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

Notes

last update:

Gadget of the month

Got a Skype phone for the wife, let see how it goes. It looks good. You connect it to your Windows PC via USB and to a PTSN line. Then you can see who is online on your Skype buddy list and call them directly. You can also dial PTSN numbers. The phone is wireless DECT-based, and so far, in my limited testing, it works very very well. Technorati Tags: skype

ADSL now up and running

My ADSL2+ link is now up and running. 2048 down, 256 up. It was painless to install and configure the Huawei router provided by the ISP I’m using. Connected my old Airport base station in bridge mode. Now I can work without having to worry about the bill at the end of the month. Last month, I had a €99 surprise from my previous ISP. Well, it was expected. I’m not accustomed to use a pay-per-use link.

Welcome back

Back from vacation. One week on a luxurious hotel and spa. Sometimes you have to indulge yourself. In fact, I got back Tuesday, but I was catching up on email and feeds: around 400 mails (after the 3645 spam messages got put aside by the wonderful SpamSieve) and 750 items on NetNewsWire. Now back to our regular programming.

Software Patents in Europe

Today, around 12:00, software patents will be up for vote at the European Parliament. You can follow it live. At work, we put a site (Portuguese only) to spread the good word. You can also find an editorial of my CTO about the subject. The process is something like this: first there will be a vote of a proposal to reject. If this vote is approved, the whole process goes back to the beginning.

Weaken references in Perl

In case you need circular structures in Perl, you should known about Scalar::Util and it’s weaken function. See this example: package T; sub DESTROY { my $self = shift; print STDERR "Bye bye: $self->{name}\n"; } package main; use Scalar::Util qw( weaken ); { my $a = bless { name => 'a' }, 'T'; my $b = bless { name => 'b' }, 'T'; $a->{b} = $b; $b->{a} = $a; } print "Should see a destroy 'a' and 'b', but you wont.

Lazy bum

Until I get something better, I added a new field to the comment form: site name. Just type simplicidade in there and all will work out well. Until I get a decent anti-spam system, this one line patch to MT::App::Comments will do. I need some time to install a system like the one Carlos pointed out recently.Technorati Tags: anti-spam

Long day, good ending

Day started at 5:15. Almost 5 hours of downtime of my service, pure stress. It’s fun to debug distributed systems, closed source, with lousy debug and lot’s of threads. It’s not fun to find out that a stupid NLS_LANG can cause so much trouble. I hate Oracle sometimes. Called a night around 22 hours, just in time to catch a movie. If you ever get to watch a movie this month, choose this one: Sin City.

Back from Reboot

Back from Reboot to find my MoveableType spammed to death. Around 400 spam comments and around 20 valid one (including some from Nuno which seems to think this was on purpose). It should all be ok now. I’ll take this time to remmember you to check the feed that you subscribe me from. I recommend that you use the this one, which includes comments, so that you can track my replies.

Greetings from planet Earth

Nuno, I’m at Reboot, which I think it’s still on planet Earth (although you could argue that some people here have fallen from some other place), so no time to pretty graphics. But let me show you something: Microsoft: Market cap 274.75B Apple: Market cap 29.51B Now, which one do you think is the company that is innovating the most right now? Size does not matter, it’s what you do with it.