We and I ... root! w00t ?

Chris Anderson - How one idea can make the world look different

2007-05-24T16:24:00.000-07:00

The following was written by Malcolm Gladwell under the Time's Magazine edition "The Most Influential People in The World - The Time 100".

"All writers are in search of the Big Idea. A Big Idea has to matter. But you can have only one of them. Your Big Idea can't be that there are, say, 89 Rules of Power. E=mc^2 was, technically speaking, a Big Idea. But not really, because the best Big Ideas are also transparent. Truly Big Ideas are the rarest of phenomena, and when I first came upon Chris Anderson's The Long Tail last year, I knew this was one.
Born in 1961, Anderson became a physicist and conducted research at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. As editor in chief of Wired, he described the idea of the Long Tail in a 2004 article; the book came out in 2006.
Here is what the idea says:
Many of us see the same movies and read the same books because the bookstore can store only so many books and the movie theater can play only so many movies. There isn't enough space to give us exactly what we want. So we all agree on something we kind of want. But what happens when the digital age comes along, allowing the bookstore to store all the books in the world? Now, it doesn't sell 1,000 copies of one book that we all kind of want; it sells one copy of 1,000 books each of us really wants.
Five sentences to explain something that, if you think about Amazon and Netflix and iTunes, will make you see the world a different way. That's a Truly Big Idea.

Gladwell is the author of The Tipping Point and Blink

McKinsey Day

2007-03-06T16:07:00.000-08:00

6.10 - Wake Up & Bath
6.45 - Download Prison Break
7.00 - Leave Home
7.50 - Arrive IST
8.10 - Tribolet shows up for SIE class
9.15 - Break
9.30 - Back to SIE
11.00 - SAD class
13.00 - Lunch at my grandmother's home
14.30 - Back to IST - McKinsey Presentation
15.30 - Case Study
16.30 - Questions & Answers
18.30 - Presentations & Discuss
19.20 - Leave IST
19.50 - Futsal Training
21.00 - Arrive Home
21.10 - Bath & Dinner
21.30 - Leave Home
22.00 - Mobbit Meeting
00.12 - Back home and finishing this schedule.

Definitely a McKinsey Day!

Too many things to come ...

2007-02-05T00:40:00.000-08:00

What to do now that you lost all your toys and don't know how to begin with ?

The shirt she taught that was for her to clean has more to tell. He sees that every single woman is a piece of joy, hopless to unveil the space between the shalow memories of her own, deeply in the sky of roses brought by him.

Call him cause you know how you will feel just when he picks up the phone and greets you with his lonely and sweet little thing that he has on his sore mouth.

Probally you notice that maybe he's not quite the guy you tought he would be! Am I right?
All that smalltalk of him really feels like you ?

You sould beware of the dangers of your life, living with your own misery portraited by some other artist that you are still willing to forgive.

Suddenly all the stuff that matters, can change before you realize that it has something to do with you.
by me.

Euro Millions Key for 9/02/2007 :
19 24 18 21 30 4 2

The (not so) great macbook

2006-09-27T06:22:00.000-07:00

As you know I waited too much time to have the great Intel Mac that I was dreaming about for years.

I bought it in June and it was perfect ... now 3 months later I'm so fucking annoyed with this RSS. (Random Shutdown Syndrome) ...

At least Apple decided to acknowledge this hardware issue

I'm really worried with the repair time since here in Portugal we don't have an official AppleCenter, just a crapy importer called Interlog which lacks of quality of service.

I'm so skeptical about this and if you have one you should be too.

How To Totally Fake Being A Geek

2006-08-18T06:40:00.000-07:00

Don't let yourself get caught up again and "get to third base with that Silicon Valley groupie!"

How To Totally Fake Being A Geek

Apple Store, Fifth Avenue.

2006-05-21T10:28:00.000-07:00

Apple just opened last friday another mega store, this time, right in the middle of the GM building plaza in New York's fifth avenue.
Altough the store is undergound, it has 32-foot glass cube as the main entrance creating a big fuzz all around it.

But what I wanted to refer here, is that this new store never closes! It's open 24/365 along with it's genius bar!

(genius bar is place located inside all big apple' stores where you can go with or without your apple products and ask/discuss all sorts of questions related to apple' software, hardware, etc, with the local genius staff)

I gotta say, Apple is rocking!

MacBook : I'm ready

2006-05-07T07:22:00.000-07:00

Both ThinkSecret and Apple Insider are reporting that Apple could hold a press conference as early as Tuesday, May 9th, to announce their new line of MacBooks. The laptop will be the Intel-based successor to the company's popular iBook line.

It was worth waiting for ...
... COME ON! :D

The seven greatest things of the internet

2006-05-01T15:50:00.003-07:00

Here it is a list of the seven greatest things of the internet. Of course it's my opinion and I would like to have some feedback of you.

7th - Hi5

Many people ask me what is the purpose of hi5. "I can't get it , it's useless" - Usually is what they say.
Probably they are right but, honestly, I think it's a good way to get in touch with people that disapeared from our life a long time ago and you want to know how they are these days.
At least this happened with me. I think I'm not the only one.
And it's a good way for meeting new interesting people.
Technologically speaking, hi5 is improving and providing new interesting services for its users. Such as Photo Albums & Chat. Wait and see.
You must acknowledge that it's probably the greatest community of people online.

6th - Blogs and Forums

Blogs and Forums are the main discussion tools 'on tha innernet'.
Such tools as Blogger or phpBB are powerful tools for letting people express their ideas using the web.
These tools let people like my mom to make her own space on the internet where she expresses her feelings and what ever she wants on a public place. (Just a scenario ... it isn' t real :P) These revolutionary tools make the internet more approachable for its major users, the lame ones.

5th - MSN & VoIP

MSN and the other million protocols is the version 2 of the IRC.
The old school guys met each other in some crappy rectangular boxes with black and white text, and some people like it that way. I liked that too but these days i prefer msn. Now, voIP is the new thing. We can talk to each other over the internet for free. It's another great tool witch improved the internet and it's services for the major users. In a long term I think phones will be forgotten as we know them these days.

4th - E-Commerce

Amazon or eBay let people buy/sell items all over the world.
Now I can buy a book from US or UK and 3 days later there it is on my mailbox at home.
WOW ! The weapon of world wide globalization and probably the greatest tool for capitalists.
Amazon and eBay are the state-of-the-art of the e-commerce. You can open your shop world wide and sell your products to everywhere.
Probably without this, the internet would never be what it is now. Think about it.

3rd - HomeBanking

Now that you think the Internet is amazing with all those stuff that globalize this world, let's talk about what really matters : money!
I'm not cold hearted as you think, but for the today's world i'm pretty right that money is the thing.
Now I'm really sure that you can do everything from your computer at home. Money is our excuse to go outside and now you can spend it from your home. (This is quite a nerd view of homebanking, I like to go out with my friends though ...)

2nd - Online Casinos

Why did I chose online casinos as the 2nd wonderfulness of the internet ? Well because now you can even EARN money from the Internet !!
You need to be a good poker player and you will be able to earn some real money playing online. For some people it's their job and with a really nice income ;)

1st - GOOGLE!

Now the first place, Google!
Google is the state-of-the-art of the internet.
Everybody in the world knows what Google stands for. Clean, fast and precise search engine.
This USA company surprises us every day with their new services such as google earth, google scholar, google news, gmail and even google mars! Yes, MARS!
The business model is simple : ads!
Now it's possible to advertise for specific target as you or me, scanning your email or using the information about what you are looking for on the internet. It's the perfect marketing and what the big companies want. Personalized targets. What you want is what you get!

iIntel: My "Don't give a fuck" opinion

2005-07-30T01:42:00.000-07:00

Apple's Switch is a major move in our tech life.
Having such OS quality running on a x86 machine is quite impressive of the power of the "just in case scenario" that Jobs is proud of.
Tons of e-comments just like this one, become the daily basis of blogs and techmags all over the internet.
This review/opinion pretend to be a merge of all those messing that is all over the world.
There are 2 main opinions and analysis of this move.
One is that Jobs is doing well: He will offer a better cpu for those who don't know what that crap is, the common user, the other is that Apple will go on the way down adopting some low-arch system compared with the uber-leet-&-geek ppc machines.
Well in my opinion i think this will be a good move for all of us. Engineers or not. Internet readers or Advanced-Custom-Uber-Leet Apps Users.
I don't give a fuck ... if it's x86 it will be widely used.
EOF

PS: I read a lot about this stuff and this is what i think.
There are a lot of info around there and i will provide some links for you to read.

iIntel

2005-07-13T09:56:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks!
I'm back after a really fucking messing boring period of exams .. i think you know what i mean :P
I'm here to anounce that i'm gonna post my opinion and my point of view about the thing that everybody is chatting of ... Apple's switch to Intel.
Now that i have more time, i'm gonna read and be informed to express my opinion of this major switch which i think it will be an advantage to all computer users.
Probably, I will be a MacIntel owner! :D :D :D
See you soon!

Returning structs in C functions

2005-06-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

- Introduction

Well this is quite a "myth" for me, or it was.
When some people told me that was possible to return some structure from a C function i couldn't believe it.
I always heard that you need pointers, mallocs and stuff and now it's so simple.
So i'm here to demystify this "myth" :P

- Basic structs stuff

As you know, we can define some elaborated data types with C using the keyword struct properly.
Here is a simple example.

I will define some type Point representing x & y coordinates.

struct Point
{
int x;
int y;
};

Then I will define a function that will print some Point to the stdout.

void
printPoint (struct Point p)
{
printf ("x = %d ; y = %d\n", p.x, p.y);
}

Some main example.

int
main ()
{
struct Point p1;
p1.x = 2;
p1.x = 3;
printPoint (p1);
}

As you can see, this is the simplest example that i could give.

- The real thing

After this little introduction lets begin our dismystifying :)
I will now, create the function that will return our data type Point.

Point
newPoint (int x, int y)
{
Point ret;
ret.x = x;
ret.y = y;
return ret;
}

As you can see it is so easy that it's dificult to believe.
We create a Point called ret, assign its attributes and then return it as we wish.
Below there is some code that will demonstrate that this work.

Code here

- Aren't those structures too simple ?

Well i think now, you are conviced that this work.
But will it work with more anoying structs that have lots of stuff ??!
Really I don't know. I think so. If it works with this simple i think that i will work too with more realistic structures that you are using in your applications.
The next example is just the same of the above but with a little difference: Let's name our points.

Code here

As you can see it works fine just as we were expecting.

- Structs with structs inside.

This is a good approach.
We probably wanna have some complex struct that includes other structs.
Should this work too ? I guess so.

As you can see bellow i'll create the data type Line that will contain 2 Points.

typedef struct
{
Point orig;
Point dest;
} Line;

Now i will make it's constructor ( OO speaking :P )

Line
newLine (Point orig, Point dest)
{
Line ret;
ret.orig = orig;
ret.dest = dest;
return ret;
}

and, the correspondent print function.

void
printLine (Line l)
{
printf("Origin -> ");
printPoint(l.orig);
printf("Destiny -> ");
printPoint(l.dest);
}

Now runing test4() ....

void
test4 ()
{
printLine(newLine(newPoint(1,1,"Start"),newPoint(3,3,"End")));
}

and voilla ,

Origin -> Start : x = 1 ; y = 1
Destiny -> End : x = 3 ; y = 3

Code here
Now i can say that this should work with your complex-mega-uber-leet data structures ;)

- How does this stuff work ?

Now that we already know that this stuff works let's get some answers ;)
Probably your compiler has this behaviour.
A structure or union which is 1, 2, 4 or 8 bytes long is returned like a scalar.
A structure or union with any other size is stored into an address supplied by the caller (usually in a special, fixed register, but on some machines it is passed on the stack).
You can get more detailed information reading "further documentation".

- Conclusion

As we saw, this is possible. It's a way to return structures just like any other.
Surely this is simply and our code is clean and much more readable, but if this structs are very large this method is less eficient than returning a pointer to some structure.

- Further Documentation

- Mail me

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to contact me at : sfbs_@mega.ist.utl.pt (without the _ at sfbs_).

./configure && make && make install

2005-06-20T19:42:00.000-07:00

Hi guys!
Well this is my first blog about this science that i love , computer science!
Here we'll discuss and share all kind of information, news, comments, what is going on in our particulary world. I would aprecciate further comments and also some good discussion on what matters ;)
Stay cool,

I'm waiting for you.