sergiosantos.info, blog and works

New project: Ineo

09.Jan.2010

For some time now I’ve been working on a new project at jeKnowledge. One I’m enthusiastic about. And finally the first visible part of it was publicly released.

The ineo blog is a place to disseminate innovation, discuss entrepreneurship and present new startups. It’s a partnership between our junior company, the University of Coimbra and Instituto Pedro Nunes, distinguished as one of the world’s best business incubator. We will take turns writing on the blog, about what we feel it should be publicised and to encourage discussion around those key topics. Later on, this project will also include a podcast on the same subjects (broadcasted by a favourite local radio) and an (hope to be) awesome event to be announced.

For now you can subscribe the weekly ineo newsletter, the RSS feed or follow the project on twitter or facebook. Feedback & suggestions are welcomed!

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about me, blog, entrepreneurship, innovation, startups

Rails testing overview

02.Jan.2010

Rails testing is one of those subjects everyone talks about in the community. So I’m dying for the opportunity to try TDD on a medium sized project. And while I don’t get myself a book like this one to get the big picture, I get overwhelmed with all the dozens of libraries available and being released.

That’s why articles like history: ruby integration testing are such a great find. It’s an overview on some important frameworks released, showing what they look like in practice. Although not as good as trying them yourself, it’s a good research starting point.

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programming, rails, testing

Why I like MATLAB

27.Dec.2009

About MATLAB.

This is not a post to turn everyone into MATLAB programmers. Even more because its mostly for academic projects and scientific research. I just want to bring up some features I like having when working with a programming language. That make working with MATLAB a good experience.

Great for prototyping

When a MATLAB application goes to production, it’s rewritten in Java, C/C++ or another language. So MATLAB ends up just a tool for prototyping research theories. But a good one at that. Reasons:

It’s has tons of libraries/toolboxes: network simulation, neural networks, audio and image processing… Just like in Processing, which is also used for prototyping, there must be tools for whatever the user might want to build.
It’s easy to get started and see results: a good interpreter mode, a simple GUI creator and instant plotting of almost anything. Type plot([1 2 3 2 1]) and it will do what you expect.

Great documentation and big community

Every function is very thoroughly documented, some even explaining theory concepts. And the MATLAB’s official site hosts a big and helpful user community. Two essentials.

It was made by humans

Type why on the command line and you’ll find answers like this:

To fool the tall good and smart system manager.
He wanted it that way.
To please a very terrified and smart and tall engineer.
Barney suggested it.
The bald and not excessively bald and not excessively smart hamster obeyed 
a terrified and not excessively terrified hamster.
The tall system manager obeyed some engineer.
To satisfy some programmer.
Can you rephrase that?

And how to get the elapsed time between some code?

tic
for i=1:1000; end
toc
>>>Elapsed time is 0.000021 seconds.

tic
for i=1:1000; end
t = toc
>>> t = 0.000021

And that just makes you smile :)

Note: I was also thinking about writing on why I hate C++, but I figured out it’s best not to think about it…

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programming, research, science