2007/12/31

Calendaris!


El Compact Calendar de David Seah és ben mono, i sembla molt pràctic; és un excel per imprimir. Hi ha adaptacions, amb els dilluns on toquen i les festes d'aqui, en Excel i en Open Office.

Aqui altres calendaris ben macos, però amb aquestes extranyes semanes de cap de setmana partit.

Tanta il·lusió que em fan els calendaris, i tan nerviós que em posen.

2007/12/30

Tag-decorated feeds


Tags should be a good cue to tell us if a blog post should be read or skipped. I find puzzling that most (all?) feed readers just ignore tags. Surprisingly enough, I could not find any feed decorator.

Yahoo! Pipes to the rescue: after some copy'n'paste, a pipe that decorates feeds appending to every post title its categories (for atom and rss 2 feeds), and also adds the tags to the top of the post: http://pipes.yahoo.com/xverges/tagsintitle

This one does the same, but also adds the results from Yahoo! Term Extraction to the top of the post. I just cooked it, so I am not really sure if the list of terms is a useful addition: http://pipes.yahoo.com/xverges/tagsandtermextraction

Annoying side effects: the feed name, url and description become those of the pipe, so a bit of manual work is required after subscribing to a feed. I hope they fix it...

2007/12/21

3D means that the screen frame is like a window frame (or More Procrastineering Wiimote hackery)

Another amazing video by Johnny Lee (or was it Leonardo?). This time on using a Wiimote for head tracking providing an amazing 3D experience.



If that was not enough, check out his video on foldable displays

Procrastineering

Someone that names his blog Procrastineering has to be brilliant. And Johnny Chung Lee proves it by using a Wiimote to let you have low cost interactive whiteboard in a LCD or any surface where you can project your screen.

But not everything is about gadgets: check out the Community Splash project, co-authored by Johnny, that used a giant slingshot to throw paint filled ballons against a 18-story building in Pittsburgh. Do not miss the project's image gallery.

2007/12/14

Social Note Taking


I just played a bit with Ripplerap, a tool to take and share notes during conferences. Brilliant. If downloading and unziping is too much for you to get an impression, take a look at Phil Whitehouse's ripplerap-is-about-to-be-born post.

It is in its infancy, and there are several things that need some ironing, but I believe that its simplicity gives it a huge potential. Good news for us compulsive note takers and/or conference-life-blogging addicts.

And I must confess that I did not see much of a point in one of Ripplerap bulding blocks, TiddlyChatter...

Update: It is a funny coincidence that the very same day that I played with Ripplerap for the first time, fellow IBMer Sacha Chua - tech evangelist, storyteller, geek - made me aware of this collecton of tips for conference bloggers.

2007/12/12

Wiimote as an accessibiity enabler?

The picture of The ThinkGeek WiiHelm I jokingly attached in my last post has suddenly made me wonder if the Wiimote could be a very cheap accessibility enabler for people with some specific mobility limitations... The Wiimote can interface with computers, but I don't know if its sensitivity is low enough.

I'm posting this just because I didt not get any obvious google hit on this.

Update: This post has reminded Josep Maria Ganyet about a video of a Wiimote being attached to a spring horse, turning the mostly static experience of driving videos into a sort of motorcycle simulator. Nice idea.

2007/12/11

Wiinflación

Wiis agotadas. Wiimotes/Wiimandos agotados; de 40€ de precio normal a 60€ + portes en eBay. Veo que amazon.fr vuelve a tenerlos en stock (40€ + iva + portes), lo que me hace suponer que la escasez no tardará en desaparecer y que ha sido una suerte contener mi instinto estraperlista.

Pero mucho más intersante que todo lo anterior es el origen de la palabra estraperlo.



Actualización:

  1. En La Vanguardia la semana pasada trataron sobre la escasez de Wiimotes.
  2. En fnac.es venden el Wii Play (un juego que incluye un mando) por 45€

2007/12/06

Happy Geek Dad


Stumbled upon Jason R. Briggs' Snake Wrangling for Kids:

"Snake Wrangling for Kids" is a printable electronic book, for children 8 years and older, who would like to learn computer programming. It covers the very basics of programming, and uses the Python programming language to teach the concepts. Examples are presented for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

2007/12/04

Bus o taxi? Opera Mini i TMB t'ajuden

Dues coses que em fan la vida més fàcil:

  • iBus, un servei de TMB que et diu quan falta per que arribi el bus a una parada. Pot dir-ho amb un SMS o, gairebé gratis, via web.
  • Opera Mini 4, que et deixa definir-te les teves pròpies cerques personalitzades (molt semblant a les quick searches del Firefox).
En lloc de buscar a Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon... (les cerques predefinides) pots fer-te una cerca a
http://www.tmb.net/piu/ca_ES/piusolucio.jsp?parada=%s
i amb pocs clics podràs introduir el codi de parada (cal incloure els zeros a de l'esquerra si n'hi ha) i veure si tens temps d'anar a comprar el diari abans de que arribi el bus.

I aquest és l'aspecte que té l'Opera Mini quan et diu quan tardarà l'autobús.


Get Opera Mini

2007/11/30

Yay! Barcelona Python Meetups are here!

Back from the first Barcelona Python Meetup Group event. The event was good, with two talks:

If the event was good, the post-event (beers, croquetas and bravas) with Maik was great and I'm bringing home lots of food for thought. Most of the talk was about Funittest (Making it easy to go from use case to functional test). Maik uses daily a high level Test Driven Development flow:
  • write the functional test, to get aligned with the user's needs/customer value,
  • write unit test, that can be driven faster and focus in the approapiate level of abstraction
  • write the code
My impression is that his ideas have lots of commonalities with Fit and Fitness, and the story-based-testing that they advocate. Maik said that Funnitest's theoretical foundation can be grasped in The Braidy Tester articles; I'm adding them to my to-read list...

Beyond functional testing, the programmer's flow, the business-technical gap, Barcelona, Sevilla, tele-working... an intriguing an promising idea: the I-told-you-that-this-was-a-wrong-decision year-end bonus.

2007/11/02

Introducing... TiddlyWiki!

Dave Gifford created a very nice intro to TiddlyWiki. Going over the 20 first slides will take you less than a minute and will give you good reasons to read further and start using tiddlywiks.

Circular del Ministerio del Amor



El Ministerio del Amor (Minimor en neolengua) informa:

Sin la nación, todo se derrumba. El acuerdo fundamental es sobre la nación de Oceanía. Sin él todo lo demás se derrumba.

No se es de Oceanía a tiempo parcial. Oceanía, además de un deber, es una pasión y un sentimiento hondo. No se es oceánico por horas o a tiempo parcial, aunque no siempre estemos pensando en Oceanía. Bien es verdad que lo solemos hacer menos de lo necesario. El ser oceánico lo impregna todo, así de poderosa es nuestra nación. Si llegase a estar en peligro, sería tu propia entidad individual la que estaría en riesgo.

Ostras, no, que no es de 1984; tanto acordarme estos días del Departamento de Registro del Ministerio de la Verdad me ha confundido.

¿De Sabino Arana? ¿De alguien de ERC? No, tampoco; es José María Aznar escribiéndole cartas a un joven español. Uf, agáchate, hijo, que viene la patria.

2007/10/30

SiSi (Say It Sign It): Voice to Sign Language


Ain't that cool? I hope it goes past the demo stage in a near future!
Interesting info and links in a post by Laura Cowen.

2007/10/22

We make mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes. Some times we are aware of them, some times we are not: looks like putting the blame of mistakes in someone or something is part of our nature. It's a pity, because we let pass by lots of learning opportunities.

Flickr picture by srslyguys

We software engineers are lucky enough of being faced in our trade with lots of mistakes that we cannot blame in any one but ourselves. Of course, some mistakes allow allocating blame on our customer, our team, our tools... My teammates often hear me cursing loudly Bill Gates or Linus Torvalds, but they know I'm jocking: we are experienced enough to know that select isn't broken. When writing code, you rarely can put the blame on someone/something else unless you are a pathological liar; that's good.

I would like to think that having to face our daily mistakes helps us weaken our blame-someone-else voice in other areas of our life, but, honestly, I don't have any evidence about it. But, just in case, I'd like my kids to learn the we make mistakes, we learn from them lesson/mindset, and this has been one of the main drivers in getting our new home pet, a Lego Mindstorms NXT Robot.

2007/10/21

Gmail spam filter sick?

In the past days I've been getting quite a few spam messages in my inbox. Not smartly disguised spam, but old plain lottery winning notifications and anatomy enlargement tips. Please, spam filter, get well soon: I miss you.

2007/10/19

Sabelotodos

Ángel Expósito, en su Mirón Perplejo de hoy en La Vanguardia:

(...) que los periodistas sepamos tanto de todo. Absolutamente de todo. ¡Qué estupido es el mundo!, al no percatarse de que un solo tertuliano español podría ser secretario general de la ONU, director del FMI, seleccionador nacional de fútbol y número uno del ranking de toreros. Todos en uno.
Y quién dice un tertuliano, dice un blogger. ¿Por dónde debe andar mi traje de luces?

2007/10/15

Shhh!


Must print these. Now.

Botnets, supervillains and flying monkeys

The idea of millions of computers infected waiting for a supervillain to tell them what to do is, at least, disturbing. If you want to learn more about the Storm Worm botnet, go read the excellent article in Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram.

Fortunately, reading about DEranged Security's very fun bluetooth social-engineering experiment changed my worrisome mood. This xkdc strip about Bobby Tables helped too (geek humor warning for this link).

2007/10/06

Jazz in the hood

Jazz band playing
Martin Espinach, coffee machine and lunch mate, gave yesterday a very nice internal talk about how his previous project used bugzilla and Mylyn to help them plan, assign and track team tasks. Although they were initially excited about Mylyn's task-focused UI, none of the team members ended up using it; they did love Mylyn's ability to get notifications from bugzilla. It looked like a neat solution.

When his very detailed talk was almost done, he told us that, for their recently started new project, they are using IBM Rational Jazz. I felt like killing him, but I then I would have missed the chance to complain about his talk during every afternoon coffee in the next weeks.

And Jazz? So far, they are loving it. I'll have to ask him to demo it to our team.

2007/09/25

Badar, riure, innocència i il·lusió

Del catàleg de l'excel·lent exposició Educant infants, defensant els seus drets, que fins dijous està a l'Illa Diagonal:

Dret a la Innocència
Segurament t’hauran dit que a la vida hi ha coses molt importants. Algunes, però, fan
referència a un moment de la vida que no és el teu, per això volem recordar-te quatre coses realment serioses, que formen part del món de la infància i l’adolescència: Badar, riure, innocència i il·lusió. Deixa que t’acompanyin.
(...)
La infància i l’adolescència són uns moments molt interessants de viure.


Dret a la Descoberta
Els adults tenen tendència a la sobreprotecció, però tenir infants i joves en una bombolla de vidre implica negar-los la sensació de l’experimentació i la descoberta.
El risc a equivocar-se és necessari en tot procés de creixement. Tens dret a cercar, a fer preguntes, a buscar respostes i a experimentar.

Traça

Un descobriment de la meva petita equilibrista:

-Oi que tinc molta traça? I com ara la he fet servir molt, ara en tinc més.
-Siiii!
-És al revés de la pintura: quan la fas servir, s'acaba. En canvi de traça s'en fa més.
Guau! :-)

2007/09/24

Beasts walking in the beach

Flickr picture by pmo
BMW has been showing a beautiful commercial featuring the kinetic sculptures by Theo Jansen. This is its one minute version:

The art of creating creatures, a talk by Jansen, has been recently posted to ted.com. But, if you are curious about some of the fascinating technicalities behind Jansen's air-powered logic and mechanical design through genetic algorithms, an earlier talk at http://www.gelconference.com is a better choice (20 minutes):

2007/09/22

Why interpreted programming languages suck

XUL templates and tabs


I had some problems using XUL templates to populate a tabbox using a RDF data source: the tabs were created, but switching tabs did not work. Avoiding the use of inline templates and moving the template outside of the tabbox element solved this. Looks like the tabbox was confused by the <tabs> and <tabpanels> elements inside the <template> node.


<template id="tabTemplate">
<tabs>
<tab uri="rdf:*" label="rdf:http://multirunner.blah/rdf#name"/>
</tabs>
<tabpanels>
<tabpanel uri="rdf:*">
<label value="rdf:http://multirunner.blah/rdf#name"/>
</tabpanel>
</tabpanels>
</template>
<tabbox id="rdftabbox"
datasources="rdftabs.rdf"
ref="http://multirunner.blah/tabs"
template="tabTemplate" />

2007/09/18

Subprime para tontos

Tanto oir hablar de "subprimes" y crisis hipotecaria, y no había entendido qué demonios es esto de "subprime" hasta que Xavier Sala i Martin lo explicaba ayer muy claramente en La Vanguardia (mejor leer el artículo que mis citas):

La historia empezó hace cinco años cuando, al ver que los tipos de interés eran anormalmente bajos, algunos financieros listos vieron una oportunidad de negocio en las familias consideradas “peligrosas”. Es decir, familias poco solventes, con rentas bajas o con un historial de impagos catalogados como “clientes de baja calidad” (o, en inglés, “subprime”). Al no haber competencia de los bancos normales ya que no quieren tener nada que ver con esos clientes peligrosos, los nuevos financieros podrían concederles créditos hipotecarios a un tipo de interés elevado. El negocio consistía en pedir dinero a los bancos normales a tipos bajos y prestar a clientes peligrosos a tipos altos.

(...) ofrecían programas de repago con cuotas muy bajas durante cinco años. (...)

Estamos hoy en el quinto año, las cuotas han subido y, como era de esperar, una parte de esas familias “peligrosas” no han podido afrontar sus pagos y los financieros se han visto obligados a quedarse con sus casas. El problema es que los precios de esas casas han bajado y los tipos de interés han subido con lo que esos financieros se han quedado sin negocio y con una enorme cartera de viviendas que no pueden vender.
Pero no todo ha sido malo:
Al fin y al cabo, aunque todo esto acabe en una crisis, el episodio del crédito “subprime” ha permitido que millones de familias pobres pudieran comprar casas. Y, de hecho, el 97% de ellas ha resultado ser lo suficientemente solvente para devolver el dinero e impedir que eso pueda volver a suceder sería un error.

No coincido con el criterio de Sala i Martin al escoger americanas, ni al hacer entrevistas (Sr. Montilla, em pot escriure la primera estrofa del Virolai?), ni al hacer páginas web, ni en muchas otras cosas. Pero este hombre se explica siempre muy bien.

2007/09/12

Happy (and secret) co-owner of a NXT kit

As today, I'm the happy co-owner of a Lego Mindstorms NXT kit. The other shareholder is my son G., and he won't know about it until his 10th birthday next month. Will I be able to keep the thing in a box for so long?

I could use as an excuse that maybe he'll like better to get a working robot than to get a box full of parts... Or that it would be nice if a writing robot greeted him (at NXTLOG there are several samples that could get me started: Writer robot Final version, TurtleBot Drawing, Plotter-Bot 3000, plotbot).

Lots of learning ahead!!

2007/09/11

Virtual gaming, leadership and agile software development

Report cover
As I was reading the excellent Virtual Worlds, Real Leaders by seriosity and IBM's Global Innovation Outlook (GIO) team, I was struck with the similarities of the leadership attributes that they found in MMORPGs (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games) and those that are familiar to me from working in agile software development projects.

I'm quoting two summaries that appear in the report:

Online gaming environments facilitate leadership through:
1. Project-oriented organization
2. Multiple real-time sources of information upon which to make decisions
3. Transparent skills and competencies among co-players
4. Transparent incentive systems
5. Multiple and purpose-specific communications mediums
In fast moving distributed environments, leadership can be:
1. A temporary phenomenon
2. Task-oriented
3. Dynamic and constantly changing

Doesn't this make you think about how the daily scrum/stand up meeting and collective code ownership provides "transparent skills and competencies among co-players"? About how the leading roles in an agile team changes constantly among team members depending on the task at hand? About the fluid communications in the noisy room where the team is sitting?

Comprar Lego Mindstorms a Barcelona

Em consten dos llocs a Barcelona on poden comprar-se kits de Lego Mindstorms NXT, així que actualitzo la meva llista anterior:

Info adicional:
  • Crec que roboteca.org ja no fa vendes, i posen algun link a electricBricks.com; cal tenir present que els preus d'electricBricks estan llistats sense IVA, i que cal afegir ports des de Madrid.
  • http://www.ladrillitos.com/wiki/index.php/Comprar_Lego
  • Ara que el dolar està baix, a botigues d'ebay de fora de la UE es veuen preus molt baixos pel NXT, però cal tenir present els ports, l'IVA (16%) i els aranzels (crec que un 4%, aprox, aplicat també sobre els ports); jo no he trobat cap oferta que compensés. Tampoc he vist encara cap NXT de segona mà; en canvi, de Mindstorms RCX si que hi ha bastant mercat de particulars.

Un NXT sobre una pissarraFoto de flickr de cackhanded, d'un hack day

Gronxar-se

Flip, flap, flip, flap... poques coses tan relaxants com gronxar-se. Si mai monto una empresa amb un local, caldrà que sigui gran, per què una de les primeres inversions serà un gronxador. I si els comptes anessin bé, hi afegiria un llit elàstic. Segur que si a totes les oficines hi havés un gronxador, el clima de treball seria molt millor.

Si no t'has gronxat des de que eres petit, tens un problema: ves de pressa al parc més proper i posa-hi remei! I si vols una gronxada de primera, els millors gronxadors que tinc localitzats són a la Platja del Prat, per què pots fer salts sobre la sorra.

No, no és que avui m'hagi gronxat, però he estat a l'aeroport de Barcelona i he caminat -boing boing boing, somriure d'orella a orella- sobre la cinta. Els pobres que es queden aturats i deixen que els arrastri no saben el que es perden!

Foto de flickr de brentdanley

2007/08/20

cmd.exe goodies

Googling to remember again the key that allows a command history window to be opened in cmd.exe (F7, in case you care), I found the misstitled Stupid Command Prompt Tricks post. Nice. Things that I did not know and that I'm going to use often:

  • dropping a file/dir on a console writes its full path in it
  • console settings (window/buffer size, fonts, quickedit...) are tied to the title, not to the shortcut that is used to launch them.
    cmd /c start "MyCmd" cmd /k ...
    will launch a command prompt that will use the settings associated to MyCmd. If there are none, just go to 'Properties' and create them

2007/08/10

I am thinking now

Do not miss (sorry, louder, DO NOT MISS) this TED Talk:
Patrick Awuah: Educating a new generation of African leaders.

It's not only about Africa. It's about entitlement[1] and responsibility, education, ethics, critical thinking, incompetence, economic elites, empowerment... in any part of the world. 18 moving minutes that will make you think.

I'm keeping a quote from it:

Every society must be very intentional about how it trains its leaders
[1] I was talking about this to someone and could not think of a good Spanish term for "entitlement". He translated quoting something heard in lots of movies when the hero is in trouble while abroad: I am an American citizen. Not that I believe that Americans are worse than in my corner of the world in the entitlement disease, but I thought that it was a very funny and good translation.

2007/08/06

XUL persist annoyances

XUL Elements have a persist attribute, that is documented as

A space separated list of attributes that are maintained when the window is closed. When the window is re-opened, the values of persistent attributes are restored. In Mozilla, persistent attributes are stored in the per-profile file localstore.rdf. Persistence can also be stored using the document.persist function. In order for persistence to work, the element must also have an id.
I've learned some things about it today:
  • It does not seem to work for the "value" attribute of "textarea" elements
  • It is stored as RDF
  • It asks for some quite verbose code if you need to access to it

var rdfService = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/rdf/rdf-service;1"].
getService(Components.interfaces.nsIRDFService);
var rdfLocalStoreDS = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/rdf/datasource;1?name=local-store"].
getService(Components.interfaces.nsIRDFDataSource);
var rdfRes = rdfService.GetResource("uri of interest after about in localstore.rdf");
var screenXRes = rdfService.GetResource("screenX");
var screenYRes = rdfService.GetResource("screenY");

if (rdfLocalStoreDS.hasArcOut(rdfRes, screenXRes) &&
rdfLocalStoreDS.hasArcOut(rdfRes, screenYRes)) {
var screenX = rdfLocalStoreDS.GetTarget(rdfRes, screenXRes, true).
QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIRDFLiteral)
var screenY = rdfLocalStoreDS.GetTarget(rdfRes, screenYRes, true).
QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIRDFLiteral)
window.moveTo(screenX.Value, screenY.Value);
I failed to call QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIRDFLiteral) for quite a while of wasted time. In another piece of code that I wrote, this was magically called for me by checking if (target instanceof Components.interfaces.nsIRDFLiteral); I need to get a better understanding of Mozilla's component model mechanisms... I also failed to use "Value" with a capital letter, to add up to the waste. :-(

Look up and marvel!

The Cloud Appreciation Society Manifiesto:

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.
cloud
We think that they are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.
cloud
We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.
cloud
We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of a person’s countenance.
cloud
Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked.
They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.
Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save on psychoanalysis bills.
cloud
And so we say to all who’ll listen:
Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!


via the tips in neave.com:
Turn the computer off and read something new. Sit on a park bench and gawp aimlessly at the clouds or stars above you. Smile like an idiot. Count your blessings. Don't worry about the future. Don't think too much. Don't take life too seriously. Don't pay attention to a word I say.

Besides these good tips, neave.com features some great Flash apps worth checking.

2007/08/05

Menos es más

Avram Hershko, Nobel de Química 2004, en la Contra de La Vanguardia:

No me gustan los grandes laboratorios ni los grandes presupuestos para investigar (...) Como yo no tengo que pagar a mucha gente, puedo dedicar mi tiempo a investigar y no a buscar el dinero para retribuir a mi equipo.
Detesto a los sí señor. Para darme la razón siempre, ya me tengo a mí mismo; lo que aprecio es que me lleven la contraria, pero con fundamento; que me hagan pensar... Ésa es la principal virtud de los buenos júniors, que no dan nada por aceptado y que plantean nuevas preguntas a las viejas certidumbres. (...) Que tengan iniciativa; que no esperen a que yo les dé órdenes, sino que me sorprendan con sus propias y nuevas ideas, y que tengan más ganas que yo todavía de investigar. (...) Necesito preguntas, no que me den la razón.

Siempre me gusta ver que alguien progresa en algo técnico sin verse forzado a abandonarlo por la gestión. El Principio de Peter no siempre se cumple.

Equipos pequeños, diversos, con redes sociales extendidas: buenas recetas no sólo para la investigación, sino para cualquier tipo de innovación.

2007/08/04

SendTo Clipboard coolness (TiddlyWiki links to your files)

The SendTo folder is a simple and powerful tool to customize Windows Explorer to simplify some recurring tasks. If you often want to link to files in your PC from your TiddlyWikis, you'll like this hack. It creates two new items in the "Send To" menu:

  • clipboard - file url: Copies to the clipboard the file: url of the file or folder that was showing the "Send To" menu
  • clipboard - new tiddler javascript url: Copies to the clipboard a javascript: url that, when pasted into the address bar of a Firefox tab showing a TiddlyWiki, will create a tiddler with the contents of the file that was showing the "Send To" menu

You can jump and just download and run the thing, a small .hta file, or take less than three minutes watching it in action in one of the lamest screencasts ever:

SendTo Clipboard Screencast from Xavier Vergés and Vimeo

Using it
  • Just download the .hta file and open it. No, wait! Never open .hta files unless you trust its author or you have taken a look at the code.
  • Provided that you trust me or that you have checked the code, you can now open it. Maybe a double click will be enough (your Windows associates .hta files to mshta.exe, a version of IE with high security privileges in your machine). Maybe you need to use the command line and type mshta path2twlink.hta.
  • Follow the simple steps described in the .hta file, and you can start using your new shinny Send To menu items.
  • You are expected to edit the file to customize what gets copied into the clipboard. It should be easy. You may get ideas to push the sendto+clipboard+javascript urls concept further; adding them to the tool should not be too hard.
  • You are also expected to do some dancing, since this is DanceLikeMattHardingWare.
Lessons learned while hacking
  • I initially wanted to use just a .js file. Getting access to the clipboard from a .js file is hard, so I went for an .hta. It turned out to be a good thing, because it ended up providing a way to avoid to the users the trouble of creating the shortcuts by hand and to me the trouble of documenting the recipe.
  • The problem of using an .hta file is that I found no way to keep it invisible, that it has an unusual way to receive its params, and that I had to warn you about its dangerousness.
  • I think that I've spent more time recording the lousy screencast and comparing video hosting services that coding. The number of times that I rerecorded the #@%! thing will remain undisclosed; I have my pride. Regarding the hosting services, after reading about them, I posted the video to google, blip.tv and vimeo.
    I still have no winner, but google's video quality was awfull, so I had to drop it despite its super cool feature of letting you link to a specific point of the video.
    Update: looks like the winner is http://viddler.com: links, comments and tags on specific points of the video, plus the best player of all (in full screen mode, showing the original size, the quality was just perfect): http://www.viddler.com/explore/xdexavier/videos/1

2007/08/02

Upcoming DanceLikeMattHardingWare (half cooked hacks)

I have a longish backlog of hacks worth cleaning up and publishing

  • FoxyHistory, a better Firefox History Manager. Having the ability to include urls when searching, and to sort the history by date of first visit has already saved me some time trying to restore some foggy memories.
  • TiddlyWiky SendTo Shortcuts, that allow to easily create customized links to files in a tiddlywiki and tiddlers with the contents of a file (Thanks for that first implementation, -- F.!)
  • MultiTiddlyWiki, that allows to have a bunch of tiddlywikis in a single Firefox tab. Specially nice when used with the terrific WebRunner, a XULRunner based distraction-free browser (Thanks for the link, schilke!)
I also had a xkdc (a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language) specific bookmarklet, but I just learned about the Long Titles Firefox extension that obsoletes it.

I think that I'll make the hacks available as DanceLikeMattHardingWare:
You are free to do with this whatever you fancy, but you are expected to do some small à la Matt Harding dancing steps now and then.

If you are too serious to dance, consider changing some things in your life, or just use it under some form of beerware or Creative Commons licensing.

Matt Harding in Berlin

2007/06/24

No fumaré

  • Pels evidents motius de salut.
  • Per què em recorda 20 cops al dia que estic fent una cosa que no vull fer. I em fa sentir fatal.
  • Per què és una pasta (prop de 1000€ l'any!!). I, a sobre, alimento a una industria intrínsecament perversa.
  • Per què un pare amb comportaments compulsius és una bírria d'exemple.
  • Per què, com no fumo dintre de casa, probablement dedico 20 minuts al dia o més exclusivament a fumar.
  • Per emetre menys CO2 :-P (no és broma del tot)
  • Per què ja els ho he dit als nens. I per què ho he escrit aquí.
I, preparat amb uns quants consells i un rebost ple de sucs, plàtans i pastanagues, llenço a la foguera de Sant Joan el tabac que em queda i un hàbit del tot ximple.

Actualització: En una tira de la Mafalda, el Felipe, provant d'esbandir-se la mandra de fer els deures, es pregunta ¿Somos hombres o ratones?; a la darrera vinyeta està llegint els seus comics mentre menja formatge. Escric aquesta actualització avergonyit per un ratonil fracàs. Però no quedarà així!


2007/06/23

Llibres en anglès a Barcelona

Vinc d'Hibernian Books, a Gràcia; està la mar de bé i m'he firat un parell de llibres:

  • Applied Cryptography, de Bruce Schneier, per 7€
  • The Peter Principle, per 4€. M'ha fet molta il·lusió, doncs l'havia llegit en castellà fa una pila d'anys, però ja fa molt que no sé on para.
M'han parlat molt bé de Elephant Book Store.

2007/06/12

Estadíticas para atizarse

Documentándome para dar una charla sobre la coparentalidad (término mucho más bonito que el de custodia compartida) y sobre la situación de indefensión de los hombres en los procesos de divorcio, me pongo a buscar estadísticas diversas.

Una que me sonaba relacionaba suicidio masculino y divorcio, lo que no me parecía descabellado. Pero, aunque no aspiro a ser como el gran Wonka, estoy bastante de seguro que la que he encontrado es un churro, al menos en lo relativo a cómo interpreta los datos.

Estos datos de la realidad nos están indicando una cifra de hombres (del orden de 9) que, cada semana, en España, están cometiendo suicidio específicamente por la causa de los procesos de separación/divorcio, absolutamente oculta en todos los mass-media no solo de nuestro país, sino en otros países occidentales
Uno de los puntos de partida del estudio son las tasas de suicidio en función del estado civil.


A partir de esto, el estudio explora el efecto del cambio de casado a divorciado, deriva un número de suicidas causado por este cambio de estado, y habla de "androcidio". Y yo, que tiendo a ser crédulo y estoy completamente seguro de que verse de la noche a la mañana sin poder ver a sus hijos, sin casa, sin dinero y sin pareja puede empujar a más de uno y de dos al suicidio, no puedo ignorar que la tasa de suicidios entre viudos no es muy distinta que entre divorciados. Y por ello me parece muy tramposo contraponer el número de suicidios entre divorciados al número de víctimas de la violencia domestica.

Que los datos sobre la violencia doméstica no sean trigo limpio, que se exponga tramposamente únicamente como un problema de hombres agresores contra mujeres víctimas y que se ignoren las agresiones contra los hombres, que los datos que nos dan no cuadren con lo que percibimos alrededor nuestro, no justifica "equilibrar" las cosas con trampas.

Y a todo esto, Erin Pizzey, la autora del primer libro publicado sobre violencia doméstica, entra en my blogroll (bueno, casi, porque no tiene rss...).

2007/06/10

Dictate to self to avoid the #%@! tiny phone keyboard

My fat fingers used to fight against my cell phone's calendar application to add appointments and reminders while on the go. I also used to take unreadable notes in tiny pieces of paper whenever an interesting idea appeared while on a crowded subway.

I learned that my cell phone can be used as a voice recorder, and now I use my best Private Investigator looks while recording whatever I want to remember when I'm away of any decent writing gear.

2007/06/09

Infectado por el baile tontorrón

Todo todo el día marcándome ridículos pasitos de baile, sin quitaremde la cabeza la música del vídeo de Matt Hardin bailando alrededor del mundo. Y encantado de la vida.

¿La culpa? De Malaprensa, por mencionar el formidable CPI (Curioso pero inútil), de CPI (Curisoso pero inútil) por su fantástico vídeo de homenaje a Matt, del "Sweet Lullaby Dancing Remix" y, por supuesto, de Matt por sus bailes. Gracias a todos.

2007/05/30

¿Me sobran hijos?


De acuerdo, Trasme: me voy con Balearia, que nos quiere a todos.

2007/05/27

Bookmarking things within gmail

Restoring a Firefox session accidentally told me that, when you open messages/chats in a new window, you get an url that you can bookmark/copy to another file. Nice.

Exploring things a bit further showed that gmail uses frames, so you can use the url of the inner frame to bookmark contacts, labels, filters, searches or any other thing that does not have the "New Window" link. In Firefox, use the popup menu, and "This Frame > Open frame in new tab".

Very handy for those of us that run our lifes in tiddlywikis.

Of course, Google is perfectly free to change these misterious urls not likely intended for public consumption...

2007/05/26

La Educación para la Ciudadanía y el filósofo desconcertado

Wonka y algunos de sus lectores se muestran escépticos sobre la conveniencia y/o la utilidad de la futura asignatura escolar de Educación para la Ciudadanía (EpC). Me pongo a buscar información sobre la EpC para intentar aclarar algunos malentendidos [1], y los mejores recursos que encuentro son

Luego me cuelgo con las crónicas de JAM sobre su trabajo durante meses escribiendo un libro de texto sobre la Educación para la Ciudadanía, que él preferiría que se llamase Ética. JAM, con evidente disgusto, dedica una parte significativa de ellas a lidiar con la polémica asociada a la asignatura
por más que intento juzgar con imparcialidad lo que dicen los que se oponen a la asignatura, me parece que están cayendo en un vicio que se extiende peligrosamente en la vida política y social española: juzgar intenciones. Intenciones que, además, no se conocen, sino que se sospechan (link)
¡Y la de palos sorprendentes que recibe la pobre EpC! Un editorial de ABC critica que la EpC haga referencias al diálogo y la negociación (claro, ¿para qué intentar que cada generación entienda mejor la necesidad y los mecanismos del diálogo y la negociación si gritos y mamporros han servido desde siempre?).

Un google de adoctrinamiento + "Educación para la Ciudadanía" da casi 40.000 resultados. Respecto a esta suspuesta relación entre la EpC y la "Formación del Espíritu Nacional", JAM afirma
Tal como entiendo la asignatura no sólo no es un adoctrinamiento, sino que debe preparar a los alumnos, mediante el desarrollo del conocimiento ético, jurídico, político y económico, y el fomento del pensamiento crítico, para que resistan a todo tipo de adoctrinamiento.
Los hay que piensan que la escuela debe limitarse a instruir, y que educar es cosa de los padres. Pero se transmiten valores por acción o por omisión. Se educa siempre inevitablemente: bien o mal, pero se educa.

Y el lío de la religión, que es el que parece que desconcierta más a JAM. Para intentar entender este lío, es útil distinguir entre ética y moral:
Moral es el sistema normativo de una sociedad. Hay tantas morales como culturas: católica, protestante, budista, musulmana, confuciana, etc. Entiendo por ética una moral transcultural, universal, pues bien, la EpC no puede ser una moral, en efecto, sino una ética. Y debe reducirse a aquellas cuestiones éticas recogidas en nuestras normas fundamentales. (...) Estas normas éticas –que protegen la libertad de conciencia y, por lo tanto, a las religiones y a sus morales- imponen también unas limitaciones: no pueden aceptarse aquellas normas morales que atenten contra derechos universales.
JAM está convencido de que no tiene ninguna dificultad impartir la EpC en clave cristiana y le cuesta entender la fuerte oposición de la jerarquía eclesiástica
sería estupendo (...) que las religiones trabajaran –como han hecho a lo largo de la historia- para perfeccionar una ética universal. Una parte importante de esa ética procede de las propuestas de los grandes maestros espirituales. ¿Por qué no intentar que esa influencia cale en un mundo laico? Hans Küng y otros muchos teólogos cristianos están defendiendo esa ética universal. La ética laica no es enemiga de las religiones. Ha sido su gran protectora. No olvidemos que el reconocimiento del derecho a la libertad de conciencia, el derecho de todas las religiones a ser respetadas, no es, ni por esencia ni por historia, un precepto religioso, sino un precepto ético. La religión cristiana rechazó ese principio hasta el Vaticano II, no lo olvidemos.
Reconocer esos puntos comunes, esa moral transcultural y universal, que no es lo mismo que relativsmo cultural, es crítico en una sociedad cada vez más diversa:
¿Tienen siempre los padres derecho a decidir la educación moral de sus hijos? Supongamos que los padres son nazis convencidos y creen que deben educar a sus hijos en la ideología nazi. ¿Debe el Estado respetar esa decisión? ¿Es que los padres tienen una sabiduría instintiva de tal manera que todo lo que ellos decidan sea infalible y respetable? ¿Y si pertenecen a la secta de los adoradores del sol, y deciden suicidarse? ¿Y si admiten la ablación del clítoris? ¿Y si casan a las niñas a los once años, como ocurre en alguna cultura implantadas en España? ¿Y si no se ocupan de su bienestar? (link)
JAM prepara un libro de texto también para padres: lo espero con ilusión.

Notas:
[1] Malentendidos: Josu "Malaprensa" Mezo, reclama que el sistema político y la Constitución formen parte del curriculum escolar, y, aunque no sé si con la profundidad que a Josu gustaría, esto forma parte de los objetivos de la EpC.

[2] Me entusiaman los anuncios de la campaña de SM Aprender lo es todo, en particular el del príncipe y el jardinero.

Paradojas del voto útil

Vía Malaprensa, aprendo que las matemáticas no están de acuerdo con la creencia muy común de que el voto útil es votar a los partidos mayoritarios, aunque no sean tu voto "natural" (e.g. votar al PSOE cuando te apetecería votar a IU/ICV, votar a CiU en lugar de al PP o a ERC...). Pues no.

Esta presentación, basada en los votos al ayuntamiento de Valladolid, explica muy bien, con la ley d'Hondt, por qué, si tu minoritario tiene probabilidades de obtener representación, lo mejor que puedes hacer es votarlo, pues no puedes adiviniar dónde pesará más tu voto finalmente.



El autor de la presentación es el anónimo autor del blog Valladolid 2007: Vota Libre.

Y, ya que estamos tratando de creencias equivocadas sobre el sistema electoral, un link a uno de los distintos posts de Malaprensa en los que se demuestra que

salvo que uno defina sobrerrepresentación como "más representación de la que a mí me gustaría que tuvieran" no hay manera de defender que los partidos nacionalistas están sobrerrepresentados en el Congreso de los Diputados.

2007/05/16

Coding Contest in Second Life

Just good an email from Christoph Steindl, a former IBM colleague, where he used to co-lead the Agile@IBM community and write an excellent blog.

Are you familiar with the Coding Wars in Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister's Peopleware? Christoph is into something similar: the cool Catalysts' Coding Contest (CCC) that his company is running:

  • Who is faster? Who is more efficient? Who is more effective? Who is more productive?
  • Does "Pair Programming" really make you faster?
  • Does "Test-Driven Development" really lead to fewer bugs?
  • How many ways are there to solve a problem?
  • Is it right that good developers only write 30 lines of code for which mediocre developers need to write 300 lines?
Catalysts organizes a coding contest to go further into some of these questions.
They will be running the contest in Linz, Austria (with post food and beverages) and in Second Life (do avatars drink and eat?).

Looks like a bright idea to me. I bet that having participants with different backgrounds, and letting anonymous participation will provide coders and organizers useful insight. I don't know if other companies do this sort of thing internally, but it looks like very interesting way to get information, a honest measurement not linked to rewards and punishments (note to self: bring this to IBM's internal ThinkPlace).

I'm even considering ignoring my usual too-busy-with-real-life-to-get-me-a-second-life to be able to participate via Second Life.

2007/05/15

Disappointed by "The No Asshole Rule"



Not that I'm disappointed by the concept of having zero-tolerance attitude towards assholes, but by Bob Sutton's book on it: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilised Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. The back cover promised hilarious examples in a funny, defiant little book. An enjoyable review by Guy Kawasaki and lots of good ratings in Amazon also made it look like a good read. And I have this dear friend working at Jerk Avenue, and I sort of hoped getting something for her. But the book, aside from making me take a little time to reflect a bit about my own episodes as an asshole [1][2], was just boring.

Maybe the problem is that before the first page I was already in agreement with the author, and I did not need the additional 170 pages. Or that I'm lucky enough of not having had to deal with assholes at work in quite a while. Or that I'm not involved in hiring any team. Or that I'm not a certified asshole.

Bob Sutton has done a very nice service making explicit the No Asshole Rule [3] and bringing focus to it. But I just did not need that many asshole stories and that much evidence about its virtues.

[1] A surprising book in improving my self asshole-ness awareness was Leadership and Self-deception: Getting Out of the Box (link for IBMers). I'm pasting a comment I made on Roo Reynolds blog, who said about it, "it made me think about the nature of selfishness. Not every book does that":

Your minimalist recommendation has made me read Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box . Thanks for that. I liked the storytelling approach, and, as "advertised" by you, it is really making me think. A lot.

My 2c for anyone else feeling tempted by the book: it is a book for anyone dealing with humans, no matter if the leadership stuff has any appeal to you.
[2] All this writing about my asshole-ness may convey the impression that I'm a jerk. My mum and I think that I'm quite nice. But the asshole path is always there...
[3] If you want the No Asshole Rule enforced, you can vote for Kellypuffs if you ever find that she is running for some election.

2007/05/13

Salen de su predestinación

Ángeles Caso escribe hoy una buena columna en el dominical de La Vanguardia, sobre "la cultura de la pobreza" y, los que, como su propio padre, se rebelan contra ella. Me sorprende este párrafo:

Me cuentan mis amigos profesores que los hijos de emigrantes que acuden a sus clases suelen dividirse en dos tipos extremos: los que, desubicados y acaso angustiados, no tienen el menor interés por el estudio, y aquéllos -mayoritarios, según parece- que saben que sólo gracias a la escuela (...) lograrán salir de su predestinación de seres pobres, incultos y, por ello, manipulables. Me hablan de la pasión con la que muchos niños ecuatorianos, peruanos, senegaleses o rumanos estudian matemáticas, inglés, ciencias, historia y lengua española, agarrándose al conocimiento como la garantía de un futuro mejor. Y me describen cómo, frente a ellos, nuestros propios críos suelen acomodarse a la ley del mínimo esfuerzo, creyendo que la vida les deparará por sí sola bienestar.

No creo que esto sea lo que nos suele venir a la cabeza cuando pensamos en el impacto de la inmigración sobre la escuela.

Nimbuzz: a new cell phone ettiquete coming?

Stumbled upon Nimbuzz, that brings instant messaging (IM) and mobile phones closer. Beyond its skype-like features (international calls at local costs), or its group calls, what I find specially interesting is their Buzz alert, a "conscious unsuccessful call attempt" that gives official status to lost-calls, one of the most used resources for any one scared about mobile phone rates in my corner of the world.

My most used features of IM is the ability to have the very short conversation "-ok if I call now? -ok/5 minutes, pls". Bringing that to mobile phones, much more intrusive than land lines, can only be a good thing.

Another thing that makes me consider looking into Nimbuzz is that maybe it provides a decent IM client. Yesterday I used for the first time Yahoo! Messenger from my cell phone, and the experience was just awful (e.g. once you read a message, it is gone forever). Having a semi decent IM client in my phone could be useful from time to time.

2007/05/12

Furry Happy Monster's bookmarklet on Dali's birthday

May 11 is Dalí birthday, so it looked like a good occasion for a bit of surrealist hacking: the Furry Happy Monsters bookmarklet will solve your frequent urge to view REM and The Muppets playing together while browsing.

You are welcome.

2007/05/11

Tiddlywiki YourSearch bookmarklet

Want to use the terrific YourSearch plugin even when visiting a TiddlyWiki that does not have it installed?
A bookmarklet will make it simple.

gotApi: docs at your fingertips

Stumbled upon gotApi.com. Its Fast Api Search, covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, Python, Java, Flickr... is fast, pretty and extremely useful.

Falling in love with MochiKit



As promised, MochiKit makes JavaScript suck less. Small things like bind(), partial(), map() and filter() are making me fall in love with it. And the very extensive documentation. And how I think that I'm going to enjoy using its Signal, inspired on Qt's signal/slot system.

Back to coding.

2007/05/02

Fast Forward to the 1940s: The Puppini Sisters

Just heard for the first time The Puppini Sisters, via a twittering kellypuffs. Here singing Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights.



*Sigh* I bet used to hate the Andrews Sister when I was younger.

2007/05/01

Google Video/YouTube->.mp3

Update: Does not work any more.
http://convert.viloader.net

2007/04/29

Mockingbird Molotov cocktails

I'm not much into poetry, but Rives seems to be monopolizing most of my rainy Sunday morning. Using June Cohen's words, "on the surface, it's light-hearted, but then he layers in unexpected depth and emotion".

Some cool things would happen if Rives controlled the internet, although I wish there were a transcript because he pushes my English skills a bit too far.


Mockingbird, including a TED 2006 remix that is not available in this text version, creates vivid surprising and pretty images on me.

But, my favourite, by far, is Compliment, in text and in beatboxer+poet+harmonica video. Mmmm, wait Xavier, that's dangerous stuff to listen to when you are happily and safely uninterested in that kind of love; so lets use a quote by George Bernand Shaw that I heard in Helen Fisher's TEDtalk The science of love, and the future of women:

Love consists in overestimating the differences between one woman and another

2007/04/28

La felicidad y la bola de cristal

A toda prisa a la librería de la esquina [1] a comprarme Tropezar con la felicidad, de Daniel Gilbert, después de haber escuchado su divertida y sorprendente conferencia en TED Talks.

La idea básica de la conferencia es que somos muy malos en nuestras predicciones sobre lo que nos hará felices o no. Al parecer, tenemos las mismas posibilidades de ser felices tanto consiguiendo lo que deseamos como no consiguiéndolo.

Está llena de datos sorprendentes, como que, un año después de acontecimientos tan distintos como quedar parapléjico o ganar la loteria, las personas de los dos grupos muestran el mismo nivel de felicidad. O que mayores posibilidades de elección van en detrimento de nuestra felicidad (más sobre esto en la también sorprendente conferencia de Barry Schwartz The paradox of choice).



[1] Mi librero no tiene el libro, así que lo encargo y me llevo uno de José Antonio Marina. JAM siempre me gusta. La magia de escribir, escrito con María de la Válgoma.

Curioso: ¿por qué me da esta pájara de comprarme libros sobre escritura (Bird by Bird, The War Of Art, La magia de escribir)?!

Democratizing visualization

I learned today about IBM Research's Many Eyes, available at alphaWorks. Although at first sight it seems simply a nice tool to create nice visualizations, its goal is to enable collaboration around visualizations.

In Fernanda B. Viégas' words, the intend is "to enable people to collectively reason about the trends and patterns they see on the vivid representations of data called visualizations", or "distributed data analysis and collaborative sensemaking".


How? You can upload data sets. You can create visualizations of them. You can discuss the visualizations, highlighting parts of them.

You are not sold into the power of good visualizations? Check out Hans Rosling's Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen TEDTalk (aka No More Boring Data, as posted on youtube). Or play with a tool similar to the one that he uses in the presentation, at http://tools.google.com/gapminder.

And whatever you think about Many Eyes, Hans Rosling, logarithms or baseball, do go and check the improved TED site.

Update: It seems that Many Eyes is not the only project in this area. From an article by Fernanda and Martin Wattenberg,

We think that social data analysis is a lively area right now and we are not the only ones exploring this space - two other sites of note are Swivel and Data360. Each of the 3 sites has a different emphasis, but what we have in common is a belief that the web enables a new, social kind of data analysis; a type of statistical thinking that is both playful and serious.
Social Data Analysis. Nice term.

2007/04/27

Evangelizing and toilets

One of Google's little secrets that has helped us to inspire our developers to write well-tested code: we write flyers about (testing techniques) and then regularly plaster the bathrooms all over Google with each episode, almost 500 stalls worldwide.

We've received a lot of feedback about it. Some favorable ("This is great because I'm always forgetting to bring my copy of Linux Nerd 2000 to the bathroom!") and some not ("I'm trying to use the bathroom, can you folks please just LEAVE ME ALONE?")
Stumbled upon this evangelizing technique in Introducing "Testing on the Toilet", while googling trying to decide which JavaScript unit testing framework use (yeah, shame on me, I've been doing lots of JavaScript lately without doing Test Driven Development).

They not only use a surprising evangelizing technique, but also have a great banner and motto for their blog: "Debugging sucks. Testing Rocks."

2007/04/25

Turn them off!


It is turn off TV week. Just do it!

And if it is not TV but your PC/phone what is keeping you from having green knees at the end of the day, it is a good week to give it a thought to this: who is in charge, you or your gadgets?

2007/04/24

Healthy urge


Or, in Calvin's words,

If your knees aren't green by the end of the day,
you ought to seriously re-examine your life.

2007/04/14

Orenetes i puputs

Foto a flickr de JulioCaldas

Fa uns dies vaig veure una puput (info, videos, mp3) desde la finestra de casa. Segons la wikipedia, a China es considera que veure'n porta bona sort ; jo sempre em sento molt afortunat quan en veig. El primer cop que en vaig veure una va ser passejant al Parc del Guinardó i no podia creure'm que bèsties tan maques voltessin per Barcelona. D'això ja deu fer vuit o nou anys, i fins el que he vist per la finestra, a Barcelona no n'havia tornat a veure.

Buscant saber-ne més sobre les puputs, he ensopegat amb el Projecte Orenetes, que manté un cens dels nius amb la col·laboració de qui vulgui (una idea maca per a escoles). L'any passat vaig considerar comprar un niu artificial, però em van semblar molt cars; no és problema: aquest any en farem quatre!

2007/04/11

Tiddlywiki YourSearch plugin

If you are a tiddlywiki user and you have not installed the YourSearch plugin, you don't know what you are missing. Serious.

2007/04/10

Bàsquet en viu (sic)

Els meus fills i jo hem tornat a veure un partit de l'UB Barça. I ja hi estem una mica engantxats. Buscant el resultat del partit de playoff d'avui, he vist que la Federació dona notícies en directe sobre els partits a http://baloncestoenvivo.feb.es/. A més de la lliga femenina, no sé per quines atres competicions ho fan.

Seguir un partit així no és la cosa més divertida del món, però l'aplicació Flash té la seva gràcia. Veus el marcador, les faltes, els punts, les estadístiques...
És particularment curiosa la part en la que pots veure des d'on ha tirat cada jugadora.

2007/04/08

New phone: PyBluez and Gammu to the rescue

My Sony Ericsson K610i may end up being friendlier to my ThinkPad. I downloaded the binary version of Wammu and have been able to send an SMS from my PC via bluetooth, send a file to my phone, retrieve calls, contacts, calendar info...

Wammu sits on top of

  • Gammu (a project which encompasses applications, scripts and drivers for managing various functions on cellular phones and similiar devices) with Python bindings
  • PyBluez (a Python wrapper for Bluetooth)
  • wxPython (a Python API for the great wxWidgets toolkit, formerly known as wxWindows)
Looks like synchronizing with Google calendar will require some hacking, unlikely to happen any time soon. Add to that the general calendar mess in my life, where there is the phone, Lotus Notes, Google Calendar and MonkeyGTD tiddlywiki.

The Wammu logs start with
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):1 - "OBEX SyncML Client"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):2 - "Dial-up Networking"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):3 - "Serial Port"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):25 - "Music Streaming Service"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):23 - "Remote Control TG Service"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):23 - "Remote Control Service"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):15 - "PAN Network Access PointNAP (...)"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):4 - "Hands-Free Gateway"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):5 - "Headset Gateway"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):6 - "OBEX Object Push"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):7 - "OBEX File Transfer"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):8 - "OBEX IrMC Sync Server"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):17 - "HID Mouse & Keyboard"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):9 - "OBEX Phonebook Server"
I'm guessing that this comes from PyBluez, and that, as soon as I change the binary installation of Wammu with the original Python packages, it should be quite simple to take advantage of some of this services, or, at least, start some educated googling.