Posted: November 18th, 2008
After the awesomeness that was codebits 07 I actually expeect 08 to be a lot better. It wasn’t imo. It still ranks as Legendary on the my personal scale. Food was a major let down tough 
The talks I went too were a disappointment. Even Jack Motif’s XMPP talk was way too introductory for the audience (at least for me). More code less talk? Seriously looking at XML I could read in the damn specification was not fun. But I did get to ask a few questions and talk to Jack Motif and Pedro Melo a bit after the talk which made it worth it. Jack Motif told me to look at Wokkel and said he had written a lot of example code for it. I’ll definitivelly look at it sometime in the near future. And this was the best talk I went. Sadly on the second day I chose to sleep late so I missed Pedro Melo’s and Celso Pinto’s presentations. Both of which I’m told were “teh awesome 4tw” or something like that.
What was suprising is that this year, even though the talks @MAIN looked great on paper, most people went to the talks on the other stages. And judging from my experience they did the right thing – however I have no interest whatsoever in server-side js or web cartooning which seem to have been among the most popular).
Another fail was the super loud Rock Band playing while some of us were trying to code but people seem to have enjoyed it.
82 projects? Holly….! Sadly things run late (fail!) and I had to leave before people finished showing their projects – I’ll have to look at the videos later. A lot of people were doing some pretty cool stuff but sadly didn’t finish in time. As for my stuff, I’ll put it online sometime in the near future when I don’t have better things to do (like study for tomorrow’s exam – pratical code thingy whatever you want to call it… crap by any other name would smell just as bad)
I got to talk a bit with the usual suspects from Lisboa (ended up with an handivi sticker on my macbook) and Porto and also met a bunch of new people from all around (Lisboa, Porto, Aveiro, Coimbra, Faro, …) – some from FEUP! And ofc I learned a few things. I regret not having ended up joining some team and working on some project with more people but I did get to play (literally) with pygame and with django. Both of which I’ve been meaning to actually play with (more than just doing tutorial examples) for like 1yr.
Btw think putting the RFID stuff@codebits for everyone to hack was a brilliant idea. Congrats @ whoever had it. And congrats to the sapo.pt team behind this event. It’s the only one of its kind (and level of quality) here in Portugal. Granted that may not mean a lot but it is a great-omg-you-really-cant-miss-it event imho.
Oh! Got to play around with an EeePC 1000H (or something) and I liked it (thanks dude, whoever you were, I forgot cuz my memory is bad and it works worse without sleep). On coming back, word from relax is that everything (or close enough) on his 901 is now supported by Ubuntu. I dunno if I want one because I really need it or just because it’s a cool gadget and I’m rationalizing my lust. Whatever. I can’t afford it anyway. Not with the ginormous ammounts of money I’m wasting travelling around… this semester I’ll actually spend more time outside Porto than @ the uni… hell yeah! Which brings me to my need to work on my cibermouse stuff both for the Robotics course and for the competition at RTSS08 in Barcelona (yay).
I’m sure I left out a lot of stuff but I’m short on time and patience and this is better than nothing imo.
Posted: October 24th, 2008
If I ever buy a netbook it needs to have a proper OS. Windows is even more of a joke on a netbook than it is on a normal laptop and since I don’t foresee apple coming up with a netbook in the near future, linux is all that’s left. And no, that crap Asus ships and calls linux is not an option. Windows wannabe Xandros with a lame interface – no thank you. Ubuntu is currently the (only) way to go. And I mean normal Ubuntu not Ubuntu with weird interface (DJ Silly Remix). Sure you can install something like Ubuntu EEE if you have an eee pc or similar but that still might not get all your hardware runing properly plus why did you have to do it yourself? That should’ve been done by the manufacturer imo.
I also find some of the hadware on the current generation of netbooks lacking. There’s nothing that can be done about the SSDs at the moment. They are all slow, low-capacity energy-vampires. One could go with the traditional mechanic drives but that’s soooo last century. The memory is a different story. 512MB is definitively not enough. 1GB is usable but 2GB would be nice. But the biggest let down in my opinion is the battery life. Assuming you don’t stick with windows or the windows wannabe that comes pre-installed, you won’t get past 5h of battery life. And knowing the reviewers and my own careless use of computer resources, that probably translates into 3h in my hands
Granted some may say I’ve missed the point of netbooks. That all netbooks are for is browsing the web, reading email and instant messaging. Nope. That’s just all you can do with the current hardware. Ok the truth is you can do a lot more but you’ll soon run into limitations. Say I want to fire up eclipse and work on my JADE powered project for the Distributed Intelligent Agents course. It’s painfull enough on my macbook I can’t imagine it being bearable on the current crop (read crap) of netbooks.
But that’s not what netbooks are for right? And if it’s just browsing and reading email, an iPhone will do. But work still needs to get done and while my macbook is great for that, I’d still like a more portable option. One I wouldn’t be too afraid to drop/lose. A more task-oriented option (e.g. work on proj A for 2h at a random place with wireless) without the hundreds of applications I keep conveniently open on my macbook would also be nice.
Obviously there are already many options in the market and more to come. But I’m not paying more than 350 eur for one. That’s the price of an eee pc 901. So all I have to do now is wait for another 12 months for it (or rather its sucessor(s)) to reach the kind of hw specs I want and for them to either drop the pseudo-linux or for ubuntu’s netbook support to improve a bit.
Posted: May 15th, 2008
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
Posted: January 28th, 2008
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
Posted: January 15th, 2008
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
Posted: November 18th, 2007
Just uploaded the Ubuntu Web Server Virtual Appliance v1.1.
Added SSL support (OpenSSL, loaded the Apache module and added demo certificate and commented out configuration).
Posted: November 12th, 2007
If you’re like me and don’t like having to install all that stuff in every PC you use than this virtual appliance is for you.
Or
If you want to start learning PHP/Ruby on Rails/Django _now_ instead of having to install/configure stuff.
Or
If you’re going to something like Sapo Codebits and want to take the server with you
Hightlights: LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), Ruby on Rails, Django
UbuntuWebServer Project
Virtual Appliance Market
VMWare Player (Free)
Posted: October 30th, 2007
There is no easy way to create application shortcuts (a shortcut to an application that may or may not have arguments). It’s extremely easy to do in Windows and Ubuntu (<your-favorite-nix/linux-distro>) but not in OSX.
I’m sure that as usual, some idiot apple zealot (sorry for the pleonasm) is going to try (yeah try, comments moderated but they still try) to post a comment saying how that’s a good (great) thing, Steve Jobs is a genius and I’m dumb for not knowing that it’s such a good thing or even knowing what a shortcut is (like when I posted about the iPhone lacking a SDK and guess what? It will get one – in your face zealot 
).
Posted: October 30th, 2007
For those of us who use multiple profiles in firefox, there’s a small surprise in Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon – firefox is no longer compiled with -NO-REMOTE as default. What that means is that now you have to pass the -NO-REMOTE option to firefox if you want to use multiple profiles simultaneously. Example:
firefox -NO-REMOTE -P work
Basically, just add -NO-REMOTE to all your firefox shortcuts (I have one shortcut for each profile).
Posted: August 28th, 2007
In a previous post I explained a way to convert a cue/FLAC to mp3. Recently I had to convert a cue/APE to mp3. While searching for ways to do it I came across this post in the aidanhm’s stuff blog. While it has very few posts (the last one in mid February) it does have a few posts that explain how to convert between different file formats (APE, FLAC, WAV,…) and how to deal with cuesheets in Ubuntu.
Since it’s explained there, there’s no point in me repeating it here.
While I haven’t done any of this in Mac OS X, I did download xACT
xACT stands for X Audio Compression Toolkit. It is a GUI based front end (written in AppleScript Studio) for the unix applications Shorten (3.5.1), shntool (2.0.3), monkey’s audio compressor (3.99),flac (1.1.3) and cdda2wav 2.01a32(with paranoia support).
I also looked at this page which explains how to use xACT to convert .flac files to mp3.
UPDATE: Filipe IMed me about a better option for Mac OS X, Max.
Posted: August 21st, 2007
Filipe IMed me this link. That’s great news – it was one of the most important things missing from Ubuntu (in my opinion).
It is such a pain to configure multiple monitors (4 in my case – xinemara if you’re wondering) at the moment. Until you learn how to do it that is. The Nvidia configuration tool that comes with the drivers was a big help but it is far from perfect – I didn’t use it directly (that wouldn’t work, at least not the way it should) but extracted info from the xorg.conf file created by it.
Posted: June 11th, 2007
I’ve moved my blog outside of FEUP. Why? Because some employees (or maybe it was just one person) of CICA decided to block neacm.fe.up.pt, the server that hosted my blog and others (blogs.fe.up.pt).
When administrator realized that the server was inaccessible from the outside, he asked the networks people to look into it to see if they could fix the problem. They replied something along the lines
“oh! It’s not a problem, I did it on purpose. There’s an option there that can’t exist. We should schedule a meeting to talk about it.”
After some inquiries, the administrator was able to determine what that “option” was. The service in question was promptly removed and they took more than one week to perform the 2 mouse clicks necessary to unblock neacm.fe.up.pt (which includes not only blogs.fe.up.pt but also the recently launched tags.fe.up.pt and the faculty’s mirror service – which WAS an official mirror for a lot of well known stuff like Ubuntu and Apache).
This is shameful. A group of faculty employees with a grudge against a member of a student group (or the entire group) was able to deprive students of several services which were actually funded by the students themselves via the AEFEUP.
Sure it can be claimed that the server had a service that violated the ToS but the proper way to deal with it would have been to notify the administrator which would’ve removed the service probably within the hour – a service that had existed for almost year and a half. But instead what was done was to stealthily block access to the server from the outside and then delay restoring access for as long as they saw fit. Shame!
If this was anyplace other than a public institution in Portugal, the people responsible for this abuse of authority would be fired on the spot. But here, it’s business as usual.
If you’re curious about it, the service, named F(eup)TP and available at http://neacm.fe.up.pt/ftp/ was an FTP proxy powered by net2ftp – it allowed outside access to predefined intranet FTP servers via the web. It was a service provided to everyone at FEUP and was announced via the faculty’s internal mailing list on January 27, 2006 – which means the same people responsible for blocking access to the server now received an email notifying them (and everyone else) of the service more than a year and a half ago. In other others, the people who did this on top of being abusive are also incompetent – shocker. (Not like there’s a single person @ FEUP that doesn’t complain about the poorly maintained network which has more downtime than Paris Hilton — hey I’m talking about her psychiatric condition not about the adult video)
This also has considerable implications for a service such as blogs.fe.up.pt. What if someone posts something there that someone at CICA or for that matter anywhere else doesn’t like? Will they block the entire service again until that post is removed? Sadly, I think that’s a likely scenario.
Personally, I’ve moved my blog outside of FEUP and I know of two other blogs that are likely to follow soon. And what can I say when people ask me if they should use blogs.fe.up.pt instead of some other service? This service was something that made the faculty stand out from others. It was something done by students. It worked well. Now I think it will soon be dead. Killed by a few people who abused their authority because of a personal grudge. Sad indeed.
UPDATE
I forgot to mention exactly how incompetent they are: they blocked IPv4 traffic but failed to block IPv6 traffic. Checkpoint should award them with a “Most Valuable Professional” medal or something.
Posted: March 21st, 2007
After like 6 weeks I removed Vista from my laptop last week. The main culprit was application compatibility (or lack of thereof) – either not installing, not running, not running well i.e. crashing OR requiring “tricks” (read annoyances) to run (run as admin and stuff) and other random, lesser annoyances.
Off course the fact that I also have Ubuntu on my laptop means that on an average day I won’t use Windows anyway – be it XP or Vista. Nevertheless I miss the integrated search. Beagle sucks. I’ll give tracker a try and post some comments about it – if I remember… I probably wont.
Off course performance (or the lack of it) had something to do with it but it was a significant factor (just another “little thing”).
Generally speaking there’s something about Vista that seems to cause more attrition – you are forced to become aware of it for some reason(s) I can’t seem to figure out what exactly. No it’s not UAC, I turned that off – it got really old, really fast (“sigh. continue”) and I suspect turning off UAC will be the norm among Vista “power users”/experts/wtv. I should probably mention that I’m used to Ubuntu’s password prompts whenever I need to do admin stuff and those are NOWHERE near as bad as UAC – in fact I don’t even consider those prompts all that annoying (except when they take a while and I forget in which monitor they are opening in). That’s because you get the UAC prompts (yes, plural) not at the start of the application/installation but only when the applications actually tries to do the admin stuff. So much for unattended installations. I found it very annoying. And why not go all the way instead of that half-ass “continue” button, why not just ask for the password? (wouldn’t surprise me if they were just afraid of trojans imitating it)
Ok that UAC rant was a bit off-topic… I was talking about attrition, I didn’t explain very well what I meant by it. I’m sure GUI experts have some term for it but I don’t know it. The GUI just seems to run contrary to some common GUI design principles at times – mainly those of directness (try changing the wallpaper or the theme), efficiency/predictability/consistency (the new control panel where everything is at least a thousand clicks away in 100 different types of menus/tabs/wtv and you have to guess where and when you do you’re rewarded with something that looks a lot like the old XP applet where it used to be 2 or 3 clicks away from the starting line), comprehensibility, simplicity and clarity. Though it’s hard to pinpoint where exactly where (except in the control panel case), but it just annoys me (though I think it’s mainly windows explorer and the taskbar/system tray). I used Vista for 6 weeks, and I’ve every version of Windows since 95 excluding ME (yeah I dodged that one, the only (large) version of Windows that became a flop so far), and I couldn’t get used to it. Plus the more Gnome evolves the harder it is for me to go back to any Windows, I just miss Gnome and it’s attractiveness. Something else that is to blame for my lack of patience with Vista is that every time I boot into Windows it feels like a chore. It’s something I don’t want to do, it’s something I’m being forced to do.
Funny thing. There was a time when linux newcomers complained about installing apps in linux and said that I should be more like in Windows. Now it’s the other way around. People try Ubuntu and ask why isn’t app installation in Windows that easy and convenient. I doubt that’s something Microsoft will ever manage to do.
Thank god for Linux and GNOME (and Mark Shuttleworth for Ubuntu).
Now compare my Vista experience with that of OSX: today, for the first time, I used OSX for more than 5 minutes unattended simply because I left my notebook at home and Filipe was in a meeting (thanks btw) . A full half hour! And I got used to it. I was quite impressed with how fast I got used to it – and I how much I actually liked it (loved the growl notifications that kept popping up) – though I obviously didn’t use it long enough for major annoyances to appear (like some linux/windows app that has no equivalent in OSX or having to use interface-crippled software like VLC). Sucks that I have to admit it (but no way I’m going to stop making no-one-uses-it jokes). I feel dirty somehow, like I’ve joined the unwashed mass of Mac-Zealots *eeew* I already felt slightly ashamed of belonging to the same species as them… But I’ll go even further: if I knew what I know now (namely that linux’s power management would keep sucking) I would’ve bought a macbook (one of the 13″ models probably) one year ago when I bought my Vaio. There I’ve said it. Now I’ve got to go take a bath.
But before I do one more word of praise for Linux and another stab at Windows: my Windows XP installation currently occupies around 40GB. My Ubuntu installation (including 3 different desktop environments – GNOME, KDE and Xfce not counting fluxbox which is too small to matter anyway) occupies around 4GB – 10x less.
In Summary:
Why don’t I use Vista? I have something better, it’s called Ubuntu.
Do I recommend OSX? No, I haven’t used it enough to recommend it or recommend against it. One huge disadvantage is that it’s tied to Apple hardware. (Zealots: please don’t bother telling me how that’s actually a hidden advantage, it’s not)
Posted: March 21st, 2007
The OSNews post entitled Windows Applications in Ubuntu with a Seamless Desktop sure caught my attention. I’m sure I’m not the first person to say this is going to need to be GUI-fied and made even simpler but it is definitively another big feature for Ubuntu that will not only help people who already wanted to migrate but it will also be another reason for people to switch.
Direct links:
Seamless Virtualization
Windows XP Under Qemu How To
Posted: March 18th, 2007
If you want to download and set the covers for your large mp3 collection in a semi-automatic way and you happen to be using Ubuntu (or another Linux variant), I suggest giving Album Cover Art Dowloader a try.
Updated: Forgot to mention that the .deb works with Ubuntu.