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

Notes

last update:

Here is something that took me a while to get. If you are writing scripts in Perl to do some reports and statistic analysis, and you are not using format, stop right now, do a perldoc perlform. Then, in case you need to switch reports in the middle of the script, for example if your script dumps the data collected in three different layouts, use this code between each report:

Dos? What DoS?

Interesting way to deal with a DoS that you get from being a major asshole: just dump it on someone else. Kudos to the SixApart network team. Technorati Tags: sixapart

I wonder...

The Macbook Pro 17" specs state: Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 2560 by 1600 pixels on an external display, both at millions of colors That means that you can have 2560x1600 pixels on the external monitor, for a total of 4096000 pixels. I wonder if you could do 3840x1024... It would mean less pixels, but a different layout. I ask this because this is very very tempting.

Farewell

The Jabber community lost a dear friend this week. Peter Millard, long time Jabber friend, and Exodus author, passed away after a struggle with cancer. I didn't knew him personally, but the quality and breadth of his work for this community make him a dear friend to all of us. Peter has written about this loss. My deepest condolences go to his wife Christina, and is daughter Zoe. Technorati Tags: jabber

Should I buy one?

Some friends ask me regularly if they should buy a Mac now or wait a little more. Instead of repeating it every time, I'll write my reasoning here and let them decide: You should buy a Mac if and when you need it: with computers the only certain thing is that it will be replaced by something bigger or better in the next few months (if you are lucky) or days (if you are not);The current Intel Macs are a good buy if you have an old G3 or G4.

Textmate goodness

I'm still impressed with TextMate and although I still run into Vim from time to time, most of my work is now done inside the new sweetheart. Of course, we are still in early stages of our relationship, and the old and trusted Vim can still regain is rightful place, specially with the newest version 7 (in late beta now). Yet sometimes I see another set of possibilities with Textmate that blew me away.

Predictions, the stuff fools are made of. Recently a couple of events, web-based services, and old style thinking have come together in my mind in a way that makes me want to write about it and share. Being about the future of the internet and the applications we will see after this Web 2.0 craze subsides, well, it just makes it interesting. The most important part of the Web 2.0 hype are the simple and universal APIs that most sites are deploying.

Foolishness

When a person has a child and holds it in its hands, there is a kind of foolishness that takes over your entire self, it's like getting the answer to all the questions about life, the universe and everything in a instance, and finding out that Douglas Adams was wrong. You truly see that its much more than a number. Predicting the future is also foolish, and not even remotely as fun, unless you are the one who will, when time brings us to it, laugh at this small notes I took upon myself to write.

MySQL updates

The MySQL Users Conference is almost over in sunny California and the output for those of us we didn't make the trip has been overwhelming with over 100 blog posts in a few days. MySQL is booming. There are three new engines: Solid, an old friend that I used for testing on my Telenet days and had to drop due to management distrust (lessons we learn when we are young: don't listen to management when choosing technical solutions); PBXT, a brand new engine, fully ACID-compliant with some novel ideas about database layout on disks (white paper worth a read); and Falcon, an MySQL.