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  • Nuno Morgadinho 12:16 pm on March 8, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Support Fernando Nobre 

    For the 2011 Portuguese Presidential elections I will be supporting Fernando Nobre. Not that anyone cares but I thought I should mention it. For that reason I’ve added to my blog a small support banner linking to the campaign site.

    I’ve also been thinking how I can contribute and help with the campaign, and how to enable people that are interested in helping out to do so effectively, besides the obvious sign-up for voluntary help at the campaign site.

    If you have a Wordpress blog, I’ve made public a widget you can use on the sidebar of your blog to display a small image banner just like the one I’m using. It’s an easy way of showing our support and it’s very easy to install:

    1. Inside the WordPress admin, go to Plugins -> Add New and search for ‘Fernando Nobre’.
    2. Click ‘Install’.
    3. Inside the WordPress admin, go to Appearance > Widgets, and add the ‘Apoio Fernando Nobre’ widget where you want, then save the changes.
    4. That’s it!

    And here’s the link to the plugin page:

     

  • Nuno Morgadinho 9:24 am on March 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Invoic€xpress – Software de Facturação 

    Para freelancers e pequenos negócios que precisem de um software para facturação, podem dar uma vista de olhos ao Invoic€xpress. Já suporta o formato SAFT-PT que desde 1 de Janeiro de 2010 é obrigatório e também facturas electrónicas, entre outras funcionalidades.

    É um serviço totalmente web-based e tem um trial de 30 dias grátis para se experimentar. Após o periódo de trial, consoante o plano escolhido, paga-se uma pequena mensalidade por mês, mas é também possivel adquirir pacotes de facturas a vulso por um preço fixo (para quem não gostar de pagar mensalidades).

    Fica a dica. Aproveitem e se experimentarem e gostarem digam qualquer coisa.

    p.s. O Invoic€xpress é um produto da RUPEAL.

     

    • Paulo Abreu 7:04 am on March 4, 2010 Permalink

      O SAFT-PT é obrigatório desde 1 Janeiro de 2008.

    • Nuno Morgadinho 9:05 am on March 4, 2010 Permalink

      Paulo, obrigado pela correcção. Na verdade estava a referir-me à nova estrutura do SAFT-PT, que entrou em vigor a partir de 1 de Janeiro de 2010.

  • Nuno Morgadinho 4:54 am on February 18, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    How to Get More From Social Media and Networking 

    Do you want to get more from social networking? Do you want to increase the level of conversation and interaction with your followers? Then start chopping down, not adding more of them.

    I’ve reduced the number of people I had on Twitter from 185 down to 50. I was getting hammered by so many tweets that I didn’t care that some of them had to go. Over the next weeks I will be selecting 50 persons that I will follow and interact with. That means those 50 better be good or they will be replaced.

    Information overload. That’s a big problem. Our heads are overloaded with information and simplifying all that information into a digestible form is a big challenge. What’s the solution? Selection.

    Result = Good quality content

     

    • João Leitão 4:39 am on March 3, 2010 Permalink

      This is a important issue in life. Nuno you are so right about this subject and indeed QUALITY = GOOD RESULTS. It is kind of hard to actually follow people on Twitter now since there’s so many people. I’ll definitely look that out and I’ll do my own clean up soon! thank you.

  • Nuno Morgadinho 3:16 pm on February 16, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Internationalizing Your Wordpress Plugin 

    We call “internationalization” to the process of setting up software so that it can be used in different languages. In my case I had a plugin with text strings in English and I wanted to add a Portuguese translation. In wp-config.php I set up the WPLANG variable to pt_PT:

    define ('WPLANG', 'pt_PT');

    I then used poEdit, a localization tool that works with Mac OS X and that can be downloaded from the poEdit download page. In poEdit, from the File menu select ‘New Catalog’. Fill in the information there and in the ‘Paths’ tab put the plugin directory. In the ‘Keywords’ tab add the missing entries so it looks like this:

    At this point it should recognize all the text strings in your code and present a screen where you can add the translations. After that be sure to save the file as pluginname-pt_PT.po, preferably in a directory called ‘translations’ or ‘locales’ (but anything will do). After that you’re all set. In your code you should load the translation like this:

    load_plugin_textdomain ( 'your-plugin-name' , FALSE , '/your-plugin-name/translations' );

    And strings should have the form:

    _e('Choose a Category','your-plugin-name');

    That’s it. Let me know if you run into troubles :)

    Resources & Further Reading for the Geeks:

     

  • Nuno Morgadinho 12:39 pm on December 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

    Supond – winner @codebits demo video 

    @semmais posted a video that shows how it is to interact with “Supond”, our Codebits 2009 project that got elected as the best project. I can’t stop bragging about it :)

     

  • Nuno Morgadinho 7:22 pm on December 6, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

    Supond is Codebits 2009 Winner! 

    That’s right, the project me and @semmais did at Codebits 2009 got elected the best among almost 50 other projects.

    The Idea – “Apple Time Machine”-like interface to your Lifestream

    You’ve probably heard about Apple’s Time Machine, the backup software that lets you navigate back in time and restore files and folders from your hard drive. Well, we thought: “Why not backup your life as well?”. At least your online life. All your tweets, facebook updates, flickr photos, youtube videos, blog posts, etc. What today is called a lifestream. Imagine you can check what happened this same day, one year before. What were you doing? What did you blog about? Any tweets? Maybe you’ve posted photos or videos. That’s what we wanted to do, within a 3D interface inspired by Apple’s Time Machine. Here is a screenshot of how it looked*:

    supond

    How it Works

    We get the lifestream from one of the many aggregators on-line these days. We used the recently launched Sapo’s Pond web service, that aggregates Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Sapo Videos, Sapo Blogs, Sapo Fotos, etc. We get the data via Pond’s API.

    The interface was build using Adobe’s Flash and Flex Builder. For the 3D we used the new 3D object manipulation functionality in Flash CS4 and not Papervision3D.

    Any service can be easily added as long as there is a RSS feed available. Also it can be used on the web or as a desktop app using Adobe’s Air. Because it is Flash it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (provided the Flash plugin is installed).

    The Prize

    1x 13” Apple Macbook Pro notebook, 1x Apple Wireless Keyboard, 1x Apple Magic Mouse, 2x iPod Nano, 1x O’Reilly Book, 3x issues of Make Magazine.

    The Story

    My project got the first place at Codebits 2009, I was so happy, couldn’t believe it. Especially because of all that happened before, up to that point of our project being announced as the winner. After all I didn’t know the rest of my team until after the programming contest had already started! And they were already doing a project which eventually they put aside to work on “Supond”.

    It was the second day of Codebits when the programming contest kicked off and I wasn’t planning on doing any project. I was hanging around with some old friends on the way to some talk when I noticed a couple of guys working with Flex Builder. I had used Flex before so that caught me eye. I approached and started talking about it. They were working on a project already and after a while I commented about an idea I had. Immediately the guys said “hey, that’s a good idea”, and we started prototyping some code. In less than nothing @semmais had some 3D planes lined up for us to use. I started working on the backend to fetch the data via the Pond’s API. @semmais went home at around 20h and I left a bit later, at 22h. We had a nice long night of sleep.

    In the next morning we got together again and I had the lifestream data all nicely put in an array for him to populate the interface. He had the nice interface ready to populate and some nice particles in the background with the galaxy picture @jvarandas had done the day before for us. We started integrating. We hacked, hacked, hacked. Integrated support to watch videos and full-sized flickr photos. And we were ready by the time the organization call in the teams for testing the laptops on stage. Great run, great fun. While it was my initial idea I think what worked nicely was that both me, @semmais and @jvarandas fitted nicely as a team and the result came from that. Here’s a photo we took to upload and test the flickr service on Supond:

    suponds_team

    Thanks

    To Paulo Andrade for helping out with the Pond API. It was so good to, when having a problem with the API, just stand up and walk over to the guys that made the thing in the first place.

    This year’s competition was largely decided by votes from the audience. We couldn’t have made it if it wasn’t for all the people there that voted on our project. Thanks to all of you.

    To Sapo, because I have to, for organizing this cool hacker conference in Portugal.

    The Other Projects

    Some other teams had really nice projects as well. I particulary liked the “Time-based OTPs” by Paulo Andrade, the  “Simple MBNet” by Pedro Sousa and BlinkBrick, a “lego” like led arduino device by Sergio Veiga. I hope they can finish their projects because they are really cool.

    What Now

    We are thinking in further developing this idea. If you have suggestions drop us a direct message on Twitter or email. One of the ideas people suggested was to allow saving the data to the hard disk.

    * – we’re thinking in posting a live demo for people to play with.

    Update: There is now a video demo published.

     

    • ricardo 10:19 pm on December 6, 2009 Permalink

      Parabéns!!!
      Pena não terem recebido dois Mac’s :D

    • Daniel Barradas 8:03 pm on December 9, 2009 Permalink

      Congrats! :)

    • Andre Pinheiro 5:29 pm on January 18, 2010 Permalink

      Sim sr! Parabens! E ate eh uma coisinha bem parecida! :)

  • Nuno Morgadinho 4:11 pm on November 4, 2009 Permalink  

    Advice for Web Entrepreneurs 

    A collection of items that has been in my inbox for some time:

     

  • 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/
     

  • Nuno Morgadinho 5:24 pm on July 14, 2009 Permalink  

    The Gizmo: small and lightweight Java container for web apps 

    You know what they say, “less is more”, right? If you ever looked at Java tools to build web applications you’ve probably stumbled upon dozens of options. So did I, but because @herrb had mentioned at lunch a web thingy he was developing for himself to play about, I asked him for advice on what Java tools I could use and this ended with an invite to look at what he had done.

    His starting point was: how hard would it be to use Eclipse+Eclipse plugins to develop web apps?

    So he started developing the thing and now it’s using:

    • A custom http server based on Apache’s httpcomponents lib
    • The Dojo Toolkit as a Javascript library
    • Freemarker as a Template Engine
    • Eclipse EMF to describe the data schemas
    • Apache log4j as a logger

    Also we talked about working on it together so we ended up publishing it on sourceforge for now. We called it “the Gizmo”. It’s not big and powerful like Apache’s Tomcat but can be useful for someone looking into using a small and lightweight Java container for web apps.

    Also it is important to understand that the initial goal was more to understand how things work and how he could play with these things, plugging them together, etc., rather than working on a full-blown framework. I’ve been using it myself for a small web app me and @aaires are doing in our free time and so far we’ve been happy with it. I wouldn’t say it is ready for production but it is something I would like to contribute in developing further. Especially because there are so many interesting Java libraries out there that we could use in conjunction with the Gizmo and also because using Eclipse for development is just plain fun.

    You can take a look at:

    http://lipog.sf.net

     

    • Joerg 7:02 am on July 27, 2009 Permalink

      Shameless little plug: as of this last weekend the Gizmo also allows for splendid automatic testing of your web apps based on HtmlUnit! It all comes with a tutorial and a little example too. ;-)

      Cheers,
      J.

  • Nuno Morgadinho 7:13 am on June 5, 2009 Permalink  

    Bullet Points about REST 

    REST stands for Representational State Transfer.

    What is the problem?

    • Software architecture research investigates methods for determining how best to partition a system, how components identify and communicate with each other, how they evolve, etc.
    • Do we know any large software architecture that has scaled immensely? Can we learn/take something from it? Yes, the Web and the Internet in general.

    What can we learn from it?

    • Client-server (separation of concerns)
    • Stateless (requests can be processed by different servers for scalability)
    • Caching (performance and fault tolerance)
    • Uniform interface (URI represents object and state)
    • Layered System (components build on top of other components)

    Example

    • Client-server => browser-httpd
    • Stateless, Uniform interface => /car/parts/12337 => URI represents the object and asks for a specific resource.
    • Can be processed by any server because there is no context
    • Output in html, XML or JSON

    Example 2

    • Imagine you could just re-use the component by redirecting requests to it
    • Example: user auth
    • Instead of having the user auth encapsulated in the application we can have the userauth to be a webservice that can be re-used by any application – this is RESTful
     
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