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Black Toilet Paper

Posted on by nuno

This is hilarious.

Renova, a Portuguese brand for Tissues/Toilet Paper/etc, came up with the idea of Black Toilet Paper. I guess Renova wrote about it in some blogs and it’s becoming quite popular, specially in the US. A lot of trendy places in NYC are adopting it already.

Check out this video.

I’ve read the following comment on a forum:

I’ve tried the stuff – was in Portugal a little while ago visiting an old business partner of mine and needed to go… and while sitting there doing what I was doing a caught myself actually staring at it. It’s a funky idea, but ah, well… it is softer than anything we have here in the US. I was so impressed I bought a bunch and brought it home and am now thinking of exposing it to the rest America…

Sustainable Disco

Posted on by nuno

You can read everything here.

Rotterdam introduces the first ‘Sustainable Dance Club’.

(…)

Producing and consuming in a responsible manner are no longer reserved for a small group. Enviu – innovators in sustainability – and Döll – studio for the art of building – have developed the Sustainable Dance Club together. An attractive way of clubbing combined with a low impact on the environment. Soon you can generate energy while dancing and flush the toilet with rainwater. The color of the walls changes as a reaction to the heat without any energy use and you can drink a biological beer at the water basin on the ‘relax roof’. These are just a few examples of what the Sustainable Dance Club can entail.

Wine tasting

Posted on by nuno

Last night, some friends and I had a wine tasting session at home.

I bought 2 bottles from Douro, 1 from Alentejo, some spicy cheese, ewe cheese, creamy cheese from “Serra da Estrela”, bloodpudding, chorizo and I also made a caprice salad for everyone.

The wine choices were:

All of the three wines were really good and I would recommend all of them, but the big surprise was Crasto. Made from “Tinta Roriz”, “Tinta Barroca”, “Touriga Franca” and “Touriga Nacional” grapes, this wine while still very young, has complex tannins and a balanced acidity. I’m sure it will be a potential “honey from the gods” in a few years.

Cortes de Cima has always produced really good wine and it has never disappointed me. I have been familiar with wines from Cortes de Cima such as “Chaminé” and “Cortes de Cima” for some years. It was the first time that I tried this Syrah which is well structured, with complex tannins and good acidity. On a whim yesterday I decided to buy the top wine from the selection – Incognito 2003 – which I plan to keep in my cellar for the next 2 or 3 years.

Evel was a shot in the dark. I had heard good reviews about it and therefore decided to purchase it. Powerful body and flavour are interlaced with the boldly structured acidity and excellent tannin resulting in an elegant and perfectly balanced red wine.

Time for changes..

Posted on by nuno

I guess I moved to WordPress, which makes perfect sense since I’m a PHP guy. And so far I like it better although I don’t see too many feature differences. I must confess that I’m not addicted to blogs though.

I also moved to Dreamhost. These guys rock!

I would like to thank Bruno Pedro for providing me hosting for my blog until now…

New SAPO Webmail

Posted on by nuno

Some people complained that I don’t update my blog for a long time.

Well, I can say that I haven’t updated my blog since I started working on a new project that was launched a couple of minutes ago. It’s the new SAPO Webmail (beta) – http://mail.sapo.pt/.

Jan Schneider already mentioned this project in his blog some weeks ago. So you can read there all the techy bits. I’ll just summarize them in one paragraph.

It’s completely AJAX based and it uses all the new hype tecnhologies that we all read about everyday.
The development cycle started last October, so in my opinion it took 5 months to become the best Webmail around. 🙂

The new Webmail is still not for everyone. Most active SAPO ADSL users are going to be the first ones to have access to the new beta Webmail (130k email addresses for now), although everyone else is free to ask for access. Just login into the new Webmail (check the beta checkbox) and you’ll be redirected to a request access form.

Zend Certification

Posted on by nuno

Bruno and I took the Zend Certification exam here at the conference and I’m glad to announce that we both passed and we’re both ZCE now… 🙂

Here’s my certification authentication.

The exam had some tricky questions and it covers pretty much all of the aspects of PHP but I can’t say it was difficult.

For the ones who want to take this certification I really advise them to read the book: “The Zend PHP Certification Practice Book” written by John Coggeshall and Marco Tabini. You can buy it here.

PHP and Unicode

Posted on by nuno

PHP and Unicode
Andi Gutmans from Zend, Andrei Zmievski from Yahoo!

– Definitions
. Character Encoding Form: representation of a character set using a number of integer codes (code values)

– Multi-i18n-what?
. Dealing with multiple encodings is a pain
. Different algorithms, conversion, detection, validation, processing… understanding
. Dealing with multiple languages is a pain too
. But cannot be avoided in this day and age
Continue reading →

Techniques for Building Enterprise PHP Applications

Posted on by nuno

Techniques for Building Enterprise PHP Applications
by Chuck Hagenbuch, John Coggeshall, Rock Mutchler from Zend

Problem: client’s site was slow

Resolutions:
– Profile site lloking for slow pages/functions in current system
. Patch this bottle necks with a faster solution:
for example caching dynamic content with zend platform or fixing poorly written code

– Identify small changes that causae large effect on site performance
. indexing tables properly
. removing large download from apache (with ZDS)
. Rewritting expensive PHP processes
Continue reading →