The black hole…
You already knew I am a LaTeX fan. I finally got the courage to go and experiment XeTeX. In fact, I was almost forced, as I am the Portuguese official translator for The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX. By the way, you can buy the Original (English) or the Portuguese versions from lulu.com. OK, […]
I own some books from Packt Publishing and they are not bad. Of course, each book is different from each other, and some are better than the others. But that is normal that a publishing company that is trying to gain space in the market with serious competitors (like O’Reilly, Apress or Manning) needs to […]
I bought the Modern Perl book by chromatic. The title is inspiring. There is a lot of people writing Perl code as they were writing years ago. Although Perl still support those syntax and lack of strictness, there is a new trend on Perl code, and actual and future Perl developers should start learning it. […]
Microsoft just released Internet Explorer 9. With it, it included some valuable improvements on the way IE visualize current Web standard. We can argue that it doesn’t support what it should, but any improvement Microsoft can do in IE is positive, so that people stop using relics like IE5. But this is not the case. […]
In the last days I’ve been using Unity3D. Unity3D is a electronic games engine. It has been developed by some years, but in the last years a free version, with some limited features, was made available. Now, why am I, somebody who likes to write real code, playing with this kind of software, where most […]
A friend lent me a Kindle DX. I installed Calibre to perform some simple conversion from .epub format to .mobi format. My first experiment was with the Open Dictionary for Portuguese (Dicionário-Aberto). This dictionary takes 5MB on ePub format. Let me remember you that ePub is a zipped format. It, after unzip, takes 25 MB. […]
Probably this is a stupid rant/question. If so, please clarify me. I can live without the insults. Really :) OK, on to the relevant stuff. Twitter has a new OAuth authentication mechanism. To write an application able to post on twitter your application need to be registered and have a consumer key. That key is […]
If you know me, you know that I program mainly C and Perl, that my preferred editor is Emacs, and that I use mostly Mac OS X for that task. But, I teach programming, and sometimes I teach programming to students that never heard of Linux or, worse, that never used the command line of […]
I was looking for LCD monitors. Cheap LCD monitors. I really would like to buy an LG or a Samsung. Not sure why, but I have some good opinion on these makers. But I wanted a 22″ (or more) monitor, with Full HD and, more difficult to find, HDMI. Why? Because I am playing XBox […]
A few days ago I found (well, somebody found and twitted about it) Ninite. Ninite is a custom installer for open/free software (in fact it includes some demos of commercial applications, too). You access their website, you define what applications you want to install, and download an installer. This installer performs the downloads of the […]