Fernando Valente's weblog

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Not too much people could say they had the chance to get rich when they were 14. Really. Believe in me or not, I had that fucking chance and I knew that. Not sure if you guys remember, but a couple years ago, as soon as the iPhone App Store came out, there was a lot of people making money on it. I knew that and all I had to do was to learn Objective-C + Cocoa(which I was supposed to have learned a couple months before I found out about the iPhone-made-rich-man). Even if my apps didn’t sell a lot, come on, there were a lot of people willing to invest everything they had on it(even their asses and their souls). So yeah, I had the chance. Mobile platforms have never been my favorites. In fact, I’d write only Mac software if I could. But I knew I had to program for the iPhone.

I started making plans for the money, like moving to Los Angeles, Mountain View, San Jose or San Francisco, buying an iPhone 3G(my dream gadget at the time) and a 17″ MacBook Pro with the best processor, memory and hard drive available. Not to mention other things like buying a Nintendo Wii and go to the mall to spend money(for just one day guys, I have never been so immature to spend a lot of money on shit all the time). I still go to the mall to walk and not to buy stuff. It makes no sense at all, I know.

Basically I was depressed at the time. I was depressed for almost 1 and a half years at the time. This depression lasted for another year. I read some time ago that the dementors from Harry Potter were inspired on depression. If it’s not, it’s would be a great inspiration for such characters. Depression sucks your blood and hope, just like a vampire. I really didn’t know I had depression at the time. Depression sucked my desire to learn how to program for the Mac and the iPhone. I just used to think that I still had time. DAMN! FUCKING DAMN! FUCKING DAMN SHIT!  6 months passed and it became impossible to make money on the iPhone app market. Basically because there was a lot of apps and developers out there(including those in India which will create an app for 140 bucks).

I wonder how my life would be now. While there is a possibility I’d have lost everything due to little experience, there’s a chance I’d pick that up quickly. I’d probably be living in the US right now and who knows what else. I still blame myself for that. Now that I’m an expert on iOS development, the market isn’t that good anymore. A lot of people thought like me, but the difference was that, unlike me, those people actually did something. So now I’m here, a mid-class worker living in Brazil.

So you might be thinking “That was a long time ago, why the hell you’re writing this post?”. It’s not about remembering about that time. It’s about something else. Have ya ever heard that music can bring our feelings back? Right now I’m listening to a song that I used to listen in early 2009, and that brought the feeling back. I feel like I’m still in that year while I’m listening to it.

BTW, I know I shouldn’t talk about suffering from depression in public as most people think people who suffer from depression got schizofrenia and randomly decide to kill people. If you think that, ya should be ashamed of yourself. Depression is just the lack of pleasure of living. If someone who suffers from it kills somebody, it surely will be themselves, not other people. But seriously, I had to write about that.

PS: comments saying depression is the lack of Jesus in my life will be ignored. I don’t need Jesus as I already have the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

When I was developing FireRocker, one of my biggest challenges was to figure out an easy way to get the audio metadata. The classic way is to read the value of a HTTP header and see how many bytes I have to wait for until the metadata is sent. Seems like a bit confusing, hum? Luckily, there’s THE easy way! SHOUTcast streams have an HTML page which you can download and parse to get the audio metadata. Say I have the following URL:

http://94.186.155.82:8044

Just add a /7.html to the end of it.

http://94.186.155.82:8044/7.html

If you downloaded this HTML file and opened it with a plain text editor, you’d see something like this:

<HTML><meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
</head><body>153,1,257,1500,153,32,Adrian - Lacrimi
de iubire bY www.FmRadioManele.ro</body></html>

Cool, isn’t it? Now let’s parse it. You can do it in any language, but I will teach you how to write a nice app in Objective-C. Create a new project and name it SHOUTcast metadata(or any name you want). Open your AppDelegate.h and add the following IBOutlets:

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Remember when I wrote about the energy of the music? This is the song that makes me feel that way.

My favorite singer/musician/dancer died exactly one year ago. I still remember about that day. I was in a car with my mom. Suddenly the radio started talking about MJ. I wasn’t paying attention on that when my mom said “Hey, look”. They were talking about a rumor of Michael Jackson’s death. I thought “It can’t be true, I just became a fan of his. He can’t be dead”. But unfortunately, he was.

I became a fan of his in February 2009. Before this, I just knew MJ as “pedophile”. I didn’t even know his work. I first heard one of his songs on the “King Of Pop: Brazilian Collection” CD commercial. I started to like that song. I saw on the commercial it was called “Thriller”. I searched for it on the web and… found it! It quickly became my favorite song. I used to listen to it all the time. Then  I searched for the music video on Youtube. My first impression was “Wow, I’ve never ever seen any one dance like he does”. I also “heard” some of his other songs on Youtube. Believe or not, I didn’t like them(excepting by Bad). When you hear the first 5 seconds of a song, you can’t really say if you like it or not. Then I recorded the song from the Pepsi Cola commercial. I thought that was a song created for the Pepsi commercial, but I was wrong. The song was a modified version of Billy Jean. The commercial I’m talking about is this one(and no, this is not the one where he got burned):

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One of the best songs EVER!

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Don’t ask me why, but music is related to our feelings and emotions. At least it’s true for me. There are songs that make me depressed, songs that makes me back in the time, songs that gimmes energy and so on. Right now I’m listening to one song that gimmes a lot of hope and energy to change and have success. It’s called  Miracle and it’s sung by Tommy Sparks. I don’t know why, but it makes me think I will have a great future. As I just said, it also gimmes energy and hope to change. I wish I knew why this happen.