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

Notes

last update:

QOD

In response to the FSF article on the iPhone, let me point you to the balanced view of Stu Charlton. Quote of the day: The OpenMoko counter-argument is "give it time, in the long run, it will win". And look, in a way, I hope so. Using the iPhone is a great case of following Keynes' adage, in the long run, we are all dead., where we optimize for short term gratification at the expense of our future.

Creating a new user using dscl

In case you ever need to create a new user in Leopard using the command line, the required steps are documented in the Porting UNIX/Linux Applications to Mac OS X document.

Disqus

Heads up: I'm switching my comments to Disqus. I had several people complaining about the current HaloScan-based system. Expect minor disturbances in the force. Update: we are now Disqus-powered. They still don't have an importer for old comments, so for a while, old comments are orphaned. Hope they fix that soon.

Subversion 1.5.0

I missed the release of the new 1.5.0 version of Subversion. Its funny, actually. This was somewhere around June (the blog post lacks a proper date), and I didn't see it mentioned on any of the blogs I follow. Anyway, its out and I was expecting it to see the new merge tracking stuff. One of my gripes with Subversion is that yes, branching is cheap, but the merge part is awful hard to do and puts much of the load into your lap.

Trying MarsEdit again

I've tried at least twice now to move from ecto to MarsEdit, but I was having some problems moving my ecto setup from 10.4.x to 10.5.4, so I decided to give it another try. This time it seems to be working much better. Local Markdown works, and I could define my usual shortcuts easily with the markup editor. I've still haven't found a way to import all my posts (I want to have the full history locally), so I'll have the check the manual for that one.

Really, its disgusting how low you can get. Here we can see Nik Cubrilovic ranting about how close the iPhone is and all the DRM plague that it brings to our world. Cool, thats nice, and certainly a valid point of view. It's certainly better written than the usual diatribe we get from the Portuguese open source evangelists. But take a moment to search the TechCrunchIT site for openmoko. You can just click the last word.

Feed cleanup

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.

Testing, ignore please

I'll delete this post in a bit, but I need to test something, sorry bout that :) Second part (extended) goes here.

Hell broke loose around here...

The silence around here is caused by a 100% increase on the house population. Our dog, Ginger, was pregnant and gave birth to 6 new puppies (pictures as soon as I get some power into my phone). The problem was with the first puppy. It was too big (the father dog was bigger than her, so this puppies are big..) and she was couldn't deliver the puppies on her own. So she had to do a C-section.

Middle-range Macs

I'm looking for a desktop Mac. I'm pretty unhappy with the current Apple offering. We have the high-end Mac Pro, starting at 2.499€ (but you can configure a single CPU version for 2.049€, and at the low end, the Mac mini, starting at 499€. In the middle we have the iMac's but those have a built-in screen, and I already have dual 20" Wide displays that I would like to reuse.