Show some Boot Land love.

The same company that created some years ago the popular foxmarks bookmarks plugin for firefox, has changed it's name to Xmarks and added some interesting services related to these bookmarking activities.

One of them is the site rank option.

Boot Land (at the time of this blog post) is ranked as #12.

This hardly seemed like a fair position so a message was passed along on the newsletter asking people to write in their words what was their opinion about the site.

The result was great.

We raised the number of reviews from 0 to 30 in less than a day, but more important than numbers was the genuine opinion of people regarding how they saw this community.

Here are some:

Best talents around the globe are part of bootland. Bootland is always way ahead of others in terms of technological development in terms of boot disk. This is the only site i refer for any boot disk related issues.
---
I discovered the Boot Land site only recently and I've been impressed by the comprehensiveness of their content. A worthwhile visit if you personally maintain your PC.
---
Bootland is very active with new updates, tools and scripts for keeping your set of rescue CD's up to date. They already have a Windows 7 boot project.

Reading these reviews is a good motivation to keep working. Sometimes it's sad as I see the quality work of so many good developers pass unnoticed and forgotten but these reviews prove otherwise. It's worth continuing to work and improve the current state of things.

We might not get a higher ranking than #12 but at the very least I'm sure that we rank #1 in the heart of everyone that is part of our community and that's the sort of ranking that really matters.

:)

5 weeks have passed!

Well.. five weeks passed from the expected 16 months of the intensive MSE program.

And believe me that "intensive" is not even the most appropriate way to describe the stress hidden behind each week.

The course is highly demanding. You're left with constant deadlines to deliver homeworks that seem to take forever to understand and complete in a satisfactory manner.

We need to account the hours spent studying, last week I've passed over 60 hours studying and this doesn't reflect the lost sleep nights to get something done on time under pressure.

It's been a very interesting experience and I'm nevertheless enjoying it very much.

Some of the things that I like the most, is the way how students are expected to behave like professionals with some level of experience at any given moment of the program. There is no room to argue that you don't know how to achieve something. If you don't know how, then it's probably due to the lack of the research to learn how to get it done in the first place.

My biggest difficulty is a class called MSS - Models of Software Systems. It involves a lot of maths (my personal nemesis) and even though my performance is somewhat below the average, I'm still working my way to raise the level of efficiency up to the expected level.

I'm also having some difficulty on other classes, my written evaluation of case studies and replies to reading questions are still not averaging a satisfactory level as well. I'm now spending a lot more hours trying to compose quality replies.

Guess I'm a slow learner, I like to do things slowly and the fast pace of the course leaves little to breath let alone do things slowly.

Well.. even the rate of my blog posts is a good sign of this lack of free time.. ;)

But heck, this is exactly what I was expecting in the first place.

This is a way of perfectly simulating how people who graduate from the MSE are expected to deal with stress and learn under tough conditions limited by time and constrained by an excess of work.

I'm loving it and after 5 weeks of work, I'm already clueless regarding what is left to dazzle us during the next 60 weeks..

:)

The MSE: at last!

Today started the official MSE classes. (hooorray!!)

The whole computer department with room for thousands is empty as we're still on the middle of the summer, and we, the proud 14 students along with a few hand picked teachers fill these halls with the classes that will later on build and shape my personal view of the software world. (crossing my fingers)

So far, so good. Having classes exclusively in english language when all students are portuguese is not something new as I've spent last year passing through a similar experience with the CCNA.

The biggest difference is the fact that studying become (finally) a full time experience to me.

Over the past decade it wasn't nowhere easy to consolidate new knowledge while fighting with professional constraints or hostile study environments.

This time I'm really having fun while living a long waited goal and yet quite nervous to some extent about the quality of my work as everyone is reviewed constantly by people that are beyond doubt experts on this craft.

The MSE is seen as the crown jewel that represents the people who teach computer science in Coimbra's University and they uphold the professionalism and devotion to this goal at an incredibly impressive level. Students are expected no less commitment and I'm really happy to work in this environment.


---------------

At this moment I'm not so worried about the complexity or costs of this demanding course but my mind is troubled because of my contract work terms with the military.

If I cut my ties, then I'll breach the permanent staff contract terms that expect a minimum of 8 years under their roof. I still had 3 more years to reach this timeline, and breaking early gives them legal basis to request a compensatory indemnization for the 3 missing years.

Guess that some negotiation needs to take place or at least a (significant) source of income needs to be retrieved as the penalty can easily reach between 10k~20k euros. Perhaps a new bank loan can be drafted or the some distributed payments be agreed but freedom comes with a price.

The question that bothers my sleep: What is the price tag to gain back my freedom?

Ninja pendisk site update

Recently I've began playing more often with Wordpress and it has become a good tool to deploy new websites.

So, I picked a small popular site that would be easy to play with - ninja - because it is the right tool for simplicity sake and the website should also be made as simple as possible.


One of the advantages that I like the most at wordpress is the integrated plugin system. Very neat. You simply look for plugins with particular features and click to install.

On the ninja site, I've decided to replace the old plain html pages with a wordpress CMS. The transition went smoothly and took less than a day to complete.

The biggest obstacle was finding a proper new visual theme and then adding back the text present on the old pages. One sad thing that could not be ported are the posts that were made on the old forum system.

I've decided to use the integrated forum simple:press inside the CMS to ensure that everything fall well together. This new forum system also brings some other neat features that might help make it more appealing for other ninja users.

For example, it's not necessary to register on the forums as it is using OpenID, people on participate on a given topic get email warnings whenever someone replies to their threads and so on.

Also, this is a good homework practice for larger projects. My next goal is to also port the http://nunobrito.eu from the e107 CMS onto wordpress.

Next would be turn of http://winbuilder.net and this would complete the round of site conversions. Why converting to wordpress?

Well, the main reason is flexibility to change things around. With e107 or static html pages is a real bothersome to add changes on the website or make it look exactly as you want.

Besides, the available plugins are really cool and I'm just scratching the surface.

I don't really like the fact that it's dependent to MySQL but for the moment there is still no other alternative.

If you have the time, don't forget to visit the new ninja site at http://nunobrito.eu/ninja and tell me what you think.

:)

Hardware limits

I'm tired.

Spent the last three days working around the clock to ensure that all my matters with this azorean island were solved. This involved in going back, forth and around the city on foot several times just to get all the required documents and trying to change my new residence whenever possible.

Also, I needed to return my rented flat back to the owner and you wouldn't believe on the amount of things still missing to pack and bring back to mainland. Many other good things could not fit my luggage and I either gave them to friends or plain left them on the garbage.

It was somewhat difficult to put our own stuff on the garbage, especially when you paid good money for them and attached some emotional links over the years as you used them and raised happy and good memories.

Certainly not easy and I'm glad my wife didn't come with me as she wouldn't certainly bear to see some of the things that went out with with trash cleanup - I won't even tell her the details.

I've spent a lot of money and time repairing small details in the house, fixing electrical light-switches, changing bulbs and other equipment that I had replaced since the originals weren't in good state.

I'm taking most of this stuff with me and my personal luggage is so, so, so heavy that my only hope is that they'll be nice and don't charge me the extra weight. I can carry 20 kilograms but my bags weight around 60 kilograms and they demand an extra 5 euros per extra kilogram if they're in a bad mood.

As if my bank account was not already in a bad state, an excess of weight overcharge penalization would only do wonders - but I need to bring these things back home.

Guess the human limits of my hardware are really starting to show some wear. I've slept too little over these days and gave no rest between the effort of getting things done.

Mostly due to my fault. I always tend to think that sleep is secondary and prefer to go out see some music concert somewhere and have fun even knowing that I'll have to wake soon in the morning.

At least things are going on track, with the student's bank loan it should become easier to balance the bank account back into positive state thought I'm still worried about the future but I'm drawing some good plans to keep things running under schedule as expected.


I'm not worried about life in general, just plain sad at this moment. Leaving the Azores for good was not easy. Life is good around here and I've built a lot a good memories from this place.

After living for two months in mainland one can note the difference in lifestyle, but this is a new important step and better things will certainly come along.

:)

Just got myself re-baptized

Two months ago when I went to the airport to collect my ticket after shipping all my things in the container, I noticed that my identification was missing - it has been mistakenly placed inside the ship container and I had no way to retrieve it.

Being late (almost 10:00 pm), I rushed onto a shopping mall where a citizen's office was still open. 15 minutes later, I had signed a declaration mentioning I had lost my identification and they gave me a temporary citizenship certificate to allow me flight back home.

I thought things had gone smooth as silk and this was indeed what happened then.

But today I went to pick the new citizen's card at the mall and a mistake was made - one of my middle names (Garcia) was mistakenly placed as one of my first names.

My mother only gave me one first name as "Nuno" but I was instantly re-baptized under a new name as "Nuno Garcia"

Oh well. I'm too tired today to fight the ID system and I've spent the whole day and night going from one place to another, so, guess I'll have to make some use of my new freshly reassigned first name and get used to it.

Go ahead and call me either Nuno or Garcia - for some unquestionable reason that I won't even bother to ask, both are now the same on my ID card.

:)

Back to the Azorean spirit

I've returned one last time to the place that I called home for the last 5 years.

Very strange feeling. I moved out of my house at Coimbra and did everything on the expected schedule to get the bus ticket, the airplane reservation, to arrive on time, to wait the necessary time, to endure the time between trips but something was not the same.

This was likely the very last time that I see my house the way has it had been for the past few years and will also be the last time I'll probably ever be here.

And my feelings are crossed. I miss the azores.

Life around here is indeed different. People talk about quality of life but after some time you kind of forget that there are places where life is not so pleasant.

Looking back, this seems like another life in a distant time but it has only passed little over two months, guess life in mainland can also change you.

So, to celebrate a new beginning I started out by going to dinner at one of my favorite spots. I didn't go out at night as I need to get up really early in the morning but I'm afraid that I'm not also being able to catch much sleep as it's 03:00 AM and no rest has yet come my way.

Well, I'll try to get some work done and perhaps get tired enough to sleep for a couple of hours.

:)

Google Social Network

Maybe old news for some but I've just tried out Google Social Network and it's impressive.

It allows to literally port a social network onto your website without the need to ask people to re-register themselves on your site.

One other cool feature is the fact that wordpress and phpbb already come prepared for google connect which means a lot less worries about integration and more free time to work out the gimmicks of the site.

This is a very approach to the same concept implemented by Microsoft (and others) over a decade ago when Passport was first introduced but with the twist that you have so much more control over the login registrations and are allowed to do a lot more.

At the moment I don't see myself using often this tool but it's certainly something to keep in memory for future projects.

Very good google, keep it up.

http://www.google.com/friendconnect

Remote posting to wordpress using Gmail

Wordpress is a really cool tool for running blogs but one of my favorite features (remote posting) was not working correctly with gmail.

This happened because wordpress itself has no support for secure connections. So, after googling for a good while, the solution presented itself in the form of a new script that is capable of handling gmail.

The article where this approach is explained is available here: http://www.mattromaine.com/2005/03/07/wordpress-gmail-mobile-blogging/

Fairly simple approach. Just copy the two files onto the installation folder of wordpress, rename the extension of both files from .phps to .php and you're ready to go.

As mentioned on the instructions, you still need to automate the calling of the wp-gmail.php script but that is the easy part.

As for setting up wordpress itself, don't forget that the pop address is "pop.gmail.com" and that it will use port 995.

Last but not least, the username should be as "example@gmail.com" where "example" is your real username to log inside your gmail account.

That's it, good luck!

:)

Updated Avatar

Yesterday I've updated my public avatar.

It had passed quite some time since the last time I had a good reason to do so, and I finally found a good picture that would illustrate my state of mind at this moment.

The new avatar features my baby child Miguel and myself during the baptism party of a cousin's newborn baptism that occurred this past weekend. It's also one of those rare situations were I get to wear a tie so the photo itself reminds me that sometimes one needs to set loose from the work ties and give some attention to the family.

This kid has been a blessing in my life and I can't avoid making a smile whenever I look on the pictures to remind me of how lucky I am for having this kid and the respective mother on my life.

:)

Step 1 for a new life.

Well.. today I've got the confirmation of what I've been waiting for a long time.

My current employer authorized a prolonged absence from work that will last the next 6 months until the end of January 2010.

This means the first 6 months of my life without a single salary for the first time in a decade but at the same time I simply couldn't feel happier at this moment as this change also means 6 months living a very desired goal in my life and fight for a chance to improve my work quality as the results are already visible.

On a financial level, things are sort of stabilized for the moment. I've reached my income saving objectives and gathered enough resources to sponsor my own education costs which will be substantial during the next 2 years.

Still missing to figure how to provide my own subsistence in the U.S. without spending these savings, guess that a bank loan is in order but I'm leaving this option as the last resort since life after the studies won't be easy either and each saved coin will count to balance the monthly expenses.

But so far so good.

It's kind of scary to see everything falling into the correct position as if this is ordered like a huge puzzle. A lot of things are in motion and a lot of things can still go wrong in the future but I'm trying to live with all doors open in order to face any possible obstacles as they come along.

The last and perhaps most ubiquous decision will be the penalty imposed by my employer in case I decide to move away after the 6 months. But if things really go well (crossing my fingers here) then I won't certainly regret my decision.

As always, time is short for everything but somehow things get balanced.

Life is fun again.

:)

My first LOC counter

Yesterday I've completed my first LOC counter.

LOC stands for "Lines Of Code" and the basic purpose is to count the number of valid lines of code that were written for a specific program.

First of all, in order to be able to count anything - you will need to specify a coding standard template.

This template is a small paper with all the rules regarding the way how code should be written for a given task. For example, avoid excessive capitalization, split each logical statement onto it's own line, assign meaningful titles to variables and so on and on.

My first attempt at designing a LOC was fairly simplistic. It simply stripped away the comments or empty lines be done with it.

But this wasn't a very realistic view of the true LOC.

As mentioned by the teacher, adding tags to the code would be more productive (even thought not mentioned in the task requirements) and so I did.

The results couldn't have been better.

I simply add "//TAG:X" (where X is replaced by the code of the category where the code belongs) and it will count all valid lines until the "//finished" tag is found.

Very simple but also very effective. This way I'm capable of truly counting the lines of quality code between what has been added, modified or recycled.

The PSP also requires to count deleted lines so I've made another tag "//DELETED,15", where 15 is the number of deleted lines.


This sort of software is really interesting, in the past I'd simply count all lines from top to bottom, most admit that this is a substantial improvement.

Unfortunately, all these modifications and all the troubles of moving away from the Azores made my fall behind schedule to deliver the assignments. I better start working to get back on track..

Living in Coimbra

For the first time in a decade I can say that I've moved back to my homeland.

I'm living back at Coimbra, place where I've spent most of my youth days.

This was at the time a city with a superb quality of life, still is today.

At the first days it was all a bit too confusing, many small things changed, family got older, shops closed, new buildings rised and all the usual things you'd expect to change over the years.

I've spent my free time over the last days to go outside and drink coffee at my favorite places. First debuted the "Cartola", placed at the "Praça da República". A somewhat peaceful place during the morning where a person can drink the coffee while studying.

Yesterday, I've went to "Celas", very close to where I used to study. Amazing to see the difference. I can still remember how things looked without being urbanized.

And today I've been at the "Santa Cruz" coffee house, another emblematic place to drink coffee placed right at the middle of the old city. Expensive coffee btw, it costs 80 cents..

It's been a very entertaining week. Coimbra has good quality of life and plenty of history to walk around. Will certainly be nice to stay here for some time.

:)

The MSE begins

And so begins one new step in my life.

No doubts about the magnitude of this step that is changing my life at so many different levels, let alone even wonder about the way how life will continue from here forward.

It's a mix of many differences for my life and I'm still feeling a bit outside the crowd thought the other students are all extremely polite and bright. Nevertheles, I should already be used to changes but I guess that leaving the Azores definitively is still tough to accept as a reality for the future.

I should probably enjoy the course and flavor the things that we are about to experience but in my mind remain all the doubts and uncertainty about my professional future.

---

A life without thinking about MSE in the horizon doesn't seem so challenging while the other available courses are nowhere interesting enough to push your own capacities, but now I'm actually living this experience in first hand - where should things go from here?

Well.. the first thing before thinking on anything else is study. And I mean really STUDY!

The instructors passed a very clear message that no student will be forgiven if their average grade drops below 3.0 GPA and if any test achieves a B- grade you're immediately signaled with a yellow card and need to work even harder to seriously improve the grades.

No joking around - study!

The former MSE student presentation revealed a concept popularized as "Good enough", and this is something that might seem revolting for most perfectionist developers but when you're working under a very tight time-frame then I think "good enough" is all you can do.

The overall presentation and care demonstrated throughout this process is impressive. This is indeed one course that is regarded as important to the image of the university and they are available to help at any given moment but it is also required to your commitemment and energies focused on the degree are total.

I liked the instructor presentations, they're all extremelly humble and polite even thought their CV's express a lifetime of work in software/hardware development and research.

Coming from a military world where discipline is sometimes forced upon people in so many repressive ways to achieve some established results, it's actually fun to work in a environment where no such methods exist and all work is purely motivated by your own struggle to achieve optimum results.

Between all these talks I couldn't accurately evaluate what my performance will be during the course. I've never coded anything in Java, .NET or Visual Basic - never needed anyways - but now they will become the working tool as other students only seem productive using them and my performance will surely degrade (especially if the time frame is very tight to present results).

Guess I'll need to adapt in order to survive amongst the other fellows in this tribe - thought my opinion for the moment remains solid that these languages are nowhere near my coding preferences.

-------------

For the moment we will begin the PSP (Personal Software Process), this is a remote lecture-style class that will occur during July.

Excellent opportunity because I'll probably get a lot of time to go outside in the middle of the day to drink coffee while working at the class assignments - no better way to get things done.

As things move forward, the difficulty bar will surely increase and I won't be having so much tranquility (or quality time) to get these objectives completed.

Also, the army only grants permission to remain absent for six months. After this time period I will have to decide wether to remain or not inside the organization or otherwise be forced to request my removal from the permanent board in case I decide to go forward with the MSE all the way until the end.

I'm up for the challenge, let's begin!

:)

Publicity, MSE and life

This week has been hard.

Why?

Because ever since the beginning of my online adventures that I've always took good pride in staying far from annoying google ads but this time I'll need to swallow my own pride and use them to survive.

My life took a very unexpected turn around. I'm leaving the place where I live, the work that provided such good quality of life and also stray away from some of the projects that I care about.

My goal to justify these measures is also well worthy of my efforts - the MSE from Carneggie Mellon.

This course is no joke for those that are faint of the heart and for those who have that crazy dream of achieving a somewhat incredible state of nirvana in terms of computer programming (if they manage to survive during 18 months of intensive stress).

I'm no exception on this group of dreamers and I'm aiming high but will this goal justify the used means?

On the case of publicity, just wish there was a better solution but I see no other source of income available during the next couple of years since.

My wife will try to find a job but she'll surely be paid the minimum wage and our child's daycare center will cost half of her earnings.

It's too much in my conscience to bear the predictable guilt of being such a weight on her shoulders at the expenses of my own goals that will surely prejudice her peaceful tranquility.

Maybe this way I'll get enough resources to leverage my contribution to the family and afford the internet and transportation costs.

My apologies to those who I disapoint with this measure, this was not an easy decision.

Flat file web software

Is mySQL really necessary?

It has all sort of advantages and performance advantages that people so quickly advocate but is a SQL database really needed to power up small websites or web applications?

My preference goes to fully portable websites that require no external database and keep everything tidy and organized inside the same folder. This makes the task of creating a new site fairly simple and even simpler to move everything onto another server.

For bigger sites, mySQL is still a tool of the trade but I've learned to look onto smaller alternatives as better option to power up those small sites that don't require a heavy CMS but still need to stretch a bit further than static HTML codings.

On this blog post I'd like to refer two developments that I've been using for some time.

The first, is a forum software that runs solely on a flatfile (no SQL needed), the name of this project is "Ultimate PHP board", very small sized, free and very easy to customize. This is the forum software that I'm also using to power up the ninja forum.

The second project is called "Razor CMS" (freeware) - a name easy to remember and also the type of software that is meant to be easy to work with from the start. This is a good option is you need to start a new website and only require to showcase a few pages.

It comes with a WYSIWYG editor and you can find additional plugins (called blade packs) to add more features and themes.

I'm using this software to create a standalone PHP powered website that runs from DVD's and USB media to be distributed as gift to guests at a meeting.

This standalone website is possible using another software that I've made some time ago called litePHP (freeware).

Have fun!

;)

A few reasons why you should or shouldn't use Windows 7

In the previous blog post we've covered the basics to get a Windows 7 install going, but what are the possible advantages from this situation?

Also, with the competition installed for the desktop OS market, what good reasons would keep you away from a Windows machine?


Pros

1 - Free until June 2010
2 - Fast (or perhaps Vista was too much of a slug anyways)
3 - XP mode - it can run software/drivers meant for older OS versions
4 - Less annoying UAC
5 - Full support for IPv6 - you'll likely understand why this is important within some time
6 - Renewed set of UI controls - those old style menus and graphics with 10 years of existence were all updated
7 - Very cool explorer and orb menu to work with
8 - No more USB/DVD autorun as before
9 - Large hardware support (really huge with the possibility to get online for fetch missing files)
10 - More flexible to install - let it be from USB/Network or whatever, it's easier to deploy.



Cons

1 - Free until June 2010 - so after this that you'll have to dump it altogether, buy a license or tamper the install with some piracy method to workaround the timebomb - not nice.
2 - It's fast but still slugs behind XP in terms of performance and any other current desktop OS.
3 - XP mode is not perfect, some drivers will crash
4 - Memory consumption is still huge when compared to other OS
5 - Viruses, Viruses. Be prepared because all the malware that hammered previous releases will soon catch up.


One of the things that I like the most is the stability of the UI, a bit like OSX this just "feels" solid to work with. They've really smoothed the edges to bring a work OS into life.

The UI redesign was a very nice touch and the default look is very pleasant to work with.

But should MS be praised?

No, it shouldn't.

These improvements derived from flaws that have been criticized heavily - and even the competition has been ahead of the game for some time while MS keeps playing catch up.

This is a desktop OS for the masses but I'm a bit disappointed to see such slow rate on exploring new ways of interaction with the desktop like compiz provides for x-window.

Would be nice to see some of this innovation going mainstream.

:)

Installing Windows 7 on Acer One

Installing Windows 7 inside an Acer One is fun and probably not a waste of your time.






Why?

For two reasons in specific: It's free and it's fast.

- Free because Microsoft allows you to use Windows 7 until June 2010.
- Fast when compared to it's predecessor Windows Vista.

Still not as fast as XP and a lot of memory is consumed but we might consider the pros vs cons in a later blog post.

How?

My short tutorial is just an example so that people have a better notion about a possible way to install.

The first step is downloading the Windows 7 ISO, it's available from MS here:
http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/windows-7/download.aspx

Then, using a separate partition to keep both XP and Win7 working is a good idea in case you need to go back some day. There are plenty of tools to split the Acer One partion, I used the one I trusted the most.

Since I use Ubuntu, there is a USB install tool that creates USB pendisks, one advantage of these pendisks is that they come builtin with a partition editor that resizes NTFS partitions safely (and as simple as it gets) - http://www.ubuntu.com/

After the partition is made available, it's time to launch Windows 7 install setup from the original XP. I created a 40Gb partition thought after installed this new Windows it took about 9Gb worth of used space.


-------------------------

Installing

Since there is no incorporated DVD reader, we can fake a drive using a virtual DVD drive to mount the ISO image.

My favorite tool for this task on Windows is ImDisk (open source) - http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html#ImDisk

Just install and reboot the machine. Aftwerwards you can right-click on any ISO image and make it available as a fake drive.

Mounting the Windows 7 ISO image we get the install started.

Don't forget to choose a new instalation and select the secondary partition that you have just created and the installation begins.

The install process is a bit lengthy (one hour perhaps) and reboots several times without need for human interaction.

------------------------

I was a bit afraid that some drivers wouldn't recognize the Acer One hardware. But there is one good thing about this Windows version - it supports drivers that were created for XP. This is a big plus without doubt.

All that was left to be done was visiting the Acer download site and grab the latest drivers for the Mouse synaptic software that allowed double tapping to be recognized as left-click.

Also, the software to control the fan noise also seemed to work only for XP/Vista - it was nice to see Win7 also asking to run the program in "XP mode" so that it work as expected (and it did).

----------


In overall

I have very nice words to say about Windows 7 indeed.

This OS is serious and less cluttered than it's precedent. The visual style is good and they have really made enough improvements to convince me as a worthy replacement for XP.

In a time that both OSX and Ubuntu are enjoying from a popularity boost given by the awfull performance demonstrated by Windows Vista, it should be no surprise to see Windows rising back into better days within 2010 if all goes well for them.

It's nice to see some competition.. :)

Got coffee?

A few weeks ago I've discontinued working at some of my favorite software projects. The next couple of years will likely be very busy and time always passes too quickly when you're having fun.

One of these projects was Ninja Pendisk. In contrast to other projects as WinBuilder or the Boot Land community that are well kept by other developers, the ninja was suddenly made orphan.

It is growing popular but development stagnated.

To lift up some motivation in order to continue support and improvement, I've placed a small donation box powered by Pledgie.

This is probably the first time that I've ever placed a donation box anywhere but the pledgie service is very nice and given the current state of Ninja, this sounded like a good experience.

Results arrived today.

A friendly ninja supporter named Wilson has contributed with 1 euro.

A small token to some but a meaningful contribution to me.

After paypal deducted 0,35 cents + 5% of the contribution value, I was left with little over 63 cents on my account - still good to sponsor a coffee.

Since I drink about 2~3 cups of coffee per day, this is enough to power one half of the morning or even perhaps a whole afternoon working on ninja to update it's functionality.


Let there be coffee!

:)

NoMachine NX - remote network control

Guess everyone heard about VNC to control a computer over the network but what about NX?

In the past I always thought that there were only two good ways to control a computer remotely.

The first would be using VNC and the second would be Windows Remote connection.

Thought these two options work fairly well for a LAN or possibly an intranet WAN, the truth is that both are a serious pain to use over the Internet due to their slug performance.

Meet NX.



This is a freeware server/client remote control software strictly for linux/solaris machines.

The client itself can also be used from Windows or MacOSX environments and this works fast!

I'm not joking about being fast. Their compression algorithm is extremelly efficient. I suspect that both client and server work together to save as much bandwidth as possible and only sending the bare minimal changes to update the client's display in contrast to VNC or RDP that output the full screen.

So impressive that it still works incredibly quick over the 3G modem dialup connection from my laptop.

Not that I complain from working remotely using a remote ssh session but it's always nice to work with a desktop to get some things done right.

Here's the link:
http://www.nomachine.com

:)