In June 2025, Sam Altman published a blog post titled “The Gentle Singularity,” in which he made a declaration that would have sounded insane just three years prior: “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started”. To the uninitiated, this summons images of science fiction—robots walking the streets or a sudden, dramatic rupture in reality. Yet, as Altman noted, the world looks largely the same. Commuters still sit in traffic; we still use Jira; and the physical constraints of the universe remain stubbornly in place.
The year 2020 is upon us already. Since barely a week has passed in this new year, I think it is a good time to reflect on the previous year. If I were to summarize 2019 in a single word, it would be atypical.
Side projects are a great way to learn new technologies, to exercise what you already know or to just challenge yourself a bit. Usually a side project is not connected to a contract or backed by financial support, so there is no real pressure to actually finish them. As a consequence, the landscape becomes something like the following very quickly (at least for me):
One of the first worries that hit me really hard when I became a professor was the influence I have on my students. Even if I just stand in front of my students, speechless and doing absolutely nothing, it will impact them somehow. They are there to learn not only the content listed in the syllabus but new experiences as well.
I started my studies in Computer Science at the Federal University of Santa Maria in 2003. I was very young and the only reason I had to study Computer Science was that I liked computers. I had no clue about what Computer Science would be, or what things I could do after graduation. I honestly had no expectations beyond improving my knowledge about computers.
I am pleased to inform that version 2.0.0 of cvui is out! cvui is a simple UI lib built on top of OpenCV drawing primitives. This post is a bit overdue since the release happened in May, but better late than never.
Managing references is a common and daily task of any academic. It consists of keeping track of papers you have read and how to cite them in the future. If you are involved in a little endeavor with a few papers to monitor, you are good to go with a folder where you store the PDF files and pull the citations from there.
This is the second update on Scifibot, my companion app for sci-fi fans. Things are finally starting to take shape, which is great and bad at the same time. It’s great because the app is coming together and I can actually see it working. The bad part is that I reached the 90% development mark, which means I have only 10% of work to go. Right?
I love scifi movies and series. There are plently of good (and not so good) titles out there to be seen, but it is really hard to find them or keep track of interesting things. If you are like me, you probably had spent a significant amount of your time 1) finding things and 2) making notes or equivalents to remember what to watch.
Since I started my PhD in September, 2015, I have been writing a lot of code. My research project contains its fair amount of theory, but it is significantly practical and applied science, so I need to write software to test things out.
I am pleased to inform that version 1.1.0 of cvui is out! cvui is a simple UI lib built on top of OpenCV drawing primitives. Here is an image to show the new features:
I have been working a lot with OpenCV and C++ lately. After spending a great amount of time waiting for things to compile (so I could see my changes), I decided to improve my workflow. I decided to make changes in runtime, so I could tweak things without the need to recompile the whole project.
It took a lot more than I wanted it to take, but I finally concluded the move from Wordpress to Github Pages! Finally my personal website (this one you are reading) runs in a static fashion, without PHP, databases and all that useful-but-not-for-my-personal-website stuff.
Another years has gone by. I wrote my new year’s resolutions for 2013 almost a year ago, but it still feels like yesterday. The last days of 2013 seem the perfect time to review the year and check if I collected accomplishments or lame excuses.
Last year was amazing! It was my second year working as a professor, something really different from the life I used to have as a game developer at Decadium. I experimented much more and the overall was pretty good. I am happy with the results
I am not a new “consumer” of open-source software (OSS). In fact several tools I work in a daily basis are open-source. The OSS idea of freedom to create, share and help others (most of the time for free) always fascinated me.
The very first time I heard about ChromeOS I thought it was an amazing idea. I always hated the painful process of keeping a computer running smoothly, which consists of formatting, installing OS/apps, update everything, repeat it all. When Google released their Chromebooks, I joined the waiting list, but they were not available here in Brazil. Damn it!
I teach object-oriented programming using Java to 3rd semester Computer Science students at Federal University of Fronteira Sul. During their first years, the students attend to algorithms and data structures classes, all using C. I teach algorithms too.
Flash game developers – meet my new project: AS3 Game Gears ! It is the right place to find useful tools to boost your game development. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, all you need is a place to find what you have been looking for. Enjoy!
If you are looking for something different to make you game or Flash app looks better than the rest then you must take a look at FIVe3D. It is an open source code for the conception of interactive vector-based 3D animations.
Sometimes I find myself solving the same problems again and again on several different projects. Definitely there is no need to reinvent the wheel, you just have to use the right tools.
One of the most common tasks in game development is the assets loading process. You have two options: 1) ship your game as a single 45Mb SWF file filled with sweet and compressed-to-the-bones images/sounds or 2) load all those assets separately and on demand.
Create and develop a game is hard task, but optimize one is even harder. You can ruin a perfect game design and a beautiful artset by filling the source code with useless and/or unnecessary stuff. In order to keep things in control a performance monitor comes in handy.
After Happy Farm and FarmVille attracted millions of user there is a lot of talking about isometric games. I’ve played several games featuring an isometric view then I’ve spent some thoughts around the idea of creating my own isometric game (or one for my company, developed during my inexistent free time).
When I play a game, I like to see all those flying particles popping up on the screen. Casual games make heavy use of this resource, sometimes more than what is considered healthy.
The first time I saw a really convincing physics engine working on a PC game was during a Half Life 2 session. All that Havok physics created an unique game experience. Luckily the use of physics inside games has grown and now we have a wide range of tool to use, even in Flash games.
I see lots of open source projetcs using Worpress as a blog platform, phpBB as a forum solution and Mediawiki as a wiki. I like them all, but maintaining them separately with no integrations is a pain. It’s great when you register to a website and you can use the same fresh new account to comment on the blog, reply to a forum thread and/or contribute to a wiki page.
I like to write my code from scratch, but it does not mean I want to reinvent the wheel every single day. This is one of the reasons why I like to use engines to code games.
These days I was looking for intranet solutions and I luckily found Open Atrium, an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations.
Probably I’ve spent several hours editing and arranging pictures to create a nice Powerpoint presentation. Even though the Microsoft product is a great tool, I do not like the final result. It seems unfashionable, too poor and/or simple.
Sometime ago I was working on a Flash game and I had to output some information to the console. That’s a very easy task when you use trace() and the Flash IDE, but things get a little harder when you need to output text inside the browser.
Javacript is the very first base stone concerning web 2.0. In the past, I always heard bad things about Javascript, but I guess all of them were said because Javascript was being used by the wrong people, in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
If you work with Flash like I do you probably have said a bunch of bad words while you were coding AS3 using the native Flash IDE AS editor. I like Adobe, I really do, Flash can do amazing things and the IDE is getting more and more powerfull, however as a AS3 project manager, the Flash IDE sucks.
Some years ago, the only thing that came to my mind when I heard the word “web” was “very simple websites”, a bunch of bytes available for browing. Google was not even born at that time and everyhing was focused on desktop applications. If your application was able to connect to the web, then it could update itself in a easy way, nothing else.
One of the most annoying thing I did during the development of our web projects was to keep our apps running smooth in a wide range of old browsers. Not too many years ago, there was only one “king” in the browser’s kingdom: Microsoft Internet Explorer. King is a little bit unappropriated, however on February, 2005, IE 6 was pumping the web engines with a market share of 82.79%, what is a quite impressive number.
Welcome to my personal website! Here you can find some information about my work, about the stuff I’ve created and about the useful (and not so useful) texts I read every day. I hope you can find here something cool or, at least, something able to help you somehow.
Sometime ago I was working on a Flash game and I had to output some information to the console. That’s a very easy task when you use trace() and the Flash IDE, but things get a little harder when you need to output text inside the browser.