Estado de bacalhau

Hoje estou como o bacalhau: de molho.

Desculpas antecipadas a toda a gente com quem estive ontem, muitos de vocês se seguirão… :-(

Bom, vou ali fazer um chá e já volto.

It’s a geek thing…

Consider this:

• I know 5 geeks who are looking for a wiki-type CMS for their personal usage (either they have one which they have outgrown or they are looking for a new thing, but this is irrelevant);
• One of them (1!!) is looking at what is out there and considering what best suits him. His approach is to find a good enough tool, use it and take it from there, making his changes to the tool if and when they are necessary;
• The other three (4!!) have looked around and are now at different stages of… rolling out their own.

So out of a (not so) random sample of 6 geeks (I’m including me here), two are using or planing to use something which is out there, changing and developing it as needed and four have just dove right on and are either planing or developing their own wiki implementation.

I’ve heard about diversity fostering quality but this is ridiculous! :)
I mean, how soon will any of them have anything to show for it? Come to think of it how many of them will actually get anywhere? This will be interesting to follow…

But even more importantly, after having developed all the basic features of any wiki (cross-referencing, indexing, editing, versioning, automagic linking, etc., etc.) will they have the patience to then implement all the really new and extra cool features they are envisioning?
Because if they don’t they’ll just end up with yet another mediocre-featured wiki on their hands.

The good part is that someone could then take it and develop the rest into a new and great wiki. But then someone who could do this will probably prefer to do everything from the beginning.

You see, it’s a geek thing!

Ah, it’s great being a geek, just think of all the new and exciting versions of the wheel we will have to look forward to in the coming years! :D

This evening was not devoted to…

Unlike most geeks I know around here I didn’t spend my evening mucking around Apple’s site drooling over the new (and extremely cool) iPod photo or spending obscene amounts of money on Apple’s new iTunes music store in Portugal.

The fact is that the iPod photo looks like it could very well be an alternative to the Delkin Picture Pad but I still have to look into it a lot deeper to make that decision.
Still, from what I’ve seen of the price point it came out at in the USA (and guessing what it will cost in Europe) I would much more easily fork out for one of these than for a standard (music-only) iPod. Yes, that’s right, I don’t actually own one! :-)

And as for the Portuguese iTMS, well, it is cool, but I don’t think I will be a very good customer there just yet. I still have a strong physical relationship with CDs…
Then again if that is ever going to change than this is a perfect way to go about it!

But anyway my evening was spent (the geek-side of it) playing around with Eclipse (the IDE) on my iBook (it looks so much better than it did when I last looked at it some 2 years ago!) and iView Media Pro which is looking like it will replace iPhoto as my photo management application on the desktop. The testing is underway and it is nearly finished indexing my photo storage (an SMB drive) with its 7400-plus pictures (mainly in Canon RAW format). It took something like two and a half hours but even while it is indexing everything moving about on the catalog and looking at pictures and picture information is blazing fast comparing with my 3500-plus local pictures in iPhoto. It’s not even fair!

Update: Yep, it was too good to be true, after nearly 3 hours indexing all those pictures (and doing a pretty good job of it) iView Media Pro just went bang at the very end not having saved the catalog, of course. <sigh>

CVS - Concurrent Versions System

CVS is a version control system, that is, a system you can use to record the history of your files and it’s changes.
This system is usually applied to software development in order to maintain history of the evolution of the source code.

CVS allows you to easily retrieve old versions of each file that is under it’s control.

In order to save space on the disk and for the sake of efficiency, instead of saving every version of every file you have ever created, CVS stores all the versions of a file in a single file, with some extra data in it so that it only stores the differences between versions.

CVS also helps when a group of people is working on the same project. Usually every developer works in his own directory, and CVS merges the work when each developer is done.

As good and widely used as it is, CVS has it’s limitations and it is a rather old system which already shows it’s age.

There are currently a number of systems being developed in order to replace it and a few other systems are already there for some time now. Some (but only a few) interesting alternatives to CVS are ARCH, Subversion and darcs.

Resources

• Online CVS usage and administration manual;
• Running arbitrary scripts under CVS;
• CVS Magic: bringing files back to life;
• Open Source development with CVS - The on-line version of the excellent book by the same name.

So can you or can’t you dodge a Magic Missile?

This is the question hounding the minds of [A]D&D’s players for millennia. Or something approaching that.

Well now, thanks to the Binary Bonsai I know.

And you can know too since I couldn’t resist downloading a copy and keeping it for posterity, so if you want to know the answer brace yourself and get this (8.5MB) .wmv clip with the answer (or just get it from the Bonsai if my puny little ADSL line is too clogged for you).

[Update: It turns out that after a few years I managed to get a grip and deleted the file. It was funny, though. :-)]

Automobile tips

I am almost completely ignorant when it comes to cars. Engines, mechanics, the electric system… All of it is a big black box to me. And I like it that way!

The car is first, foremost and last of all a means of getting from A to B with the most possible comfort and the minimal possible hassle.

I do like to have a lot of features in my cars, but that’s just because of the aforementioned comfort, not for the features’ sake.

Even so, we must sometimes know more that we wished we had to and this is where I collect those (unfortunately) necessary pieces of information.

Jump starting a car with a dead battery

This happened to me once and I had to find out the correct procedure to do it. If I ever need to do it again here is how to do it safely:

1. Turn off both cars;
2. Turn off each and every electrical part of each car;
3. Plug in the red wire to the positive (+) pin of the dead battery;
4. Plug in the other end of the red wire to the positive (+) pin of the good battery;
5. Plug in the black wire to the negative (-) pin of the good battery;
6. Plug in the other end of the black wire to a clean metal part of the car with the dead battery. This metal part should be on the engine block to provide good grounding. Avoid connecting the wire to the negative (-) pin of the dead battery directly as this is what causes the greatest risk of explosion;
7. Turn on the car with the good battery;
8. Wait for at least 5 minutes in order to let the dead battery charge a little and give you a hand starting the other car;
9. Turn on the car with the dead battery. If it doesn’t turn on on the first 2 or 3 attempts wait a bit longer. Leave the car on for the rest of the procedure;
10. Disconnect the black wire from the car with the dead battery;
11. Disconnect the other end of the black wire from the car with the good battery;
12. Disconnect the red wire from the car with the good battery;
13. Disconnect the other end of the red wire from the car with the dead battery;
14. Leave the car with the dead battery running for as long as possible (ideally something like an hour or so) so that the battery has a chance to charge.

The wiki

It lives!

There is a saying in Portugal (I’m guessing there is an equivalent saying for most languages but I just don’t know what the English version of it goes like) that says something about the perfect being an enemy of the good.

What it means is that sometimes you just have to go with what is good (… enough) and leave what is perfect for a later time.

This is what I’ve decided to do with the wiki on NunoNunes.org.

It is not done, it is not really ready for the “big time” but it is there, I can (and do) put information in it and I can (and do) use it to retrieve it later. So it is a lot more useful to me if I have it linked in from the main navigation bar as it should be.

There are a lot of details to cover, there is need for a major design overhaul (… or is there…) and this will probably not be the wiki-platform that I will say I’m fully satisfied with, but it is there and it does the job. And it does it quite well actually.

So that’s it, I welcome the latest member of the NunoNunes.org site: the wiki! :-)

[Update: The wiki has, in the mean time, been de-activated.]

Gelado de noz com azeite

Esta sobremesa foi algo que eu experimentei num restaurante de um hotel em Madrid e que nem sei bem o que me deu para a ter pedido logo para começar…

A receita vai parecer bastante estranha (e é extremamente simples) mas, se for feita como deve ser, é simplesmente deliciosa!

Essencialmente a receita consiste nos seguintes passos:

• Fazer uma bola grande de gelado de noz (preferencialmente sem pedaços, mas se não houver alternativa não é grave) e cobri-la com pedaços de sal grosso;
• Colocar a bola de gelado numa taça relativamente pequena;
• Deitar azeite bom e à temperatura ambiente na taça (sem ser por cima da bola) até ficar a cobrir cerca de um quinto da bola. A quantidade de azeite é difícil de determinar e é crucial para a sobremesa, pelo que tem de se experimentar até acertar;
• Preparar previamente um pedaço de chocolate quente (do tipo de cobertura tradicional de gelado com chocolate quente) e servir numa taça à parte.

E pronto, serve-se assim e (no meu caso, pelo menos) deita-se o chocolate quente por cima imediatamente antes de comer.

As quantidades de sal e azeite podem variar muito com o gosto pessoal, pelo que terá de se experimentar fazer algumas vezes e ir afinando até se obter o resultado pretendido.

The Antipope de Robert Rankin

Primeiro livro da trilogia de Brentford.

Embora seja muitas vezes comparado com Terry Prattchet não acho semelhanças de maior entre os dois. O tipo de humor de Rankin é diferente, mais acutilante, pelo menos neste primeiro livro, e mais impregnado de referências claramente inglesas às quais é mais difícil chegar. O setting também não me é dos mais apelativos, embora claro que seja impossível comparar seja o que for com o genial discworld.

O livro é interessante, mas não é um block-buster, no entanto a série promete, sobretudo depois de amadurecer um pouco. Vamos ver nos livros seguintes. Os livros iniciais do discworld também não são propriamente os melhores da série…

• Livro: The Antipope
• Autor: Robert Rankin

Night Watch de Terry Prattchet

Estava em pre-order há uns meses, pelo que se pode dizer que sim, sou um fã! Mas independentemente disso, este livro é talvez, dos melhores da série da Watch.
Claro que tem de se gostar da série, e há muito quem não goste, mas pessoalmente acho que a City Watch, as Bruxas e a Morte andam taco-a-taco nas melhores séries do discworld.

Parece que com este livro a série discworld ganha um fôlego que aparentemente tinha perdido nos últimos livros.

Recomendado a conhecedores mas para iniciantes tenho as minhas dúvidas…

• Livro: Night Watch
• Autor: Terry Prattchet

Cryptonomicon de Neal Stephenson

Uau! Que livro fabuloso.

É bastante denso e é preciso coragem para passar o primeiro quarto do livro. Uma pessoa pode facilmente desesperar com a quantidade de informação que é despejada nesta parte e com a quantidade de factos e pessoas que aparecem completamente out of the blue e, aparentemente, sem relação nenhuma. Mas quem perseverar tem pela frente uma bela recompensa.

O livro é, como já disse, um pouco denso e é, talvez, um pouco difícil de seguir para uma pessoa menos inclinada para questões técnico-cientificas, mas para quem conseguir seguir a história é fabuloso. Não é demasiado rebuscado nem negro, mantém uma coerência histórica notável (para um romance, claro que isto não é um compêndio de história) e o argumento é retorcido até ao final. A acção é constante e, no geral, é um livro que nos deixa “satisfeitos” com a sensação de uma boa leitura.

• Livro: Cryptonomicon
• Autor: Neal Stephenson

The Code Book de Simon Singh

Uma perspectiva histórica da evolução da criptografia e das técnicas associadas ao secretismo ao longo dos tempos.

O livro contém partes técnicas bastante detalhadas mas escritas de forma a serem bastante acessíveis até para pessoas de fora do meio.

Muito bem conseguido, o livro torna-se uma leitura interessante e, por virtude das partes de história, bastante leve.

• Livro: The Code Book
• Autor: Simon Singh

Fermat’s Last Theorem de Simon Singh

Boa leitura. Embora não chegue bem ao nível do Code Book lê-se bem e sem grande necessidade de conhecimentos profundos de matemática.

Quem percebe de matemática e queira saber com mais detalhe a história completa da prova deste teorema terá de seguir as sugestões de leitura aqui apresentadas (que parecem cobrir bastante bem o assunto), quem pretenda simplesmente ler o livro pelo prazer de saber coisas ficará bem servido. No entanto parece-me que o autor preferiu tomar o caminho de tentar contar a história num estilo demasiado romanceado e eu duvido que alguém que queira simplesmente ler um bom romance se vire para este livro.

• Livro: Fermat’s Last Theorem
• Autor: Simon Singh

Burning Chrome de William Gibson

Embora não tenha a fama do Neuromancer acaba por ser uma leitura de qualidade superior.
Composto por uma série de short stories de pura ficção científica, tem 3 histórias passadas no Sprawl e 7 outras que exploram temas que vão desde a aventura espacial Soviética (sim, o livro está bastante desactualizado) ;-) até às alucinações de um fotógrafo on the road no interior dos EUA.

Muito interessante, com histórias de leitura rápida e compulsiva é um livro leve e de fácil leitura.

Autor: William Gibson

The Difference Engine de William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

Só para quem gostar muito do género.

A leitura é um bocado difícil e o livro torna-se maçudo muito rapidamente. A parte mais interessante é a da acção que se passa mais ou menos no meio do livro, mas para chegar até lá temos de passar por partes confusas e desinteressantes e depois da acção o resto do livro parece um bocado forçado, como se ele devesse ter menos um terço do que tem na realidade.

Claro que há os admiradores que adoram este livro, mas para os típicos fans de FC é melhor ter muito cuidado…

Autores: William Gibson e Bruce Sterling

Happy birthday

Today I’ll get off work earlier because it is my wife’s birthday.

So I’ll just repeat it here once more: Happy Birthday Tuxa!

Although… Come to think of it I don’t have to wish anything, I’ll just have to make sure she does get it. :-)

AdiumX - one less icon in the dock

For a long time now I’ve been using Proteus and iChat for my instant messaging needs. It is a very good multi-protocol client with a lot of nice features and a interface I rather like.
But even so I started having some issues with it and it started bugging me enough to make me look at alternatives.

So last week I got Adium and I’ve been using it since then to really get the feel for it.
Of course since neither of these clients supported .MAC accounts I still had to use iChat for those contacts, but I was used to it so no problem there.

What I found was that Adium is also a very good multi-protocol client, with a set of features which paralleled those of Proteus and a bit more stable on the Jabber accounts (although still not perfect). The only feature I had on Proteus and lost on Adium which made a difference for me was the ability to group accounts under a single contact (an actual person) and have it decide which account or protocol to use to get in touch with that person without bothering me with the details.

This was the state of things until this morning when I found out there was a new version of Adium around. When I started reading the release notes (yes I actually do read them) I couldn’t believe my eyes: not only did it get the ability to group accounts under a single contact but it also now supports the .MAC protocol and Rendezvous-based messaging.
This means I can now group all the accounts I have for a person (Yahoo!, MSN, .MAC, Jabber, ICQ, etc.) on a single IM client and have only that client open, without the need for iChat as an extra icon on the dock.

Hurra! This looks like it will be my client of choice for the time to come. At least until iChat get Jabber support, that is, then I’ll have to re-evaluate.

Perspective

One of the best strips I’ve seen in a while, and a new one too (for me at least). I am quite versed in Calvin and Hobbes and I don’t recall ever having read this one.

It’s all a matter of perspective I guess. And scale. Yup, scale.

Probing patterns on nunonunes.org

I obviously have iptables running on my gateway at home (where this site is hosted) and I filter everything I am not expecting to receive.

One thing I’ve noticed while making the usual round over the log files is that I have a really high incidence of attempts to reach services which I do not provide and which are, therefore, blocked.

So some time ago I decided to graph it on mrtg.

This is the result so far. The values are in incidents per minute, not per second, but even so this is high.

[Image lost to the ages, but it was impressive. Honest!]

The next step is to try and graph HTTP exploit attempts. If I dare to do it, that is…

The geek-phone

Rui has sent the usual provocative link.
But this time it got me, I must admit I fell for it, damn it! :-)

Well, it would be kind of kool to be able to run a top on your phone, but then again, named??

Domingo de manhã

O pequeno-almoço de hoje consistiu de sumo de fruta, chá, ovos quentes e torradas com manteiga, queijo, mel e compotas.

O Outono tem realmente coisas boas, já sentia a falta destes pequenos almoços de Domingo mais aconchegantes.

Última aula de vela

Hoje sim, foi um dia de vela mais a sério.

Para começar o mar estava bastante picado (o que é mau, fomos os únicos veleiros na água num local onde costumam haver montes de barcos). Depois o vento estava bem forte. E ainda apanhámos uma bela chuvada.

Entrámos logo de vela grande totalmente rizada e estai de tempo e fizémos apenas mareações muito simples e seguras para não haver azares. Aliás só saímos para o mar devido à insistência dos monitores, porque o resto do pessoal, incluíndo o barco de apoio achava que, apesar de perfeitamente navegável, iria ser um bocado duro.

Depois do almoço é que já não deu para nos fazermos ao mar e fomos apenas recolher os barcos.

Mas a verdade é que é muitíssimo mais interessante velejar assim do que com vento fraco.

Hoje já me soube muito bem as minhas botas e o corta-vento pesado. Ainda assim cheguei totalmente molhado a terra.

E agora para o aperfeiçoamento.

More on server upgrade

While I was at it I installed mod_gzip on this server.

I played around a bit with the configuration and I think I got it right and everything is OK, but if you notice anything unusual let me know, please.

Update: now on the RSS feeds too. Duh!

Upgrades

Trying to compile php-curl into PHP resulted in a major upgrade to this site’s structure.

It is now using Apache 1.3.31 and PHP 4.3.9.

This was definitely not a planed upgrade and some down time was experienced. Also some major headaches as I was trying to maintain my legacy configuration from the past several years. Only when I decided to take the server down, move it to the side and do a fresh install did I get it running as I wanted it to.

So on the whole this is good news. I think…

Oh and in the end I did get php-curl working. Good for me, he?

Update: It turns out spending too much time playing around with Apache’s configuration and modules got to me. I didn’t want to compile modcurl_ into my PHP, I wanted to compile php-curl. Duh! Thanks to Melo for asking about mod_curl, thus making me aware of the mistake. It is corrected in the body of the post.

Dia da recolha anual de pinhas

Aproveitámos o dia estar bom para não fazer absolutamente nada de produtivo.

Levantámo-nos tarde, fomos tomar o pequeno almoço ao café que fica por baixo da casa nova do Paulo (tem o que são provavelmente as melhores torradas que á comi fora de casa, em grandes fatias de pão saloio —as “torradas caseiras”) e fomos até à Ericeira passear e almoçámos por lá.

Na volta lembrámo-nos que está na altura apanha anual de pinhas para a lareira e a salamandra. É sempre melhor do que apenas lenha miúda e nós consumimos sempre muito. O problema é que só nos costumamos lembrar destas coisas quando já caíram as primeiras chuvadas do Outono e as pinhas que apanhamos já costumam estar meio húmidas.

Mas este ano não! Encontrámos montes de pinhas, perfeitamente secas e em óptimo estado na estrada para a Barragem do Rio da Mula.
Já no ano passado tínhamos apanhado umas quantas lá e outras mais acima na serra (isto é tudo na serra de Sintra, para quem não conhece), mas foram muito menos e um pouco húmidas.
Este ano foi um regalo, prevê-se um Inverno em grande conforto cá em casa! ;-)

Todos para barlavento para equilibrar o barco! Estamos a adornar muito! Vamos parar para rizar as velas! Orça já!

Tudo isto foi o que não se ouviu hoje no mar.

De manhã o vento começou muito fraco e, mal saímos da barra, fomos arrastados pela corrente, fortíssima, até quase a Carcavelos. OK, não foi bem, mas quase…

Depois o vento levantou um bocadito, mas ainda estivemos umas boas 2 horas para subir o que tínhamos descido logo no início.

O que vale é que depois ainda tivémos talvez umas horita de vento decente. A Tuxa foi no lugar do timoneiro bastante tempo, com pouco vento, mas ainda assim fez tantas viragens de bordo que já está especialista.
O mesmo não se pode dizer de mim que acabei por pegar no leme quando havia um pouco mais de vento, mas por pouco tempo. Logo depois de passar para o leme o vento caíu e foi toda a gente para terra almoçar.

De tarde foi a desgraça total: sem vento absolutamente nenhum acabámos por ir (a motor) até ao farol do Bugio tomar uns banhos de mar e de sol.

Esta parte até nem foi má de todo, mas claro que toda a gente preferia estar a velejar! E como seria de esperar, quando acabámos de desaparelhar os barcos e estávamos a vir embora lá se levanta um belo vento. Bah!

Mas mesmo assim o resultado final foi o mesmo da semana passada: ficámos tão podres depois de tanto tempo no mar que nem conseguimos ir à noite de dança mensal do Trópico de Dança…
Enfim, acho que o resto do pessoal da dança nos perdoará. :-)

Diana Krall at the Coliseu de Lisboa

Friday night, as an appetizer for the weekend I went to see Diana Krall at the Coliseu de Lisboa.

I like Diana a lot, even though heavy jazz music is not my strongest point —I just don’t understand a lot of it. This concert was heavily jazzy so it wasn’t exactly one of my all-time favorites but still I had a great time and I quite liked to hear her sing and play live.

Even with a big cold she managed to sing exquisitely and she is very entertaining on stage. Not by doing crazy or flamboyant stuff, but by simply talking with the public in a simple, direct and friendly manner.

I did get the feeling she would be more at home (and I would probably enjoy it a whole lot more) on a small club with a lot less people watching but this was not bad at all!

A great start for the weekend, even if I had to get up today really early to go sailing.

del.icio.us API is, indeed, in flux

I guess this has been happening for a couple of days now (maybe more?), but the API was slightly changed and functions like “posts/recent” are not returning what they should. The “extended” field of the responses just mimics the “description” field now.

This is why the listing of links in my homepage is kind of weird with the description exactly equal to the title. Still, it does show that they are working on the API which can only mean good things are coming! (We hope…) ;-)

[Update:] Things are really moving in there. The API is acting as it should again.

HHGTTG - now in realtime

Just found out last night that even those of us who are not in range of a BBC radio 4 transmitter can still listen to it live.

What that means is that we can listen to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy episodes in real time instead of having to wait until after the repetition on thursday for it to be available on the web.

All you have to do is go to “the page” and click on either the “listen live” link or the “Radio Player” button. It is broadcasting to the net 24x7!

So yes Melo, there is a point in having the original episodes airing dates on the ICS calendar —removed the old out-dated link— with a warning before.

I just knew it would come in handy! :-)