There was a time in which information finding on the web was difficult, exhausting, frustrating, and indeed succeeding, a miracle. The most of us woke up to a web in which Google already existed, the search engine that made the world a smaller place, however, the information present on the web was far less than it is nowadays so, although there was a great tool to find exactly what we want, rarely that information was even present on this world wide system. Times changed, the information amount is not just more, is huge. If the users of the old times had to deal with frustration of not finding what they wanted because it just was not there, the users of today have information at a distance of a click, but there is just so much and it is all so easy they simply don't bother making the difference if what they get is really what they want.
This is something I noticed a while a go, but got reminded in a intro of a
João Martin's post. In that intro he shows he's quite annoyed with the fact that a major part of the comments made to
another of his blog posts about a portuguese project called Magalhães (which will deliver netbooks to 6 to 10 year olds kids in Portugal) where of people asking questions that should be rather asked on the
(un)official website of the project or would there be successfully solved. I and a couple of friends of mine suffered of exactly the same thing (even worse) in a joint blog where one day we publicize a portuguese project that built a platform that made easy the acquisition of used school books. The
post was simple, just a brief note about the project (linking to the official website) and our votes for its successfulness. After roughly one year of existence, that blog post
summed 24 comments in 28, from people asking about the availability of some books that they needed, some complaining about the site, and even some replying back to others saying they indeed had those books and could make a deal, this all in a blog that had nothing to do with the project, having a blog post that clearly pointed out this was not something of our own, and being the 3rd comment a message trying to clear that out for the users. While I was seeing the comments counter rise more and more with always the same kind of message, I could only wonder what was the matter with the users of the web, which, in that case, were behaving exactly like spam bots, with the difference that they just wanted that someone doesn't matter who, from somewhere doesn't matter where, could give them the answer to their problems the fastest possible and with the smallest effort from their part needed.
This is not really a problem of Internet literacy, it's just a problem of education, of people don't being used to read, don't being used to correctly understand a text's message, and a problem of the generation and of the society: nowadays it's all too easy. Kids, teenagers, the adults they will be and their parents, live and lived in a society were nothing really challenging is put to them as a barrier they have to cross. It's all immediate, fast, easy, and it's sad when we see even our portuguese government's education ministry aiming towards that same easiness that somewhat reflects itself in all these little details that nobody cares about, but say a great thing about who we are.
Have you ever seen a collection of photos of some place or monument and felt the desire of wanting to see it all together in a 180º picture? Since two days ago, you can. Microsoft launched Photosynth, an engine that let's you see your photos of anything pasted together, giving you the experience not of the camera that took the photo, which is limited, but of the photographer thas was behind it and saw it all. The engine tries to catch the intersection areas of each photo and then simulates a 3D environmment that gaves you the whole picture. There's no way you could take this picture from the Beijing's Forbidden City.
I had to try this, so I took the family's Cybershot and start taking shots from my loft's window of my hometown's skyline. This is what I think is the best feature of Photoshynth, the hability to generate 180º pictures. Supposedly, it was a great tool too to generate a 3D view of an object, but I saw it in some of the project's best examples (like the Ferrari) and didn't particularly love the result. You always end up with the feeling you are just seeing inidividual round photos of something, and not some 3D thing. My first experience could end up better, I was just able to achieve 55% of synhty, because suddently the engine was unable to deal with the distance of the objects present in the photos or the lack of intersection areas between those, but I achieved a sequence of twelve photos succesfully conected to each other. So I tried a second time with a bit more patience, and hurray, 100% synthy. It takes you a lot more pictures than you usually would take to achieve a good synthy in Photosynth, so if you're on some synth just seeing two images at a time, of course a normal shot would be able to get the whole area in just a photo, so you achieve litle. But a good synth can show you 7 or more images tied together in a environment you couldn't possibly shoot.
Now, restrictions. Yes, this is a Microsoft product, so don't expect it to be availble on Mac or Linux for now. Also, on Windows, you will need a plugin to experience this all. Anyway, if you meet this conditions try it. Although this has 2 days, I expect it to get even better and surprising. The service is getting so much attention the server is having an hard time dealing with all the demand.
This is the best of Microsoft working so, as a good product it deserves good comments. Hating just for the sake of it, leads to missing the coolest things of today's technology.
It's has been a long time, as usual, since my last post. But nothing didn't change in this humble place of the web. The Summer season is always one when I try to improve a bit my web development/designing experience, so here I come again with the change that was needed for this time: the design.
I must not lie, the first design of this webpage reflected my (un)experience in the field, being my very first serious attempt of making something aesthetic in CSS. As usual in the first tries, they seldom come to the level we desire. I needed a clean, minimalistic, open design, and this was what followed. I surprised myself in this process, and loved the change.
Of course a good design, as Apple's products sometimes show to us, usually compromises several functionalities that a poorer could have. This place has now a blogish interface, a all-in-one-page kind of design, and so loosed several not so important features it had. Search is now gone, I think you can do it better on google, and the contact form was replaced by the email you can check at the footer. The other ones will soon come, such as my del.icio.us links, last.fm last listens and projects area.
Anyway, I hope you like it, and report anything unusual you may find.
Today I went to the first edition of
BarCamp FCT, not actually the first BarCamp to ever take place in Portuguese soil since there were already two promoted by WeBreakStuff in Coimbra.
Having participated in the last year's BarCamp and realized that the organization of this one was not quite the same, nor the previous seemed to be able to attend I was a bit skeptical about what would this turn out to be.
Truth is, some of my predictions turned out to be true, some don't.
First, I have to say, Monte Da Caparica doesn't loose to Coimbra, both places are equally calm and beautiful, so there's plenty of "BarCamp tranquility and informal feeling" in the air, which is crucial but doesn't make the thing by itself. So what could be better was not the place nor the people attending, it was the plan, somehow with equally fault being shared by the organization and the "pseudo-participants".
Fact is, there were 78 people registered in the wiki, and I hardly doubt the 50-people mark was ever broke. So, at the beginning, we can excuse the organization for supposing that people would eventually come. So the presentations started with the people attending (perhaps 30), which in my opinion was a mistake. A simple informal talk outside for knowing each other could have been really beneficial to break the ice, which somehow was only achieved after-lunch with HalfBaked.
The presentations in the morning went well with FireHOL, which could have been done latter, swapped by the informal talk I just referred above, and Techniques for giving presentations, which I, as
Vítor Domingos did, thought went a bit longer than it should be.
So, lunch, excellent, fast, good food are the best words to describe it. The method used for lunch (like a big coffee break) made possible discussions that otherwise wouldn't happen due to the division of people for tables (something I noticed in Coimbra).
Then we did HalfBaked which is allways so much fun anywhere it is done, with some really cool (and unexpected) ideas coming out of two apparent non-sensical words. Ok, most of them were also non-sense ideas, but in the middle of it there is always the feasible one that makes you think.
After, Ignite was fine too, it's a great way to have more diversity in the presentations which otherwise wouldn't be possible - there aren't much persons with 45 minutes presentations to give. Also, 7 minutes talks are really focusing ones, there is no time to loose attention. What I criticize a bit is our portuguese sense of having to copy at the smallest detail the rules to this kind of activities from other countries. In there it might work, but in Portugal I think it's a bit stupid having the 15 seconds per slide thing. If the objective is fast presentations make it like that, the slide time is irrelevant, it would still be fast by having just a global time limit, like 7 minutes or so.
Well, Ignite took it till the end, in part thanks to Wiizi (I think there was too much time spent in the conversation that surged after the Entrepreneurship talk, but some might have learnt with it, I don't know).
In a nutshell, this blog post may seem a little too critic but it was intentional because I had a great day and will be certainly there next year, the organization just needs to ear the feedback and improve it, which I'm sure they certainly will. Also, I have to say that I based all the post in my experience in BarCamp 07, which is not really fair, since it's a two-day event.
My thanks to all involved.
P.S.: it was great to discover the guy behind
MenuIST twitter bot.
So, lately I haven't been posting much, but hey, that's not an exception, it's the rule of this blog: better be quiet than saying crap. This may be understood by a lot of people has an exception, an odd behavior, since the most of blogs around tries too hard seem active by posting a lot to keep a steady readers base. The problem begins when those bloggers start posting stuff that is just either a copy of other major sites, news, or simply, in the most fairest of the words, crap. And this is something that really bothers me.
So, what does this have to do with Twitter? Simple, did you discover some great thing that will do for the post of the day in your blog but is unimportant enough for being there? Go register on twitter, and free your blog of chewing gum. Do the mental work of thinking in something else if you actually want to do a post, meanwhile twitter will filter for you all the minor things that otherwise you would be tempted to post about (I agree with
Pedro Cavaco on this).
This may eventually put you post's-per-day rate at risk, but isn't content above regularity in a quality scale? Or do you post about everything that happens in your life, which you know it's irrelevant to the readers out there, but still do it because you enjoy to?
That's related to a question that was brought to me a few days ago, wether a blog aggregator for a programming/technology community should filter content by technology or just allow everything that comes from the user. And I though about that for a while and decided that without very well defined blogs, in the way that the author will self-restrict the kind of contents that he talks about or the way in which he talks about them, a blog aggregator like that would turn out to be a salad in which the technology would appear just as the temper, and not the lettuce. And the more a blog aggregator makes the reader filter information the less will be its quality.
Being a Google apps user by default, I doubted that any new online maps service would grab my attention. This was till Microsoft Live Maps came and I heard news about the deal they made with the Portuguese Geographic Institute, which gave them (and to Google) high-defenition images of the whole country.
The difference is just astonishing. It really made me wish Google was a bit faster in updating the now old-fashioned images of Portugal that it has. But what really made me play around with Live Maps was their new feature "Bird's Eye", which displays images with a slight inclination and with the possibility of rotation for seeing from another angle. Sure Google has street view, eye alt, 3D view and all that stuff, but hardly any of those is really helpful. The first will take a crazy amount of time for being available worldwide, and even by that time, it still will display a pretty useless view of the streets. The second, eye alt, I don't even know what is supposed to be, since is just a option for seeing worse what you already have. It might make more sense in 3D view, but even that, in my opinion, had a bad approach by rendering computer-made images of the buildings as a supposed real view of the planet. If I wanted a maps system which was like a CoD4 map I would ask.
With Bird's Eye Microsoft made it simple and stupid, but it's far better than any of the existent alternatives.
I had the chance today to participate in the today's started XV Sinfo, the computer science week here at IST, and to watch to some of the talks that were given. Unfortunately, my class schedule didn't allow me to participate in everything, but I managed to see two thirds of a talk hosted by Raymond Chen from Microsoft.
It was quite fun actually, since this was not supposed to be, as Raymond said , one of that talks in which you actually learn something. It was rather a nostalgic narration of fun events that only one working for Microsoft for so long can have in the bag of memories.
So, it seems, Windows XP, one of the most successful windows versions, comes, in its CD, with a hidden encrypted version of Microsoft Bob, one of the biggest failures of Microsoft, just to fill up the remaining disk space.
Doesn't that make it one of the most shipped products ever?
Later today, after the class that didn't allow me to see the whole Raymond Chen's talk, I begged the oportunity to attend to Miguel Vicente's presentation, another guy from Microsoft, talking about the Imagine Cup. It was a very good presentation actually, not because of the project itself, but rather because of the direction that was given by Miguel, that turned out to talk most of the time about "changing the world", creating and having ideas that actually matter.
Finally I hearkened to the call of the revolution and decided to join OpenID, thus creating my online identity, which I actually delegated to this website.
Now, I'll be able to register and sign in web services and platforms with just a link that "is" my online identity, not having to type all over again usernames and passwords for an infinite number of sites. Great.
Note: If even with my little introduction this openid stuff is just "chinese" to you, you'll find plenty of information on the official
website and also if, for you, portuguese is not "chinese", this
guide done by
Alcides Fonseca will be pretty useful.
But now what? Where are the sites which I can join by such method?
Truth is, there aren't
many... but the technology is promising, so we as developers can only help it, not really by using the system, but by creating websites that support it.
So one of the features this blog might have in the future is OpenID enabled for the comments, which I'll study to implement. If you have a wordpress blog, you can do the same easier and even more by installing the
wp-openid plugin.
Actually, with all the late buzz about this technology, it was quite difficult not to give attention to it, mainly given the news about Yahoo, which turned out to be an OpenID provider and advertised its new feature.
But actually, what's so good in this news? Of course it's great to have a giant of the web being an openid provider but, the other feature of openid, the one which actually matters to those who already were on the bandwagon before Yahoo jumped in, which is the ability to sign in the services of Yahoo with OpenID, is not there just because they made it only possible with Yahoo as a provider. For me this is not OpenID, this is the same closed system that has always been around and I simply can't find any good in it for the ones that chose not Yahoo as their openid provider.
If all the webservices were like Yahoo, we would better be as we were when there was no OpenID.
Are you seeing that fancy live search system in the
blog area? Did you ever realize it was not SQL Injection proof? I'm glad you don't, for it wasn't.
During a late night surfing on the web yesterday I came to read
this post by Nuno Job, where the little introduction that he gave about SQL Injection caught my attention and made me go check the
wikipedia page about it. Although I already knew what it was, I was looking for the usual inputs that could cause it.
So, I read it and went check my live search system with the char '. For my surprise a Rails error was output and I noticed I had a pretty bad security issue.
Let's see the insides of my Rails application so that you can see what went wrong and learn with it, as I did.
The problem was in the method of the live search in the controller. That system was supposed to search in the post's body and titles and for that I had code something like this:
@results = Post.find(:all, :conditions => "title LIKE '#{@searchphrase}' or body LIKE '#{@searchphrase}'")Notice that little
#{@searchphrase} thing? That's a
huge mistake. Initially I had something like:
@results = Post.find(:all, :conditions => ["body LIKE ?", @searchphrase])Which is fine and secure, but I ended up wanting to search in the post's titles too, and modified to the first version, which worked. I didn't even think about SQL Injection by that time. The ? makes the whole difference, for it escapes all the chars with meaning for SQL, preventing Injection. So, the correct solution would be:
@results = Post.find(:all, :conditions => ["title LIKE ? OR body LIKE ?",@searchphrase,@searchphrase])
With the system like it was for five months, the SQL request that was done when you searched for something was this:
SELECT * FROM posts WHERE (title LIKE '%<what_you_typed>%' or body LIKE '%<what_you_typed>%')
So, this way, if you'd want to hack my site you'd only have to search this:
lol%'); DROP table posts; SELECT * FROM posts WHERE (title LIKE '%lol
The resulting request would be:
SELECT * FROM posts WHERE (title LIKE '%lol%');
DROP table posts;
SELECT * FROM posts WHERE (title LIKE '%lol%' or body LIKE '%lol%');
DROP table posts;
SELECT * FROM posts WHERE (title LIKE '%lol%')
Since this is a valid SQL command the result would be the successful deletion of the table posts of the database, which would instantly erase forever all my posts. Don't do mistakes like these when you're developing and just want everything to work, because the solution that just works could be a pretty serious security issue.
On September I did my switch to Mac OS X, since I bought a MacBook. When I finally put my hands on the system, I almost didn't think and accessed Mozilla to grab the latest version of Firefox, my browser of election on both Linux and Windows. I was too used to it, the browsing, the extensions... but was it really a good choice or just some unreflective act?
Actually, I didn't think about it, and kept using Firefox. No problems.
When I finally got Leopard and used Safari to open some pages while I didn't have Firefox installed I felt the integration on the system and the speed that only Safari could give, and I thought going back to Firefox would be a problem. And it was, since I installed it, tweaked it for looking like Safari and felt as like I was using some counterfeit piece of clothing when I had the original right next to me. But why then, would I love to use Safari but seem unable to?
NoScript Apple! NoScript! I just want Safari to have something as powerful as it! It's not really about security (although the more the better) , since I know that most of the adware around can't damage Mac OS X, it's just about surfing with the option of not seeing the awful adds that corrupt some pages being able to turn them off or on, seeing just what matters.
Do you want to see the difference? Here's an example:
With Firefox + NoScript:
With Safari:
With Firefox + NoScript:
With Safari:
Apple, please, create something like it, and you'll have an user!
