Older blog entries for fxn (starting at number 111)

Reading

These days I am finishing the second part of LOTR, together with the corresponding sections in The Atlas of Middle Earth. Reading LOTR with that atlas at hand is wonderful.

On the technical side I am reading Code Complete. Excellent.

26 Jul 2002 (updated 26 Jul 2002 at 17:00 UTC) »
sab39, GNU Emacs has builtin support for what you want: After you visit a file do M-x toggle-rot13-mode RET. That's all, ready to echo the text you type rot13ed.
MyAdvogato 0.9 is out.

As I commented yesterday, the main new features of this version are:

  • The edition of boxes is optional.
  • In recentlog, links to the user's personal page are highlighted no matter the actual linked text.
  • In recentlog, user name highlighting is case-insensitive.
You can download it as a tarball or as a zip file.
21 Jul 2002 (updated 21 Jul 2002 at 15:28 UTC) »

Working in MyAdvogato this weekend, almost ready for a new release. Now everything is optional, including the edition of boxes, and some minor things that hadn't a corresponding flag. You can even edit the boxes in the home and not the ones in recentlog, or the other way around, if you wish.

User highlighting is a bit smarter: it detects links to your personal page in Advogato no matter the actual linked text. Thus, I see the following link to this guy highlighted. Links of that kind occur now and again in recentlog.

20 Jul 2002 (updated 20 Jul 2002 at 14:31 UTC) »

I began to write MyAdvogato to offer an interface that made certifying more scalable, the three boxes idiom and the summary were its main raison d'ĂȘtre. That's why those were non-optional modifications.

I think, however, that nowadays some people could be interested just in some of the new features, as username highlighting in recentlog. Thus, in the next release users will be able to leave the original boxes as they come. It sounds kind of strange to me, but I believe that is the next natural change.

18 Jul 2002 (updated 18 Jul 2002 at 21:26 UTC) »

I wrote in my previous entry the next release of MyAdvogato would highlight the username without taking case into account. This was motivated by some links to Raph, instead of the correct raph, I saw today in recentlog (though it is not the first time it happens.)

In the meantime this is a patch for the current 0.8:

18 Jul 2002 (updated 18 Jul 2002 at 17:52 UTC) »

Please, remember the username in the person tag needs to coincide exactly with the actual username in Advogato, case included. Otherwise, the generated link is broken.

In its next release MyAdvogato will highlight the username without taking case into account. At least you won't miss those occurrences.

13 Jul 2002 (updated 13 Jul 2002 at 22:02 UTC) »

I added a screenshot that shows a wrapped recentlog with user name highlighting and hidden diary rates to MyAdvogato's project page.

12 Jul 2002 (updated 12 Jul 2002 at 09:45 UTC) »

I attended a talk yesterday where Luiz André Barrozo, from Google, offered a technical overview of how Google works. It wasn't too much detailed but very interesting. He explained, for instance, they are so focused in robustness and efficiency that they have written all their software, but some small and controlled fraction of Linux. As far as it seemed, that includes web servers, indexes, network communication (based in HTTP, TCP and UDP), load balancing, and so on. He said they program mainly in C/C++, there is some Java as well, and a lot of Perl and Python scripting.

It seems they radically avoid any fancy things that aren't necessary, and this comprises from interface design to hardware choices. I love that attitude. I had the impression that they have clear, well-defined goals and a pragmatic and effective way to accomplish them.

6 Jul 2002 (updated 6 Jul 2002 at 17:16 UTC) »

I sent a proposal to give an introduction to Perl for programmers in the forthcomming V Congreso Hispalinux, to be held in Madrid next November.

The seminar would be largely based on the talk I gave some months ago in the company where I work, but with some improvements. A new section explaining the comparative C/C++/Perl/Java/Awk found in The Practice of Programming would be included, and I'd like to present updated timings.

Hey Jordi, nice to see you here again.

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