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

Notes

last update:

Pretty please, with sugar on top?

I've been using ecto since I started writting this mis-mash of notes. It's good enough and doesn't get in the way. I know where everything is and I don't get lost. With all the publicity about MarsEdit, I downloaded the latest version and tried it out. Although its much more polished than Ecto2, I didn't find any compeling reasons to re-learn a new tool. I loved the Cmd-Shift-D to post (I use that with Mail.

WordPress, king of the community

I can only say that with all these security problems WordPress is having (releases 2.3.3, 2.3.2, and 2.3.1), it truly is the best choice to build a community site: everybody will be able to edit your pages.

Flash vs iPhone

This whole "Flash on the iPhone eminent"-rumors is weird. Given that Flash now supports H.264 as a video codec, maybe iPhone supporting Flash is just that: Apple will support Flash video if the codec used is H.264. If YouTube starts encoding the videos as H264 (maybe as an option at first given that Flash with H.264 support is probably still in the single digits market share), then this makes total sense for Apple to support.

github.com

There is a new service starting up, github.com, that provides Git hosting including a very nice Web interface with some cool twists like LightHouse integration. Another cool feature is the read-only Subversion repository of the git master branch. Unfortunately the service is still in beta. I've subscribed for an account, I hope they open up more slots soon.

AIM/ICQ, and now Yahoo!

There is something in the air, because we now have two big IM providers flirting with XMPP. A couple of weeks back we could login to the AIM/ICQ network using XMPP. The trial seems to be over though. But today, Mickaël Rémond tells us about Yahoo! Live experiments with XMPP. Very cool.

FOSDEM 2008

Hotel: check; Plane: check; Baby sitter to cover for me during the weekend: check. Guess I'm ready to go. I'll see you at FOSDEM 2008. You'll probably find me around the Jabber Software Foundation stand.

Sniffing browser history

Came across this article about using JavaScript to sniff your browser history. Very interesting stuff. I wonder how long it will take to see a jQuery plugin for it? (via 43 folders)

Stallman on copyright

Richard Stallman wrote an article entitled "Freedom - or Copyright". Its an interesting read. Two paragraphs stand out to me: When computer networks provide an easy anonymous method for sending someone a small amount of money, without a credit card, it will be easy to set up a much better system to support the arts. When you view a work, there will be a button you can press saying “Click here to send the artist one dollar”.

My next birthday present

Feel free to pitch in so that I can buy my next birthday present. The second picture of the setup is amazing... But yeah, I could settle for something in the range of a 1/50th of the total cost. (via pfig)

The first fix is free

Google launched Google Apps Team Edition. In a nutshell, users of an organization can setup a Team, with all the goodies of Google Apps for Domains, using only a valid email address. no need to bother the IT administrator... Smart, very smart. Get the users addicted, and have them push for the stuff internally, a "upgrade" to the bussiness package (watch the video at the Google Talkabout blog, and pay close attention to the last 30", starting at 1:54").