Random Cool Links
An assortment of random cool links I’ve been gathering during the holiday break (even in my glorious horsey days in Alentejo).
Iphone and app stuffs
This app, if it lives up to its promises, has everything that I’ve been wishing for and more. Basically, it’s a smarter contact manager that can aggregate not only contacts from your contact list, but also from social networks, it keeps track of how much you communicate with your contacts, spots trends, can create smart lists and take advantage of the information that you have in social networks to perform smarter searches. The interface is pretty awesome as well. My only complaint is that for now, I cannot add my Facebook contacts. When I do it, it completely resets the settings in the app (that’s the iphone app). Maybe that’s just a problem with my particular system, but I’m looking forward to seeing this working in my iphone, ipad (app hasn’t been released yet) and desktop (ahhh… automatic lists for sending e-mails in Xmas)!
If your iphone home button is unresponsive (mine becomes from time to time, randomly so), here are four ways to fix it by our friends at c|net.
Web development tutorials and stuffs
This link has an assortment of the “best” nettuts tutorials, released month by month. The most interesting for me seem to be the “learn jQuery in 30 days”, closures with javascript, mobile-first responsive web design, javascript design patterns, and gem creation with bundler. For those that want to know more about topics such as agile development and vagrant (highly recommended) there’s something for every taste as well! I’ve been procrastinating learning more on frontend development because I find the backend problems way more interesting… I hope to follow these tutorials to learn more about these topics.
Fourier transform
Yup, I wish I had taken a signal processing class during undergrad. But I didn’t. And this interactive guide to the Fourier transform is a lovely start for those like me who didn’t have the wisdom to figure out the stuff that they needed on their own during undergrad. Amazing explanation!
Three Crowdsourcing Projects that are Advancing the Medical Field
I really really believe in the power of crowdsourcing for advancing our knowledge of medicine and of the human body. Medicine as it is practiced nowadays seems so… retrogad. As a friend of mine put it, the best doctors for ourselves are ourselves. There are so many things that doctors just cannot know, so many new weird conditions… So why not harness the power of the people? That’s what these crowdsourcing projects aim to to.
Security random stuffs
A very cool article/podcast interviewing Robert Watson about the shifts in computer security, especially from an OS security and exploits point of view.
An app that attempts to mitigate the side effects of these problems (such as accessing the data in your phone) is remotium, where a good friend of mine (José Luís Pereira) is working. Do check it out – they have a cool video of an android exploit being performed live.
Clipboard buffering for OS X
How can you live without it?
I chose flycut, which is based on jumpcut but seems to be updated more often (as we can see by the choice of github and not sourceforge :-) ). Highly recommended, you’ll never know how you could live without it.
Really assorted links
One topic that really comes to my mind often, especially now that I teach at the University, is how much college is worth exactly. This article gives a nice blunt opinion on why college still matters (but to be honest, I do think that we should not go straight to college out of high school – not because we don’t know what we want exactly, but also because we don’t know how to appreciate and select the most important topics for us to focus on. I view my undergraduate experience completely differently as of today!).
Another proof that only execution matters is DeveloperAuction. I had something similar to this idea years ago… but of course, never executed on it, and it doesn’t mean that I would be any successful if I tried ;-) The article is very interesting. The “world” is very different for developers engineers in the US!
Call for help
If anyoone has any idea of why the code in my gists appears centered and not nicely indented as nature intended it to be, please let me know. I am using Octopress and Slash, and the gists are stored in Github (where they do indeed appear nicely indented).