Author Archives

Use Backbone JS without REST

Backbone.persistence is a simple adapter to use Backbone.js without using the REST persistence layer. Backbone is great, but not only for applications that use a remote persistence mechanism, for example, the demo TODO app uses the HTML5 localStorage instead of the usual REST layer. Sometimes you don’t even need to use localStorage, for example, when [...]

What I learned from Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman

A few years ago, while attending a “Computer Systems and Networks Security” class, I was talking with a friend of mine. We said to each other: “There’s no way in hell that two principals can exchange a key without a pre-shared key of some sort“. A few minutes later, our professor introduced us to the [...]

AppEngineLogTz – A User Script to convert timestamps in the Google App Engine logs to the browser’s current timezone

I noticed the time stamps used by the Google App Engine to show the application logs were all in  the Pacific Standard time Timezone. That’s just not useful for everyone not living in the pacific coast. So I wrote an user script you can use to show the time stamps in your browser’s timezone. I [...]

LXBus – Obtaining Lisbon bus waiting time information

A few months ago I started using a new service provided by carris to check how much time I have to wait for the bus. Problem is, people at Carris never heard about webservices and rest apis, so I had to send an e-mail and wait for an automated reply with information about waiting times [...]

Browser fingerprinting

Tomei conhecimento do estudo da Electronic Frontier Foundation intitulado “Web Browsers Leave ‘Fingerprints’ Behind as You Surf the Net”, através do Miguel Almeida, mas já vi várias opiniões em vários sítios diferentes. Apesar de achar que os resultados do estudo são de facto preocupantes, acho que se está a exagerar bastante. Ao correr o teste [...]

PrinScreen RSS File – Long live Prt.sc… sort of

Recently, one of my favorite blog aggregators died, but left us with a nice OPML file containing all rss feeds from the authors of the aggregator. Yahoo! My pipes couldn’t parse the opml file, so I built a python script to do it and hosted it in my server. The RSS File is updated every [...]

opml2rss.py – An opml to rss converter

I just uploaded another script to my github repository. It’s a python script to parse an opml file and generate a rss file with entries from all rss feeds in the rss file not older than a certain number of days. You can get the script here: http://github.com/…/opml2rss.py The script has a few configuration parameters [...]

New github repository

I just set up a github repository to hold my code. Here’s the link http://github.com/simao/mycode Currently, the repository contains only the code of my latest Python script, rssTorrents.py. Tweet

Automatically download torrent files from a RSS feed

I was looking for a way to parse a RSS feed I built using yahoo pipes and add new torrents to Transmission to download them automatically. I couldn’t find anything useful, so I just wrote a python script to do just that. If you want to use it, you’ll need to configure the first lines [...]

Emacs easy window switching

I just found out about a another cool emacs plugin: WindMove This packages allows you to switch windows withouth using C-x o. WindMove is included with emacs, just include the following code in your .emacs: (when (fboundp ‘windmove-default-keybindings) (windmove-default-keybindings)) More info @ http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WindMove Tweet