Notes

Crazy... A QR Code generator that outputs HTML. To use: cpan HTML::QRCode perl -MHTML::QRCode -e 'print HTML::QRCode->new->plot($ARGV[0])' TEXT Replace TEXT with the string you want to encode. For example, a QR Code for http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/ looks like this in HTML: Who said tables where dead? Next step: search for a barcode-in-HTML generator.

Some days ago I found out about the real-time FriendFeed API and yesterday I decided to try it. I've setup all my feeds into my FriendFeed account and subscribed the usual suspects. Also, I used Fluid to create a SSB just for FriendFeed so it doesn't interfere with my main browser. The rate of updates is still too large for my comfort zone, specially because of twitter updates. I need to look for a way to hide them for all my contacts.

Yesterday, I uploaded to Vimeo a screencast showing some of the features of git-gui. With a UNIX background, and with only a brief detour to Windows NT 3.51 (the last Windows version with decent internals), I'm mostly keyboard oriented and never before I used a GUI to solve my SCM needs. This changed with git-gui. With the Stage chunk and Stage line features, I'm much more productive with git-gui, and my commit history is cleaner and more logical to follow.

My favorite BitTorrent client is Bitflu. It is a head-less client that runs on a server somewhere, and you can manage it using a HTTP or telnet interface. It also supports a auto-start directory where all the torrent files you drop in it will be picked up automatically. What it doesn't have is a way to upload a torrent file programatically. At least, not until today. Check out my torrent-upload branch of Bitflu.

I've been using git for more than an year now, and I've settled on a repository organization that I like. The foundations of this setup are: a GitHub account: the public face of my repositories. A free account is enough, and although I don't have private repositories at GitHub, I'm using the Micro plan, a mixture of kudos to the GitHub owners, and my preference for HTTPS-based access;gitosis: manages all my git repositories, both public and private;my x-git-update-to-latest-version: I re-compile git every day with the master branch, to help catch regressions.

By Christopher Hitchens Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured Nothing much to add, really. I don't get to vote on this one.

My laptop battery started expanding to new territories (the outside, really), and given that it is no longer under warranty, I ordered a new one online. But for the last week or two, I've been working on my laptop without the battery, and in the process I learned something useful. If I close the laptop lid, and wait for the light to start glowing, I can then unplug the power cord, move to a new location and plug back it again.

Update: uploaded version 0.04, fixes two small things: I was using pre-release 0.8 of Mojo, and apparently I don't know how to use requires in Makefile.PL, causing a stream of CPAN tester failures. Sebastian Riedel released version 0.7 of his new HTTP stack Mojo (also includes a tiny web-framework called Mojolicious). The code is very very nice and clean, and in the future you might be able to run Catalyst apps on top of it.

Cool week around here. The final countdown for the opening of a new bridge made everybody work twice as fast, and twice as bad. The fiber that connected the north side of Figueira da Foz to the south was cut by the construction team, and they had to lay a new one for some bizarre reason. Result: 4 days with zero or unstable ADSL service. We used 3G connectivity but only on a single PC to do support.