Por mero acaso soube hoje que na Faculdade de Farmácia da Universidade de Coimbra existem regras deveras curiosas para a inscrição nas turmas. Nestas regras a inscrição é primeiro para os alunos “normais” e depois para os alunos que sejam trabalhadores estudantes. Isto é claramente uma violação do artigo 20 dos estatutos da Universidade de Coimbra. Nesse artigo está estipulado que os trabalhadores estudantes têm direito a disposições especiais definidos pelo senado. Eu não consigo acreditar que o Senado fosse decretar uma medida de tal forma prejudicial para os trabalhadores estudantes.

A Paula Simões notou que existia uma gralha no blog nas horas dos comentários. Primeiro pensei que fosse o theme, mas afinal é mesmo no .po do Wordpress do projecto Português.

Lá alterei mas não consegui encontrar forma de submeter isto sem ter de me registar em mais um local.
Se alguém quiser pode sacar o .po e o .mo directo deste blog.

This is a mental note to myself so that I do not have to google every time I want to do an upgrade of a Ubuntu system to a new release.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get get upgrade
sudo apt-get install update-manager
sudo update-manager -d


I was mostly ready to go to Echofon web site to complain about the lack of push notifications when I noticed I had to go to the account settings INSIDE echofon, and activate it there.

Now just have to way for a reply/dm to see if it works.

My current experience with Push notifications on the iPhone is a bit mixed. I know I’m not receiving alot of the pushed messages I should. I have no idea if there is a statistic but I guess some >50% of notifications are being lost. What is your felling?

I am a bit tired of waking up the the marimba sounds from my iPhone. I wanted to play some calm music to help me get started. So I went to see if I could setup a music or playlist like in the old iPods. You cant. You can only play sounds that are ring tones. And the reader says:

-Well…. It seems stupid to play ring tones but not to play a song…. So how do you go around getting a ringtone from a music you have?

Well that is the funny part. If you bought the music from iTunes store Apple is generous enough to charge you another 99 cents for the permission to create the ringtone.

What if you have the music because you:
1- Bought it from another online store
2- Bought the CD and made a lawful copy to your computer

Apple just tells you you cannot do it. Either re-rebuy the music or move along.

I know you can get another software that will strip a peace of the music to amr, and then send that file to the iPhone and “shazam” a free ringtone. But that is just STUPID!!

If I have a music I should be free to use it as a ringtone/wake up music. Who is Apple to pass judgement on what I have on MY system?

@jpedroso: You see why I may like Apple’s products but have very little respect for it as a company?

The very nice Timetracker application now runs at some 90% under Linux.

The software is a dotNet application that runs in Mono. Under ubuntu (Jaunty 9.04) you need the core that is probably already installed and:

sudo apt-get install libmono-microsoft-visualbasic8.0-cil libmono-winforms2.0-cil


The only annoyance right now is that the software is distributed as a .exe file that cannot be run in Mono. You have to either install the software in a Windows machine and then copy the installation directory to your Linux machine, or use Wine to run the Installer.

Today I was playing with a plugin/theme for wordpress that allows for mobile browsers to view the site with a simpler look when I started thinking:
“Why am I loosing time with this when I just post some 20-30 times a year?”
And that took me to my second tought:
“Why do I blog so little? I used to blog 4 to 5 times more.”

It’s not the twitter effect. I just use twitter for light stuff. It has to be something else. I guess it’s the pressure of the post. When you blog you have to open yourself. You have to open your ideas to others, and have to open for critics.

I have been looking at the Archives that date back to 2003 and found many occasions where we get rude and offensive reply’s. I guess many bloggers are just getting tired of being abused on their own house.

This does not mean that I’ll blog more or less from now on. It’s just a thought I had.

I really like to live in Portugal. But sometimes I get really pissed of. All statistics say that we have some of the lowest wages in the EU. But in the shops everything has the same price as in the rest of Europe. And sometimes it costs more. Today at the local FNAC store I was looking at some Fatman products. After some searching I could find a UK store that sells at HALF the price the Portuguese reseler does.

How can our economy go anywhere when we have to pay more than the ones that have more?

If you search for this topic you will find some examples of using ffmpeg to convert movies to a format that will work with the iPhone. I am a Linux user so I did not had much usage for this because there is no iTunes in linux Until I needed to stream videos to the iPhone. Right now I’m using wowza for the actual streaming that involves creating a special playlist that will tell the iPhone how to get the file from the server. But that is another story.

So the actual ffmpeg command I’m using is:

ffmpeg -threads 2 -i INPUT_FILE -r 20  -vcodec libx264 -s 320x240 -flags +loop \
-cmp +chroma -deblockalpha 0 -deblockbeta 0 -crf 24  -bt 256k -refs 1 -coder 0 \ 
-me_range 16 -subq 5 -partitions +parti4x4+parti8x8+partp8x8 -g 250  \
-keyint_min 25 -level 30 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -trellis 2 -sc_threshold 40 \
-i_qfactor 0.71 -acodec libfaac  -ab 128k -ar 48000 -ac 2 OUTPUT_FILE

So what does all this mean? I am no ffmpeg expert but I’ll try to give an explanation. If you can fill the gaps please post a reply.

• -threads 2 Number of threads ffmpeg will use. This should be the number of cores in your system
• -i INPUT_FILE The path to the file you want to convert
• -r 20 The frame rate of the converted file. This should be the same as the input file. A lower value means a smaller file
• -vcodec libx264 Codec of the output file. This means that output will be a H264 Mpeg4 file
• -s 320×240 Resolution of the output. Should not exceed the input file. In any case remember that iPhone resolution is: 480×320
• -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ar 48000 -ac 2 Audio format. AAC audio with 128kbits bitrate, with 48000Hz sample rate and 2 channels. Lower values will give smaller files and less quality.

If you know what the others do anf how do they affect the quality/size please post.

Laura:

Hoje é dia da criança. Um dia criado para que nós os grandes nos lembremos dos mais pequeninos. Como se fosse preciso um dia! Deveria ser nossa preocupação todos os dias os mais pequenos de entre nós. São vocês o futuro do mundo.

Hoje quando passei no teu berço dormias. Estava ali a ver-te há uns segundos quando abriste os olhos e olhaste para mim. Não sei se foi só a fominha a apertar ou se te estavas a sentir observada. Sorri para ti e tu devolveste o sorriso. Obrigado filha.

Bom dia Laurinha. Bom dia meu doce. Bom dia meu amor.

The question in most of the Free Software advocates right now is what will happen to Suns Free Software products:
1- MySQL
2- OpenOffice
3- Netbeans
4- ……

Although MySQL seems the first candidate to die I guess this is one of the products with the best chance to survive*. Databases is the core business for Oracle so they will probably keep the product and in time make it more Oracle friendly. So that users that develop for MySQL can easily migrate to Oracle when requirements increase.
Right now Oracle has the Oracle Express Edition but installation is sometimes complex and the limitations to the CPU/Memory/Disk Space make some developers run away. PostgreSQL is very good, but does not have the momentum. So MySQL is not a brand that any company wants to kill.

* – The Free Software products always have a chance to survive if the “Mother Company” kills them. The community can always pick the product and develop it. That is one of the base ideas that made Stallman create the concept. But it is always easier for a product to survive if there is a cash flow of some sort.

It is not as nice as Windows “depends” but does the job:

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#!/usr/bin/env ruby
 
paths = [ARGV[0]]
libs = { ARGV[0] => 1 }
 
while paths.size > 0 do
    path = paths.pop
    lines = `otool -L '#{path}'`.split("\n")[2..-1]
    new_libs = lines.collect do |line|
    line =~ /\s+(.*)\s+\(.*\)\s*/
    $1
    end
    new_libs.each do |lib|
        if libs[lib] then
            libs[lib] += 1
        else
            libs[lib] = 1
            paths < < lib
        end
    end
end
 
puts libs.keys.sort.join("\n")

Credit for finding this at idevappsgoes to Armindo

I’m running Windows XP inside vmware. The host machine is running Linux (Ubuntu jaunty). I was having issues with the keyboard where the arrow keys would not work, or would do the wrong thing (down key would open the start menu).

I found a solution that involved editing ~/.vmware/config and add a line like:
xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true
But this would not work properly as Vmware would think I had a Japanese keyboard and some keys would not work.

I found another solution and this one seems to be working fine. Instead of the previous code add this to your ~/.vmware/config:

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Laura:
Chegaste no dia 21 a este mundo. Não tenho palavras para descrever o que senti quando te vi e peguei pela primeira vez, mas consigo dizer que foi a melhor sensação do mundo.

Raquel:
Chegou a nossa filha….. Chegou a nossa filha…..

A todos os leitores:
Estou aqui a olhar para o écran e não sei o que escrever. Nada me parece correcto. Tudo me parece demasiado pequeno ao pé desta sensação forte cá dentro que me faz o cérebro parar. Digam só uma coisa a este pai babádo…. Não é a bebé mais bonita que já viram?

An application that sends and receives MMS messages is now available for you’re iPhone. There is no need to have a Jailbroken iPhone as the application is available from Apple Store. Right now the application only works for clients of Vodafone Portugal. More info is available at the producers web site.

A video that shows the application working is also available:

This beatifull fish is now mine. But it was breed by Martinho Brazão. If you are looking for Betta fish you can be sure his fish will be sent in very good packaging.

Designing a regular expression to find phone numbers is some string are not trivial. The rules of what is a valid number are strange, and the phone itself can be present with any number of artifacts, like spaces, dashes and parentheses.

This last morning I have been trying to design a good regular expression but I’m still a bit far. So far I managed to do:
(\(?[\s]*(00|\+){1,1}[\d]{1,4}[\s]*\)?)?([\s]*|-)(-|[\s])?(\(?[\d]\)?([\s]*|\.|-)){7,15}

But it sill misses things like: +351 (21) 1111111

Apple should add thunderbird+lightning support to at least iTunes on Windows. Not every windows user has Outlook installed.

Right now almost all options to do this include some extra softwares (jailbroken iPhone) or thunderbird plugins and Google accounts. And I may not want my data in Google.
If you do not mind having data in Google read on. Right now I just want to sync Calendar events.

As I need to have data synced I’ll post my findings were. So stay tunned.
[UPDATE 2009-02-10]
All this syncing is dangerous. The iPhone will delete all contacts and/or calendar events on the phone when adding a external sync.

Two solutions so far for Contacts and Calendar:

1- Get your company to install Exchange or one of the Free Software alternatives. And then just add the account on the iPhone and search for info on how to get Lightning to get the data from there.

[New Update 2009-02-15 15:17] There is no need to use the Nuevasync Service
2- This is the one I use. It involves having a Google Calendar account and Sync the iPhone and Lightning there. In the iPhone follow the instructions in the Google Mobile Sync page. To have Lightning use the calendar just add a new Calendar of type CalDAV and in the url put: https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/YOUREACCOUNT@gmail.com/events .

There is no “Sync now” and events will be propagated auto-magically. In my case if I have calendar open on the iPhone and add events in Lightning they propagate in 3 to 5 seconds.

Ontem à noite a Laura resolveu pregar um susto a mim e à mãe. A dois meses da data prevista de chegada ela achou que já estava presa à demasiado tempo e que a hora de nascer tinha chegado.
A Raquel está neste momento na Maternidade Dr Daniel de Matos e parece já estar controlada a situação. Mas agora terá de repousar para que não haja mais sustos.

Laura: Tem calma filha e espera mais um pouco.

[UPDATE 17:45]: Parece que já está tudo mais calmo. A Raquel deve voltar para casa amanhã, mas terá de ficar por casa até a Laura nascer.