A programmer’s rants

Just found this video on Youtube. Apparently it’s been featured a few days ago, but in my opinion it should have stayed there for a few weeks, minimum

Lyrics here.

PS: John Williams is the man!

Today I got to the office, and the first thing that popped into my eyes when I opened Twitterrific was this:

Rick Olson announcing that Warehouse is now open-source. Damn, it HAS to be Christmas! I have always loved the products that Active Reload builds, mostly because they follow the “do more with less” and “keep it simple stupid” principles, but also because their web-applications look awesome, thanks to Justin Palmer, the self-taught and self-proclaimed Design Ninja (I’ll have to agree with him on this one).

I have always wanted to give Warehouse a spin on my projects (professional and personal), but never got around to buy it because I was afraid it could be of no use for me (you guys have to find a way to distribute trials or something). Now that it’s open-source, I am going to try and provide a guide on how to install it.

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… someone you admire starts following you on twitter.

Thanks for making my week start well, Pedro.

The first thing you should know about this game is that this game hates you. I don’t mean that the game is designed to go against you. I mean the game hates you. The designers of this game created the first artificial intelligence system designed to mimic the actual emotion of hate. When you are sleeping, the game is plotting your downfall with all of your other electronics. In all seriousness, you will constantly find yourself getting frustrated with the random nature of the game. Many times, you will find yourself crying foul and cheating when the game drops a +5 Skull in perfect position for your opponent. Granted, the randomness will also help you every once in a while, but you will swear that the game cheats for your enemy more than it does for you. There really isn’t much you can do about this aspect of the game. After all, this is how randomness works.

Read it here. Emphasis is mine.

Browsing the iTunes App Store today, I found a priceless application that turns your iPhone into a flash light. Needless to say, I went on and checked the screen shots. So, without further ado, here they are:

As Marcel Molina puts it, “I like that there are two screen shots for the Light app“. Nicely said.

It’s common sense in the programming circle that programmers should make an effort to learn a new language every year. Some make it their New Year’s resolution, some just do it for the fun of it, others do it to enrich their experience and their CV. So, today, I decided to grab a new language and stick with it until I MASTER the damn thing. I only had a requirement before choosing it: it had to be fun!

So, what language did I choose? None other than LOLCode.

I know what’s going through your mind now. “Why the eff is this guy even thinking about learning a new language?”, “useless”, or even “OH HAY I CAN HAS CODEZ?”. There’s a reason for that.

I tend to browse lolcats whenever I need a bit of extra motivation, romance, feeding or even inspiration. So, whenever I look at bits of code that read:

or even

I can’t stop thinking that it’s PURE GENIUS (right before bursting into tears of laughing so hard). So, for starters, I’m going to try to understand a Brainfuck compiler written in LOLCode. Want to tag along?

Fun times await.

Just wanted to share with you something that made me laugh so hard today I cried my eyes out. Here’s an excerpt:

So, if you’re looking for a nice guy, here’s what you do:

1. Build a time machine.
2. Go back a few years and pull your head out of your ass.
3. Take a look at what’s right in front of you and grab ahold of it.

It’s funny how other people’s “misery”, when expressed like this, makes your day a bit better.

UPDATE: I also found this. Although not related, feels like a counter-retort, view from the opposite sex kinda thing. Pure awesomeness.

While getting up to speed with Slashdot, I found an interesting article about a security breach on Mac OS X that allows user escalation through AppleScript.

Trying it on the terminal works, but, as they say, the user needs to have physical access to the machine. So, Patrício suggested trying to access through SSH to see if it works, and it did.

Slashdot member gombah99 posted a tip on how to neutralize it non-destructively:

Here’s to you, Apple Un^H^HSecurity Team!

Browsing DZone today I found an interesting article from IBM’s developerWorks site, which supposedly teaches you how to build an on-demand video site with CakePHP.

My first thought was that, being Belacena built with the same technology, I could learn one thing or two and make it run 10x as fast (OK, maybe not, but you get the point). So, I signed in (AKA got a user and password from BugMeNot), and started reading part 2 (part 1 covers the basics about video optimization for the web, creating the database tables, and extracting CakePHP). Let’s just say I was disappointed, because I have big expectations on everything that comes from IBM.

So, in sum, their 3 part tutorial teaches how to scaffold in CakePHP, tweak the views a bit, and that’s pretty much it. You can see the resulting site here. If you feel that article is worth reading, you can start here.

If you have any suggestions on more advanced topics, let me know, and I’ll consider writing about it.

I just read the latest press release from the European Network and Information Security Agency alerting about a possible digital 9/11. All I can say is that I’m shocked on how these people are so narrow-minded.

Now, the biggest threats on this matter seem to be botnets, spam and computer viruses.

Guys, here’s a free tip: install Linux and switch to Google Apps. Works for me (TM)