On the 24 6×12 episode, you can hear this from the best technicians from CTU:

What is this? (Pointing to a weird text appearing on screen)

It’s ASCII text!

It is?

Yes! In RUSSIAN!!

I don’t believe they really made this error…

Well, I was bored… And when I’m bored I program in Perl :)

So I wrote two simple utilities for me, and published them to CPAN.

• Net::SMS::Perl (link)

This module makes it easy to send messages throught the portuguese Optimus mobile operator. You simply pass you username and password, 1 to 3 destiny numbers and your message. The module does all the magic, simulating a user sending the SMS through a browser behind the scenes.

I’m planning to refactoring all the code, make it OO, and then make small GUI plugins for using it (example: GNOME applet, standalone app, firefox plugin, etc…)

I’m planning too writing a similar module for all the other portuguese mobile operators (tmn and vodafone).

• ACME::SDUM::Renew (link)

This module is a small hack to renew all by books from my main university library. Like the previous module, it accepts a username, a password and an email. It then tries to simulate a real user renewing the subscription of his books, and at the end a report is sent to the specified email.

Now I have a cron job than uses this module to renew all my books everyday at 4AM O:-)

Bigger plans include refactoring to OO and utility GUI modules.

Stay tunned!

I spent most of this week studying various open source graph visualization frameworks to use on the WebAppViewer PCVIA Project.

At the beginning I thought that my best option was JGraph . However, I’ve soon realized that JGraph is a commercial product, and this could create problems during the integration with WebAppViewer.

Then I launched Google :) The next items are just some things I found:

• Jung Java Universal Network/Graph Framework

OpenSource, great, clean, pretty graphics, but more oriented to graph algorithms than visualization.

• GEF Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework

Opensource, integrates directly with SWT (great!), but doesn’t run outside eclipse :( What a shame…

• Prefuse information visualization toolkit

Opensource, the best visualization framework I’ve seen, cinematic effects, easy to extend, bad docs

In the end I don’t know what to choose. I will try to code on some of this frameworks and make a final decision next week. If you can send me some tip about this, you’re welcome :)

Last Thursday I presented a project from the last year of my graduation in Computer Science and System Engineering. The project was to create a DSL to parallelize a NPL process and make the most of the cluster SeARCH we have at our campus.

The project was a success, and the tool is already being used in production. Since at least two people asked me again for the slides of the presentation, I decided to put them here to the world.

Sorry if you don’t understand Portuguese. Just look at the pictures :) Later this month I plan to publish a English article with full coverage of the tool.

The presentation can be found here