Ramble On

Leaving Tumblr

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 10:01:00 +0100

My relationship with Tumblr started in December 2008, and since then I’ve never been completely satisfied with the service.

This is not really a blog platform, but something more quick and agile that allows you sharing and posting content without spending many time, which is good. But every now and then I need a real blog, and then I start looking for an alternative. This is the third time, so I think it’s better to me to live now and never look back :).

Live and learn, now I know there are some reasons to never start a blog in Tumblr:

You can’t export your blog out of Tumblr. The fact I know I can’t leave urges me to leave ASAP. It’s probably me, but keep it into account.
Their RSS feature is broken. I filed a bug report (twice), and seems that it’s not important because it’s still broken.
If you’re not into their social features, it’s very likely that the people following you are part of some link-back form of spam.
Disqus is not a bad comment platform, but I think it would be better if a blog has its own comments instead of using a third party service because of page loading times.
Tumblr uptime and performance could be definitely better.
Tumblr and SEO it’s like oil and water, and because their built-in search doesn’t work very well, I’ve found hard to find old posts when I need to.

Because I can’t export my posts, I’m leaving everything here just in case is useful for someone, but I’m not posting anymore. My new home is at wordpress.com, so please update your bookmarks/feed reader:

"As a user of BrowserID, you confirm your email addresses once. Then, you can sign into any web site..."

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:57:47 +0100

“As a user of BrowserID, you confirm your email addresses once. Then, you can sign into any web site that supports BrowserID with just two clicks.”

- From BrouserID website.

It needs a better website design, please. Besides that stating that is an open source experiment is basically a call so nobody treats the idea seriously (it’s an experiment after all).

I’m sceptical (at best).

I keep sucking. The chords are from Polly (original song by...

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:29:45 +0100

I keep sucking.

The chords are from Polly (original song by Nirvana).

About Apache License at Google

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:57:00 +0100

Although all Chris DiBona’s interview at derstandard.at is interesting, I’d like to point to this fragment:

derStandard.at: Why did you choose the Apache license as a default?

Chris DiBona: We really like it, it has a couple of things which make it very modern. Obviously you are getting a copyright grant, you are free to use and modify the software - like with all open source licenses. But it also says for any patents that we have in relation to that software we are giving you a license free of charge, and your users can too. The only exception is, if you sue us - well you don’t have that grant anymore. If you don’t - it’s yours, you don’t have to worry about us sneaking up on you later.

That’s a very good reason to use the Apache License (version 2.0) over MIT or BSD licenses.

"Is Silverlight dead?” I replied: “No, but it has seen better days."

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 11:23:28 +0100

““Is Silverlight dead?” I replied: “No, but it has seen better days.””

- From Silverlight is Dead, Long Live XAML.

I’m surprised, because I never had the perception of Silverling taking off; although that it has seen better days it’s quite relative.

I’ve never used Silverlight, and I have a quite decent online life (that’s harder to say without Flash, for example), but the big news behind this is that Microsoft wants HTML5 and Javascript to be the main application platform in Windows 8. That sounds like screw you .NET developers!

I couldn’t care less about the next Windows version, but it’s true that Microsoft embracing a standard it’s been dangerous in the past. You know that embrace and extend motto.

I hope it doesn’t mean that we’re going to see standard HTML5/Javascript applications that work in Microsoft systems only.

Installed Fedora 15

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 09:55:00 +0100

Despite all the efforts to make Fedora 15 easier and more user friendly, making power users kind of unhappy by removing functionality and features, it doesn’t look ready yet (please, remove more features! :D).

I installed Fedora 15 and it’s running in Gnome fall back mode (no hw acceleration here, so it’s OK). First thing I tried was updating my system: Applications > System Tools > Software Update; and it didn’t work. The error about a failing transaction was quite cryptic to me, and I didn’t know how to fix it (I tried to update several times but it didn’t work).

Running yum from a console works as expected, though. Fortunately nobody thought that yum had to be removed because some weird reason!

This is my first experience with Gnome fall back mode, and it feels less crippled than the regular Gnome interface. Too bad the drag-to-maximize thing doesn’t work in fall back mode.

I suck at improvisation. Dmaj7 : F#m7 : Bm7 :...

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 19:33:02 +0100

I suck at improvisation.

Dmaj7 : F#m7 : Bm7 : Em7 : A7, from try this out on your guitar.

libravatar

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 10:29:00 +0100

libravatar:

Interesting, although is pretty clear that Gravatar rules the world (really, it is the Globally Recognized Avatar service).

From the website:

Libravatar is a service which delivers your avatar (profile picture) to other websites. If you create an account with us, your photo could start popping up next to forum posts or blog comments on any site where you left your email address.

Why is it interesting? Because it’s an open source federated service, and it means you can run your own instance and serve yourself the avatars related to your domain name.

Aldershort One (original) I tried to put some lyrics on it, but...

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:57:00 +0100

Aldershort One (original)

I tried to put some lyrics on it, but I failed. Probably because the verse part it’s too short.

Anyway, it’s not the style I like most so… who cares! Enjoy.

I’ve used my Telecaster guitar, Hydrogen for the drums and Ardour for recording and mixing. Linux powered, and the song is licensed CC BY-SA (you can download it in mp3 format).

"Way back in 1999 I predicted a significant market for desktop Linux by 2005. (I was targeting..."

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 17:52:00 +0100

“Way back in 1999 I predicted a significant market for desktop Linux by 2005. (I was targeting better than Mac OS type numbers, in the 10-15% range.) It was clear back then that Linux had found a substantial adoption as a server OS, and it seemed only time before the desktop adoption rivaled at least “the other desktop”. Obviously I was wrong.”

- From Focusing on the next Linux client (btw the title of the post is a picture).

TL;DR: we give the tiniest sh*t for the Linux desktop, and it’s because we think it’s irrelevant.

This post wasn’t needed Adobe, we already knew that. Sincerely yours, a Flash 64bits Linux user.

Joy Machine

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 17:27:00 +0100

Royalty free music for professional licensing

This Polish band is simply awesome: pure 80s hard rock/heavy metal, licensed Creative Commons BY-SA. Check their latest album …to be rock and to roll… (distributed by Jamendo).

Apparently they failed to find a distributor for their work, I guess this kind of music is not commercial any more (because it was commercial, some examples are Mötley Crüe, Skid Row or the early Guns N’ Roses). I’ve never been interested in charts and billboards, but I wonder what kind of music sells today. It looks to me like there’s no place in the mainstream for sharp guitars and guys screaming in their glam rock pants.

It’s a pity, because I think they’re really good. Seems that after failing to release the album in a more conventional way, the singer left the band and it’s not clear if there’s any future for them beyond …to be rock and to roll….

Needles to say I strongly recommend you the album!

"I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0. It will get released close enough..."

Mon, 30 May 2011 08:24:52 +0100

“I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0. It will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just that I can no longer comfortably count as high as 40.”

- From Linux Torlavds on Linux 3.0-rc1.

It’s just a numbering change, so don’t expect anything special beyond the usual stuff. The mail is quite funny, it’s reading is fully recommended.

"Install Apache with your web application running under mod_php, mod_perl or some other persistence..."

Sat, 28 May 2011 22:35:00 +0100

“Install Apache with your web application running under mod_php, mod_perl or some other persistence engine for your language. Then you get famous and start getting emails about people not being able to access your website.”

- From How to handle 1000′s of concurrent users on a 360MB VPS.

Seriously, Apache + mod_php (and probably MySQL) is the easier way to start serving web pages, but it is also the easier way to start having problems when your server is under some load.

Some customers ask us stuff like how many web sites can I host in a 512MB RAM VPS?, as if there was a simple answer for that. But, actually… there is a simple answer: if you’re asking that question, probably none.

I’ve seen so many times people blaming Wordpress, Dokeos, Magento, etc, when the problem is Apache. Oh, I know… it isn’t Apache but the system administrator behind it, but there should be some amount of responsibility when correctly configuring Apache seems to be so complicated…

Bring a Box!

Sat, 14 May 2011 20:32:00 +0100

Today we attended to the May Bring a Box meeting of the Surrey Linux User Group, and it was great!

We got a lot of interesting chit-chat and a couple of talks/demos at Nokia Southwood (nice venue, thanks Nokia guys!).

One of the talks was about VoIP alternatives to Skype, I guess because of the recent news of Microsoft acquiring Skype.

I was kind of disappointed by the approach to this topic, because instead of focusing on open protocols and applications using those protocols, the guy pointed to other “free as free beer” closed systems (or open, but they don’t tell you what are they using). Sincerely, I can’t see the benefits of switching from a closed system that actually works to another closed system that does a worse job.

He did a good work looking for SIP providers, but I think the open source clients were poorly represented (he failed to make Ekiga work, and he didn’t mention that Empathy, the Gnome default IM application, has actually a quite decent support thanks to telepathy components).

Then we had a demo of Gnome 3, going through its main features, and I offered myself to do a demo of Unity (I’m using it at work, and Alex has it installed in her netbook).

Hidden feature

The first thing I’ve noted is that most of the users don’t really know how to use the new desktop environments. I mean that there is stuff that you can’t know without actually reading some documentation (I showed how to make the Power off menu appear in Gnome 3, and it was a big surprise to everybody!).

I took my time to learn how to use Unity, because Alex and I wanted to seriously test it before discarding it completely. Alex was happily using Ubuntu before Unity and I got my laptop at work with Ubuntu installed, so both want to stick with Ubuntu in those machines as long as possible.

The second thing is that I would say that nobody likes Gnome 3 or Unity, although sometimes is a tittle bit unfair because users aren’t dealing with the change in the right way. Most of the attendees were happy Gnome 2 users, with Ubuntu mostly (I saw only one guy running Fedora, and there were some Red Hat guys).

Anyway, again that’s a problem of the desktops… if the functionality it’s not evident, they should find a way to show (or teach!) the users how it works, otherwise you’re very likely to refuse to use something that you don’t understand.

It was a nice day, with nice people. Thanks everybody!

Scan With your Deskjet F2400 Series

Tue, 10 May 2011 18:18:00 +0100

I hate when I forget these kind of things, and scanning with my HP Deskjet F2480 is probably my favourite.

Printing with this all in one printer is so easy with Fedora, but today when I tried to use the scanner functionality, Simple Scan application was unable to detect the scanner (actually it was using my webcam!).

I think I always follow the same steps:

Check the dmesg, and the printer is there (of course, as I said it prints).

Then I try scanimage -L and… I can see only the webcam:

device `v4l:/dev/video0' is a Noname Laptop_Integrated_Webcam_1.3M virtual device

Although this time I’m not using the sane frontend, I try sane-find-scanner anyway:

  # sane-find-scanner will now attempt to detect your scanner. If the
  # result is different from what you expected, first make sure your
  # scanner is powered up and properly connected to your computer.

  # No SCSI scanners found. If you expected something different, make sure that
  # you have loaded a kernel SCSI driver for your SCSI adapter.

found USB scanner (vendor=0x03f0 [HP], product=0x7611 [Deskjet F2400 series]) at libusb:002:011
  # Your USB scanner was (probably) detected. It may or may not be supported by
  # SANE. Try scanimage -L and read the backend's manpage.

  # Not checking for parallel port scanners.

  # Most Scanners connected to the parallel port or other proprietary ports
  # can't be detected by this program.

  # You may want to run this program as root to find all devices. Once you
  # found the scanner devices, be sure to adjust access permissions as
  # necessary.

Yes, it is there. WTF.

And then I remember… the last time I had to install a library so sane can talk with the HP scanner: libsane-hpaio.

Then the scanimage will show the scanner as expected, and obviously Simple Scan detects the device and everything works like a charm.

I guess I’ll need to go through all of this again in the foreseeable future, so I hope that me from the future will check the blog before going into troubleshooting mode and wasting half an hour with this thing (again).

In last week Have I Got News for You (BBC One, we watched it...

Sun, 08 May 2011 10:55:52 +0100

In last week Have I Got News for You (BBC One, we watched it yesterday night, thanks to iPlayer), the guest publication was Nuts and Bolts Magazine, and one of the questions featured Linux.

So, Do you know of any software that allows you to program PIC chips from within Linux? And apparently, and according to the magazine, there’s no one!

I’m not that sure: pic programmer linux :D.

"OpenShift, is a portfolio of free, portable cloud services for deploying and managing applications..."

Fri, 06 May 2011 23:15:57 +0100

“OpenShift, is a portfolio of free, portable cloud services for deploying and managing applications in the cloud. Currently there are three application deployment services offered as part of OpenShift; Express, Flex, & Power.”

- From FAQ on OpenShift.

So Red Hat wants to be a PaaS provider with OpenShift. That’s interesting, but the fact they support PHP, Python, Ruby and Java it’s surprising! I mean, I would have expected Java (Red Hat owns Jboss), but not PHP, Python and Ruby.

The only thing that is slightly confusing it’s the name… because it’s OpenShift, but it doesn’t look like open source. That’s something bad coming from Red Hat, because they know what is OPEN and what is abusing the open buzzword. In which way is OpenShift more open than, let’s say, Cloud Foundry?

"Because JavaScript is pretty free-form, consistent coding style and unit tests are critical to give..."

Tue, 03 May 2011 21:40:00 +0100

“Because JavaScript is pretty free-form, consistent coding style and unit tests are critical to give it some structure and keep it readable.

We propose that all GNOME usage of JavaScript conform to the style guide in doc/Style_Guide.txt to help keep things sane.”

- From README of GNOME Spidermonkey Javascript binding.

I think this README file sums up my opinion about Javascript in Gnome 3: I can’t understand why Javascript is used in the shell and not a more suitable language (such as Python). It was a very good opportunity to open the desktop to new developers, but… Javascript?

PIL Error Saving a JPEG Image

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 19:21:02 +0100

This bug has been very difficult to identify and workaround, so I’m writing this post for the record.

When I tried to save a JPEG encoded image using optimize option, I was getting the following error with some images:

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 100, in get_response
    response = callback(request, *callback_args, **callback_kwargs)

  File "/home/motivator/../motivator/public/views.py", line 227, in creator_done_view
    img.copy().resize((480, 480*h/w), Image.ANTIALIAS).save(fd, 'JPEG', optimize=True)

  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/PIL/Image.py", line 1439, in save
    save_handler(self, fp, filename)

  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/PIL/JpegImagePlugin.py", line 471, in _save
    ImageFile._save(im, fp, [("jpeg", (0,0)+im.size, 0, rawmode)])

  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/PIL/ImageFile.py", line 501, in _save
    raise IOError("encoder error %d when writing image file" % s)

IOError: encoder error -2 when writing image file

The weird thing is that it was happening with a couple of images, and I couldn’t find a pattern (although the image size seemed to be relevant).

The problem looks related to libjpeg (the library PIL is using) and the way PIL is encoding the JPEG, and after trying blindly to tweak the saving process, I managed to get it to work setting ImageFile.MAXBLOCK to a big value (by default it’s using 64KB).

 # before saving, increase MAXBLOCK
from PIL import ImageFile
    ImageFile.MAXBLOCK = 1024*1024

I don’t know what block size works best, because I certainly don’t know what kind of image is making PIL to crash, but 1MB it’s been working fine for me so far.

When I was looking for information about this bug I’ve found that there’s some people not very happy with PIL because of the JPEG support. It’s working OK for me now, but I’m not 100% happy with the workaround.

77 Million Accounts Stolen From Playstation Network

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 18:44:00 +0100

77 Million Accounts Stolen From Playstation Network:

More information at PSN blog: Update on PlayStation Network and Qriocity.

I don’t know how I would feel if I had a PSN account, with personal details, billing and credit card information, but I wouldn’t be happy. Not at all.

The thing is that I trust a couple of providers that currently have more or less all this kind of information (I don’t think I have provided personal details to the same people that have my credit card information, but nevermind). So it could happen to me. It’s scary.

Could this happen to you? If your answer is no, think again.