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

Notes

last update:

Line noise

I was editing some Perl code and I needed to comment the function I was working on, from the cursor till the end. My editor of choice is vim for quite some years now, so I typed this: :.,/^}/-1s/^/#/ It never ceases to amaze me as line noise can be so productive and intuitive if you know your editor and your regexps.

The Macworld SF 2005 best of show

I’ve made a list of products I found interesting from several online sources. I used: - the Best of Show listing of Macworld; - all the Macworld articles about Macworld SF 2005; - Alan Graham list of cool products that he saw at Macworld SF, and didn’t get mentioned in mainstream media. For future reference, if you ever need to give me a present, you can pick from the following list: - Webstractor, an app to save entire webpages and much, much more; - the firewire-to-ethernet repeater, just for the geek value; - Phlink, the perfect match for the home Mac mini; - TuneJuice, using normal 9 volt batteries with your iPod; - AirClick, another cool add-on to the home Mac mini; - LaClie SilverScreen, a USB 2.

The honeymoon is over

Apparently the honeymoon between Apple and HP is over. HP is stopping selling iPod’s. We’ll see what part of this report is true in the near future, I’m sure. I can’t wait for the next issue of MDJ (which is the best newsletter about the Mac I ever saw, highly recommended).

Inside the Mac mini

I’m very interested in the Mac mini. I’m thinking on buying one as a gift to someone (I will not mention names, in case she’s reading this…). Anyway, I’m trying to find information about what parts can be changed without voiding your warranty. I don’t mind if it’s difficult, but I don’t want to void the warranty. I found an article with a summary of some internal stuff, and a article with pictures of a disassembled Mac mini (although the first time I went there, the pictures where offline for some reason).

An apple a day...

By now, both the Mac-savvy and Mac-envy worlds are in a intense battle about the Mac mini. It’s a low-powered box with a old 9200 ATI graphics card that (until two days ago) was not listed in the future Core Image list of supported cards. The list is gone, by the way, from the Apple site. In spite of all this, I’m ordering one as a gift. It’s just a no brainer.

Federated Identity and Single sign-on

For quite some time we have been setting up a federated identity system for single sign on web apps at work. The way it works is that whenever you access a web app and you are not authenticated, you get redirected to a login server. There you can choose which intranet you belong to. You click on you intranet name, you authenticate there, and then you are redirected back to the original web app you where trying to access.

darcs2rss now at 0.5

Real life has kept me from posting what’s going on at simplicidade. I just sent a mail to darcs mailing list announcing version 0.5. I switched to a proper XML::Parser and added command line options to change RSS metadata. In my personal copy I have two big changes: - generating RSS 2.0; - filtering comments: current filters are ‘simple’ and ‘markdown’. Both these features are optional, of course. I really like markdown and I’m using it more and more everywhere, so this is mostly a feature that I use a lot and I needed fast.

darcs2rss

I’ve been using darcs for some weeks now, and I like it a lot. I’ll write more about darcs and why I like it in a future post, but I’m switching from CVS to darcs for my current and future pet projects. Last friday, Bennett Todd was asking in the darcs-users mailing list for a script to generate a RSS feed of darcs changelog. I send him a quick perl script to do just that.

Examples of notifications via XMPP

Yesterday, I wrote an unusually long article about IM systems as a transport mechanism to notifications. I got a comment from Bob Wyman, of PubSub.com fame, getting my attention to PubSub usage of JEP-0060 as a prospective search mechanism. Well, I didn’t forget. I use it everyday. I have a pubsub subscription on “JEP-0060” and less than 30 minutes after I posted my article, my pubsub feed was telling me that I had a new article, my article.

Updated: fixed all the links, sorry, I’m a markdown beginner. Thanks Ralph. Rui did some work on growl remote notifications, and then he made a question: why don’t we make this a standard? In doing that, he also talks about Jabber and the failure of that project. I don’t agree with the last part at all, and I’ll try to answer his question. First, let’s talk about Growl. I really really like Growl, I think it is the second best thing that has happened to the Mac this year (the first being Quicksilver).