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 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

I’ve been using it this week, and found some very interesting songs, and the ability to play endless hours of different music.

Check it out here, and the source here!

For those reading in feeds, here’s the link to the video.

Update: Well, it seems that the video has been removed for the second time due to copyright claim by 20th Century Fox, which I think it’s very sad. It was only a lousy 3 minutes video, what could that hurt? Whatever…

Videos list:

• Introduction to OWASP, by Jeff Williams
• OWASP Top Ten, by Jeff Williams
• OWASP Enterprise Security API (ESAPI), by Jeff Williams
• LDAP, XML and SQL Injection, by Marcos Slaviero
• LDAP injection demo, by Marcos Slaviero
• XML injection demo, by Marcos Slaviero
• SQL injection demo, by Marcos Slaviero
• Clickjacking, by Arshan Dabirsiaghi
• Clickjacking demo, by Arshan Dabirsiaghi
• Phishing demo, by Matt Tesauro and Brad Causey
• Training sessions overview, by Mano Paul

Source: blog.carlosserrao.net

The Agile software development methodologies are often mistakenly compared to cowboy coding and related to undisciplined developers. This couldn’t be more far from the truth. But before I continue, let me explain what Agile software development is.

Agile is a conceptual framework that tries to mitigate the risks in a project by developing software in a short amount of time. It’s an iterative method, and each iteration can last 1 to 4 weeks, having casual tasks from a complete project life cycle (planning, design, coding, testing and documentation).

Each iteration starts by defining the requirements (interaction stories) and ends with potentially market-ready software.

Teams have the ability to self organize as they speak directly with other team members and the stakeholders.

But what makes Agile really different from other methodologies is the fact that the entire process is adaptive. While others like the waterfall model, spend allot of time and effort trying to predict every aspect of the process, Agile just keeps going and adapts itself to whatever comes along. Just think about all the planning that the waterfall needs, and then if something changes, it goes back to the start. It’s slow and tends to resist change.

Of course that this is not suited for every software project. The best case for Agile is when you have a medium size project with a small team (up to 20 programmers), a constantly changing environment, and a demanding client that loves to add or remove features from the projects every new day (don’t they all do?) and is collaborative.

In the end, you get a happy client, because he is not locked up in a contractual negotiation, instead he collaborates in the project and has the freedom to change his mind whenever he feels that something should be different. Generally this also increases usability, because once again, the client/user took part in the process. Quoting Jakob Nielsen regarding Agile methods:

“Agile methods hold promise for addressing the many ways in which traditional development methodologies erect systematic barriers to good usability practice.”

You can read the article about usability and Agile methods by Jakob Nielsen right here.

There are some famous examples of Agile methods, like XP (Extreme Programming) or Scrum, and I will talk about them later in another post. For now, just concluding the title, Agile is probably the right way for most of today’s projects, specially in the Web 2.0 field. But it’s not easy to change to this kind of methodology, and requires everyone involved to collaborate intensively. If the change comes naturally, you will probably get great and fast results.

More about Agile:

• The New Methodology by Martin Fowler
• Agile Manifesto

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