I've activated a Javascript-based syntax highlighter. You can see the results on my latest post, Perl testing and git pre-commit hooks.
I need to tweak my server setup to be a little bit faster loading all this javascript, so you might notice a delay before the highlighter does its job.
The server where this site was hosted is dying a slow death.
I'm moving my personal stuff to a slice in the next few days, so expect some disturbance.
One of the road-blocks after email is DNS. My .com, .org and .net domains are hosted at Joker, and so far I'm happy with the service. But I also have other domains in the .pt, .im, .as, and .tv top level domains, and for those, Joker is not a solution.
I did a bit of shopping around and the prices are ridiculous. Most places ask for $20 per year to host a domain. I really don't like to do this myself, but with the number of domains that I host, and with those prices, its just cheaper to do it myself.
I've updated the small contact box at the top of the right sidebar.
With a single click you can now contact me with:
The PTSN number is actually a SIP-based VoIP number. I'm now using the amazing telephone SIP client for Mac OS X. Kudos to Celso for a nice how-to to use with my current provider.
My "XMPP - Hands on" presentation at Codebits 2008 is online. You can find it at GitHub and download the tarball (the big Download button). Its in Portuguese so most of you can ignore the PDF and dig straight through to the code.
I didn't have Keynote.app on the laptop where I wrote it so I decided to try S5 to write my slides.
The HTML version is great, and with a bit of syntax highlighter even the XML examples look good.
But the PDF version is very basic. I searched around for a better CSS to print S5 slides, but could not find anything. Maybe CSS is just too limited for decent printing control.
I don't know if I'm going to use it again. The lack of a decent PDF output is a big minus. On the plus side, I really like having the full power of HTML/CSS/JS inside my presentations.
As for the code examples, I wrote two:
All examples are written in Perl using the Net::XMPP2 framework. I made a few fixes to some of the Net::XMPP2 modules, you can find them inside the repository to make running the bots easier. I'm going to send Robin Redeker (Net::XMPP2 author) those fixes, so they should appear in a future version.
Heads up: I'm switching my comments to Disqus. I had several people complaining about the current HaloScan-based system.
Expect minor disturbances in the force.
Update: we are now Disqus-powered. They still don't have an importer for old comments, so for a while, old comments are orphaned. Hope they fix that soon.
I removed all traces of the multiple feeds this site had to just one: http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/42.xml.
I've also added redirects on all of the old feeds to that one, so unless your feed reader cannot read RSS 2.0 it should all work out.
Feed Validator tells me that I have three things to fix at the moment. I'll probably fix two of them (done). The other is content related, and I don't know of a easy fix.
Update: in a effort to improve my ego (any bit counts), I've also started to use FeedBurner services to track usage of the feed. You don't have to change nothing, the official feed URL will always be http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/42.xml.
Just an heads up: I'm moving the XMPP and the email service between two servers. XMPP will be down for a day or so, email should be a painless move.
There will also be some changes:
simplicidade.org will move to ejabberd: much lower resource usage than the current Wildfire;So I might be "off" for a day or so until everything catches up.
In the next few days, I'll be moving all my feeds to Feedburner and reorganizing them a bit.
Zee plan right now is:
The first to move will be the full blog content. Others will join him with time.
I'll place permanent redirects on all my current feed urls, so decent news readers will do the right thing.
I have zero plans to start putting any kind of advertisement in my feeds. I just want the stats they collect.
Comments and Trackbacks are back, courtesy of HaloScan.
It might go bonkers while I tweak my templates, but seems to work.
Old comments are still available on each individual entry under the heading Comments BHS (Before HaloScan) (like this todo.sh entry). The old Trackbacks are still missing though. I'll get to them later, the solution I used for old comments is not that good for Trackbacks.
Yes, I'm still breathing.
This is just a quick post to tell you all that I'm closing comments and track-backs on all my posts for a couple of days, while I move them to HaloScan.
After that is done, I'll give you a big update on life, and the meaning of freelance work.
As you might have notice, sometimes there are weeks where I don't write nothing here.
This trend will accelerate in the next few weeks, while I'm on vacation.
When a person has a child and holds it in its hands, there is a kind of foolishness that takes over your entire self, it's like getting the answer to all the questions about life, the universe and everything in a instance, and finding out that Douglas Adams was wrong. You truly see that its much more than a number.
Predicting the future is also foolish, and not even remotely as fun, unless you are the one who will, when time brings us to it, laugh at this small notes I took upon myself to write.
Predicting the future, that's my plan in the next weeks.
Technorati Tags: future
The MySQL Users Conference is almost over in sunny California and the output for those of us we didn't make the trip has been overwhelming with over 100 blog posts in a few days.
MySQL is booming. There are three new engines: Solid, an old friend that I used for testing on my Telenet days and had to drop due to management distrust (lessons we learn when we are young: don't listen to management when choosing technical solutions); PBXT, a brand new engine, fully ACID-compliant with some novel ideas about database layout on disks (white paper worth a read); and Falcon, an MySQL.com engine, developed in house by Jim Starkey, a ACID/MVCC guru (two articles about his presentation). And as a final item in the storage engine department, Oracle renewed the InnoDB aggrement with MySQL. All in all great news.
I've also been collecting all the talks that are online, and reading all that I can find. So far the one I liked the most is from Ask Bjørn Hansen (online at his site). But there are others:
Some Flickr information, partly MySQL-related, was also covered in a recent O'Reilly Radar by Tim. This last one is specially useful for people dealing with tags (Hint, Hint, you know who you are :) ).
Unrelated to MySQL UC, J. Scott Johnson also made a presentation on php|tek about MySQL at Ookles.com.
There are common themes:
Other presentations I would love to see online, or some notes:
Great times for MySQL. Great times indeed.
Update: got a couple more presentations related to MySQL. I'm just linking them here for future reference:
I've moved MT to a new site, shared with other people, and took cleaned up some settings on my blog.
Everything seems to be working, but if you notice something strange, please complain to me via SMTP or XMPP (prefered).
BTW, I'm also moving to Lighttpd in the next couple of days. I'll try to be gentle.
Just a quick post to note some things:
rss-full.xml and index.rdf. They are back but they are not announced anywhere. My recommendation is to use the Atom feed, or the RSS 2.0 feed if you want comments and trackbacks as well;And if I don't see you again, have a very good New Year.
Technorati Tags: mt
For those of us working with XMPP, this is probably the best christmas present we could have.
Yesterday, the Jabber Software Foundation, announced two new JEPs (similar to the RFCs of IETF, they define extensions to the basic XMPP RFCs), Jingle Signalling and Jingle Audio, to specify a standard way for XMPP clients to negotiate Voice over IP sessions.
In the wings of that announcement, Google released libjingle (also look at the SourceForge Project page for libjingle), a C++ library to implement the Jingle spec.
I'm still looking over licensing details and technical details, but the future for XMPP-based VoIP seems a lot brighter today.
BTW, my employer, is happy and proud to be part of the list of companies that pledged support for this standard. :)
Update: I'll be collecting some links to post around the comunity
Update 2: Aparently the libjingle also includes a relay server and a STUN server. From the libjingle readme file (via Celso):
Relay Server
Libjingle will also build a relay server that may be used to relay traffic when a direct peer-to-peer connection could not be established. The relay server will build in talk/p2p/base/relayserver and will listen on UDP ports 5000 and 5001. See the Libjingle Developer Guide at http://code.google.com/apis/talk/index.html for information about configuring a client to use this relay server.
STUN Server
Lastly, Libjingle builds a STUN server which implements the STUN protocol for Simple Traversal of UDP over NAT. The STUN server is built as talk/p2p/base/stunserver and listens on UDP port 7000. See the Libjingle Developer Guide at http://code.google.com/apis/talk/index.html for information about configuring a client to use this STUN server.
Technorati Tags: google, googletalk, jabber, jingle, libjingle, network, xmpp
Not something that I usually do, but I wanted to clear some links from my Safari toolbar:
After a small break, I'm back. I had some problems with MT, a trip to london perl workshop and some powerbook updates.
Also PSP stuff and perl mongers stories.
All of this and much more, right after the break.
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.
In case you usually browse my darcs repos, I switched to the new web interface.
The old one is still available.
My ADSL2+ link is now up and running. 2048 down, 256 up. It was painless to install and configure the Huawei router provided by the ISP I'm using. Connected my old Airport base station in bridge mode.
Now I can work without having to worry about the bill at the end of the month. Last month, I had a €99 surprise from my previous ISP. Well, it was expected. I'm not accustomed to use a pay-per-use link.
I was just browsing their marketing site, and this page stands out. Not bad, but for a real switcher-like experience, the videos are lacking some background music :).
Today, around 12:00, software patents will be up for vote at the European Parliament. You can follow it live.
At work, we put a site (Portuguese only) to spread the good word. You can also find an editorial of my CTO about the subject.
The process is something like this: first there will be a vote of a proposal to reject. If this vote is approved, the whole process goes back to the beginning.
If not, then the 21 amendments will be voted, and for each ammendemnt to pass, a majority is required. That's 365 of 729 votes.
As always, you can find information about all this at the Software Patents vs Parliamentary Democracy website.
Until I get something better, I added a new field to the comment form: site name. Just type simplicidade in there and all will work out well.
Until I get a decent anti-spam system, this one line patch to MT::App::Comments will do. I need some time to install a system like the one Carlos pointed out recently.
Technorati Tags: anti-spam
After waiting almost 5 months for my order, I finally received my Iconize me! order this week. It was worth the wait!
You can see the result on my blog homepage, also on each archive page.
I choose the premium package, and I got a small .GIF useful to be used in webpages, a monstrous JPEG (2000x3000 something 300DPI), and a PDF version, vector version of it. Sweet!
I finally have internet at home. For now, I'm using a cable modem with a per-usage plan. It will be my backup link after the ADSL is installed.
The ADSL should be ready in two weeks, it seems.
For now, I have a 256/128k link, costing 30 Euro cents per block of 10 minutes. With ADSL, I'm getting a 2Mb/256k link for 22 Euro per month.
So I had 700+ comments to approve today. And in the middle of those, about 10 of real people. Sorry about that you all.
Basically I never got the emails to approve the comments, and that sucks. I think I need a RSS feed of pending comments.
Anyway, the comment listing in Moveable Type sucks. You can't filter by text (all those Casino posts) and you can do LIKE in SQL either. And you can't filter to show only pending comments.
Or should I said couldn't.
I made a small patch to Moveable Type 3.14 (when I upgrade to 3.16, I'll update the patch). It adds match semantics to each field (implemented in the DBI back-end with LIKE), adds support to filter by text and URL, and also adds a small checkbox to show only pending comments.
With these two new features, it was a breeze to clean up 700+ comments. I could not report most of them to MT-BlackList, it kept complaining about too many URLs, so I just deleted them.
Anyway, I can now go and read all those comments I didn't get the first time around. BTW, please check the feed you are subscribing. There is one of them which includes the full comments. That would be my recommendation.
I've been using Backpack on and off. I (still) lack a internet connection at home right now, so I don't have that much online time.
Today the Backpack API was announced. I'll have to look at it. Maybe, if I don't find a good to-do app for the command line, I can write one with this API.
Web application of the day (and it's still early...) is Webnote.
Javascript/DOM/CSS+XHTML and modern browsers are growing up like mushrooms. It's crazy. And it's becoming so common that we move from one to another with a simple "yeah, nice", even if six months ago you could not dream about these stuff.
I'm switching servers in the next couple of days. The Shuttle that powers this site has not been stable enough. I think that the memory is still bad.
I had two 512M DIMMs and I found memory errors on one of them. It seems that the other one might have problems to.
Anyway, expect some downtime. I'm disabling comments and trackbacks in the meantime.
Update: mostly done, this site is now on a new server. Let's see how it goes.
In case you're wondering why this server was off the network from time to time, well, the poor thing was crashing. On a regular basis. Like a religion.
I made all the upgrades, I tried some tips from friends, but it kept crashing.
But now I know. Bad memory.
Well, I've removed the bad memory (at least I hope I did remove the right one...) so it should be more stable now.
BTW, memtest86 is available directly from any Fedora boot CD. Just type memtest86 at the prompt.
I upgraded my aging 3.0D version of MT to 3.14.
If you notice any problems, please leave a comment.
I'll install some anti comment spam plugins in the next few days, not exactly sure with ones. More to follow on that.
I just turned on mod_defalte on this site. If you notice any problems, just drop me a comment.
The setup I'm using right now is this:
# Insert filter SetOutputFilter DEFLATE # Netscape 4.x has some problems... BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html # Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip # MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine # BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html # NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48 # the above regex won't work. You can use the following # workaround to get the desired effect: BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html # Don't compress images SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png|zip)$ no-gzip dont-vary # Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
Got it from this site. I dropped the Location stuff he was using and put the directives above in the global config.
Ladies, and Germs, we have a new feed for those 3 who subscribe to this waste of time: RSS 2.0 full posts with comments and trackbacks. Just use 42.xml instead of the current file.
Nuno provided the template, thanks.
I never used MT-Blacklist. I started with MT3 so I really didn't feel the need.
But the screenshots of the new version (MT3 ready) are nice. I'll have to check it out :).
Sometime I talk about some things and I never get around to write them, or sometime I do but I leave them unfinished.
Sometimes they are useful even in their unfinished state. So I'm starting to release those as proof of concepts. Most of them will slowly die, other will morph into something better.
I'll post them at my proof of concept page.
The default templates that come with MT 3.0 are almost OK.
I have two pet peeves: first, there is no full posts rss feed; and second, the individual archive template lacks the right navigation bar of the main index template.
I want the first one because it's my preferred feed type. Almost all my feeds that I subscribe in NetNewsWire are full posts.
To solve that, I added a new index template, named rss-full.xml, and changed the default rss 2.0 template to output full posts. The result of my work can be found in the full posts rss template.
The second one is easy to understand: all the RSS/Atom feeds point to the individual archive page, so it makes sense to have the navigation there too.
Frankly, I expect most of my traffic from the archive pages, and not the home-page.
The edited individual archive template for your download pleasure.
Well, I finally decided to put up a website. And to make matters worst, I'm also starting to take some notes about the process of building my site, the projects I want to publish here, and some occasional rants.
The main purpose of this site will be to host all the projects I want to do, or that I'm currently doing.
Those projects are not related to my current employer, they are my own. There are a couple of exceptions, but those will be clearly marked as such.
There are 4 main projects right now: Kiwi, SAF, Apache::WAF and Test::Exception.
The first one is the largest one, and it will eventually take over the stuff I'm using MT for.
I really don't know if this is going to work, specially the blog part. Let try it and see.
Are you ready to be an Iron Man? Join the challenge and find out! (what is the meaning of this little man?)
