My name is Sérgio Bernardino (a.k.a. smpb), and I am a software engineer, hobbyist photographer, and all-around geek. I hail from Lisbon, Portugal. Feel free to save this information and contact me at any time.
I enjoy seeing the world through the unique sight of a camera.
Please, check out my photos here.
This is my official home on the web, but quite often you'll find me in a lot of other places as well.
Markdown is text, just plain text. Its the one format that has not changed over all the years. Oh sure, we’ve gone from a 7-bit ascii code to UTF-8, but all text editors happily handle the old text formats. And when they stop, a small C program will fix it.
Plain text, and therefore Markdown, are as future-proof as you can get in computing.
Since I can remember I’ve been acutely sensitive to file format lock-in, for all the reasons ranging from portability, to maintainability, and future-proofing. Plain text has always been my format of choice for anything involving writing.
In that context, Markdown (or any sort of light-weight markup language for plain text, in fact), is nothing new or revolutionary. It has, however, become increasingly popular this past few years, and it is a trend that I find most welcome.
The more people rave about it as the pinnacle of data portability, the more tools spring out of the woodwork to support it, and facilitate its creation, editing, and consumption. And that’s great!
Tools like iAWriter, TrunkNotes, and plain old - reliable - vi, are common-place (and increasingly valuable) in my daily workflow1. This post itself has been written with Markdown formatting, and on the day the format is replaced by “The Next Big Thing (TM)”, all the time I spend buried away in Perl code should keep me, and my data, safe enough2.
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I stopped playing D&D during the transition from the 3.5 Edition to the 4th1. I was somewhat burned out after playing the former for a long period of time without meaningful interruptions, and the new mechanics introduced by the latter did not grip me at all.
To see news of Wizards (or should I say, Hasbro) planning a new major edition a mere three years after the debut of the Fourth Edition (by comparison, the gap between the 3rd and 4th was eight years, with the 3.5 revision showing up roughly mid-cycle) really rings alarm bells to me. It looks clear now that the Fourth Edition wasn’t all that successful in stopping the increasing loss of players to the digital RPG front (such as MMO video games), and the like.
Having them boast that, this time around, what the community wants truly matters to them is just silly, and Penny Arcade nails the “why” perfectly. People who are really serious about pen & paper roleplaying games aren’t at all aligned with what Wizards really needs: people willing to spend unreasonable amounts of money on renewing their core book sets and on increasingly contrived accessories like cards and miniatures.
You can catch up on that experience, through some writing I did during that time, on Draconus Dictum. It’s only available in Portuguese, though. ↩
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Incredibly comprehensive list of readily available books related with programming.
I find lists like these to be a double-edged sword. They are very useful, but one can harm himself with too much information, by quickly losing focus and the realization that actually doing something is as important (if not more) than just endlessly reading about how it is done.
Still, this one is a keeper, and definitely worth a browse.
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As of late, Google has been increasing the rate in which it brings the broom out of the closet to sweep its portfolio of products, in an effort towards shoving the weakest links under the rug of deprecation.
In its recent “fall sweep”, the broom hit squarely in the face of Code Search, a tool I find most useful. As such, the announcement of its untimely death annoys me, and prompted me to seek for an alternative.
Fortunately, I was steered towards Koders which appears to be a very competent replacement.
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A reasonably known paper that was on my reading list for far too long.
It did not disappoint.
I really enjoy these sort of speculative exercises, and this one in particular is very interesting. For those still on the fence about this being worth their time or not, I can provide no argument more compelling than the reasoning already present in the paper’s introduction:
Apart from the interest this thesis may hold for those who are engaged in futuristic speculation, there are also more purely theoretical rewards. The argument provides a stimulus for formulating some methodological and metaphysical questions, and it suggests naturalistic analogies to certain traditional religious conceptions, which some may find amusing or thought-provoking.
Further reading on the subject of this paper is available, and sprawls far and wide in broad directions. I’d highly recommend those interested to - at least - check the FAQ afterwards.
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