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

Notes

last update:

This was a question I was wondering for quite some time. All the things I read about this pointed to a positive answer: I have a Xeon CPU and all Xeon CPUs since second quarter 2004 support EM64T. But I wanted something more reliable, like a cat /proc/cpuinfo flag. And I finally found a post that gave my some hints about detecting EMT64 from the cpuinfo flags. It describes the lm flag as "long mode", having the 64bit extensions, but it talks of those in AMD context.

Today I needed to generate a good password for a special site. I remember I saw a tool to do that and I could not remember where. After some searching, here is the deal: open System Preferences and select the Accounts preference pane;select your account from the list, and click Change Password button. Don't worry, you don't need to really change your password;Click the small key icon next to the New Password text field.

When gmail first appeared I subscribed as soon as I could get my hands on an invitation. I forward a lot of mail to try it out. Some months later, I saw that I could use gmail as an archiver for certain things, those mails you don't know if you really want to keep, but the problem was that now my gmail account was full of garbage. I wanted to purge all mail from my account to start from scratch but there seems to be no way to do it easily.

Sick

I hate being sick. Waste of resources. But I was able to get a good laugh in the morning with this: Look, I'm not interested in all of the 'moral reasons' for not doing this, ok? This is an intranet - I want proprietary code here, I don't care about the W3C and any of that other hippie crap. in a thread about opening links in a new tab.

New iPod

After struggling with my iPod shuffle listening to Audible books, and having to give back the 2nd generation iPod that I was using, I finally found a 5G for sale in portugal today. I went to FNAC at the Colombo shopping center, and they had 4 on display on top of a desk. They didn't even bother to put them on shelfs. About thirty minutes after I picked up my own, I understood why: there where none left.

Buying an iPod

I'm looking for an iPod 5G, in Portugal. If you see any for sale in Lisbon, can you leave me a comment? I searched two FNACs in Porto and they didn't have any on stock. People temporarily inhabiting london should not apply, BTW. I've been listening a lot of Audible content, and yesterday I had to fast-foward 4 hours with an iPod shuffle because the damn thing lost the place where I was listening.

we can only wish

From a Ars.Technica article: Google Talk may have a spartan user interface and a small user base, but sometime in the near future, ICQ and AIM will be able to communicate directly with GTalk servers as well. That means that all the XMPP networks can mingle with the millions of ICQ/AIM users, and the federated love-in I was hoping for is one step closer to reality. Oahh there... Just because AIM/AOL will open up federation to Google Talk, that federation is not transitive.

GTalk is now open

Ok, I was able to subscribe several buddies @gmail.com just now, and talk to them, all of this from my @sapo.pt account. Server-to-server is now open with GTalk. Let the games begin. (kudos to Rusty Shackleford who pointed this to me) update: it seems that ralphm beat me to it. Behold the power of mimir (speaking of which, I got to resubscribe to it...). update 2: Official announcement via GoogleTalk blog.

Old habits die hard

After using CVS for the last 10 years, the cvs sequence is hardwired between my brain and my hands when I think about source control. So for the time being, I'll use this: melo@roadrunner(~)$ cat ~/bin/cvs #!/bin/sh # cvs wrapper: old habits die hard, and don't remember which VCS I'm using most of the time # if [ -d CVS ] ; then /usr/bin/cvs $@ elif [ -d .svn ] ; then svn $@ else darcs $@ fi That covers the three source control systems I use on a regular basis.

FastCGI: the way ahead?

I picked up an article about FastCGI, SCGI, and Apache by Mark Mayo. I found interesting and insightful, but some of the conclusions or opinions diverge from my own, enough to make me write them down. First, let me say that I'm sure I don't have as much experience as Mark with FastCGI, and none with SCGI. I do have 5 or 6 years experience with mod_perl. Also, I've recently switched from Apache to Lighttpd due to the lack of a good FastCGI implementation on Apache (something that is probably going to change).