Impressive Piano Presentation

I’ve been a little away from my blog (I think you all who enters here may have noticed). As I said in the first post (implicitly), sometimes I’m very motivated to do something, then, this motivation vanishes…

I think my motivation to post on this blog has come back as soon as I saw this amazing video from TED of Eric Lewis performing his own version of Evanescence’s “Going Under” on piano. Directly from TED 2009.

more about “Eric Lewis strikes chords to rock the…“, posted with vodpod

Firefox 3 has been released!

Hello! There’s been so much time I do not post something on the blog… These last months have been so full of new things to do and a lot of new work to do, but I will get back to post, starting from now, with the official release of Firefox 3!

First things first, let’s go for the download day! I know it’s so close (already started) but let’s download Firefox 3 for the guiness record on software downloaded over 24h!! You can get more information about this here.

As soon as possible I will make a review about what Firefox 3 brough to us on this new version (with the 15,000 improvements) and me personal feeling about it. For now, the first thing I noticed is that the del.icio.us extension do not updated automatically when you run the browser for the first time.

With a little research I found this blog post that says it will prompt you with the upgrade (but if someone had the same problem that me, I will send the link to upgrade and not stop to use the extension) and links to some information about the improvements on the plugin (here’s the link).

In this link you can get the extension.

This is it for now.

Installing Eclipse on Ubuntu 7.10

This holiday I wanted to use eclipse on my new install of Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”), but found it somewhat strange to do with the Add/Remove tool and searched a way to consistently install it and integrate on the Desktop environment.

The first thing I have done was to go on “Synaptic Package Manager” in “Administration” and search for the last JDK to install, you can do it by searching for jdk using the search button. In the time I’m writing, the latest JDK avaliable package avaliable was sun-java6-jdk. It needed some other packages to be installed (jre, gcc-3.3, and other java packages) for me.

When the installation was complete, I went to the Eclipse site and downloaded the latest Eclipse version for Linux, in the time was Eclipse 3.3.2, from here.

After the download was completed, I changed to a terminal and entered in my root account. With root privileges, I sent the eclipse package to the /root directory and unpacked it with the command “tar -zxvf ./eclipse-java-europa-winter-linux-gtk.tar.gz”. With the new directory /root/eclipse, I sent it to the /usr/lib with the command “mv /root/eclipse /usr/lib” and created a symbolic link to the eclipse application on the /usr/lib/eclipse directory with the command “ln –symbolic /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse /usr/bin/eclipse”. With this last command, we add a link to call eclipse inside a PATH that is already in our system variable allowing us to call it as a simple command in the console (try it by exiting the root account and using yours type the command “eclipse”, in an gui console).

It’s done, but, if you want to create a menu entry you can access the “Main Menu” software on “Preferences” and add an entry where you would like using the option “New Item”, for me I created on the Programming sub menu, below my entry for eclipse:

I hope this tutorial helps you out installing the Eclipse manually on Ubuntu. I like this way, because I can choose what version, when and where I would like to install it, and manually take care of it.

Best Regards!

Now along with Gutsy Gibbon

It has been some time that I didn’t run linux in my desktop at home. Since I changed my desktop (when my old one burn the motherbord up), I haven’t touched on a linux system (where I work, we use windows).

These days, I was talking about some linux distros at work and wanted to install it again at home.

After some problems to install my old Slackware 10.2 and the found the same problems with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, I managed to download a new distro version and the chosen one was the Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” (this link goes to the “Introducing the Gutsy Gibbon” by Mark Shuttleworth).

I never wanted to change from Slackware, but this version of Ubuntu is very cool and simplify some of the manual things I have ever done with my old distro. Like the installation of new software and a very nice updater that points to me the new security and recommended patches.

In the start I had a problem with a slow connection on the new os, but after some research found that the resolv.conf file had a not valid dns server and that made the system too slow to resolv the addresses I wanted to access. (If this information comes in hand for someone with the same problem)

Besides the problem, the system is very nice and simple to use. But I still want to install slackware, along with ubuntu, ofcourse.

Oops, I forgot. In this other link you can download the Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”, if you want.

Offline Silverlight

That’s nice to know from Ryan Stewart that Microsoft would want to make Silverlight work offline, something may come in the MIX convention next week, or not. It’s good for developers to have a broad list of technologies to choose when creating some application, specially one as good as silverlight.

Silverlight is a browser plugin that let developers create rich internet applications using any .NET language. It make possible to develop using animations, sound and data access, dynamically loading XML data into the application and manipulating it with DOM interface. The control of XML content on Silverlight is similar to the way it’s done in Ajax, but it seems that is a lot faster if compared to the JavaScript way, as Michael Arrington wrote on TechCrunch. Take a look on the previous link to know more about Silverlight.

It seems that Microsoft want to compete with Adobe on creating RIAs that can be accessible on the desktop, like the AIR runtime environment. There’s a controversial point here where some people consider Silverlight more like Flash than the technology applied on Flex and integrated with AIR. I believe that the two are nice platforms and have their own strengths, but I only tested Flex until now, maybe I will play with Silverlight a little to know it better.

What do you think? Can Silverlight be as good as AIR, or it can’t be compared.

Alegria!

Bon soir! That’s what’s for me now…

This is not like the other topics I have posted. This is about something that I watched yesterday and liked a lot. Yes, as the topic has already induced, it’s the wonderful show of Cirque du Soleil, Alegria.

I would recommend for everyone to see this, but don’t know if they are performing anywhere but here, in Brazil. If you live in the city of São Paulo or Porto Alegre, you must see, if you doesn’t and have conditions to travel, you must too! It’s colorful, with lots of very cool jokes and it focus on Alegria! There’s no way to come out of it without being touched by joy and fascination, a must see.

That’s all I will write, you need to go and see it for yourself, because that I will not enter in details. For the end of the post, I will place a piece of the theme music, Alegria, from the Terra’s lyrics site.

“Alegría
Come un lampo di vita
Alegría
Come un pazzo gridar
Alegría
Del delittuoso grido
Bella ruggente pena, seren
Come la rabbia di amar
Alegría
Come un assalto di gioia

Alegría
I see a spark of life shining
Alegría
I hear a young minstrel sing
Alegría
Beautiful roaring scream
Of joy and sorrow, so extreme
There is a love in me raging
Alegría
A joyous, magical feeling (…)“

Written by Franco Dragone, Manuel Trados, Claude Amesse and Rene Dupere

May you like this show! Alegria for you!

Firefox 3 Beta 3

It’s a little old but Firefox 3 Beta 3 was released in february 12. I managed to download it and tested on my virtual machine (I’m a little paranoid with betas) and tried to see some of the improvements and new stuff.

The first thing that is noticable about the third version is the new theme that comes out of the box. It was visually improved (still I like the actual version default theme) and had some new functionalities. The back and forward buttons seems to have their history function merged, the address bar has now a button in the left to drag and create a link to the page, in the right part of it we have a star to bookmark the current web site and the auto-complete web site address now inform us if it is bookmarked and other informations about the site.

There are some major upgrades on security like anti virus integration (for the happiness of windows users), Web Forgery Protection, malware protection and now firefox integrates with Vista Parental Control. For the status bar, we can now see download information on it, simplifying the download management.

Something that hooked up my attention was the integration of history and bookmark allowing us to search directly from both on auto-complete and sorting it based on visit frequency. It’s now possible to bookmark something with tags!

The Smart bookmarks button on the bookmark toolbar allows us to locate the most visited, the recent bookmarked and recent tags.

I’ve read in the release notes that the speed was improved and the memory usage was optimized but didn’t notice it, maybe I need to test it a little more… :)

That’s my impressions from the Firefox 3 Beta 3 plus some information that I read from the release notes. But it would be cool that you take your own impression from it using and sharing some problem you find with the mozilla community.

You can download it from this link and this other has informations about system requeriments.

Have fun!

Popup on Flex

These days I was playing with PopUpManager component on Flex. I was searching for some way to create Popup windows, in the moment for a Login screen, and came across this component.

It’s simple to use, you need only to import it on the script and use it directly. There are four things that you can set on a popup from the component, you can add a popup to the Manager, put a window on the top of others, center it and remove it from the Manager.

I will put some examples here. Let’s first consider creating a popup, we need to extend some component to create a container for the popup.

In this sample, we will use the TitleWindow component as the extended component. Before it’s creation, we need to set up some properties, we will leave it with the default.

Next, we need to set up some basic behaviourof the window, like it’s title, show it’s close button and the code that will take place when someone closes the window. To set all these things up we will need to do the following:

1. On the TitleWindow component set the parameter “showCloseButton” to true and set the function that will be called when the event “close” is captured (it can be anything, be creative);
2. In the script component, you need to add the definition of the function you set to the close event and code the “PopUpManager.removePopUp(this)” to close the window, you can add some other code too;
3. You can add, if you want, a title for the window using the”title” attribute.

With the new component implemented, we can now go to the main program and instantiate it to create the popup window, but, to achieve this, we can use two ways. In the first, we create an instance of the component you created and then add it to the PopUpManager, in the second, we use the PopUpManager to create the instance to us, then we cast it to the type of our component and send it to an empty variable.

The first way is done with this code:

var bar:foo;
bar = foo(PopUpManager.createPopUp(this,foo,true));


Being foo my customized component based on TitleWindow and bar the variable that will contain the instance of the popup. The first parameter is the parent component, the second the component type of the window to be created and the third is the modal definition (if other popups will be avaliable while this one is opened).

The second way:

var bar:foo = new foo();
PopUpManager.addPopUp(bar,this,true);

Being foo the same as above and bar the instance of the component, but this time we do instantiate it and only send it to the PopUpManager. The way you choose is almost identical, it’s up to you if you need to instantiate it manually or let the manager create it to you. In this case, the parameters changed a bit, the first is the component instance, the second the parent and the third is the modal definition, again.

I saw some usefulness in the second if your component have some parameters to be sent on the constructor, but I’m still meditating about it. Some day it can become one post or half…

Best Regards!

Get FLEXible!

I loved Flex the first time I saw it’s framework open and the first tags appeared in my screen! It’s increadible how you can manage ActionScript classes with MXML (XML-like user interface language) and extend these classes to create RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) based on Flash that can be built on the fly usign the AJAX Bridge.

You can, using Flex, create applications that access REST and Web Services to retrieve XML information and present it in a Flash like way, with standard components or create your own. It’s simple to use, flexible to customize and powerfull to use.

Enough of my personal impression. I will show a simple Flex application and you take your own conclusions.

There we go! We are using here six MXML tags to create this example, there are: Application, HBox, Tree, VBox, TextArea and XMLList.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">
<mx:HBox left="40" top="40">
<mx:Tree dataProvider="{TreeData}" labelField="@label" width="200"
height="500" change="output.text = event.currentTarget.selectedItem.@label;"/>
<mx:VBox>
<mx:TextArea id="output"/>
</mx:VBox>
</mx:HBox>
<mx:XMLList id="TreeData" xmlns="">
<item label="Item 1">
<item label="Item 1-1"/>
<item label="Item 1-2">
<item id="item121" label="Item 1-2-1"/>
</item>
</item>
<item label="Item 2"/>
</mx:XMLList>
</mx:Application>

Resulting in this:

As you can see, it’s simple to create a RIA in some minutes using this powerfull tool, that can be customized in many ways to suit our needs.

Thant’s all folks! Hope you enjoy!

The First Post (Not THAT Dramatic Huh?)

Hi! In the first place I need to thank you for looking around, besides there’s nothing to see…

As soon as my lazyness fade  some time happens to appear, I will be writing something about Flex, my new passion on the computer. I’ve spending some time learning this new tool and found there’s a lot more to see. Everything (or something like that) that I think that’s cool, I may write something about here. So, if you get yourself with nothing to do, take a look around again.

Bye!