November 2nd, 2007
Last month I completed the visit of the 4 major US universities that were on my To Visit list. After Sanford and Berkeley during my internship in California, visited Boston this October for a conference and had the opportunity to visit the Harvard and MIT campuses.
While Harvard is a beautiful place to visit with all the fancy coffee shops and restaurants around Harvard Square and a very nice bookstore, that makes you feel you are still in the XVIII century.
As for MIT, not much to see, besides lots of geeks (yes, they are easily spotable) and lots lots of bicycles in the parking lots. Just a few funny buildings like the ones in the picture.
As for Boston city, although at first it looks just like a small size NYC, after a few walks around the city you can feel its own vibe and style. For food, you must try the Italian restaurantss in the North End. For guided tours, the list of attractions listed on the trolleys is just a joke, i.e., “Access to MIT campus and Harvard Square” means: we let you out close to a subway station where you can catch the subway to there 
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October 23rd, 2007
I’ve been looking at JPA - Java Persistence Architecture and decided to play a bit with OpenJPA using DB2 as the back-end. My goal: to persist and query XML data in DB2, making use of DB2’s pureXML capabilities to query the XML data using SQL/XML’s XMLQUERY() function.
However, while OpenJPA has an extensive documentation, the examples are not always complete and there isn’t a lot of information on the web regarding OpenJPA error determination and solving. So, here are some recommendations for some of the problems I have encountered. The class xml.Address is the one to be persisted as XML in the database using JPA and it is stored as the field shipAddress of the Order objects.
[java] Exception in thread “main” <openjpa-1.0.0-r420667:568756 fatal user error>
org.apache.openjpa.persistence.ArgumentException:
Type “class xml.Address” does not have persistence metadata.
Suggestion: Remove the reference to xml.Address from persistence.xml.
[java] Exception in thread “main” <openjpa-1.0.0-r420667:568756 nonfatal user error>
org.apache.openjpa.persistence.InvalidStateException:
Encountered unmanaged object “xml.Address@9b2a51″ in
persistent field “xml.Order.shipAddress” of managed object “xml.Order@12b3349″
during flush. However, this field does not allow cascade persist.
You cannot flush unmanaged objects.
[java] FailedObject: xml.Address@9b2a51
Suggestion: Make sure you have no @Entity or @Embeddable annotations in xml.Address. The main annotation is @XmlRootElement.
[java] Exception in thread “main” <openjpa-1.0.0-r420667:568756 fatal general error>
org.apache.openjpa.persistence.PersistenceException:
“xml” doesnt contain ObjectFactory.class or jaxb.index
Suggestion: add a file jaxb.index into your xml package containing all the classes to be persisted as XML: a file containing Address in our case.
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October 18th, 2007
For the GIMP users that, like me, keep complaining that Photoshop has so much more filters to do some fancy effects, the agony is over
I just found this today, but it dates back to 2004. There is a GIMP plugin that handles Photoshop plugins. It is called PSPI and it works like a charm on the filters I have tested so far.
Here are the instructions on how to get it working on Windows:
- download the binary package from here.
- copy the plugin file to “C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins”
- start GIMP
- click on Menu Xtns -> Photoshop Plug-in Settings
- add the folders where you have your photoshop plugins (.exe or .8bf files)
- restart GIMP
- all the compatible plugins in the folders you specified in step 5 will show up under the Filters menu (*)
This was a new for me, and I’m quite happy as there was a couple of photoshop filters that I like to play with sometimes (just for fun, but still).
(*) For some odd reason, all my plugins appear under the sub-menu “Flaming Pear”, the creators of the first photoshop plugin I loaded into GIMP.
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October 17th, 2007
I’m back to fiddling around with my Ruby on Rails experiments(1)(2). I was able to create a very useful 2-way mapping between Ruby objects and xml data stored in DB2 pureXML. Basically, trying to replicate some of ActiveRecord’s functionality but for XML data. I still find it odd, though, that both ROXML and xml-mapping haven’t had much activity as of late. I’m wondering if there is any new OXM library around that I don’t know of.
Also on the same topic:
- the main DB2 on Rails website is up and running again, with a revamped design and now using wordpress instead of typo.
- a new version of the ibm_db driver was also released, containing several bugfixes. Update it through gems (gem update ibm_db) or from here: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyibm/
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October 17th, 2007
Originally uploaded by Vitor Rodrigues.
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October 14th, 2007
Peter Bowers is one of my favorite photographers on Flickr. His canoe nature shots are just amazing, and the proof of that is that this shot has been faved by more than 1000 people already and this one is close to reaching 2000 faves, probably the highest number ever reached on flickr. He has always been an inspiration for me since I found his flickr page more than one year ago. The most surprising thing about Peter? He is just an amateur photographer, with a regular job and taking pictures on his free time.
This past Tuesday, I had the pleasure to attend a public lecture by Peter, where he explained some of his techniques, his inspiration and we even got to hear about some peculiar stories that can happen to any photographer, like encounters with bears or being gate-locked in a private property
Peter showed 3 8-minute slideshows, and discussed a few shots from each show telling us the story and the technique behind it. Here are a few notes I got from the lecture and that may interest you if you are or want to be a nature photographer:
- the most important piece of gear for landscape photography is the tripod. You don’t need expensive lenses or ultra-modern bodies… you need a sturdy tripod so you can get sharp images. Some of Peter’s shots were taken with his camera’s kit lens.
- timing is very important, as the best light is before sunrise and after sunset. In a cold country like Canada, sacrifice is needed Some of Peter’s extraordinary shots were taken at -20C, early in the morning for example.
- Rule-of-Thirds and Near-Middle-Far rules should be used as guidelines and not strict rules.
- The “secret” for most of Peter’s sunrise/sunset shots is a ND grad filter, from Sing-Ray. Using the ND grad filter he can get the perfect exposure for both the sky and land.
- his favorite aperture if F11-F13, and he focus at 1/3 of the depth of field. With such a small aperture, a tripod and a long shutter speed, all the depth of field will be sharp.
- be prepared to fail Most of the days you will go out and won’t find any decent light to create your shots, so just try again in the future.
- another thing I noticed in Peter’s lecture is that he likes remote places. Most of his shots are taken while doing canoe trips, and even in the city he likes to take his shots from places hard to get, to guarantee a unique perspective of the scene.
Overall, it was an excellent lecture, one of the many organized by TPMG, one of the biggest photography groups in the world if not the bigger, and from which I’m a proud member.
Here are some of my favorite shots from his pool:
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September 30th, 2007
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September 26th, 2007
I have been running Yahoo Ads and Google Adense on my blog pages for over several months now. Although I am yet to make a few cents on advertising, the reason why I keep the ads running is that I do plan to write a detailed comparison of both tools sometime in the future. Google beats all of its competitors in context search and advertising, but in my opinion Yahoo is so behind only by self responsibility. From several constructive comments I’ve made on their YPN Blog, the answers, if any, were vague and the problems persisted, with completely out of context ads.
But today I found something really fun while browsing trough one of my articles, “The World is Flat“:
Food for thought:
- being Friedman’s book such an actual and popular topic, how can Yahoo not find any more relevant ads to publish in this page?
- Google paying for ads in the Yahoo network? This one makes even less sense :-)
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September 24th, 2007
In a time when more and more person talk about Google Big Brother posture, new examples of their constant supervision of our actions pop up frequently. There are several webpages I prefer to search on google each time instead of bookmarking them. It may look counter-productive, but it is actually quicker, since those sites are the first search result. One of them is the Google analytics website. Today, however, my search had something new on it:
We all knew that Google saves all the information about our searches, but for some reason, the fact that they even displayed it to me, frightened me a bit, not because of my searches, but because of all the other information that we, sooner or later, exchange in an email, like banking, confidential, login credentials, etc…
I must say that I’m facilitating this task to Goole, as I use Firefox’s GMail notifier plugin, that keeps me logged in all time, giving Google everything it needs to trace all my steps… One must decide whether to surrender to the inevitable or to delay it with counter measures…
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September 24th, 2007
Last week, after my presentation at University of Minho about the DB2 on Campus and DB2 Student Ambassador programs and the pureXML features in DB2, one student came to me and asked me if DB2 was available for Mac. My answer was a ‘no’, but things will change pretty soon.
My ‘office neighbor’ Antonio Cangiano just made public IBM’s intention of releasing a DB2 Express-C port to Intel Mac. This is one more big step from DB2 Express-C towards the community, after very open licensing conditions, Ruby on Rails driver and adapter, soon-to-come Python and Django driver and adapter, DB2 Express-C orum and DB2 Express-C blog, etc….
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