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

Notes

last update:

utf-8 and DBD::mysql

After an afternoon trying to understand why some of my output from a utf8 table in MySQL was coming out garbled, I finally realize that: even if your tables and database are all created with utf8 charset;even if you set your connection charset to utf8 with SET NAMES 'utf8';your scalar results in perl will not have the utf8 flag set, so any print, concatenation or XML generation further on will result in a mess, when finally printed out to a XMPP stream, for example.

The quest for fastcgi MT setup

After successfully placing Trac under fastcgi with Lighty, I'm now targeting Moveable Type. It's not as important as Trac was, I'm pretty happy doing it via CGI, I'm very low traffic. One of the caveats with this approach is that some plugins might not work correctly, due to the persistent nature of fastcgi processes. But, hey, this is the way Yahoo! is doing it, so if that is really a problem, I think they will be corrected shortly.

Wake up and smell the fastcgi

You might have noticed that fastcgi has been getting a lot of momentum in the past few months. The biggest deployment I know is Yahoo! Small Bussiness Web Hosting service using Moveable Type under fastcgi. Most rails apps are deployed using it, Catalyst also has support out of the box, and even PHP works very well with it. The main advantages I see with it is that it splits the application from the webserver.

Resolutions for 2006

I've never written down my new year resolutions before, but I want to keep track of them this time, so here they are. I thing my friends already have sufficient ammo to embarrass me on a daily basis, but I want to make their life even easier, one year from now. The first thing I want to do is to change my main text editor. I've been using vi and/or vim since 1991/92.

Jingle is out there

For those of us working with XMPP, this is probably the best christmas present we could have. Yesterday, the Jabber Software Foundation, announced two new JEPs (similar to the RFCs of IETF, they define extensions to the basic XMPP RFCs), Jingle Signalling and Jingle Audio, to specify a standard way for XMPP clients to negotiate Voice over IP sessions. In the wings of that announcement, Google released libjingle (also look at the SourceForge Project page for libjingle), a C++ library to implement the Jingle spec.

Embrace...

Maybe I'm old and grumpy, but after reading that Microsoft will use the same icon for RSS feeds in IE that Firefox uses, the only phrase that stuck in my memory was this one: embrace and extend. We'll see. Technorati Tags: mozilla, rss, safari, microsoft

Blog recommendation

One blog that I follow with interest is Bruce Schneier Schneier on Security. I like his practical approach to security, but most of all I like to read some of the clippings he collects from several sources and from anonymous emails he receives. Just today he posted two articles, all good: Korea Solves the Identity Theft Problem;Weakest Link Security: extremely funny, or not.Recommended. Technorati Tags: security, schneier

Harry Potter

I like the Harry Potter books, I own all of them, in both Portuguese and English. Tonight I went to see the latest Harry Potter film, The Goblet of Fire. Let me start saying that it is a big book, around 790 pages. Also, it's packed with lots of action. The next book, the Order of Phoenix is much slower than this one, for example. So making a film around this fourth book would be a challenge.

Link dump

Not something that I usually do, but I wanted to clear some links from my Safari toolbar: IBM Ajax explanation: nice and complete step-by-step explanation of what is this Ajax thing all about. In a world with prototype and script.aculo.us its easy to forget how things work;[Emily's "10 things a developer girlfriend needs to know"](http://www.emilyhambidge.com/blog/emily/66/: a must forward to your girlfriend/wife, in case you are a developer;Bush on the Constitution - 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper': I was going to write 'hilarious' as my comment, but no, its not hilarious, its sad.