The question in most of the Free Software advocates right now is what will happen to Suns Free Software products:
1- MySQL
2- OpenOffice
3- Netbeans
4- ……

Although MySQL seems the first candidate to die I guess this is one of the products with the best chance to survive*. Databases is the core business for Oracle so they will probably keep the product and in time make it more Oracle friendly. So that users that develop for MySQL can easily migrate to Oracle when requirements increase.
Right now Oracle has the Oracle Express Edition but installation is sometimes complex and the limitations to the CPU/Memory/Disk Space make some developers run away. PostgreSQL is very good, but does not have the momentum. So MySQL is not a brand that any company wants to kill.

* – The Free Software products always have a chance to survive if the “Mother Company” kills them. The community can always pick the product and develop it. That is one of the base ideas that made Stallman create the concept. But it is always easier for a product to survive if there is a cash flow of some sort.

I’m running Windows XP inside vmware. The host machine is running Linux (Ubuntu jaunty). I was having issues with the keyboard where the arrow keys would not work, or would do the wrong thing (down key would open the start menu).

I found a solution that involved editing ~/.vmware/config and add a line like:
xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true
But this would not work properly as Vmware would think I had a Japanese keyboard and some keys would not work.

I found another solution and this one seems to be working fine. Instead of the previous code add this to your ~/.vmware/config:

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0x138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0x135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0x148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0x150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0x152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0x153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0x147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0x149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0x151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0x46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0x100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

Laura:
Chegaste no dia 21 a este mundo. Não tenho palavras para descrever o que senti quando te vi e peguei pela primeira vez, mas consigo dizer que foi a melhor sensação do mundo.

Raquel:
Chegou a nossa filha….. Chegou a nossa filha…..

A todos os leitores:
Estou aqui a olhar para o écran e não sei o que escrever. Nada me parece correcto. Tudo me parece demasiado pequeno ao pé desta sensação forte cá dentro que me faz o cérebro parar. Digam só uma coisa a este pai babádo…. Não é a bebé mais bonita que já viram?

This beatifull fish is now mine. But it was breed by Martinho Brazão. If you are looking for Betta fish you can be sure his fish will be sent in very good packaging.

Apple should add thunderbird+lightning support to at least iTunes on Windows. Not every windows user has Outlook installed.

Right now almost all options to do this include some extra softwares (jailbroken iPhone) or thunderbird plugins and Google accounts. And I may not want my data in Google.
If you do not mind having data in Google read on. Right now I just want to sync Calendar events.

As I need to have data synced I’ll post my findings were. So stay tunned.
[UPDATE 2009-02-10]
All this syncing is dangerous. The iPhone will delete all contacts and/or calendar events on the phone when adding a external sync.

Two solutions so far for Contacts and Calendar:

1- Get your company to install Exchange or one of the Free Software alternatives. And then just add the account on the iPhone and search for info on how to get Lightning to get the data from there.

[New Update 2009-02-15 15:17] There is no need to use the Nuevasync Service
2- This is the one I use. It involves having a Google Calendar account and Sync the iPhone and Lightning there. In the iPhone follow the instructions in the Google Mobile Sync page. To have Lightning use the calendar just add a new Calendar of type CalDAV and in the url put: https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/YOUREACCOUNT@gmail.com/events .

There is no “Sync now” and events will be propagated auto-magically. In my case if I have calendar open on the iPhone and add events in Lightning they propagate in 3 to 5 seconds.

Why you should use the Wiimote writs band at all times:

After many years running on my home server this blog is now hosted at lylix. I went to them because it was the only Gentoo/Funtoo VPS provider I could find:)

If something does not work, please drop me a note

20 Weeks and we now know that were having a girl. We’ll name her Laura, and as you can see from the picture she has a beautiful nose…

A long long time ago I voiced about the need for a wiki in the Gentoo project. In those days Gentoo-Wiki was starting up.
For some reason or other people inside the project felt that having the users producing documentation was a bad idea. For some other reasons that I never understood the gentoo-wiki.com becamed a banned issue, and Gentoo developers were advised not to mention, and not to link to him. I wrote an extensive article about Gentoo on the Efika board that got some raised eyebrows because it was written on the Wiki.

Now Gentoo Wiki has been down for a few days. And according to the backup page it does not seem a fix is going to happen soon.

If we had taken this project under an umbrella a long time ago our users would not be missing on this very important resource.

My friend L0rd Saur0n made this nice retro chick image. I found it so hilarious that I just had to share.

VT100 in Bright Green

Lets say you have an Action that lists some items. And you have another action that adds items.

If you add an Item you can either just show a “blank” with the “All ok with addition” or even smarter is to use the ListAction. But how do you give feedback to the user that the addition was ok? Simple you just addActionMessage(“Item added ok”); on the first action and the message will be rendered by the s:actionmessage in the jsp of the second. Right? Wrong!!
Struts will “eat” ActionMessages and ActionErrors between the first and second action. But Glindholm solved the problem with a simple Interceptor.

If you like IDEA and use Struts 2 you can be happy to know that 8.0 release comes with a new Struts 2 plugin. There is a small tutorial on how to use it but it has some errors.
First the Action class should extend ActionSupport hand have proper setter methods:

package hello;
import com.opensymphony.xwork2.ActionSupport;
public class HelloWorld extends ActionSupport {
    private String username;
    private String message;
    public String getMessage(){
        return message;
    }
    public String execute(){
        message = "Hello, " + username + ".";
        return SUCCESS;
    }
    public String getUsername() {
        return username;
    }
    public void setUsername(String username) {
        this.username = username;
    }
}

Second the JSP file can have a proper action:

< %@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" language="java" %>
< %@ taglib prefix="s" uri="/struts-tags" %>
<html>
  <head><title>Simple jsp page</title></head>
  <body>
		Struts 2 Message: <s :property value="message" default="Guest." />
		<s :form method="GET" action="HelloWorld">
			Enter your name:<s :textfield name="username" />
			<s :submit value="Submit" />
		</s>
  </body>
</html>

And finally struts.xml can have the Action declared without the ugly unRESTFUL .action:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 
< !DOCTYPE struts PUBLIC
  "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 2.0//EN"
  "http://struts.apache.org/dtds/struts-2.0.dtd">
 
<struts>
    <package name="/" extends="struts-default">
		<action name="HelloWorld" class="hello.HelloWorld">
			<result name="success">/index.jsp</result>
		</action>
	</package>
</struts>

I really like IDEA when it comes to Java codding, and I can live with the quirks of the Struts 2 support. But one thing that makes me steam is the fact that I have to un-deploy and deploy the application for each change I make. That steals me hours every week.

The jPod book by Douglas Coupland is probably one of the most hilarious things I’ve read in the last few years. It is a fairly accurate picture of Pop-Geek culture (minus the homicidal, drug dealer mom and the homicidal, white meat smuggler friend).

If you have the chance get a copy and read it. You’ll love it.

My copy is going to be dropped in some bookcrossing site somewhere in Coimbra… Search for it

A new life is in the process. The joy of looking at a small paper with a tiny bean that is part of me is overwhelming.

Raquel told me that even with this small size she could hear the tiny human being hearts beating fast. Next time I’ll go and no matter what I’ll get to listen to it to.

Ecografia 7 Semanas

42 ? 42 is not the answer. Life is the answer.

Thunderbird was behaving strangely today not showing messages when I clicked them. I tried to close it and open it a couple of times but nothing happened.

I selected the compress folder option and now my mail from 2003 till now is gone!!!!!

Sad sad sad day. Really sad indeed.

The guid to cats that we all were waiting for.

For some days now Skype has released a new public release that has video support. Since day 0 the Gentoo users that were running the testing version could have an upgrade. A few more weeks and if no strange bugs pop up it will be marked as stable software.

So if you are still running the old skype and want to use the new one:

emerge --sync
echo "net-im/skype" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge skype


All in all there's something to give,
All in all there's something to do,
All in all there's something to live,
With you ...

14-06-2008

The company I work for (WIT-Software) launched it’s new corporate identity a few days ago. The new web site is up since…… some 15 minutes ago .

I hope you all like the new logo and image.