Codebits 2008

After the awesomeness that was codebits 07 I actually expeect 08 to be a lot better. It wasn’t imo. It still ranks as Legendary on the my personal scale. Food was a major let down tough

The talks I went too were a disappointment. Even Jack Motif’s XMPP talk was way too introductory for the audience (at least for me). More code less talk? Seriously looking at XML I could read in the damn specification was not fun. But I did get to ask a few questions and talk to Jack Motif and Pedro Melo a bit after the talk which made it worth it. Jack Motif told me to look at Wokkel and said he had written a lot of example code for it. I’ll definitivelly look at it sometime in the near future. And this was the best talk I went. Sadly on the second day I chose to sleep late so I missed Pedro Melo’s and Celso Pinto’s presentations. Both of which I’m told were “teh awesome 4tw” or something like that.

What was suprising is that this year, even though the talks @MAIN looked great on paper, most people went to the talks on the other stages. And judging from my experience they did the right thing – however I have no interest whatsoever in server-side js or web cartooning which seem to have been among the most popular).

Another fail was the super loud Rock Band playing while some of us were trying to code but people seem to have enjoyed it.

82 projects? Holly….! Sadly things run late (fail!) and I had to leave before people finished showing their projects – I’ll have to look at the videos later. A lot of people were doing some pretty cool stuff but sadly didn’t finish in time. As for my stuff, I’ll put it online sometime in the near future when I don’t have better things to do (like study for tomorrow’s exam – pratical code thingy whatever you want to call it… crap by any other name would smell just as bad)

I got to talk a bit with the usual suspects from Lisboa (ended up with an handivi sticker on my macbook) and Porto and also met a bunch of new people from all around (Lisboa, Porto, Aveiro, Coimbra, Faro, …) – some from FEUP! And ofc I learned a few things. I regret not having ended up joining some team and working on some project with more people but I did get to play (literally) with pygame and with django. Both of which I’ve been meaning to actually play with (more than just doing tutorial examples) for like 1yr.

Btw think putting the RFID stuff@codebits for everyone to hack was a brilliant idea. Congrats @ whoever had it. And congrats to the sapo.pt team behind this event. It’s the only one of its kind (and level of quality) here in Portugal. Granted that may not mean a lot but it is a great-omg-you-really-cant-miss-it event imho.

Oh! Got to play around with an EeePC 1000H (or something) and I liked it (thanks dude, whoever you were, I forgot cuz my memory is bad and it works worse without sleep). On coming back, word from relax is that everything (or close enough) on his 901 is now supported by Ubuntu. I dunno if I want one because I really need it or just because it’s a cool gadget and I’m rationalizing my lust. Whatever. I can’t afford it anyway. Not with the ginormous ammounts of money I’m wasting travelling around… this semester I’ll actually spend more time outside Porto than @ the uni… hell yeah! Which brings me to my need to work on my cibermouse stuff both for the Robotics course and for the competition at RTSS08 in Barcelona (yay).

I’m sure I left out a lot of stuff but I’m short on time and patience and this is better than nothing imo.

My Future Netbook Or Something

If I ever buy a netbook it needs to have a proper OS. Windows is even more of a joke on a netbook than it is on a normal laptop and since I don’t foresee apple coming up with a netbook in the near future, linux is all that’s left. And no, that crap Asus ships and calls linux is not an option. Windows wannabe Xandros with a lame interface – no thank you. Ubuntu is currently the (only) way to go. And I mean normal Ubuntu not Ubuntu with weird interface (DJ Silly Remix). Sure you can install something like Ubuntu EEE if you have an eee pc or similar but that still might not get all your hardware runing properly plus why did you have to do it yourself? That should’ve been done by the manufacturer imo.

I also find some of the hadware on the current generation of netbooks lacking. There’s nothing that can be done about the SSDs at the moment. They are all slow, low-capacity energy-vampires. One could go with the traditional mechanic drives but that’s soooo last century. The memory is a different story. 512MB is definitively not enough. 1GB is usable but 2GB would be nice. But the biggest let down in my opinion is the battery life. Assuming you don’t stick with windows or the windows wannabe that comes pre-installed, you won’t get past 5h of battery life. And knowing the reviewers and my own careless use of computer resources, that probably translates into 3h in my hands

Granted some may say I’ve missed the point of netbooks. That all netbooks are for is browsing the web, reading email and instant messaging. Nope. That’s just all you can do with the current hardware. Ok the truth is you can do a lot more but you’ll soon run into limitations. Say I want to fire up eclipse and work on my JADE powered project for the Distributed Intelligent Agents course. It’s painfull enough on my macbook I can’t imagine it being bearable on the current crop (read crap) of netbooks.

But that’s not what netbooks are for right? And if it’s just browsing and reading email, an iPhone will do. But work still needs to get done and while my macbook is great for that, I’d still like a more portable option. One I wouldn’t be too afraid to drop/lose. A more task-oriented option (e.g. work on proj A for 2h at a random place with wireless) without the hundreds of applications I keep conveniently open on my macbook would also be nice.

Obviously there are already many options in the market and more to come. But I’m not paying more than 350 eur for one. That’s the price of an eee pc 901. So all I have to do now is wait for another 12 months for it (or rather its sucessor(s)) to reach the kind of hw specs I want and for them to either drop the pseudo-linux or for ubuntu’s netbook support to improve a bit.

UbuntuWebServer Virtual Appliance V1.4

This is probably the last version of my ubuntu web server VM that will use Ubuntu 7.10.

UbuntuWebServer

Direct Download Link

REVISION LOG:

1.4 – added phppgadmin and some php stuff
1.3 – added FTP Server
1.2 – added JDK+Tomcat5.5 and PostegreSQL
1.1 – added OpenSSL and demo apache configuration (commented)
1.0 – initial release

UbuntuWebServer Virtual Appliance V1.3

Yet another version of my Ubuntu Web Server VM out.

I added an FTP server to make it easier to upload stuff from within editors such as Dreamweaver.

UbuntuWebServer

REVISION LOG:
1.3 – added FTP Server
1.2 – added JDK+Tomcat5.5 and PostegreSQL
1.1 – added OpenSSL and demo apache configuration (commented)
1.0 – initial release

UbuntuWebServer Virtual Appliance V1.2

New version of my Ubuntu Web Server VM out

UbuntuWebServer

REVISION LOG:
1.2 – added JDK+Tomcat5.5 and PostegreSQL
1.1 – added OpenSSL and demo apache configuration (commented)
1.0 – initial release

UWS Virtual Appliance v1.1

Just uploaded the Ubuntu Web Server Virtual Appliance v1.1.

Added SSL support (OpenSSL, loaded the Apache module and added demo certificate and commented out configuration).

LAMP, Rails, Django Server Virtual Appliance

If you’re like me and don’t like having to install all that stuff in every PC you use than this virtual appliance is for you.

Or

If you want to start learning PHP/Ruby on Rails/Django _now_ instead of having to install/configure stuff.

Or

If you’re going to something like Sapo Codebits and want to take the server with you

Hightlights: LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), Ruby on Rails, Django

UbuntuWebServer Project

Virtual Appliance Market

VMWare Player (Free)

One Retarded Thing In Mac OSX – No Easy Shortcuts

There is no easy way to create application shortcuts (a shortcut to an application that may or may not have arguments). It’s extremely easy to do in Windows and Ubuntu (<your-favorite-nix/linux-distro>) but not in OSX.

I’m sure that as usual, some idiot apple zealot (sorry for the pleonasm) is going to try (yeah try, comments moderated but they still try) to post a comment saying how that’s a good (great) thing, Steve Jobs is a genius and I’m dumb for not knowing that it’s such a good thing or even knowing what a shortcut is (like when I posted about the iPhone lacking a SDK and guess what? It will  get one – in your face zealot ).

Multiple Profiles in Firefox with Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon

For those of us who use multiple profiles in firefox, there’s a small surprise in Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon – firefox is no longer compiled with -NO-REMOTE as default. What that means is that now you have to pass the -NO-REMOTE option to firefox if you want to use multiple profiles simultaneously. Example:

firefox -NO-REMOTE -P work

Basically, just add -NO-REMOTE to all your firefox shortcuts (I have one shortcut for each profile).

Converting Between Audio File Formats

In a previous post I explained a way to convert a cue/FLAC to mp3. Recently I had to convert a cue/APE to mp3. While searching for ways to do it I came across this post in the aidanhm’s stuff blog. While it has very few posts (the last one in mid February) it does have a few posts that explain how to convert between different file formats (APE, FLAC, WAV,…) and how to deal with cuesheets in Ubuntu.

Since it’s explained there, there’s no point in me repeating it here.

While I haven’t done any of this in Mac OS X, I did download xACT

xACT stands for X Audio Compression Toolkit. It is a GUI based front end (written in AppleScript Studio) for the unix applications Shorten (3.5.1), shntool (2.0.3), monkey’s audio compressor (3.99),flac (1.1.3) and cdda2wav 2.01a32(with paranoia support).

I also looked at this page which explains how to use xACT to convert .flac files to mp3.

UPDATE:  Filipe IMed me about a better option for Mac OS X, Max.