This past 3 days I was at Codebits. That, I have to say, was one of the best tech conferences I’ve ever been.

In the first day, the workshops were really interesting, and quick enough to never get boring, so that we could jump right to the next one, keeping it always interesting.

Second day, after 6 hours sleeping at Living Loung Hostel (recommended), we’ve arrived just in time of learning from Mitch Altman about his Tv-B-Gone and how to stick with an idea until we can make it come true. He’s a truly inspiring person, maybe one of the most interesting workshop there, despites not being technical at all. He also had a place were he was teaching people on how to make you’re on tv-b-gone and other gadgets.

After lunch, the hacking begun. Along with some friends, we’ve started hacking a web platform for creating and managing journeys. The idea came from the bus travel, were we’ve thought that it could be nice to plan a travel online, with some guidance on means of transportation and points of interest to see. The ideas started to flow, but the time to implement was short, so you’ve managed to create a nice prototype, using SAPO services for getting information and twitter for status updates and a couple more of things. Only later we’ve leaned that the idea of the contest was way far from that, there was no need to actually have something operational, so the project didn’t get much notice, but we’ve learned a lot from it.

We’ll back next year  for sure:)

Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Lisbon, attending Codebits, a 3 day conference organized by SAPO. Despite the late inscription, I’ve been accepted and since this is my first year attending, I’m really looking forward to it. The place is looking great, ready to accommodate 3 days of hacking by 600 attendees. You can check the calendar here.

I already have my idea and team for the programming contest, let’s see how it works out for us.

See you there?

It was a nice dinner, and it is always good to get to know better the ones behind the emails or posts out there.

Before leaving, we’ve had an open-gift exchange. Everyone was supposed to bring something, like some code, a picture, an image, anything. Since I’ve forgot to print it, I’ll share here the little ncurses based application I’ve wrote to share. Download, compile it with g++ -lncurses xmas2007.cpp and run it with ./a.out. Merry Xmas.

This is for you!

Google’s Higly Open Participation Contest will bring together young developers and open-source. They’ve gathered some great projects, like Apache, GNOME, Python, and many other, that will now give to the contestants several type of assignments, like writing code or documentation and patching bugs.

At the conclusion of the contest, contestants will receive a t-shirt and certificate for completing at least one task and 100 USD for every three tasks completed (maximum 500 USD per contestant).

Still waiting?

Here’s a video showing some of the already built applications . Amazing!

Version 1.0 is ready for download for Windows and Mac, but the final release for Linux is still being developed in a partnership with Novell.

What to learn more?

So, remember it, phpFormGenerator can be of great help to you when you have enormous forms to code.

The work is a simulation problem, coded in C++. We’ve had to simulate a gymnasium, calculating the load of the equipments during the day, with a random number of clients using each one differently. Not that hard, but the lack of practice took me 3 hours around debugging, in order to find this head aching bug inside an if statement.

It is know close to finished, I’ll work on it a bit more now, and, after some good hours of sleep, I’ll try to end it.

In order to control them, I wrote a small PHP script to write the current date and my rank into a file, appending my rank to that same file every time the script is used.

I’ll share it here, it might be helpful for someone!

<?php

/* This script is intended to get your rank from technorati
* and save it with the current date into a file.
*
* This is just meant for someone who wants to learn php or
* anyone who wants to keep track of their technorati rank.
*
* The call is made using a REST-ful interface.
* Send either a HTTP GET or a HTTP POST to
* http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?key=[apikey]&url=[blog url]
* with mandatory parameters “key” and “url” and one optional
* parameter to request various formats.
*
* You’re free to change it in whatever way you want to.
* Please keep the credits.
*
* Tiago Boldt Sousa
* http://blog.tiagoboldt.net
*/

//Change this to any data
$mykey=”APIKEY”; //Get your technorati api key, and put it in there
$myblog=”http://blog.tiagoboldt.net”;//Change it for your blog
$filename=”technoratiranks.txt”;//Rename the file if you want to

//Creating the URL
$techurl=”http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo”;
$myurl=$techurl .”?” . “key=” . $mykey . “&url=” . $myblog;

//Opening the URL
$fp=fopen($myurl,”r”) or die(“Not connecting”);
$data=stream_get_contents($fp);
fclose($fp);

//Parse the XML into arrays
$parser=xml_parser_create();
xml_parse_into_struct($parser,$data,$values,$index);
xml_parser_free($parser);

//Get your RANK from the XML
$myrank=($values[$index["RANK"][0]]["value"]) or die (“Impossible to get your rank”);

//Write your current rank into a file
$fp=fopen($filename,”a”) or die(“Unable to create or write the file”);
fwrite($fp,date(“F d, Y”).” Rank:”. $myrank.”\n”);
fclose($fp);

?>