Notes

A video to explain the current financial crisis, by Marketplace Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch. The best one I found so far.

There is this newnetwork notification service called Stitcho. Think Growl (which they support) but with a HTTP-based API. Its still in beta, but works pretty well. I've found some problems with UTF8 encoded strings and I have an open ticket on that. I've released a Perl client library to CPAN, Net::Stitcho. It allows you to use it from your Perl programs easily. Its not feature complete yet, only the send message API is supported, but it should have the signup API today.

Remember the Godfather, when Michael goes to Las Vegas, meets with Moe Greene and offers to buy him out? He says no, and in the final moments of the movie, he ends up with a bullet in his head. Well, the nine largest banks in America seem to have learned something from the movie, because in a recent meeting with Treasury Secretary Paulson, they get a single sheet of paper in front of them, giving the government permission to buy significant stakes in their companies.

The new laptops released yesterday made most of my unread news items this morning. Overall, they look good, and if you have a fetish for industrial design, then you probably had a picture of Jonathan Ive in the shower today. I admit that I'm curious to see one live, not that I'm shopping for a new laptop (my 17" should be good for another 2 to 3 years), but the full size glass screen and the new touchpad are intriguing.

My new ADSL provider, Telepac, gives me a free SIP number, with free fixed-line calls, so I downloaded a soft-phone, X-Lite, and set to work. The configuration is pretty simple. See the screenshot below: You can use whatever you want as a display name. The user name is the string +351 followed by the number you got. The password field should pretty obvious. The two fields that wasted most of my time where Domain (must be voip.

The new RFCs for SMTP (RFC 5321) and Internet Message Format (RFC 5322) where released yesterday. You can find a list of changes in the MailChannels blog. The most user-visible change is that port 587 is finally recommended for end-users, reserving 25 for MTA-to-MTA traffic. Also, use of SMTP for end-user clients is discouraged, pointing them to the Message Submission for Mail (RFC 4409) protocol. For server operators, a lot of blessings to current behaviors:

... get a good laugh at my expense. The next PerlMongers meeting I attend will be a lot of fun. if you search for my name in the 2001 Google index, the first hit is a patch for the PHP build system. Talk about the past coming back to haunt you.

Amazon UK is selling a "Complete" boxed set of Battlestar Gallactica, seasons 1 through 4. Given that the second part of the fourth season will only air next year, how come this isn't plainly false advertising? Amazon should either correct the description or pull the article.

Apparently soon you'll have a supply of cheap 1Gb MicroSD cards. You just need to format them. Some people will never learn...

This I did not know. You can have several URLs per remote in Git, and git-push will update them all. On a personal project I have this: [remote "backup"] url = [email protected]:melo/perl-sapo-broker.git url = git@git:melo/perl-sapo-broker.git A simple git push backup master and all is well.