Pedro Assunção

Archive for December, 2009

The beginning of the Matrix? Chicken poo equals electricity.

Chicken matrix. Are we there yet? This article reports a new clean way of turning animal waste into electric power. What I understand from it? A new motivation for chicken farms not to go away any time soon.

Christmas vacations

Just came back from Portugal. I wish I could stay there at least one more week, but that’s the way it is. Yesterday I drove around 600 Km to go skydiving in one of the best locations in the world. Here’s some hints of what you will see from above: And here’s the location, in [...]

Websockets tutorial/example with pywebsocket

As everyone already knows, Google Chrome now supports websockets. In essence, this allows you to keep a connection open with a webserver indefinitely (analogous to typical sockets) and send data bi-directionally. Unfortunately Chrome is the only browser currently supporting this, but I’m pretty sure this will change. So I decided to give this a try [...]

VLC for OSX developers needed

According to a post on their forums, there are currently 0 (zero) developers working on the OSX version of the popular video player VLC. If you know someone with Cocoa skills that wants a good challenge, pass the message on. Please do, I don’t want to lose my favorite video player of all times

Qik-in-touch. See your friends in realtime.

Qik.com just released a desktop application to view qik videos. Here’s the mandatory screenshot: Although it’s a cool addition to the awesome qik service, I have to say I am a bit disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that I now have a “friends TV channel” kind of thing in my desktop, [...]

Organizing texts

I recently took another look at all the different texts I wrote in the past and came to the conclusion that I really need a central place to handle all of that. Due to the fact that I don’t feel like maintaining the Java desktop application I created for that effect, I decided to put [...]

Mars produces Methane, and so do I

Turns out that the methane that was found on Mars is not a product of meteor strikes, scientists have found, which means Mars actually produces methane. My question is: Where are the green aliens that fart all day to produce it? NOTE: After careful investigation, I found the following: “According to Dr. James L. A. [...]

Good news for helicopter pilots

NASA is investigating how to use Kevlar to soften helicopter crashes. If you consider that, since 2001, the accident rate for civilian helicopter use per 100.000 flight hours has been 40% higher than for general aviation fixed wing aircraft (1), then I hope this will eventually help mitigate some of the fatalities in those crashes. [...]

Ancient egyptians had bad teeth

I don’t know about you, but they just destroyed a bit of my fascination for ancient Egypt… Turns out that 18% of the 3000 mummies discovered so far presented signs of really bad dental problems which, in retrospective, is something that one would expect at those times when Colgate and Pepsodent were not around The [...]

Reddit developers, please fix this

I previously mentioned how dumb it was for someone to have to wait 10 minutes to be able to post a comment on a different thread on Reddit, but this latest discovery is just delicious. Just tried to post a comment on a post where the submitter clearly forgot to add the link to the [...]

I really hate intensedebate right now

For those who happen to have a blog (and who doesn’t these days?) you are probably aware of intensedebate. It’s basically a system of threaded comments that you can plug into your site and take advantage of… well, now that I look back after uninstalling it I really don’t see an advantage, but I’m sure [...]