JPCosta

Stack Overflow

I just found Stack Overflow and its getting nearly an addiction for me. It’s an awesome site where you can post questions/answers in all kinds of programming topics, with a point/rank system that rates both the quality of the questions as well as the quality of the answers.

I found there answers to questions that were bugging me for quite a while, and browsing the top questions is a great resource for knowledge.

Visit the site or the wikipedia entry

Recently I came across a great addon for firefox: Ubiquity.

Although I must say that it looks impressive, I’m not sure if it will turn out to be really useful in daily tasks.
Ubiquity works like a special command window (bring it up with Ctrl+Space) enabling the use of user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs.

From Ubiquity‘s page:

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

1. Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
2. Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
3. Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
4. Extend the browser functionality easily.

I found this brain teaser on the portuguese mensa forum and I think it is really interesting:

There are 3000 closed door’s and 3000 doorman’s. The first doorman opens all doors. The second doorman closes every second door. The third doorman goes to every third door and opens it if it was previously closed and closes it if it was previously opened etc..

How many doors remain closed after the 3000th doorman ?

Foritensum is an incredibly difficult logical/IQ test. What makes it interesting is that you don’t need any previous knowledge, and anyone can give it a try. As the author says in its homepage:

Foritensum is what some people would call an IQ test. It was inspired by Logima Strictica 36 by Robert Lato. I have tried to come up with a good mix of problems, some of them hard and others extremely difficult. Foritensum is meant to be culture fair; an alien from a different planet should have the same chance to score well as someone raised and living in the western world.

Give it a try! The rules are simple, 1) No time limit and 2) Do not discuss solutions with anyone