Lawyer Pwns “Reporter” – TVI

(in portuguese) TVI – Evening News.

teaser:

Badass Bible Verses

The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses | Cracked.com

If the Bible had been written by King Leonidas and the rest of the Spartans from 300, it would probably read pretty much the same as it does now.

It turns out, the Bible is already chock full of ass kicking. Here are the verses that make us want to take to the streets and put some unbelievers to the sword.

Aim For The Starts

Is the title of a film about the rocket physicist and astronautics engineer Wernher von Braun. I haven’t seen it but I like the suggested subtitle:

I Aim For The Stars (But Sometimes I Hit London)

Wikipedia

(originally via Joao)

CNBC Gives Financial Advice – The Daily Show

Chamomile Tea

I just LMAO with this:

Chamomile Tea

Chamomile Tea

ACTUAL COLLEGE THEME PAPER – HEY I COULDN’T MAKE THIS UP
Remember the book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”?
Well, here’s a prime example offered by an English professor
at an American University.

“Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story.
The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person
sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write
the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the
first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The
first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and
forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order
to keep the story coherent. There is to be absolutely NO talking
and anything you wish to say must be written on the paper. The
story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.”

The following was actually turned in by two of my English students:

Rebecca -last name deleted, and Jim – last name deleted.

————————————————————
STORY:
(First paragraph by Rebecca)
At first, Laurie couldn’t decide which kind of tea she wanted. The
chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home,
now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times,
that he liked chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs,
keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if
she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again.
So chamomile was out of the question.
—————————————————–
(Second paragraph by Jim)
Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack
squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to
think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named
Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. “A.S.
Harris to Geostation 17, he said into his trans- galactic communicator.
“Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so
far…” But before he could sign off, a bluish particle beam flashed
out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship’s cargo bay. The
jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across
the cockpit.
———————————————————-
(Rebecca)
He bumped his head and died almost immediately but not before he
felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one
woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth
stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers
of Skylon 4. Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and
Space Travel,” Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news
simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window,
dreaming of her youth, when the days had passed hurriedly and
carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract
her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things
around her. “Why must one lose one’s innocence to become a woman?”
she pondered wistfully.
——————————————————–
(Jim)
Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live.
Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu’udrian mothership
launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted
wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament
Treaty through the congress had left Earth a defenseless target
for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the
human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty
the Anu’udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough
firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop
them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium
fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President,
in his top-secret Mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor
off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion,
which vaporized poor, stupid Laurie and 85 million other Americans.
The President slammed his fist on the conference table. “We can’t
allow this! I’m going to veto that treaty! Let’s blow ‘em out of
the sky!”
———————————————————
(Rebecca)
This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature.
My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic semi-literate
adolescent.
———————————————————-
(Jim)
Yeah? Well, you’re a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts
at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. “Oh shall I have
chamomile tea? Or shall I have some other sort of F*CKING TEA??? Oh
no, I’m such an air headed bimbo who reads too many Danielle Steele
novels.”
———————————————————-
(Rebecca)
Asshole.
———————————————————-
(Jim)
Bitch.
———————————————————-
(Rebecca)
Wanker.
———————————————————-
(Jim)
slut.
———————————————————
(Rebecca)
Get f*cked.
———————————————————-
(Jim)
Eat shit.
——————————————————–
(Rebecca)
F*CK YOU – YOU NEANDERTHAL!!!
———————————————————-
(Jim)
Go drink some tea – whore.
——————————————————–
(Teacher)
A+ I really liked this one.

Asustek May Use Google’s Android in Netbooks, in Challenge for Microsoft (Tim Culpan/Bloomberg)

Asustek May Use Google’s Android in Netbooks, in Challenge for Microsoft (Tim Culpan/Bloomberg): “

Tim Culpan / Bloomberg:

Asustek May Use Google’s Android in Netbooks, in Challenge for Microsoft‘ —’ Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) — Asustek Computer Inc., which pioneered the market for sub-$500 laptops, may install Google Inc.’s free Android operating system on its low-cost notebooks, challenging the dominance of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software.

(Via Techmeme.)

Alan Kay at TED – A powerful idea about teaching ideas

Alan Kay (wikipedia) – A powerful idea about teaching ideas (TED Talks)

With all the intensity and brilliance for which he is known, Alan Kay envisions better techniques for teaching kids by using computers to illustrate experience in ways -– mathematically and scientifically — that only computers can.

Noise Sample

How Digg Works is a nice blog post on the digg technology blog that gives an overview of the digg network architecture: load balancers -> application server (apache, memcached, gearman) -> database server (MySQL) / file server (MogileFS). Quoting:

“Digg uses Debian GNU/Linux across the board with a mixture of MySQL, Memcached, MogileFS, Python, PHP, Apache, Gearman and various appliances to serve up billions of requests a month (and more every day!)”

What’s New In Python 2.6. My highlights: new documentation format using Sphinx (which btw looks incredibly powerful – read “complex”), awesome (but still optional) with statment (from future) to replace try…finally blocks, multiprocessing package,and more.

I had more stuff to put in this post but it has been in my “draft” folder for more than a week now so I’m just gonna post it like it is.

UbuntuWebServer Virtual Appliance V1.4

This is probably the last version of my ubuntu web server VM that will use Ubuntu 7.10.

UbuntuWebServer

Direct Download Link

REVISION LOG:

1.4 – added phppgadmin and some php stuff
1.3 – added FTP Server
1.2 – added JDK+Tomcat5.5 and PostegreSQL
1.1 – added OpenSSL and demo apache configuration (commented)
1.0 – initial release

Google Web Services for Free

Dave Winer recently broke the news that Google will soon introduce a “Google Web Services”,  a competitor to Amazon Web Services. This isn’t much of a shock to anyone. The extra bit that is somewhat of a surprise  is the price: free. He then explains that the reason it will be free is that they can pay for it in the reduced cost of integrating new acquisitions into their infrastructures which would become, effectively zero.

I don’t agree with that. At least I don’t think that is the main reason. I think it’s just the same old business model – basic service is free, premium is paid. The same model you see in Google Apps and a lot of other business on the web.

The basic service will be limited, in terms of traffic and/or storage (file and DB) etc. This will be the most widely used by startups. The premium service will just be the same pricing model amazon – pay as you go, the only different is that you don’t start paying at zero usage but rather at a higher threshold. When a startup becomes successful its needs will grow exponentially. They will be using more than the maximum allowed for free, and they’ll need to pay. But that’s alright because now that they are successful they can afford it. And the 1% or so that will be successful will have subsidized everyone that didn’t make it and still give Google a nice profit. Let’s not forget that Google’s infrastructure is already here and even tens of thousands of failed ventures won’t make a dent in it. Successful ventures will generate enough cash to upgrade that same infrastructure. Specially as the cost of hardware continues to drop.

Off course I’m sure people at Google also thought of the acquisition factor. Past acquisitions have taken a lot of time to be integrated. I think it took something like a year for writely to become “Google Docs“. That’s a very long time on the web.

Combine the free GWS with the powerful web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails that allow single individuals to create useful applications quickly and the new marketting oppurtunities that the web2.0 has created and the cost of trying won’t be measured in millions, thousands or even hundreds of dollars. It will be measured in terms of hours – the hours you “wasted” trying. And that, in many cases, won’t even be “time wasted” but rather “experience gained”.

It’s a brave new world indeed.

Out of WordPress.com and Into Evernote.com

I mentioned in a previous post that I was using a private WordPress blog to keep my notes. Not anymore. I migrated to Evernote.

Thanks to Maria Joao Valente for sending me the invite to evernote.

Evernote is a note organizers, similar to Journler which I used a while back.

Check out the About Evernote and their screencast. My highlights:
* Web client
* Desktop client
* Works with Mobile Devices
* Painless, automatic synchronization (think gmail + IMAP but better)
* Notes can be found by searching and filtering for text within images
* Clip (via bookmarklet) or email entire webpages into your account
* Can import html files (you’ll see why this was important for me)

See also: Wired Review and TUAW Review.

Migrating between applications has never been an easy task. In this case I need to migrate from a WordPress blog to evernote. I could manually click “Clip to Evernote” for each post on that blog or I could’ve written a simple AppleScript to do it or I could probably have found a way to do it in Javascript or I could’ve taken advantage of the “clip” thing in another way. But off course I choose the hardest way possible – I wrote a python script to convert the WordPress XML Export File to multiple HTML notes and then dragged those files to evernote. At least it was fun if a colossal waste of time…

Anyway here’s the python script in case you ever want to convert a wordpress blog (or more accurately a WordPress XML Export File) to html files.

wpdepress.py

# Copyright (c) 2008 Luis Rei
#
# Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
# of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
# in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
# to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
# copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
# furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
#
# The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
# all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
#
# THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
# IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
# FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
# AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
# LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
# OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
# THE SOFTWARE.
# Notes:
# - currently does not handle images, attachments or comments
# - was only tested on MacOS X (10.5)
# - not "carefully" developed e.g. poor exception handling, little testing, ...
# - see also http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/06/12/xml-import-export/
import string, os, sys, getopt
from xml.dom import minidom
__author__ = 'Luis Rei (luis.rei@gmail.com)'
__homepage__ = 'http://luisrei.com'
__version__ = '1.0'
__date__ = '2008/03/23'
def convert(infile, outdir, authorDirs, categoryDirs):
    """Convert WordPress Export File to multiple html files.
    Keyword arguments:
    infile -- the location of the WordPress Export File
    outdir -- the directory where the files will be created
    authorDirs -- if true, create different directories for each author
    categoryDirs -- if true, create directories for each category
    """
    # First we parse the XML file into a list of posts.
    # Each post is a dictionary
    dom = minidom.parse(infile)
    blog = [] # list that will contain all posts
    for node in dom.getElementsByTagName('item'):
    	post = dict()
    	post["title"] = node.getElementsByTagName('title')[0].firstChild.data
    	post["date"] = node.getElementsByTagName('pubDate')[0].firstChild.data
    	post["author"] = node.getElementsByTagName(
    	                'dc:creator')[0].firstChild.data
    	post["id"] = node.getElementsByTagName('wp:post_id')[0].firstChild.data
    	if node.getElementsByTagName('content:encoded')[0].firstChild != None:
    	    post["text"] = node.getElementsByTagName(
    	                    'content:encoded')[0].firstChild.data
    	else:
    	    post["text"] = ""
    	# wp:attachment_url could be use to download attachments
    	# Get the categories
    	tempCategories = []
    	for subnode in node.getElementsByTagName('category'):
    		 tempCategories.append(subnode.getAttribute('nicename'))
    	categories = [x for x in tempCategories if x != '']
    	post["categories"] = categories
    	# Add post to the list of all posts
    	blog.append(post)
    # Then we create the directories and HTML files from the list of posts.
    # The "base" directory
    outdir += "/wordpress/"
    if os.path.exists(outdir) == False:
        os.makedirs(outdir)
    os.chdir(outdir)
    for post in blog:
        # The "category" directories
        path = ""
        if authorDirs == True:
            path += post["author"].encode('utf-8') + "/"
        # This creates a path for the file in the format
        # category1/category2/category3/file. Note that the category list was
        # sorted.
        if categoryDirs == True:
            if (post["categories"] != None):
                path += string.join(post["categories"],"/")
        if os.path.exists(path) == False and path != "":
            os.makedirs(path)
        # And finally the file itself
        path = outdir + path
        title = post["title"].encode('utf-8')
        filename = path + "/" + post["id"] + ' - ' + title \
                    + '.html'
        # Add a meta tag to specify charset (UTF-8) in the HTML file
        meta = """"""
        f = open(filename, 'w')
        f.write(meta+"\n")
        # Add "HTML header"
        start = "\n\n\n\n\n"
        f.write(start)
        # Convert the unicode object to a string that can be written to a file
        # with the proper encoding (UTF-8)
        text = post["text"].encode('utf-8')
        # Replace simple newlines with
 + newline so that the HTML file
        # represents the original post more accuratelly
        text = text.replace("\n", "
\n")
        f.write(text)
        # Finalize HTML
        end = "\n\n"
        f.write(end)
        f.close()
def usage(pname):
    """Displays usage information
    keyword arguments:
    pname -- program name (e.g. obtained as argv[0])
    """
    print """python %s [-hac] [-o outdir] infile
    Converts a WordPress Export File to multiple html files.
    Options:
        -h,--help\tDisplays this information.
        -a,--authors\tCreate different directories for each author.
        -c,--categories\tCreate directory structure from post categories.
        -o,--outdir\tSpecify a directory for the output.
    Example:
    python %s -c -o ~/TEMP ~/wordpress.2008-03-20.xml
        """ % (pname, pname)
def main(argv):
    outdir = ""
    authors = False
    categories = False
    try:
		opts, args = getopt.getopt(
		    argv[1:], "ha:o:c", ["help", "authors", "outdir", "categories"])
    except getopt.GetoptError, err:
		print str(err)
		usage(argv[0])
		sys.exit(2)
    for opt, arg in opts:
		if opt in ("-h", "--help"):
			usage(argv[0])
			sys.exit()
		elif opt in ("-a", "--authors"):
			authors = True
		elif opt in ("-c", "--categories"):
		    categories = True
		elif opt in ("-o", "--outdir"):
		    outdir = arg
    infile = "".join(args)
    if infile == "":
	    print "Error: Missing Argument: missing wordpress export file."
	    usage(argv[0])
	    sys.exit(3)
    if outdir == "":
	    # Use the current directory
	    outdir = os.getcwd()
    convert(infile, outdir, authors, categories)
if __name__ == "__main__":
	main(sys.argv)

Firefox 3 First Impressions

+/-:
+ Faster
+ Lighter
+ Better default theme
+ Cool new features

- nothing so far

Download Link

UbuntuWebServer Virtual Appliance V1.3

Yet another version of my Ubuntu Web Server VM out.

I added an FTP server to make it easier to upload stuff from within editors such as Dreamweaver.

UbuntuWebServer

REVISION LOG:
1.3 – added FTP Server
1.2 – added JDK+Tomcat5.5 and PostegreSQL
1.1 – added OpenSSL and demo apache configuration (commented)
1.0 – initial release

UbuntuWebServer Virtual Appliance V1.2

New version of my Ubuntu Web Server VM out

UbuntuWebServer

REVISION LOG:
1.2 – added JDK+Tomcat5.5 and PostegreSQL
1.1 – added OpenSSL and demo apache configuration (commented)
1.0 – initial release

HD Wars Update – WB goes Blu-Ray

Warner Brothers dropped HD-DVD and went Blue-Ray only.  This is how things look now:

(Source: Wikipedia)