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

Notes

last update:

Dabble

If you asked me what web-based application is the best example of what you can do with HTML and AJAX, I would respond: Dabble. Check the videos and screencasts, it's truly amazing.

What am I watching?

Not only to answer to Rui, but also so that I don't forget, these are the series I'm keeping track of, mostly via DVD's from Amazon.co.uk: House MD;Battlestar Gallactica;24;The West Wing (waiting for last season, number 7): I'll miss this one;CSI (Las Vegas, Miami, and NY);Without a Trace;Desperate House Wife's;Gilmore Girls (Yes, that one);(sometimes) Law & Order: Criminal Intent.Ordered in terms of my personal preferences at the moment. I might be missing Also so that I can keep track, and remember to talk about them later, this are the latest technical books that I bought and I'm in the middle of (ordered in reverse chronological order of purchase):

Nature

Failed hard-disks are Nature way of telling us to live for the future, and forget past stuff. Recently I've lost a bunch of pictures of my newest child, stored in a external Maxtor disk drive, so I can feel Rui's pain. Fortunately I have a flesh and blood backup, worth for some decades.

MailTags 2.0

Based on what I've been reading about MailTags 2.0, and Apple Mail 3.0 (Leopard version), I would bet that MailTags 2 plus MailActOn and current Mail.app is a lot better than Mail.app 3.0. MailTags 2.0 is now in public beta, downloading now. The only think I'm still missing is the ability to apply rules to outgoing messages, and see my decisions about a message (tags, colors, or folder where to archive it) be applied to future messages in the same threads.

80 days with a MacBook Pro

It's almost 80 days since I bougth my MacBook Pro 17", so I think I'll recap what has been going on. First, I had problems with the built-in iSight camera. I tried to upgrade all the software I could think of, installing all the firmware upgrades I could find at the Apple website. But it wasn't meant to be. Two days before the 30 day warranty no-questions-asked expired, I cloned my hard-drive and did a full nuke & pave reinstall.

RSI

Lately, I've been feeling "the pain". It starts after 7 hours at the office, and has become a major nuisance. I'm only 35 and I wouldn't like to be unable to work by the age of 40 or 45, so I'm taking some steps. After a recommendation from João Bordalo at the local Mac-for-geeks list, I've installed AntiRSI, and so far I've been able to cope with the forced intervals, even when they appear in the middle of a wicked Perl line.

Still hot

After reading the technical specification of the Core 2 Duo (Merom) CPUs, and trying to make sense of Chapter 5 (see page 77), and comparing with the technical specification of the Core Duo (Yonah) CPU (see page 81), I got the impression that the Merom, although faster than the Yonah at the same clock/power consumption, was still sending out a lot of heat. So, unless Apple changes a lot of heat dissipation stuff on the Macbook Pro's, you will still be able to toast a piece of bacon on your new laptop.

Perl training by Damian Conway

The author of the excellent Object Oriented Perl is going to be in Lisbon, Portugal this September's 12th and 13th, to give a two-day training on Perl Best Practices. There are a limited number of places, and the early bird discount ends August 20th, so do it now: harass your boss to send you, because this is an excellent opportunity to learn more about writing good Perl from one of the best practitioners of the craft.

Music

Latest albums bought online: Time Without Consequence - Alexi MurdochThe Eraser - Thom YorkeBlack Hole and Revelations - MuseJust Like Blood - Tom McRaeTwin Cinema - The New PornographersI'm experimenting.

... and now with Fedora

I like Tim O'Reilly articles for the Radar. One of the last ones compared with Google Trends four major Linux distros. The graphic that accompanied the article was this one: I found the RedHat line very low, it was not what I was expecting at all. Then it hit me: he didn't include Fedora. It's not even mentioned in the article at all, something that makes me uneasy about his analysis.