an ordinary blog — andr3.net

Whenever I'm discussing the concept of microformats, one of the most recurring questions is:

What's in it for me??

If you're a publisher, the answer you're looking for is in the answer to the question What's in it for the users?. You'll enable your users to extract semantic meaning and take it wherever they want. If your company has an ecosystem of services, like Google has, they can take your semantic data – as well as data from the entire interweb – and inject it on your own services (Google Calendar, for example).
To top it off, it's not even that hard to implement. But I won't go there today.

So I thought it would be interesting if I had somewhere to point to when I wanted to show someone how great this is from the user perspective. So I made a screencast, available down below.

Before you jump at me for not using the most used browser at the moment, let me just go out and say this: I used Mozilla Firefox and the Operator extension by IBM's Michael Kalpy. But please, bear in mind that this issue is being followed closely by the fellows over at Mozilla and Firefox 3, the next grand release, will support this out-of-the-box! That's a huge, tech-savvy crowd with easy access to these features.

IMHO, the rest of the browser vendors won't be allowed to take much longer. Microformats are here to stay and they have some heavywheight entities backing them up. For more on this, read this post: Microformats: getting mainstream? by Pedro Custódio.
Also, even if you-know-who doesn't give a crap about this, there's plenty of toolbars going around. One of them is bound to start supporting this. My money is on Google's, but feel free to prove me wrong guys.

Enough babble, let's just jump straight to the video...

Screencast: What's in it for me?

http://screencast.com/t/lcf6aShStSu

Sorry for not having an embeddable flash screencast. Maybe next time.

Related Links

• microformats.org - everything you need to know.
• Operator extension for Firefox
• Tails Export extension for Firefox
• Join the discussion!

After countless all-nighters, some pretty challenging projects, "some" great teachers and painful final exams I can officially say I'm done with college. It's been a hell of a ride, that's for sure. Funny, I thought I'd feel more ecstatic when the time came, but still I won't be fooled - it is a major milestone in anyone's life (even though it's more and more common these days).

Ever since I got that last grade, a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders and the last comic strip of Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes has been springing to my mind ever since:
not much for the snow part, of course

As for the future, I'm proudly part of the great ranks of PrimeIT and I'm having a blast working for one of the most exciting companies a Portuguese web developer could ever ask for.
To be perfectly honest, this new journey has started right after I left my previous position at Core Factor, but let's just pretend, shall we?
Life is good. Cheers everyone.

You know, I've never seen myself as an Apple fanboy and I'm not going to start now. Despite having a Mini at home and loving MacOS as much as the next guy, I still try to keep it sane – I own a recently purchased Creative Stone plus, far superior to iPod shuffle, IMHO. I always try to make educated decisions when I evict my money from mine to someone else's pocket. Thus, I never found enough good reasons to buy an overpriced iPod... that is, until – maybe – now.

Screw the nanos, classics and the buzz-buzz of the iPhone 24h debacle (Steve managed to clear his face a little, check the open letter to iPhone owners). I'm talking about the iPod touch, of course. iPhone as it stands now is still half the phone I need or want. But the platform is pretty impressive, specially after seeing Nuno's up close. Safari on my pocket? Hell yes.

This is not just the webdeveloper in me talking, the user craving for eye-candy is pretty excited as well. But don't get me wrong, I still love my Opera Mini, and will never ever make an iPhone/iPod touch (see how ridiculous it is?) specific website. But Safari? Damn, mobile scripting is coming and it comes in a pretty package!

So what's the title all about?

Ever since I saw the 3rd or 4th gen iPod, I had a vision and a wish. What if your portable media player was able to connect to your own computer via wifi/bluetooth and sync everything up. Calendar, address book, MP3 playlists, podcasts (please, please, make the podcasts accessible from the iTunes WiFi Store), videos, whatever! And everything as transparent as possible? Would be pretty sweet, eh?

Well, that's why Apple is coming close. They have the technology laid out and they have the balls! With these two high-end devices sporting WiFi and outstanding media playing capabilities, the time is now! Do it. Show Microsoft what a mistake it was to waste the Zune WiFi with silly DRM.

Well, for now, I'm pretty impressed with iPod touch, even if it makes me carry around another device, my trustworthy Nokia 6630. Let's just wait and see what the transoceanic flight will do to the iPhone. I hope there's 3G and decent bluetooth selling on the Duty Free of his flight.

Keep an eye out for Apple Expo in Paris, September 25-29.

A couple of days ago I was greeted with an "Account Suspended" message sitting on my mailbox. Upon further inspection I realized my hosting providers had suspended my account due to a query overloading their servers. WTF?? That's what I get for using old un-cached code with naive queries and disregard huge waves of spam-comments.

To get my site back up I couldn't just go through the entire code removing key features and nit-picking every query. Too much work and little reward. Instead, I thought it was high time I put in practice some things I'd been reading about (not nearly a large scale app, but this is as good a sandbox as any). So I whipped up a pretty basic layout, used the old database schema and overnight I had my blog up and running again. The worst thing was having Google slamming into 404 walls and losing the pagerank I'd been gathering over time.

Anyways, this post is nothing more than an explanation as to why the place is quite different and you are – for now – unable to comment (if you want, drop me a line to the address at the bottom). The reason for this is me not wanting to rush things and I really don't have that much free time right now. Working full-time and studying for a final exam is not for the faint of heart, I tell you.

But stick around. Keep checking back or update the feed link, as I'm improving the place a bit. Been sprinkling here and there with microformats and I intend to take it yet a bit further. ;)

Meanwhile, if you're interested in some bookmarks, have a look at my Ma.gnolia (rss). Also, if you want, have a peek at my stream (not really ready for the front stage yet). More on this later.

Yes. It's been a year since I took a job as a webdeveloper for Core Factor, a small company in Lisbon working on IT Consulting and Design.

If you would ask me why haven't I written about this before, I'd probably tell you it was due to lack of time or for privacy reasons... the truth is, I don't know why.

What I do know is that all some good things come to an end. Yes, as of last friday, I'm no longer a member of the team. See? A whole year just went by in a couple of lines.

From the past few months, I remember a standards-proficient conference, an online publication with a challenging IA and good, discrete use of Ajax, a very complete intranet and much, much more.

It was quite rewarding seeing a company being born. Including all the inherent difficulties and doubts around bootstrapping.

What's next?

Right now, I'm walking steadily towards new challenges, but I want to wish everyone at Core Factor the best of luck for the future. It was an exciting year, with many lessons learned along the way.

Next chapter is just around the corner. More on that later.

Even though I've yet to set foot on a conference outside of Portugal, I've followed @media events closely since the beginning, in 2005.

The @media 2007 event was split up in two distinct editions: America – San Francisco, May 24th - 25th – and Europe – London, June 7th - 8th. I'd have to say they both look very promising just by looking at the program. But that's not news, per se. The thing is, the American edition has just ended and presentations started popping up all over the web. I'll try to update this post as I find more and more, but for now, check these high-quality presentations, mandatory for all web professionals.

Download/view slides from the event

• Interface Design Juggling by Dan Cederholm
• Designing for Communication by Cameron Moll
• Microformats, building blocks and you by Tantek Çelik
• Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps (pdf) by Jeff Veen

All nice chaps, with great content in their presentations. If you don't have time enough to spare for all of them, I'd recommend having a look on Dan's and Cameron's. Top notch stuff.
Also, enjoy some photos of the event:

Photos

• persistresist's set of @media 2007 America on Flickr

maximizer — one who maximizes the browser window.

Roger Johansson posted a poll a couple of days ago with the intent to learn how many people usually maximize their browser windows.

He has just posted the results and I thought I'd share them with you.

Do you maximize your browser window?

A tie!

Overall results:

• Yes 50.4%
• No 49.6%

Maximizers by Operating System

• MacOS 20%
• Windows 65%
• Linux 64%
• NetBSD 33%

read on about: Maximizers by Operating System

If you have ever picked up a book about Distributed Systems you'll see that throughout history we've been passing weight from the client to the server and vice-versa. These days we are witnessing yet another shift.

Last week I was attending the Usability Seminar here in Lisbon, organized by the APPU (Portuguese Association of Usability Professionals, roughly translated) – great event, by the way – and when the discussion was launched with Adobe's Apollo and Joyent's Slingshot logos on screen I thought, you're kidding me right? Why? Because I just can't seem to get what all the fuss is about! (And I know I'm not the only one [portuguese])

read on about: Merging online and offline experiences

On their April issue, they include a wonderful section, which I strongly recommend:

The 100 Greatest Singers & their 1000 Greatest Songs

I won't give you the top slots here – maybe in the comments – and I won't get started on which singers who didn't make the countdown should have... I'll just copy the line they used to describe Janis Joplin:

Sandpaper-larynxed '60s wild child.

Best. Short. Biography. Ever.

First of all, I doubt there are still any real subscribers to the feed, but if there are i'd appreciate if you'd make yourselves noticed. I'm not sure whether I still have an audience or all the hits my feeds have been getting is search engine crawlers. The spam keeps getting in but my posts don't. I've always said I'm not an ambitious blogger and the truth is that some changes in my life made me prioritize and blogging lost some importance/relevance.

Still, like I said when I launched mobifeeds, I won't close the blog because every once in a while I come up with a little something I'd like to share with the world. This time, is no different.

Digg - direct links feed

Being an avid Digg reader and a rare participant of the community sometimes the last thing I want to read is the stereotypical – and at times, very predicting – comments of some less inspired members. I just want to read the article!

So, I wrote a small script that basically removes the need to actually GO to digg's page to jump to the article at hand. It still presents a link to the digg page as well as some cache options (duggmirror and coral cache), in case the page has been dugg.

All you need to do is replace the feed address http://digg.com/rss/index.xml in your favourite feedreader (or startup page, like netvibes) with http://digg.andr3.net. Simple, eh?

I had this working a long time ago and at the time I shared it only with some close friends, but then digg changed the layout and the scraping started to fail. I never went around fixing it but now that I did, I thought I'd lay this here for all the visitors the search engines bring here.

That's all for now, see you all next year... or maybe not.

Much has been said about the whole Web 2.0 paradigm. Release early, release often, label it beta and go ahead without fears. Me, being a bit of a perfectionist, have found some problems implementing those guidelines.

The truth is that I have been working on a little service for over a year – on and off – which I have so cleverly named mobifeeds (I've never been the best at naming things). As you can probably hopefully tell from the name, it's a service that allows you to read any feed from a mobile device.

Why?

I don't expect people to use this service as their main source of news, but I do feel – and I've felt that need myself – to read some news/posts while going to work or waiting for the bus. This is an almost free way (depending on your operator gprs rates) to get access to all the news/blog posts you want, right in your mobile. If you have an RSS feed for the movies showing at particular theatre, it's a cheap way to get it anywhere you go. If you're a blog owner, use it to track comments in your blog. Actually, the options are endless, since everything available through RSS will be available to any phone with a browser.

That's why I made the website usable both on the desktop and on mobile devices, but I expect people to use the mobile only to read and the desktop to add content to the database.

read on about: Finally launching: mobifeeds - get feeds anywhere!

I feel fine!

I know I've been absent for a long time but that doesn't mean you got rid of me. This summer I decided to get myself away from computers as much as I could and enjoy the great outdoors, so I didn't have much time to blog or do anything worth sharing. Sorry.

Aren't you at BarCamp?

Yeah, I know I said I would be... and I even wrote myself up as an attendee... but due to some unfortunate calendar-related issues, I was unable to attend.

You see, next week I've got to get rid of Linear Algebra, so I need to study hard for that – that's what I'll be doing after I post this – and since I already have two evenings reserved for my pure entertainment (Pearl Jam are coming to town, twice), I couldn't afford to lose an entire weekend worth of studying, despite of how tempting the program was. I hope they're having a good time and if I run into some nice resources (videos, presentations, reviews, etc.) I'll edit the BarCamp post and dump the links in there.

Also, it's funny that even though the site has been stopped for almost two months, I still get many daily visits (google) and I even got myself recommended on BlogDay, by Hugo at LisbonLab. Thanks for the add, dude. (that's what the cool people at MySpace use to say) I'm not so sure about the Asterisco bit, though. Not really interested. ;) And you, my fellow readers, make sure to check his log, his web log – how 007-ish of me.

Furthermore, thank you for sticking around. You know I'm not an ambitious blogger and that comes with a price... long periods of nothingness. I do have some news to share with you, but more on that during the week.

And if you're going to the PJ concert, drop me a line in the comments. And you might want to check this out. I, for one, am crossing my fingers for Crazy Mary, State of Love and Trust and Release. See you there?

Today Slashdot featured an article written by respected / hated tech-expert John Dvorak in which he states the problems with CSS. He goes so far as to state the following:

As we move into the age of Vista, multimedia's domination on the desktop, and Web sites controlled by cascading style sheets running under improved browsers, when will someone wake up and figure out that none of this stuff works at all?

Wow! CSS doesn't work?! Wait a minute, let me keep on reading.

Oh! This rant article is based on his own frustration when he attempted to redesign his blog! Amazing. He can't find an easy way to design the layout he wants for all browsers with CSS and suddendly the technology is dying and it doesn't work. He doesn't even consider the possibility that he just didn't get it!

He mentions cascading/inheritance properties of CSS to be a bad thing? It's actually one of the most powerful features of CSS in the first place! You just have to understand it and learn how to use it for your advantage. It's exactly the same as someone saying Java's inheritance and polymorphism suck because they're complicated or tricky!! Sometimes you are going to have to sit down and actually learn something. And then you're going to have to practice, and then you'll learn how to use it more effectively, over time.

All of this stems from the fact that the Web has always enabled anyone to create a webpage without understanding the technology below – regardless of the result. You grab Frontpage or Dreamweaver and you create a page. Nice. But that doesn't mean everyone should be able to grasp advanced concepts of CSS, specially if your aim is crossbrowser compatibility.

It was never easy to make one site look exactly the same in every browser. Ever since Internet Explorer 2.0 there has been inconsistencies between IE and Netscape – remember Netscape? – and it's hard to ensure that everyone implements the standards exactly in the same way. Designing for crossbrowser compatibility is hard and the best way to make it easier is for browser vendors to get their act together and improve their support of the standard. Not strike it off the map!

Please note that I'm not saying it shouldn't be easier, we all know how much frustration IE6 bring into the world of webdesign, but don't blame the entire community for that!

Dvorak, as always, manages to make silly remarks on a subject he knows little about. Sad.

As always, I'm a bit late posting this, but I'll do it anyway.

WeBreakStuff / Fred Oliveira is organizing the local event for the BarCamp Earth which will happen next August 25th and 26th September 2nd and 3rd. The venue is still to be announced, but they're aiming at Coimbra.

First of all, what is a BarCamp?

A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.
( The Rules of BarCamp )

And a little description of what BarCamp Earth is all about:

Was BarCampWorldwide – now, BarCampEarth – a simultaneous compendium of Barcamps around the world to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the first-ever BarCamp taking place August 26-28, 2006.

So, with all that being said, I take this opportunity to invite all my readers (all three of you, counting myself) to come by and join us. You've always been trying to find a reason to come to Portugal, now you have it! Steve?

I'm still not sure if I'll be making any presentation, specially since I don't feel qualified to talk about any particular subject – most of them seem to be standards-aware already. What can I possibly have to offer? If I end up finishing up a personal project – in development since last summer – I might end up doing some sort of demo of it, to get feedback, opinions and share the experience of building it.

What I am sure is that it's going to be a great experience for any person interested in technology.

So go on, write yourself in, join the mailing-list at Google Groups and see you there!

Do you know what irks me about this Press Release from Creative? The fact that even though they have the best mp3 players, receive awards in major tech websites and events, they still get trampled by Apple's fancy-looking iPod.

Last christmas I acquired a Creative Zen Micro 6GB, despite the existing hype around the just-released iPod nano. I did so because analysing the pros and cons, I came to the conclusion that getting the Zen was a wiser choice. Bigger capacity, bigger compatibility (sketchy issue, with new firmwares supporting Windows Media PlaysForSure), more features, cheaper, etc. and since I couldn't care less for the photo capability or the color screen of the nano, Zen was – and still is, if you ask me – the wisest of the choices.

Most people I talk to about this subject end up agreeing with me, but some of them still manage to grunt an But I'm still buying an iPod... by the end of the conversation. It's the power of the great strategy lead by Apple's marketing department. Apple managed to conquer a market that hardly ever enters the equations of tech companies. The Average Joe. While you see old ladies in the subway wearing their iPods proudly, you won't see the same with Creative products. Creative managed to convince the tech crowd, apparently – see the awards in the press release linked above –, but there are far more people listening to music thanus tech heads.

Creative, get your stuff together. You have good products, so get out there and sell your stuff to the wider audience. I don't remember seeing a Creative Zen in a tv show or a movie, but I do remember the 10 second close-up of Jodie Foster and an Apple 23-inch Cinema Display in the movie Inside Man. Get the Hint?

(This post is more of a rant than it is an information; most of you already know iPod is the market leader of Mp3 players, but that doesn't mean it's the best – with all the subjectivity that comes with that term. Just think about that if you're thinking about getting a new player, will you?)

ps: sorry for my absence. Been busy with a project I shall be releasing soon.

If you visit Mininova.org frequently, you've probably noticed they started providing feeds for search results earlier this month. The "problem" – not really a problem, I totally get it – is that their feed is pointing to the torrent's page and not the torrent itself. This presents itself as a barrier for programs that support RSS (such as the extraordinary µTorrent ), since they expect the link of each item in the feed to be the url of a .torrent file.

How could I make it work?

Given the awesome Mininova's URL structure, it was just a matter of replacing 3 letters. So, therefore, I give you Mininova Searches in RSS, with a twist::

http://torrents.andr3.net

read the disclaimer, this is not to incite piracy or any other legal activity, is just to provide a easier access to legal, uncopyrighted torrents in mininova. Specially if they come out periodically.

Tips

I recommend you to use Firefox Live Bookmarks as a backup, pointing to the original feed, since you won't have information about the number of seeders and leechers on each torrent. For that, make a jump to mininova before starting to download.

Feedback

You know the drill, anything wrong, shout.

It's that time of year again. When actors, actresses and others involved in the making of films, hold their breath after hearing And the Oscar goes to....

I always try to sit down and try to guess who will take the little golden man home, but I seldom get it right. Check out last year, for example. Let's see how I do this year.

I tried to watch most of the nominated movies, but couldn't manage to cover them all. Here's a list of those I haven't watched:

• Munich
• North Country
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Transamerica
• Good Night and Good Luck
• Pride and Prejudice

So with that in mind, let's start guessin' the main categories.
(here's the link for the Nominations List)

read on about: 78th Academy Awards

(warning: lengthy, nerdy post ahead)

Many standardistas and CSS advocates will answer NEVER! [google search] in a split second. But let's take some time to think about this. One of the biggest advantages of using CSS to style your hypertext documents is the centralization of the display layer in separate files. As we all know, it is a recommended practice to separate the document in three (or four) parts:

Three Layers of Separation

• Content (xhtml)
• Display (CSS)
• Behavior (Javascript)

The best way to achieve this, is to have an XHTML document, an external CSS file and also an external Javascript file (.js). Why? Simple, this way you can control each part separately. There are other advantages, such as bandwidth saving, but I'm not getting into that now.

If you want to go even further...

Four Layers of Separation

• Data (Server Side Script + Database)
• Structure (XSLT)
• Display (CSS)
• Behavior (Javascript)

For more info on this subject, read ParticleTree's article entitled 4 Layers of Separation, by Ryan Campbell.

read on about: When is inline styling acceptable?

I'm sure most of you – yeah, the whole 2 of you reading this – must have noticed that things are a bit slow around here. Indeed they are and I feel I owe an explanation to my readers, no matter how few. And I know I'm the only one to blame for that.

I've never seen this blog as a news site, nor do I want it to be. There are plenty of these out there: Slashdot, Digg, Newsvine, BBC. For that reason and for not seeing myself as a news reporter, I don't have the habit of posting every bit of interesting news I found on the web in here. For me to write a full post it means I feel strongly enough about the matter at hand to dedicate my time and my readers' time to it.

The main reason behind this place is my will to share my projects, views and thoughts on everything I find relevant. That means I won't post something just for the sake of it. I know I've slowed down, but I will eventually get back into my own pace. I just felt I needed to set the record straight. I'm not loosing interest. I'm not an ambitious blogger, I just want to be able to share stuff with my peers.

So while this is going on I have also embarked on a project that will surely update my portfolio with some work that will showcase my current skills in designing and developing accessible and usable websites. Hopefully, I'll have it up and running in about a month. Stay tuned.

Most of you must have already heard that Microsoft released IE7's Beta 2. It was all over the interweb last week – or two weeks ago –, but since I've been studying for the exams I didn't find the time to write this little piece until now. Bear with me, it's all over now, so I'll get back to my usual pace. Have some stuff up my sleeve that will hopefully spike your interest. ;)

Moving on. IE7 b2 is out and it brings a couple of interesting improvements. I'll make a small list with the links to respective post on the IE7 Blog.

• Instant Feeds ¹ – it shows a fancy page when you click on any feed.
• Zoom Feature – pretty cool. Nice to check on details of some pages.
• CSS Improvements – check the post for a list of corrections. Looking good, IMO.
• Manage Add-ons – not sure if this was already available on b1, but it's handy to get rid off some "add-ons"/spyware. You can even remove ActiveX controls. There isn't a post focusing this feature at the IE Blog.
• Searching is Better – you can add your own search engines, given they provide an OpenSearch interface.
• Favorites Center – Everything under one roof. Nicely done.
• Clear Type Text – Aha! Very well done! More on this right below.

¹ Annoyingly it overrides the XSL specification I have on my feeds. Personally, I think it's kind of rude. I can see why the end user would want IE to grab the feed and display it just like any other feeds. Why can't they display an alert box in case there's a XML Style Sheet specified? "Would you like to ignore the display rules specified on this page?" or something. I don't know.

read on about: Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2: Clear typed!

You know what they say... There's a first time for everything. So today, my friends, you will witness the first meme to ever set foot on these god forsaken corner of the web.

A couple of days ago I started seeing this Four Things meme on a couple of sites I subscribe, but I didn't think it would ever reach me, for these were big players in the webdev scene. Guess what, Steve Williams from CCCP tagged me, so I'll join the bandwagon and do it just for fun.

read on about: Four Things

Oh boy. I've been watching this whole Apple Hype as a bystander, but I've been seriously considering switching to the Mac world for a good while now. The biggest reason is MacOS X, followed by the outstanding design of their hardware. Despite that, I'm far more interested on what's inside than what's outside.

What impresses me the most about MacOS is the stability and high quality of the applications. Even the smallest app seems to be much more usable than the most engineered Win application. My main interests reside in programming (C/C++, Java, PHP, Ruby...), image editing (photoshop), common everyday use (safari, netnewswire, etc.) and also in presentations (à lá Powerpoint), but that's mostly for my brother.

I have a dream... and that dream speaks of a machine so powerful and "open-minded" that it will be able to run all three main Operating Systems: Windows, Linux and MacOS. I am aware, though, that this won't happen anytime soon. At least for me, since I'm sitting on a rock at the south-western tip of the European country where Intel Macs will take their time to become available. And it's not really clear at the moment if the new macs will be able to boot WinXP, after all...

But before going into the actual reason of this post, let me just go over what's been going on in the past few weeks in the Apple World.

read on about: These are hard times to make The Switch

I just got an email from Esteban Kozak, from SearchFox, in which he announced that SearchFox will be shut down next January 25th!

SearchFox Users,

Thanks for all your help in making SearchFox what it is. We have enjoyed providing this service, and hope that you have enjoyed using it. Please export all of your links and an OPML file with your RSS sources before the site shuts down. In accordance with our privacy policy, we will delete all personal information on January 25 after we shut down the services.

Esteban Kozak
SearchFox

This saddens me a lot, since I've been using SearchFox since September last year and I've been very pleased with it. Even though they support Exporting to OPML, I'll lose the entire archive of items. This is why I'm starting to look for a replacement and one of the requirements is: I must be able to download the application package and run it on my Apache server. That way, if there's anyone to blame for the loss of data, it will be me.

All of this makes me think of Tantek Çelik's presentation Microformats: Evolving the Web at Web Essentials '05. If there was already a microformat for items in an aggregator, I'd be able to export the entire archive and not lose a byte. Is there? If there is, I can't find it anywhere.

There's an article about this on Techcrunch.

A good replacement could be feedlounge, but for starters it's a web-based solution and I'm getting tired of switching. Plus, as you can see on this Feedlounge Review at Broken Kode, there will be a monthly fee of $5. Seems like it'll be a long search, specially since I'm kind of picky about this.

First and foremost, I wish you all a belated happy 2006. Or 0x7D6. Or even 03726. Or if you're really geeky, 11111010110. I've been taking some time off the web and computers altogether, so that's why this place has been kind of slow. That and the exams have started early this time. But I'm back now, so you can expect the usual non-sense.

For those that didn't get the Halloween joke, it's a well known geek-joke which states that geeks confuse halloween with christmas because 31 OCTal equals 25 DECimal. (numerical systems)

It's the time of year for people to evaluate what's wrong in their lives and set their goals for the new year. Not that they'll actually do any of it, but it's a nice way to convince ourselves this is going to be a better year than the one that has just finished.

I'm not that much of a foreteller, but I'll write down some predictions to serve as a reference for the rest of the year. Let's see if any of these will come true or not.

My predictions

• Ajax hype will continue, however its usage will be more moderate and educated.
• In terms of webdesign tendencies, black is the new black. More and more websites will sport dark clothing layouts. I hope people will take readability into consideration though. Alternative stylesheets would be nice.
• Personally, I believe 2006 will turn out to be the Year of the Webstandards for Portugal. Towards the end of 2005, I noticed an increase of awareness by Portuguese folks. It should continue to grow exponentially.
• Intel Macs will prove to be a stunning success – unsurprisingly – which, IMO, goes to show the importance of Windows compatibility in today's life. Think about it.

Damn, I really suck at this. :)

read on about: Turning the page

(há uma versão portuguesa desta entrada.)

Oh wait! Ops! Let me switch back to the decimal system. *switch* There! Oh! It's Christmas!!! MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL.
If you got that joke, you are officially labeled as geek – if you weren't one already.

I'm taking some time off to be with the ones close to me so I suggest you do the same. Leave the computer and go hug someone. Now.

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote one of these, but with all school projects turned in and respective oral exams attended, I finally had some time to go to the movies. Given that The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe was the last book I actually enjoyed, this movie was one of the top choices in my list.

Just like Bryan mentions in his post Fantasy and the Epic Battle, one shouldn't lose the ability to cater to the inner child trapped inside each and every one of us. Just like when I loved watching Labyrinth for the first time in my life when I had already passed my teen years, I felt just like that after reading this book a couple of months ago. I remember thinking on both occasions: I would have loved to read/watch this when I was a kid. So, if you haven't already let the child in you die – and if you have, please accept my condolences – and are fond of fantasy tales, this is a movie for you. It's one of those tales that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside – quoting a friend, hope she doesn't mind.

read on about: Chronicles of Narnia

Many of you might have already read this somewhere, but IconBuffet, the place to go when you're in need of high quality icons, has started a really interesting campaign. If you're a registered member, you'll receive one set of icons a month for free. But that's not all – damn, this sounds like a tv shop program –, they also allow you to deliver that very same free set to any other 5 members. You see, they don't give the same set to every one. In fact, they choose like 6 sets a month and deliver them randomly among their members.

Once you have your free icons, they're royalty free so you can use them in both personal and commercial projects (if you credit them). You just can't resell them or redistribute them on their own. So hosting the file and posting a link is out of the question, since it's illegal according to their license agreement.

So this is my idea... I have 5 deliveries left, and I have got Oslo Finance. If you have any others, we can trade, thus taking advantage of this great initiative. I'll probably do this every month so that I don't end up with free deliveries sitting in my inbox going to waste. I'd like to share the wealth. So if you'd like to exchange, here's what you can do:

If you're not a member already, signup for an account. Then, go to the feedback page and send me your name and email so that I can send you my Oslo Finance. I'll reply to that email address with my info so that you can send me yours.

Damn, this really feels like trading cards.

I already received Taipei Night Market from João Craveiro. Thanks dude. So if anyone wants this set as well, I have 5 more deliveries. Go ahead and ask. I have more icons to share. Thanks to Bryan I also have Shangai Tech.
Also, instead of sending me an email, you can leave a comment if you insert the email address you used to register your account at IconBuffet. Just let me know which ones you have and which ones you want. Guess what, Leto Kauler has sent me 4 new sets: Olso Atmosphere – my favourite thus far –, Taipei Buddies 1, Manhattan Night Life – sweet – and Shangai Tech Vector. I'm thankful. I'm sure some of these will definitely be useful for some future projects. Specially both from the Oslo family and Manhattan's.
After that, IconBuffet sent me the one set I was missing – Taipei Buddies 2. So, now I'm giving them away. Just leave a comment with the ones you want and they're yours, provided that I still have deliveries left.

After a long period of indecision, followed by a not-short-enough period of saving up some cents, I finally ordered Professional CSS from my usual bookshop – arrived yesterday in the mail –, kind of as an early Christmas a late birthday gift for myself. I'm not much of a buyer of technical books and most of what I know about webdesign I learned either reading/searching on the web or on my own. The previous book I had bought was Webdesign in a nutshell, from O'Reilly. It helped me getting started but, of course, it's more than dated at the moment.

I've been investigating all available books on webdesign and before going ahead and buy myself one I had to choose carefully because I can't afford all of them and you know how hard it is to leave a good book behind.

What I really wanted was a book that didn't give me a beginners view at CSS but showed me best practices and real-world case scenarios instead. I also wanted to learn more and more about CSS to be able to create visually appealing layouts yet do it in a short period of time, without having to loose too much time dealing with browser inconsistencies. Having a knowledge of those problems beforehand can help me shortening the time I spend laying out a webpage.

read on about: Professional CSS: it's here!

After I was hit by the first wave of spam, I knew sooner or later i had to take active measures to protect my holy spot on the web. The first time there wasn't much of a problem since the comments didn't show up on the website, but now – as some of you might have noticed if you stumbled upon any of them – I've been receiving tips on pharmaceutical products which i don't need. Thank you very much. But this time, they were showing up in the comments feed and on the website itself. That just pissed me off. How dare they?

Anyway, I had to do something, so from this day forth – or at least until further notice – every time someone posts a comment for the first time, it will be left pending until I approve it. Just letting you guys and gals know.

Really dudes-who-write-spam-bots, you don't want to play this game with me. I'm really stubborn. But since I like challenges, and to avoid repeating myself, I'll just say:

Bring it on.
–Duke Nukem

Everyone is posting about this, so i'm just going to join the crowd and maybe give Firefox a push. If it ever needs one, in the first place.

It's here. After a few betas and release candidates the final version is out. I've been holding out from testing the previous not-final versions, but now the time has come to put my hands on 1.5 goodness.

Get Firefox 1.5.

What's New?

I'll just pass out what's on mozillaZine:

Firefox 1.5 introduces several new features, including an improved software update system, faster Back / Forward page navigation, a new options to clear private browsing data, drag-and-drop reordering of browser tabs, a redesigned Options/Preferences window and more robust popup blocking. Standards support is also improved, with support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), JavaScript 1.6 and additional CSS properties. Accessibility is much improved (including new DHTML accessibility features), security has been enhanced and Mac OS X support has also been improved.

You can also check the release notes.

read on about: Firefox 1.5 released and it can be portable too

Access, a global provider of Internet technologies to the mobile and beyond-PC markets, has announced (press release) that their world-renowned browser NetFront has been deployed on more than 200 million devices worldwide. This is spread over 720 different products on various platforms (Palm®OS, Symbian, BREW^TM, Windows Mobile family, REX OS, etc.)

What is it?

Netfront is a browser made for mobile devices that on top of its support for all the platforms mentioned above, includes support for a respectable pack of standards that would make some desktop browsers weep. That pack includes HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.1 (and XHTML-MP) , Javascript 1.5, CSS 1 and 2 (partially), graphic formats (jpeg, png, gif, etc.), HTTP cookies, HTTP 1.1, SSL3, IPv4 and IPv6, etc. Their last version even supports ATOM/RSS feeds! Have a look at their page about Netfront or view the animated gif.

read on about: Netfront installed on over 200 million devices

This is yesterday's news – or the day before yesterday – but i had to mention it. Microsoft is at it again! But this time it's bringing something useful onto the table and even releasing it under a proper license.

If you have been paying attention to the web you already know what RSS feeds are and how they work – if you haven't, drop me a line, i'll be glad to let you into the party. Now Microsoft has developed an extension to the RSS and OPML formats called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE). Its purpose is to enable the sharing of information in both ways, which will enable the construction of cooperating applications on top of this spec.

read on about: Bidirectional Feeds for cooperating apps, by Microsoft

This has been out for a while now, but i haven't had much time in the past few days to sit down and write this through.

I'm sure you all know and most of you have used phpMyAdmin, one of the community favourite Database Managers out there for MySQL. Even though it's very well built and very robust, some simple operations – like simply editing some record that, for reason, went bad – become a many step sequence. Login, Select Database, Select Table, Browse, Go to record, Edit...

But now, some very clever dudes over at TurboAjax.com have put together a quicker-to-use manager for MySQL, named TurboDbAdmin. It uses AJAX and even though it doesn't have any kind of fallback version – ie, one that doesn't require Javascript to run –, i'm fine with it. It's an application made for recent browsers. Just like a requirement for some other piece of software, this requires Javascript to be enabled (and XmlHttpRequest Object support). It would be cool to edit my DB from my mobile, but i'll wait for some other clever dudes to write a mobile MySQL Admin. MyMobileAdmin sounds like a cool name, doesn't it? Here's a screenshot of the little ajaxian bugger:

website | live demo

read on about: MySQL meets Ajax + password protected folders

Yes, finally, i got my first comment-spam. And they came in groups of three, to boot! Oh, the horror!

Now i don't mean to sound cocky, but i wasn't expecting this to happen, specially since i didn't write some sort of RPC-XML mechanism for comment posting, nor did i use an out-of-the-box CMS. Now, i'm still using an XHTML form, sending variables through POST method, but still, the names of each field aren't necessarily equal to any CMS out there, so i assume the spam-bots have to be a bit smarter and get a list of fields from the form, populate them, and finally submit them to the URI specified in the form's action attribute.

So you can understand my surprise when i woke up only to find three spam comments on some not so recent posts. They didn't show up on the site, but they were showing up on the Comments RSS Feed. A little tuning (three words added to the SQL query) and they didn't show up on the feed anymore.

Using a home-grown CMS has its advantages, but i'm not as invulnerable to comment spam as i thought i would be. I'm sure there will be more in the future, and they'll be fiercer. All i have to say is...

Let them come, there is one Dwarf in Moria who still draws breath.
- Gimli the Dwarf

If you're in any way connected to webdesign – or simply a curious fellow – then you probably heard about CSS Reboot. If you haven't, very quickly, it's an event where thousands of webdesigners around the world coordinate an effort and redesign their websites and present the results during the same day. This time, November 1st was the target.

Browsing the galleries, you can obviously see it was a success. Lots of rebooters and some very high quality layouts. I've been browsing the galleries on and off ever since the reboot and i've chosen to mention a couple of entries i thoroughly enjoyed.

read on about: CSS Reboot Fall 2005 - highlights

I just recently noticed i had an "old" 17" Dell monitor gathering dust at my parents' house – yeah, i had forgotten all about it –, so i thought about bringing it to Lisbon and setting up my own dual desktop system. Now, i had never really worked in such an environment but i could obviously see the advantages. Increased desktop area is always nice – the virtual, not the real desktop –, but what i was really curious about was how to take advantage of it in real everyday situations. That's exactly what i'm going to explore in this post.

read on about: The wonderful world of Dual Desktops

(há uma versão portuguesa desta entrada.)

It has started! The World Usability Day is on the move. As i start typing this, we're currently at the 12th hour of the day (of 36 hours).

There's a bunch of activities going on all around the world, and you can keep track of what's happening every hour on the official site. Portugal is no stranger. Human Easy is the local leader for the event in Portugal and counts with APPU to lend an helping hand. The 2nd Usability Seminar will be part of the day's initiatives.

The Portuguese website of the WUD has a list of all the events. There will be a live video webcast for the events taking place in Lisbon (at the IST). To watch the video streams, head over to the gael page created for the event. I'm not sure if the videos will be kept online for post-mortem consumption or if it will be a one-time stream.

I'm sure there will be podcasts of the events and if you're interested, bookmark this page, because i will edit it later with all the media i found on the web. Stay tuned.

For those of you who will attend any of the events going on world wide, enjoy. Unfortunately, i won't be able to attend any of the sessions but i'd be glad to hear your experiences..

Related Links

• World Usability Day official site
• Dia Mundial da Usabilidade portuguese webpage for the event
• Lisbon Webcast live video streams of the Lisbon events

As previously mentioned, Antony and the Johnsons played the Coliseum last night. I was there and this is my account of the event. Sorry, I didn't take any pictures. Will use a couple from Google Images to avoid a text-only review.

As i got to the room, the opening act was nearly finished. Currituck Co., who curiously is one of Antony's two guitarists. I was surprised to see a couple of empty chairs – given the demand for his latest album at music stores – , but they weren't that many.

Before it all started, i did what i always do. Scanned the crowd. As some of you might remember, i mentioned this in my review of the Jack Johnson concert, back in May. This time, the very same room welcomed a much more mature crowd, with ages ranging from the late teens to late 60s. Quite impressive. I wasn't exactly expecting that, but crowds can be a total surprise.

read on about: Antony at the Coliseum

(há uma versão portuguesa desta entrada)

Have you, my dear readers, faced any problems when trying to access my website in the past few days? I'm asking this because i've received a couple complaints and i'd like to know whether it's an isolated problem or if it's something that needs my full attention.

Be it long page loads, error pages (404, 500, etc.) or simply failing to load a feed, i'm interested in hearing reading from you.

For the past couple of weeks, my hosts have been having problems related to DDoS attacks, which i mentioned in the post New trends in hacking. On top of that i'm consistently running into problems, which seem to be the aftermath of these attacks. Now i'm trying to learn whether this is a serious issue that is affecting my visitors in general, and if it is, i'll start looking for alternative hosting at once.

If you haven't felt any problems at all (or if you run into problems in the future), let me know through the comments to this post. The more info i get, the better.

Thank you in advance.

Flock Developer Preview is out. Go grab it. But before you do, you might want to know what's so great about all this "new browser" everyone's talking about.

Just to make things clear, Flock hasn't launched yet... this is a preview of the final release, so i don't think it's correct to say "Flock Launched". Specially when they mention in their release notes:
We do not recommend that you use Flock 0.5 as your main web browser.

With that out of the way, let's move on.

read on about: Flock - The Browser who went Social

For the past week i've been busy with two projects – actually, more, but never mind. One of them, for PSD (Programming in Distributed Systems, 4th year), was building a system on top of Apache using a CGI written in C which was making Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) to a server on some other machine. On top of that, we had to make HTML form verifications in Javascript before sending any data to Apache. Sweet.

The other one, is not completed yet but it's moving along nicely. It's for the subject VIS (Visualization, 4th year), and we have to build a 3D representation of a college building (C2 @ FCUL) using Microstation (similar to AutoCAD, but way worse).

Needless to say that the for the PSD one i was in charge of – among other things – writing the javascript part. We ended up with a very robust form, which was being verified as the user filled it in, giving instant feedback to the user. One of the fields, the e-mail address, had to be checked whether it existed on the database or not, so for that i used a little AJAX magic. It was the first time i used it in a school project, and since this verification bit will also be evaluated, i'm waiting to see what the teacher has to say about it. ;)

Anyway, that's not why i'm making this post. During the coding of the RPC client (CGI) i was faced with a personal challenge.

read on about: Changing a programming habit?

According to Betanews (article), the two giants will join forces and connect the users from both networks. Assuming this story is authentic – and i'm lead to think it is – people will have no more excuses to stay with MSN and will be able move to a far more complete client – YIM – but most of all, it will show that both Microsoft and Yahoo! acknowledge the power within Google Talk's inter-operability.

I don't care which side will win the war – will the dark side have its way? or will the Jedis have something to say about it? – but as far as i'm concerned, this is good news. Of course, the utopian dream of having every major IM networks under ONE roof – and i don't mean roof as in "client" – is still pretty much impossible, but i'd be happy if we ever reached a point with all of them spread under two roofs. No? Even if we have to wait decades? ;)

More articles

• ZDnet: Yahoo, Microsoft close to IM pact
• Wall St. Journal: Microsoft, Yahoo Plan Instant-Message Pact
• Google News - Related Articles

There's an article now on slashdot. The comments are always worth reading.

—
By the way, sorry for the lack of major updates, but i have two major school projects to turn in by monday and i'm heavy at work. I'll try to update the quickposts as often as i can, but i'll be back in no time. I already have a set of semi-completed posts, so don't worry, i'm not MIA, i'm just busy. ;)

(há uma versão portuguesa desta entrada)

Last night I was writing some PHP code – a simple upcoming feature for the blog – when i had to once again query the MySQL server, and use mysql_fetch_array() to grab the returning data. Some of you probably use some fancy PHP Class to interface with the server, and you should. But for some odd reason i prefer to do this way.

So, i end up having an array – which i usually call $raw – with a couple keys and values:

Array

(

    [id] => 1

    [field1] => test

    [field2] => another test

)

Now, if you want to use this in a string, you either echo it like:

echo "this is the value of field1: " . $raw["field1"];

Or you stick it in a var and use it directly:

$field1 = $raw["field1"];

echo "this is the value of field1: $field1";

Ok, but most of the times you're simply creating a local variable with the same name as the key. So I came up with a very short function to pull out the variables from the array. It can also be useful to extract session variables, but it can be used pretty much in every similar situation.

function pull_vars( $target ) {

   foreach( $target as $key => $val ) {

         global $$key;

         $$key = $val;

   }

}

Attention This can cause some clash between these and other variables. Be careful with the names of the variables used. If this happens, you can solve it by giving an alias to the fields in the MySQL query: $sql = "select title as ptitle, datetime as dt, (...).

Stick this in a file called pull_vars.php. Now include it on top of every page and call it every time you need to unpack the variables in the array returned by the MySQL server. Just for the sake of completeness, here's how you call the function:

pull_vars( $raw );

Thought i'd share this little tip, might be helpful to some of you. ;)

Last wednesday, i had the pleasure of being one of the lucky bastards that attended the pre-screening of Serenity in Lisbon – thanks to a hard-working fan. ;) For all you Portuguese-speaking fellows, there's a great post about this movie and its director over at Nuno Markl's blog.

Anyway, here is what i thought of the movie...

Right from the beginning i realized they were going to explain everything so the people who hadn't seen the tv series would understand the story and enlightening us – the fans – on several issues while they're at it. So for all of you who are dismissing this movie simply because you haven't seen any episode, think again, because the odds are you'll like it – i haven't heard a negative opinion on this movie. And if you're one of the fans, i don't need to tell you to go watch it, but i will tell you it didn't disappoint me — at all.

So, with that out of the way, let me plunge into the movie itself.

read on about: Serenity (review)

Hacking is nothing new, pretty much everyone has heard the term and is familiar with its consequences. Maybe not everyone know the difference between a hacker, a cracker, a phisher, etc., – and i won't get into the subject here – but it's widely known they aren't the best people to have as your enemies.

One of the most basic attacks is the Denial of Service (DoS) and i'm pretty sure most of you already know how it works. A huge ammount of requests are made to one particular server which will cause it to overload, bringing both him and his services down. This is what happens to pretty much every site posted on /., unless you use Coral Content Distribution Network, developed at NYU. tip: To use it, simply append nyud.net:8090 to the domain of an url. For instance, to access my website you would type http://andr3.net.nyud.net:8090.

Anyway, the new trend – actually, it's not that new – is to use farms of zombie pcs – ie, infected Windows XP machines – to unleashed a Distributed-DoS (DDoS). The infected computers have a process running that will join an IRC channel and then respond to their "Masters" orders. This is much more powerful, given the number of vulnerable PCs around the globe. Furthermore, the owners of those computers have no idea their little machines are playing a part in a criminal act. Your computer could be one of them.

There will always be hackers, that's true. The icky part of all this is that now hackers work with commerical and financial goals in mind. They take part in competitions between different firms to generate revenue through the ripple effect caused by those attacks.

For instance, recently, my hosting provider, powweb, has been targeted several times by these attacks. Now, who could possibly be behind these attacks? I have no idea, but it's very possible they're aiming at deteriorating their service so that their clients become unhappy and start considering changing hosts. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out who wins in this scenario.

Although, to all fairness, this could be just a side-effect of someone attacking one particular website which happens to be residing at my host. Perhaps someone made other someone angry? Perhaps. But option a) is still possible.

I've been putting this off for far too long!

Did the title mean anything to you? If not, then this post is for you.

Last year, a friend of mine mentioned a great tv series by Joss Whedon – creator of Buffy – that aired in the states in 2002 and was coming out on DVD at the time and described it as a Futuristic Space Western. My reaction was: o_O Are you kidding? No, she wasn't kidding and i decided to give it a chance. I watched the pilot episode and was immediately hooked.

read on about: Firefly and Serenity

(há uma versão portuguesa desta entrada.)

I'm sure you've all seen blocks of text which have a color or an image as a background.

Most of the times – not always – that i see this people often make a pretty common mistake slip-up. By not leaving a space between the border of the text block and the text itself, you create a feeling of choking. Check out these examples.

Which of these two examples seem more comfortable to you?
This text block or this text block?

This is an even better example since the outer background color is the same as the inner text color, the boundaries are sort of blended. This is more readable.

The code to create the adequate padding couldn't be simpler. I'll apply the rule to the class .highlight.

.highlight {

      padding-left: 3px;

      padding-right: 3px;

}

It can still be shorthanded to padding: 0 3px 0;, if the padding-bottom and the padding-top are zero. If they're not, adjust the values.

When i started building websites, which was around 1998, i didn't realize i was embarking on a long-term journey. More than that, i didn't know people would eventually assume i wasn't a coder/programmer simply because i designed websites. Last year, i took a class in which we had to build a website using HTML and Javascript. To me, it was pretty much the daily work that i'm used to do, but to a lot of colleagues it was a new thing. I heard a lot of people saying HTML isn't for me, this is for designers. I'm a programmer., and that made me think about how i considered myself. For some reason, the issue awoke in me today.

Pretty much all of the websites i've been a part of in the past were done on my own, so i had to do all the work. Designing, image-editing and coding the needed scripts which were in Javascript at first, but later i started working with PHP, MySQL, etc. (check my bio). So now i'm a bit trained in all those areas, although, i don't see myself neither as an accomplished designer, nor a very hardcore coder. I've never went to school to learn about design and image-editing, but i have been taught to program in various languages both in high-school (Pascal, C) and lately in the University (Haskell, Java, Prolog). I've also learned a couple other languages on the side.

I do believe it is possible to be both a webdesigner and a coder at the same time, although, it's a tough job excelling in both areas.

Some people are capable of creating great designs and writing stunning server-side coding, such as Mr. Inman and Mr. Orchard (just to name a couple). But i'm not like those guys, i'm a mere wannabe-designer and an average programmer, so i'll stay in my little corner, reading, learning, absorbing as much as i can, both design and code-wise. Later, depending on the roads i choose in the future, some of this might prove to be helpful in some way. At least, i hope so.

Now, if possible, i'd like to know a bit more about my "audience" – I know you're there, i see the statistics. ;) How do you see yourself? A designer, a coder, both or none of that?

It's been a while since i wrote about any movie, but i promise i'll try to keep it short. If you think these reviews are too long, let me know, I don't want to bore you to death, now do I?

Ron Howard and Russell Crowe meet again and produce another good movie together. This one tells the story of James Braddock, a legend in boxing who lived through the big Depression of the 30s under great difficulties and ended up restoring the hope of many fellow Americans. Russel plays James and shares the screen with Renée Zellweger, who plays the wife. Paul Giamatti concludes the holy trinity of the cast as James' agent.

read on about: Cinderella Man

I don't know if you have this problem or not, but at least around here i've had to update my CSS file quite a couple of times, specially in the beginning since i was using new elements in my posts that weren't already styled. For example, when i wrote my first post about a movie, i had never styled the rating box before because i hadn't thought of it, so I had to add that to my posts.css.

Yeah, so?

Well, for the first times that a user saw that post he was likely to see the box incorrectly since the div was unstyled, because his browser was using the copy in cache. Not until that copy was refreshed did he see the correct style.

read on about: Keeping your CSS fresh and cached