Yeah, it’s a pretty old (almost silly) aspiration I have, born in the days I’d consider myself in “good” shape (read “late 90s”). I’ve decided to take that one down from my bucket list so it’s finally getting [in] shape! 
My friend Pedro helped with crawling for information about the usual distances and such. The Portuguese Triathlon Federation (FTP) seems to support the super sprint, sprint and olympic distances, which is more than enough – do I hear anyone for an olympic participation? 
2nd place in 2nd Asprela race - it even rhymes! 
- It would probably be much easier to make minor modifications to my regular training then to try getting in shape again. Guess I just didn’t know that starter distances were quite accessible.
- 10 years ago I ran a lot more than I’m even able to today, in about half the time!
- Less wrinkles and white hair look best in photos, no matter how (I was trying to avoid drawing this argument for the sake of “other” elders out there!… )
I should mention that some extra inspiration also came from others (most notably Jim Ley, one of the earliest SVG giants who started taking sports seriously a few years ago), as well as all “running freaks” which joyfully populate my jogging itineraries.
Finally, I’m trying to keep here (at heldermagalhaes.com or trib4thirty.info) some sort of progress log. When I first had the idea, in the beginning of 2011, my weight was about 68Kg. I expect to gain a little weight (as muscle is more dense than fat) and resume measuring timings with some degree of accuracy: I currently run, swim or ride the bike “until I’m tired” or “am short of time to keep going”, both not really precise units of time…
Consider joining me! I’d be delighted.
Note 2011-01-16: Portuguese Triathlon Federation (FTP) logo adapted from one available here
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Detail of the final score between LEIC and Man. City, with focus on Sven Eriksson
[People] struck the equalizer as LEIC deservedly took big-spending Manchester City to a replay after a pulsating FA Cup third-round tie.
I was astonished. Spending quality time with the family in a Sunday evening, at a local bakery, I never though I’d see such amazing event transmitted live and on paid cable TV: The spectacular but amateur L.E.I.C. versus the Manchester giants (more than professional and paid in gold, if you known what I mean). What could happen?
A feeling of frustration came into my mind, though: why wasn’t I at least invited? I know I’ve been skipping training (the team regularly meets for an indoor soccer session at Wednesday nights), as things have been pretty rough lately at work but… Not even given a chance to chase world-class soccer stars? I did momentaneously toss some curse words in my mind to Nitro (a.k.a. Ricardo), our word-class team manager, which quickly faded away once I realized I absolutely had no reason for that – ultimately he is the coach and therefore knows what’s best for the team…
I then saw Sven Eriksson (Manchester City manager) worried face and couldn’t resist taking a couple photographs (to the TV set). I pretty sure he was thinking something like:
OMG! They told me not to mess with the geeks and I laughed at them…
Who’s laughing now, Sven? Yeah, I thought so…
Note 2011-01-13: Opening blockquote took from here, slightly adapted but… Who cares? This was fun!
Back when I entered college, I adopted the nickname HellThere in IRC and other chat services – ICQ was quite popular back then, remember? I don’t…
The reasoning behind the nickname, as one probably already guess it, was the phonetic similarity with my own name – Helder, in case you’ve missed it!
Thing is, when I started using international servers (freenode, Mozilla IRC Network and so on) the “Hell” caused some disturbance in users from countries where the name Helder is uncommon, probably associating it with chaotic and destructive users… 
I then (temporarily) stopped using it, and started using the “boring” OwnnameLastname in most services, although it didn’t feel like a nickname at all. 
Today, I decided to start using a “decent” nickname again. It’ll be using yet another pun: Lthere. It seems even more confusing, which is the idea after all.
So, if you don’t see HelderMagalhaes around anymore, just scroll to the “L” word (not that one, silly! ) and that’s probably me.
Cheers,
Lthere
Update 2011-01-11: Added Batman-inspired image created from logo (shamelessly copied from here); “Batman Returns” font found here.
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Screenshot of SVG image after rotation, zoom and pan
I’ve just finished a demo which tries to fill a long caveat among SVG implementations: a consistent front-end for internal document navigation (zoom, pan, etc.). It took me a while to workaround and document a few subtle bugs in several implementations, as well as recently integrating SVG Web, which has it’s own set of limitations, but it’s ready (at last!).
What are you waiting for? Go ahead and try it!
Hello world!
First of all, a quick apology to fellow Portuguese readers for deciding to publish this blog in English. It wasn’t very hard to decide, as English is the language of the Internet, but me being a big fan of my mother tongue made the choice slightly less obvious. Naturally, I reserve myself the right to publish some blog entries in Portuguese but, in general, English it is (this applies to comments as well).
One of things I don’t have a strong opinion yet is whether should I publish previously written material with a date in the past (when the material was actually created, I believe WordPress allows doing this) or start those blog entries with “a couple of years ago” or similar introduction… My current opinion goes to publish stuff in a past date, reason why I named this post.
I intend to make this the beginning of a revamp of my previous website which was severely outdated and missing lots of relevant content which I intended to share in the last few years. This can take a while (forever? ), as I intend to focus on writing new stuff, but definitely there’s aged material to share.
By the way, in case you are wondering, the blog’s subtitle (“Half-baked stuff for an imperfect World” as of this writing) was somehow inspired by a curious site which I visited more than 5 years ago (!) and only again today just to pull the link here. I intend to publish stuff in a less polished state, as that (perfectionism) was the #1 reason for taking so long to start publishing more often…
Disclaimer: a similar title (to this post’s) is found in the WordPress ReadMe file (shipped with the distribution). I’ve noticed the fact after writing this, so I’m leaving a soap opera like reminder that “any resemblance to reality is pure coincidence”.
Update 2009-11-22: Added post image, shamelessly copied from here.
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Firefox screenshot after rendering the page
OK, I better start by stating this post’s title is actually a pun: as far as I know, Emacs doesn’t cause any interoperability issues with SVG implementations, but I thought like a sensationalist headline from time to time won’t hurt…
Today I stumbled across emacsformacosx.com, a nice HTML+SVG use-case: HTML for the actual text content and SVG for visual improvements, which would degrade whenever no support is available (Internet Explorer, essentially). Unfortunately, the site seems to have triggered a few bugs in several implementations…
Firefox rendering issue in pen clip
In a Firefox 3.6a nightly build:
- The pen clip sometimes hides during mouse drags (see bug 541883)
In a Firefox 3.0.x previous release:
- The pen clip only shows up when triggering the context menu over the “Download” button (see bug 541883)
Opera rendering issue in text selection
In an Opera 10.10b weekly build:
- The whole drawing doesn’t even show up initially, usually only after forcing a page reload
- Bringing up the context menu on the broken loaded image (only with the vertical gradient visible) and selecting “Original size” (to force a redraw) only displays the graphics: text portions are not (re)drawn
- Selecting the text within the star from a line up to the line above shows text selection redraw issues
In Opera 9.64 release:
- The whole drawing doesn’t even show up initially, usually only after forcing a page reload
- Selecting the text within the star from a line up to the line above shows text selection redraw issues
(Behavior is similar to version 10.10, with the exception that using “Original size” to force a redraw actually works.)
IE8+ASV6 rendering issue in inline SVG
Using Internet Explorer 8 RTM + ASV 6 (SVG viewer plug-in):
- HTML+SVG integration on page breaks pretty bad
Note that, by default, IE8 doesn’t allow in-line SVG in HTML: this result was obtained using tweaked settings. An untouched IE installation will properly display the text-only version of the website.
At least WebKit behaved (surprisingly?) well! Given that the site is for a Mac OS application download, I imagine the author was using Safari (which is built upon WebKit) and therefore might not have realized these small issues… (By the way, I’m contacting the author as soon as this post goes on-line.)
Update 2009-11-22: Added screenshot of the page rendering for posterity.
Update 2010-01-31: Added link to Firefox bug report; Fixed WebKit word case.
Properties screenshot of a file shipped with Adobe Reader 8
A common belief is that ASV 6 Developer Release 1 was the last version of the famous Adobe SVG Viewer software (ASV 3.03 being the last stable release). Well, apparently not…
Distributed with Adobe Reader 8, one can take a peek at the ImageViewer.API file, placed within the plug_ins directory (full path will typically be %ProgramFiles%\Adobe\Reader\plug_ins\ImageViewer.API. The original filename, NPSVG8.dll (see screenshot), is probably familiar to whoever has played with previous ASV versions: NPSVGX.dll stands for Netscape Plugin, where X is the major version number; the file was used for deploying the plug-in in browsers, such as Firefox (Gecko) and Safari (WebKit), who didn’t natively support SVG by then. As of today, at least Firefox is no longer compatible with the plug-in (and Safari will likely follow) but they don’t need to anyway: a good level of native SVG support is available in modern browsers.
When first I noticed about this file, there was an obvious question bouncing in my mind: Would it be possible to turn NPSVG8.dll into an updated SVG Viewer? That is, to integrate the DLL in order to produce a fixed version of ASV6 (which, while being superior to ASV3 in terms of features, is also more unstable and has a couple of nasty regressions). Crawling through the web brought up a link containing some leads, but in any case, the Adobe Reader license blocks it (in case someone is still wondering):
Plug-in Restrictions. You will not integrate or use Adobe Reader with any plug-in software not developed in accordance with the Adobe Integration Key License Agreement.
I wonder if Adobe would issue an integration agreement for doing that…?
A quick search through Adobe Reader 9 shows that the plug-in seems to have been removed for good. Chances are that functionality might have been reworked into Multimedia.api; also, some features were probably moved to the Adobe Mars (PDFXML.api) plug-in. Well, this turned out to be nice material to write about, anyway…
Notice 2009-11-30: This post wasn’t actually published when written: the post contents were mostly ready but, unfortunately, got lost in my “to do” stack (see the first blog entry for more on this).
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BIOS screenshot of USB controller speed configuration
Today, while browsing through my system’s BIOS for some tweaks, I noticed a strange sentence in my peripheral configurations:
Configures the USB 2.0 controller in HiSpeed (480Mbps) or FullSpeed (12Mbps).
Full-speed at 12 Mbps and Hi-speed at 480 Mbps? Damn, is this a typo in the BIOS textual description or am I missing something? I crawled the Web and found out that it was I who was confused: in fact, Hi-speed USB is the fastest one.
I was aware about the speed differences, I just didn’t had noticed such a counter-intuitive marketing terminology for the two different versions. And yes, I’m convinced that I was the one who had “tweaked” the setting to Full-speed (option which was active when I noticed the weird sentence).
So that’s why my USB drives were so slow… And me blaming the drivers and hardware for the lame performance… Better double check yours too to see if no one did the same mistake as I did!
Finally, while investigating the difference between Full-Speed and Hi-Speed, just noticed the upcoming Super-speed which will take data transfer into light-speed (!). Not that my current data transfer requirements are as high, but I always like to watch things moving!…
Notice 2009-09-27: This post wasn’t actually published when written: the post contents were mostly ready but, unfortunately, got lost in my “to do” stack (see the first blog entry for more on this).
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