Occam's Razor

That's funny :-)

WOW, this guy is truly amazing.

An all new perspective on motion, time, rhythm, and space.
All of is pieces are just ballets of rhythm, time and fluidity of motion, bending our perception at every move.
Lots of mathematics and geometry in there also. Just beautiful and amazing.

Perception changing performance well worth the 37'' length of the video.

The guys over at Tarpipe have launch a developers preview.
So what is Tarpipe ?  To put it in the words of founder Bruno Pedro (from the Tarpipe website) 

Tarpipe is a publishing mediation and distribution platform that will simplify regular upload activities:

This one only proves that sometimes the simplest ideas are the best ones and come from the more unlikely sources.
This guy, with no medical training and his wifes Pots and Pans (I'm not kidding really),  has made possibly one of the more exciting breakthroughs in cancer research in years.

And he did it in the face of contrary opinion (that stated that it wouldn't work ) of one of the most eminent minds in the field of nanoparticles and Nobel prize winner Rick Smolley.
Check out Lesly excellent report on CBS 60 Minutes, especially the ending.
Inspiring ...

The guys over at FCT UNL are organizing a BarCamp on the 24 of May.
I went to last years BarCamp Portugal 2007 in Coimbra organized by the WeBreakStuff guys and it was a interesting Sunday with some good discussions. What i like most, more then the sessions is the opportunity to mingle with like minded people and have a good conversation about technology and the web.

Not to miss.

 Cheers

PS : ooh, and it's FREE :-) 

Sun is offering a  free online trainning course on their Online Learning Connection site  titled "Introduction to Glassfish". The course offers a overviews of

• GlassFish development
  
• deployment
  
• performance
  
• debugging
  
• monitoring
  
• centralized administration
  
• clustering 
  
• high availability
  
• service-oriented architecture (SOA) features
  

and more. It's a time limited offering, so don't waste time. It's a great opportunity to get a little bit more knowledge about a great application server.

If you are interested just fallow the link and sign up, It's Free  :-)

One of the things i like to do during the weekend is watch one or two TED talks. This talks cover many subjects, ranging from science and technology to art and education, featuring some of the most brilliant and innovating minds on the planet today. The talks are small, from 15m to 30m and in many cases very inspiring.

The last two weeks have been crazy, and i haven't been blogging for a while.

I have done two session on Microsoft TechDays 2008, one about Scrum and one about web service interoperability with WCF and Sun's Metro stack.

Overall it didn't go has well has i expected, but never the less it was a great experience and i would like to thank Microsoft for the opportunity.

The session about Scrum was packed full, with more then 400 people attending, i wasn't expecting that many people,  and i think that took away the ability to strike a conversation with your audience and start a discussion that a session about Scrum requires, at least IMHO.

That said, here are some of the lesson i took from doing the sessions

  1 . I need to work more on my communication / presentation skills. I have been doing this for a short time, and have a lot to learn, when it comes to deliver a captivating talk.

  2. Scrum it is all about people, about communication about teams. Scrum sessions should have a small audience, 30, 40 people max.

  3. Doing sessions, especially when your creating the material from scratch, it's hard. So don't over commit. I did, and the result was that although i had a lot o fun doing it, and the  subjects where interesting, it took a lot of hard work, and consequently a lot out of me.

  4. Audiences are hard to please, and sometimes the criticism isn't that constructive, people get stuck in minor  faults in your presentation and don't get pass that, and focus on the subject.

So, you better deliver a squicky clean presentation without bugs. If you don't, even tough your content is relevant, informative and interesting, they get caught in minor things and loose focus of what's important.

In the  next few days i will be posting more about Microsoft TechDays 2008 and about my sessions.

Stay tunned , Cheers

Last night i was doing some interop testing between .Net 3.5 and WSIT and wanted to log the SOAP messages .This one, had me running around for at least half a hour before discovering the solution in Arun Gupta blog, thanks to my good friend Google ;-).

Ok, where's the scoop.

WSIT Pipeline Assembler exposes multiple system properties to enable SOAP message logging using DumpPipe. Each property, if it's value is set to true, injects a DumpPipe before or after a WSIT component pipe in the pipeline. This allows the developer to monitor message dumps at several points through out the pipeline ...

Last November i did a talk at Sapo CodeBits about Groovy. It's available on SlideShare for those interested.

Cheers.

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 PS : Sorry but it's only available in Portuguese

Groovy is a new dynamic language for the JVM. While it gives you all of the goodies and syntactic sugar we now came to expect from the latest and coolest languages like python and ruby, it has some features and design goals, that IMHO set it apart from the rest, and make it the perfect match for a Java developer ...

Johnny Chung Lee has a page detailing some amazing projects we has been working on using the very cool Wiimote.

You can get all the plans and software from the page, so get going and start building, i will ;-).

Where come the links

• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
• http://www.wiimoteproject.com/

 

Happy 2008, we are back

The blog server has been down for quite some time while we moved  it to our new infra-structure.

I know it took some time, but, we have been busy working on our upcoming product "Loomy", and i'm basically the 

resident IT gnome . 

 2008 will be awesome, lot's o new project in the works so check us out from time to time.

cheers