iPhone AppStore Secrets – Pinch Media

iPhone AppStore Secrets – Pinch Media

24hours BEST Engineering Competition

Seriously, if you don’t know BEST Engineering Competitions, get to know them. They are incredibly fun. I’m not the “build stuff” kind of guy, my usual approach to “hardware” involves smacking stuff – the caveman approach. But I tried it for a bit and found it surprisingly fun.

The 24hours BEST Engineering competition will be held next weekend. You can participate if you’re a student @ FEUP or FCUP.

Here’s the promo video (flash)

Go to the website for more information (Portuguese)

Endgadget: Ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark

Editorial: Ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark
1: It’s exactly the same as Windows Mobile 6… er, 5.
2: The interface improvements are still way behind the curve.
3: The UI tweaks are mostly just skin deep, and third-parties have already gone way deeper.
4: It doesn’t support capacitive touchscreens.
5: It’s not due out until “later this year.”
6: You probably can’t upgrade your phone.
7: No Zune integration. Not even a new Windows Media Player.
8: Where’s the keyboard?
9: The browser is still weak.
10: It doesn’t innovate in any way.

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.

Cibermouse @ RTSS 2008

Right now I’m still sleep deprived having only slept 3h30 – something that happened by accident. I’m also a bit angry because my entry got arbitrarily bumped out of 3rd place by the competition judges. That sucks. Not just for the cash (100 eur) but mostly because it feels like a slap to face. I worked for 1 week non-stop (close to 20h/day for 5 days) and came all the way to Barcelona. I watched with excitement as my agent did better than most in the competition even if it was partially luck (as was for the 2 teams with better scores). And after all the sacrifice, tears and joy I don’t get to go to the final because of an arbitrary decision of a group of people. FUCK THAT. That’s why I dislike the existence of judges in a competition such as this. “Fixing” scores is cheating – regardless of weather it’s done behind the scenes or in plain view. Sigh. I guess it was too much for the final round to be 2 Portuguese teams, 1 Italian and none from the USA.

And worse, both of the entries from FEUP were from undergrads who only had 1 week to work on this while many of the other teams were from people who had masters and phds and the italian guy that got 2nd place was an associate professor and had 1 month to work on it (and said he thought it wasn’t enough in his presentation).

Oh well. At least the team that won was from FEUP (Team SpeedyGonzales) and I’m happy for them (congratulations again Alvaro, Fabio and Sara). The other team from FEUP (NetSqueak) sorta gave up so they got merged into my team and presented their results during the first part of my team’s presentation even though their agent wasn’t running in the competition.

My presentation sucked! I fell a sleep and didn’t wake up till 5 min after the competition officially started. I managed to arrive on time and do a few slides but I was way too tired to make a decent presentation.

Since I only had one week to prepare for this (from scratch) that meant 1 day to write the paper, 5 days to write code and 1 day to travel. Unfortunately my initial approach which consisted of using neural networks for motor control was a huge fail and I wasted a day with it. Still, in 4 days I managed to get probabilistic mapping, basic communication, and a bunch of behaviors (though many buggy) written. Apart from what I learned about cibermouse and robotics there’s also the experience of having an even more insane deadline than usual. It’s very much like a real time system: if you cant do it in this amount of time, it’s a fail. You have to give up on certain solutions if they don’t work because you can’t predict how much time it’s going to take you to get it to work while it’s a lot easier to estimate how long it’s going to take to implement a different solution (if you’ve done something similar before).

Honestly, a few minutes before the competition I thought I was going to be the worst entry there. There were so many bugs that remained unfixed that I had to disable a lot of my mouse’s intelligence – hell, during the first run, 2 of my agents crashed and I had to further cripple it by disabling the comunication system for the second run or risk losing points again (crashed agents collide with walls). Most of the entries had no intelligence anyway – at least not in practice. I was expecting to see some really intelligent agents but instead, the ones that did better where the ones closer to plain simple reactive. In fact, the robot that won the thing for SpeedyGonzales was a purely reactive agent (they had two wall followers, two explores and 1 simple reactive agent). Building intelligence into robots is a lot more complicated than I believed it to be. Also why the hell did so few of the entries bother to actually use the damn sensors properly to avoid collisions? Makes no sense.

I spent the past few hours at the hardrock cafe which is pretty much next door (like 30s walk) to the hotel I’m staying at. I liked it, the only other I had been to was the one in Oslo and that one was a HUGE FAIL – when I went there, it didn’t have Rock (they were wacthing football) or “Cafe” (coffee), the machine was broken or something. I was told the one in Lisbon was Bigger & Better (TM) than this one so I’ll have to check it out next time I’m in Lisbon. In the meantime I’m tempted to purchase a tshirt or something.

For the next 2 days I’ll get to see Barcelona (so far I’ve been stuck at the hotel working). So I

Sapo Codebits 2008: First Project – irnotify

The first project I’ve made (well technically second since it’s a support lib for another project) is now available (via SVN) at google code – irnotify.

A python library for making notifications. Currently implements notifications via XMPP (Jabber), SMTP (Mail) and Twitter direct messages.

Here’s the example code:

Twitter DM

from twitternotify import TwitterNotify
n = TwitterNotify("twitter.conf")
n.notify("lrei", "How do you feel, Rei?")

XMPP message

from xmppnotify import XMPPNotify
n = XMPPNotify("xmpp.conf")
n.notify("luis.rei@gmail.com", "How do you feel, Rei?")

Got Handivi

I got my handivi invite yesterday, registered today but I’ll wait until november to start using it. I’ll be out of the country (from the 24th of October to the 3rd of November) and that way I can try it for 1 month by subscribing to TMNs internet service for 1 month (which isn’t exactly cheap at 7.5 eur/mo).

The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination Of Jesse James

The last months of Jesse James’s life, from meeting Robert Ford, a 19-year-old who idolizes Jesse, to the day Ford shoots him. Jesse’s a wanted man, living under a pseudonym, carrying out a train robbery, disappearing to Kentucky, and reappearing to plan a bank holdup with Robert and Robert’s brother as his team. The rest of the gang is dead, arrested, or gone from Missouri. Whenever Jesse’s around, there’s tension: he’s murderous, quixotic, depressed, and cautious. Ford wants to be somebody and wants the reward. On April 3, 1882, things come to a head: Jesse is 34, Robert 20. Ford becomes famous, reenacting the shooting on stage, facing down the label “coward,” shot dead in 1892. Written by {jhailey@hotmail.com}

From imdb.

My Rating: 8/10

Amazing soundtrack, beautiful picture. The movie has style and substance. Sadly it is a bit slow and long (160min). I really liked the introduction made by the narrator. Favorite narrator phrase:

Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them, rains fell straighter, clocks slowed, sounds were amplified.

(“he” being Jesse James)

Dark Blue (2002)

Set in the Los Angeles Police Department in April 1992, Dark Blue is a dramatic thriller that takes place just days before the acquittal of four white officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King and the subsequent L.A. riots. In this racially-charged climate,the LAPD’s elite Special Investigations Squad (SIS) is assigned a high-profile quadruple homicide. As they work the case, veteran detective Eldon Perry, known for his tough street tactics and fiery temper, tutors SIS rookie Bobby Keough in the grim realities of police intimidation and corruption. Meanwhile, Assistant Chief Holland, the only man in the department willing to stand up to the SIS, threatens to end Perry’s brand of singlehanded “justice” on the Los Angeles streets. While navigating through the tumultuous neighborhoods of South Central L.A., Perry and Keough must track down cold-blooded killers and face their own demons, which prove to be more ruthless than the criminals they pursue. Written by Press kit

(Source: IMDB)

My Rating: 7/10

Braid

Braid (blog) is one of the most interestingly different games I’ve played in a long while. It’s a plataform/puzzle game (mostly puzzle) with the particularity that the puzzles are solved by manipulating time.

It is available on the Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade and costs 1200 MS points (15 eur) which is a lot for an arcade game but it’s worth it. The game plays differently, looks different and sounds different. It’s fun and some of the puzzles are indeed challenging.

Watch a video review.

Listen to the game music (from magnatune which I’ve mentioned before).

Download Braid icons and wallpapers.

Tool of The Month: jhead

jhead – Exif Jpeg header manipulation tool

I wish I had bothered to search for this tool when I bought my Samsung D900 which fails to write the correct timestamp on the damn photos… oh well, better late then never.

Via Mac OS X Hints (or more precisely, google and the keywords on a comment on that post):

Simply use jhead -dsft *.jpg on the files to set
the EXIF date to the file creation-date

Quick Read: Six classified Portuguese Iraq Intelligence Summaries from 2004

Six classified Portuguese Iraq Intelligence Summaries from 2004 (Wikileaks). Found this while browsing wikileaks. Just did a very quick skim read of a couple of the summaries.

MNUM – SimpsonCsv

This one instead reads the values from a CSV file containing experimental data.
Link to my previous implementation of Simspson’s rule.

import csv
class simpsonCsv:
    def __init__(self, filename):
        reader = csv.reader(open(filename, "rb"))
        xlist = []
        ylist = []
       
        for row in reader:
            try:
               x = float(row[0])
               y = float(row[1])
            except TypeError:
                continue
            except ValueError:
                continue
            xlist.append(float(x))
            ylist.append(float(y))
       
        self.len = len(xlist) - 1
        self.xstart = xlist[0]
        self.xend = xlist[self.len]
        self.interval = self.xend / self.len
       
        self.data = map(None, xlist, ylist)
   
    def f(self, x):
        for (u,v) in self.data:
            if u == x:
                return v
               
        print "Bad x value (probably bad n): %s" % (x)
        return None
       
       
   
    def simpson(self, n):
        "Approximate the definite integral of f from a to b by Simpson's rule."
        if self.len % n != 0:
            print "Error: %d mod %d is not zero but should be." % (self.len, n)
            return -1
       
       
        h  = float(self.xend - self.xstart)/n
       
   
        si = 0.0
        sp = 0.0
        xk = 0.0
   
        for i in range(1, n, 2):
            xk = self.xstart + i*h
            si += self.f(xk)
   
        for i in range(2, n, 2):
            xk = self.xstart + i*h
            sp += self.f(xk)
       
       
        s = 2*sp + 4*si + self.f(self.xstart) + self.f(self.xend)
        return (h/3)*s
   
filename = "integral_tabela_CO2_csv.csv"
s = simpsonCsv(filename)
print s.simpson(20)
print s.simpson(40)
print s.simpson(60)
print s.simpson(100)
print s.simpson(300)
print s.simpson(600)
print s.simpson(900)
print s.simpson(1800)

WordPress Related Content

WordPress.com (where this blog is hosted) recently started appending

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

To every blog post. These are links to other blogs hosted on wordpress.com that are (possibly) related to it. This feature can be disabled but personally I like it

You can try it by clicking for example on one of my “not so new” posts (like this one) and scrolling to the bottom.

Fate/stay night

From anidb:

Fate/stay night is my favorite anime. The summary above doesn’t do it justice. I remember reading it and thinking “this sounds lame”. It came so highly recommended that I decided to watch it anyway. I didn’t use to watch anime until I started watching FSN.

The Story
The game had the game in which the anime is based had three different scenarios that came together to explain the enitre story. The FSN anime storyline is basically the FATE scenario from the game with some extras (mostly from the Unlimited Blade Works scenario). Because of this, to understand the story, one has to pay great attention to otherwise small details. The relationship between characters and other essential bits can only be understood from interpreting short flashbacks or “clue scenes”. It was easy for me to understand almost the whole thing the first time I watched the show but I was still finding small details the third time. Yes, I’ve watched this anime 3 times! That’s how much I enjoyed it. A friend of mine who also watched it completely missed some crucial bits such as the identity of Archer which in spite of being semi-obvious from the first few episodes, is only shown by an object at the end of episode 14 (another clue is given in a later episode by another object or rather two). Without knowing who Archer is, you miss out on one of the main topics of the show – ideals suck (and disillusion which is the name of the first opening btw).

I also found interesting that the current Holy Grail War was shown as largely a consequence of the previous war. Many of those participating in the war had their lives completely changed by the previous war.

Emya Shiro, the show’s main character is the stereotypical dropout loser that you see in many anime with the particularity that he has some lofty ideals of saving the world.

Tosaka Rin, the “friendly” sorcerer that is sort of Shiro’s teacher in the ways of the force… herm… magic, is also sort of stereotypical (even if bisexual) It’s sort of interesting to see that she lives her life to fulfill what she believes were her father’s expectations for her – a top of the class student and a dedicated sorceress,

I don’t want to talk about the other important characters so as not to spoil the anime for anyone. It’s a 24 ep show that was subbed by the excellent Eclipse productions.

The soundtrack is by Kaway Kenji (Gundam 00, Higurashi, …) and even though it’s a bit too “synth” I still like it a lot.

In Summary: WATCH IT!

Wikipedia Link