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

Notes

last update:

Books

Due to lack of time (wife, 1.5 kids and a dog, and some hobbies), Audible.com is almost my only source of books (apart from technical ones). In the last month I listened to three books: Enders Shadow, The Fifth Elephant, and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I listened to Enders Game one or two years ago, and The Speaker of the Dead last year, and I wanted to continue exploring that story a bit more.

CES

I've been following the CES 2006 in the news, specially AnandTech coverage. From the latest article, I'll like to point out some things that I found interesting: the Motorola In-Ear Bluetooth Headset: this is interesting because the microphone listens to vibrations from you jaw, so it will muffle the noise around you;the Hitachi's OLED Tech Demo: notice the thinness of the display, amazing;and for me the most impressive demonstration Philips Rollable Display Demo: the first time I see something near what electronic paper should be like.

Yahoo keynote has Ellen DeGeneres and Tom Cruise. Google keynote has Robin Williams... It's not even a fare fight. Robin Williams blows them out-of-the-water. I laughed out loud with this part of the Q&A section: Reporter from Screen Actor's Guild SAG magazine: "What parameters are in place to prevent the unauthorized downloading of actors' images from the Internet?" Robin Williams mocks him savagely. "Nice to see a union man in the house!

Walled gardens

The subtitle should be: Put your network where your mouth is. Endgadget covered the Yahoo keynote. At the end of the Engadget post, we can read: Terry: "What we've shown you today are only the first steps. You can be sure we will continue to innvoate right alongside you. I'll go back to the first question about why Yahoo was here (at CES) for the first time today. Here's what I hope you take away:

Textmate goodness

Well, after three weeks inside TextMate, I must say I'm hooked. I knew it existed and it was cool and stuff, but until you read the TextMate manual, you don't know half of the power it packs. If you want to see if it is for you, I would recommend that you try and read through the fine manual. Around our corner of the world, I count five converts already, and given that we had abused the local mac users group mailing list with TextMate stuff in the last couple of days, I went ahead and created a TextMate Portuguese User mailing list.

Windows zero day exploit

The vast majority of software has bugs. The ones that haven't are either two small to do something useful, or written with rigid rules, during long years. We can argue the fine points of this, but it's rare the software that doesn't have them. The issue with bugs is not that they exist, it's how long you have to wait until they get fixed. It seems that we now have active exploits roaming around for the latest Windows bug.

Housekeeping stuff

Just a quick post to note some things: I had problems with my upgrade to MT 3.2. I decided to reinstall from scratch. Everything seems much better now. Comments seem to work, and all the feeds validate;During the upgrade, I forgot to include two feeds I had previously: rss-full.xml and index.rdf. They are back but they are not announced anywhere. My recommendation is to use the Atom feed, or the RSS 2.

Tip: use TextMate and Ecto

Quick tip for those who are using ecto and Textmate: you can edit your drafts using Textmate directly from ecto. In case you use Markdown to write your posts, this is great. The Markdown bundle in Textmate is very good. Just choose Edit > Edit with > TextMate and you're done. The text updates in ecto after you save in Textmate. For more information, see this article on the ecto blog.

Trac and Lighty

I'm moving this and other simplicidade.org sites to Lighty. My main motivation was memory usage and the fact that I'm starting to use Trac a lot, and using that as a CGI is painful. I wanted to use fastcgi and Lighty is high-rated in that area. After reading some articles about Trac and fastcgi, I settled on this config: $HTTP["host"] == "projects.simplicidade.org" { server.document-root = "/servers/sites/projects.simplicidade.org/docs" accesslog.filename = "/servers/logs/lighty/sites/projects.simplicidade.org_access_log" server.indexfiles = ( "index.

TextMate: cool stuff so far

In my quest to implement my 2006 Resolutions, I decided to start early and I've switched to TextMate already. I will not dump all the links to the documentation on you. I will only point to some "Wow, cool"-type of things I found in the last couple hours browsing stuff. Some of the links are from the Macromates blog, a resource I would recommend you to, if you are also switching to Textmate.