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

Notes

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Software patents

An interesting article about software patents by Philip Greenspun. Two quotes stand out to me. The opening shot (which you get to read it yourself), and further down this one: I was asked "Why didn't you patent this yourself, if you developed it first?" My reply was "It only took me an hour to build; if I went down to the patent office after every hour of programming, I wouldn't get very much done.

Smoking

In Private equity firm pours $100 million into SCO money pit: "We saw a tremendous investment opportunity in SCO and its vast range of products and services, including many new innovations ready or soon to be ready to be released into the marketplace," Norris said in a statement. I want a big pile of the same stuff SNCP is smoking.

Index cards

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.

Screenshot editor

I need a Mac app to blur or hide certain parts of screenshots I take. I don't want a app tied to any online system. Just a quick, direct, graphics editor. Any recommendations?

Screencast software

I usually use Snapz Pro X and I'm pretty happy with it, but ScreenFlow is amazing. Checkout the screencast, specially the last 20 or 30 seconds. But €79.99? Yeah, only if you are a Pro.

Apple TV as a AirTunes destination

A quick tip that I just read, and I didn't see this mentioned anywhere else: the Apple TV, with the latest software update, is now a AirTunes destination. This is very cool. I can send the music from my iTunes to the big speakers easily now.

High-performance SSH

A very interesting patch to the standard OpenSSH code base, to improve SSH throughput. Something to try in a week or so. There is also a TCP tuning article at the same site worth a read.

Operations Mantras

A big Operations Mantras article by Alan Kasindorf. Loads of interesting stuff, but it does take a bit to digest.

Live Yahoo!

Ok, Live Yahoo! is awesome. It took me literally 3 clicks to have a multi-user video conference going.

git hosting

If you need to host your project somewhere using git, I suggest you try gitorious.org. Setup was a breeze, painless and just worked. I was up and running in less than 5 or 10 minutes. I tried repo.or.cz a couple of days ago, but I still can't push to a project I created there...