The Tao of Mac

We are Jolla. We are Unlike.

Rui Carmo — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:19:57 GMT

I can’t believe their pitch revolves around personalised back covers. Seriously, people…

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Unknowable

Rui Carmo — Sun, 19 May 2013 21:18:11 GMT

“Shit gets weird somewhere between 100 and 200 people.” Oh yeah. Definitely.

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Yahoo will purchase Tumblr for $1.1 billion according to WSJ report

Rui Carmo — Sun, 19 May 2013 21:14:04 GMT

So now they have their user-generated content gold mine. I just wonder if they can stomach it.

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Zato

Rui Carmo — Sun, 19 May 2013 09:37:59 GMT

Very interesting indeed. I’ve been looking for something like this for a while.

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Daft Punk - Pitchfork

Rui Carmo — Sat, 18 May 2013 22:15:00 GMT

Awesome HTML. This is what magazines ought to have been doing on the web since… forever.

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Fries

Rui Carmo — Sat, 18 May 2013 18:21:27 GMT

Like Ratchet, but for Android.

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The new Google Hangouts will not support XMPP

Rui Carmo — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:33:49 GMT

I have to wonder how long GTalk will last.

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Getting Started with Android Studio

Rui Carmo — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:24:16 GMT

I think this is the most interesting Google novelty for today (right after I figure out if Hangouts will kill plain XMPP, but that’s another matter).

Eclipse needs to die a quick, excruciatingly messy death, and this is better simply by dint of being different.

I do wonder when we’ll get high-performance Web-based IDEs, though.

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Sponsorship Terms

Rui Carmo — Wed, 15 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Sunday, Apr 27^th 2008.

Since mid-2007 or so I’ve been getting a steady increase on the number of e-mails asking me if they can put up a link, paid advertisement, sponsored post/review, etc. Around 2008 I was getting more than one such contact a day, so I thought it worthwhile to put up a clear statement regarding my policy on such matters, and that trickled down substantially.

However, and given the economic situation come 2013, I am now open to sponsorhsip deals in the following formats:

Hardware (vastly preferred, with guarantee of my posting a fair, unbiased review)
Software licenses (subject to their suitability for my personal use – I have limited time, and I can’t waste it on reviewing something I don’t use regularly)
Sponsored posts (i.e., small, 1–3 paragraph posts clearly denoted as ”[Sponsor]” in my linkblog, complete with direct link to your product and site thumbnail)

Since I live in the EU and have to declare taxes on the above (except when gifted), there will also be some paperwork involved – please be aware of that.

Background Info

The following is still valid, though:

This is not a commercial operation. It is, at most, an engrossing hobby. As such, it does not strive to make a profit.
I do not engage in link trading. All the sites linked are there because I like them, and I reserve the right to refuse linking to products/services that do not fit my personal preferences.
Save for sponsored posts, I do not accept press releases. See here.

In a nutshell: If you want to get listed on my sidebar, build a site that I read every day. If you want to make it to my link blog, create something that matters to me.

Donations

I also accept individual donations, preferably in the form of books from my Amazon UK wish list (ordering from the US is a nightmare due to the retrograde Portuguese customs). Which brings me to the next topic:

Books, Software, etc.

I do not do canned reviews. I read voraciously and publish notes on most of what I read, and will gladly read new publications thrown my way (in fact, roughly a quarter the books I read these days are donations, picked by kind readers from my Amazon UK wish list), but tossing over a copy and a reviewer’s guide packed with ready-made blurbs is the best guarantee I won’t accept it.

All the software, hardware and other stuff I post notes about is mentioned (and occasionally reviewed) because I think it’s worthwhile to do so, in the sense that I only pick up stuff I can actually use and test thoroughly instead of dilly-dallying with every little shiny new thing that pops up.

As such, if you want me to review your product, please don’t toss over a license key or a sample without asking me if I find it interesting in some way.

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"Sponsorship Terms" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Sunday, Apr 27^th 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2012 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

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BlackBerry bringing BBM to Android and iOS

Rui Carmo — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:27:44 GMT

I’ve been waiting for this for years. The Q5 looks really nice, too.

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MacroPy

Rui Carmo — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:44:59 GMT

And people ask me why I like Python.

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Sony unveils a 13 inch flexible E Ink writing tablet

Rui Carmo — Mon, 13 May 2013 18:33:52 GMT

This makes perfect sense for the japanese market. Heck, I want one myself.

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Ground control to Major Tom

Rui Carmo — Sun, 12 May 2013 22:14:23 GMT

So awesome.

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Erlang

Rui Carmo — Sat, 11 May 2013 12:07:00 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Friday, Nov 23^rd 2012.

Erlang is a language I’ve studiously avoided despite actually having been trained to use it by Ericsson, back when we lived in caves and had no mobile data. Obviously, these days I have trouble even reading it.

Resources:

Category	Date	Name	Notes
Madness	11 May	Erlang on Xen	Insanely awesome, or awesomely insane, I’m not quite sure.
Madness	13 Mar	Lisp Flavored Erlang	Insanely awesome, or awesomely insane, I’m not quite sure.
References	23 Nov	Learn You Some Erlang	For great good!
Web frameworks	23 Nov	Zotonic	A complete CMS
		Nitrogen	Very complete framework, with a somewhat iffy notion of views. Not crazy about the way it generates JavaScript.
		Spooky	Inspired by Sinatra, apparently, and pretty straightforward for RESTful stuff.
		Erylweb	The “traditional” thing, pretty much dead, apparently, even though it’s in active use in many places. Let’s call it “stable”.
		BeepBeep	Also on the “stable” side of things.
		Webmachine	Actively maintained, apparently.

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As usual, please consider donating towards hosting and bandwidth costs.

Virtual DevOps Inception

Rui Carmo — Sat, 11 May 2013 11:48:00 GMT

After months of following devopsreactions, my life feels a lot like it.

So it’s come to pass that I’m now involved in at least four different projects where automated deployment and testing are required (if only to maintain sanity), and as such I’ve been increasingly messing around with Vagrant and Puppet.

Which would be fine if it wasn’t somewhat painful to deal with VirtualBox on a Mac — it works great for simple stuff and does an amazing job, but it’s resource-heavy and slow.

So I dug around a bit and came across vagrant-lxc, which lets you dynamically set up and tear down LXC containers (which I’ve been using for a while and am very familiar with, although they’re a bit of a hassle to set up and tear down repeatedly), and promptly set that up… Inside Parallels, which is what I’m using these days for running VMs on my Mac.

For good measure I also set up Docker inside the same VM and it seems to coexist with vagrant-lxc quite happily, so the next step is likely to be scripting a way to evolve a (development) Vagrant environment to a Docker box. I’ve already started tinkering with that (and, serendipitously, was actually pointed here while writing this post).

The big win here would be to work on reproducible environments using Vagrant and have them re-packaged as a Docker service automatically (or at the very least without much hassle, considering that right now I have to setup two equivalent OS images in two different formats, etc.).

If that turns out OK (and feasible in my rather limited free time), I’ll surely consider using Docker to manage a production environment, despite Go and all¹.

But for now I’m wrestling with a script to deploy Solr and associated trinkets inside an LXC container inside a Parallels VM via SSH, which is enough of a challenge for the weekend.

Go has also been in my mind lately for my own pursuits, but I’m finding it hard to like the language as far as syntax and module organisation are concerned — but that’s for another post, another day. ↩

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"Virtual DevOps Inception" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Saturday, May 11^th 2013. Except as noted, it's ©2012 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

As usual, please consider donating towards hosting and bandwidth costs.

Erlang on Xen

Rui Carmo — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:03:31 GMT

Whoa.

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PyPy 2.0 - Einstein Sandwich

Rui Carmo — Thu, 09 May 2013 20:11:05 GMT

Great news. The ARM binaries are nearly done, too.

I’ll be checking Homebrew and submitting a recipe for this ASAP.

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In Nook, Microsoft sees a chance to compete

Rui Carmo — Thu, 09 May 2013 19:19:48 GMT

I’ve always thought the Nook hardware and user experience was better than the Kindle, but that wasn’t enough for the masses. Let’s see what Microsoft does.

As to the software, well… Let’s wait.

Curiously, my aging Nook Color is running the latest Android version (4.2.2) and works great as a generic e-book and news reader, even considering it’s pretty much obsolete. If I had the cash, I’d probably spring for a refurbished Nook HD before they’re replaced.

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Bruning, the new flashmob meme

Rui Carmo — Thu, 09 May 2013 09:21:28 GMT

I’m so proud of @nosuchuser, the prophet of this new religion.

He’s been doing this for years in every single vacation photo he posts, and it seems to be catching on.

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Cloudiness

Rui Carmo — Wed, 08 May 2013 21:28:52 GMT

Great move. Tomorrow, Pixelmator 2.2, with vastly improved vector tools (Full disclosure: I paid for my copy and love it).

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