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

Notes

last update:

Powerbooks

My TiBook is nearing it’s third year of life. He’s been very good to me, but it’s 800Mhz G4 is starting to show its age. Sometime back, I talked about my next Powerbook, what choices and what would make me switch. So far, none of the new ones have a feature that makes me lust. They are neither dual core G4 nor G5. I have my mind made up about three issues though: if both models, a dual core G4 and a G5, are available at the same time, I’ll most likely go with the dual core.

Get perpendicular

Get perpendicular is a great flash-based demonstration of a new disk drive recording technology. Kudos to Hitachi, it’s probably the best presentation I ever saw about the subject. Now, can I have one? :)

Do you know your friends?

I was looking at the demo video of Locus and talking with Rui. Locus analyses your chats (Jabber-based but you could use over anything, even multi-protocol) and creates a bayesian profile of your friends. It’s then able to create connections between friends sharing the same interests. The interesting part of the idea is that you could extend it beyond chat, into mail. You could link all your own friends interactions (mails, chats) to find hidden links between people.

First post is so 90's

When Slashdot first appeared and started getting some attention, we had a deluge of “First Post”-nerds. Their sole objective in life would seem to be the first one to post a comment on each story appearing on Slash. Now fast forward to 2005 and we start a new game: First link. If you are the first link on a Wikipedia node, in the External links section, you are a “First link” person :).

POE and Rendezvous

You can find on CPAN my recent itch. I wanted to add discovery to some POE servers I have running on my laptop and on local servers at the office. Enter POE::Component::Rendezvous::Publish. It’s now super-easy to make all those nice web-interfaces to your own POE servers available in the local network. It’s alpha for now, I haven’t decided the final API yet.

POE and Rendezvous

You can find on CPAN my recent itch. I wanted to add discovery to some POE servers I have running on my laptop and on local servers at the office. Enter POE::Component::Rendezvous::Publish. It’s now super-easy to make all those nice web-interfaces to your own POE servers available in the local network. It’s alpha for now, I haven’t decided the final API yet.

New job

Today is my first day at the new job mentioned earlier. I’m now at Sapo to work on XMPP. I’ll be working on the server-side, mainly. The long period of silence is a direct result of a lot of work. Leaving my previous job requires documentation, 8 years worth in certain areas. BTW, the documentation was mostly done in Kiwi, so I’ll be publishing some of it in the near future.

It depends

When writing Perl, should you use this: if (!unlink($file)) { $log_main->warn("Could not delete temp file '$file'"); } or this? $log_main->warn(“Could not delete temp file ‘$file’”) unless unlink($file); The second one is shorter, and has extra-geek-points, but I say that “it depends”. In this case I settled on the first form because the important part, the important action, is the unlink() call. You should always put the important action first.

Apache 2.1

I just noticed that Apache 2.1 documentation is available in the usual place. Some new features, the most interesting being mod_proxy_balance. I’m still biased to Perlbal because of the internal redirection to a local file feature.

Moving day

Today is my last day at the office. I’m moving to a new place, starting April 1st. I’ll be sort of on vacation for the next 3 weeks. The next week will still be documenting stuff (Kiwi has been really helpful, I must clean it up.) in text and audio (very useful). I’ve been working here since March 97, 8 years ago, and after 10 years doing ISP stuff (real-time provisioning systems, offer management, and middle-ware stuff), I need a break.