Tweets of the month

30 Nov
grr

29 Nov
Wounded lion back on the hunt...

29 Nov
@NunoGuerreiro cloud.delete() throws MethodNotImplementedException

28 Nov
Maybe I'm trying to solve too many things at the same time... :(

28 Nov
No time to look at this now, but very... Groovy! http://t.co/Eq9VZHx7

28 Nov
Sugestão de Teatro para este Natal: http://t.co/pCn5Yy1i Muito boa a peça... recomendo!

25 Nov
One more paper draft is ready, not as complete as I wanted, but it will have to do. More hard work ahead next week.

25 Nov
At the Civil Engineering pavilion study room. Hoping to overcome one more roadblock...

24 Nov Link Link ‏ @LinkConsulting
Novas funcionalidades na Plataforma online do Banco Alimentar tinyurl.com/6v7ogok
Retweeted by Miguel Pardal

25 Nov
Today is a "make or break" day. Let's make! :)

24 Nov
A simple advice for this work day: start with an easy task to get your productivity engine running! Then move to harder stuff!

24 Nov
Dear friends and family in the US, Happy Thanksgiving! :)

23 Nov
The Advent Conspiracy adventconspiracy.org

23 Nov
Sometimes admitting your failure is necessary to start over fresh. Good luck D!

18 Nov
PJ 20 - What a great way to start my 34th birthday! :) Thanks Jo! Always "walk with me"! ;) http://t.co/kNMU60EX

16 Nov
Headache gone now, thanks to Joana's medicine. A very "rare" mix of Coca and Cola ;) @joanappardal

15 Nov
@joanappardal asked me: Where's Wall-E? :) http://t.co/CMr0EFJQ

11 Nov
I miss teamwork...

10 Nov
A participar nas Jornadas Pedagógicas do IST sobre Boas Práticas de Docência http://t.co/kQveoFcp

8 Nov
Recalculating... :)

7 Nov
Producing Excel output using the Java Excel API http://t.co/XPsKvLvH

4 Nov
I have the "Lego" blocks, now it's time for assembly

3 Nov
debugging

Design Patterns Reference

You can find a very good reference for design patterns at the following site:
Design Patterns Quick Reference

Enjoy!

Google and Microsoft talk Artificial Intelligence

Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, and Eric Horvitz, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, recently spoke jointly to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California, about the promise of AI. Afterward, the pair talked with Technology Review's IT editor, Tom Simonite, about what AI can do today, and what they think it'll be capable of tomorrow.

Full article: Technology Review via ACM Tech News

This post is dedicated to Joana, of course ;)

Sovereign Keys to strengthen Public Key Infrastructure

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is proposing an extension to the current SSL chain of trust that aims to improve the security of HTTPS and other secure communication protocols.

EFF's "Sovereign Keys" (SK) specification is designed to put the control give domain owners control over the link between their domain names and their certificates after recent Certificate Authority (CA) compromises raised serious questions about the security of the entire Internet Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

One of the main problems with the current PKI model is the lack of control over CAs and their subsidiaries. There are literally hundreds of organizations spread around the world that are allowed to issue certificates for any domain name and some of them are operated by governments that practice Internet surveillance and censorship.

Sovereign Keys was designed to solve this problem by allowing domain owners to sign CA-issued certificates with their own private keys for additional authenticity. These validated domain-certificate associations are kept on so-called timeline servers and are synchronized with mirrors that are queried by clients.

Source: Network World via ACM Tech News

El Cid

El Cid

El Cid: You will soon be a King, you must start to think like one, any man can kill, only a King can give life!

How About Better Parents?

In recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.

Source: NYTimes.com

PJ 20

Pearl Jam 20 soundtrack

What a great way to start my 34th birthday! :)
Thanks Jo! Always "walk with me"! ;)

"
I feel your love
I feel your strong love
I feel the patience
Of unconditional love
I feel the strength
I feel your faith in me
I'll never let you down no matter what you do
If you just walk with me and let me walk with you
I'm on this journey
I don't wanna walk alone
Walk with me
"

Computer Programming for Children

New and more sophisticated tools are changing the way that the next generation learns to program computers. Children can now create elaborate scenes and games without the cryptic commands that were once the only way to tell computers what to do. The most talented children can also use some of the sophisticated tools normally used by professional programmers, because the tools are now often easy enough for someone to pick up with only a few months of study.

Source: NYTimes.com

Amazon Price Check

Amazon Price Check, an Android app that allows a customer to check how much a product costs at Amazon.com.

This can be considered a mainstream Internet of Things application. Watch out for many more in the coming years, as the borders between physical and virtual world become more blurred...

Heidi

Heidi

Klara Sesemann: Isn't Heidi the funniest little thing? I'm so glad she's going to stay.
Andrews, the Butler: Is she?
Klara Sesemann: Yes, but she doesn't know it. The poor dear thinks she's going home today. But she'll be happier here, don't you think? And I'll have some new dresses made for her.

Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang

Nanny McPhee Returns

Mrs. Docherty: You seem to have forgotten the way she works. When you need her but do not want her, then she must stay. When you want her, but no longer need her, then she has to go. I know from personal experience.

Tony Blair's 10 dos and don'ts for religion and democracy

Tony Blair, CNN.com Belief Blog, 2011-11-11

1. DO have democracy-friendly religion and religion-friendly democracies.

2. DON’T think you understand democracy if you think it’s only about elections: it’s about a culture and mindset which includes freedom of thought, freedom of expression, political and religious pluralism, and human rights.

3. DO maintain equality of treatment for different religions within the law as a core element of the secular state.

4. DON’T duck difficult conflicts involving religious and secular ideas: discuss them openly.

5. DON’T rush to legislation to solve religious conflict; instead seek first to resolve it by discussion and accommodations.

6. DON’T allow religious schools to opt out of the same national standards and core curriculum that you expect of everyone else.

7. DO listen to religious voices on social, political and economic issues, and allow people to justify their views on explicitly religious grounds if they want.

8. DO insist on religious leaders making their case by reasoned argument not by bald assertion or authoritarian claims. Insist on that for atheists and secular leaders too.

9. DO NOT allow religious voices to have dominance in the public sphere if they cannot achieve majority support through democratic means.

10. DO ensure, whether the overwhelming democratic choice is either an atheist state or one dominant religion, that the voices of religious minorities and those who have no faith are protected.

Remember that none of us are qualified to state with certainty the will of God – so humility, openness to others, and interfaith dialogue are all essential for a healthy society.

Tackling a test in an infinite loop

I had a bug that was causing a unit test to go in an infinite loop. Gradle would not print any output from the test because the standard output stream is captured to a test report.

To debug I used the following two techniques:

1 - I accessed the actual standard output, bypassing Gradle's redirection for this specific situation (this is usually not a good idea):

    PrintStream actualStdout = new PrintStream(
        new FileOutputStream(FileDescriptor.out))
    actualStdout.println("test message")

2 - I placed a pause inside the loop that was not stopping to be able to read the messages and make sense of them in human timescale (1000 milliseconds = 1 second).

    Thread.sleep(1000)
 

Gradle flatDir repository

Q:
"
For a Gradle flatDir repository, is it looking for a local filesystem that is built up like Maven (pom's etc)..
or is it just looking for jar files in a folder called lib?
"

repositories {
flatDir name: 'localRepository', dirs: 'lib'
}


A:
"
As you assume it just looks for jars/wars/whatever in the 'lib' folder. It resolves versions by looking at the version number in the filename. for instance:
myveryownjar-1.2.0.jar
spring-2.5.6.jar
"

"
Pretty much. For each dependency that you declare in the build script, Gradle will look for a corresponding file in the 'lib' directory. For example, for a dependency on 'junit:junit:4.7', Gradle would look for
lib/junit-4.7.jar or lib/junit.jar. It assumes there are no transitive dependencies.
"

Adapted from http://gradle.1045684.n5.nabble.com/Flat-Dir-repositories-td1431519.html

Groovy and Gradle

The next generation of Java and Ant (+Maven): Groovy and Gradle.

There are still some improvements required but these tools represent major steps forward in programmer productivity.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Journey to the Center of the Earth

[recognizing Mt. Vesuvius behind them]
Trevor: If your mother asks you where you went this weekend, tell her your uncle took you to Italy.