Monthly Archives: November 2007

git

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If you haven’t tried git, you should. Git is a “distributed version control” system, that is, similar to Subversion with the big difference that… you do not need a server. There are only clients, any of them, and you can pull and push changes to and from other repositories from your project colleagues. The git Wikipedia entry does a much better job than me to introduce the subject :)

In Mac OS X, I’ve just downloaded the source code tarball with the latest snapshot of the code, and it compiled out of the box. Just the classical operations:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Then I went through the tutorial, and frankly, I loved it. The Everyday GIT Guide is excellent too to understand the idea of this beautiful piece of code.

It’s too cool, really. Lightweight, and damn fast. No wonder why everyone’s talking about it lately!

Anarquismo y Software Libre

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Anarquismo Triunfante: Software Libre y la Muerte del Copyright, por Eben Moglen (1999), profesor de ley e historia legal de la Universidad de Columbia, USA:

Oscar Wilde dijo alguna vez que el problema con el socialismo es que ocupa demasiadas noches. Los problemas del anarquismo como un sistema social estan tambien relacionados con los costos de transaccion. Pero la revolucion digital altero dos aspectos de la politica economica que de otra manera permanecieron invariantes durante la historia humana.Todo software tiene un costo marginal nulo en el mundo de la red, mientras que los costos de coordinacion social han sido reducidos de tal manera que permiten la formacion y disolucion rapidas de groupos sociales altamente diversos y de gran escala sin importar las limitaciones geograficas. Un cambio tan fundamental en las circunstancias materiales de la vida necesariamente implican cambios igualmente importantes en la cultura.

Tremendo articulo, lamentablemente en ingles pero que merece una lectura atenta.

Black shirts, black water, black sheeps

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god-is-a-republican-e.jpgMussolini had the black shirts, Hitler had the Gestapo, Bush has Blackwater. They have started operating on USA, and have reportedly killed people in New Orleans during “routine” post-Katrina “security controls” (the Blackwater Wikipedia article is particularly hypocrite in the description of the facts).

Please, watch this movie. It’s an interview of Naomi Wolf, about her new book “The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot”. Please.

And then read her book.

dsc00237.JPGWhy do I care? kulturterror.jpgBecause in Switzerland everything’s set up to follow the same path. I have lived in a dictatorship, and I agree with her in that there are “common signs” that indicate that a democracy is being destroyed from the inside out. The famous “black sheep” advertising of the UDC is part of that process.

(Propaganda poster taken from here. I found the fake republican poster here. The UDC poster photo is mine.)

sobre el copyright

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tremendo analisis:

para ilustrar el continuo infringir cotidiano del estadounidense promedio, tomemos por ejemplo el diario trajin de un hipotetico profesor de leyes llamado john. para los propositos de este “gedankenexperiment” (nota: experimento del pensamiento), asumimos el peor escenario, el de una aplicacion completa de los “derechos” de los poseedores de copyright, y el de un extremo, aunque perfectamente posible, caso de aplicacion de la ley existente y de uso “correcto” de la doctrina. el uso correcto de la doctrina es, despues de todo, notoriamente caprichoso y la defensa ofrece poco refugio “ex ante” para los usuarios de obras bajo copyright. Continue reading →

Facebook: une boîte de nuit?

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welcome_3.gifFacebook et son API sont devenus incontournables aujourd’hui, et ce, encore plus depuis l’annonce d’OpenSocial. Et pourtant, en tant que développeur, j’ai de la peine à voir dans ces sites les “plate-formes” dont la blogosphère n’en finit plus de parler. Et je ne suis pas le seul; dans ce court article, quelques extraits traduits de l’anglais ouvriront, je l’espère, un bon débat à propos des sites de networking, leurs cycles de popularité et leurs futurs. Continue reading →

Installing Xubuntu 7.10 on a G3 iBook

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Just a small post, pointing to the one and only solution to a known bug, that (incredibly) shipped with the public release of the PowerPC version of the latest Ubuntu distribution: 7.10 or “Gutsy Gibbon”. When installing that OS on a PowerPC G3 iBook (like mine), during the boot sequence the computer “freezes” (that is, the scrollbar stops running and the whole boot stops) and then you get a “BusyBox” screen, which is, needless to say, kind of a bummer.

The problem is that /dev/hda3 is not available (that is, your IDE internal hard disk) and of course, Xubuntu does not know what to do in that case. Kind of incredible, huh?

Well, the solution for that problem was in this answer of the Ubuntu Forums. Just follow the instructions there and you’ll succeed. Now I have a nice Xubuntu install in my good old and faithful G3 iBook (in double boot with Mac OS X “Jaguar”).

Miro: social puissance vidéo

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31_thumbs_100.jpgPour regarder des screencasts ou écouter des podcasts, on peut s’abonner à un (ou des) flux RSS, être notifié des nouvelles vidéos ou fichiers audio, et ensuite les télécharger manuellement pour les regarder ou écouter. Mais toutes ces opérations sont de trop avec Miro – un outil indispensable dans l’arsenal de tout “infovore”: en espagnol, “Miro” veut dire “Je regarde”, et justement, je vous propose de regarder Miro de plus près. Continue reading →

Building JUCE on Kubuntu 7.10

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JUCE is a gorgeous thing:

JUCE (Jules’ Utility Class Extensions) is an all-encompassing C++ class library for developing cross-platform applications. It’s particularly good for creating highly-specialised user interfaces and for handling graphics and sound.

For Mac OS X (with the Developer Tools installed) and Windows (using Visual Studio 6, 2003 or 2005), the library builds out-of the box (well, almost: on Windows you need to have QuickTime and the ASIO SDK installed). However, for Linux there are a couple of external dependencies.

This is a small tutorial (and a reminder for myself, as usual) for those interested in building JUCE on Kubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” (these instructions should also be useful for other Linux distributions, but I cannot tell for sure). Continue reading →

Little terminal trick

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If you have to delete a folder which contains locked files, the Mac OS X Finder won’t let you (because the “locked” flag is used precisely for that!). If you want to remove such folder (typically folders coming from a Subversion checkout have this problem) run these commands:


sudo chflags -R nouchg to_destroy/
sudo rm -r to_destroy/

Where “to_destroy” is the name of the folder that you want to get rid of. As always, be careful! There is no confirmation dialog whatsoever! You’ve been warned.