In the last 3 days I’ve been at Sapo Codebits. It was the first time I attended the event and I can only say that I’ll do my best to be at the next one. Three days of absolute awesomeness.

The programming contest was sort of an endurance test. Thirty two hours awake, most of them coding like mad (with some PES2009, lots of pizza and redbull in between).

And the final output of the contest was an iPhone app called Got Giggs?. The project consists of not only an iPhone app, but also a web app that fetches concerts from a given country/city from the Last.fm api and a public api that serves them from our database in various formats including JSON, XML etc.

The iPhone app was built using PhoneGap. This open source tool let’s you build apps for mobile devices like iPhone, Blackberry, Android, etc. using HTML and Javascript. The concept is nice, but the lack of decent documentation and examples makes it a harder challenge than it seems at first hand. But with some persistence and lack of sleep we came up with the app almost complete:

Featured | Soon | All Concerts | My Bands | Settings

The presentation didn’t ran quite well. First I got nervous when I opened the macbook pro on stage and found out that I only had less than 20 minutes of battery. This laptop normally shuts down to sleep on the 10 minute mark.

I had 90 seconds to present the project, but it seemed more like 10 seconds to me. I didn’t even had the chance to explain half of the app’s features. That’s for being a noob presenting projects in public. But well, lesson learned.

Anyway, this project won’t stop here. We will continue developing it to reach a final product. The name will be different and will target only musical events in Portugal. So if you’re interested in this web app/ iPhone app, check this blog for more updates.

Overall this experience was very enlightening and definitely worth repeating. Next year will be better ;)

If you use the terminal in OS X allot, you have probably noticed that the ls command has no colors. You can activate the colors by adding the following to your ~/.profile:

alias ls='ls -G'

Or you can even choose a better way. Adding the following to your ~/.profile:

export CLICOLOR=1

Now you just need to restart your terminal, and you have a all nice and shiny ls output.

The problem is… if you use a dark background, like any other sane person. The dark blue coloring the directories names is simply impossible to read.

To change that color you just need to add another line in your ~/.profile file:

export LSCOLORS=gxfxcxdxbxegedabagacad

What’s with the DNA chain? Well, it’s just some crazy way to configure the ls output color. You can find the corresponding color to every character on the ls man pages. Just to keep it simple, that combo turns the directory names to cyan, so that they become readable on top of dark backgrounds.

After of some weeks flirting with the Apple keyboard, today I finally bought it. I’m writing this post with it. And I can only say that this is the best keyboard one can have. It’s very slim and the typing is smooth, actually is pretty much the same as the new macbook keyboard.

I bought it to use at work, mainly because working endless hours in a laptop can injure your back and an external keyboard allows me to vary my posture when sitting in front of the macbook. Another reason, is that in summer time, having my hands resting in a macbook pro, turns out to be a hot and sweaty experience.

I opted for the USB version because I don’t really like batteries at all, and I wouldn’t be very tolerant with random bluetooth disconnects. Although the keyboard USB cable is short, Apple was king enough to include an extension for those who need a longer cable.

Here’s the Apple keyboard side by side with my old Revoltec Lightboard, so you can get an ideia about the size of this thing:

Just to end this post, as you can see on the first picture, I bought this keyboard at TB Store in Colombo. I definitely recommend this store to buy Apple stuff. Great customer service, nice and unusual bags for the shopped products and bonus key chain lanyards.

I decided to upgrade the ram of my black macbook. I was noticing it getting slower on some more demanding apps, so I upgraded it from 1Gb to 4Gb (2×2Gb) Kingston RAM. Damn it’s fast now! :D

By the way, I decided to post this on the blog and not on Twitter just for a change :P

I’ve created this project in order to simplify the process of interacting with the Twitter API on a project I’m working on. So I decided to release it as open-source so that others could use it if they find it useful.

What is TwitterPHP? It’s an object-oriented and easy to use PHP library to interact with the Twitter API. It is still in development but it has almost every API feature implemented, which makes it the most complete of it’s kind (at least from what I’ve seen out there, please correct me if I’m wrong). You can do lots of stuff with TwitterPHP, you can write your own client, or bot, or even just use it to display twitter info on your blog or website.

You can check out the Google Code project page and soon I will host the phpdoc online, to make it easier (but it’s already included in the zip file).

Link: twitterphp.googlecode.com

I’ve been away from this blog for some days because I’ve been busy changing jobs. I’m now working in a new place in a full-time job and left the part-time one at Faculdade de Ciências. My new workplace is now at Mr.Net as a Web Developer.

In the meantime I’ve also been developing some toy apps, that are almost done. One is a tool to use with Filebuster, that downloads every file linked on a web page and the other one is a twitter bot that alerts you (by sending a direct message) when a specified web page has changed (aka gets updated). All basic stuff, but proved to be useful in certain situations.

Twitter is right now the number one motive for my lack of updates in this blog. Recently some unusual amount of portuguese friends have just joined so, much of my ideas and link sharing are being done through Twitter. Even the President Cavaco Silva now has a Twitter account (check it here).

One of the good thing on Twitter is it’s API. Very well documented and simple to use. You can do almost everything, and almost everything has already been done. I’ve been playing with the API recently and made some fun stuff that I plan to share when it’s finished.

Also, now there’s a Twitter icon on the menu on top of this blog, that links to my account, so feel free to add me.

Until next post (it wont take long, I promise), I’ll see you on Twitter :P

I’ve made a remake of Filebuster (named “emoogle” back in 2006) just to try out some fancy things with jQuery.

Filebuster is a web interface to make specific search of media files on Google. The app itself is useless most of the time and most of the search results are just fake or wrong, but if you dig enough you’ll probably find what you’re looking for. Maybe i’ll make some better features in the future.

Link: rogeriopvl.com/filebuster

Expect to have some trouble in the next days trying to access this blog and any other file hosted on rogeriopvl.com. I’m moving from my current host (Hosting Bug) to Dreamhost.

I’m not moving due to any kind of problem with Hosting Bug, I have absolutely no complains about them. It’s just that Dreamhost is offering some crazy new year sales, and I just took the chance.

Let’s hope that the transfer runs fine and soon I’ll be posting again :)

Do you remember your first computer? Well, I do, thanks to this tweet from Célia Leocádio, I found my first machine in this old computer archive website.

Back then I knew almost nothing about these machines. When my parents bought it, I was about 11 years old. I only wanted to play games. The only contact I had with computer programming was in some BASIC lessons I had at school, where we just copied code from paper to an editor, and then some pretty colored and flashing ASCII art would appear. I had no clue of what I was doing.

I’m not sure of the real specs of this computer, it was an IBM PS/1, I believe it had something like 2Mb of RAM, the CPU was a 386sx with speed probably around 10Mhz and came with Windows 3.1 installed.

I remember playing games like Accolate Grand Prix, Prince of Persia (the first game I was addicted to), Crystal Caves, Pacman, Italia 90, and allot of others.

I could now just end up this post saying “those were the days”, but well, that would make me feel old :P