Notes

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)