Já não vou salvar o mundo

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: »

Update in May 2020: I don’t think I hate PHP this much nowadays. I have barely touched it for the past 6 or 7 years but it seems to have fixed a lot of its bigger problems. Good for you PHP! Despite that, I think I’ll still stick with other languages for the time being. The trauma is just too great… :) I hate PHP. Even though it’s the programming language I use the most to earn my keep, I can no longer keep this inside me. »

Actualização 3 e final, de 2 de Maio de 2013 Actualização 2, de 2 de Maio de 2013 Actualização 1, de 1 de Maio de 2013 Há já mais de um ano que ando em guerra com a TMN e nem sei como é que ainda tenho paciência para isto. O meu tarifário é um Moche sem mensalidade, as condições do qual podem ser vistas no fundo da página do serviço ou aqui (caso a página original desapareça ou seja alterada). »

You may have seen this picture a few times before: It’s been viral a few times now and this is the explanation given with it: In the resort town of Skagen you can watch an amazing natural phenomenon. This city is the northernmost point of Denmark, where the Baltic and North Seas meet. The two opposing tides in this place cannot merge because they have different densities. I’m sorry to ruin the fun of this but that’s a lie. »

When I discovered Google is going to shutdown Google Reader, I felt sad. Not because I am one of those hardcore users that had half of his social life in Google Reader’s social features (which have been kicked out some time ago), but because I didn’t know any decent alternatives. Well, I decided to look and apparently there’s a lot to try. I’m not going to pick one as my favourite, because it’s going to take time for me to play with them and see which one I like the most, but at least I can list them here so others can find them, and also for my future reference. »

A minha namorada comprou um Sony Vaio em segunda mão, o qual tem estado a funcionar perfeitamente bem com o Ubuntu, excepto por não ter o scroll com dois dedos e ao suspendê-lo ele resolve reiniciar. Procurámos um pouco e encontrámos a solução para o problema do scroll. É bastante simples, bastou-nos criar um script que é executado no arranque: #!/bin/bash synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=1 synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1 synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinW=0 synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinZ=90 Se ele fizer scroll quando querem que o cursor se mexa, aumentem o valor do MinZ. »

My girlfriend has found a cheap second-hand Sony Vaio laptop, which has been working great with Ubuntu, except for not having two-finger scrolling and suspending it causing it to reboot. We dug a little bit and ended up finding out how to enable the two-finger scrolling. It’s pretty simple, so we just created a script that gets executed on startup: #!/bin/bash synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=1 synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1 synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinW=0 synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinZ=90 If it scrolls when you want the cursor to move, increase the MinZ value. »

Recentemente, numa aplicação que estou a desenvolver com Django, precisei de obter o domínio da aplicação para um email que é enviado pela aplicação django-registration. A django-registration gera um código único para activar uma conta de utilizador. Sabem, aquele processo típico de nos registarmos num website, receber um email de confirmação, carregar num link para activar a conta, feito. Como a django-registration depende de nós para criar o URL completo com o código e apenas nos dá uma variável site variable, que é uma instância da classe django. »