Rui Pacheco

Have a quick Nap...

2007-06-11T09:55:00.000Z

I've recently come across a blog post describing a procedure to take a quick nap during the work hours. This reminded me of a friend who could successfully do this, Luis Monteiro.

I have to confess that I've taken naps regularly when I was working at home as freelancer and it did wonders for my productivity. I'll give it a try with a little help from a Pzizz soundtrack. Results coming soon :)

June 19^th: Pzizz doesn't work for me... I can't get to sleep with all those sounds echoing in my head. It made me lost my humor as well, as I got very very sleepy in the process. BAH!

July 11^th: Wired bites the dust! They ended up unsatisfied as well.

"All of these use a technique called binaural beat generation. Two slightly varying tone frequencies are played simultaneously, one in each ear. The out-of-sync peaks of the sound waves produce a pulse below the range of human hearing. Even though the pulse is inaudible, the effect is said by proponents to calm brain activity and quiet the mind."

People's Voice

2007-06-06T11:41:00.000Z

How to download a single Gmail label via POP

2007-06-01T19:14:00.000Z

Gmail doesn't let you get one label at a time via POP3 (well, POP3 doesn't allow that itself, only IMAP does), but this crazy idea actually works:

Empty your Trash (you should really do this);
Choose the labels that you don't want to download;
In each of those labels, delete your messages. They won't be really deleted, they'll just be sent to the Trash;
Point to Settings, select "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)";
Configure your favorite e-mail client and start the transfer. Only the messages that haven't been deleted will be sent to you;
After the transfer has ended, go back to Gmail and disable POP;
Go to the Trash, select all the messages and then click "Move to Inbox" to recover your messages.

Note: I've tried this with a regular Gmail account, not a Google for your domain hosted account.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together

2007-05-31T10:25:00.000Z

And for the first time in 20 years (click the image to watch the videos):

Apple & Google

2007-05-30T23:33:00.001Z

I've just read about the Apple TV support for YouTube videos. Reminds me the board seat engineering going on between Apple and Google in combination with Cringely's thoughts on the matter.

Google: content gathering, search, advertising.
Apple: content selling, devices.
Both: committed, resourceful, leading.
Others: maybe clue less.

No further comments for now. It's a nice novel to watch, though.

Alpha Geeks

2007-05-30T21:34:00.000Z

On his latest post Martin Fowler talks about "Alpha Geeks", a very old term (considering the tech time scale), used first by Tim O'Reilly on a Keynote back in 2002:

"There are always people in any field who are the most clued in to the deep trends, who seem to be playing with all the coolest stuff, and seem to have their finger in everything before most people even know about it."

Martin proceeds talking about how these pioneers determine the most successful technologies in the near-future and how Microsoft is loosing ground to OSS-like technologies, particularly in the development field (most notably against Ruby on Rails).

Nowadays being locked down to a vendor is not allways OK, specially one whose tactics aren't always clear.

Microsoft & .NET: you must have windows. Mono is cool, but you only get partial .NET 2.0 support. Where's the coolest stuff, like WCF and WF? (more on this soon).
Ah, and you have to rush to keep up with the release cycle, a thing that is becoming increasingly complicated to some MS-based ISV's.
Sun & Java: Java is quite open, but it's not sexy, it's rather complicated. I've never been much Java-aware but it seems to me that Sun has no killer strategy for it, and somehow the whole thing keeps working because there's a huge community constantly extending Java.
[etc]

-- Enterprise.

On the other corner, the somewhat vendor-less tech:

Perl was sexy. We have sexier stuff now.
PHP is very easy to use and there are huge sites build on it. Has never been an Alpha's favorite, mostly because it's too accessible. Alphas are not like common people :)
Python: cool, but loosing ground. I like python a lot, but Ruby is getting the spotlights, so...
Ruby: hot hot hot. Where's the vendor? The strategy? We don't care!

-- Startups.

But take notice:

Web tech: HTML/XHTML/CSS/JS. It's one of the few things we can count on, so everybody uses it.
Ajax [technology without vendor]: it's not controlled, it's a mashup of standards, untied from a specific corporation.

-- Everybody.

These last ones feel nicer, don't they? You sleep better at night knowing that your vendor won't be able to easily slip in a revision that will require you to further invest in your product development without an underlying business need.

WCF contract ConfigurationName versus class name

2007-05-30T11:35:00.000Z

Note to self:

I've already seen this at least a couple of times:

"The contract name 'Company.Project.ServiceContract' could not be found in the list of contracts implemented by the service 'SomeService'."

Whenever this happens, don't forget what truly matters to WCF is the contract name expressed in the attribute. The class name is irrelevant:

namespace Company.Project
{
 [ServiceContractAttribute(
     Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/SomeNamespace/",
     ConfigurationName = "Company.Project.ServiceContract")] // « real deal!
 public interface ServiceContract123
 {
     [OperationContractAttribute(...

...so the service .config should look like:

<service behaviorconfiguration="DebugBehavior" name="Company.Project.Service"></service>
 <endpoint binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingconfiguration="HttpBinding">
 name="ServiceEndpoint" contract="Company.Project.ServiceContract" /></endpoint>

and never like:

<service behaviorconfiguration="DebugBehavior" name="Company.Project.Service"></service>
  <endpoint binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingconfiguration="HttpBinding">
  name="ServiceEndpoint" contract="ServiceContract123" /></endpoint>

What is WCF?

2007-05-25T12:02:00.000Z

WCF was introduced with the .NET 3.0 and my experience tells me it stands for:

Windows Complicated Framework

Go figure yourselves why...

Indigo was much cooler anyway, much like Silverlight is when compared to a possible name like "Web Presentation Framework".