Alcides Fonseca

So Twitter is leaving Rails and I bet Rails programmers are not happy with this. Their #1 success application at a large scale is leaving the building. I guess now it’s more difficult for them to persuade businesses to start using Ruby on Rails.

One the other hand, Jaiku is moving in to Google App Engine and I guess they’re using Python. They’re minimizing the risk of scaling issues (something they could have learned form Twitter’s success). I still wonder what’s the key think that makes them working on Jaiku. Is it Android? Or some killer-feature?

Puppets doing JRuby

On my talk at TechDays2008, I noticed the audience was looking more to integrate IronPython/IronRuby on their existing C# apps, than using it as a standalone language. In order to get one of this two languages in your application is to host a DLR engine.

It’s very easy to do this, so easy I guess it will be be used, even when it’s not the best solution (just an hintch). As usual, Michael Foord puts it plain simple, with a couple of examples for you to get started.

This is a great excuse to start allowing scripting over you application, using one (or even both!) of this great languages! As I mentioned in my presentation, there are power users who would want to code something in this languages (that are really, really simple!) and start using the full power of your application!

| View | Upload your own

Quinta feira fiz a minha apresentaçãozinha no TechDays. Lá tentei convencer a audiência das vantagens (e algumas desvantagens, claro) das Linguagens Dinâmicas, e da sua utilização em .NET. Ficam por aqui os slides e os demos para o caso de alguém querer dar uma olhadela, mas ficava muito melhor contextualizado.

Para terem uma ideia, falei das razões que me levam a acreditar que as linguagens dinâmicas são o próximo passo (na evolução assembly – C – Java/C#) e em como são linguages muito mais alto nível. contei também um bocadinho da história do DLR e do estado actual das linguagens dinâmicas. Demonstrei a integração com o Visual Studio e a interacção com managed code em C#. Falei também das situações em que usar linguagens dinâmicas pode ser uma vantagem (e mostrei algum código exemplo). Acacabei referenciando exemplos de aplicações de IronPython no mundo real.

Deixo também alguns recursos adicionais para quem estiver interessado em explorar estas novas linguagens em .NET:

IronPython
IronRuby
DynamicSilverlight – Site específico com informações e tutoriais sobre linguagens dinâmicas para Silverlight

Aprender Python em 10 minutos para quem já sabe outra linguagem
Aprender Ruby em 20 minutos
Poignant Guide to Ruby – Um tutorial cheio de humor, para quem tiver mais tempo.
Michael Foord’s Introduction to IronPython - Muito bom para entrar em IronPython. É também o autor do primeiro livro sobre o assunto.
Learning IronPython – Um bom tutorial para aprender IronPython

Blogs:
IronPython
John Lam
Jim Hugunin

Community & Customer Service – The video of an interesting talk with Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress, Gina Bianchini from Ning, Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency and Patty Roll from Timbuk2.

Ruby and RDF - What about creating RDF statements using Ruby's beatiful syntax?

Why Joost will loose to Miro – A nice article showing why in the near future Miro is the best choice for P2P video.

Why I Unfollow People Who Use Hashtags On Twitter – A negative view of Twitter microformat Hashtags. I do use them sometimes, but most of the time, I guess I’ll agree with Dave Coustan.

DataPortability and me, JB – Another video by John Breslin on DataPortability and a bit of RDF and SioC. I really liked it!

Hail king of the python parsers! Will you (or anyone who is cool enough) port Mofo (and Hpricot) to Python?

Until now, there was already this one that I couldn’t even put to work. And its old and lacks of many microformats.

I have found this one in beta but it has too many dependencies and sucks to have that all in shared hosting :/

I am really liking Mofo, but not liking ruby that much! But fits in all my current projects (I won’t release its source so you wont make fun of my ugly code!)

I’m sure you are familiar with the MyBlogLog concept. It’s a list of people that have recently visited your website. It works through a widget that reads a Cookie in your computer and saving it for the site owner to check.

Well, I am conducting my own experiment to do the same, but instead of requiring a MyBlogLog/Yahoo account, users just need an OpenId. As I don’t use openid for logging in or commenting (yet), only users who have OpenID integration in the browser will be recorded. This works fine with Seatbelt Firefox Extension, so if you are using it, you are being watched by the Big Brother.

According to OpenID documentation, form elements for openid should be called “openid_url” in order for browsers to fill the url automatically. I take advantage of this feature, and when loading the webpage, it that hidden field is not empty, I send a AJAX request passing the visitor’s openid as a parameter that is saved in a txt file (for now).

Yes, it’s as simple as that. I also have a simple script for printing the OpenIDs and I am working in order to fetch the hCard in the URL. For now I am using an external link, but when I got the time, I will make everything work together. It is a simple ruby CGI script (ruby’s CGI module is awesome!) and uses Mofo for scrapping the microformats.

For now, it justs let me know who visits me that uses Seatbelt and OpenId, but in a near future with browsers having natively this future, it will Rock! Oh, and it helps building whitelists of openids.

This post is a best-of my feedreadings of today. Some people do del.icio.us posting and I’m getting infected too.

I found about Port25, a website where is explained why Microsoft hates OpenSource! (NOT) I’m curious about what will MS say about OpenSource in 10 years. When maybe Ballmer is enjoying his retirement and someone from a different background (and younger) will decide what direction will Redmond’s still-big Giant take.

IronRuby vs Ruby.NET, a nice post by the IronRuby developer John Lam, a bit more of what I mentioned between IronPython and Python.NET.

I want the new Windows Mobile 6.1 new interface! I guess 6.0 should be called 5.1 and this one it’s the one that is the real 6!

Developer’s Hymn: pretty much self-explanatory.

A fan of Desktop Tower Defense? And you also like World of Warcraft? There you go: Hordes of Orcs! But OS X only for now…

Feeds still messy. Sorry but no time to fix it. Please bear with me and come visit my wonderful website :)

Over the years Microsoft has done this great marketing that makes (almost) everyone to use their tools, mainly because (almost) all computers ship with Windows pre-installed (Assismática is starting to sell computers with Ubuntu in Portugal) and “simple users” do not know any other alternative.

In this context, I support actions that take opensource (or not) alternatives to some places, like schools (PT) that show people that there are some free (and open) alternatives too. Although I think some Microsoft software is better, I believe each user should make their own decision and to do that, they should know all options. About this, Tecnonov is having its second edition this year and it will be a nice event to show people other options.

A few days ago I saw another perspective to solve this problem: Tom Morris thinks that teaching people how to code they will value more OpenSource alternatives and also help them in their own life with structure thinking. Well I had this idea that management student should learn relational databases since that really helps them organizing stuff. I am happy that someone thought something similar, but taking it farther to programming itself. And he mentions Python, Ruby or other dynamic language to be chosen.

I’m not sure how possible this is, but I’m sure some it would help some people. Any thoughts on this one?

In a world where GTD matters to everyone, Sérgio came up with an idea: Why wouldn’t we use twitter to record some notes? Since you have twitter in almost every platform (mobile phone, PDA, desktop (windows,mac,linux), web, you name it!) it is a good way of posting messages from anywhere and use the API to organize them.

That’s what he did the last week. Started a Rails project, added Twitter4r and a bunch of pluggins and coded a bit lot. As for me, I just made the design and artwork. The layout was based on twitter’s since twitternotes users are used to it.

So, go ahead to http://www.twitternotes.com and login. Then use your favorite twitter client and post something like + i have to tell everyone about twitternotes and that’s it! And you will even tag that message with “twitternotes”. Simpler is impossible!

Feedbox is a project of my partner at ideias3, Sérgio Santos. It is a kind of RSS aggregator with rating, but can also be avaiable in a box to use at your own website (future feature).

Check it out at http://feedbox.ideias3.com.


In the meanwhile, I'm am working on Ideias3's main website. News coming up soon.