Gonçalo Valério

Author: Gonçalo Valério

  • Feito

    Generally when I have to develop a website or web application, I use technologies and frameworks that I am used to work with and I have more than basic knowledge about them, in most of the cases it turn out to be django and in some of them I also use node.js. With these two i can always achieve what I want without to much effort (with some exceptions).

    Some time ago I was asked to participate in a project that involved Ruby on Rails, a technology that I didn’t have too much knowledge and never had done anything with it, besides attending few workshops and talks about it (where I’ve just got a general idea how it worked). So it was time to give it a try and the fastest way to learn basics is to build something from the ground up with it and understand how stuff works along the way, and that’s what I’ve done at the time.

    So the first step was to find something or some idea that I wanted to work on and that would involve all the common techniques and stuff that you generally have to master when you start developing webapps.

    Here is what I’ve come up with:

    An inverted daily “To Do” list. So basically instead of making a list of what you have to do, you at the end of the day write what you have done and rank it with the amount of effort it took to do it. The system then store it, and shows to you in a pretty graph of your performance along some period of time. For a motivational boost at the end of each week it sends you an email with all tasks that you accomplished and the total amount of effort points.

    Basically it’s an app to monitor your daily performance and could serve as a motivational tool to help those who struggle in getting things done.

    I know its a basic app and I didn’t implement too many features, but it served its main purpose, at the time, of understanding the basics of ruby on rails.

    Yesterday I made it available on-line to anyone who wants to try it. For those who end up using it for some days/weeks I would appreciate some feedback, reporting of any errors you find or even suggestions of new features that would improve the app.

    So you can find it at: feito.ovalerio.net (Update: after 5 years, the server was turned off)

  • Bombermine

    Have you ever played “bomberman”? Yesterday I found that some guys made the classic even better. Just go to bombermine.com and you will be able to play the game in a huge scenario against hundreds of other people in a massive multi-player game.
    But the best part is that you won’t need to install anything because it’s played in the browser. Believe-me it’s fun, give it a try and hope you don’t get caught by one of my bombs.

    Note: This note has nothing to do with the subject, i thought one of the comments in the game discussion makes a good point about this kind of games and the all the buzz around html5. So here is the extract that i wanted to share:

    Web Apps set us back 20 years in pretty much every respect except ease of deployment (1992 – people are impressed that Wolfenstein 3D gets 60FPS on a 100MHz Pentium; 2012 – people are impressed that Wolfenstein 3D (in Javascript!!!!111omg) gets 15FPS without sound on an 8-core 3GHz box).

    by Shish2k

    Source: HN

  • Tour of the International Space Station

    I already reshared this post on Google+ but i think the video is just too awesome to not publish here in the blog too. So here it is, a twenty minute tour of the International Space Station:

  • This year’s project

    Another year and another codebits edition has come and gone. This time i had to enter the 48h programming competition. So with André Gonçalves and some help of Carlos Santos, we tried to develop a new service that would help the users of MEO Kanal. The description of the service was the following:

    Basically this project aims to develop a new way of managing your MEO Kanal (or several of them) through your cloudpt account. Giving you the ability to access all the functionality without the need of a browser or any additional software.

    The way it works is simple, just give the permissions to the webapp (from MEO Kanal and cloudpt accounts) and you are ready to manage your channel from any devise which can upload files to cloudpt, by adding or removing files in the channel folder. The next video (we made it for the presentation) shows the basic usage of the app:

    Since the project is not finished and the coudpt will not be available to the public till December, i will try, in the next few months, to complete at least the basic functionality and publish a prototype. You can access the code (and help) in the github repository of the project. So if you have any idea, opinion or want to give a little feedback, please use the comments.

  • Here i go again

    Just take a look on what arrived to my mail box yesterday morning:

    codebits2012accepted

    Like last year (and a little bit sooner this year) i had the privilege of being accepted for the biggest technology event here in Portugal. It will take place in Lisbon in the middle of November and i will be there, participating in the 48h hackathon, and this time trying to finish my project. So in the next two months I will be collecting ideas (comment box please, if anyone would like to share some) and preparing for a great weekend.

    If you’re going too, see you there. If you didn’t applied yet, you only have 3 days left.

  • Between 32°22.3?N 16°16.5?W and 33°7.8?N 17°16.65?W

    … you will find the atlantic pearl also known as “Madeira island“. I spent this summer there and is always good to return to that paradise, where few kilometers separate the 20ºC waters (sometimes even more) of sea from the highest mountains with 1500+ meters.

    Since most of you never had the chance to visit the island and i am very proud of the place where i was born, i’ve made a simple compilation of photos and videos that can give you a glimpse of what you can find in Madeira.

    I hope you like it and if you have any extra content you would like to share just use the comments below.

    Edit July 2016:
    The content has been removed from the post, you can find it here.

  • Using less browser toolbars

    One thing that I don’t like is having a big chunk of my screen area wasted with browser’s toolbars. Generally, i try to remove all of them, leaving behind only the minimum required to browse the web, this way I’m able to maximize the area used for what really matters. Recently i start using one really neat webapp called Bundlr that lets me save and organize images, videos, tweets and some other type of content in a single place that’s always available for me and for the public (the premium account allows private bundles), something similar to Pinterest but way better.

    The app works just fine, but since my browser is Opera I’m obligated to use their bookmarklet in bookmarks toolbar to select and capture the content i want to add to my bundles. This isn’t good because, or this bar steals space from my screen or i have to turn it on and off every time i want to clip something. Chrome users have an extension that solves this problem in a beautiful and practical way, adding a button right next to the address bar.

    Well i just need something similar in Opera, so i tried to do the same thing and create an extension to opera that transforms the bookmarklet into a button. The final result is in the picture bellow:snapshot

    And it works pretty fine!

    I could upload this thing to Opera Addons website but they don’t allow the extensions to run external javascript, so probably this one will not be accepted. For those of you who want to try it, here is the link to the file.

    Maybe on a future post i’ll explain how to do a simple Opera extension and what steps were needed to transform the bookmarklet in an extension.

    Edit: just updated the extension to better handle secure connections, following a recomendation from the bundlr team.  (19-07-2012 )

  • Recovering your bookmarks

    Some time ago, while cleaning stuff in my computer, I decided to switch my browser to Opera and delete the version of Firefox that I was using at the time. While doing that and removing all the Firefox folders that are left behind, I accidentally erased all my bookmarks and I didn’t had them synced with some on-line service. Well that wasn’t good, I had references stored there that I wanted to keep.

    When trying to recover the file ‘places.sqlite’ I found an bookmark backup generated by Firefox. When I opened the file I found that it was a mess, basically it was bunch of big JSON objects stored in one line containing lots of garbage (I only needed the urls).

    I kept that file until today, when I finally decided that I would put those bookmarks again in my browser. As Opera doesn’t import this kind of files, I made a little python script that extracts the names and urls of the backup and generates a single file that opera can import, while keeping the folder structure.

    Well, it worked, so I tought it might be usefull to someone else and pushed it to github. If any of you ever have the same problem give it a shoot and use this “quick fix”. You can find it here with some instructions on how to use it. If you find any problem, use the comments and github issues.

  • Leap

    Just found out about the existence of this device, at OMG Ubuntu, 5 minutes ago. This is one case where internet’s common expression “Shut up and take my money” fits very well. Seems to be amazing and is affordable.

    Can’t wait to put my hands on one of this toys together with one Raspberry Pi. More info at http://leapmotion.com/ .

  • Underwater Sunshine

    Counting Crows - Underwater Sunshine - Album Cover

    Last month “Counting Crows”, the rock band responsible for some big hits like “Mr. Jones”, “Big yellow taxi” and Shrek’s soundtrack “Accidentally in love”, has released a new album called “Underwater Sunshine (Or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation)”. This week they shared some of their new songs with everyone through “Bittorrent” and gave “Torrent Freak” an interesting interview about the music business and the Internet.

    You can find the interview here and the band’s new music bundle here.

  • Almost 9 zeros

    Take a picture, add some pre-made effects and share. Now just wait for people to leave comments on your “work”. These were the steps that i made till i reach this photo:

    instagram

    The biggest tech news in the last few days was around this simple process and the application that is behind it. It’s called “Instagram” and Facebook just paid more than 900 million dollars for it (more than The New York Times current market value, according to some websites).

    I already knew the service but never had tried because it was only available for the iphone. Recently with the launch of the android version and all the buzz around the deal with facebook, i decided to try the app and see if it worth all that noise around it.

    The greatest weakness that i see on the service is that it doesn’t have a web interface, so basically all the network only functions within the mobile app, which is very limiting. People are comparing this application with Youtube, saying it is the same thing for photos, but Youtube works everywhere (almost all platforms) and Instagram doesn’t.

    Besides that and in a overall view, the app is addicting, has a nice design and you learn fast despite the icons and menus aren’t obvious at first (on the android version). I found myself watching photos and more photos that i didn’t even care about, and that is a good sign.

    In conclusion, i am from the opinion that it was a nice move from facebook to buy Instagram but it was very (very) overvalued, since there are lots of other great ways to share photos on the web.

    Time will tell if it was well spent money or not.

  • How design works

    design-works-screenshot

    Nowadays, in almost every business that have the general public as the client, one essential factor that dictates the success of the products is the design. Big companies already found it and also many startups that are trying to win their spot in the market.

    Addressing this subject, i found a nice website developed by the student Wells Riley, that gives an overview about what is design and why it is important for startups. It gives you nice examples and explanations, while you are sliding down through one really well structured webpage.

    So if you are interested in this kind of stuff, i think you will like, Startups, this is how design works.

    P.S.: As you already noticed, I (with all my artistic qualities) have just destroyed one screenshot of the page title.

  • Developers and facebook

    While doing my daily news reading I stumbled on an article at the blog “GigaOm” discussing whether or not programmers like facebook to interact with each other and to discuss work. In the middle of it I followed a link that lead me to the place where the original discussion about this topic was taking place, and guess what?

    Almost all of them (>95%) prefer other tools or websites to this kind of stuff. I found it very strange since lots of discussions about technology are taking place at Goolgle+ and other similar platforms.

    This poll doesn’t prove my theory that people are losing or wasting lots of the great features and possibilities that the web has to offer, when they restrict their Internet usage to one “social network” or tool. But still is interesting to know that developers prefer other places to meet, work and discuss.

  • Everything is a Remix: Part 4

    The final chapter of the “Everything is a remix” series is officially out. As I posted here the first three episodes I have to do the same for this one.

    Is the end of an interesting and visually appealing analysis to the background of creativity and innovation, suggesting that there is nothing 100% original.

    We have to thank the author and everyone involved for the good work done here.

  • Tribes and Startups

    Yesterday I’ve read a very interesting post, on the blog “onStartups“, about the different roles you can find in a tribe and how that structure can be compared to today’s startups.

    For me the great value of article, is the explanation about how different people with different skills and backgrounds, are actually quite important to achieve your company’s goals, and none of them is more important than the other.

    They elaborated one video summarizing the key points (you can find it bellow), that is a good introduction to the rest of the content.

    Here you can find the whole article.