Goodbye Jorte, hello ownCloud
30 de Maio de 2014, 20:43 - sem comentários aindaAfter I migrated from Palm Treo to Android phones, I was very displeased with the Calendar application. I don’t use Google Apps (my phone is AOSP), which only leaves me with (argh!) Exchange for online-synced calendar. Besides, the first incarnations of the Calendar application in AOSP were barely usable.
So I just went for a standalone free (as in beer) Calendar application named Jorte, which is really good. Recently, I’ve been investigating ownCloud and CalDAV, and decided to review the state of current AOSP Calendar application. To my surprise, it have evolved a lot (to the point of being usable), but still no CalDAV sync.
So I found DAVdroid in F-droid repository, which is an interesting application that can register a CalDAV account that is usable by AOSP Calendar. So, now, I am able to use ownCloud calendaring, ownCloud CalDAV server and my phone, and, since free-as-in-speech software is much better than free-as-in-beer, I decided to ditch Jorte.
But Jorte doesn’t have an option to export its data to an Icalendar file (why make things easy, right?). All it spits is a csv-file as a backup. (As a side-note, Jorte seems to intentionally not provide an Icalendar-file export option… as the ‘rrule’ field they use in the csv follow the same rules Icalendar standard dictates, they might be using it internally). Since this is pretty trivial stuff, I just coded a Ruby script to do the job. I released it to my github repo, just in case anyone else finds it useful.
ConQuest DICOM Server
3 de Abril de 2014, 18:15 - sem comentários aindaI’ve been busy with Real Life™ lately, but I managed to get some time to work on ConQuest DICOM Server packaging for Debian. I’m almost reaching upload state. The work can be checked at GitHub.
It’s compiled for i386 in an unsigned APT repo, if anybody wants to play with it before I upload. These are the sources:
# Wheezy
deb http://people.debian.org/~spectra/debian spectra-wheezy/
# Sid
deb http://people.debian.org/~spectra/debian spectra-sid/
# Ubuntu Saucy
deb http://people.debian.org/~spectra/ubuntu spectra-saucy/
Enjoy it.
Nostalgia time
3 de Dezembro de 2012, 18:49 - sem comentários aindaMy parents will soon be moving to a smaller home, so they are digging up a lot of stuff of my sister and mine past. Among my stuff, they just sent me my first computer (which was, of course, the first computer of my father’s company I was using in the spare time). I couldn’t believe they kept that. It was an Unitron Apple ][ 64K!! I just had it cleaned and took this picture:
Due to the closed informatics market Brazilians were subject to at the time, it came with a full set of manuals in Portuguese which taught me how to code in Basic (I was too young to learn English at the time)… Interesting how a bad policy like that can result in a Good Thing™ sometimes. 
Is it just me or does this picture made you nostalgic also?
Decision-making by flipping a coin
20 de Novembro de 2012, 8:56 - sem comentários aindaYesterday I was discussing in an online board how to break a decision deadlock in life. There are real deadlocks, but I don’t think they are very frequent… most of the time, doing a pros and cons analysis is enough to decide what to do. Sometimes our judgement is impaired by lack of objectivity or by our inability to see things from a different point of view (it’s hard to think straight when everything seems to be falling apart around you); talking to a friend or relative can help in these situations.
But there are times when nothing helps. When you are really stuck and nothing seems to break the deadlock. At these times I give it one or two days, sleep on the issue and if I cannot come up with a decision I assume the alternatives are equivalent to me and just flip a coin.
Of course, this will do if you can postpone the decision, giving yourself (and your inner self) time to decide on a course-of-action. But is there some way to speed up the process? During the discussion, someone came up with a rather smart quote by Rothstein character in Boardwalk Empire TV series:
Flip a coin. When it’s in the air, you’ll know what side you’re hoping for.
I found it an interesting way to give your inner self an ultimatum: decide or luck will decide instead. I’ve never did it like that, for I would not flip a coin unless it’s my last resort. Being such a clever psychological idea, I doubted it originated in the TV series itself, so I went on pursue of the original idea. I found a Danish poet and mathematician called Piet Hein, who wrote a poem about it circa 1969:
A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP
Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
and you’re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No — not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping.
And also, there are a Donald Duck comic called “Flip Decision” circa 1953 that introduces Flipism philosophy, which supports a rather radical anecdotal variant: make all decisions by flipping a coin.
Piet Hein or Rothstein character idea is much better than Flipism, of course. Does anyone knows any older sources of the same idea?
That’s a lot to do!
7 de Novembro de 2012, 19:06 - sem comentários aindaReading about Michael Stapelberg’s codesearch I bet a lot of people had the same idea. I just had to post a screenshot of it:
It seems we have a lot to fix 
