The Tao of Mac

MEO Kanal

Rui Carmo — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:51:30 GMT

As of today, and in a worldwide debut, every Meo customer can create his/her own TV channel, powered by SAPO. Nobody’s done this before, as far as I can tell.

Now you have an inkling of what I’ve been involved with for a year and a half (there’s more stuff going on, but this was the main event). The traditional TV business model is long overdue some disruption, and this is just the beginning…

Also, more here, in Portuguese (try to spot me in the top photo, took me a while to realize it myself).

A little more background: This means a million customers can create their own TV channel, on a platform where roughly 2/3rds make heavy use of the interactive features. It’s going through the roof as I type this…

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Google (finally) brings Chrome to Android

Rui Carmo — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:37:18 GMT

Finally indeed. Of course, it took so long that legacy devices are going to be a major pain for years to come.

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To My Old Master

Rui Carmo — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:32:18 GMT

Exceptional, in every sense of the word.

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jQuery

Rui Carmo — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:05:45 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on May 1^st.

jQuery is a JavaScript library that has struck my fancy repeatedly over the past few years and which I find vastly more productive than the alternatives.

Resources:

Category	Date	Link	Notes
Layout	Feb 5’12	turn.js	An amazing page-turning effect plugin
	May 2’11	UI Layout	A powerful layout manager plugin
	Apr 2’11	Sausage	Visual progress indicator for infinite (or just very long) scrolling.
	Feb 7’11	Isotope	Amazing layout helper
	Apr 26’10	jQuery Masonry	Its predecessor.
Social APIs	Jun’11	jquery-lifestream	Fetches and renders a fully client-side lifestream widget
UI Elements	Oct’11	jQuery AutoSuggest	very nice autocompletion plugin with CSS bubbles.
	Jun’11	Dynamic Carousel	with support for swipe events
	Jan’11	CLEditor	A pretty decent WYSIWYG editor.
	Apr 18’10	jsplumb	A Yahoo Pipes-like plugin
	Apr 18’10	AlphaNumeric	A plug-in for masked field input.
	Dec 29’09	Ajax AutoComplete for jQuery	Very practical.
	Jun 5’09	Rounded corners	Another plugin
	Dec 8’08	jwysiwyg	A simple WYSIWYG editor.
	Nov 20’08	Liquid Canvas	Rounded corners plugin
	Oct 21’08	Asynchronous Treeview	Simple and effective.
	Sep 17’08	jQuery.ScrollTo	scrolling to arbitrary positions
	Sep 4’09	jParallax	a brilliant way to display layered content
	Sep 4’09	labelify	a plugin to add labels to your textboxes
	Jul 8’09	jgrowl	Growl-like notifications
Graphing	Jun 6’09	Fun With Canvas: Create a jQuery Graph Plugin	Simple and effective.
	Jan 15’09	flot	A very complete interactive plotting library
	Sep 4’08	jQuery Sparklines	very flexible Sparklines plugin
Graphing	Jun 6’09	Fun With Canvas: Create a jQuery Graph Plugin	Simple and effective.
	Jan 15’09	flot	A very complete interactive plotting library
	Sep 4’08	jQuery Sparklines	very flexible Sparklines plugin
References	Aug ‘10	jQuery for Designers	A nicely designed, task-oriented site.
	Sep 4’09	Cheat Sheet for version 1.2	Very, very good
		jQuery Crash Course	a good primer
		Learning jQuery
Media	Jun’11	slides	Yet another image slider
	Sep 4’09	jQuery Flash Plugin	get rid of FlashObject and UFO
		PNGFix	fixes PNG images in stupid browsers such as IE
		Media plugin	seems to do it all, for all formats
		Zoomimage
		FancyBox	a lightbox-like plugin with a Mac-friendly look and on-demand image retrieval that I use on this site
		Interface
		JCarousel
		Coda-Slider	a carousel-like sliding panel library
		jqGalScroll	a simple and effective photo gallery scroller that I also use on this site
		Galleria	a very nice image gallery component that uses fades to good effect
Tables	Sep 4’09	Flexigrid	a pretty amazing grid control with JSON support
Tables	Sep 4’09	Tablesorter	simple client-side table sorting

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Portugal Business Guides

Rui Carmo — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:20:08 GMT

Spot on. The good bits are accurate, and the bad bits are a handy summary of nearly everything I dislike about Portuguese corporate culture.

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Stratified

Rui Carmo — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:00:01 GMT

There isn't much mention of it anywhere, but back in college I did a fair amount of multimedia and 3D design - a little detour in my education that served me well at the time where it regarded rounding out my skill set and earning some spare cash, and which I've been revisiting as part of my new job.

Turns out I realized I haven't written about it much, so here goes, as a sort of break from more low-level pursuits.

Life beyond Adobe

One of the first things I got rolling when I took charge was to pay the Adobe tax and get as many of my design teams onto the Creative Suite 5 bandwagon as possible, but I've tried to steer clear of installing any Adobe software on my own machines - partly because I don't need to use it daily, and partly because I hate their installers and bloat.

Since I'm not making a career out of design in and by itself, I can afford to buck the trend and use alternatives freely, both at work and at home (where I would never be able to justify the expense).

As such I've been happily chugging along with Pixelmator for nearly everything and a few odds and ends like VectorDesigner and Sketch for vector editing, which are, together with the Mac's built-in support for previewing all sorts of media, more than enough for reviewing and tweaking.

But I've been needing to do a fair amount of 3D (mostly set scenes and mockups), so it bears mentioning that I eventually settled on a combination of SketchUp for modeling and Strata LE for rendering.

I haven't given up on Blender (and still use Loki Render on occasion), but I used Strata's grandaddy in another era, so I took to its UI instantly¹.

It may look somewhat antiquated, but the renderer is adequately speedy, materials management is quirky but sane, it has the ancient time-honored lighting "ball" control, and (most importantly of all) can import COLLADA files directly and without fuss, something that other low-end modeling software like Cheetah 3D can't (yet) do.

A bot meeting slapped together in a hurry and rendered with an alpha channel.

So it took me all of 15 minutes to set up a scene and do a set of basic shots of the Codebits bots for a number of purposes, which was great, and I've been doing rather more complex stuff with it that is only hampered by rather long rendering times².

Motion

Another thing I've been increasingly doing is video, and video comes with a plethora of contextual nuisances that you need to address when you plan on showing it to human beings, such as intros, captions, transitions, etc., etc.

Even though I have After Effects at work, I decided I'd get to grips with Motion - partly because I might someday decide to get Final Cut once Apple decides to stop annoying people with it, and partly because it's now quite cheap.

Also, it's quite usable on the relatively pokey hardware I have (both at home and at work), even though I've yet to do anything even moderately complex.

If I ever do, I'll let you know. Well, maybe.

Blender, despite continuous improvement, still seems to go out of its way to be unfriendly to people who know what they want to do but can't figure out where in the UI they should go to achieve it, and, quite honestly, I just don't have the time to figure it all out these days. Maybe in a couple of years. ↩
Alas, laptops aren't rendering powerhouses, and unlike with Blender, I can't push out a job to other machines (I've done a few very promising experiments with a small cluster, but not being able to create scenes effectively in Blender makes it impossible for me to benefit from some of the massive computer power I have available online). ↩

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Python

Rui Carmo — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:37:00 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Apr 15^th.

Python is my current programming language of choice for most endeavors (even if only for prototyping). I am, however, not shy of using something else if it is better suited for the task.

It is also one of the main contributors to my occasional rants on the utter lack of an universal system scripting language.

My Stuff:

Yaki	my current never-ending opus.
MailArchive	a quick hack to file web pages as MIME compliant e-mail messages.
IMAP Backup	another quick hack that apparently filled a long-standing need.
Growl native protocol implementation	this spawned numerous variants, including a proxy.
PicoRendezvous.py	a minimalist (and dumb) Bonjour / Rendezvous client.
PNGCanvas	a native Python PNG creation module.
PicoStats	a minimalist Apache log parser.

Stuff I Help Out With:

The Python Grimoire, which I converted into TiddlyWiki format
newspipe, which I used daily for a couple of years and occasionally contributed to.
Snakelets, the runtime for Yaki

Testing Aids:

Testosterone, a testing framework with a great screencast
Pycallgraph, which can generate a program flow graph via Graphviz.

Resources:

Mac OS X specific Stuff:

Using Python with Quartz 2D on Mac OS X – an intro to the developer samples that have shipped with Xcode for a good while now
Python Metadata Importer – for Spotlight
BundleBuilder – to build standalone Mac OS X OS X app bundles

Windows:

Enthon, an enhanced Windows distribution with several scientific tools included.

Libraries:

Category	Link	Notes
GUI Stuff	kivy	A sophisticated UI/UX library with Android support
	pyglet	a cross-platform windowing and multimedia library with OpenGL support
	PythonCard	A bit basic, but interesting.
	urwid	A `curses` based library for building console UIs
	winGuiAuto.py	for Windows automation.
	VPython	3D OpenGL libraries for quick visualization.
Console	Clint	A great module for developing CLI applications.
	Littleworkers	Parallell job management without the hassles.
	Colorama	Making ANSI color sequences work across platforms (see also this gist).
Mail	IMAPClient	An IMAP wrapper library
Data formats	biplist	A library that can manage Mac binary `.plist` files
Data formats	xlwt	a library to parse Excel documents (cheatsheet).
Unicode	Unidecode	Does character transliterations.
Interpreters	Skulpt	Some interesting twists on using Python on the way to JavaScript.
Interpreters	Pyjamas
Reporting	Relatorio	A very neat reporting library with multiple output formats
Database	SQLAlchemy	See tutorial
	Sybase module	I’ve used all of these at any one time, and `pymssql` worked out better for me.
	FreeTDS
	pymssql
GIS	geopy	an amazingly flexible geocoding library.
HTML and XML	BeautifulSoup	The most powerful HTML parser out there.
	mxTidy	HTML Tidy for Python
	pygments	Python syntax highlighter able to handle multiple nested languages
	pyquery	A jQuery-like library for manipulating documents.
	cssutils	a CSS Cascading Style Sheets parser.
	Mechanize	a programmatic web browser for screen scraping.
	Gnosis Utilities	all sorts of XML goodies.
	lxml	a different `libxml` binding.
Web Application Frameworks	Bottle	Tiny, flexible, awesome. My favorite for 2011.
	Tornado	non-blocking, which is pretty interesting.
	Django	The new hotness.
	Snakelets	A minimalistic app server, my current web platform of choice.
	Draco	Old and busted, to various extents.
	medusa
	CherryPy
	Karrigell
	Twisted
	Zope
Graphics	smc.freeimage	A wrapper for the freeimage library that can handle various TIFF and fax formats as well as ICC color profiles
	Graphite	a real-time graphing system similar to RRDTool.
	SciPy	scientific (including plotting) libraries for Python. Most impressive.
	Pyx	Oldie, but goodie.
	Skip’s Python Bits	lots of useful snippets
pygame	a game-oriented library with SDL support
PDF	PDFMiner	a parser and text renderer that can identify location of text on a page and do basic rendering to HTML
	PyPdf	a PDF toolkit
	Kiva	a Display PDF library.
	ReportLab Toolkit	a pure Python PDF library that includes a presentation tool.
Networking	msnlib	An MSN protocol implementation
	ircutils	A relatively modern IRC framework that uses `asyncore`
	Python smtplib progress indication	Might come in useful some day.
	RPyC	an awesome RPC library
	Eventlet	Amazing event-oriented framework
	dpkt	packet creation and parsers
	Pcapy	a packet manipulation library
	Tftpy	a pure Python TFTP library, useful for implementing UDP file transfer testbeds.
	ftputil	a high-level interface to the `ftplib` module
	telnetscript	a simple module to do scripted telnet sessions.
	FAPWS	a very fast asynchronous web server with a small codebase.
	simple non-blocking HTTP server	another simple server.
	PuSSH	SSH wrapper.
	POP	a POP3 class with neat semantics.
	PyRendezvous	neat little Bonjour module I use a lot.
	IPy	an IP address manipulation library.

Techniques

daemon.py, an example daemon script.
Pydoc – built-in Web help, anytime, anywhere
How to Write a Spelling Corrector – an interesting technique that can come in handy to fix/suggest search terms, etc.
Python Webcam Color Track
Python webcam fun – motion detection

Notes:

Instant Web Server on port 8000:

#!/bin/sh 
python -c '__import__("SimpleHTTPServer").test()'

Totally Unrelated:

Estimating the Airspeed of an Unladen Swallow

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About the OS X Lion v10.7.3 Update

Rui Carmo — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:01:06 GMT

Sadly, no explicit mention of fixing the hourly Safari crashes I’ve been experiencing for a while.

Also, mind that you re-enable TRIM for your SSD. The best way is probably this, but your mileage may vary.

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French court fines Google 0.5MEur for gratis Maps

Rui Carmo — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:52:13 GMT

When you can’t adapt, sue.

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The Dead Mobile Platform Graveyard

Rui Carmo — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:44:39 GMT

I’m getting old – I remember most of these being heralded as The Next Big Thing.

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Sane Python subprocess wrapper

Rui Carmo — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:13:32 GMT

If, like me, you need to do a lot of plumbing and hate the modern popen replacements, this is a veritable godsend.

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Netherlands makes net neutrality a law

Rui Carmo — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:07:58 GMT

This is XXIst century legislation.

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Setting up a VM for Raspberry Pi development

Rui Carmo — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 22:54:16 GMT

I’ve been using a tweaked (and older) version of this alongside my QEMU build.

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ARMing for the future

Rui Carmo — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 22:32:40 GMT

Looking back, it turns out that I've actually been doing a lot of apparently unrelated stuff in between meetings, more meetings and real life, and some of it bears mentioning.

In anticipation of the Raspberry Pi launch (even though I don't expect to be able to get one from the first production batch, given the amount of people expressing an interest these days) I've been messing around with Pyglet.

Pyglet is an interesting little beast, but I find it fascinating largely because it seems to be the easiest way to do cross-platform game/graphical development without bothering to install everything but the kitchen sink - it talks directly to SDL and OpenGL via the magic of ctypes, is very simple to get into, and the same codebase will run (and I've tested it) on the Mac, vanilla Linux, and an ARM emulator - I used both a pre-built scratchbox2 environment with QEMU inside a Linux box and qemu-system-arm on Lion, which I got to work recently¹.

It's obviously (and sadly) useless for targeting mobile platforms directly, but the nice thing about it is that it is such a thin wrapper that porting working SDL or OpenGL code into another language is pretty trivial refactoring, so it's even useful for prototyping.

I have a couple ideas I'm going to use Raspberry Pi devices for on a personal level, but the starting point will be a little graphical shell that will take input from a Bluetooth gamepad (of which I have plenty, given the layers of dust my PS3 is collecting) and allow me to launch apps such as vintage emulators and application-specific web browsers.

Since I'm going to try to avoid X altogether, I've also been looking for a lightweight WebKit engine with Python bindings that will run inside an SDL environment², so that I can make a credible stab at enabling the browser to work with keypad input.

This isn't going to happen overnight, of course, but given my love for tiny machines, it promises to at least be an interesting hobby - I leave you with a couple of screenshots of Pyglet running inside an ARM VM and a shader demo running on Lion that I'm having some fun with³:

And this is just one of the things I have in mind...

Sadly, the QEMU team seems to have a single person maintaining the Mac bits (and even then not using Lion), so they haven't fixed the LLVM compiler builds and apparently have no milestone for doing so, which currently means that if you want to do ARM development on a Mac, your best bet is putting up with a Linux VM - I was lucky enough to get QEMU to build since I had the right tools lying around, but it's an unsupported hack. ↩
So far I've only found one, and it's not trivial to get going... Pointers to more would be most welcome. ↩
It runs on the ARM emulator as well but the whole thing is (naturally) painfully slow, so I'm breaking it down to figure out how much I can do with software rendering until I have some real hardware. ↩

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iPhone, iPad MagSafe and styluses

Rui Carmo — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:18:59 GMT

Purely speculative at this point, of course, but interesting nonetheless.

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A bit more on the Portuguese Private Copy Levy

Rui Carmo — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:00:05 GMT

Following up on my earlier post, and despite a number of other things I would much rather be writing about, it bears mentioning that the local Authors' Guild has done a number of interesting things lately, in rough chronological order:

Published a FAQ that conveniently sidetracked all of the issues associated with private content (or even their proposed per-GB tax) - by, of course, not mentioning the levy rates included in the bill.
Attempted to muddle the issues by mentioning the word "piracy" at every possible opportunity, befuddling even senior justice officials who were misleadingly prompted to comment on the bill.
Removed the 2010 annual report I (and many other people) linked to, in utter ignorance of such obvious things as the Google cache, thanks to which there is now a permanent, independent record of it¹.
Posted a listing of 100 authors who "supported" the bill (around a fifth of which are members of, hold office at the Guild, or are directly related to same by family ties).

This last bit was the most telling, for it soon became apparent that some of the people on that list had actually never signed anything in support of the bill, or had been reached by phone asking for permission for adding their name to an "anti-piracy" document.

Interestingly enough, the page now mentions that the petition is "open", but at least one of the authors who openly stated that he did not support the bill is still listed.

Even as the controversy rages on in Facebook, I cannot but help mulling how incredibly, unbelievingly, stutteringly badly they botched this up - at least similar discussions around ACTA and SOPA in other countries have the (rather dubious, I know) advantage of being orchestrated by professional lobbyists instead of clueless rank amateurs that would, at the very least, be clever enough not to be news on BoingBoing.

But it bears mentioning that there are still some chilling aspects to the whole thing - for instance, I am flabbergasted at how mis-informed journalists, senior judges and (most of all) artists seem to be regarding the bill, even though there is a growing number of savvy ones publicly denouncing it.

And I have to wonder how anyone holding political office can support it given the nearly criminal amount of deceit and disinformation currently surrounding it - politics being what it is, I don't suspect many will keep supporting it as further knavery comes to light.

Sadly, the media have so far mostly ignored the issue.

Which is to be expected, I suppose, since once it was tainted as a "piracy" bill nobody cared to dig further into the matter, and most journalists probably aren't savvy enough to worry about the way the levy affects just about any kind of digital storage - or to run the numbers and notice that the Author's Guild is effectively trying to raking in an order of magnitude more cash by taxing every single storage device in the country, regardless of what it is actually used for.

My favorite bit? Some luminary actually stated on the record, during the obscure little public hearing they held for trade associations (because, after all, there is no way the general public can be allowed to comment on this kind of thing...) that people using large volumes of storage for personal media were "a statistical anomaly", in an age where the staple storage product is the 2TB hard disk.

I can't wait for the records of that hearing to be published - I'm positive I'll be perusing them with great relish.

But I would hazard a guess that whomever stated that is not a creative person - forget about computer science, software development, etc., I mean authoring your own content, something just about everybody with a camera does - and, increasingly, we do it on video.

Which would be ironic for anyone affiliated with the Authors' Guild, but oddly fitting given their overall approach to, well, authorship.

There are quite a few more copies, so it's going to be fun if they ever try to get it removed. ↩

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"A bit more on the Portuguese Private Copy Levy" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Jan 27^th. Except as noted, it's ©2011 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

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