Eu confesso que sou pro-”qualquer um que em vez de se lamuriar meta mãos à obra” mesmo que o dito cujo acerte ao lado uma vez ou outra. O saldo dos determinados é sempre a média dos seus sucessos e insucessos, e normalmente é sempre positivo, é sempre melhor do que reclamar e nenhum fazer.

E é por isso que não sou de políticas. Mesmo sendo deformado por uma educação mais à direita do que à esquerda (seja lá o que isso for), é com a maior das naturalidades que entre amigos tenho elogiado uma série de medidas do actual governo e de alguns ministros que têm tido a coragem de executar decisões difíceis e impopulares nas mais diversas áreas da nossa sociedade.

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Today, a particularly stressful day at work, a came across several E-Mail and IM threads about Google Gears with my friends and colleagues. I finally had the time to look into it more seriously and I feel I should point out that I don’t share the global excitement everyone seems to suffer from.

Google Gears anticipates what browsers should have already and clones what Zimbra envisioned months ago, I fail to understand the wow effect, really. I had that wow when Zimbra demoed the concept over at eTech 2007. Sure, it’s Opensource, and works with almost all platform combinations, and I’m not saying it isn’t neat either, but stop the presses please, what about these questions ?

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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. So enjoy, we did.

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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. And of course not less important, it’s a lot of fun for everybody too, it’s win-win.

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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. It was just too hackable not to have it, or, in the words of the Maker’s owner manifesto: “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it”.

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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.

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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.
• You take the chance to renew and clean your RSS subscriptions, which you never had time to.
• During your quest to recover documents from your “IMAP disk-drive” you’ll find the most stupid things you believed in a couple of years ago. Makes you laugh, for a change.
• Keychain is great, but the low risk of fire or earthquakes still makes the good old paper an excellent alternative for storing passwords or secure notes (crying now).
• You’ll find the coolest Mac software you never bothered to check out before.
• You buy and actually use a backup utility until the drama is fresh.

Yes, it all happened to me. The freaking drive is as dead as it gets. I’ve tried everything, Disk Warrior, Data Rescue II, dd_rescude and dd_rhelp on Linux (which are great by the way, don’t spend money on cute UIs, get a 2.5″ to 3.5″ HD cable and connect your drive to a Linux, dd_rhelp rocks. USB/IDE adaptors won’t work well because most times the driver will disconnect the faulty device) but no help. Managed to recover 240 Megs out of 80 Gigs and suddenly the HD collapsed from block 0 to the last.

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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. Se as soluções aparecessem de livre e espontânea vontade as pessoas só se precisavam de reunir para abrir a garrafa de champanhe.

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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”. Eles andem aí em Portugal e é de louvar, admirar e aprender com eles.

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“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:

1. 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 ?

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