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There is a lot of people working to get a decent free Windows emulator for Mac OS X Intel.
Some just want VMWare to launch their player technology, others seek the Q and QEMU solutions. All of this will eventually work, I'm sure.
In the meantime, you can follow the progress of a VMWare-based solution. Aparently someone took the time to make VMWare for linux run under Knoppix using a iMac Intel. That's nice.
Jive Software announced Wildfire 2.5.0 just now. They are now 100% XMPP compliant. Congrats! They are the second server with source available to make that claim, after ejabberd last December.
I was still running an old Jive Messenger 2.3.1 so I decided it was time to upgrade. Installing a Wildfire is so easy that I never upgrade. I just export the users from the old server, do a fresh install of the new server, tweak two or three settings, and import the users. If you are upgrading from a Jive Messenger server, edit the XML before importing, and replace the start and end tag from JiveMessenger to Wildfire. I consider this not a bug, but a real annoyance: the User import/export plugin could easily support old formats, to make their own users to upgrade their server...
This time, it took me less than 10 minutes. Yes, it's that easy. And I'll bet that you could even do it in less time, but I have to patch the wildfire startup file to my personal taste.
The patch to the wildfire script allows me to run Wildfire in the foregroun, under daemontools. Its simple: copy the start section of the shell script and rename it as foreground and then remove the nohup at the beginning of the following line and the & at the end. There, you can now supervise your Wildfire installation.
You can fetch (.tar.gz, .tgz, .zip) my patch to the wildfire startup script, and my run files that I use for my setup. Please don't use them without reading. I have strange layouts in my servers.
Anyway, simplicidade.org domain is now up and running again, with a full XMPP compliant server.
Note: Robin Bowes commented that he was having difficulties with the tarball... I tried it just now and tar zxf wildfire_supervised.tar.gz worked first time. Anybody else had problems?
Note 2: Pedro also has problems with the file. I don't know what's going on. I can do a tar zxf both on the server side and on the client side after downloading with Safari. In any case I placed two more options for download, a .tgz and .zip. Maybe that helps.
Technorati Tags: ejabberd, jabber, jivesoftware, wildfire, xmpp
I was expecting this service to open soon, and my wish was granted.
I was able to grab the address http://geeks.campfirenow.com/ and I'll test it with a couple of friends.
As usual you can expect the clean look and interface that 37Signals have accustom us to. Only the minimum features are there, but for now, it seems very responsive.
Given the recent example of Zooomr regarding authentication (only the good parts, of course), I would like to see 37Signals start some kind of distributed authentication system, even its only on their sites. Right now, I have an paid Backpack account, a free Basecamp account and now a Campfire account. Time to unify all of them?
Anyway, the service looks good, but I'll reserve final judgement for tomorrow morning when a bunch of us discuss where to have lunch in a room in campfire.
One final question: why call something campfire and then use a lobby and rooms as your language? "there I was in a room at campfire" or "everybody around the campfire inside a room" does not sound good. I guess OfficeBuildingNow.com is not as sexy, but CubeFarmNow.com would be nice :).
Update: David Hansson commented on the single login across all 37Signals apps. His suggestion is that you look closely at the screen-cast posted in a previous Campfire article. The video crashed on my powerbook after a couple of seconds, I'll try to see it on another Mac, might be a problem on my side.
Yesterday, Joel commented on my authenticate anywhere post, talking about the security and privacy problems with the Google authentication in Zooomr.
He is right, of course. Zooomr asks you for your login and password. Of you GMail account. And that's not good.
This is of course, because GMail was never designed to be an authentication mechanism, and people are abusing it. You could do the same with almost any ISP that offers POP3, for example, using that service to check credentials.
What I would like to see, to make things right, is for Google to start a OpenID service for their clients.
That would be very very good.
Update: check this comment from Kristopher Tate (lead programmer - Zooomr.com) about this problem. They are working on it, so expect a solution soon. I think the important part is that Zooomr guys are aware and working on a fix. Kudos to them. I would prefer that they didn't had to "fix it", because the "problem" could be solved by Google if they implemented OpenID.
Update 2: Well, it took almost no time at all. You don't have to use your GMail password on Zooomr anymore.
There is new Flickr-type site making the beta rounds, called Zooomr. I found it via Dystopics review.
I normally could care less about a new photo-site, but there is one feature that I'm just crazy about: distributed authentication.
See the screenshot from their login page (taken from the above review):
You can use Level9, OpenID, LiveJournal, Google and Meetro. OpenID is the cool one, for me, because it also enables you to use your Typekey identity for logging in.
I think this is the second service I see the allows this kind of distributed authentication, the first being LiveJournal and their comment system. But Zooomr takes it to the new level, by using distributed authentication instead of providing a registration step.
You see a lot of people, specially the 37Signals guys, talking about the importance of doing simple registration procedures. This is the next step: no registration at all to start using the service.
Technorati Tags: typekey, google, meetro, livejournal, level9, distributed, openid, authentication
Several times I needed a way to quickly see which process are using the most memory on a Linux system. After reading a bit of the man page and with a tip from the Apache performance article I was reading, I settled for this:
ps ax -yl --sort:rss (BSD syntax)
ps -eyl --sort:rss (standard syntax)
There you go.
Update: corrected the command, thanks to Daniel Fonseca. I messed up BSD syntax (which I prefer) with standard syntax. I included both versions.
Thanks Daniel.
Update: To clarify, this is in a Linux system. On my Mac, the better I was able to do with standard ps command was:
ps alwxm
Not as good, specially because the results are sorted in descending order.
Campfire is coming along and the first screen-shoot and screen-cast seem great.
They have been conducting load testing on their service this last few weeks, and it seems that yesterday they did the last one before launch.
It seems another winner after Basecamp and Backpackit, very nice, and well deserved.
Jeremy was giving us a heads up about 2006 being the year of the privacy problems for search engines. And a couple of posts down, we see that the latest Google Desktop makes it very easy to send your documents (Word, PDF, you know, your personal documents) to the Google server for indexing...
It's a beautiful technical achievement and perfectly possible with their technology, but the privacy implications are huge, as you can imagine.
I'm just thinking all those corporate IT managers blocking access to Google data-centers in their firewalls to prevent this. Really, I do.
It's nice to see the efforts of the team of non-Apple WebKit developers rewarded.
As a thank you, we are giving MacBook Pro computers to twelve of our top contributors. We’ve also invited five of them to attend Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference 2006 “on Apple’s dime”.
Kudos to the all team!
The TV here in Portugal is now showing a classic, Steven Seagal Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. A good movie.... Not.
Well, at least Seagal has a Newton :).
I like Dashboard widgets. I like the looks, I like some of them for their functionality, but mostly I like them because the poetic way they burn my CPU.
Anyway, If I had access to the US iTunes Music Store, I would be running this one, iTunes Estimator. Heck, I'll fess up: I'm running it anyway to see how accurate will he be.
Thanks go to the TUAW guys for this waste of my CPU.
I found this article interesting, at least for the technical details: The Mysteries of X-GOOGLE-TOKEN and why it matters.
On a related note, if you needed a simple single sign on system to deploy in a controlled environment, that could be used with PHP and Perl sites, and with Apache+mod_(perl|php) or lighttpd+fastcgi.... Probably no such beast.
I'll see if OpenID covers what I need. Yes, it's not a SSO system, but maybe it's a good base to build on.
Is it just me or rsync include/exclude patters are crazy??
I want a simple thing: specify in the server rsyncd.conf file that we only want to export 3 directories from a specific path.
After battling for 1 hour with this, I settled on this configuration file.
use chroot = yes
read only = yes
uid = nobody
gid = nobody
[files]
path = /my/files/
comment = my important files
filter = + /dir1 + dir1/** + /dir2 + dir2/** + /dir3 + dir3/** - *
Notice the pattern? for each directory, we include the directory itself with /dir and then we include all the files (and subdirectories recursively) with dir/**.
I understand why I have to write it this way. I read the fine manual to reach this configuration, but simple things should be simple, right? It would be nice to see something like this:
use chroot = yes
read only = yes
uid = nobody
gid = nobody
[files]
path = /my/files/
comment = my important files
filter = + /dir1** + /dir2** + /dir3** - *
By the way, before you ask. I also tried two lines, first include = /dir* followed by a exclude = *. It seemed logical to me, but it didn't work.
Anyway, it's working now with the first configuration, but I would like to see a simpler way.
Update: The Gods must be watching... In the latest rsync release, 2.6.7pre1, this is mentioned on the release notes:
- The include/exclude code now allows a dir/*** directive (with 3 trailing stars) to match both the dir itself as well as all the content below the dir (dir/** would not match the dir).
Thank you!
Technorati Tags: rsync
Today I needed to generate a good password for a special site. I remember I saw a tool to do that and I could not remember where.
After some searching, here is the deal:
System Preferences and select the Accounts preference pane;Change Password button. Don't worry, you don't need to really change your password;New Password text field. A new panel, Password Assistant, will open. You can now close the change password window by clicking Cancel;Password Assistant, chose the preferred type of password you want, and check the sugestions. You can also type your own desired password and see how strong it is by looking at the colored bar. In this case, bigger and green is better.That's it.
This was a question I was wondering for quite some time. All the things I read about this pointed to a positive answer: I have a Xeon CPU and all Xeon CPUs since second quarter 2004 support EM64T.
But I wanted something more reliable, like a cat /proc/cpuinfo flag. And I finally found a post that gave my some hints about detecting EMT64 from the cpuinfo flags. It describes the lm flag as "long mode", having the 64bit extensions, but it talks of those in AMD context.
Further googling turned up this Debian mailing list post and a MySQL commit message, and they seem to confirm this: even on Intel CPUs, lm CPU flag means 64bit extensions.
Now the question for all: if I have a dual Xeon processor, is it worth it running CentOS with EM64T extensions or should I just run normal i386 version?
When gmail first appeared I subscribed as soon as I could get my hands on an invitation. I forward a lot of mail to try it out.
Some months later, I saw that I could use gmail as an archiver for certain things, those mails you don't know if you really want to keep, but the problem was that now my gmail account was full of garbage.
I wanted to purge all mail from my account to start from scratch but there seems to be no way to do it easily. Clicking on 80 pages (8k message, 100 messages per page), selecting all and delete, was not an option.
So I wrote a script to login to gmail POP3 service, delete all messages, exit, and try again, until I got 0 messages on my inbox.
I now have about 10k messages in the trash, and those will be removed in 30 days.
Done!
In case you need to do the same, here is my x-gmail-expunge script. It requires Perl and the Mail::POP3Client from CPAN. Run it without parameters for usage, but it's really simple: x-gmail-expunge.pl LOGIN PASSWORD.
I hate being sick. Waste of resources.
But I was able to get a good laugh in the morning with this:
Look, I'm not interested in all of the 'moral reasons' for not doing this, ok? This is an intranet - I want proprietary code here, I don't care about the W3C and any of that other hippie crap.
