Alcides Fonseca (english feed)

Idiocracy

me@alcidesfonseca.com (alcides) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:28:38 +0100

Humanity doesn’t have a nice future from now on. Smart people stop having children while dumbasses have one after another. While homo sapiens de-evolute, an average soldier and a prostitute hibernate due to a unsuccessful military project (Think Futurama’s Fry). When they woke up 500 years in the future, society is dumb as hell and the average soldier is the smartest man on earth (for good and evil). As for the prostitute, almost nothing changed.

It’s a nice adventure in the future, a future that resembled Wall-E’s, and among some dumb-dumb-dumb stuff, the way they handle the rest of the world is entertaining, and I really rolled on the floor when he did his Scoffield-trick to break jail.

Oh, and the end is predicable, amused me nevertheless.

Custom Newspaper

me@alcidesfonseca.com (alcides) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:11:36 +0100

Newspaper Club is a project that aims to give everyone the chance to make their own newspaper with content from online sources, in paper.

They are still developing their system, and blogging it!, and the biggest problem in my opinion has already being mentioned there: printers aren’t prepared to print such small numbers of each edition. But luckily they realize it’s the future and are willingly to try work it out.

When ebook readers are starting to get to alpha-geeks (and some targeting newspapers, like Amazon Kingle DX) it’s surprising to see some paper love around geeks.

Placebo - Battle For The Sun

me@alcidesfonseca.com (alcides) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:29:27 +0100

Battle for the Sun is the newest album from Placebo. I’ve been a fan of the band since I’ve first listened to Special K (9 years ago) and this one is pretty good. I’d recommend this For what it’s worth and Battle for the Sun.

We're losing the sense of communities

me@alcidesfonseca.com (alcides) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:22:58 +0100

5 years ago my internet history would reveal a list of online-communities to which I belonged. Each community website was a CMS (PHPNuke, phpBB with a lot of plugins, or e107 if I was the admin) and had all the content related to that theme. The latest news, the downloads (or torrent) section, a forum for us to discuss stuff, a gallery, some articles and miscellaneous things that vary from scene to scene.

Today I get all my downloads from ThePirateBay (at least until now), all my news from Google Reader, I write all my long stuff in my blog (wether it is portuguese politics, music or even geeky posts), I write all my short stuff to twitter, and all my photos to flickr. Although there are tagging capabilities, you cannot group people and friends, so you share everything that matters to a specific group. The sense of online communities is dying with these services.

The only service in which communities play an important role is the one that survived from the Ice Age of the Internet: Email. I subscribe to a few mailing-lists and almost all of them are themed. I really want communities back, and services that empower them. The Internet is either getting Semantic and abstracting a lot of stuff, or it is going back from services to hosted applications.

I do miss the way I met new people with the same interests. Much more personal than adding the people facebook suggested you.

Via versus RT

me@alcidesfonseca.com (alcides) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:54:57 +0100

For those using twitter there are three main ways of representing a retweet:

RT @person: original twit

original twit (via @person)

♺ @person: original twit

The last one is clearly the shortest one (in twitter size does matter), and it’s the one I don’t really use. And I use the other two for different purposes, and I propose people do the same, since it makes easier to understand what kind of twit it is. The first form is used when you write exactly the same twit without change. The second form is used when I want to re-share a link (but could be other thing) and I add or modify the comment, but still want to credit the author.

What do you think?

Placebo - English Summer Rain

me@alcidesfonseca.com (alcides) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:37:22 +0100

Placebo – English Summer Rain

_why at the ART && Code Symposium

me@alcidesfonseca.com (alcides) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:31:23 +0100

ART && CODE Symposium: Hackety Hack, why the lucky stiff from STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on Vimeo.

Famous why the lucky stiff presents on Hackety Hack and teaching code to kids. I really believe programs should be more human-friendly, mostly in a way a kid could play with it. You can read about in one of his blog entry.

Restoring memories

me@alcidesfonseca.com (alcides) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:37:24 +0100

When I moved all my stuff from Dreamhost to this VPS in slicehost, one thing that stopped working was the blog before this one. I started that one at alcides.ideias3.com and later moved to alcidesfonseca.com. It was my 7th or so blog, and as all the other ones, all hand-coded by me.

I wrote it as a demo project for my micro-web-framework pungi including features like cgi helpers, templates, html helpers and a ORM. I don’t know why (and I really did my best to figure it out) but it doesn’t work on the new box. Well, if I run python index.py in the shell, it prints the right html, but not via Apache.

Well, I wanted that archive online, so I did a little hack just to view the content using Sinatra (Ruby). I migrated the MySQL database to sqlite3 using a script I tweaked. The database schema was already defined, and I didn’t want to be changing it, so I needed a ORM that would fit just nice. DataMapper did the thing just well, and most of my pungi conventions applied to DM except for N-N relationships where I had plural nouns for foreign keys. The solution was really trivial, just override the foreign-key child id and it was working almost out of the box.

Thanks to simple things, I was able to get my old blog back online as an archive.

The Mars Volta - Cotopaxi

me@alcidesfonseca.com (alcides) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:26:34 +0100

The Mars Volta release today Octahedron in Europe and tomorrow in the US (Yay!). This music, Cotopaxi is the single here while our friends overseas get Since we’ve been wrong.

I already have the music here, and I’m afraid they are going soft. Since we’ve been wrong is the perfect example of how clear their music is becoming. Not very Omarish of them.

Movie Night

me@alcidesfonseca.com (alcides) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:29:06 +0100

Today I gave the presentation of the last project of the semester, so I decided to take the night off (something that I haven’t done in a while) and catch up with the “tosee” folder that is becoming way too overpopulated for my standards.

I started with Once which is a kind-of-musical and I cannot recall who recommend it, but I gave up after 15 minutes. It was just not my thing, maybe except for the “walking the hoover”.

Next I gave Blood, the last vampire a go and I liked. I felt that it was somehow too short, and a very simple storyline. I am in doubt if I should watch Blood+, but it will have to wait since I’m in the middle of the 1990’s X-Men and Escaflowne, Gundam has finished the download and Karas is almost finished. Not to mention that I’m one season behind in 24 and Stargate SG1 will soon arrive. I already have plenty of stuff to survive this summer.

Back to tonight movies and despite have giving up on the first musical, I went for another, this time Dr. Horrible’s sing-along blog. It was a good choice and I really enjoyed the show. Unexpected story and, something rare these days, an unexpected end too.