics): http://tinyurl.com/2pqdfe
Tags: life, lisbon, lost, viral marketing
5 Comments »
March 30th, 2008
As I’ve written before, I’ve been using Firefox 3, and as with everyone else, one of the first changes I noticed was the Awesome Bar. At first I didn’t really knew what to think about it, and then it started to annoy me a bit but when I changed my mindset and started using it the “Gnome Do way”, I started to get along with it.
However, something still annoys me a lot.
If the mouse pointer is hovering above the area where the bar is going to appear, then the option below the pointer gets automatically selected. That way, if I want to use the first result given by the awesome bar, I can’t just press the down arrow and use it. I either have to press the up arrow some times or move the mouse there, and that way the awesomeness disappears. It completely defeats the purpose.
This didn’t happen with the old bar, and it doesn’t happen with the search box. On the search box, an item only gets selected with the mouse pointer after you move the pointer.
I’ve been searching the bug tracker but I haven’t found anything similar. Can anyone confirm if this is still present on the latest builds ?
Hopefully this will get corrected before the final release, otherwise this is going to be a huge usability flaw which is sure to annoy many more users.
Tags: gnu/linux, web, desktop, awesomebar, firefox
12 Comments »
