OpenID authentication rocks.

I’ve been using TypeKey as the OpenID provider for my domain for a long time now and until today things had gone by without a hitch. But tonight, as I was in a hurry to log in to tarpipe to write a quick workflow to use on my upcoming journey, it just failed me.

Now tonight, of all nights, I became aware that not only has TypeKey undergone some changes, but also tarpipe itself changed something in the authentication page so I was confused for a brief period as to what was failing where. But then I followed the authentication steps and it became obviously clear that TypeKey was the one failing me and having zero time to read all their explanations about the changes they performed (and really annoyed that those changes broke the service they’d been rendering me without any kind of previous warning whatsoever —I’m assuming it is a bug, not a conscious decision, but still, a failing authentication service? Ouch!) I decided to take the only course of action that was available to me on the spot.

So TypeKey is misbehaving but this being OpenID, tarpipe doesn’t really care who authenticates me, as long as they do authenticate me, right?
So I just had to open an account on any other OpenID provider, set up my domain to refer that provider as the one that authenticates me and then everything should work, right?

As it turns out yes, that is all there is to it. I created an account on myOpenID.com (don’t know them at all, maybe it was a good choice, maybe it was a bad choice, I’ll have to look into them more carefully later, but for now I just needed to be able to log into tarpipe and do it NOW), I made the necessary changes to my site to reflect the new authentication provider and voilá, instant gratification! I can now log into tarpipe and create and tweak my workflows at will.

It took me all of 20 minutes, from coming across the problem to solving it. Good heh? :-)

Yesterday I finally made it to my first Twittlis meeting —Twittlis #5.
.oO( About bloody time too! )

Excuse me? “What in the world is Twittlis,” you ask?

Well, I’m glad you did ask that question! :-)
You see, Twittlis is a meeting of people who use Twitter, who also happen to be around Lisboa on the first wednesday of any given month and who also like to chat with other people (which is obviously a given for almost anyone using Twitter.) The fact that this chatting happens over a few beers and, possibly, a nice pub-food-based dinner doesn’t hurt in the least. :-)

The (sub-)thirty-second pitch is, in words of Pedro Pinheiro (the organizer and afaik “father” of the thing):

Completely informal - arrive at any time, leave at any time. Come meet in person the people who you follow or follow you on twitter.com.

The venue that hosts Twittlis is, at the time of this writing, the most excellent O’Gilins Irish Pub and in it, again in Pedro’s own words:

Besides the wonderful assortment of lagers and ales (and non-alcoholic drinks too), there is a good and hearty selection of dinner choices, at affordable prices.

Oh and contrary to popular belief, the conversations are not all geek-oriented. Really. It’s nice! ;-)

I’ve recently started trying out Google Reader for my rss reading needs.

Until now (and for quite a long time, too) I’ve been using News Gator for that purpose. Together with the Mac desktop client —NetNewsWire— It has been my platform of choice because of it’s seamless integration with the desktop client, it’s mobile interface (which I think is pretty good) and, especially, the ability to synchronize status across multiple readers (yes, even multiple desktop readers).

At a time when I routinely used my iBook laptop, my iMac at the home desktop and my Linux laptop at the office (using the web interface) this made sense. Nowadays I find myself reading more and more online (via the web interface) or on my phone, but rarely do I fire up any of the NNWs on any of the Macs.

So I decided to try out the big G for yet another one of my on-line activities (seeing as it is already the keeper of most of my wired life’s information anyhow).
And the result (not unexpectedly) is that I am now ready to start dropping things from News Gator and start reading them solely on Google Reader.

The only thing that still keeps me from ditching News Gator entirely is the way that the G (doesn’t) handle private (i.e. authenticated) feeds. It has been pointed out to me that there are services out there that deal with this issue, but I’m not the least bit comfortable with having my credentials stored in some mom-and-pop web shop somewhere, so I’ll keep the private feeds safely within News Gator for a while until I come up with something I like better.

And now for the ironic part: why am I writing this now, instead of reading my feeds before lunch? Well, because Google Reader is not working! Ta-dahhh! Feeeeed meeeeeee! :-)

The new iPod is in da house!

I finally made up my mind for the 160GB classic. It was a no-brainer, really, as my music collection alone was more than the 60GB of the old one and on this one I will also carry my photos, videoblogs and so on and so forth.

It is slim, grey, heavy and has a nice engraving on the back with a line from one of my favourite songs (it actually took me a while to decide what I wanted engraved in it, you know?)

So the advantages of the new iPod are:

• My car supports it (haven’t tested it yet, but it should) so now I can operate it using the standard car-stereo controls, which is way nicer (not to mention safer);
• My music collection can continue to grow at it’s own pace without me being in constant need of deleting and moving stuff around to make it fit into the iPod.

Soooo, I now have an old 60GB iPod Photo (third generation, if I’m not mistaken) with heavy, heavy use, which is still in perfect working condition (appart from the scroll-wheel which sometimes stops responding and requires a locking and unlocking sequence to start working again).
This baby has been with me through thick and thin and I was considering keeping it for the sentimental value (of which it has a lot), but then I realized how silly that would, so now I have to find a good home for it.

Can’t wait for the new one to synch up so I can start testing it! (It will take a while yet, that’s for sure…)

Today, due to the massive problems that Twitter has been facing for quite some time now —which got really worse in the last couple of days—, lots of people in the “portuguese geek scene” went over to Jaiku to check out the service.

Now, I’ve been using Jaiku for quite some time now and I know it is far from perfect, but given Twitter’s latest trend of (at least partial) unavailability, I think Jaiku may look like a viable alternative to some people at least.

I don’t believe that people will actually flee in droves to Jaiku and the most probable outcome of all of this is that when (if??) Twitter deals with it’s load issues (and they should be more than on the ball on this one, especially now that they’ve got the funding to do it), everyone will just come back “home” and twitter away to their heart’s content, their Jaiku accounts soon forgotten.

But in the off-chance that the people at the big G do try to grab some serious market-share at this time, here is my (very personal and off-the-cuff) wishlist for nifty Jaiku features:

• Let us choose which if our contacts we want to receive notifications on our mobile devices from and which ones we just want to see updated on the web. (Twitter does this);

• Let us group our contacts and give us a nice and easy interface to turn on mobile notifications for those groups of contacts. An (admittedly esoteric) extension of the above feature which I would find most useful;

• Remove the spurious characters we get when we receive an update via SMS which is actually a comment on some message. What’s the point of those characters anyway (am I just being dense and not getting it, I wonder…);

• Am I missing something or is there no direct messaging capability? If it really isn’t there, do add it;

• Stability, stability, stability;

• Speed (but only after stability);

• Design it to scale, please, while you still can! Hurry up moving it to the App Engine.

More things are sure to come into my mind, I’ll update the list if/when they do.

OK, my iPod has been acting up and it seems like it is ready to go to the big electronic garbage can in the sky any day now.

Last week the drive on my home server died on me.

Today the drive on my work laptop is dying on me (I’m trying hard to get my home directory out before it fails completely).

What the heck is wrong with my electronic equipment?

You’d better watch out if you see me getting anywhere near your computers these days. You never now what sort of weird electromagnetic fields I might be emanating.

Sheesh! :-(

Heads up everyone sending me Email: I’ve moved my mail to the Google Apps account I’ve setup for my domain (nunonunes.org) and today I’ve turned off the scaffolding I still had on my previous server in order to get any stray mail there was coming it’s way. So if there is any funkiness with my Email and I don’t seem to be answering you back, please try again (or contact me any other way you wish) and let me know what’s up.

I finally have a decent webmail interface for my Email and also IMAP access to it. Sweet!

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… Erm… Right, OK, a while ago, I talked a bit about moblogging and how I wished the media posts were handled and so on. After that I didn’t really think much about it, but I did keep on doing what I always did as far as posting things “on-the-go” was concerned and thing kept evolving.

Now on my recent foray I used and abused of my mobile phone to do what can only be described as moblogging. Namely, I routinely posted small text snippets into twitter, pictures (taken with my phone’s camera, so the quality is not brilliant, but passable) into flickr and I did not (because my phone’s video capture is rubbish) but could very easily have posted videos to youtube.

All of this I did (or could have done) with MMS messages. The email interface would have given me even more options about what to do with the stuff I posted and how to categorize it, but on a country such as the one I was in I was lucky enough to have GPRS as it was.
And that is precisely the point, when you get to a stage where you have this kind of connectivity on a country such as Morocco, you truly are able to moblog to your heart’s content easily, with a (nowadays) more or less run-of-the mill phone.

The issues I alluded to on the old post are taken care of by default (you just have to use different email addresses for the pictures in order to specify their privacy settings, for example) and many people are now able to understand how to do all of this stuff easily.

If you want you can even use a service such as, for example, ShoZu to make even more sophisticated stuff with your media, but it really is not necessary.

The only thing I couldn’t do so easily was to post to my regular weblog, but that is a result of my decision to use a proprietary platform. If I were using any “normal” blogging platform out there it would be easy as pie to do it too.

Fun stuff.

Dear Lazyweb,

This coming weekend I’ll be performing a thorough cleansing of a Windows XP PC which, by the description that was made by the users, is probably filled with spyware and maybe even some viruses (despite the fact that it has Norton’s Antivirus suite installed and —I’ve been assured— religiously updated).

Now I know that this will most likely end up in a complete re-install of the system and since the users have dutifully been doing their backups to an external hard drive I should be able to just leave it at that but… The backups have got to be infected with some viruses so I will have to clean some stuff up no matter what.
Also, I would really rather not go into the fresh install thing because it will just mean a lot more trouble with all the apps they need.

So what I need is to find out what the cool kids are using these days to rid their PCs of the vermin. I haven’t done windows in ages (and I mean years thank goodness) so I’m really out of the loop here.
The last time I had to do something like this I found out an article entitled “How to fix mom’s computer” or somesuch but I can’t seem to find the article now and besides, it was a long time ago so it is probably outdated.

So in short, Dear Lazyweb, can you tell me what I should arm myself with in order to get all those nasty bugs out of the system?

Thanks a bunch!

Yous faithfully,

Nuno ‘Lazy’ Nunes

Since I’ve stopped being able to use my Mac @ work a while ago, I reverted to using Linux (in one distro or another, which is beside the point here). Now being used to having spotlight at the tip of my fingers (so to speak) I found it hard to adjust to what there was available for indexing and searching at Linux-land.

The best bet there was at the time (and until recently actually) was Beagle and even if it did have some of the features I required I could never get it to work properly on my desktop. I’ve been using Macs for a while now and I just can’t be bothered with all the hassle my friends and co-workers go through in order to get something like this running (and note that I said “running”, I didn’t even dare to go so far as to say “running smoothly“…)

Now I’ve recently been attuned to the Linux version of the Google Desktop by a friend and after using it for a couple-three weeks I must say that even though it doesn’t compare with spotlight (blessed are those who never knew anything better than what they have now), it sure beats Beagle by a long way.

Now if I could only be sure that Google will never, ever do any evil I could even turn on the “Advanced Features”… But being the suspicious guy I am, I think I’ll pass on those.

The time is almost upon us. Battlestar Galactica’s third season (of the new series) starts this friday and I’ve just managed to watch the last episode of the previous season, plus the webisodes that are already out there.

If you’ve fallen behind, you can catch up to the story so far before plunging in to the good stuff ahead.

Let’s blow out some toasters!

Well that’s it, the EuroOSCON 2006 is nearly over (I’m at the last talk I plan to attend right now) and it has been good.

I’ve put a few notes of some of the talks I attended in my [/notebook] and while they’re basically just that —notes taken during a lecture— maybe someone will be interested in them.

I’m flying home today and I’ll be arriving late (technically I’m betting that I’ll arrive tomorrow) so I’ll miss my podcast day. Oh well…

This is at as far as conferences go this year and I must say that for my particular needs YAPC::Europe::2006 was actually a bit better than EuroOSCON 2006.

Technorati Tags: EuroOSCON, EuroOSCON06, EuroOSCON2006, Conference, OpenSource

Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about things related to the “Semantic Web”.

This sudden new interest came about during a conversation I was having with José Castro (leader of Lisbon.pm) in which he was telling me about his plans for a service he would like to provide in the Lisbon.pm homepage: he would like to be able to automatically list all the CPAN modules “owned” by the group’s mongers.

As we started talking about this, we concluded right away that in order to achieve that goal we needed a list of all the members and their respective PAUSE accounts and instead of listing that information on a file somewhere we wanted to use something a little more dynamic. This meant that each member would have to host a file (probably some sort of XML formated file) somewhere on the web (maybe even on the group’s server if needed) where {s}he stated something about h[er|im]self, which the software than runs the site would parse and then take the necessary steps to gather the rest of the information from CPAN based on that.

Well, José was thinking about using something along the lines of what the London.pm group uses (apparently they went through a similar process some time ago). They developed a XML vocabulary that they use for this purpose.

All well and good but really it felt a bit like re-inventing the wheel to me. The thing is that I had had conversations like this before, although in different contexts, and lately I have, by some twist of fate, been listening to a lot of recorded presentations around the semantic web, FoaF, SPARQL and the like to pass up such a good opportunity.

In fact it was Melo who first got me onto the FoaF stuff some time ago and the notion basically lay dormant in the back of my mind just waiting for an opportunity to be used.

So what am I on about with this FoaF, SPARQL and semantic web stuff?

Very simply put (very simply, go and look at the websites I link to or google for it if you want to know more), all of this enables machines to gather information about resources on the web —and even things off the web, like people and information about them— and structure it into something that can be automatically manipulated and from which inferences can be made automatically.

FoaF (an acronym for Friend-of-a-Friend) allows people to state things about themselves, their web-based resources, their relationships to other people or other resources, etc.
Now FoaF is very useful for this project as a descriptive language, but it is still just a piece of XML that just sits there waiting to be parsed and we all know how fun it is to parse XML, right?

Enter SPARQL, a query language designed to be “the query language for the web” which basically allows us to query multiple data sources of various formats and get back the results we need. It was a happy coincidence indeed that just as I was preparing to write down the extensions I would need to the existing Perl FoaF parser I happened to listen to an interview with Elias Torres about SPARQL and how it applies to a lot of the things I need right now.

But wait, all that is quite a mouth-full but what does it actually mean for this specific context?

Well, it means that if all the mongers who are interested create a FoaF file about themselves where they state that they have a PAUSE account with ID “FOO”, then we can build a program in the server that goes out, queries the FoaF file of each monger, checks to see if that file references any PAUSE account and, if so, then it goes out to CPAN, gets the list of modules owned by that account and does whatever we decide that we want to do with it.

Right, that’s the easy stuff done right there, figuring out which parts should be used. Now for the real fun part…

First off I had to make sure the technology was all there to begin with. The semantic web has been in gaseous state for much too long and I had to make sure that it wasn’t all just vapour anymore.

So I went out and tried to find out about FoaF and in the process even created my own personal FoaF file. Not bad at all, it seems that this part, at least, is good enough to go (even if some of the name spaces it uses are still in experimental stages —deemed unstable).

Then I decided to look at extracting the information without writing a specific-purpose XML parser. As I said earlier, there is a module out there that does that, but it only supports part of what I needed and I decided that, should I take that route, I had to write down a couple of extensions to it.

But then I heard the interview with Elias Torres and decided to give SPARQL a look.

It was just a matter of hopping over to http://sparql.org/ and trying out the SPARQLer demo with my own FoaF file and validating that I could indeed effortlessly get out some of the information I needed and then realizing that there are already some Perl modules for using SPARQL out there on CPAN.

All I have to do now is look into those modules to see how usable they are and with any luck I should have something knocked together real soon (or maybe not that soon, SPARQL doesn’t quite seem to be a trivial language to master).

I’ll try and write up some notes on the process as I go along and maybe even do a more structured article on the whole semantic web thing and how it fits into our solution for the article section of the Lisbon.pm’s site (assuming there will be one… José, are you listening?). ;-)

Technorati Tags: FoaF, SemanticWeb, SPARQL

I’ve recently found out about Cory Doctorow’s Podcast (via the latest TWiT) and being somewhat of a fan of his writings, I decided to check it out.

So I went there and downloaded the 4 latest episodes, which together cover a full new story that Cory had just finished writing.

In the podcast he essentially reads us the story and I find it extremely amusing and entertaining to be read a story first-hand, by the author himself.

He makes it quite clear that he considers the work still very rough but I kind of like to hear it almost as it first come out onto the paper, I find it very genuine this way. And, of course, something “quite rough” from an author such as Cory is always light years ahead of the “finished” work most of us could ever produce anyway so it’s all a bit relative, isn’t it? ;-)

Needless to say, I am now subscribed to yet another podcast and eagerly await further fiction to be seamlessly delivered to my iPod one of these days.

Technorati Tags: fiction, podcast

Where to begin?

Well, I suppose I can start with the iPod camera connected that I tried out today for the first time. The person who lent me the tiny device swears by it and I must say I’m fairly impressed.
It is slow as molasses of course (to borrow a phrase from Rui) due to my camera’s blazing fast (not!) USB 1 connector but it does get the job done (i.e., it stores the files pristine and doesn’t muck around with them).
The thing that would make it better for me would be to be able to read the JPEG which is embedded in my Canon-RAW files and display it the same way it does for JPEG photos, but that’s somewhat unnecessary for my purposes. I think it does it for the Canon EOS 20D photos but not for my 10D.
So when I get my own connector I’ll basically gain an external storage device (external to the camera, that is), which I always carry around with me anyway, with a fair amount of free space in it (my 60G iPod still has around 13G free). Good for those occasions when I go out and don’t want to take the laptop with me. Hey, it can happen!

Visio, Xfig, Open Office Draw and friends: byte my shinny metal err… OK, that’s the wrong phrase here but well… Some things just feel better done the old fashioned way and planning furniture arrangement for a new home is one of them.
Taking the ruler and drawing out everything, cutting the furniture prototypes out of yellow post-it paper… I stopped just short of drawing the main features of the room in china ink. It feels great to do something like this with something other than a mouse or a digitizer board.
Guess I’m just an old-geezer me…

On an unrelated note: Adobe Lightroom really, really rocks!

On an even more unrelated note: expect some action on the portuguese PERL arena anytime soon. Things are afoot which should be exciting for anyone interested in the community aspect of the language. Hum… Does this phrase sound weird to me only? Oh well…

See? What other title could I get this post? Well, I could think of something better, were I not half dead from a two-week spree of hard problems at work and tripping on a great big migraine.
So there!