Diogo Gomes Blog

Although the weather wasn’t the most pleasing, I decided to get back to my MTB weekend rides. Today (as a warmup ride) my brother and I took an all road ride to Praia da Barra, that is approximately 15km away from Aveiro.

Since I haven’t done any exercise since summer, my legs are very sore (can’t wait for tomorrow, when they will feel completely numb). But hopefully I will be back in shape in no time, in order to start doing more appealing tracks offroad.

An interesting side effect of these bike rides is that I’m taking a GPS with me that enables me to log the track. This information is very useful for the OpenStreetMap Project that requires your GPS logs to build a free geographic data repository (resembling Google Maps and Bing Maps). I’ve already contributed to the project in the summer, mapping some streets in Aveiro, but lots of places are still missing information.

My challenge is for you to take your GPS along with you next time you go out and upload back your tracks into OpenStreetMap.

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OS X – basic apps

December 14, 2009

I recently got a new Macbook Pro, which means I also moved to Snow Leopard (not that I couldn’t have stayed with Leopard).

I keep a Time Machine backup, and could have used it to move all my files to the new system. But since I had to many things installed which I don’t use anymore, I decided to move just my personal settings to the new system.

This constituted a great opportunity to list the applications I consider essential:

1 Password
Adium
Flip4Mac
git
Growl
Handbrake
KisMAC
Freemind
MacPorts
NetNewsWire
Office 2008
Papers
Perian
Seashore
Skype
Telephone
VLC
VMWare Fusion
Wireshark
XCode

And had to leave GPGMail out (no snow leopard version currently available)

The question now is: What am I missing ?

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Back in Berlin

November 20, 2009

Here I am, back in Berlin.

This has suddenly become my second city, since this year I’ve spent more time in Berlin then in Faro, Portugal…

I’m back in Fokus for the final meeting of project C-Cast. And as I prepare to leave, I know that I’ll be back in the beginning of next year for the project Workshop were we will be doing demos of the work done.

Unfortunately I’ve never took some days off to properly explore the city, one of these trips I must bring my family with me and show them around this great city.

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Codebits 2009

October 18, 2009

Been quite busy in the last weeks…

I’ve finally submitted my Phd thesis (more on that in another post), and been quite busy preparing project proposals for FP7 Call 5.

But I still had time to register for this year Codebits 2009. This year it will be held in Cordoaria Nacional.

Hope to meet you there!

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Why I’m not upgrading to Snow Leopard

September 2, 2009

It’s that time of the year again, when everyone rushes to upgrade their OS to their latest version that just got release or is in the process of…

Upgrades are done because people techies just need to have the latest version of everything. Even when the new version will enable them to do exactly the same task they were doing before. And lets face it, if the new version wasn’t released yet, you would still be able to do your work.

“do your work”, now this is tricky… because most of the times an upgrade to the OS breaks a lot of applications (and I’m not even calling in Linux Upgrades that sometimes leave the System Inoperable…).

Reports fly all over the Internet about failed applications, some quite amusing, and there is even a wiki just to track the subject.

In the end it all comes down to a week or two of low productivity for anyone that just had to be the first to upgrade…

I don’t have the time to be less productive, especially considering that I’m preparing the final version of my thesis. To lose a single day upgrading would cost me dearest…

I’m not saying that I will not upgrade, I’m just saying that I will wait until all dust settles.

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