Pedro Assunção

Archive for October, 2009

Blog usability tips

I recently came across a really useful article about blog usability tips. I still think the best tip for any blogger is to write about things he/she is passionate about, but these can give you a bit of a boost presenting your content. Here’s my take on some of their tips: Pick a topic for [...]

Freefly pants

No, it’s not pants that are flying free. It’s pants that you wear while freeflying, a modality in the skydiving sport. And these are the ones I’m going to get, provided I can find a measure ruler tape somewhere. Since it’s something that you usually order online (and it’s clothing) you have to be very careful [...]

Skydiving A license issued. Awaiting arrival :D

That’s right, the Portuguese Parachuting Association just issued and mailed my A license. In a couple of weeks I will be able to start jumping with my dear friend Ricardo, in Portugal. Also, in another note, thinking of buying some freeflying pants. Anyone knows a nice price/quality ratio brand and online store? Currently considering these.

Friendfeed youtube favorites integration

Awesome stuff. I had no idea that friendfeed also picked up stuff that you favorited on youtube. I just added this incredible BASE jumping video and saw this on my stream. Pretty cool: It’s too bad that facebook apparently is not planning to continue developing this awesome service. One can only hope they will at [...]

Grabbing title tag from web page

At least a couple of options, the first using BeautifulSoup: import urllib import BeautifulSoup soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(urllib.urlopen(“https://www.google.com”)) print soup.title.string And the second one using lxml: import lxml.html t = lxml.html.parse(url) print t.find(“.//title”).text

Ahhhh, just had my fix :)

Just returned from another day in Teuge, skydiving. As it turned out I was right about the weather. It was a bit cold, especially in the first jump, but overall it was a very pleasant temperature and no wind. And you know what that means, right? Fast landings!!! The first jump was particularly great, because [...]

“Early riser” experiment conclusions

In case you didn’t read my entry on becoming an “early riser” (i.e. someone that gets up every day at the same (early) hour), I started a 30 day experiment to see what would happen to me both physically and mentally if I did. These are the conclusions. Let me start by giving some background: [...]

Fabric for remote deployment

I recently came across a piece of software called “Fabric”. It has been made in python and its purpose is to help simplifying the process of deploying software to remote machines. The really cool thing I like about it is that it’s much faster than, say, an ant script because it actually reuses the SSH [...]

Using google wave to organize events

This thing is going to be really useful. Say, for instance, I want to organize a skydiving trip with some friends. I can just create a wave, throw in a map of the destination, along with the weather on that particular date, discuss about all of the options, attach pictures. Simply awesome!