Autarquicas 2009 – Évora

October 4th, 2009 No comments

Antes de começar a opinar devo dizer que não tenho qualquer cor política nem sou militante de nenhum partido.

Arrisco a dizer que 80/90% da população eborense não faz a mais pequena ideia de como é constituída a câmara municipal e a assembleia municipal. Para esses deixo aqui um link bastante útil e esclarecedor: Sobre as Autarquicas.

Estou bastante desiludido com o rumo que Évora teve nos últimos 8 anos. Consigo reconhecer o que actual presidente e candidato do PS, Ernesto d’Oliveira, fez de bem mas também consigo reconhecer o que fez de mal e ainda consigo reconhecer o que não fez. Este último ponto (o que não fez!) é o que mais me desilude.
Ao fim dos primeiros quatro anos ainda dei o beneficio da dúvida e há 4 anos atrás votei no Sr. Ernesto. Hoje já não repito a “asneira”. Simplesmente porque não tem visão, não tem projecto e está a atrasar Évora. Évora não precisa de alguém que vá governando, precisa de um líder com visão e iniciativa.
Estive a ler o Programa eleitoral do candidato do PS, que está disponível no seu site e chego à conclusão que é mais do mesmo. Já chega!

Évora não pode parar no tempo, não podemos perder mais oportunidades.

Temos alternativas e é preciso dar-lhes uma oportunidade, para o bem de Évora.

A minha alternativa preferida e onde muito provavelmente vou votar, projecto Ganhar Évora do Sr. Eduardo Luciano.
Vejam o Programa Eleitoral (resumo). A mim convence-me.

Há ainda o projecto do Sr. António Dieb, “Évora Estamos preparados…”, para mais informações podem ir ao site ou ler o Programa eleitoral.

O candidato do CDS é o Sr. Luís Madeira. Procurei pelo site para poder também ler o programa eleitoral mas não encontrei. O mesmo se passou com o candidato do Bloco de Esquerda, Miguel Sampaio.
Se tiverem conhecimento dos sites ou links para os programas comentem que depois incluo aqui.

No próximo fim-de-semana podemos alterar o rumo das coisas e dar um “pontapé” no atraso de vida. Espero que isso aconteça.

EDIT:
Podcast – AUTÁRQUICAS – DEBATE (Antena1)
Edição Lisboa: Debate Autárquicas 2009 com os candidatos à Câmara Municipal de Évora

Categories: real world Tags: , , ,

Rumo à Antartida

September 21st, 2009 No comments

Sou um ouvinte assíduo da antena3. Há algumas semanas ouvi falar pela primeira vez no “Rumo à Antartida”. Trata-se de um Português de nome Luís Monteiro que tem o sonho de ir à Antárctida (ou Antártida) e que tem feito um esforço enorme para conseguir cumprir o seu sonho.
O Luís Monteiro entrou num concurso em que o mais votado vai ganhar um lugar numa expedição à Antárctica.
Podem ver aqui (http://www.rumoantarctica.com) todo o esforço que tem feito para estar no topo da classificação bem como verem o que devem fazer para votar e ajudar este tuga!

Categories: real world Tags: , ,

Changes to GTG’s plugin manager

September 8th, 2009 No comments

Today I just had to code. For days I’ve been studying for my last exams (I hope!). Kevin Mehall made me the suggestion to add a preferences button on the dialog manager in order to allow a user to set the preferences/configure a plugin. The idea is based on the Gedit system. I think I never gave credit to Gedit but I actually based allot of things on their plugin system.

It looks like this:
preferences_plugin_manager

You can read about it and how to make your plugin configurable in the plugin howto along with all the other info.

Categories: gnome, gtg Tags: , , , , ,

This domain is for sale!

September 5th, 2009 No comments

foobox.org is for sale! If you want to buy it contact paulo.cabido@gmail.com. The price is negotiable.

Curious information:
http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.foobox.org

Categories: internet Tags: , ,

Notification area plugin for GTG

September 1st, 2009 1 comment

As requested and discussed before I made a notification area plugin for GTG. This allows you to click on the notification area icon to “minimize” GTG. It also has a small context menu. Keep in mind that if you minimize GTG it will minimize normally (it will not “disappear”), this plugin does not change GTG’s UI or how it works.

gtg_notification_area

Anyway You should read Lionel’s article on “There’s no tray icon in GNOME!“. It is a MUST READ!

The plugin is available in the current development branch.

Categories: gnome Tags: , , ,

aLANtejo 09

August 31st, 2009 No comments

logo_alantejo09

Após quatro edições de sucesso, o Núcleo de Estudantes de Engenharia Informática com o apoio da Universidade de Évora e da Câmara Municipal de Évora, tem o prazer de apresentar a aLANtejo 2009!

A aLANtejo 2009 tomará lugar na Muy Nobre e Sempre Leal Cidade de Évora sendo por isso também uma oportunidade para entrar em contacto com o espírito universitário que nela se faz sentir e visitar uma cidade património mundial.

Este ano todo o evento será dedicado à Lan Party, focando assim todo o nosso trabalho e dedicação de modo a realizar um evento excepcional. A lan, para além de diversos jogos a torneio, contará também com vários concursos e mini-conferências. Esta quinta edição do nosso evento realizar-se-á nos dias 23, 24 e 25 de Outubro com o objectivo de superar a qualidade das edições anteriores.

Já se encontra disponível um fórum de discussão, onde podem votar nos torneios para a Lan-Party, e tirar dúvidas sobre as várias componentes do evento, podem aceder ao fórum através da pagina do evento: http://www.alantejo.uevora.pt

Categories: neei, real world Tags: , , , ,

A few weeks using Android

August 30th, 2009 2 comments

I’ve been using my HTC Magic/Android for the past weeks. It’s not true that it is totally Google dependent, but it was made buy Google and the google services are, of course, very well integrated. In another perspective it is very Internet dependent and if you can, subscribe a data plan. Currently I don’t have one but I’m working on that.

I didn’t change any default applications, I tried chompSMS but I didn’t see why it was better than the default one. Besides the colors, I think it’s basically the same thing. All the others are good at least from my point of view and for my usage.

I did install some additional applications:

  • A bunch of CurveFish widgets
  • TaskKiller free – Lets you close running apps.
  • APNdroid – Prevents the phone from connecting to the internet over 3G/EDGE/GPRS
    • It has a problem, it also prevents MMS. I have been in contact with APNdroid developer, Martin Adamek, and the future version of APNdroid will support this (choose if MMS are also disabled or not).
    • I made a simple change on the code to test it and I have a working workaround, I posted the function I changed here. I have been with so little time to make the proper changes to APNdroid myself but here is a working version that does not affect the MMS APNs. Copy it to your SD and use eoeAppInstaller to install it.
  • Toggle Settings
  • WiFi Scanner
  • Astrid Task/Todo List
  • OI Shopping list
  • eoeAppInstaller – SD apk installer (lists all apk’s in the SD)
  • twidroid – twitter client
  • ASTRO File Manager
  • Babbler Lite for Facebook – full-featured native Facebook client
  • EboBirthday
  • SMS Popup – shows a popup dialog when a SMS/MMS is received (very configurable)
  • ConnectBot – SSH client
  • Ndrive
  • ShopSavvy – shopping assistant
    • I haven’t really tried this one yet, still waiting for a opportunity.
  • Any Cut – Allows to create home shortcuts to anything

Some other apps you may want to consider (they are said to be the best around):

  • Snap Photo Pro – Camera App
  • imeem Mobile – Streaming Music App
  • CoPilot Live – GPS Navigation App
  • WeatherBug – Weather App
  • chompSMS – Communication App
  • Weather Widget
  • Sherpa – Location Based App

Of course and as I have commented above, I have been looking into android development. You can read all about that at http://developer.android.com. The android plugin for eclipse is nice and works very well. I only had some initial trouble with the debugger but not a big problem.

Another thing that I haven’t tried yet is WiFi with WAP Enterprise. I’ve been lazy to try it out at my university but I’ll give it a go very soon.

I have also been tempted to change the ROM version from the original to a HERO based ROM, but there are some things still aren’t working so I’ll wait.

Categories: android Tags: , ,

GSoC 09: Aditional documentation for my work

August 26th, 2009 No comments

I made some documentation for my work that I had not yet advertised, so here are the links:

Categories: gnome, gsoc Tags: , , , , ,

Getting Things Gnome 12 weeks after SoC

August 20th, 2009 4 comments
SoC is ending and 12 weeks after I’m very happy with the experience. The first weeks were difficult, I had university assignments and exams to do and it wasn’t easy finding the equilibrium between SoC and the university stuff, some of those weeks were exhaustive. Still it was a great experience, I would do it again! My mentor, Lionel Dricot aka ploum, was always available and helpful during the hole 12 weeks. The GNOME and Getting Things Gnome communities were also very important and contributed in a very positive way to my SoC experience.

My SoC project and the goal was to add Geolocalized tasks (using geoclue and libchamplain) in Getting Things Gnome witch I achieved.

Getting Things Gnome is a task manager and if you don’t know it yet you can read all about it here and see some of the many reasons for why you should use it or try it at least. One of the concepts of the application is the “Work View”. The “Work View” concept will only show tasks that you can do “right now”, it doesn’t display tasks that depend on other tasks, tasks that cannot start before a given date or with tags you have marked as non workable. The main idea of my project is to add a here to the right now, extending the work view concept to “right here and right now”. The extension of the concept is now available if you enable the geolocalized-tasks plugin that packed allong with GTG (only in the current development version that you can get here).
To try it you will need:

  • libchamplain installed with python support
  • Geoclue installed with the main providers
  • my newly created python-geoclue module

I’ll provide the detailed instructions to test it in a few days. I’m currently in contact with Keith Preston so that the python-geoclue module can be integrated in the Geoclue project, so I’ll have some news on that (were you can get it, how to install it, how you can use it, etc) very soon.

During SoC I also added plugin support to GTG and plugins with new features are emerging. It is very satisfactory to see my work being useful. Some of the plugins that already exist are:

  • Geolocalized-tasks plugin (my plugin)
  • Hamster Time Tracker Integration by Kevin Mehall
  • Remember the milk sync plugin by Luca Invernizzi

So if you have any request for a new feature, don’t hesitate to add it to the whish list or just digg in because it’s now easier to add features to GTG.

Categories: gnome, gsoc Tags: , , , , , ,

Hello Android World!

August 9th, 2009 7 comments

image_htc_magic_01

This is my first Android related post. Thanks to the iPhone 3G S release last week, my mobile provider made a nice promotion to fight it. They sold the HTC Magic for 50% of it’s price. The stock for this promotion was about 200 units and they were sold out in 30 minutes. It wasn’t easy but I managed to buy one.

 

After a week using it, I have to say.. it’s just wonderful! The phone/android platform exceeded my expectations!

But I also had some issues.

Pros:

  • Nice design
  • Superb screen quality
  • The trackball
  • Android platform
    • User Interface
    • Navigation (navigation between menus, UI, using the phone)
    • Google Apps Integration
    • Android Market

Cons:

  • Internet dependency
  • The camera hasn’t got flash
  • No keybord/phonepad
  • As it is open source it should sync with evolution (or some other) :-(
The phone has no pen (those pens to use on the screen) and you will not need one. I was astonished with the facility and by the fact that it worked perfectly with touch. If that wasn’t good enough the they added a trackball that let me say, it’s just perfect!

I didn’t put the battery in the cons. It holds up to 2/3 days of battery with normal use (sms, phone calls) but if you use the GPS it will drain the battery’s power allot faster.

About the cons, the Internet dependency is a con only if you don’t have a data plan. If that’s your case, you MUST have APNdroid! This app allows you to enable/disable the internet use but still has one problem… no mms get by, although this is the most requested feature and will be added soon.
I don’t use the camera that much but my old Nokia had flash so there is no excuse for the HTC Magic. The keybord.. the virtual keybord is very nice, I can use it very well and still I only have few days of experience, but for bigger tasks like for example connecting via ssh to a remote machine and solving a problem… well it might be challenging.

The first thing I tried was to get all the contacts out from my Nokia 5320 into the HTC Magic. I made a sync with outlook and made backups in pst and csv just in case. I had a hard time synchronizing the HTC Magic with outlook. First I tried windows 7 witch wasn’t a good idea, it lacks support for software and drivers. Then I tried to use a windows xp that I have in a virtual machine but still couldn’t do it. I ended up using my sisters laptop with windows vista and HTC Sync worked perfectly there.. although some of the contacts were messed up. I think the reason for this to happen is several syncs thru 4/5 mobile phones along the years (I had “invisible” contacts that I didn’t even know about). The prefect solution to sync the contacts was to import the csv file in gmail and then sync the phone with my gmail account. Worked like a charm and I have a backup of my contacts in my gmail account, witch I can access from anywhere.

I’m still testing the phone and it’s features but I can tell you, my next android related post will be with the “must have” apps. Stay tunned!
Categories: android Tags: , , ,