Monthly Archives: September 2009

Noticias de Honduras

Posted on by

(como siempre, cortesía de elFede)

Querida familia y amigos: Mil gracias por sus distintas muestras de apoyo! En adjunto el aporte de Sergio Tischler de la Universidad de Puebla y del Centro de Amigos para la Paz y la Mision Francisco Morazan en Costa Rica. El dia de ayer, finalmente el gobierno de facto autorizo a salir durante un lapso de 7 horas y obviamente mucha gente utilizo la oportunidad para para comprar comida o volver a sus casas (muchas personas quedaron “atrapadas” en el lugar en el que estaban cuando levantaron el toque de queda). Quienes decidieron unirse a la marcha pacifica numero 88 de la resistencia (desde la pedagogica hasta el centro) no solo perdieron la oportunidad de abastecerse, sino que ademas fueron reprimidos por la policia con gases lacrimogenos, y como lo que ya es costumbre, con golpes, asesinatos y detensiones. Mañana el gobierno de facto tiene programada otra de las marchas de los “camisas blancas” conformadas en una buena parte por empleados publicos y privados –a quienes se les ha amenazado con despedirles si no participan- y la oligarquia. Estas marchas en general estan resguardadas por los policias y las personas caminan entre 300 y 500 metros, o sea el tiempo suficiente para salir en la foto. Vean este link, http://tiempo.hn/portada Es el unico periodico nacional que esta sacando noticias verdaderas, aunque omite practicamente todo lo referente a las acciones de la resistencia. Esta es tan fuerte, que se rumora inclusive un pacto de no agresion entre las irreconciliables mara 13 y18, para defender los barrios de la policia. Por otro lado, antenoche en los enfentamientos nocturnos populares hubo alrededor de 30 muertos que no figuraran mas que en los listados de los entes de Derechos Humandos. No dejen de apoyarnos e informarse. Besos y abrazos,

Situación en Honduras

Posted on by

(recibido por e-mail, via elFede)

de una amiga, borré las firmas

Querida familia y amigos: Les aviso räpidamente que estamos bien y les pido que se informen a traves de telesur sobre la situaciön de Honduras y que hagan todo lo que puedan a su alrededor para que la gente sepa lo que estä sucediendo y nos socorra la comunidad internacional. Estamos en toque de queda (nadie puede salir del lugar en que se encuentra y quienes lo han hecho han sido golpeados y detenidos en las postas policiales) y estado de sitio desde ayer 21 de septiembre a las 4pm. Nos han quitado la luz, han atacado la embajada de brasil, allanaron las casas aledagnas, reprimieron a las personas que pacificamente la resguardaban. Las personas de las casas en las zonas vecinas fueron tambien amedrentadas con ruidos estrepitosos durante toda la noche a traves de personas en motocicletas. En la madrugada lanzaron bombas lacrimögenas y golpearon a quien encontraron. El gobierno de facto ha desplegado una serie de autos de lujo sin placas que andan recogiendo a la gente que encuentran. Han confirmado dos muertos, no sabemos cuantos hay heridos y al menos hay 200 personas detenidas en el Estadio Chochi Sosa de Tegucigalpa. No se trata de pre-ocuparse sino de ocuparse. Comenten, presionen, difundan. Nosotros tenemos un acceso muy limitado a internet. Nosotros nos cuidaremos. Ustedes por favor apoyen a Honduras desde afuera. Muchos abrazos y muchas gracias,

Epic Interview: A New Literary Genre in the Tech Section?

Posted on by

Here’s a simple recipe:

  1. Contact the most important people in some field.
  2. Sit down and ask a similar set of questions to each one of them.
  3. Record all the interviews and then write them down.
  4. Publish the resulting book, usually with great reviews (such as this one).

This does not constitute, by any means, a new genre; but it’s certainly a fashionable one in your technical bookstore right now. At least Apress and O’Reilly have realized that this simple technique yields epic books.

I have already blogged about Founders at Work, thus it’s worth mentioning that Coders at Work (which I’m reading right now) has just been released. Both books share a similar structure (as well as a similar cover), and both are highly recommendable, with interviews of David Heinemeier Hansson, Steve Wozniak and Paul Buchheit for the first, and Donald Knuth, Joe Armstrong and Brendan Eich for the second.

founders_work coders_work

On the other side, O’Reilly is very well aware of the force conveyed by this kind of books: their “/Theory/In/Practice” series of books has some gems which, I think, are really worth reading:

beautiful_code beautiful_teams masterminds_programming

“Beautiful Code” features interviews with Brian Kernighan, Charles Petzold and Yukihiro Matsumoto; “Beautiful Teams” (already my preferred book for 2009!) features Tim O’Reilly, Barry Boehm and Grady Booch; finally, “Masterminds” has great interviews with Bertrand Meyer, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling, Brad Cox and Anders Hejlsberg.

I think that the names of the interviewees, in each of the five books, speak for themselves. In all of them, I have found inspiration, advice, tips, humour, awe and enlightenment. The good thing being that, in most cases, you don’t need a Computer Science degree to read these books; it’s just a matter of empathy and sociology. Our world is driven by software, and the stories behind its construction are not only interesting, they are also important to understand the cost, the difficulty and the wonder that constitutes a piece of working software. These books are a way to approach the immense complexity of our society.

I really look forward to read more books of this kind! If I forgot to mention any other similar book, just leave the reference in the comments section below. I’d love to read your suggestions.

Using Multiple Twitter Clients from your iPhone Application

Posted on by

I love playing with iPhone URL schemes. And if you ask me, just like for Mail.app and Safari, I think there should be a “default” Twitter client URL scheme in the iPhone, with an interface in the Settings application allowing you to set the application that you prefer to tweet. Alas, this is not the case, and each application must manually allow users to select their preferred client, from a list of known ones.

Having documented iPhone URL schemes for TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Tweetie and Twittelator, I’ve created a project, available in Github, called TwitThis, which helps users choose their preferred Twitter client, and makes it easy to remember the user choice, and to launch the associated application with a single command:

TwitThis

This application has the following features:

  • The class TwitterClientManager loads a list list of supported Twitter clients is loaded from a plist file, which can be extended to support more clients in the future;
  • Each Twitter client is represented by an instance of the TwitterClient class;
  • The user can choose his preferred Twitter client at any time, and launch the application by a simple touch; the TwitterClientManager class stores the selected value in the user settings.

If you have to support several different Twitter clients, feel free to use these classes in your own project! The project, as usual, is available in Github with a liberal BSD license. Enjoy! I’d love to hear your comments below.

Slides, slides, slides

Posted on by

I’ve been doing presentations for a while now, so I decided to open a SlideShare account to publish all the slides I’ve created over the past 5 years. SlideShare has a great Flash-based viewer that you can embed in web pages, so I’ll be using it a lot now. Check out my presentations, feel free to download them and also to use them if you find the contents useful for you (they are distributed with Creative Commons licenses).

Having said that, I’m also announcing that the slides (and sample application) of yesterday’s JAOO geek night presentation in Zürich are also available in the Projects section of this blog, and here goes the SlideShare player with those slides:

iPhone App Development Tips & Tricks (Zürich)