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 don’t use Google Talk much, but I use my Gmail account everyday, and I usually keep a tab with it open.
Via the Google Operating System blog, I found an extremely easy way to add a simple chat system in my blog, allowing users to talk with me (but not among them selfs, my blog is not a IRC chatroom).

Just create a new Text widget space and copy paste the HTML you get from the badge generation page.

I have no idea how useful this will be for me, but it is sure a nice thing to have!
Go ahead, if you find me online, drop me a line or two. I promise I will answer

After vising again Blender’s homepage I’m thinking about giving another shot to my old 3D modeling hobby. Blender has changed a lot since I last used it in 2004/2005, a really set of nice features has been added and the community is really strong and supporting, judging by the average comment count on every Blender Nation blog post. I still have my old gallery up, but it is now really outdated

I’m sure that soon, the release of Big Buck Bunny, Blender’s amazing open source animation project codename Peach, will revamp the whole community. A lot of people will see this movie and get excited about Blender 3D, so I will be just one more of this guys, but I already know a little about it and hopefully I won’t have to go through the tutorials again!

Today I started to play around with Semmle! What a great tool this seems to be. I installed the eclipse plugin

Since I don’t know much about code analysis and metrics, the short descriptions for the queries shipped with the app don’t help me much, so here is a quite nice description for each metric.