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

Notes

last update:

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Carmack is (still) god. At least one of them. (via apostle pfig). Update: a more accurate version of the source of the code. Update 2: the real author stands up.

Amazon Kindle

I find it amusing that a search for Kindle in Amazon UK doesn't return any relevant results. So much PR, so little return. Anyway, I'm carbon-oriented when we are talking about books. I prefer the paper-kind, not the electronic version. I subscribed O'Reilly Safari bookshelf for a while, but I stopped using them because of that. Granted, the experience with Kindle could be better than a browser and a computer screen, the display is much better than the usual 72dpi of a LCD.

File uploads

I like the new web-based upload tool that Flickr is using. I like it so much that I no longer use the Flickr iPhoto plugin. Update: there is a open-source project that matches most if not all the features of the Flickr uploaded: SWFUpload 2007. One thing I could never understand is why don't browsers have a upload list with a progress bar? I mean, they have all the information they need to do it.

Wide-Finder and Perl

The Wide-Finder project has been a lot of fun. For those who think that it is not a real-world problem I'll leave you with a quote from the Wide-Finder results page: Worth Doing · There is a steady drumbeat of commentary along the lines of “WTF? This is a trivial I/O-bound hack you could do on the command line, ridiculously inappropriate for investigating issues of parallelism.” To which I say “Horseshit”.

Storage and the growth of ZFS-based NAS

I've come across an interesting project growing around OpenSolaris. Its called NexentaOS and its a OpenSolaris branch. The company behind NexentaOS is Nexenta. They use the OS to build a NAS appliance, NexentaStor, that runs on commodity x86/64 hardware, and offers very cool features: unlimited snapshots, snapshot replication, NFS, CIFS, FTP, Rsync and Amanda. Also, they use ZFS so you can grow your storage to extremely large pools, with both direct-attach storage or using iSCSI.

How do you like them apples?

Yes, I need a haircut. Yes, my wife refuses to admit that she's married to me with pictures like this floating around. And yes, they where good apples. I think I ate about a dozen of them during the three days of Codebits. (Picture from the Delfim Codebits gallery).

Codebits wrap-up

So Codebits ended last thursday night. It was the best conference I attended in a long time. We had pretty good house (I would love to know official numbers, but I would say that about 300 people where around), and at the end of the contest, 47 projects, some goofy, some hardware hacks, a bunch of mobile hacks, and a lot of web stuff. I think it was a good participants to projects ratio.

api.destakes.com

Another thing that showed up during Codebits: the Destakes API. Simple, and to the point. Like it should be. Kudos to Carlos.

Codebits update

The Codebits event is awesome. The haven't had this much fun in a long time. You can look through some great pictures of the event at Delfim's gallery. The F.E.V.E.R. concert last night was pretty cool, although I'm not a fan of their kind of music. Even through out the concert people where still coding like good geeks. Update: uploaded some pictures of my own to Flickr.