Lost?

Brilliant ad.

I Kern, You Kern...

Waiting It Out

Ink Stamps

Recently I had an idea for a sort of critical blog post (which you can see here, in Portuguese) and to achieve the desired effect, I wanted that kind of approval ink stamp to mark approval or rejection in a retro way. Googling for a bit, all I could find was a paid Photoshop brush set and obviously I wasn't about to shell out for something this small even if the brushes would probably be useful in the future.

So I decided to roll my own, with a few tips from here and there. As it may be useful for someone else, here they are for download. Use and abuse at will.

RSS Feed Tracking in Blogger

I've been puzzled over and over again as to how I could go about monitoring the visitors I receive in my blogs coming through RSS feeds. I've been using Google Analytics for a long time, but the only thing I was tracking was the default: visits directly to the websites. Today I decided to give it another shot, this time with my eyes open... and having all my blogging ventures on Blogger helps tremendously. That and Google buying every company in sight.

After understand that I what I was looking for was obviously FeedBurner, I had to find a way to somehow redirect my current RSS feed to the new FeedBurner one, so current subscribers wouldn't have to manually update their feeds. That's where Google's buying spree comes into play: Blogger and FeedBurner are both under Google these days, so not only I can use the same account for everything - including Analytics - but there's also perfect and simple integration between each service.

So all I had to do was burn my original feed into FeedBurner, and then access my blog settings and put the new feed URL in the Post Feed Redirect URL field. Brilliant. Now FeedBurner is munching on data (see last post) and I'm eagerly awaiting to see some stats. Rock on.

Great User Feedback

While setting up RSS feed redirection to FeedBurner for 24Hz (my pop culture blog, in Portuguese), I've come across this fantastic piece of feedback from feedburner app:


It's good to use a service that actually understands they're dealing with people. Way to go, feedburner.

50 Great Examples of Infographics

Huge list of beautiful and inspiring infographics over at Design You Trust.

Cheatsheets

There's obviously a gazillion of websites providing cheat sheets for everything under the sun but this one over at Six Revisions I found particularly useful and complete. Cheat sheets provided include:

• Photoshop
• Color
• Typography (very cool!)
• Units/Dimension
• XHTML/CSS
• Dreamweaver
• Illustrator
• Browsers

Gregory Crewdson

Beautiful art by Gregory Crewdson. Via Cgunit.


More.

Flo Mounier

Try and not get really tired just by watching it. Flo Mounier of technical death metal band Cryptopsy fame.

Grid Based Design Toolbox

Adelle Charles over at Fuel Your Creativity has posted the mother of all posts when it comes to grid-based design. It's a bucket load of good links on all things grid which definitely will come in handy for me a little later on.

Grid Based Design Toolbox.

Redesigning the (US) Government

Graphic designer Ali Felski presents a couple of redesign proposals for US government websites, now that Barack Obama is the new President, which provides a good timing to re-think a lot of stuff.

It's true that the websites Felski mentions do indeed need an overhaul, as both look totally coming straight out of 1999. It's also true that this Presidency seems to be taking the Internet very seriously, a trend which already started during Obama's campaign and is extending into his spell at the White House. Recovery.gov is a perfect example and I wouldn't be surprised if the two sites mentioned in Felski's article would also get a face lift real soon.

Don't even get me started on Portuguese government-related websites... it's been worse before, though.

I Lego N.Y.

Beautiful. Illustrator Christoph Niemann tells us how playing Lego with his kids during bleak Winter days in Berlin gets his mind thinking of New York in the most unexpected and imaginative ways. It also has the added bonus of nostalgia if you, like me, spent a good portion of your childhood playing with Legos.

Pure visual joy.

Paul Rand

"Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations." -- Paul Rand

Layer Tennis

While doing some research on web design and the likes, I've come across something incredible. And it's incredible because the people making it happen are nothing short of fantastic designers. The cream of the crop, shall we say.

To explain the concept of layer tennis, I defer to the wise words of Jason Santa Maria, who has played the game twice:

For those uninitiated with Layer Tennis, the premise is simple: two players trade a Photoshop document back and forth, each player has 15 minutes to iterate on the previous “volley” however they see fit. The matches are played live on Friday afternoons, and people follow along and comment via Twitter. It really isn’t about winning or losing, which is determined by voting on Twitter, it’s more of a exercise in visual literacy and design constraints. Also, it’s just a game and a fun distraction on a Friday afternoon.

Fuck if my fun distractions on a Friday afternoon are this good looking. To exemplify what's been happening so far, here's a few links to some of these "layer tennis" matches. Mind you that all of them are accompanied by some form of commentary, either written on the page, as an audio or even a video stream.

Without further ado...


Yup, this last one is hand made.

This has got me thinking how having tr00 Photoshop skillz is just a piece of the pie to be doing an exercise this constrained. You gotta have a great eye and a lot of quick thinking imagination to readily figure out what needs to be done in order step it up a notch from the previous "volley".

True artists, these guys. Yet another win over at Coudal Partners.

Negative Creep

Hard to believe it has been 15 years already since the passing of Kurt Cobain, legendary (whether you like or not) vocalist and guitarist for legendary (whether you like it or not) Seattle band Nirvana. Cobain put an end to his own life on April 5th, 1994.

I can't say I was a die-hard fan of Nirvana ever since its inception back in 1987 or so, but I did listen a lot to it around the time of Kurt's death and then as a true militant from around 1999 thanks to a very important friend. Ever since that time, I've gone through a lot of changes in my musical taste, always adding to what I previously loved, never substituting or dropping anything along the way. In that sense, I found myself totally immersed in progressive rock and metal at some point but Nirvana has always been a passion ever since becoming one. And no matter what goes on or what I might be onto at any particular point, there's always a feeling of exhilaration every time I pop one of Nirvana's record, from the rawness of Bleach, to the perfect punk pop of Nevermind, the craziness of Incesticide's b-sides, the intimacy of In Utero or the perfect live compilation embodied by From The Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, this last one released a couple of years after Kurt's passing.

Nirvana may be one of the most loved, and hated, bands ever to grace the face of the planet and Kurt Cobain as its leader, one of the most controversial rock figures ever. Genius or junkie? I don't give a damn. The music he and his pals created make me feel alive whenever I listen to it. Fuck the rest.

Mere Sketches

Truly astounding work from Mike Rohde on what are simply meant to be his sketch notes during this year's SXSW Interactive (click the image for the full Flickr set):


Truly inspirational and beautiful stuff.

Effective Learning

I've neglected what seems to be an important bet of my personal future for far too long, so I've recently been slowly getting back at personal side projects. One important aspect has been trying to get the basics right, or at least as right as possible. A lot of mistakes have been made in the past and while I live under no illusion that no mistakes will be made this time, I'm gladly undertaking the challenge of trying to learn from what went wrong before. Hopefully, things will simply be better, not necessarily good yet. And better means closer to success.

Yesterday, after my usual bike ride in the afternoon, I had a chance encounter with Cláudio in our porch and we ended up talking for a bit precisely about past experiences and in particular the challenges we face while designing web sites or web applications. As our joint ventures slowed down to a halt, he got more seriously involved in his girlfriend's startup in a sort of technical advisor/web [master,designer] capacity. He tells me when he rolled up his sleeves and got down to designing and building the company's website he came to the sad (yet somehow invigorating) conclusion that he simply didn't know how to build a website, all our past experiences notwithstanding. So he said his solution was nothing more, nothing less than reading a couple of foundational books, one about principles of (beautiful) web design and another about principles of Photoshop usage.

This got me thinking and wondering how foolish we've been in the past, not only going straight to designing and messing up with no basics under our belts whatsoever, let alone hitting the computer right from the get go by writing a bunch of HTML and CSS first thing. It obviously couldn't work, because we simply aren't geniuses and no house has ever been built from the roof down. Not to my knowledge, anyway.

So, armed with broadened abstract reasoning we have picked up from years of schooling and personal experiences in a multitude of domains, we must have what it takes to pick up any book on these subjects and effectively learn from them. With this in mind, while designing a roadmap for the development of my web application, I'm accounting for reading just as much as for anything else, like sketching screen mockups, surveying technology or figuring out how to pay for hosting.

Sounds like a step in the right direction, one that gets me closer to where I want to get.

Tada!

Getting things done is an elusive concept, especially for people who just can't wrap around their heads the concept of simply having too much to do with too little time avaliable. Getting things done for me also gets ridiculous when you waste way too much time understading the GTD concept... time probably better spent doing something else more productive. But anyway, I know little about GTD and David Allen would surely prove me wrong, with one of his hands tied to his back.

In any case, one concept I am constantly going back to is the ancient thing called a TODO list. I've gone through a lot, from a simple piece of paper to a full fledged online organizer, with a bazillion reminders and what not. iCal works quite well for most things, especially for remembering things happening in a mid-term future, but the proverbial right tool for the job for me right now is 37Signals' TadaList. It's a simple TODO list web app that lets you create very simple lists with very simple operations to act upon them. You can add, edit, remove items and thankfully you can also easily reorder items inside a list by simply drag and dropping, which I use to re-prioritize tasks on a whim.

So far I've been using it for a few days and it's working like a charm. No bells, no whistles, I simply look for the top of the list to see what's really pressing right now. Long-term, not so important tasks right now are buried in the bottom, sometimes off screen due to the list spanning more than a single screen page. Perfect.

See it for yourself.

Yes We Can

Just a quick thought to write down how I currently feel about the Obama administration. I really haven't been paying close attention to every piece of news concerning Barack Obama, certainly not reading a lot of opinion articles in the international press, but there's a big sense of enthusiasm from what I can gather. Obama seems to be doing all the right things - yet who am I to judge?

One thing's for sure: this guy is intelligent and not a clown like his predecessor. And America's deadly enemies already seem to be developing a soft spot for this leader.

World peace and prosperity is the biggest utopia but certainly we can do away with the current state of affairs brought upon us by years and years of malpractice left and right. It's an hopeful start from whom I think may just be the most exciting politician I've ever known.

Where will we all be four years from now? And eight years from now? Hopefully, a little better off.

Crazy Day

After going to bed past 5am, the next day couldn't be too productive, now could it? Got up at 1.30pm! For Christ sake.

Anyway, up to that point it was really productive, Macbook wise, as I finally managed to install Leopard and spend a few hours getting all the apps I need up and running. Much, much better now, as I can smoothly run CakePHP for Hawkeye's sake, after much tinkering with PHP and Apache2.

Not much progress in the MSc front, more to come tomorrow.

Building Speed

Had an immensely satisfying meeting with my supervisor today. Happily enough, it was the first time I was actually able to approach him with something done and so we built from there. Learnt a bunch of Emacs tricks, namely how to compile from within the Emacs window and better frame/buffer handling.

After much head splitting, (mild) desperation and much Flex/Bison refreshment, put together the majority of the scanner/parser duo for wam2c. I'm now in the process of debugging it and gearing up to start devising data structures to hold the abstract syntax tree.

Interesting first day of the week... let's keep the ball rolling, shall we?

Bootstrapping

Proving to be harder than I thought to finally kick the MSc work into gear. It's been an atypical week with D. falling ill and then recovering, but then the weekend got in the way and we've just done a huge bunch of nothing. And let's not even talk about Hawkeye. Zé surely has a lot of on his plate with a new baby and all, but I should have been more active on that front as well.

BTW, I'm afraid this blog will turn quite technical for a while now...

Anyway, first steps for the masters work is writing a scanner/parser pair using Flex and Bison. This should parse a subset of Prolog used in GNU/Prolog to represent WAM instructions. It looks something like this:

predicate('$$find_existing_stream/3_$aux1'/3,41,static,private,built_in,[
    load_cut_level(3),
    try_me_else(1),
    allocate(4),
    get_variable(y(0),0),
    get_variable(y(1),1),
    get_variable(y(2),2),
    get_variable(y(3),3),
    put_value(y(0),0),
    call(current_stream/1),
    put_value(y(0),0),
    put_structure(file_name/1,1),
    unify_local_value(y(1)),
    call(stream_property/2),
    put_value(y(0),0),
    put_value(y(2),1),
    call(stream_property/2),
    cut(y(3)),
    deallocate,
    proceed,

Beautiful, ain't it? If I have something working by Tuesday, I'd be a happy man.

Daniel Levin Becker on Isis

"But the clincher is the vocals. Turner uses them not to convey the lyrics, which are all but incomprehensible anyway, nor to fulfill that de facto part of the hardcore formula, but as a honest-to-god instrument. His singing voice is a raspy and by all accounts ugly one, but it blends perfectly with the tuneful abrasion of everything under it."

(Source)