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

To copy something to the clipboard using the terminal seems to be pretty simple in Mac OS X. There’s this command pbcopy that copies whatever is passed to it from the terminal into the clipboard (aka pasteboard in OS X, hence the command “pb” and not “cb”).

To use it’s just this simple:

echo 'lol' | pbcopy

This will copy “lol” into your clipboard. Now you can paste it in your browser, mail or whatever. And if you want to paste this also from the terminal, you can use pbpaste, to do it:

pbpaste > file.txt

This will paste the previous copied “lol” into “file.txt”.

I’ve googled for something similar in Linux, and found xclip, but it seems that it doesn’t work with the graphical paste. You can only paste the output using the wheel mouse button.

Oh, and by the way, this the first 2009 post, so Happy New Year! :)

I came to know World of Goo in a interesting article by Jeff Atwood about software piracy, where he says that games like these don’t deserve to be pirated, and he’s right.

I’m not much of a gamer, but this game is simple yet very addictive. I’m writing about it because it’s not just another game released by a large game company that builds games in nearly cold mechanical way. World of Goo is a game that the first time you play it, you can tell that it was made with love, every single detail of it.

The game was developed by a two-man team (2D-Boy an indie game studio), and it’s the most original game made in the past few years and it has excellent graphic details with that cartoonish feeling.

World of Goo is available for Mac, Windows and soon will be available for Linux too, and it’s worth every dollar out of the twenty that it costs. If you wish to try the demo click here for the Mac version or here for the Windows version.

Link: www.worldofgoo.com

This is my new toy. The tradition of buying Apple stuff on christmas (I want to thank my girl for this gift) is still alive around here.

I got it because I was looking for something like a PDA with wifi to help me organize, browse the web, check for mail and have some fun when I’m in boring places or situations. I’ve check lots of them, and the only one that seemed to please me, was either the iPhone, or the iPod Touch.

The iPhone here in Portugal is still something very similar to a robbery, so I just went for the iPod.

I couldn’t be more satisfied with it. It does everything I need, and does it well. The web browsing experience is the best that you can get in a mobile device. The tons, I mean literally tons of apps available trough the app store just a click away are fabulous. Some are free (until now I’ve only installed free apps) but the paid ones are a bargain like 1 or 2 euros. And well, the bonus for having a macbook is the cherry on top of the cake. This way I can sync all my iCal and Mail.app stuff with the iPod, among other things. I can even ssh or VNC to servers at work. And also check Twitter :)

I’ve been playing with it in the last few days and I can’t go without it anymore, and yes, the iPod is the one to blame for the lack of posts on this blog.

More photos available here.

I found this cartoon when I was reading an interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Blink (which I’m currently reading and highly recommend it). Even if you, the reader, like boys band, you have to admit that it’s funny, and somewhat close to the truth :D

Cartoon taken from here

This is hilarious, just watch the video!

Link: www.collegehumor.com/video:1886349, taken from here

The truth is that I’ve already heard allot about microformats, but I’ve never had the chance to search and read something more detailed about it. It all comes down to the Semantic Web.

By the time I write this post, a major “geek” event is taking place in Lisbon. I’m talking about Sapo Codebits (by the way, you can watch it live 24/7 here).

Yesterday at Codebits there were some interesting presentations, but the one from André Luis about Microformats, really caught my attention. If you’re interested in having a good introduction to this matter just read this presentation. The video hopefully will come out soon after the event that ends tomorrow.

So, now that I caught some interest in Microformats, I’ll soon be applying them on my web projects.

Links: microformats.org

The chassis improvements on this new version of the macbook, make my “blackie” look like a fragile matchbox. Nice piece of engineering.

The new trackpad is also a big improvement, and has some interesting new moves. The rest stays almost the same, and of course, deep down, there’s always that itchy feeling that makes you want to go out and buy a new one… :D

Unfortunately the new one it’s not mine :P.

“Trying to fix or change something, only guarantees and perpetuates its existence.”

“Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I’m yours.”