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Looking though my backpack (and those who know me personally know that I'm talking about the 10kg behemoth) I found my passport.
I think I always carry my passport with me. I don't know if it is wishful thinking, just wanting to get called somewhere where I actually will need it, or a hidden feeling of being somewhere else far away. I really don't believe any of these, though.
But I'm sure there is a meaning somewhere.
Maybe the passport is my towel.
As usual, a must read. The State of the Onion n. 9 is here.
Favorite quotes:
Wu-Li isn't actually Chinese. He only thinks he's Chinese because when he was young his parents told him that every third child born into the world was Chinese, and he was a third child.
and another:
As I was thinking about the intelligence community and its recent obvious failures, it kinda put a new spin onto the phrase, "Information wants to be free," or my own version of it, which is that "Information wants to be useful."
and this rings some bells:
We often think that intelligence failures are caused by having too little information. But often, in retrospect, we find that the problem is too much information, and that in fact, we had the data available to us, if only it had been analyzed correctly.
So I'm just wondering if we're getting ourselves into a similar situation with open source software. More software is not always better software. Google notwithstanding, I think it's actually getting harder and harder over time to find that nugget you're looking for. This process of re-inventing the wheel makes better wheels, but we're running the risk of getting buried under a lot of half-built wheels.
I've been using darcs for quite some time now, and I'm generally happy with it. It's reliable, simple to use and doesn't get in the way, nor does it force me naming conventions, coding styles or directory organizations.
The most useful feature it has for me is the interactive commit: I'm hacking away on some feature, I found some other bug, I fix the bug, and then I can commit just the bug fix, and keep on hacking.
Recently, I've started using Trac, both at work and personally. I find it very good to keep track of projects. The integration of wiki, ticketing and source control functions in a single package, with seamless linking between all of them is very productive. The problem is that Trac does not support darcs as a source control system, it only supports subversion.
For now, I've solved the problem using the excellent tailor script, specifically the VersionOne version.
There is a patch to add native support of darcs to Trac, done by Lele Gaifax (also the author of Tailor), but I haven't tested it yet. Seems very nice though. Check the Browse Source option there to see how it looks.
The current problem is that, although I can use darcs and the tailor script or the darcs patch to trac to keep my own stuff, I cannot do that at work.
We use CVS here, and the only possible switch in the near future would be to subversion. The leap to a full distributed SCM is too big right now, although it would solve some issues.
So the roadmap is to use CVS for the time being, using Tailor to push the CVS commits into the subversion repository under Trac.
But, has we get more comfortable with svn, I don't see any reason to keep on using CVS. The command line options are almost identical, and they are the same if you only use basic stuff. Also most of the users that would switch to svn use Tortoise CVS on Windows, so they can switch to Tortoise SVN.
After we move to svn, I need to really try and use svk, and is little brother svl. svk has been on my sights for almost 6 months now, and it seems really great. The recent interview with the lead developer/creator of svk increased my interest in it. The cherry-on-top was the news that support for incremental commits, darcs-style, is being added to svk. Very nice!
So with this news, I think I'll have to try svn/svk in the near future. It might be a very good combo to use at work.
This is fun. Apparently the eBay/Skype deal was over-heard by a cabby in NYC.
USPTO validated Eolas patent today. I'm sure it will be all over the tech blogs in the next 24 hours.
Via Ars.Technica.
Very nice article on O'ReillyNet about Perl6.
Perl6 Polyglot by Geoff Broadwell -- What Perl 6 is learning from other languages -- and why you should learn a few too.
Go! Read!
Going to upgrade to Moveable Type 3.2 now.
If the site disappears, then something went wrong with my backups :).
I'm sorry but you'll loose all the juicy links to sex, travel and casinos that we could find on my trackbacks.
update: seems to work. Still messing around with templates, expect some changes and fixes.
Tomorrow, the 2: TV channel (the only broadcast channel worth watching) is going to try something new.
Starting at 23:30 Friday, and until 1:15 of Sunday, they will transmit a full 24 second season. You can watch Jack Bauer in real-time, as intended.
Anyway, if you like 24, or you don't know if you do, try switching to the 2: channel.
I think a measurement of how good a game is, is the things that the game environment allow outside the original control of the programmers. How open is the game.
Recently, World of Warcraft gained a virtual plague that is spreading like wildfire inside the game. Nice.
Me, I try to keep away from that black hole of productivity like if it had the plague... the real one.
I so want one, but $299 ??? No freaking way...
More posters and the original commercial at the RedLight Runner store.
Apparently the disaster plan of the ASPCA worked reasonably well during the Katrina disaster.
At least, I can see the site with my Safari browser, something that FEMA doesn't seem to feel as important.
It seems that in the USA, animals get better treatment than people.
This week we saw some announcements from Apple.
Monday, we got the bad news: the Paris Expo keynote was cancelled, so the probability of seeing new hardware is low. It seems that I'll have to wait a little longer for my Powerbook upgrade.
Then Wednesday, you got the iPod nano, the iPhone, and a new iTunes.
I'm not going to talk about the iPhone, I couldn't care less about a iTunes client inside my phone. Besides, I would be raging mad to switch from my SonyEricsson to a Motorola phone.
The iPod nano is a different story. I so want one. My iPod 10Gb is dead for some months now, and I've been using the wife 20Gb second generation to listen to podcasts, the only real reason to have a screen. My music is being pumped by my shuffle and it's quite enough for me. I have no need to see my 16Gb library in my pocket.
The size is amazing, the capacity is enough for my needs, even the 2 Gigs model. And the black one is very very nice, although it seems that the headphones will still be white.
The only drawback of the iPod nano is the USB-only thing: I can't use a firewire connection. It's ok if you have a new Mac, with USB 2, but mine is still USB 1.1. I guess I could get a USB2 PCMCIA card, like João Gomes did. I haven't used the PCMCIA that is always inside my powerbook, to read memory sticks, due to the fact that it doesn't support the Duo's.
Other small things about Apple, iTunes and all the speculation flying around: the fact that you can donate to help the Katrina victims via iTunes; and one interesting view about the politics behing wednesday announcement.
Pfig would not be happy if I didn't mention the Harry Potter audio book release as an iTunes music store. I'm going to buy one of the books for sure. I want to see how it's read, and if it works. I've been listening to audio-books for almost 3 years now, and having a book read to you, if done right, is a totally different experience from reading it. Some books work much better, other just don't work at all, but I can tell you that I found myself laughing out loud while listening to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, read by Douglas Adams.
Also, Mac OS X intel is now everywhere. I've seen it running with a normal Intel desktop, and it's amazing. The performance is very good, even for a developer edition, and the stability, although not what I'm used to, seems good enough for daily work already. Impressive. You can find a lot of info about running it on your hardware at BoingBoing (linking to the OSX86 site how-to) and Diario de um Vadio (also the follow up article).
I'm very tempted to install it on a Shuffle I have more or less idle.
The fact that the Mac OS X Intel edition is possible to be installed on normal Intel hardware should not come as a surprise to anyone. The basic protections that Apple did where simple to work around. The use of SSE3 instructions was more tricky because it's not a common feature yet, but the amazing work done by the community, providing a patch to change them to SSE2 was jaw-dropping.
One must wonder how far will Apple go to prevent you from running Mac OS X on any PC. On one side, they need to sell you those nice and somewhat pricey machines; on the other, pirate copies of Mac OS X will increase the usage of Mac OS X. Windows has some 80-90% market share, but how many of those are legal copies?
Some say that by allowing even some piracy, Apple will lose sales. I'm not so sure. I think that people who will pirate Mac OS X are unlikely buyers of Mac hardware, due to price. Yes, they will loose some sales, but not that many. And they will gain a lot of people that will try Mac OS X. And maybe those people, if asked by friends which computer to buy, will advise the Macs.
Or not. This is pure speculation. But given all the scenarios discussed in the last week with friends, I think that a little piracy will help Apple improve the awareness of Mac OS X, and with that probably help their sales.
Who knows. Maybe Apple will have some Mac OS X trial CD's in the future...
The is the mother of all memes. If you read this, you should link to the hilarious job offer from microsoft to esr. Let's make this the all-time most-linked-in page in Google :).
Picked up from so many places, including Rui.
I saw the original Galactica series when I was a teenager on TV. As most kids my age, it was a total hit, and we loved seeing the adventures of Apollo and Starbuck.
When I read that the SciFi channel (oh why can't I pay my cable company to have this freaking channel??) was doing a new version of this series, I was afraid we would be stuck with a Episode I kind-of disaster: an over use of CGI graphics and a plot worth less than nothing.
Yesterday, I finished season one. And I love it. It's very very good. I bough this DVD set thinking that I was going to regret it, but now, I can't wait for season two DVD set (which should be available some time next year, I suppose).
Can't wait.
