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

Notes

last update:

Welcome

Well, my current boss started blogging. Welcome! I noticed due to my Technorati watchlist. His second post is very worthwhile rant about iChat and XMPP support. I’ll have to read it more carefully later.

Amen brother!

Gradual Ephiphany » Frustration: > Protocol designers have a responsibility that needs to be taken seriously. They must design > protocols that are easy to implement and understand, if at all possible. Furthermore, protocols > must reflect the realities of the societies in which they are deployed. Right on! KISS should be written in all the monitors of people who design protocols.

The Apple way

It seems that Apple is fine with changing old ideas about the “right” way to do things. See one example: the new launchd. I don’t think they are innovating that much (the article itself talks about Solaris 10 solution to the problem), but I find it refreshing that they are not bound to UNIX tradition and don’t mind rethinking about old problems. That is what I like about them.

Forked files and Tiger Server

AFP548 - Tiger Server Overview: > Another welcome feature is a new API that lets traditional UNIX tools such a cp, mv, tar, and > rsync work with forked files. This should open up a much easier world of scripting > for Mac OS X. This is way cool! At last! Can anyone confirm that rsync that comes with Tiger Client is already using this API? Update: More information from Michael Tsai - Blog - Random Tiger Notes: > A Mac-savvy rsync was, for me, one of the most anticipated features of Tiger.

XMPP and Perl

I’m writing an external component in POE::Component::Jabber. It’s a custom development that will link to a XMPP server. POE::Component::Jabber is nice, but it seems to me that I’m investing in something that I won’t be able to reuse. There is no clear way to create a standalone module or plugin to hide the details of a certain protocol (like the jabber:iq:register). I have some old code, XMPP::Session, that should solve this problem.

Tiger notes

As I said before, I’m not upgrading to Tiger until sometime next month. Yet, I need to keep some links to things that I need to test or fix in my Tiger setup. The good news in Tiger for scripting fans like me, is that Perl and Ruby have decent and recent versions. The bad news is that at least Ruby has a bad configuration file. From what I could understand, it seems that they left a CFLAGS=-arch i386 in a config file… I can’t wait the rumor sites to get this one… A fix is available.

Johannes Ernst's Blog

Johannes Ernst’s Blog: I’d like to suggest that some of the world’s most successful distributed software architectures are neither client-server nor peer-to-peer when you look at them closely. They follow an architectural pattern that I’d like to call the 4-Point Architecture. I like his point of view. Yet, I don’t think that all of the rules make sense. In particular: No dark point ever interacts directly with another dark point, they always go through their respective bright points first.

Upgrade time for my powerbook

So, it’s upgrade time to update my powerbook. No, I’m not installing Tiger yet, I need my powerbook in working order. I’ll wait until 1 week after 10.4.1 to install that one. I’m upgrading to 10.3.9 only because I want to upgrade to Quicktime 7 and try some H.264 goodness (see also this impressive report). Right now, I have 11 items in my Software Update Window. So, I’ll see you all (three of you) in 20 minutes or so.

Back from the dead

Ok, so we’re back! Simplicidade was down for a couple of days. The good news is that it wasn’t a hardware problem. When I got to the data-center where we are hosted, the machine was powered down (!!). Nuno looked at the logs and apparently the kernel was upgraded and at the end it automagically rebooted. The problem is that after the reboot, it did a halt. We’ll have to figure this one out.

BabySafe. Pay the gentlemen. It’s really the only safe way to put your laptop in the hands of the kid. It protects your data (although your screen is still a bit exposed). And why you want to put the mac in the hands of your kid? Well, it’s warfare. My wife prefers Windows, and I prefer UNIX and Mac in particular. So we have to win the kid when he’s young.