Já não vou salvar o mundo

A short movie well worth watching. I always wonder why so many people know about these issues, at least minimally, and still insist on maintaining their atrocious consumerism behaviours, throwing things away, not recycling anything. Recycling is not the solution but it’s much better than the alternative. Still, people prefer to turn a blind eye and keep acting like environmental criminals. Instead, they just complain and ask why nobody does something about the rubbish they see everywhere. »

Hoje aconteceu-me algo que já aconteceu muitas outras vezes: alguém que não sabe o código da estrada quase me arrancar a parte da frente do carro quando se atravessa à minha frente no meio de uma rotunda. A diferença é que hoje decidi fazer algo quanto a isso. Sinal vermelho numa rotunda de duas faixas e por onde passa o elétrico de Almada (sim, aquilo é um eléctrico, não é um “metro”). »

A few years ago I saw this video and lately it has been coming back in some social networks. Lots of people seem to think the swans are feeding the fish and if you search for “swans feeding fish” videos, you’ll find quite a few. While swans feeding fish would indeed be interesting and fun to watch, it’s far from what is actually happening. In reality what is happening is that swans and geese are trying to get their food wet, not feed the fish. »

If you heard of the “heartbleed” vulnerability and are interested in testing your servers, here are a few websites that may come in handy: Heartbleed test - Simple and works. LastPass Heartbleed checker - also simple but I found that it was giving me some false positives. Qualys SSL Labs SSL Server Test - this is serious shit, deep analysis of much more than just the heartbleed vulnerability. Good stuff! »

Recently I had to add a new MySQL slave server to an existing master -> slave setup, without causing any downtime. Having done that only a couple of times in the past and never having played the central role in the process, I wanted to make sure I was getting everything right, so I did a lot of research but couldn’t find all the best (or what I consider the best) bits and pieces in one single place, so I am documenting everything here for future reference and hopefully they will also help others. »

Mais uma da TMN. Já não é a primeira vez que a TMN quebra as suas próprias regras, por isso não me espanta. Nem vou perder muito tempo com isto, vou só deixar aqui o email que lhes enviei. E para quem sabe das minhas desventuras anteriores com eles, sim, infelizmente ainda sou cliente da TMN. Dependendo da resposta que obtiver a este email, pode ser que essa situação finalmente se altere. »

O que se segue é a tradução (e várias correcções e clarificações) para Português de um artigo do Bella Caledonia, publicado originalmente aqui no dia 25 de Agosto de 2011. Faço isto porque acho que não há gente suficiente a saber o que se passou e ainda se está a passar, e porque isto devia ser um exemplo para nós, Portugueses - e Espanhóis, e Gregos, e Italianos… Espero que consigam ver aqui a semelhança do que aconteceu com a Islândia e os levou à falência, com o que está a acontecer com Portugal. »

Today I came across Mark Litwintschik’s post titled Abandoning PHP for Python. What Mark says resonates with me in almost every paragraph but what led me to write this post was what I read in some of the comments there. It’s a shame that some PHP fans insist on not understanding that when these comparisons are made and people say “X is better than PHP” (X being some framework like Rails or Django), they’re not really comparing PHP (the language) to that framework. »

If you ever consider joining Empower Network, Lazy Millionaires League, MagNET system or some other similar pyramid or MLM scheme, forget it. It’s just not worth your time and money. I’ve always been very suspicious of these things and always thought they were scams - intricate and subtle ones, but scams nonetheless. I call them scams because they promise that you will earn a fortune when in reality only a very, very small percentage of the people who get involved in these schemes actually makes any money at all, and from those who do, the ones that actually make a significant amount are even less. »

On the 29th of July, 2013, I discovered a privacy breach in RunKeeper. I immediately contacted them but their response was very disappointing - they ignored me and did nothing regarding the problem I brought to their attention. Since this implicated the privacy of everyone using the service, I felt obligated to put it out there so people knew what to expect. This was the first support ticket I sent them: »