Notes

Ruby on Rails hits 1.0. Congratulations to all in the core team. Since discovering Catalyst, I've left Ruby on Rails behind me, but it was RoR that got me hooked in Ruby, and for that I thank them. Ruby really is a lovely and clean language. I can only hope that Perl6 cleans some of the "issues" with Perl5. And from what I can see from the presentations I've seen in the last year, it will :).

I bought^H^H^H^H^H^Hreceived as a present a PSP last October, and to be brief, it's been great. For quite some time now, I couldn't get myself in front of a TV, plug all the PS2 stuff, and play. Sitting there in front of that brain-sucking-device seemed a waste of time. And it's a pity, because although not a hard-core gamer, I like to play video games a lot. The PSP changed all that.

After a small break, I'm back. I had some problems with MT, a trip to london perl workshop and some powerbook updates. Also PSP stuff and perl mongers stories. All of this and much more, right after the break.

In case you where wondering where all your crontabs went after you upgraded to Tiger, check out Mac DevCenter article about launchd. Good stuff. Technorati Tags: apple, mac, osx

This is not something new but I hope we can see more of this in server-class CPUs in the future: Sun Fire T2000 and Secure Applications. The basic idea is to have a cryptographic accelerator on chip, to make certain operations, like those required by SSL, much more fast and inexpensive. Its a big win for a lot of companies who want to offer SSL to his clients but can't due to the cost of scaling up SSL ops.

Apple recently released a Broadband Tuner application for Mac OS X. Basically it sets some kernel parameters in /etc/sysctl.conf, regarding network buffers. Well, Aaron Adams (one of the switchers in the Apple campaign, in case you forgotten), has some alternative configurations that you might want to try. I'm using them with no problems. Technorati Tags: network, broadband, osx, mac, apple

You are probably sick of hearing me talk about my powerbook, and how old he is and how much I want to have a new one, specially a dual-core G4 one. So I'll just say this only one (more): I want a new powerbook. The "new" ones, although with a nice new display and some bells and whistles, are not enough for me to buy one. So I'm stuck with a first generation x86 powerbook, and that means waiting at least 3 to 4 months after they are announced sometime next year.

There are some key combinations that drive me nuts in Mac OS X. For example, Cmd-Q and Cmd-W. The first quits the application and the second one closes the window. They are too freaking close of each other, and its very easy to trigger the wrong one. After quitting Safari with N tabs open, you either buy Saft and activate session history, or read below. Or both as I did.

Yesterday, as RuiRui already pointed out, I stopped by the new Apple Center, in Lisbon. It’s a small shop, with some hardware on display, but it’s no Apple Store for sure. They had some people there buying a iMac G5 (the older model). I almost went up and said to the couple “Hey, don’t buy that! There is a new model already!”, but I suppose that availability of the new one is not that good, and in Portugal, it’s even worse.

Previously, I was using a setup with Tailor to see my darcs repositories with Trac. It works ok, but there are some issues, the most annoying one is that the commits don’t preserve the original author in the meta-data of the change-set, only in the comment. So, all the SVN change-sets you see in trac are made by the user under which you run tailor, and in the comment with each changeset you have something like: