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

Notes

last update:

Codebits update

The Codebits event is awesome. The haven't had this much fun in a long time. You can look through some great pictures of the event at Delfim's gallery. The F.E.V.E.R. concert last night was pretty cool, although I'm not a fan of their kind of music. Even through out the concert people where still coding like good geeks. Update: uploaded some pictures of my own to Flickr.

Olà Portugal

So, at last, the Apple Online Store opens in Portugal. One quick tip: It's Olá, not Olà... (Kudos to Miguel)

codebits: gentlemen, start you torrents

Codebits started a couple of minutes ago, and I'm really impressed with the number of people who showed up. This is already a big success. More later, now back to Mike Culver presentation.

git-darcs-record

A cool script, git-darcs-record, that adds darcs-style interactive record to git. Recommended.

XMPP and AIM

After the Google/AOL agreement in late 2005, speculation regarding the interoperability between AIM network and GTalk network was rampant. A screenshot of a new GMail client shows some AIM integration. Unfortunately, the image shows "Sign out of AIM" which means that they seem to be doing a multi-platform client, and not XMPP federation. That is to say: you can login with your AIM credentials and talk with your AIM friends, inside the GMail interface, but you cannot use your GTalk account to talk to AIM buddies.

SAPO Services and IM

pfig mentioned the public SAPO APIs and noticed the lack of instant messaging APIs. I worked at SAPO in the IM department and we created some APIs for the service. In fact you can see them at work in the Webmail service (the presence status of your email recipient is shown, like the green indicator in the Mail.app message list) or even better, look at the SAPO homepage, login in the right-hand side column, and check the tab "Amigos".

Codebits

In case you have been living under a rock, the best geek conference in Portugal is just around the corner. Codebits has everything you need to have loads of fun hacking: a big place, decent bandwidth, cool conference track, and access to SAPO APIs that you might need to build your next site (soon to be at developer.sapo.pt). Follow the blog for the latest updates and check the FAQ for everything else.

Test::Harness and Devel::Cover

I've been using the alpha/beta's versions of Test::Harness for a couple of weeks now, and I'm very happy with them. This week, Test::Harness 3.0 was released so it should start to flow naturally to all of you unsuspecting users. There are people more qualified than me to tell you what was changed and why it is a worthy upgrade. One thing that I noticed during the beta phase was that the HARNESS_PERL_SWITCHES environment variable is no longer supported, so the classic way to run your tests under Devel::Cover:

Android

You remember when Google started using the "beta" moniker with several of their sites? It started with the main search engine. And it started the Beta trend that still lives on today. Today Google started a new trend but forgot to place the same style moniker in the logo: vapor. You see, the promise of "write once, run anywhere" has been made several times, and it seems that it get shoot down due to politics.

ODF

I wanted to write something about this but I didn't know what. Rui did it for me. Update: some counter arguments.