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

Notes

last update:

Battery

I bought a new batery for my laptop in October 2008. A couple of days ago, I started getting abrupt shutdowns, even before the low-battery warning pops up. And it doesn't enter sleep mode. It just goes puf, and powers off. Searching around for similar reports, it seems that my battery is kaput. Either a cell is damaged, or the battery is starting to swell. I'm guessing its the first one, since I don't notice any swelling.

Buzz off

The lack of trust that Google as gained in the last year is impressive. Gone are the days that you could actually believe the "Don't be evil" corporate motto. The reality came crushing down, and Buzz is only one of the last proofs that "Don't be evil" is much different proposition than "Do good". I'm fortunate enough not to use a lot of Google services, but still the amount of information they have on me is scary.

Oh when the Saints...

... go marching in. Congrats to all the Saints fans, excellent second half, with a awesome starting play. Drew Brees MVP. Pity about not breaking the pass record. Tied with Brady at 32.

Apple vs Flash

Update: Firefox also has multiple file upload since 3.6, fixed. As expected , the iPad will not support Flash, and this brought back all the discussion that went on when the iPhone appeared. I find it interesting that Gina Trapattani is seeing a reduction on Flash-enabled browsers (and thats not counting iPhones, just regular browsers) on her sites. Also Gruber (but he is counting iPhone's) and Alex Bayo. As a end-user I would not mind see Flash burn in hell.

Creativity, hackers, and other stuff

Below you'll find an article that I wrote to my local Mac users group. I haven't had the time to translate it into english, so unless you are willing to learn portuguese, you'll have to wait a bit. But for those that share my mother tongue, here it is. (para quem leu a versão na mailing-list, tem apenas pequenas alterações de estilo, e um "Resumindo:" lá pelo meio) A discussão que está a acontecer sobre o iPad, o efeito do modelo fechado e controlado pela Apple, e o que ele trás àcriatividade e ao espirito hacker (no sentido cosquinhas, curioso, e não no sentido cracker) está mesmo muito interessante.

Real-time web

There is a lot of stuff being written these days about real-time web. Some think that it is the next step, the next big thing. I find the concept interesting only from a technical point-of-view. All the details about a good real-time web is what passes for tech-porn around here. But from a human point-of-view, the concept is flawed. Or at least, my own brain finds the concept flawed. I can't keep up with a constant barage of updates.

Clarifications about AnyEvent::Mojo

It seems that I need to clarify some stuff, based on Sebastian comments in my last post and via Twitter. I really hope this is the last time I have to talk about it. I rather spend my time coding. First, you can look at the code of AnyEvent::Mojo::Server::Connection: no private Mojo APIs are being used. They might have been with early releases, but as Sebastian says, I did work with him to improve Mojo so that I didn't have to depend on private APIs.

Anyevent::Mojo update

The current version of AnyEvent::Mojo is failing some tests. The Mojo API that I was using changed yet again and I don't have the tuits to fix it right now. I'll explain how we got here, what are the next steps, and finally I'll comment on lessons learned. A long, long time ago… When I wrote AE::M, I was looking for a way to do long-polling in Perl, with decent performance and cool stuff like epoll/kqueue support.

iPad

My take: what Rui said. My analysis: I like the price, the battery life and the screen size. I would like to have a webcam for Skype, but that wasn't meant to be. Maybe next time. I'll buy one, probably the 32G WiFi-only. It will replace my 17" Macbook for the non-work-related tasks that it does now. I keep my iTunes, iPhoto, and other media stuff on my desktop Mac at work, and I travel around with the Macbook.

Muito obrigado

I'm not American so officially I don't get a Thanksgiving holiday. Still, we are reaching the end of 2009 and looking back I think we do have a lot of things to be grateful for. Giving thanks, like Christmas, doesn't need a special day, and for us perl hackers our favorite team, the perl-porters, giving thanks couldn't be easier. So lets all, no matter where you are, run the perlthanks command line today, and celebrate our new schedule for Perl5 releases and happy days and long lives to our pumpkins.