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

Notes

last update:

Welcome to the club

Well, the kid is out of the bag. Congratulations to all the the Carmo house (or at what is left of the house, thanks to the wonderful species that are contractors). Anyway, after two kids myself, I enjoy seeing new parents, in a sadistic kind-of-way. Unfortunately Rui has already set some pretty harsh rules, ruling out any kind of Perl adventures. Thats just not fair, he could learn so much with Uncle Melo (and now thats an even scarier picture in Rui's mind.

Plazes all over again

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.

Perspective

From The economics of high-end prostitutes: Spitzer spent more than $80,000 on high-end prostitutes in one year. That's a lot of bank withdrawals. I would say that its a lot of deposits, but hey.

Webkit, Gnome, and Epiphany

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?

GitHub network view

Speaking of GitHub, they are now open for business. With the official launch they enabled a couple of features that had been discussed in the past: commit comments (I still don't know if I like them or not), and integration with Campfire and Lighthouse (although you can also roll-your-own integration using their hooks). One feature though, was not on the roadmap, and its a beauty: an network graph visualizer. Its a great view across several repos, and it works very well.

chromatic vs GitHub

I usually like chromatic articles about language design and his work in Perl6. As an example, just yesterday he committed a 20% improvement on the Rakudo build time. But last week, he wrote the following about GitHub: A centralized repository for a distributed version control system! Why didn't I think of that? I think that he is way off base on this one. Distributed version control systems are not incompatible with a centralized repository.

Cairo with Quartz support

The 1.6.0 release of Cairo moved the Quartz back-end from experimental to supported. This is very good news for me because some nice Perl modules for charts use Cairo. If you are using FF3 betas on a Mac, you're already using Cairo by the way. Update: an article from one of the authors.

VDSL

Eh: To get a sense of just how expensive even such a limited fiber rollout can be, consider than telecom provider KPN in the Netherlands will expand from 1,350 local exchanges to around 28,000 in order to launch VDSL service. That's a lot of trench digging and cable laying to bring the fiber further into the neighborhood, making this a nontrivial upgrade. Thats what I call an upgrade... 26k new POPs.

Freebase

Some friends complain that I talk a lot about Git, so to even out a bit, I'll talk about my current favorite Website. Yes, amongst all the sites I know or visited, there is one that takes the title "Current favorite", in the singular form. Its Freebase. Its a Wikipedia with a decent database schema. You can query it in much richer ways, like "Directors of $10M+ companies who have starred in movies" (the query for this can be seen on the left, as "Show this query in MQL"), or "Graduates of Stanford born since 1960 who are board members of companies".

Twittering

I admit: I still don't see what is all the fuss about Twitter. Twitter is like a selective (your followers only) shout command of old Moo's, but it seems to me to be a drain on productivity. If you think IM can be bad, well, you haven't seen nothing yet. But I'm still there trying to get it. I wonder if there is really something to get at all. For now, I cut my following list to about 30 people who are either close friends, or with whom I work constantly.