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The guy who won $275.000 on the Google Android contest (english translation):
Asked what he would do with the cash, his response was “I guess I could invest it in my software company, but first I want to port PicSay to the iPhone.”
Priceless...
(via daring fireball)
In case you didn't know, you can pretty print XML with the xmllint command line tool that comes with libxml2, and its installed by default with Mac OS X.
Basic usage is
xmllint --format xml_file.xml
and the pretty version will be sent to standard output.
But working with XMPP and SAPO Broker, I'm always copy&pasting XML from one place to the other and it would be nice to format the XML snippet sitting in the clipboard.
This pipe does the trick quite nicely:
pbpaste | xmllint --format - | pbcopy
I wrapped this into a script, called x-xml-format-clipboard and now its just one command away from gratification.
Next step, create a version that I can place in the services menu. I need to find a way to access the selected text on the current Cocoa app. I hope thats not to hard. Making the final script a service is definitively easy, using the ThisService app.
Mozilla Labs Ubiquity looks very nice indeed.
I wonder how hard it would be to port it to a Fluid plugin?
(via Ajaxian)
The bounty for the first verifiable security problem found in djbdns increased from $500 to $1000.
I offer $1000 to the first person to publicly report a verifiable security hole in the latest version of djbdns.
For us Europeans, it stays the same actually.
The CPAN::Mini::Webserver module is getting a lot of love in the last few weeks.
The most recent 0.40 version includes a lot of goodies including:
cpan client to it;Getting everything right is easy.
First, you need a CPAN::Mini mirror of the full CPAN. Right now it takes 862Mb of my disk.
Create a .minicpanrc in your $HOME directory with the following:
local: /Users/melo/Documents/cpan
remote: http://cpan.perl.pt/
also_mirror: authors/00whois.xml
Adjust the local and remote settings to a local directory where the mirror will be placed and the CPAN mirror you wish to use.
Then run minicpan. You can stick this in your own crontab, also . I run mine each morning at 10:20.
The first time will take a bit of time, but updates are very fast. Recent versions of CPAN::Mini use HTTP keep-alive, so I recommend that you use a HTTP-based mirror.
You can take the opportunity and update your cpan configuration to use this module. To do that, run the cpan client, and use o conf init /urllist/. Keep you current mirror and add the new local directory at the end of the list. Don't forget o conf commit to make your changes persistent.
My configuration looks like this:
cpan[1]> o conf urllist
urllist
0 [http://cpan.perl.pt/]
1 [file:///Users/melo/Documents/cpan/]
Having a HTTP mirror and your local mirror this way triggers an optimization in the cpan client. He will always keep the module indexes up-to-date using the external mirror, but for each module that he needs to install, the local mirror is tried first.
Install tht CPAN::Mini::Webserver. You will also need to install the plugin HTTP::Server::Simple::Bonjour and a proper Net::Rendezvous::Publish::Backend module for your operating system (I use Net::Rendezvous::Publish::Backend::Apple).
You can now run minicpan_webserver and open http://localhost:2963/. You can change the port number with minicpan_webserver -p PORT.
You can also keep it running by sticking this on the inittab or if you use a Mac, use Lingon and create a "My Agents" entry to keep it running. I use the second option.
On a last note, the Bonjour stuff doesn't work since 0.39. CPAN::Mini::Webserver is overriding the print_banner method that the Bonjour plugin uses. I've reported this as a bug.
There is no easy way out. Probably the best way is to add a new init_plugins hook to HTTP::Server::Simple that gets called before the print_banner and then change the Bonjour plugin to use that.
On my copy I patched CPAN::Mini::Webserver directly and commented the print_banner function. I prefer to have Bonjour than a prettier banner I never get to see anyway.
Interesting stuff: HTML5 gained a event loop this week.
I like event loops. I'm still reading the draft spec, but it seems very nice.
If you happen to be a dead-tree-addict, and interested in XMPP like me, then I'm happy to tell you that you will have a present next year.
Kevin, Peter and Remko are hard at work for O'Reilly to brings us the XMPP missing book.
Entitled "XMPP: The Definitive Guide", it should hit the shelfs in 2009.
Shameless offer: if you need technical reviewers, you know my JID :).
I've been playing with framing protocols.
I need a protocol with:
I've looked at AMQP wire protocol, BLIP, BEEP and some others. I plan to look over SSH too.
I'm looking for further suggestions of protocols to reuse. Anyone?
I've talked a bit about Freebase over the last few months. I understand that a rich, semantic, structured database of knowledge is not something other people get excited about, but that happens to be my thing.
In the hope to excite others with Freebase, I recommend that you spend 8 minutes watching the Parallax browser in action. That kind of research tool is only possible with something like Freebase on the bottom.
Update: the code for the Parallax browser is open source now.
I've updated my own Search In Project with ack TextMate command.
Changes:
: to search only in the selected files;You can find the current version at GitHub or download the tmCommand file directly.
This is a very simple ack interface. For a more complex and feature-full, see the ack TextMate bundle by Trevor Squires.
Really, see this...
In her own words, this cannot be natural.
I spent the last 30 minutes chasing down this bug. The following tests should all pass but the last one doesn't:
use strict;
use warnings;
use Test::More 'no_plan';
use XML::LibXML;
use XML::LibXML::XPathContext;
my $parser = XML::LibXML->new;
ok($parser, 'XML::LibXML parser created');
my $xml = '<x:me xmlns:x="some_namespace" />';
my $xdoc = $parser->parse_string($xml);
ok($xdoc, 'Valid XML parsed');
$xdoc = XML::LibXML::XPathContext->new($xdoc);
ok($xdoc, 'Converted to XPathContext');
my ($node) = $xdoc->findnodes('/me');
ok(!$node, 'Not found because no prefix means NULL namespace');
($node) = $xdoc->findnodes('/x:me');
ok($node, 'Found because using document prefix');
$xdoc->registerNs( new => 'some_namespace' );
($node) = $xdoc->findnodes('/new:me');
ok($node, 'Found because using new specific prefix');
# Notice the change of namespace
my $uri = $xdoc->lookupNs('x');
is($uri, 'some_namespace', 'x prefix is some_namespace');
$xdoc->registerNs( x => 'other_namespace' );
$uri = $xdoc->lookupNs('x');
is($uri, 'some_namespace', 'x prefix is still some_namespace');
($node) = $xdoc->findnodes('/x:me');
ok(!$node, 'Not found because using document prefix was changed to diff namespace');
The basic problem is this: you get a XML document in which a namespace N is tied to a prefix P. I was expecting that if I set in my own parser prefix P to something else, that my local prefix P would take precedence over the document P. Apparently it does not.
Right now, what I did was this: before using XPath to match anything, I always used registerNs method of XML::LibXML::XPathContext to make sure I was getting the right elements. Now, I use this new function instead:
sub _safe_ns_register {
my ($xpc, $prefix, $ns) = @_;
while ($xpc->lookupNs($prefix)) {
$prefix++;
}
$xpc->registerNs($prefix => $ns);
return $prefix;
}
This function makes sure that the prefix I choose does not clash with any prefixes on the document. It returns the prefix I must use on my XPath expressions.
It solved my problem, but I still think that my local prefix should take precedence over the document one.
The recent DNS bugs sent me reading the cr.yp.to site for old stories, long forgotten. djbdns is one of the DNS server softwares that was immune to this problem from the start.
Some pearls:
I still receive a diff of changes to the cr.yp.to site, almost 5 years running now, I wonder if anybody has an archive of them. It would be interesting to assemble all of those diffs into a repository to track back the changes.
So you have a friend who is going to spend some time traveling and that journey includes the United States. Usually you would buying him a travel guide.
But our times require something different. I recommend that you send your fiend the link to Professor James Duane talk entitled "Don't talk to the Police".
In a country where habeas corpus is no longer controlled by the court system, those 26 minutes could save your friend a lot of trouble (as confirmed in the follow up presentation by a police officer).
(via Schneier)
The latest weeks where a bit crazy but normality is returning.
Are you ready to be an Iron Man? Join the challenge and find out! (what is the meaning of this little man?)
