This is worth a note. After almost two years of development we’re finally gone public with our SAPO Messenger for Mac and are going high-profile on it. It’s been one of the must fun projects on the company, much to be learned from it (a making-of story is a must on this one, I’m convincing João, Pedro and the rest of the crowd to make one). The project is also Opensourced, also one of the biggest commitments and investments we’ve made with the community so far.…

Everybody knows Yahoo is doing it’s European version of Hackday in London in early June. I’ve seen Yahoo’s presentation about the US version on eTech and it clicked on me. It’s a great idea for a variety of reasons: Team and company morale boost, tell the outside world what you have, image building amongst the developers community, a great way to find new talent and eventually recruit some, a free test-bed for your infra-structure and APIs, and a great environment for new ideas.…

So don’t ask how (or why) but I got my hands on the Apple TV for a week now. Much has been said about this cute living room apple fruit, but maybe the hacker’s perspective hasn’t gone into much analysis yet. Hacking was the trigger for me. I wasn’t convinced by the iLife sync stuff nor the HDMI output, but the enormous list of hacks during the first week, while I was in San Diego, clicked on me.…

There’s an emerging technology in illumination: Led lamps. LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) have been around for ages, first used massively in the early electronics age, then applied to many decorative solutions, now they’re being used to provide mass market illumination products AKA ordinary lamps!. LED’s advantages in a nutshell are very low power consumption (2-3 watts), very low heat (the energy is almost all transformed into light), very long life (10 years) and a unique kind of light that incandescent, fluorescent or halogen lamps can’t produce.…

10 reasons to meltdown your Harddisk: You realize you’re an idiot for not having a recent backup. You realize you’re a complete idiot for not having a backup at all (you had to delete the other one because you needed the space for MAME roms). You find the real value of storing all your E-Mail on an IMAP server. You realize you should have the Sent folder on IMAP too. You find that your old Powerbook G4, now restored from scratch, is still a great machine to work with for next year, and therefore you save a bunch of money.…

Ainda dentro da mesma linha. As reuniões, essa infindável fonte de matéria prima para tiras do Dilbert, são a prova provada de que as organizações empresariais modernas não funcionam e que estão erradas. E não, não preciso de ter um MBA em gestão empresarial para ter legitimidade para dizer isto, a minha experiência profissional basta-me. As pessoas “reúnem-se” em exagero porque naturalmente, deixando a cultura corporativa fazer o seu trabalho, as soluções não aparecem.…

Há uma nova geração de Web Developers. Chegaram de fininho sem ninguém dar por eles. Fazem coisas fantásticas e surpreendentes sem precisarem de saber uma linha de Perl ou PHP, não podiam ser mais apáticas em relação às guerras dos Windows vs Linux, mal saberão o que é o “bash” ou o “vi“, na sua maioria subcontratam a infra-estrutura aos amigos que percebem da coisa, os amigos mais velhos, os que sabem o que é o “vi”.…

“Martelada” is the Portuguese word for what browser engines have to do to deal with the Web. The Web is broken in ways no one can imagine. I recently got involved in writing a small program to clone web pages and had to deal with rudimentary manual html parsing. Did you knew that: Yahoo!’s Homepage refers to URLs in anchors without parenthesis or apostrophes just to spare a few bytes (and then they have a huge 30k banner at the same time) in the form ?…

I’m actively looking for .Mac alternatives. Being a satisfied .Mac subscriber since I have my Powerbook to sync my personal data between my work and my house in a efficiently and no-fuss way, I can’t help to feel that lately Apple is pushing it too much, and I don’t like it. .Mac is no more no less than a huge Webdav server and remote storage, everything else is rendered and published by your local computer.…

The thread about the P990i made me think about the fast evolution in mobile technology and I became nostalgic. This was my first mobile phone. The stunning GA628 with 125 hours talk time, SMS and just 160g weight. What was yours ?…