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

Notes

last update:

And the second good news...

I’ve been using Backpack on and off. I (still) lack a internet connection at home right now, so I don’t have that much online time. Today the Backpack API was announced. I’ll have to look at it. Maybe, if I don’t find a good to-do app for the command line, I can write one with this API.

In case you live under a rock...

Web application of the day (and it’s still early…) is Webnote. Javascript/DOM/CSS+XHTML and modern browsers are growing up like mushrooms. It’s crazy. And it’s becoming so common that we move from one to another with a simple “yeah, nice”, even if six months ago you could not dream about these stuff.

I’m looking for a command line to-do app for UNIX-based systems. It must work on a Mac, though. I don’t need no fancy text-based GUIs, just command line. Each to-do must have the following fields: body of text; optional due date; a set of tags. That’s it. It’s so little that I though of writing it myself… I’m just curious to see if there is anything like it already.

Decisions

I decided to start using a managed service for my email protection (anti-spam mostly, but also anti-virus although using a Mac makes that not so important). I’m looking at Postini and MessageLabs services. I’ve a subjective preference for the later, but I haven’t decided yet. One thing that bothers me is that neither of their sites describes their products. They only describe the technology. To know more, you have to enter “free trials”… Well, will start with MessageLabs trial and then do the Postini trial, to compare the two.

ecto just got better

I’ve been using ecto most of my very short blogging activity. It’s easy to use, supports Markdown preview, and does what I want to do easily. And it just got better: the latest release adds automator support to ecto (also check latest developer build with more updates). You should also install his get selected text from Safari automator script. I’ve been collecting Automator stuff do try when I upgrade to Tiger and I’m now certain that Automator will be my most useful feature.

I’m sure of it! Just yesterday, I was talking with Celso about good UML tools to use with our Macs. And just now, Rui writes about two of them: CanonSketch and TaskSketch. And they are written by two portuguese persons from Univ. of Madeira. Very cool! I confess that my knowledge of UML is close to zero. I know what it is, in a general way, but I don’t know how to use UML in real life.

Time to go

The day was ok, lot’s of XMPP stuff, solved a couple of problems, created a few, learn some more. I found out that, apart from Exodus (a Windows Jabber client), I could not find anything else with decent support for MUC. TKJabber might be be an option, but couldn’t get it to work yet. So I need a quick MUC-admin-client. I’ll write one tonight it seems. But now it’s time to go.

P2P? Think NNTP...

Celso wrote about using P2P technology to distribute content, in the context of blogging. There are two types of content that you might want to distribute: the syndication feeds, and the HTML pages. The syndication feeds is a hot topic right now, specially in the Feedmesh group. Feedmesh already has notification distribution and it seems to be working great. In the two previous weeks there where some messages about full content distribution of feeds in the Feedmesh mailing list.

Settle for warm

This one make me laugh my head off at work.