Adam's bon motd

Stallman on Software Patents

Quite and old video, but he uses a good analogy to explain why software patents are bad - jump to the part at 1:40:30

posted at: 13:04 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

Slides from BCN PHP Conference 2008

A couple of weeks ago I popped along to the Barcelona PHP Conference which held talks on a range of PHP-related topics.

Some talks were better than others, but it was definately worth the treck out to Citilab in Cornellà.

Here are some slides from the event. Some videos shoud be available soon.

posted at: 13:00 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

alt.techcrunch.die.die.die

Warning: this is just a rant.

This is the top story on Hacker News? Embarrassing. Should I add downvotes on stories, for users over a certain karma threshold?
—Paul Graham

I've had it with Techcrunch. What was once an interesting lowdown on the tech startup world has descended into a bitch-fest. Take the following post from yesterday where Michael Arrington impatiantly dribbles over Delicious's second born child:

It’s been over nine months since Yahoo first gave us a glimpse of Delicious 2.0 - a complete code rewrite from the now aging platform that was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005 ... and since then, not a peep from Yahoo.
It’s now be nine months ... Meanwhile, scaling issues have confound the Delicious team and they continue to rework the architecture.
Delicious is still my social bookmarking service of choice, but Delicious 2.0 is a serious black eye for Yahoo and the Delicious team. It’s time for them to update us on when we can expect a general release of the next version.

I find this all rather impatient and presumptuous. The strangest thing is that Arrington refers to its 'ageing architecture' and the dev-team being 'confounded' — where does he get this from? What are the sources? We can be pretty sure that Arrington does not have first-hand information; as an economics grad he's not even a programmer or technologist of any sort.

It seems that people more interested in building cool things than fueling hysteria and hyperbole can be found over at Hacker News or on the SDF bboard.

Comments at HN

posted at: 12:37 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

Choice Coding Font

Droid Sans Mono is currently my favourite programming font, having previously been fond of Proggy Fonts. Here's a sample:

posted at: 12:17 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

'Chocolate' VIM colorscheme

Here's the VIM colorscheme I'm using:

It's called 'choclolate' because it's based on the W3C core style with the same name. Download chocolate.vim here. If you like chocolate you may also like vividchalk.

posted at: 16:30 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

The Dollar Gap

The biggest problem with micropayments is said to be the penny gap: the fact that the biggest price hurdle one the internet is the difference between £0.00 and £0.01.

The SDF Public Access UNIX System has been using this to its advantage for a number of years, and charges $1 for a basic 'user' account and lifetime membership of the system. You can still use some basic UNIX facilities for free, but the dollar validation, while keeping out spammers, free-loaders and scrip-kiddies gets you all this:

FREE Default Shell (users)
--------------------------
 . Access to email (elm/mutt/pine/mailx) OR pop3
 . Local chat (com/send/bboard)
 . Choice of UNIX shell 
 . Hundreds of shell utilities, games and programs
 . Network utilities: ping, finger, whois, traceroute
 . 20 MB disk quota for your email
 . 20 MB disk quota for your home directory
 . 20 MB disk quota for your webspace (yourlogin.freeshell.org)
 . 20 MB disk quota for your gopherspace
(Inbound FTP, scp and sftp access is available after validation)

$36 (one time initiation fee) LIFETIME ARPA Membership (arpa)
-------------------------------------------------------------
 . Use of ARPA utilities (telnet/rlogin/ftp/nslookup)
 . Use of Supplementary network utilities (ssh/irc/tf)
 . Use of System Development Kit (gcc/g++/f77/lisp/perl/python) 
 . 150 MB / 1 file quota for your email
 . 150 MB / 5000 file quota for your home directory
 . 150 MB / 5000 file quota for your webspace
 . 150 MB / 5000 file quota for your gopherspace

posted at: 12:00 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

Flipping MySQL Bits

In MySQL the BOOL column type is an alias of TINYINT(1). I recently wanted to 'flip' the values in a BOOL column, so the NULLs becomes 1s and the 1s become NULLs, and here's the best way I could find to do it:

START TRANSACTION;
UPDATE `tbl` SET `col` = 2 WHERE `col` = 1;
UPDATE `tbl` SET `col` = 1 WHERE ISNULL(`col`);
UPDATE `tbl` SET `col` = NULL WHERE `col` = 2;
COMMIT;

posted at: 13:00 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

Twitter from the command line

Recently SDF got TTYtter, a terminal-based Twitter client.

I've still not quite been pulled under by twitter mania, although somehow I've managed to get a few followers. Here's a little script to tweet directly from the command line:

#!/bin/bash
# tweet.sh - twitter from the command line
echo $1 | ttytter -user=username:password -script

Substitute with your own username and password, drop it in ~/bin, chmod +x and then you can do:

$ tweet "I'm a command-line twit :)"

posted at: 12:00 | path: / | permanent link to this entry