Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Notes

last update:

Perl switched to Git

I was following the conversion process for some time now, but the final switch was done today. The development of Perl is now maintained using Git. The repository includes all released versions of perl up to the most recent 5.10.0 and will take 219Mb of your hard disk.

The best Perl book in recent years is now available as a free PDF download. If you are a Perl programmer, even an experienced Perl programmer, you should read this book. Chapter 3 in particular. Go and get your copy of Higher-Order Perl, by Mark Jason Dominus. And if you end up with your mind blown away, buy a copy.

Back to work

My first day back at work will be spent reading about three weeks of email, and make sure everything still works ok. Still 1700 unread messages to go.

Sponsors

The last week of silence was sponsored by an emergency surgery to my lower intestine. Friday, the 28th I woke up with an abdominal pain. I have an history of stomach problems so I drove to the clinic where my father works and they diagnosed a small problem with my lower intestine, and I was back home later that day felling great. But apparently it was the calm before the storm.

In sync

Since I upgraded from a single laptop to dynamic duo including a new desktop, the "how do I keep the two in sync" problem became a topic of some significance on my geek life. There are several sets of information that I want to keep in sync, and for some of them I found solutions, and for others I'm still struggling. The first and easiest to solve was my work/ directory.

Bluetooth between Macs

I paired two Macs via BlueTooth but the OBEX File Transfer service was not available. WTF? Is this some limitation of my BT dongle (I can send and receive with a mobile phone...) or something idiotic on Apple part? Any ideas?

FriendFeed

I'm keeping track of all the stuff out there using FriendFeed. For now, it is the best service I found to do it. I'm using a Fluid SSB with the "real-time" view, and I disabled all the XMPP updates. This way, I can glance to the SSB from time to time, without the interruption of real real-time notifications. The only feature I miss, I would like to have an action "Mark as seen" at the top of the page tab (next to the "Pause updates").

Codebits 2008 XMPP presentation

My "XMPP - Hands on" presentation at Codebits 2008 is online. You can find it at GitHub and download the tarball (the big Download button). Its in Portuguese so most of you can ignore the PDF and dig straight through to the code. I didn't have Keynote.app on the laptop where I wrote it so I decided to try S5 to write my slides. The HTML version is great, and with a bit of syntax highlighter even the XML examples look good.

MacPorts

My love/hate relationship with systems like MacPorts and Fink requires an re-evaluation. I used fink a lot in the 10.2 days, and I didn't like it that much, and given that my OSS software needs where either covered on 10.4 and 10.5 or a simple ./configure --prefix=my_local_app_dir && make && make install away, I was always able to stay away from them. But the installation of CouchDB has a lot of dependencies, and there is no way that I'm going to try and install Erlang OTP and SpiderMonkey from source by hand.

GTalk Videochat

By now, you have probably read that GMail has added video-chat to its web interface. The blog post mentions the usual suspects: XMPP for signaling, RTP for transport and a H264/SVC codec. The implementation uses a browser plugin. Time will tell if this plugin will be bundled with Chrome (most likely) or bundled with Gears (would make sense for Google). The Mac installer includes a meta-package with two packages: Keystone.pkg and the GoogleVoiceandVideo.