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

Notes

last update:

Priceless

The guy who won $275.000 on the Google Android contest (english translation): Asked what he would do with the cash, his response was “I guess I could invest it in my software company, but first I want to port PicSay to the iPhone.” Priceless... (via daring fireball) Update: the PicSay author clarifies the whole story.

Pretty print XML

In case you didn't know, you can pretty print XML with the xmllint command line tool that comes with libxml2, and its installed by default with Mac OS X. Basic usage is xmllint --format xml_file.xml and the pretty version will be sent to standard output. But working with XMPP and SAPO Broker, I'm always copy&pasting XML from one place to the other and it would be nice to format the XML snippet sitting in the clipboard.

Ubiquity

Mozilla Labs Ubiquity looks very nice indeed. I wonder how hard it would be to port it to a Fluid plugin? (via Ajaxian)

$1000

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.

CPAN::Mini::Webserver++

The CPAN::Mini::Webserver module is getting a lot of love in the last few weeks. The most recent 0.40 version includes a lot of goodies including: act as a true CPAN mirror so that you can point you cpan client to it;syntax highlight of Perl code;Bonjour registration: easy to find on a local lan;shows which modules are installed locally;A lot more meta information shown about each module.Getting everything right is easy.

HTML5 and event loops

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.

XMPP for carbon lovers

If you happen to be a dead-tree-addict, and interested in XMPP like me, then I'm happy to tell you that you will have a present next year. Kevin, Peter and Remko are hard at work for O'Reilly to brings us the XMPP missing book. Entitled "XMPP: The Definitive Guide", it should hit the shelfs in 2009. Shameless offer: if you need technical reviewers, you know my JID :).

Framing protocols

I've been playing with framing protocols. I need a protocol with: low overhead: it will be used for mobile communications and some of us pay for each byte;multiplex streams: you should be able to open channels inside the same TCP connection;restartable: each session has an ID and I need to restart all of the channels inside it very quickly if my TCP connection dies.I've looked at AMQP wire protocol, BLIP, BEEP and some others.

Parallax

I've talked a bit about Freebase over the last few months. I understand that a rich, semantic, structured database of knowledge is not something other people get excited about, but that happens to be my thing. In the hope to excite others with Freebase, I recommend that you spend 8 minutes watching the Parallax browser in action. That kind of research tool is only possible with something like Freebase on the bottom.

Updated Search In Project with Ack

I've updated my own Search In Project with ack TextMate command. Changes: search in selected files is optional now: start your query with a : to search only in the selected files;fixed search for words with a initial dash in them.You can find the current version at GitHub or download the tmCommand file directly. This is a very simple ack interface. For a more complex and feature-full, see the ack TextMate bundle by Trevor Squires.