Notes

Nice: Snippets allows you to upload small snippets of code in several languages and tag them in a del.ici.us/flickr way. Very nice.

The fact that I had to write so little code is a tribute to two things: the design of Apple APIs is very clean; and Ruby integration with ObjectiveC runtime is almost perfect. Doing a web browser with XCode is equivalent to the early 90’s ‘Hello world’. One interesting thing. I’m almost sure that I can reuse the same NIB file with a CamelBones project. I’ll try it next week and write the same app with it.

I woke up around 6:00 am (very early for Portuguese standards) and couldn’t get back to sleep. I had been reading about Ruby on Rails and I was thinking about it, how it could affect some of my projects. Yet, for some reason, I started thinking about Cocoa. I knew that there was a Ruby/Cocoa framework, and I have some experience with CamelBones, the Perl/Cocoa framework. How easy is to create a small Cocoa app in Ruby?

First, grab a couple of blank CD-R discs, one for each manager of a tech company you know. Put an extra for you. Make a list. Then, go to http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail188.html and download the best quality audio file of the “Great Hackers” presentation by Paul Graham, OSCON 2004. After you have burned all the CDs send them to each manager on the list. The best presentation I ever listen to from IT Conversations.

I know Rui since 97 or 98 (can’t remember) but only yesterday we noticed that we almost have line-of-sight between our homes in Lisbon (!!). As he said, we should try to link our wireless networks some day, if not for listening to each other iTunes playlist, to have two different internet links. My 2Mb ADSL should be up and running sometime next month (I hope…), and his link is from a different provider.

I know who you are. Do you? Check it out: http://www.digpeople.com/. I’m hit number 2 on Online Communities.

I’ve been married for 13 years now. We have our ups and downs, but I kept faithful all this years, and my other-half as been always there for me. Even when the stress levels are high, you could always count on finding a almost-ready solution at hand. I’ve done quite a lot of stuff with my partner… I shouldn’t feel this way… But I do. I’m married for 13 years now, with Perl, but I’m having an affair with Ruby.

I needed something new to do, to learn, and I decided to learn a new language. That was 2 months ago more or less. I though about learning OCaml or Haskell but I don’t have the correct mental model to learn something like that just now. So I went with something easy, given my background. I picked up Programming Ruby a month or so ago, and I just finished my first reading of it.

So I’m a lazy bastard, so far nothing new. But I also want to look at the latest Psi, ze mozt powerfull Jabber client out there, releases for Mac, and lo and behold they have nightly builds… This is the script I ended up with to update my Psi every day: melo@RoadRunner(~/Desktop/psi-night-build)$ cat update_psi.sh #!/bin/sh # # Updates Psi with latest nightly build # today=`date +%Y%m%d` if [ -d "psi-mac-$today" ] ; then echo "You already have build $today, restart your Psi to use it, maybe?

I’m switching servers in the next couple of days. The Shuttle that powers this site has not been stable enough. I think that the memory is still bad. I had two 512M DIMMs and I found memory errors on one of them. It seems that the other one might have problems to. Anyway, expect some downtime. I’m disabling comments and trackbacks in the meantime. Update: mostly done, this site is now on a new server.