Notes

... go marching in.

Congrats to all the Saints fans, excellent second half, with a awesome starting play.

Drew Brees MVP. Pity about not breaking the pass record. Tied with Brady at 32.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

There is a lot of stuff being written these days about real-time web. Some think that it is the next step, the next big thing.

I find the concept interesting only from a technical point-of-view. All the details about a good real-time web is what passes for tech-porn around here.

But from a human point-of-view, the concept is flawed. Or at least, my own brain finds the concept flawed.

I can't keep up with a constant barage of updates. For quite sometime, I don't have a Twitter client (I only get status updates that contain a link via RSS), I stopped using FriendFeed, and I've disabled or pushed to 8+ hours all of my checks for new mail or new articles on my feed reader. The only exception to the no-real-time updates I have is my instant messenger, and a lonely IRC client on the last virtual desktop of my system.

Not that it isn't helpful sometimes, its just not a good way to consume knowledge and information.

There are two very different concepts here: up-to-date information and real-time awareness.

I want the real-time web to succeed because it creates the necessary infrastructure to have up-to-date information in real-time, but I don't want to have the awareness of those updates shoved at me.

In an ideal future, you would have an application that sits on your mobile device, your smartphone or your tablet, that helps me manage the real-time stream. Some of my friends, Nuno and Pedro, call this application Exocortex.

Your Exocortex would subscribe to all your news feeds, your email, your Twitter/Facebook/Whatever stream. With the real-time web infrastructure in place, it would be constantly being updated with the latest information. He does not interrupt your concentration, he doesn't require your awarness; he just collects, organizes (preferably by learning what you like, and what is important to you), and indexes all. It fetches pages mentioned in the articles that you get and caches them (I find that I often click on the links but rarely follow to the second level).

Most of this happens locally on the device. It is a ecological crime not to use your local CPU. The cloud should not be CPU and storage outsourcer, but a meeting point and backup destination. Not the main point of consumption, but the backup destination. And yes, some business models would stop working.

Then, when you take your device, you get an interface into the latest trends, articles, web pages mentioned, all from the inside of your little information world, powered by your personal social network.

You can be offline and still see the latest information up to the moment you disconnected. Everything is cached locally, and if something is missing, you can pin it for later retrieval. I like to call this "close the laptop and go"-scenario. No need to sync the latest version.

So I welcome the real-time web, not because I want to be bothered every time someone farts on Twitter, but because I just want to take my iPad and go.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Since May I've been using PGP Whole Disk Encryption on my laptop and his Time-Machine external drive.

Almost 6 months later I can report that it works great, you don't notice it at all. Strongly recommended, if you need this sort of thing.

But there are no completely secure software-only solutions, and its good to know the limitations, like the "Evil Maid" Attacks on Encrypted Hard Drives.

The comments on the article are also worth a read. There are some proposals in there that might work and defend against this kind of attacks.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The book turns into a TV show.

It might not have a comparison between riding a manta ray or riding a air-powered submersible thingie, but it shouldn't be too bad, given the two names associated with it.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 09:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So 14 years ago a project was born in Aveiro. Just a couple of guys (there is a picture of them, but it was buried somewhere due to hair style issues), love for technology and an idea.

Today the company has over 200 persons working there, keeps sharing their technology with us all, gives us access to a bunch of very cool APIs, and invites us to have fun from time to time.

I was lucky enough to work there for a couple of years, and do hope to do it again sometime in the future, it was a lot of fun.

For now, a really big happy birthday to SAPO.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I like to tinker with hardware, specially old servers.

I spent an hour upgrading our office server this morning. In a world of Ghz speeds, be prepared to slow down a little.

The server was a dual-pIII (yes, Pentium III, Katmai generation) at 450Mhz (yes, mega) with 512Mb RAM (at 100Mhz, in 4 DIMMs). The upgrade replaced the CPUs with a pair of pIII 500Mhz (a 11% increase, not bad), and the memory to 1Gb at 100Mhz. Basically thats the best you can hope for with this Intel N440BX (aka Intel Nightshade) board.

I don't have the full specs for either of them but I would guess that the CPU inside the new iPhone 3GS is a little faster than the pair of pIII I'm using.

The obligatory Flickr set for enthusiasts of old hardware porn.

I also uploaded a small video showing the hardware boot up, but had to use Vimeo because Flickr limits video uploads to 90 seconds, and this server takes a bit more than that just counting the RAM...

I bought this server in 1999, to power the NFS server for the first launch of the mail.pt service. It was handed down through the times, from company to company, until it belonged to me after the demise of Prodigio. At the time it used two Mylex SCSI RAID controllers (I still have them, one of them in production) with 4 x 9Gb SCSI hard drives on each.

I have a quote for a €390 upgrade to a Core 2 Quad 2.8 Ghz with 8Gb RAM. I plan to do this sometime next month. But this old office server will not die. It will power a smoke server to test Perl modules with several releases of FreeBSD.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

For the past week or so, I've kept myself without network access for the larger part of each day.

I check my email and RSS feeds early in the morning and late at night, just before bed, and keep my IM and IRC clients closed.

I needed to take a break, really. I found myself in the worst productivity slump ever, and something had to change.

I have lot of work piled up that I really want to get done:

• update the AnyEvent::Mojo module to support the latest Mojo developments, most notably support for pipelining commands;
• try out the Protocol::OpenID module that vti is writing: I promised him a AnyEvent::Mojo-based implementation;
• finish the XMPP Radar application;
• read through the new AnyEvent::XMPP branch that Robin has been working on: it looks significantly better and more developer-friendly than the current one;
• play around with real-time peer-to-peer synchronization of JSON-based documents: mostly a prototype to wrap my head around the problems of adding real-time replication to Prophet.

Thats the top 4, and I'm not even including $work stuff. On that side of things, I'm considering switching parts of DBIx::Class-based that I have (and don't particularly like, and in need of some feature-upgrades) to KiokuDB. That's probably the top item.

So far, working offline is paying off. I'm clearly more productive and I'm slowly getting myself out of the hole. I wonder how long I'll keep myself sane this way...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 06:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

One recurrent worry that I had was about my laptop security. At least once a week I get an email from a local portuguese Mac-zine about stolen Macbooks. When I got them, my first thought was always: if that happened to me, my $bussiness is screwed...

So a couple months ago I started looking around for options to secure my two macs (desktop and laptop) and their Time Machine backup drives against physical theft.

I bought a copy of PGP Whole Disk Encryption and I'm using it on my laptop. On day-to-day usage, you just don't notice the overhead. I suppose that if I had to do I/O intensive stuff I might, but so far it doesn't register at all.

The setup process is slow but painless. It took about 3 hours to encrypt my hard drive, and the laptop remains usable during the whole process. You can even stop and restart if you need to.

You can have several users each one with a different pass-phrase that can unlock the hard drive at boot time. I created two users, one for me, and another for disaster recovery. I generated a long random pass-phrase for the second user, printed two copies, and stored each copy on two different safe deposit boxes that I and my business parter have access to. This way, if I get hit by a bus, my partner can access the content of the drive.

My next step will be to encrypt the entire Time Machine external disk drive that I use. After that, I'll update the desktop machine and its Time Machine backup disk.

This should solve the physical theft problem. There are some precautions that you need to take though. For example, to be protected you must shutdown your laptop. When the laptop enters sleep mode, the hard drive remains "open". It would be nice to "lock" the hard drive when entering sleep mode, but I guess that it would require more support from Apple to do that. This is a problem for the laptop. I usually shutdown my desktop everyday when I leave the office. I do hope to see a lock-on-sleep feature in a future release.

But so far I'm very happy with this solution. Recommended.

Of course, I still have to worry about non-physical theft. People could still hack into my servers, or even hack into my desktop/laptop while they are running. But its a step.

The servers run with minimal services, and with a firewall active. I still haven't made the jump to a full SELinux enabled system, though. I do have a minimal port-knocking system for ssh connections, but its still experimental and only covers two of the ten servers I manage.

Also, some less secure services still share hosts with other higher security services. This is legacy from a time when I had less servers, and splitting them was not an option. My experiments with OpenVZ should provide an even better solution for this problem.

Small company, so small steps.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I've switched providers of OpenID. I was using ClaimID, but now I'm using MyOpenID.

The anti-pishing features are great, specially the personal icon feature. It basically sets a cookie on your browser, with a picture URL, and shows you that picture on the login page. If you don't see the picture, then the site didn't get the cookie, and the URL is probably fake. Simple and effective.

I've also gained OpenID 2.0 and XRDS support, which is nice.

And given that I was already using simplicidade.org as my identifier, I only had to update the <link>'s on that page to point to my new provider.

OpenID delegation FTW...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 06:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I stop following a bunch of people on Twitter, and I've stopped using any kind of real-time Twitter client. Its an amazing waste of time.

My new relation with Twitter can be summed up like this:

1. I'll post links that I find interesting;
2. I've subscribed the feed of mentions of @pedromelo: this allows me to read responses or comments about such links in my RSS reader, when I feel like it;
3. I've created a feed with all the twits from my friends that contain a link: allows me to catch any links they find relevant.

There. Twitter off.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Yesterday, Jaiku was turned off for a 24 hour maintenance. The goal: move it to the Google App Engine.

The site is now back, and the announced future is here: Jaiku is now a community maintained project called JaikuEngine (to be seen, really, its not there yet).

There are a couple of changes: SMS (as any sane cost-consciencius person would expect) are gone for all but US networks, and they will no longer pool your feeds (this was a surprise for me, and I think a lot of Jaiku'ers will be unhappy).

Also, the XMPP bot is still supported, so it seems that the announced support for XMPP and background processes on Google App Engine is working.

I don't know what is the future of Jaiku, but it will be interesting to see it unfold.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Today, Amazon AWS announced a new pricing tier for EC2 instances.

If you commit to 1 year or 3 years, with prices $325 or $500 respectively, you'll get a small EC2 instance for as low as $49-$35/month. Compare that with the current $75 per month, and it sounds like a very good deal if you have a constant set of EC2 instances.

The other interesting announcement is already a couple of months old, the new Amazon S3 Requester Pays Model.

This model should allow companies like DropBox to offer a lower-priced service with zero storage, and the end user uses its own S3 key for storage and transfer costs.

If this is a good deal for the end-user remains to be seen. A $100/year service from Dropbox gives you 50Gb, a $92 cost with the current S3 pricing structure. Of course, most people will use less than 50Gb, so that difference reverts to Dropbox. But on the other hand, you don't pay any data transfer costs, the risk is on their side.

But at least in terms of clear ownership of the data, it is much more reasonable for my data to be under my own key.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I admit that I really like D. J. Bernstein software. I use on a daily basis qmail, dbjdns, daemontools and ucspi-tcp. I also know that he can be a bit difficult sometimes. I've seen him on the qmail mailing list in the late 90's and he could be very hard on people (case in point, Brad Knowles). But I never saw him on the wrong side of reason.

Thats why I'll be watching with pleasure the next battle on the horizon. Everybody who has read DJB on DNS security (scroll down, to "Under the hood: DNS problems") know that he really doesn't believe in DNSSEC. But now, we have his answer to the problem.

Yesterday his site was updated with a link to his secure DNS solution (top and bottom of the page), dnscurve. I haven't read it yet, but I'm sure I'm going to enjoy it.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 06:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Shadow Puppets, by Orson Scott Card, chapter 3:

Gossip flies around here, since there's nothing else for the parents of geniuses to do but twitter to each other about the doings of their brilliant boys and girls.

Curious. I wonder if they where Card fans.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Interesting post at Joyeur about the new library, the set of books that most of us should have laying around.

I got all of them minus one, Solaris Performance and Tools, from both the new and the old list. I think I lost the APUE, though.

Of the listed books I would single out Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle, as one of the most insightful books I read in the last two years.

To that list, specially if you are a Perl programmer, I would add Higher-Order Perl, by Mark Jason Dominus. You can buy it or download a free copy at the author site.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

My relation with bug trackers is full with disappointments. Or maybe unmatched expectations.

Bugzila, Trac, RT, Redmine, FogBugz, all of them where courted in some form or another. But I'm still a bachelor.

As any successful marriage, there are some things that your partner will bring to the table (organization, perfect memory) and somethings that you need to be happy (the ability to integrate with my workflow). And so far, all of them failed to make me happy.

I think I can blame darcs and git, as they reminded me that version control can be fun. I wonder: are DVCSs my mistresses?

As soon as I tried darcs, I was hooked on distributed version control systems, and the workflows they allowed (in particular off-line work), and both CVS and Subversion lost any sex appeal they had right there. Its like those two lost two thirds of their IQ. With git, the passion that started with darcs turned into a workable happy marriage: no more waiting for her to take hours to get ready for a simple dinner.

So now I can work seamlessly between several computers, and my new partner git keeps my source code sane and consistent.

But this new found freedom makes the bug tracking system I used the weak link. They stick to the old ways, of a central place where everything is done, and lack the flexibility to just hop on the car, drive somewhere nice and keep on working.

What I wanted was the same kind of love that I got from the distributed nature of the others. The ability to work anywhere and have my tickets right there, locally, with fast access and keep on working, even if the network is not.

There are some cute new systems around, bug trackers that use a DVCS as a backend. But I have a problem with them: the explicit need to pull/push the ticketing branch.

The problem derives from a misconception: if you use a DVCS for code, with an occasional pull, integrate, push cycle, it shouldn't be a problem to use the same workflow for tickets, with an occasional pull, fix conflicts, push. They look similar, but actually they are not.

But tracking and ticketing are essential for team communication and should be as close to real-time as possible. If I create a new ticket or add a new comment or change ticket meta-data, it would be very useful to propagate that to all the replicas of my ticketing database.

Of course, the change could cause a conflict, but you can work in "apply until you get a conflict"-mode, and then, when you have the attention of the user, say "hey buddy, I have some changes here that need some work from you".

In reality, if most replicas are online most of the time, conflicts should be rare, because each person will be working with fresh, up-to-date world view.

The main difference is that DVCSs are always offline and occasional go online to synchronize. A distributed ticketing system should be always online, with occasional offline periods, during which you queue up changes to publish later.

And this would allow a "just close the laptop and go"-kind of workflow. The local ticket database has all the updates from everybody, and it will synchronize with others when you are back online.

So far I haven't found a system with all this features. The last couple of months I have been playing with two systems to see if they are solution (completely or partially) to this problem.

The first one is CouchDB. It is not a ticketing system, but it is a document-oriented database with a nice HTTP-based synchronization protocol, and a interesting way to deal with conflicts.

Although I think you could make it work, it lacks any kind of security for now (should be available in the 0.9 release) and the use of HTTP for synchronization makes it hard for peer-to-peer synchronization.

I came across the second system last week. Its called Prophet, and it is written by the same people who wrote RT, Best Practical.

Prophet is actually a distributed database. On top of it, they wrote SD (simple defects) that is able to do most of what I'm looking for.

I've read through the docs and parts of the code, and it has a very nice design.

Synchronization is field-based, not document based, so you can have two different persons editing two different fields and don't generate a conflict. Of course, real-world is more complicated than that, and certain field combinations might be invalid, but it seems (still checking) that the conflict resolution code is pluggable so you might be able to have some code that validates the document after any field changes and generates a conflict in those cases.

On the negative side, it still requires a pull, resolve, push cycle. It also seems to bundle the fetch and merge into a single operation, so a always-on-fetch and occasional merge might require some coding.

I guess I still haven't found the ticketing system of my life, but peer-to-peer database synchronization is starting to see some real work, so the basis of a system like that should be available soon.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Next week I'll be attending the 2008 edition of Codebits.

I also have a slot to talk about XMPP and this is where you can help.

I don't want to do another abstract talk about XMPP, but instead I want to write code that you would like to see.

So if there is some XMPP-based functionality that you want to see how you can get it done, ping me or email me with the high-level details.

I'll take all the projects I can cover in an hour and present my skeleton or even complete solution at the conference and discuss why it was done that way.

All the code will be available before the presentation so you can also follow along.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Dirac, a GPL'ed wavelet-based video compression algorithm, reached the 1.0 milestone.

I'm not expecting a Apple-official QuickTime component (there is a non-Apple project to create a QT component for Dirac, including encoder), but I'm interested on comparisons with H.264. Anyone?

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Dear Lazyweb,

this is something that I searched for quite some time and could not find yet, maybe a helpful soul knows.

In a bourne shell script, how can I find the full path of the script being executed?

Thanks in advance.

Update: the following command, sent by Celso Pinto, passes all my tests.

SCRIPTDIR="`cd $(dirname $0);pwd`

For the record, I used two scripts to test this. First, the script_dir.sh script:

#!/bin/sh

echo "\$0 is $0"
SCRIPTDIR=`dirname $0`
echo "    dir: $SCRIPTDIR"
SCRIPTDIR="`cd $(dirname $0);pwd`"
echo "    dir: $SCRIPTDIR"

The script to run the tests, run_script_dir_tests.sh:

#!/bin/sh

chmod 755 script_dir.sh

./script_dir.sh 1
../$USER/script_dir.sh 2
../$USER/bin/../script_dir.sh 3

sh ./script_dir.sh 1 with sh
sh ../$USER/script_dir.sh 2 with sh
sh ../$USEr/bin/../script_dir.sh 3 with sh

export PATH=`pwd`:$PATH

cd /
script_dir.sh "via path"

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Hi all,

does anybody knows if I can modify the encoding that should be used with a specific file using mode lines?

I have a project with a mix of utf8 and iso-8859-1 files, and I would like to "mode-line"-them to the proper encoding so that I don't have to remind me to do it.

Thanks

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Remember when Plazes appears a couple of years ago? Quickly the got a lot of mac addresses geo-referenced.

Now you can go through all that work again, but this time to improve the service that Skyhook provides to his customers, like Apple with the "Locate me" button. Just fill this form and be happy.

Speaking of Plazes and mac addresses, now you can map you location using Plazes with a mac address or any other unique network identifier, like a bluetooth ID, or the mac address of an appliance or office server, or a GSM tower ID. Its all due to the love of the new plazes.net site.

I wonder if Apple will add a "Improve my location" button to the Maps application. You could tell the service, "No, I'm actually here", the iPhone/iPod Touch would scan the near by mac addresses, GSM IDs and send them to Plazes and Skyhook.

This would be an interesting App to develop with the new SDK, if anyone is looking for an idea.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Apparently this is not a April's 1st joke. Nor is this.

I would think that the Mozilla guys to be a bit pissed at Epiphany for dropping Gecko, but hey, meritocracy, right?

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

A most excellent Ultimate Game strip at xkcd.

By the way, in case you haven't figure it out yet, half the fun of xkcd is usually buried in a alt/title tag on the image, so always hover over the image to see it.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 06:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I don't have a iPhone nor an iPod Touch because I would like to have 3G on the device. 3G is more important than Wifi where I live.

Anyway, for the first time today, I saw an application that really tempted me to buy one: Labyrinth.

Yes, my desire for this kind of thing is not natural.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Three weeks ago I powered down my oldest Linux server.

It started is useful life as a NFS server for mail.pt site, moved to MySQL server of EVOLUI.com, and now is going to rest a bit.

It went online March 1999. I pulled the plug in 27th, January 2008.

It still has the original CPUs (dual PIII, 450Mhz), the original memory (although half of it is from an upgraded after I moved it to MySQL server, for a total of 1Gb), and this is the real kicker, the same 4 data SCSI disks, connected to a DAC9660 RAID SCSI controller.

I don't remember the original Linux distro, but given that the servers where assembled by me and Celso, I guess he suckered me into installing Debian on the box. Lately it was running RedHat 7.2 (Enigma), with a 2.4.18-17 kernel.

They don't make them as they used to.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

April 4. Ok, April 5 for those with SciFi-over-BitTorrent only.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So, leaving for FOSDEM 2008 later today, I need a checklist:

• Passport: check;
• Plane ticket: check (Pedro tells me a plain ticket will not fly...);
• Laptop hard drive: update clone at the office - still to do;
• Send phone number to one or two persons going to be there: still to do done;
• Clothes: still to pack;
• Clean up non-essencial stuff from backpack: still to do done.

I'll drive to Lisbon around 1PM and catch the plane at 7PM. I'll probably miss the FOSDEM Beer Event though.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This will be all over the news, but Fidel Castro is stepping down after, what, 30 49 years (corrected by Pedro) as President of Cuba.

Its the end of an era, for sure.

Now, two choices:

• Cuba becomes the live action series Miami, the Next Generations Vices;
• a civil war erupts between a tired population and a elite trying to keep the same control that Fidel had.

Time will tell.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I've uploaded to Flickr a couple of pictures of my current index card system that I use to track the stuff I need to get done.

In the end, after a year and a half trying several different systems, this is the one that stood the test of time: it works for me.

I would love to have something online that I could work with, specially because working with other people using index cards is not practical, but I haven't found it yet (I will try Hiveminder again just because it seems they have a IMAP interface, I'm curious about that. update: false alarm, no such feature exists, but it would be an interesting one).

One thing that I like with this index card system is the built-in expiration cycle of tasks: monday morning, I look through all the cards and I rewrite some of them, to merge related stuff. When I copy a task from a card to a new one, I add a number at the end, like (1). This is the number of times I copied the task without completing it.

It gives me a very good view about tasks that are really not that important.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Hotel: check; Plane: check; Baby sitter to cover for me during the weekend: check.

Guess I'm ready to go.

I'll see you at FOSDEM 2008. You'll probably find me around the Jabber Software Foundation stand.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Last week we had a server crash. And I did 400 kms to fix all the bits. And it works now.

Nothing to see, move along.

Unless you are a true geek... In that case:

• Pentium 4 motherboard (about 3 years old) with a graphics card no longer supported by the graphical installer of CentOS 5 (see below why is that important);
• 1Gb memory: I could have bumped it to 2 Gb, but I had other more important hardware upgrades to make;
• Our single (I though I had two RAID1 disks, I was wrong) 80Gb disk was caving under usage. Also, the console started burping about cannot read, blah, blah, blah.

So I slapped two 250Gb SATA drives. Total cost about €100. Then I set to update to latest CentOS 5.1. I wanted to use software raid 1 and then use LVM on top of that.

Turns out, you can only do that if you use the graphical installer, and the on board ATI Rage something is no longer supported by the CentOS 5 installer. So I had to bring my preferred rescue disk, INSERT, built the partitions, raid and LVM setup by hand (not that hard, two fdisks, and a sequence of mdadm, pvcreate, vgcreate and lvcreate; six commands total), and then used the text-based installer to map and format the partitions.

I took the opportunity to remove all the PHP vestiges I had on my blog. I was using PHP to include the sidebar on every page, but I replaced it with Lighttpd mod_ssi.

Copying data (in my case, about 20 Gb of mail mostly) was the slowest part, really. Lots os small files. rsync --size-only helps a bit here.

All this work makes you look at Google Apps for Domains really hard, but my "clients" don't want to have their mail inside GMail, so I'll stick to the current setup for now.

But now we're back, and ready for the next 2 or 3 years.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

In the past day or so, I came across with a couple of tools that are worth mentioning.

First, FogBugz is now at version 6, and its better than ever. They have a small screen-cast online about the new version. If you just need to see one feature, I suggest you fast forward to 4:00 and see the part about estimates and how they use it to calculate delivery dates. If you can afford it, its worth the price.

The second set of tools is about code review. I'm testing these two I found online and they seem very nice, but its too soon to pick one. The contenders are:

• Review Board: a tool written at VMWare;
• Codestriker.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Whoa....

My first reaction was "Nooooo....", but I'm more on "Let's see how this goes" now.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This can be found on any http://flickr.com/photos/YOUR_ID/ page:

<link rel="openid2.provider" href="https://open.login.yahooapis.com/openid/op/auth" />

You cannot use that login as an OpenID yet, but it should live soon, apparently.

Another win for OpenID.

Update: more comments from Simon Wilson.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Paul Downey:

If you know someone still slipping around on the SOAP, don’t hate them, just warn them the longer they continue the sillier they look. They deserve your sympathy, not hate. Just give them lots of hugs!

in "End of an Era".

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

That's how much Amazon payed for the copy of the The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling. The proceeds will be donted to The Children's Voice campaign.

The book is beautiful. Scroll down and see all the pictures.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So I need to decide what to do with my broken 17" laptop.

I'll try and see how much would it cost to fix this, but replacing a LCD is always the most expensive operation.

If I have to buy something new, I'll probably won't buy a Macbook Pro again. I spend a lot of time in the office now a days, so I can work on the road with a smaller laptop.

A combo of a low-end iMac plus a low-end Macbook is cheaper than my Macbook Pro 17", anyway.

I'll wait for Macworld 2008 (less than a month away) to decide. Time to put my APPL gains to some good use, I think.

Not in a good mood, however...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Ok, time to panic.

My laptop LCD is going bonkers.

A ruined laptop is something I do not need now.

Update: yep, I'm severely fsck'ed. The lower half of the LCD on my 17" Macbook Pro is berserk. Running with external LCD for now, while I decide what to do. Happy Christmas to me.

Update 2: Left the laptop at the most recommended Authorized Apple support shop. Hope to hear from them today. It appears that its just a loose cable, because if you wiggle the LCD, the screen shows up perfectly. However, a loose cable is not something that you easily swap apparently.

Update 3: Out of warranty, I'm afraid. Apple gives you 1 year (no AppleCare in Portugal), Portuguese laws give you 2 years if you bought your computer as an individual but mine was bought by my company, and in that case, you only get 6 months.

I'm waiting for a call to know how much does it cost to buy a new LCD for the 17". I'm don't expect a good deal, so I think I'll be counting the days until MacWorld 2008.

In the meantime, I'm using a Mac mini G4 (oh the pain...) and a friend is going to lend me a Mac mini Intel.

I guess its time to try Mac OS X Server running on the Macbook Pro.

Update 4: over €800 for the new LCD. I'll wait until MacWorld 2008 to decide the next step then.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So it seems that a lot of usual friends are going away for a while.

I'm mostly concerned with BSG season 4. I mean, its the last season, it would suck big time if it didn't get back to production.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So after 6+ years of faithful service, my TiBook died just now, with a buzzing sound (not hard drive, somewhere in the upper right-hand corner of the logic board under the keyboard).

I'll have to search around to see if this is something recoverable or not. I didn't have any important data on it, but he was the box that powered my third screen, as described previously.

Must... Resist... Buy... New... Mac...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

URI Fragment Identifiers for the text/plain Media Type: hope this gets approved. It would make source-code linking easy.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Nice write-up by Jens Afke about Facebook and decentralized identifiers.

I need a "link-blog"...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

PEP was committed to the trunk of ejabberd. Probably the checking I was most anxious to see.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The last 2 ADSL routers I bought (the most recent 3 months ago) lack support of SRV DNS records.

When I get my IP address via DHCP, the router also sets itself as my DNS server. But if I use it, dig srv _xmpp-client._tcp.simplicidade.org gives me zero answers.

This, as you might imagine, sucks big time. This is a D-Link router bought in 2007, and basic SRV lookups are still missing in action.

Two applications I use on a regular basis have problems with this: XMPP clients and the Mac OS X 10.4.x version of ssh command line client.

Both of them use SRV lookups, and while ssh just becomes slower to connect, for XMPP clients this has a devastating effect because all of my accounts only have SRV records.

I know that you can use also fallback to a A record, but if you have out-sourced your XMPP server to someone like Google Apps for Domains, or if you use different servers for web and XMPP, it might not be as easy. There is also XEP-0156: Discovering Alternative XMPP Connection Methods but the business rules section (in particular rule 2) prevents us from using TXT records to provide the same information that is already in the SRV records.

The solution is to use a decent router, or upgrade to a decent firmware if available.

But in the meantime, this sucks.

Update: it's not a SMC router, but a DLink router, DSL-524T. Anyway, the firmware is the latest one available at my local support site, but the http://www.dlink.co.uk/ has a newer firmware, 3.00B01T02.UK-A.20060621. I'll install that one. A good thing is that this router supports OpenWRT, another option.

Update 2: all firmwares I could find for the D-Link would fail the upgrade process, so I gave up on any official firmware. Next step: OpenWRT.

I had a SpeedTouch 580 around (as a backup for the 510 I use at the office). The default firmware, 4.2.7, had the same problem with SRV lookups, but a quick update to 4.3.6 solved the problem and now I have SRV lookups again, yeah!

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This is good news. Qmail distribution page is already updated.

Pity it took so long. 8 or 9 years ago, a public domain version of Qmail would rock. Now, not so much.

But even so, it will make things like qmail-ldap project easier to use.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

A football match with the players using binoculars.

Not work safe because you'll make a fool of yourself laughing out loud. I know I did.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

A full (114 pages) PDF version of the series by Ulrich Drepper is now available.

Everything you ever wanted to know about memory...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Carmack is (still) god. At least one of them.

(via apostle pfig).

Update: a more accurate version of the source of the code.

Update 2: the real author stands up.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I've come across an interesting project growing around OpenSolaris. Its called NexentaOS and its a OpenSolaris branch.

The company behind NexentaOS is Nexenta. They use the OS to build a NAS appliance, NexentaStor, that runs on commodity x86/64 hardware, and offers very cool features: unlimited snapshots, snapshot replication, NFS, CIFS, FTP, Rsync and Amanda. Also, they use ZFS so you can grow your storage to extremely large pools, with both direct-attach storage or using iSCSI.

The cool part, the one that got me interested, is that they also make available a VMWare image, a NexentaStor Virtual Appliance, fully featured time-unlimited evaluation product (good for up to 6Tb) that you can download for free. I'll download the Quick Start Guide to see what can be done with this, but if this is really simple to use, it might just replace the small office NAS (around 500Gb RAID-1).

I found out about Nexenta via the Joe Little blog - Little Notes. Joe works at the Electrical Engineering department at Stanford University, and you can read how they are using Nexenta as a second tier storage for backups, keeping 6 months of daily snapshots. He also has a white-paper about multi-tier storage worth a read.

One last item: in the Community tab of the Nexenta website, I also found a RsyncShare, a open source implementation of RSYNC shares manager for Windows servers. It might be worth a look if you have to manage stuff like that.

I'll leave you with an article by Paul Murphy about OpenSolaris, NexentaOS and what they mean to Linux. Also very interesting stuff. The road to ZFS on Linux is still buried deep in incompatible licensing mud, so I don't expect to see a decent implementation running native on Linux soon. And I don't consider FUSE to be a production environment, sorry. So if running OpenSolaris or NexentaOS makes you dizzy, you might want to take a look at FreeBSD, given that ZFS support is already in there.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Yes, I need a haircut. Yes, my wife refuses to admit that she's married to me with pictures like this floating around.

And yes, they where good apples. I think I ate about a dozen of them during the three days of Codebits.

(Picture from the Delfim Codebits gallery).

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So Codebits ended last thursday night. It was the best conference I attended in a long time.

We had pretty good house (I would love to know official numbers, but I would say that about 300 people where around), and at the end of the contest, 47 projects, some goofy, some hardware hacks, a bunch of mobile hacks, and a lot of web stuff. I think it was a good participants to projects ratio.

The 90 seconds per project presentations where very cool, and it gave a very good rhythm to the whole thing. At the end, 10 lucky winners (I suppose the winner list will be online sometime next week) got a great set of prizes: Xbox 360, Macbook and Vaio laptops, O'Reilly books, iPods, and lots of other stuff.

Of all the projects, two of my favorite projects won a prize: a Pong game based on distance sensors, and a presentation about a slideshow organizer for pictures of porn sites (the presentation didn't include the pictures of those sites, but he did put up a porn movie in the background, audio-only during his 90 seconds...). Just for the record, the last one won the humor category.

Two other projects that didn't win but deserve a mention: the first, called GPlat. Its a simple website for playing games. I liked it because it matches some of the work I want to do with the SAPO Messenger client. The second, Use Your Head, is another pong game but this time you control your pad using a web-cam and facial recognition.

(Update: I was mistaken, Use Your Head did win a prize. Thanks to JoaoP for the correction)

Celso and Pedro are to be congratulated. They did an amazing job putting this together, and they where able to get an amazing set of support people. Congrats to all of them.

You can look at updated photos by Delfim and also see what people uploaded to SAPO Fotos and Flickr.

As for me, it was a blast participating, and being part of the jury. If they had pre-bookings, I would put my name down for the next year.

Update: more links to photos, videos and blog posts:

• videos at SAPO Videos;
• photos at Flickr;
• Isa Costa summary;
• Especialistas (several cartoons about Codebits).

Update 2: official wrap-up post by Celso.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Another thing that showed up during Codebits: the Destakes API.

Simple, and to the point. Like it should be.

Kudos to Carlos.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The Codebits event is awesome. The haven't had this much fun in a long time.

You can look through some great pictures of the event at Delfim's gallery.

The F.E.V.E.R. concert last night was pretty cool, although I'm not a fan of their kind of music. Even through out the concert people where still coding like good geeks.

Update: uploaded some pictures of my own to Flickr.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Codebits started a couple of minutes ago, and I'm really impressed with the number of people who showed up.

This is already a big success.

More later, now back to Mike Culver presentation.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

In case you have been living under a rock, the best geek conference in Portugal is just around the corner.

Codebits has everything you need to have loads of fun hacking: a big place, decent bandwidth, cool conference track, and access to SAPO APIs that you might need to build your next site (soon to be at developer.sapo.pt). Follow the blog for the latest updates and check the FAQ for everything else.

And you get to meet a bunch of crazy geeks, just like you.

So come on down, bring your laptop and your brain, and let them provide the rest. Hurry though, we are down to the last places now.

I'll be around the three days.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So there is this batch of Seagate disk drives that has a high (or more accurate above normal) rate of defects:

The faulty drives are all Seagate 2.5" drives that are manufactured in China, with a Firmware revision of 7.01. They are also all SATA interface. No other drives seem (at this stage) to be affected.

Guess what my Macbook Pro 17" 1st generation has:

I have good backups, but still... Time to find out if there is a Apple program to replace the drives.

(via João Pedro, and the local Mac mailing list)

Update: the counter-punch.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

For those of you who have Leopard Fever and will install 10.5.0 in the Mac that you use for work (big pause here so that you can digest all the hidden tigers in this last sentence), be smart and at least use some protection.

Some links that might help:

• jwz on backups: a basic dual clone setup, the same setup I use for disaster recovery;
• SuperDuper!: I use this for my clones, not rsync;
• Carbon Copy Cloner: I used this before SuperDuper!. Recently upgraded, worth a look. I prefer SuperDuper! because the UI is simpler.

The basic point is: do not upgrade to Tiger without a tested full bootable clone of your current hard-drive.

By the way, cloning is not backing up. Backing up means that I should be able to retrieve deleted and previous versions of any file. Cloning does not allows me to do that. Think of cloning as disaster recovery only. You'll quickly be up and running again, but it will not save you from accidently deleting some files you worked on yesterday.

For backups, right now, I can't really recommend anything. I don't like any of the solutions out there. At first I would recommend Retrospect but in recent times it has been lagging (there still is no Universal version for example). Also I don't trust Apple's Backup.app, not yet.

With Leopard, you'll get Time Machine which has some interesting features (mainly the frequency of backups it allows), but do not forget that this is the first release of Time Machine, and if you have one piece of software in your laptop that must always work, its your backup solution.

So take Time Machine with a grain of salt. Do not depend solely on it for your backups.

The best thing about Time Machine is that it forced Apple to create a infrastructure inside Mac OS X that will allow backup applications to do incremental backups with ease, speed and therefore with greater frequency.

I do hope to see some big names in the backup software field to use the same fs_events magic that Time Machine uses. EMC insignia is talking about a new version of Retrospect for '08, lets wait to see what will come of that.

If you really want to take your data seriously, I would recommend you spend $10 and buy this book: Take Control of Mac OS X Backups (updated September 27, to include Leopard stuff).

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

An article about SIP and IM from Marshall T. Rose (you know, X.500 and most of the OSI stuff dude). Interesting read.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Whooa.... Google Mail gets IMAP...

This is huge. This makes me and my business a customer of Google Apps for domains. Pity that we just settled a year-long contract with other party. On the other hand, it will give Google a year to fine tune their IMAP server :).

(via Gruber - Daring Fireball).

Posted by Pedro Melo at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Hi, my name is Pedro and I'm a Pixel Lover Anonymous. I can't get enough of them, and its ruining my life.

Latest update of my workstation display setup brings the total usable display width to 4740 pixels across.

The setup started with a Matrox DualHead2Go Digital Edition to span a single DVI output across two 20" Acer Wide LCDs (see a Flickr set with two 24" I used to test it) but the results where not that good. Besides having my mac opening the windows between the two screens (after all its only one screen to him), I got a fuzzy picture and some edge-issues: part of one screen crossing over to the other. This last problem is probably due to the extra DVI-to-VGA setup I was using, given that my LCDs where VGA and not DVI, but I'm not quite sure.

So, up-to 1280x1024 dual external display, I think that the Matrox is a good solution.

But I had two 1650x1024 AS2016W... So in the end I went back to a previous setup: use the old PowerBook, attach one of the 20" to it, and use ScreenRecycler to make it appear as the third monitor in my main Macbook Pro.

So far, even with a 800Mhz PowerBook using this setup with VNC in the middle, performance is acceptable, and the image quality is perfect. You'll notice screen redraws while dragging windows, but thats not a problem for my line of work.

So if you want to expand your workspace of your Mac, and have an extra LCD and any kind of computer laying around, I would recommend ScreenRecycler.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I'm trying to buy some SATA drives in bulk, to have some idea of the cost of 2TB of storage.

The question to you all: do you know of a price comparison site for bulk purchases of SATA drives that I could use just to get some idea on prices?

Thank you all.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

An amazing new technology to resizing images. The video is pretty impressive.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

In a site I manage that requires user registration, 5.4% of the users use as password a combination of 4 digits.

I wonder how many of those match their PIN numbers of their credit/debit cards.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I guess we'll have to way a bit, but given the pedigree of the author list, this will most definitively be the MySQL book to buy.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 09:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Does this mean that they are bankrupt?

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

At work, I use two displays: the internal 17" 1680x105 of the Macbook pro, and a external 20" 1680x1050.

The problem is that the DPIs of each monitor are different: the external has 3" more at the same resolution.

This makes me almost never use the 17" for work stuff, and stuff it mostly with long-lived tasks or log tailing windows.

Now I'm trying something different. I've lowered the resolution of the 17" to 1440x852 (stretched) and that makes the 17" much closer DPI-wyse to the external one, and I can have real work windows there.

Will see how it goes. I don't know if the fuzziness that this stretching causes will make it a very livable experience. Time will tell.

I can only hope that Leopard and its resolution independence will allow me to set both monitors to the same DPI auto-magically.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This last week I went around shopping for a HTML rich editor, those "little" JS things that learned in Hogwarts (Hi, pfig! ;) ) some spells to turn normal text-areas into Word look-alikes.

Anyway, this is my short list right now, in no particular order:

• Asbru Web Content Editor: fully supports Safari, commercial but inexpensive. Supports tables;
• YUI Rich Text Editor: fresh out of the oven, not tested yet, but YUI always makes my short list;
• ExtJS Lightweight HTML Editor: I already use ExtJS so this also makes the list, but it seems very limited, to be investigated;
• TinyMCE: this has been my choice on other occasions but Safari support is lacking a bit.

At the moment I'm biased to the first one, just because it supports Safari and Table editing. But I might stick with ExtJS simpler editor if it has all the feature I really need (mostly bullets).

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

If you want/need to receive money from your customers online, you now have another option: Amazon Payments.

250 pages of docs... That will take time.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Nothing more to say, really...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Dear Lazy Web, I need to implement a distributed election algorithm over an mostly-reliable group communication channel.

Any pointers to papers or software that already does this would be mostly appreciated. I'll post my own findings here also.

Kisses,

Posted by Pedro Melo at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This is just too cool not to buy. Checkout Meraki.net and their meshed network gear. It looks amazing.

I'm trying to buy a pack of three here in Europe. I'm hoping the scandinavian reseller is able to ship them to our little corner of land.

Can't wait to play with these...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Recently, Rui pointed me to Drobo.

The feature list and the ease of use look amazing, and the box is pretty too. Unfortunately there is no NAS version (yet?).

One of the features is the seamless storage expansion. Just add disks, and the box takes care of the rest (all that RAID non-sense).

The best NAS product that does the same thing that I could find is the ReadyNAS NV+ (Anandtech review). They have something called X-RAID that does basically the same thing as Drobo, although Drobo is much smarter in terms of using all of the storage space, splitting it between protected and unprotected storage space. You can see the Drobo storage space calculator (the Drobolator!) to see what I mean.

Anyway, I would like to buy one of these. Now begins the hunt for a Portuguese reseller...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

melo@mrtray:melo $ ping melo.mobi 
PING melo.mobi (melo.mobi): 56 data bytes
ping: sendto: No route to host
ping: sendto: Host is down
ping: sendto: Host is down
ping: sendto: Host is down
ping: sendto: Host is down
ping: sendto: Host is down
ping: sendto: Host is down
^C
--- melo.mobi ping statistics ---
12 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

My mobile phone is dead. Replacement hasn't landed yet. If you need to contact me, use Jabber.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Google Apps for Domains is looking very very good. Pedro switched today, and I would to, but right now I depend on IMAP (I use offline mode a lot), and there is no support for it, even on the Premier Edition (the one I would be using myself).

I've read some comments that IMAP would have less than ideal mapping to the current tag-based approach of GMail, but for me, thats a non issue:

• tags are folders, folders are tags;
• if I move a message to a folder in my IMAP client, I'm tagging the message;
• a message can exist in several folders (multiple tags).

I don't see a problem with this approach. You could think that folders inside folders might be hard, but thats just a bit of meta-data associated with tags.

The same comment said "Server-side searches can potentially use lots of server resources".... I wonder if he noticed that he was talking about Google, search and heavy loads in the same phrase... The IMAP SEARCH command can just plug into the current search for GMail. Again, I fail to see a problem with this.

We shall wait and see...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

April 6 is just around the corner... Fun!

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

About Google server farm:

Even today, Google is serious about exerting total control over the servers in their now-massive server farms. They build their own high-efficiency power supplies, and conduct fascinating, public research on disk failure. Current estimates put Google's server farm at around 450,000 machines - and they're still custom built, commodity-class x86 PCs, just like they were in 1999."

Thats a lot of juice.

(via Google Operating System)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Hey, kudos to pfig for getting his photo published. I like his Tube set.

He can fall a sleep before sex like no other, but he takes good pics.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I like the concept of OpenID. I remember when Brad announced it, when it was still called Yadis. I remember because at the time I was cleaning up the code that Clix used for global authentication across all their properties, and that one shares a lot of ideas with Yadis/OpenID.

In recent weeks we've seen AOL, Microsoft (63 Million OpenID potential users just there, plus all the Yahoo! logins), Verisign, BitFrost (of the OLPC project), any XMPP account, and even Mozzila Foundation is thinking about OpenID inside Firefox3, and this makes me believe that OpenID is now in his teen years.

Brad passed the torch to Simon Wilson and he has made an excellent screencast showing him using his OpenID to access some sites.

We live in interesting times...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This site will be on-and-off during the day. The 4th result in the Google search results for iPhone is hosted in the same server as this site...

We are dealing with it :).

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The ZFS filesystem seems to be too good to be true. A good presentation about ZFS major features is available.

Having instantaneous snapshots is something that I grew accustomed to with NetApp OnTap filesystem. I love the idea of having them in my servers. And if you believe the rumors flying around about Leopard, soon in a laptop near you.

Regarding the Mac, using ZFS as the basic filesytem for Mac OS X would be a superb move, and would give them for free all the technology to implement Time Machine. It would be only a pretty face on top of ZFS snapshots.

Next topics for R&D: OpenSolaris and OpenSolaris as a Xen client. The outlook looks good.

Update: as commented by Carlos Rodrigues, LVM also has snapshots. Yes, I knew that, but they are not as simple as NetApp or ZFS in terms of usage. I believe you have to specifically mount them, as can be seen in this example. I did find a couple of disturbing posts though. Also, I've read somewhere that snapshots are not resiliant to reboots, but haven't found a reference for that.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is now on pre-order on Amazon.co.uk. Yes, I've already ordered mine.

The Amazon.co.uk sales rank lists both versions of the book taking the two top spots. Amazing.

Some time later...

There is something wrong with some people...

From the Wikipedia article about book seven:

In September 2006, Rowling was nearly barred by US Transportation Security Administration officials from carrying a working manuscript for the seventh Harry Potter novel onto an airplane, due to security restrictions, but eventually she prevailed. She said at the time she would rather have sailed home in a boat than be separated from the manuscript.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Yesterday, I was doing some shopping in a local mall and I happen to cruise by the monitor section and they had an Acer 20" with a 1680x1050 resolution on promotion. They had 6 monitors left with a very good price.

Today I stopped by and picked up the last one left.

I'm now writing this on a large widescreen display. It's pretty nice, and the pixel-maniac in me is pretty happy. I'm still tuning the contrast and to make it easier on the eyes, but the new real-estate is very useful.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Some friends ask me regularly if they should buy a Mac now or wait a little more. Instead of repeating it every time, I'll write my reasoning here and let them decide:

• You should buy a Mac if and when you need it: with computers the only certain thing is that it will be replaced by something bigger or better in the next few months (if you are lucky) or days (if you are not);
• The current Intel Macs are a good buy if you have an old G3 or G4. The speed increase will be noticeable. If you have an G5, I would not buy a new Mac right now;
• If you think a Macbook pro 15" is too big, wait for the Macbook, the iBook replacement. I would bet that you'll see them before the end of May, because the education buying season in the US ends sometime after that;
• The Yonah chips that the current Macs are using will be replaced later this year. Check this Ars Technica article for more information about the CPU roadmap of Intel;
• I would expect the PowerMac successor to use one of the new Intel CPUs, not the current generation.
• I would expect laptops using the new line of CPUs either by Christmas or in January'07 Macworld;
• I don't have the faintest idea what kind of hardware could be introduced in September, in Paris.

Given all that, let me tell you my own plans.

I do plan to buy a 17" Macbook Pro as soon as I can get one in Portugal. My TiBook 800Mhz is five years old in a week, and I want to switch to a 17" screen, and the Yonah CPU is good enough for my modest needs in the next five years. Remember that I'm still pretty happy with my TiBook, and I'll keep it as my second/backup laptop, but I want to run a Linux VM for some work that I do that requires Linux.

I also plan on buying one of the the new Matrox external cards, probably the DualHead2Go, although my hormones want me to buy the TripleHead2Go. If I could get a Graphics card to plug into the ExpressCard slot of the new Macbook Pro, I would probably get two DualHead2Go for a total of five 17" displays.... Pixels....

By the way, this DualHead2Go cards are great. Instead of having a big 23" display, I can buy several 17" displays for less money, and I still have the felling that I don't loose all my real estate if one of the monitors breaks down. Monitor redundancy.

Now I only have to wait one or two months to get my new Macbook Pro.

Technorati Tags: apple, dualhead2go, intel, mac, macbookpro, matrox

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Finally! 1 Gb RAM, 120Gb disk, 256Mb VRAM, 8x SuperDrive DL, 5.5 hours battery life. 3.1Kg, 1/2 Kg more than my current 15" TiBook.

Now waiting 2 months to fetch one from FNAC.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac, powerbook, macbookpro

Posted by Pedro Melo at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

From the Steve Jobs’s Commencement address at Stanford:

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.

Really a great quote. Via the now professional Daring Fireball.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

A friend of mine mentioned Reboot 8.0 is coming up, and having attended Reboot 7.0 (and liked it a lot) he asked me if I was going.

My answer is that I'm going to ReBorn 2.0, because my second son will arrive more or less by that time.

A new son is probably the best closed source program I ever been part of.

Have fun, all of you going!

Technorati Tags: reboot

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I've been using darcs with some success on my personal projects for more than a year now.

The good thing about darcs is that it's very easy to start using, and some features, like the interactive record (commits for those using other SCMs), are extremely powerful.

I also had some problems with it, specially with large repos. It's getting a lot better but still, sometimes, with specific patches, it takes as long time to merge changes between repos.

In the last year, I've also started using Trac a lot, even with darcs, as I mentioned before. This is probably the best system I ever used to keep the code, wiki, bug tracking and project management all integrated, and I like so much that in the last months I've been pushing his use at work also. We now use it to manage two big projects with a Subversion repository, and it's been great. Several other projects there are also moving to Trac.

This push at work to use Trac + Subversion, and the problems with darcs that I have with two of my bigger repositories made me look around again, re-evaluating my choices.

I would love to keep the interactive record capabilities of darcs, but I also don't like using too many systems at once. Also Trac is starting to support other SCMs (Mercurial is in the trunk, a plugin for Trac to support darcs is also in the works in a separate repository, also written by Lele Gaifax), so I should be able to switch to another (well, at least Subversion or Mercurial) SCM without too much problems.

Mercurial is nice, but that would be yet another one to master, so I looked at Subversion as my SCM of choice for my projects. Unfortunately, it's a centralized design, and I want a distributed SCM for my pet projects because I do a lot of work offline and like to commit in small change-sets, and because having several remote mirror repositories is an excellent backup tool.

Enter svk.

svk its a decentralized version control system that uses the Subversion filesystem as its base, but then adds loads of other features that darcs already has. Also it allows you do mirror remote Subversion repositories (like the ones I have at Sapo), and work offline on them.

To start with svk, read the svk workflow explanation by Bieber Labs, It's probably the best one I've seen until now, and it will help you understand the rest. Then install svk, and read the output of svk help intro. The organization describes is much better than the ones you'll find in the wiki.

Then read through the wiki, the faq and other documentation (you still feel lost). There is also an excellent svk visual guide by Russell Brown.

After the intro, and a bit of browsing, I was able to mirror all the Subversion repositories I use on daily basis with no work at all.

There is also a nice tutorial on how to import darcs repos into svk, in case I need that.

The only think I'm missing is the incremental record feature of darcs, really. But good news: its on the roadmap for version 2.0.

As a bonus, for those old, very old repos still in CVS, apparently svk can also mirror them, although that feature seems broken for now. If I can make that work, even old CVS repos will be united under the same tool.

So I'm switching to svk for now. It might allow me to cut back on the number of systems I have to work on a daily basis to just one, if all goes well, but just using the same tool at work and on my projects will be a great time saver.

I'll keep you all posted on how this goes.

Technorati Tags: cvs, darcs, mercurial, scm, subversion, svk, trac

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

After battling with lighttpd and friends for a couple of hours, I finally have a very cool setup for this site.

I use the Moveable Type software to publish this articles. I modified the templates to publish each zone of the site in a separate HTML file. Then I use PHP to include them all in the final result. This allows me to generate the right hand-side column just once, as a index template, and include it on all the other articles.

So even if you go an see an old article, you'll still see my current right hand-side column.

In the past few weeks, though, Apache has been burning a lot of memory with all the traffic we've been getting on the several sites that are housed here. So I wanted to test another server, single threaded, and try to use FastCGI to reduce memory usage.

So after a PHP recompilation (use this page as an how-to) and some tweaking, I have a setup that works. I need to tune the other sites before moving to lighttpd but for now it looks and feels great.

My final configuration file looks something like this:

$HTTP["host"] == "www.simplicidade.org" {

  server.indexfiles    = ( "index.html" )

  $HTTP["url"] =~ "^/notes/?(.+\.html)?$" {
  fastcgi.debug        = 0
  fastcgi.server       = (
      "/" => ( (
          "socket" => "/path/to/site/simplicidade.org/fcgi.socket",
          "bin-path" => "/path/to/bin/php",
          "min-procs" => 1,
          "max-procs" => 1,
          "bin-environment" => ( 
              "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "4",
              "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "1000"
          ),
          "bin-copy-environment" => (
              "PATH", "SHELL", "USER"
          ),
          "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable"
      ) )
    )
  }
}

The $HTTP["url"] match makes sure that only files with the HTML extension will be processed by FastCGI, leaving all the images and CSS to lighttpd static file engine, which is very fast.

I also don't use the min-procs/max-procs settings for now. They seem broken to me because lighttd will always start max-procs no matter what I do. I think I'm missing something from the documentation.

Anyway, I'll move the other sites to similar setups and then I'll switch DNS to the new IP address with all this sites on lighttpd.

Technorati Tags: apache, fastcgi, lighttpd, mt, php

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Last thursday we had another technical meeting of the Lisbon.pm group. It was a great success, with 29 people attending.

There where three presentations: one by João Gomes about Catalyst, another by me about POE with an example of process control, and the last one by Miguel Duarte about when not to use Perl, which was, as you can expect, a hot topic.

If you are interested in Perl and live or work around Lisboa, please join our mailing list (instructions can be found at the Lisbon.pm website).

The meeting was organized by José Castro, and the space (and first round of drinks afterwards) was sponsored by Log. Kudos to them both.

I've been the Lisbon.pm leader for some time now, and since the reactivation of the group last September, our social meetings have been better each time and our technical meetings have also been great.

Yet most of the work of organizing our events is being done by José, so it's only fair to make him the leader of the group. So after forcing^H^H^H^H^Htalking with him about this, he finally accepted.

I think the group is now in better hands.

Technorati Tags: perl, perlmongers

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I bought an iPod Video to replace my aging 2G iPod (well, officially I stole the 2G from my wife after my 1G broke the firewire port...) and to be able to carry my photos of my kid with me: grandmothers love that part.

Anyway, when I arrive at home in the evening, I like to listen to music and usually what I did was start iTunes and use the built-in TiBook speakers. It should be obvious that it's not a very good experience.

Given that this home is not my main residence, just the place I spend the night when I'm working in Lisbon, I don't want to spend a lot of money buying some audio system, so after talking a bit with Pedro, I decided to buy an iDeck.

The first week was great: excellent quality of sound (for my amateur standards), the remote control worked very well, and as a side benefit, the iPod gets a full charge and I have my sync cable always ready.

Then one night, the remote stopped working, and the sound was super-loud, I could not control the volume. Then the left speaker stopped working. Not good. I changed batteries on the remote, checked all cables, looked at the documentation (printed and online) and nothing I could find was able to solve this problem.

I took the system back to the local dealer, DelAudio, and they replaced my set with a new one after checking that indeed the system was not working properly.

Tonight I did the setup again, and right now I'm enjoying the sound and all the niceties that this system provides.

It's a great speaker set, a bit pricey, but I think it will be worth it in the long run. I like the fact that I can leave my sync cable connected in the back of the amplifier, so that I can just connect in the evening to sync up. I also like the fact that the iPod gets charged while I'm using it. And finally, the sound quality is excellent.

The thing I don't like in the iDeck is the fact that if you plug a cable to the back of the amplifier, to the aux in line, the system immediately switches to it, and silences the iPod. I would prefer a switch on the remote or on the amplifier to make that switch between input lines. This would allow me to connect the iDeck to a Aiport Express at all times and switch to a remote iTunes easily.

Apart from that, I can't find any flaws. Even with the problem I had with my first set, which was solved rapidly and without any fuss by my local dealer, I would recommend this system to anyone looking for a good set of speakers to connect their iPod.

BTW, Apple has the iPod HiFi system now, but from reports I've heard, I think the iDeck is still superior. At least, from what I've seen, you cannot sync the iPod with it, and thats a major issue for me.

Technorati Tags: apple, ipod, ideck

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Technorati Tags: apple, vmware

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Technorati Tags: 37signals, campfire

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Technorati Tags: gmail, google, openid

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Technorati Tags: 37signals, campfire

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Ok, I was able to subscribe several buddies @gmail.com just now, and talk to them, all of this from my @sapo.pt account.

Server-to-server is now open with GTalk.

Let the games begin.

(kudos to Rusty Shackleford who pointed this to me)

update: it seems that ralphm beat me to it. Behold the power of mimir (speaking of which, I got to resubscribe to it...).

update 2: Official announcement via GoogleTalk blog.

Technorati Tags: google, googletalk, jabber, xmpp

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

One of the tools I miss in my day-to-day work is a good project management tool for Mac OS X.

There are some attempts out there, but never I saw a application that integrates with the rest of the system.

This might be about to change. Project X (I just hate flash intros...) seems to fit the bill quite well, but at $199 is a bit more that the usual software I purchase. So, although I don't have a problem dropping $199 if it reduces my stress level at work, I do hope they give us a trial version.

Technorati Tags: apache

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

The Flickr group of the day is this: Stick Figures in Peril. Amazing stuff. For example:

Already joined. You should do to.

Technorati Tags: flickr

Posted by Pedro Melo at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Some months ago, I bought a external firewire DVD burner to use with my Mac. Today, I was browsing for something in System Profiler, and I discover this:

_NEC DVD_RW ND-3520A:

Firmware Revision:  1.04
Interconnect:   FireWire
Burn Support:   Yes (Vendor Supported)
Profile Path:   VendorSupport.drprofile
Cache:  2048 KB
Reads DVD:  Yes
CD-Write:   -R, -RW
DVD-Write:  -R, -RW, +R, +RW, +R *DL*
Burn Underrun Protection CD:    Yes
Burn Underrun Protection DVD:   Yes
Write Strategies:   CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO
Media:  No

Notice the DL under DVD-Write. Apparently this drive supports double-layer writing, and according to the NEC product page and a review at CDRLabs.com, it really does support it.

I did not know that. I don't remember buying this drive as a DL drive. Cool! I can now backup my Audible files to DVD.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Well, after three weeks inside TextMate, I must say I'm hooked.

I knew it existed and it was cool and stuff, but until you read the TextMate manual, you don't know half of the power it packs. If you want to see if it is for you, I would recommend that you try and read through the fine manual.

Around our corner of the world, I count five converts already, and given that we had abused the local mac users group mailing list with TextMate stuff in the last couple of days, I went ahead and created a TextMate Portuguese User mailing list.

To subscribe to the mailing list, send an empty message to tm-subscribe@lists.simplicidade.org. You'll get a confirmation back that you must reply to.

Version 1.5 was announced yesterday, and although not mentioned anywhere I could find, it comes with an Input Manager that allows you to edit any text field (therefore including Safari text areas) from any Cocoa application in TextMate. I've been using this to edit my posts from inside ecto.

Some applications, even ecto, already had a feature like this, but this strategy makes it available on any application. Also, the update is instantaneous on each Save, and that gives me a sensation that my work is always safe in two different apps (Tip: set TextMate to Save your work when it looses focus, and it becomes even more magical).

To install it, use the command Install "Edit in TextMate..." available at Automation > Run Command > TextMate, and follow the instructions.

Technorati Tags: apple, ecto, safari, textmate

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Due to lack of time (wife, 1.5 kids and a dog, and some hobbies), Audible.com is almost my only source of books (apart from technical ones).

In the last month I listened to three books: Enders Shadow, The Fifth Elephant, and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

I listened to Enders Game one or two years ago, and The Speaker of the Dead last year, and I wanted to continue exploring that story a bit more. I found Enders Shadow a very good book. Although I felt Bean's capabilities stretched a bit in some places, the story is a nice complement to Enders Game, and if you liked that one, this will not disappoint you. Recommended.

I had already listened to The Fifth Elephant beginning of last year, but I felt like doing it again because I picked up another Pratchett book while staying with Pedro in November during LPW. I would love to see more Terry Pratchett books at Audible.com, but for now, this is the only one there.

But all is not lost. The UK Audible site has 35 Terry Pratchett books! So I'll be trying to figure out if I can move my account from the Audible US to the Audible UK site, or if I close the US account, will I lose my 100+ books and audio shows I already own from the US store.

The last one, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, I read it on carbon-based-medium last summer, both adult english and portuguese versions. It's by far my favorite book of the six. I was curious to see if the Audiobook was nicely done or a letdown, so I pre-ordered via iTMS. It was not available on Audible, only iTMS.

First things first: I wasn't able to play it on my 2G iPod, I would start on the first part, and it would skip until the last one, don't know why. I had to listen to it with the Shuffle I own, and listening to audiobooks with a Shuffle is not something I would recommend to anyone. If, for some bizarre reason, the Shuffle forgets where you left off (and it does, several times), you are stuck and have to fast forward patiently to the place where it left off. Not good. And yes, for more than one occasion, I was tempted to go out and buy a Nano or a iPod Video. Fortunately (for me) this is Portugal, there is a magical barrier worthy of the late Dumbledore that prevents Apple stuff to appear in the stores.

The reading was done by Stephen Fry, whom is also the narrator of other Audible.com books that I have (like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), and with its nice british accent, slow and clear voice, the book really comes to life, and I think that anybody who likes HP will not be disappointed with the result.

One of the things I liked the most was that he doesn't rush to the end of the book. The pace is very nice and slow, giving you time to create a mental picture of the environments and situations that arise. This is the most important part about audiobooks and the cabon-based counterparts: with the latter you can lift your eyes and imagine what you just read and savour it for a bit before moving on. With a audiobook, unless you actively pause the stream of words, you don't usually get much time to picture the scene. I sometimes have to go back in the recording to re-listen to some segment that I missed because my mind wandered someplace else. It takes a bit getting used to it.

I wont buy the other 5 books, also available on iTMS, because I already own them in various paper editions, and they are not my favorite. But if you like HP, I would recommend that you pick the one you like the most from iTMS and give it a try.

Next steps: try and change my Audible account to the UK store, I have 35 books waiting for me there. Also read a couple more from the Ender saga.

Technorati Tags: audible, ender, harrypotter, jkrowling, pratchett, discworld

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I've been following the CES 2006 in the news, specially AnandTech coverage.

From the latest article, I'll like to point out some things that I found interesting:

• the Motorola In-Ear Bluetooth Headset: this is interesting because the microphone listens to vibrations from you jaw, so it will muffle the noise around you;
• the Hitachi's OLED Tech Demo: notice the thinness of the display, amazing;
• and for me the most impressive demonstration Philips Rollable Display Demo: the first time I see something near what electronic paper should be like. I was dumb-struck by the fact that the display will retain the last image written to it for several months without needing any power...

Technorati Tags: ces2006

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Too late for christmas but you never know. Amazon can sell you anything, I guess.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This is not something new but I hope we can see more of this in server-class CPUs in the future: Sun Fire T2000 and Secure Applications.

The basic idea is to have a cryptographic accelerator on chip, to make certain operations, like those required by SSL, much more fast and inexpensive.

Its a big win for a lot of companies who want to offer SSL to his clients but can't due to the cost of scaling up SSL ops.

It's not the first time I heard of this. There where PCI accelerator boards for quite some time, that you can offload most of the crypto tasks to, and even moving it to the CPU has been done before, even in the x86 world. I think I remember the VIA Padlock Initiative included some support for crypto acceleration.

If you want to know more, check the the SSL Acceleration page.

Technorati Tags: acceleration, cpu, crypto, intel, padlock, ssl, sun, via

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Not something that I usually do, but I wanted to clear some links from my Safari toolbar:

• IBM Ajax explanation: nice and complete step-by-step explanation of what is this Ajax thing all about. In a world with prototype and script.aculo.us its easy to forget how things work;
• [Emily's "10 things a developer girlfriend needs to know"](http://www.emilyhambidge.com/blog/emily/66/: a must forward to your girlfriend/wife, in case you are a developer;
• Bush on the Constitution - 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper': I was going to write 'hilarious' as my comment, but no, its not hilarious, its sad. If its true, of course;
• Why SQL sucks: need to look into that book mentioned.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

In a project that I'm working on, there is a requirement to use some sort of rich-text editor for textareas in a web-based forum system.

I did a quick survey and found a lot of systems out there. I collected some links and I'm dumping them here, for future reference.

Right now, my prefered solution is TinyMCE.

• http://xstandard.com/
• http://www.richtexteditor.org/demo/
• http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/
• http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/widgEditor/
• http://www.fckeditor.net/demo/

I also found a long list of editors with useful comparisons between them.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Some days before the Oct 12 Apple announcement that they will be selling TV shows via iTMS, specially ABC shows like Desperate and Lost, Robert Iger, the Disney CEO, who also was at the Apple event, gave some hints about the digital distribution of content:

If we sit back and rely on old technology, the consumer is going to pass us by," Mr. Iger says, noting that the music industry made that mistake. "It's extremely important as I enter this new role that I not let that happen to the Walt Disney Co. We're not a technology company, but we need to be the closest thing to that.

Check the article over at Ars.Technica.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I like to have the same sidebar on the right of my pages, both in the main page and in the individual article pages.

With MT, I always edited the templates to add the same sidebar on both the main index template and in the individual archive template.

Today, I tried something new. I added a new index template, sidebar.html, and copied the sidebar from the main index template. Then I removed that content from the main index template and replaced it with a include of the new template. Also I edited the individual article template in the archive section and added the same include there. You also have to change the class of the element to ''layout-two-column-right''.

Now, my sidebar code is in a single template, for easy updating, and I can update a single template to change the sidebar on all the pages.

The include part is done in realtime using PHP. You can, of course, use whatever you want, but for simple include stuff, PHP is the best solution.

So, recap: to make certain elements of your blog layout easy to update (as in, having them in a single place), do this:

• create a new index template with the common elements;
• replace the places where they where being used with includes;
• adjust css classes if needed.

For example, to make the main page sidebar appear on all the templates, do this:

• from the main index template, take out the <div> with the ''beta'' class;
• replace it with a <?php include "sidebar.html" ?>;
• create a new sidebar template, and paste the original code there (make sure you check the ''Rebuild this template automatically when rebuilding index templates'');
• alter the individual article archive template, change the <body> element to the class ''layout-two-column-right'' and after the ''alfa'' <div, add something like <? php include("../../../sidebar.html") ?>. You have to adjust your path to the correct number of directories you crawl back, it depends on your archive URL layout.

Then make sure you setup Apache to filter all the HTML files via PHP. And then rebuild your entire site.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

In case you usually browse my darcs repos, I switched to the new web interface.

The old one is still available.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Recently I downloaded a copy of Confluence due to the new licensing option, Personal Edition.

So far I'm still getting to know the application but it seems quite good and in a corporate environment like the one I work at the mail integration and access control features are essential. I'm tempted to try a full trial license during August, with the JIRA integration also.

Will see how my personal evaluation goes. In the meantime, check the notes that Rui took with his installation. One thing though: it's not closed source. You get full source code with the commercial versions of Confluence.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Got a Skype phone for the wife, let see how it goes. It looks good.

You connect it to your Windows PC via USB and to a PTSN line. Then you can see who is online on your Skype buddy list and call them directly. You can also dial PTSN numbers.

The phone is wireless DECT-based, and so far, in my limited testing, it works very very well.

Technorati Tags: skype

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Back from Reboot to find my MoveableType spammed to death. Around 400 spam comments and around 20 valid one (including some from Nuno which seems to think this was on purpose).

It should all be ok now.

I'll take this time to remmember you to check the feed that you subscribe me from. I recommend that you use the this one, which includes comments, so that you can track my replies.

I'll try and post some thoughts from Reboot in the next few days. The think that I want to write the most is the Subethaedit experience.

Now, back to work.

oh! before I forget: on the right hand side, you'll find a small box courtesy of plazes.com with my location. It's an experiment, and it should be updated whenever I open up my laptop.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Nuno, I'm at Reboot, which I think it's still on planet Earth (although you could argue that some people here have fallen from some other place), so no time to pretty graphics. But let me show you something:

• Microsoft: Market cap 274.75B
• Apple: Market cap 29.51B

Now, which one do you think is the company that is innovating the most right now?

Size does not matter, it's what you do with it.

AMD would be a better choice to Apple if they had a better technology than Intel, and right now, they do in terms of x86-64. After reading the ArsTechnica article, we are told that Intel seems to have a better roadmap than AMD.

It's not only about cost per cpu. Apple already sells their gear at a higher price point than the rest, so a difference of x amount of dollars, if they had a better technology with it, would not be a problem for them. One could argue that this was the reason to keep PowerPC for so long: better CPU, albeit more expensive. They only changed their CPU when the roadmap of the competition was better. So it seems that Apple prefers technology over price (for reasonable differences between prices, of course).

I would bet that if AMD had a better roadmap than Intel, they would choose AMD.

Now, the point of Ars Technica article is a good one, and for now I find it acceptable to my question (Why Intel?). But I think that the main reason is the roadmap, not the size, nor the market cap (which is meaningless).

And now back to Cory Doctorow, preaching the good word: broadcast flag in Europe.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

There is a wiki page with all the notes taken collaboratively with SubEthaedit here.

Check it out.

Technorati Tags: Subethaedit, reboot7.0

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Just left the conference of Dina Mehta – Social Tools for Research and Collaboration.

It the best one so far. She talked about the blog/wiki/network collaboration that grew out of an collaborative effort when the December 2004 Tsunami hit. They had a chaotic environment and operation but from that, order slowly become apparent.

The most interesting point for me is that the reason she thinks it worked was that people were helping out in the fields of expertise they had. Each person felt the pressure of responsibility and that made them keep on their respective fields but with a will to share.

The main problem she had was about classification: with so much information coming in, how do you classify all of it? They solved by keeping the points of entry of information low (3 public emails on the homepage) and then having those three persons pass on the information to the correct task force.

This pyramid scheme worked well for them, and kept the information flowing.

The tools used where blogs, wikis, IM, and a lot of Skype.

On other news, this talk was edited by 8 people in Subethaedit. The pace of the talk was enormous but it was possible to keep up. It was interesting to see a talk about collaborative tools being transcribed or annotated in real time.

Technorati Tags: reboot7.0

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Yesterday, we had 5 people cooperating on the same document, at Building of Basecamp. At the end of the day, 1400 lines where written by us.

Last night I wrote about that the old way, pen and paper, so I have to copy that into here sometime later, about the rules you could use in those situations.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Check this out:

Amazing the list of people here... 450 persons from all over... Just starting.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Got my ticket to Reboot7 today.

I'm going with André and Pedro next week.

I'm assuming that we'll have some network connectivity, so you can expect some notes about each conference I attend.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Greasemonkey is one of the most powerful features of Firefox. It allows you to attach small javascript files to existing Websites to change them in ways that make them more useful to the user.

I've used them in special ocasions but Firefox is not my main browser (that task goes to Safari), so I'm not a regular user.

If you want to see a nice example (with screencast) of a Greasemonkey script, look no further than this.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 09:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I've been seeing a lot of AJAX stuff in the last coupple of weeks. I also have been trying to use BackPackit on a regular base.

But until I read this article, I didn't noticed how simple it really is...

I'll have to try it sometime.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Check out http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050519-4925.html. I quote my favorite part

The plaintiffs do not know the identity of the persons they wish to sue, let alone the details of precisely what was done by each of them such as to actually prove infringement. Such facts would only be established after examination at trial. [...] It is sufficient that they show a bona fide claim, i.e., they they really do intend to bring an action for infringement of copyright based on the information that they obtain, and that there is no other improper purpose for seeking the identity of these persons.

Nevertheless, the court found IP addresses deficient as a justification for forced identification, and they rejected the argument that the broadband companies were in possession of documents detailing who these users are in real life. With regards to this latter issue, the court rightly noted that matching an IP at any given time to a user constitutes more than re-producing information (e.g., there's no peice of paper they could surrender; rather, they'd have to investigate themselves). Along similar lines, the court said that the evidence presented amounted to nothing more than hearsay. As you can see, the gist of the decision centers not on ideology or copyright analysis, but on the rules of evidence.

This is really interesting. I'm specially impressed by the notion that when an ISP gives information about a user based on the IP address, the court compares this to hearsay.

Of course, this was in a Canada court, and I don't think that we'll see something like this in Portugal anytime soon.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I decided to start using a managed service for my email protection (anti-spam mostly, but also anti-virus although using a Mac makes that not so important).

I'm looking at Postini and MessageLabs services. I've a subjective preference for the later, but I haven't decided yet.

One thing that bothers me is that neither of their sites describes their products. They only describe the technology. To know more, you have to enter "free trials"... Well, will start with MessageLabs trial and then do the Postini trial, to compare the two. I really would like more information on-line, specially price structure.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Well, my current boss started blogging. Welcome! I noticed due to my Technorati watchlist.

His second post is very worthwhile rant about iChat and XMPP support.

I'll have to read it more carefully later.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

As I said before, I'm not upgrading to Tiger until sometime next month. Yet, I need to keep some links to things that I need to test or fix in my Tiger setup.

The good news in Tiger for scripting fans like me, is that Perl and Ruby have decent and recent versions. The bad news is that at least Ruby has a bad configuration file. From what I could understand, it seems that they left a CFLAGS=-arch i386 in a config file... I can't wait the rumor sites to get this one... A fix is available.

One thing I want to test is the new CoreData framework. Cocoa Dev Central has two articles entitled "Core Data Class Overview" and "Build a Core Data App" that seem very nice.

I'll keep this post updated with all my things-to-see in Tiger-land.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So, it's upgrade time to update my powerbook.

No, I'm not installing Tiger yet, I need my powerbook in working order. I'll wait until 1 week after 10.4.1 to install that one.

I'm upgrading to 10.3.9 only because I want to upgrade to Quicktime 7 and try some H.264 goodness (see also this impressive report).

Right now, I have 11 items in my Software Update Window. So, I'll see you all (three of you) in 20 minutes or so.

Updated: 11 done, 2 to go. The Java fix and Quicktime 7 are installing now. Quicktime still needs a reboot after it finnish "optimizing" my performance...

Update 2: all seems ok. Audible.com is flaky with Safari, but I always have problems with them. It's probably the worst site I need to visit on a regular basis.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Ok, so we're back!

Simplicidade was down for a couple of days. The good news is that it wasn't a hardware problem. When I got to the data-center where we are hosted, the machine was powered down (!!).

Nuno looked at the logs and apparently the kernel was upgraded and at the end it automagically rebooted. The problem is that after the reboot, it did a halt. We'll have to figure this one out.

The bad news is that it took too long to get the server back up. There where two problems: the procedure to get access to the data-center was not clear to me, I'm fixing this. The second problem is that I didn't have the time, and unfortunately I hadn't put Nuno and Rui as authorized persons also. They will be now.

The second problem has also some personal implications to me. I don't like stress factors that can be solved by technology (well, price conscious technology...), so I was looking around for some solution to reboot and look at the console remotely. This is a job for IP KVM stuff.

The problem with those setups is that the lowest price I found for a single port IP KVM switch starts at $500 US. I should be able to get one in portugal for €400, but it's still expensive. I'm looking at the MegaRAC K1 from AMI.

While at their site I came across this other board, the MegaRAC G3 that seems very nice also. And best of all, my usual hardware dealer has one in stock (he was not sure if it was a G3 or a G2) and he will lend it to me for testing. If the price is right, I think we'll have a remote KVM in no time.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Nice: Snippets allows you to upload small snippets of code in several languages and tag them in a del.ici.us/flickr way.

Very nice.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I woke up around 6:00 am (very early for Portuguese standards) and couldn't get back to sleep.

I had been reading about Ruby on Rails and I was thinking about it, how it could affect some of my projects.

Yet, for some reason, I started thinking about Cocoa. I knew that there was a Ruby/Cocoa framework, and I have some experience with CamelBones, the Perl/Cocoa framework. How easy is to create a small Cocoa app in Ruby?

Well, check it out: a Web browser made in Ruby and Cocoa. It works for me, but I don't know if all the frameworks where included.

It was my first Ruby program. Ever. An it was not a very big one:

require 'osx/cocoa'
require 'osx/webkit'

class AppController < OSX::NSObject
  include OSX

  ib_outlets :inputText, :previewWindow;

  def previewBtnClicked (sender)
    urlText = @inputText.stringValue
    url = NSURL.URLWithString(urlText);
    request = NSURLRequest.requestWithURL(url)
    @previewWindow.mainFrame.loadRequest(request)
  end
end

Anyway, I'll do a short movie next week: How to build a web browser with Ruby in 20 minutes.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I know Rui since 97 or 98 (can't remember) but only yesterday we noticed that we almost have line-of-sight between our homes in Lisbon (!!).

As he said, we should try to link our wireless networks some day, if not for listening to each other iTunes playlist, to have two different internet links. My 2Mb ADSL should be up and running sometime next month (I hope...), and his link is from a different provider.

Good connectivity... hums...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I know who you are. Do you?

Check it out: http://www.digpeople.com/.

I'm hit number 2 on Online Communities.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Get perpendicular is a great flash-based demonstration of a new disk drive recording technology.

Kudos to Hitachi, it's probably the best presentation I ever saw about the subject.

Now, can I have one? :)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I was looking at the demo video of Locus and talking with Rui.

Locus analyses your chats (Jabber-based but you could use over anything, even multi-protocol) and creates a bayesian profile of your friends. It's then able to create connections between friends sharing the same interests.

The interesting part of the idea is that you could extend it beyond chat, into mail. You could link all your own friends interactions (mails, chats) to find hidden links between people.

That would be.... interesting.

An extreme example from my chat with Rui: "Locus wants to know if you'd like to meet Mandy. Mandy is an air hostess that enjoys Macs, scuba diving, raw photography and bayesian filtering".

A dream come true to a special common friend of ours.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

During the last 48 hours a lot of things have happened and I dealt with a lot of hardware. I took some notes for future reference.

First, always take a camera with you. Take pictures of everything, and then catalog them. You can always go back and see how things where inside your servers or around them. Don't remember if a ethernet cable is connected to the onboard ethernet or the external one? Just go and look.

Second, some vendors have some strange notions about accessibility, so be prepared.

Third, forget about boot floppies and CDs, just install a recent linux distribution in a brand new IDE disk, and use that as a rescue system.

Fourth, make sure your backups work, and make sure they are compreensive.

Fifth, if your monitoring system is hosed, don't wait a month or two to put the new one in place.

That's all folks,

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Yesterday, Feb 18 2005, I had a special day.

I arrived at work in the morning, and I was catching up on email, rss, and reviewing my task list when I get a call from my wife.

We have a e-learning site in Portugal, where we sell online courses. We have several different sites selling those courses, some of them affiliated with portals or job offers sites.

So this site was down, had been for a couple of hours.

First mental note of the day: when your previous monitoring solution is totally trashed, don't take more than a week to setup something else. The previous spong-based monitoring system was dead for quite some time, and the new nagios-based one didn't monitor this site yet: I finished installing it the previous day. So Murphy was clearly awake and at work.

The data-center where we have the server has all the redundant stuff one would like (power, network, the works), and I could log on to the back-end server, where the database was located. Only the front-end server, where all the sites where, was down. So I could rule out external factors.

The servers are connected to a IP KVM from Dell, so I started up the Java console and I selected the front-end server. The message was clear: blah blah blag kernel panic blah blah scsi blah error blah blah you are toasted bla blah.

Yep, this is going to be a fun day.

I go down to the data-center and reboot it. The system is able to fsck the boot disk (IDE disk), but the SCSI data disk is a no go.

So now, I switch to the back-end server and see if my daily backups (rsync with snapshots) are OK. The file count seems right, the logs are ok, no errors reported, so we are in good shape. Or maybe not.

Second mental note of the day: whenever you add a new software server to your solution, make sure your backups cover it.

Some months ago, I added a new web server to the mix, and the config file took some working to fine tune. And no, it was not in the backups.

So recovering the disk is now very important to me.

First, get fresh media. I went out and bought two 80 Gig IDE disk drives. I could use one right now, and then add the second one in a RAID-1 setup.

I got with the two disks to the data-center, I power down, connect one of them to the server and boot up. Time to do some brain surgery. I decided to move all the data from the boot disk and the data disk to this new one. An old 8Gb IDE and a 9Gb SCSI should fit into a 80Gb drive, right?

Well, wrong.

Although the motherboard and BIOS could see all the 80Gb, the Linux could not, only seeing 10Gb worth. This is a RedHat 7.2, and there are probably some parameter to turn on LBA support or something, but I didn't have that kind of time, so I just use the jumpers to limit the disk to 32Gb.

Reboot again, and now I could see the 32Gb.

Time to get the tools. A [friend][4] had used [dd_rescue][1] with great success so I went with that.

I also needed a rescue disk. The server did not have a CD so it must be a floppy. I decided to use [Toms rescue disk][3]. I copied dd_rescue to another floppy.

So boot from the rescue floppy, mount the new disk, partition in a similar way to the others, mount the old IDE, and tar'ed the OS over to the new disk. Edit fstab and make sure everything is ok. So far so good.

Now start dd_rescue, copying /dev/sda1 to a file in the new disk. Later we will run fsck on it, and mount it with a loop device.

Invalid instruction.

Ok, this is a P3 server, and I compiled dd_rescue on a P4, so my bad. Recompile on a P3. Copy to floppy, copy from floppy. Sneaker net at his best.

Run it again, and it starts to do his job. It should take little time...

... and it's over. My 9Gb disk drive is now in a file, with only 6kb missing. Wow! Thats great, I now have a 9Gb file in the new drive with only 6Kb missing. Let me just confirm all the files are ok...

ls -la

hmms... that sda1.img is smaller than I though... 2147483648 bytes? That number looks familiar... Doh! 2Gb limit! Arrgs. The rescue floppy is a 2.0 kernel...

So now I need a decent rescue alternative. Well, the OS is is already in the new disk, so let's boot from that one and finish the job.

Disconnect old drive, connect new drive with OS as primary, keep SCSI connected. Boot from rescue disk, mount root filesystem on new drive, chroot to it, run lilo, remove floppy, reboot.

The system starts cleanly, cool. So the first tar part went very well, and my fstab editing was also good. Well, thanks for that.

By now, I add found a faster alternative to dd_rescue, a shell-based front-end named [dd_rhelp][2].

So I compiled dd_rescue. Went well. Then dd_rhelp. Nooo, you need newer version os autoconf! Download autoconf, configure, make, make install. Recompile. success.

Now try to run dd_rhelp. Syntax errors all over... So, like, you shell, you know, it's too old... wget bash, configure, yada yada yada...

I run it again and it works! And it should be faster. Also, it has prettier graphics... :)

ls -la

Something about a value to big for something else... du cannot see the file either.

So this glibc can create the file, but you cannot stat it, and you cannot mount it...

Let me recap: we now have a 9Gb file in the new disk will almost all of the content from the old disk, but I cannot work with it.

And I have an extra 80Gb disk drive next to me, free.

Get the Fedora network install CDs, get another computer with a CD, plug second drive, insert CD, answer couple questions, and now we have a bootable fedora core 3 server install, our new rescue disk.

Connect new Fedora as boot device, move the new "32Gb" disk to other IDE channel, boot.

Ahhs, there he is, my 9Gb image is finally visible... losetup and fsck /dev/loop0. He goes and does he's thing, and reports 6 (6!) files missing, and those files are generated files, rsync'ed from the back-office. So no data loss at all. First good news (after 8 hours work).

Mount loopback device, and rsync the data over. Power down, remove Fedora, reconnect main disk to primary channel.

Reboot.

All is well, the sites come back alive. It's now 23pm, some 10 hours later. I'll cleanup the war zone tomorrow (today).

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

For quite some time we have been setting up a federated identity system for single sign on web apps at work.

The way it works is that whenever you access a web app and you are not authenticated, you get redirected to a login server. There you can choose which intranet you belong to. You click on you intranet name, you authenticate there, and then you are redirected back to the original web app you where trying to access. From then on, you can access to all the other web apps that use the same system without further authentication steps. Authorization is also managed by the system based on profile information provided by each intranet about the user.

This works very well and allows for distributed management of permissions of each user, but with centralized enforcement.

Some weeks ago I found out about Shibboleth. It does exactly the same thing, so I'm looking into using their code and replace all our half-baked solution. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, check out OpenSAML and Ping Identity for commercial solutions with open source code. Also, a great article about identity from Doc Searls is up at Linux Journal.

Anyway, when I was reading through the shibboleth docs, I started to think that since I use my powerbook, I've been doing single sign on almost in every app I use and website I visit without all this fuss about setting up a federated identity system.

The system Keychain of Mac OS X is a great solution. It stores all my login/passwords for apps, sites, ssh keychains, and x.509 certificates I use for mail. It really works well, and I feel a lot more secure knowing that all my "stuff" is in my personal computer, where I'm the only one responsible for backups (which I do almost every week... :) ).

Kudos, Apple.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

For quite some time we have been setting up a federated identity system for single sign on web apps at work.

The way it works is that whenever you access a web app and you are not authenticated, you get redirected to a login server. There you can choose which intranet you belong to. You click on you intranet name, you authenticate there, and then you are redirected back to the original web app you where trying to access. From then on, you can access to all the other web apps that use the same system without further authentication steps. Authorization is also managed by the system based on profile information provided by each intranet about the user.

This works very well and allows for distributed management of permissions of each user, but with centralized enforcement.

Some weeks ago I found out about Shibboleth. It does exactly the same thing, so I'm looking into using their code and replace all our half-baked solution. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, check out OpenSAML and Ping Identity for commercial solutions with open source code.

Anyway, when I was reading through the shibboleth docs, I started to think that since I use my powerbook, I've been doing single sign on almost in every app I use and website I visit without all this fuss about setting up a federated identity system.

The system Keychain of Mac OS X is a great solution. It stores all my login/passwords for apps, sites, ssh keychains, and x.509 certificates I use for mail. It really works well, and I feel a lot more secure knowing that all my "stuff" is in my personal computer, where I'm the only one responsible for backups (which I do almost every week... :) ).

Kudos, Apple.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I installed the skype client for Mac some weeks ago, as soon as it was released. I've been letting it running in the background since then, and I used it 5 times at most.

I was interested because I would like to have a cross platform voice solution. My wife used Windows XP, and I would like to talk to her with VoIP as I'm away from home three to four days each week.

My problem with skype is that you can never be sure the kind of performance you'll get. Most of the time, my skype connection goes to the US before reaching the other side. We are both in the same provider, in Portugal, so this seems a bit stupid.

I know that the peer-to-peer design of skype is the root of this problems, but that makes skype inadequate for my purpose. I have tried the AIM 5.5 client (I use iChat AV everyday) but couldn't get it to work. I think I'll have to try harder.

In terms of voice quality, if you get a good peer, it's very good. But you cannot trust it to perform always at that level, due to it's design. In that respect, the iChat AV/AIM client is better. The quality is not as good, but it's reliable (when tested between iChat's...). And it supports video also, allowing me to put my iSight camera to good use.

I also tried skype out with some friends in england. They where having a conference call: 2 guys with skype, calling Pedro via mobile phone, and me via fixed phone. It did work, the quality was acceptable, but it was very confusing.

Let's wait and see if the final version is better, but the peer-to-peer design doesn't seem a good one to me.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So my trusted old (30 months today) powerbook is still kicking. I never had a laptop that lasted this long. I'm a 15'' TiBook 800Mhz owner, with 1Gb RAM and 40Gb disk.

I've been thinking my requirements for my next laptop, what are the things I value the most. This will allow me to choose my next one in the next 6 months or so. I'm expecting some annoucements from Apple in January, or the WWDC, in June at the latest.

The list is in order of importance, most important things to me at the top: * screen real-estate: pixels, pixels, pixels... * battery life; * processor type.

Let me start with the things that are not on the list. Airport Extreme and built-in bluetooth are a must-have. There is no way I'm ever getting another laptop without them. My current TiBook has Airport (the "normal" kind), and it rocks (although TiBooks suck in terms of signal strength). And I'm tired of plugin the bluetooth dongle. Also, the backlight keyboard is at most a nice-to-have. I can keep on using my USB-powered thingie for light.

The current minimum disk drive is 40Gb and I'm happy with that. If it's bigger, great. If not, that's enough for me, for now. I always carry a external 40Gb Firelite, and I have a 200Gb Maxtor OneTouch at home for weekly backups.

I did not list the superdrive also. In two and a half years, I think I burned 10 CDs at most, and some of them where not for me. I don't use DVD or CD for backups, and my line of work does not require a constant use of a burner. A superdrive would be cool to make some home projects with the kids photos, or something like that, but it's not clear to me if the price difference is really worth it.

Now let's see the list and each point in turn.

The first point is a tricky issue for me: I think that the 17" PowerBook is very very big, but I haven't ruled out the possibility of buying one. I still have to check if it fits my current backpack. It's a great backpack and changing it simple to carry the 17" is not an option. I prefer to keep the backpack and buy a 15". But I can safely say that 15" 1280x854 is the minimum resolution for me.

Battery life is more important than raw CPU power. Apart from games and the occasional compile, I've been working with a two-generations old 800Mhz G4 and I can keep on doing it. I would prefer to have a 1.5Ghz G4 with a 6/7 hour battery life than a 2/3 hour G5. I think that if the difference is 1 or 2 hours between the two, I would probably go with the fastest one, but more than that, I don't think so.

My most used applications are: Terminal.app, Mail.app, Safari, iTunes and NetNewsWire. I also use Quicksilver, iCal and AdiumX a lot. Everything else is used much much less. With regard to games, I play a bit of Massive Assault, and I would like to play Doom3. I also have Apache, MySQL and Jabberd running in the background. I usually have 5 to 9 applications going, so multi-tasking is a must. If you ignore Doom3, I could buy a fast G4 and be happy. Even better, a dual-core G4 would be great. The only reason to buy a G5 is Doom3 right now, and unless they appear in the first half of 2005, I'm not going to wait: if Apple presents a dual-core G4, I'm sold. You can always buy a cheap PC or a iMac to run Doom3.

The CPU question is tricky only if you think that you'll keep your laptop for the next 2 to 3 years. In that case, buying the fastest CPU you can afford makes a lot of sense, and waiting for the G5 might be a good idea. Yet, I don't expect my application profile to change in the next years. My laptop is my main machine. I work in a lot of different places and the laptop must be able to do it all. So a dual-core G4 is the most likely step.

Of course, it all depends on Apple. If they launch dual-core G4 and a G5 at the same time, I really don't know :)...

So, I think I can summarize like this: I'll probably buy a 15 or 17" dual-core G4, or a G5 if they appear in the first half of 2005.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I just throw away my first generation iPod warranty. I installed a NewerTech battery, the 2100mha kind.

So far it's looking good. I'll have to test it in the next couple of days, but the battery came with a little charge and I could listen to my music again.

This is still a 10Gb model, but it's enough for me for now. And it prevents me from buying a newer model.

The instructions seem straight forward, but it took me some tries to open the damn thing. In the end is a very simple procedure, and it takes 5 minutes tops to change it. The non-scratching tools that came with the battery work fine and do the trick.

If you have a aging iPod, and don't want to spend hundreds of Euro in a new one, this is a worthy upgrade, and this will give me another 2 years on my 30 months old iPod, purchased May 26th 2002.

If you need one, I ordered mine from ipodworld.co.uk. Recommended. Me and Rui tried to order this from US, but it was complicated.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Which source control system do you use? In a open-source world the usual suspect is CVS. For some years now, CVS has been showing it's age, so a bunch of replacements have appeared: Subversion, Arch, Darcs, to name just a few.

I still use CVS daily, with large projects, and I know it well. Well enough to get around most of the limitations it has. But I have decided to switch systems some time ago. The question is: which one?

Subversion has a lot of momentum right now. Perl is now maintained in Subversion, Mono switched today, and most of the Jabber stuff is also Subversion. The switch from CVS is simple, they have similar command line interfaces.

Arch is very well desingned but the learning curve is very steep. I tried a coupple of time already, and I always give up because I can remmember wich command I need. I'll have to look into some of the arch frontends. It's very different from CVS, but the offline capabilities are extremely good.

Darcs seems very good also, but I haven't had time to test it. That's my next step.

The three things I look in these systems are: * simple things should be simple: commit changes, push changes to remote repository, pull changes from remote repository, see differences between my copy and remote rep, see my changes since last commit, add, mode, delete files; * complex things should be possible: keep several branches of a project, merge branches. * They need to support offline operation: you must be able to commit, update, diff your work to a local repository and then sync when you get to the office.

There are also some nice-to-have things, like commit triggers. I use commit triggers to generate RSS feeds of commits.

While evaluating these systems, I developed a small test to see if it's good enough for me: * create two branches of a project, called B1 and B2; * modify file X in B1; * in B2, rename file X to Y; * merge B1 into B2.

If after these simple steps, your Y file does not have the modifications made in B1, the source control system is flawed, and I just can't use it. If you are serious about source control, this is just not acceptable.

The interesting part is that it seems Subversion fails this simple test. I think I'm doing something wrong, I'm trying to see what, but I can't get Subversion to do the right thing. This would remove it from my list, and I would like to use Subversion (JabberStudio uses it a lot now).

I'm going to try Darcs now, re-check Subversion, but if those two fail, I'll have to find a decent frontend to Arch.

Some references: * CVS * Subversion * Arch * Darcs * Version Control System Comparison * Thoughts on Version Control * Some notes about source control systems * JabberStudio

Posted by Pedro Melo at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Thanks to The Register for making me laugh at the end of a loooong day at work:

Agents searched Dugan's home and found an AK-47, a loaded rifle, a loaded shotgun, two handguns and 1800 rounds of ammunition. In Texas, that's known as "the weekend hunter's package."

See the whole article.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 07:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

First, let me just say this, as an advice: give your credit card to a trusted friend before entering any of these sites. Trust me.

Done that? Good.

Now enjoy: * Boys Toys * I want one of those * Gadgets

It's really nice to buy some christmas presents, though.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Color me beautifull.

It has a happy ending: the perl guy gets rich and famous.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Speaking of Audible, I'm in the last 4 hours of Snow Crash, the 16 Hour unabridged Audible version (sorry, no direct link, Audible site sucks big time).

So far is clearly the best audio book of my collection, in part because of the story, but also because the narrator, Jonathan Davis, creates a truly amazing atmosphere.

I tried to read a paperback edition some years ago, but I was not in the correct frame of mind possibly, I gave up. I should have tried harder. The story is very very good.

The geek side of me is constantly thinking that metaverse, the virtual reality world described in the book, is now mostly possible to do, with the current technology. Imagine a distributed network of modified Doom3 servers, sharing only a common currency, and a protocol for jumping between servers (something like portals). Big corporations would pay to have big cluster of servers capable of keeping a couple hundred users online, probably payed with advertising in that world (targeted with your profile, of course). Or they could collect a entrance fee, and provide services to the avatars.

Or even neighborhood servers, where people chip in to pay for it but get to have a place to build their home.

A entire business could be made just from selling models of avatars, as the book explores.

Anyway, I lost some time already thinking about the possibilities of this idea. The only thing that is not quite common yet is the hardware part, the googles and that kind of stuff.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

It's almost here. The website of Delicious Monster was updated. They are writing Library v3, a program for Mac OS X to keep track of all my DVDs, books and other stuff.

I've been waiting for this program to scan all my 300+ DVDs. At least that's what I tell myself :).

You can ask them to notify you the moment they release it.

By the way, their website is very nice, if you're into those things.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

IETF has published the XMPP RFCs. This is great news.

I don't expect the world of IM to switch to XMPP, but if the large IM networks open up, my only hope is that they choose XMPP as the public protocol. I guess I'm a optimist :)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Well, if your bandwidth bill from you RSS feeds is starting to eat your income, then you should thank Bloglines and some desktop aggregation software companies.

Check out the new service from Bloglines. Basically they will develop a new Web service API so that applications can pull the feeds from them, instead of pooling your site directly. FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Blogbot will have support (apparently there is a beta of FeedDemon already out with support for it).

See also Mark excitement over the new service :).

Although I don't like pooling (see a previous post regarding mod_speedyfeed), I see this one as a necessary step towards a real pub-sub network. Bloglines, as others who already have a lot of feeds locally, are the best players to start, or to feed a pub-sub network.

Update: there is a Perl module already!
Update 2: some comments from Brent give you some idea about the possibilities of this setup.

Very good stuff, congrats to Bloglines.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I think that this Dilbert strip is the best one I've seen in a long time.

Anyway, Dilbert and bash.org are my morning kicks to start coding.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

There is a new version of ecto ready to be released. I've been using the betas for some weeks now, and I'm very happy with it.

Check out the latest features. The main one seems to be WYSIWYSG editing, but I started using Markdown a couple of days ago so I cannot say if it works or not. For me, having multiple posts at the same time, and a improved entries & drafts window are welcome additions.

My remaining problem is the trackback interface: it seems that I cannot add trackbacks with the keyboard only.

Anyway, it's a very good release, and if you are looking for a Mac OS X app to blog (Windoze version also available), highly recommended.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Now that the JPEG bug has a public exploit, the last step is to crack a widely used site and replace a JPEG image.

Imagine what you could do if you where able to replace the Windows Update site logo :)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

... calling Quicksilver “just an application launcher” is a little like calling the Ten Commandments “two stones some dude found on a hill.”

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

...is coming to a speaker set near you. I wonder If I will be able to put this in my iPod...

It starts Tuesday, September 21, BBC Radio 4. You should be able to find the episodes in their site.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I've been using NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds since I started doing it, little over two years ago. So far it has been good enough and the features in the to-be-released version 2.0 seem great.

Yet, I don't see some features that I would like to see, like aggregating several items into a single one if they mention the same URL.

So I need to implement some sort of filter between the feeds I subscribe to and the feeds I read, that transforms the content into something more manageable.

I don't know if the end result is something that can be read via something like a RSS reader, or if I need some other application. I think I'll also look into reading my feeds by converting them to mail messages. Rui is using newspipe and I noticed Hep to (although I don't know if it does the same thing yet).

I really need to waste less time (30 to 40 minutes each day) catching up on RSS feeds, or become more efficient reading them.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I love a gadget as any other tech-oriented person, so I'm a regular customer of Expansys. Well, bad news: it's now much easier to spend money on them if you happen to live in this corner of Europe called Portugal - Expansys Portugal is now up and running.

I think that I'm going to give my credit card to my wife so that I don't spend too much money... Wait... That was not very smart... Give credit card to wife... does not compute... bzz... EOT

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Ok, so the day is long and you must waste some time. Have no phear, Lemmings is here...

In glorious javascript and dhtml....

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I have to move one mailbox from one office to another. The first is in Porto, and the second in Lisbon.

The connection is ADSL, but the wrong direction: I have to push the entire mailbox via the ADSL uplink, 128kbits.

Well, it's a 6.5Gigabytes mailbox (actually a set of maildirs), so I'll just check it monday :)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I usually don't do "The news", but I must pass this along. Apparently nobody attending a specific presentation at BlogOn is using Internet Explorer. Zilch, Zero persons.

Impressive.

Thanks, Nuno

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Ambrosio is almost ready for major deployment. A new version is available (0.3), and now you can subscribe the bots presence.

The roadmap is something like this:

1. Finish Notice plugin: you drop small files in a specific directory, the local bot will pick them up and forward them to the JID's specified in the file - this allows for other scripts or applications in each one of your servers to send notifications;
2. Better management of notifications and presence: don't send notifications to people that are away or disconnected.
3. Multi-User chat support: its going to be nice to enter a room filled with your webservers and tell them all, restart apache, or having bots talking to one another like people, bloody harvest at IP_ADDRESS and have all the others block that IP via iptables
4. Log watcher: probably just a gateway to a local swatch application?
5. Start to think about a meta-bot: a bot controlling the other bots - he can receive notifications for disconnected users, and decide what to do with them:
   • forward part of the notification via SMS?
   • send a URL pointing to the note?
   • keep a log of unread notices?
6. Each plugin could have variables that he was willing to supply to some one: uptime can have the load, df can have free_kb_partition. These variables can be watched (you get some notification if they change, or if they trigger some threshold), or even logged (sql or rrdtool).

I have more ideas, some totally crazy (like having a pam_bot that asks the admin of the machine if the person trying to logging can do so before allowing it :) ), others more useful.

Remember that the core of Ambrosio is likely to change in the near future. The plugins will most likely be compatible. But the core will change a lot!.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

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.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This is the latest abuse of CSS I found.

This reminds me that I have to sort the 100+ links of CSS stuff I have in Safari.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This is about how many Terminal.app windows you can open :)

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

So I've got an account on Gmail, at last.

I was curious to see the javascript behind it, so now I can :). I'll play a bit more in the wekend.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Rui is my preferred source for all that is mobile or PDA related in the last couple of months. He is pretty exhaustive, and I share a lot of his view on what I want as my PDA and mobile. I'm not as forgiving about Windows CE as he his, not because I hate Microsoft (I really don't, I like a lot of software they do, not the operating systems but the apps), but because I really don't like the Windows interface.

I read his recentThe Perfect (Smart)Phone? article, and it validates my current view of my personal mobile purchase: today the company that I work for is giving me a T630; that one will go to my wife (MMS stuff), and I'll stick with my 2-year-old T68i until I can get my hands on a Z1010 or similar. I was worried about the 510 contact limit until I counted my own contacts (250-something).

The current price makes it impossible for me to buy one right now. I'll have to wait at least a year. I might buy a K700 in the meantime. Will see. I'll probably have to upgrade my 2 year old PowerBook next year also, and that takes priority.

Either way, the mobile will have to work with my PowerBook, my NZ-90, and must support iSync. That's the only really really important requirement right now.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Finalmente! Sim, eu sei que vinha um cliente de linha de comando com o bittorrent orignal, mas nunca o consegui por a funcionar...

Vou por isto a bombar e dou noticias.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I'm a proud owner of a Clie NZ-90 (the monster!), but it seems that it will be my last Clie.

I think I understand why they are doing this. When I first heard about Clie, they where very advanced in comparison with Palm and Handspring offers, but now, the Palm T3 and others are getting there.

I don't know the entire Clie line. There are some models that don't have a replacement right now (mine for example), but those are niche markets.

hmms... time to get a new battery before they really disapear...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Some people are never happy... Lets see what we can about this.

First, arch repositories will be online tomorrow for Kiwi (very alpha stuff), and others (SAF and Apache::WAF).

Second, moblogging seems nice, but does anybody knows what a moblogging app should do? What kind of protections you expect it to have?

If someone cares to write a spec of the ultimate moblogging app, send me a trackback to this entry, please. I would like to know what people want, so that Kiwi will at least make it easier to support.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This IE6 bug is very bad. Very very bad. We do some SSL stuff at work, so it's time to update the Apache configuration.

Got to love Microsoft.

Thanks, grantm.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

From the Trac homepage:

Trac is a minimalistic web-based software project management and bug/issue tracking system. It provides an interface to revision control systems (Subversion), an integrated Wiki and convenient report facilities.

It has some great features, and although I don't use yet, I'm thinking on trying it out. The biggest problem is it's Subversion dependence. I'll have to see if I can make it use arch instead.

The idea is to get to know trac, so that I can make sure Kiwi will be able to be extended to support it or a variation of it.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

I removed this content because it talked about software that is still in beta.

I was not aware of any confidentiality clauses associated with the beta testing. If I where I would not post information regarding it.

I like the software this developer is doing, I'm a paying customer, and I intend to keep paying him for future versions. My intent was only to give some personal opinions about the software.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)