Pedro Assunção

Archive for the ‘cries for help’ Category

HTML WYSIWYG editor with Flickr upload support?

Lately i’ve been tinkering around with the idea of recreating my blog in a more handcrafted way (ruby on rails) as opposed to the current implementation using WordPress. Don’t get me wrong WordPress is awesome. It has many years and millions of websites as a testament of it’s awesomeness behind it. But i guess my [...]

Venting, or how humans no longer respect each other

Is it me or people are respecting each other less and less every day? You see it all the time: someone trying to get in line in front of you – at the supermarket, people yelling at their kids in the middle of the street (and the kids yelling back at their parents), you name [...]

Dropbox plus Mercurial -driven development. Anyone tried that?

One of the biggest pains of any developer is maintaing the source code. Especially if you – like me – have a gazillion pet projects that need to be updated whenever you come up with “cool idea #20000″ for one of them. Version control systems like Mercurial are awesome, but they are only part of [...]

Adventures at the Indian embassy (or how Portuguese services suck)

Disclaimer: I’m not complaining specifically against the way the Indian embassy works so, before calling a xenophobic or some crap like that, keep in mind that i’m just venting out something that could have happened in pretty much any other Portuguese public bureau. Where should i start? Ah, yes, the motivation: In about a month [...]

How does one change his domain name without losing hits?

I recently decided to drop one of the domain names that points to my blog. After (finally) getting the proper domain (pedroassuncao.com), i figured there was no sense anymore in keeping the old one (diffract.me). Now here’s the problem: A lot of google links that bring a huge percentage of my traffic are pointing to [...]

Schiphol-Amsterdam : Airport security at its best

There i was at gate D83 (or should i say 53?), waiting for my flight back to Portugal when something suddenly starts beeping. I turn to look and see a man washing the floor who had just stepped through an unused set of security gates that is laying around there (see picture). If i’m not [...]

A new kind of bandages?

I hate bandages. I really do. Everyone knows the best way for a wound to heal is to leave it exposed to oxygen and, hence, a bandage is the worst thing you can do to it. A couple of days ago i took a big crash while going downhill on my bike (for gore lovers, [...]

The quest for a simple music player on mac OSX

I have to say this: looking for a simple music player for OSX is like searching for a needle in the middle of lots of big sticks; it should be easy, except the needle is under the carpet. Nevertheless, between trying out iTunes , Songbird , and a few other options, i have always felt like there should be something, you know, simple and memory efficient.

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.

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

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 [...]

SWIFT transfers are monitored by US authorities (even European transfers)

I was really in shock when I went with my mother to the bank the other day: There was a small sheet of paper stating that bank transfers done via the SWIFT network are prone to have its details shared with US authorities. The network currently has two nodes working with the same data in [...]

Network library for games in Python

I have always loved games. Especially Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. I have even tried to develop a couple of them in the past, using several different technologies, the latest ones being Java and OpenGL. So, while finishing college, I wrote a 2D game engine, a networking library, a map editor, sprite editor, basically everything [...]