lang:en « Avi Alkalay

Convert DBF to CSV on Linux with Perl and XBase

Published: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:39:18 +0000 Updated: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:44:53 +0000 |

I spent a few days to figure out how to make a simple conversion of a DBF file into a plain text file as comma separated values (CSV) or tab separated values (TSV) in a batch/command line way. I was almost setting up an OpenOffice.org server because it seamed to be the only packaged solution to [...]

That's why I disable SELinux right away

Published: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:53:29 +0000 Updated: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:00:15 +0000 |

1 comment

Folks at the Fedora Project devel list asked us to enable and use SELinux.

So I sent this reply:

SELinux blocks some very basic functionality I use in my Linux systems. That’s why I disable it right away.

SELinux is too complex to learn on the moment that you are setting up a new system and want to deliver [...]

Multimedia ● Web 2.0

The Flash versus Apple War

Published: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:29:52 +0000 Updated: Mon, 24 May 2010 18:04:14 +0000 |

1 comment

This is my reaction to The iPad provides the ultimate browsing experience? that appeared on the Flash Blog.

I’m not an Apple fan but I tend to disagree with that campaign of Flash support.

Clearly, this is another platform war. The Apple platform versus the Flash platform. It is very strategic for Apple to keep the attention [...]

Multimedia

Samsung LED TV with Medi@ 2.0 is not ready for me

Published: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:18:49 +0000 Updated: Mon, 24 May 2010 18:03:52 +0000 |

4 comments

Today I spent several hours testing the almost amazing Samsung LED TV on a local store. More specifically the UN40B7000 model.

The image quality is great and all but I was more interested in the digital multimedia features included in these new models, branded Medi@ 2.0 (or Media 2.0). You actually plug these TVs on your [...]

Linux & Open Source ● Web 2.0

Drupal is Gonna Change Your World

Published: Sat, 12 Dec 2009 09:37:33 +0000 Updated: Mon, 24 May 2010 18:03:05 +0000 |

comments

Forget expensive and proprietary MS Access. Forget about applications built on top of complex muiltitab spreadsheets. Drupal with Content Construction Kit, Views and Faceted Search are the right and way better solution for you.

Forget about building Flash-only web sites. Drupal and its modules is a better and semantically correct way for your Web 2.0 site.

Forget [...]

Music & Podcasts

Ambient Music

Published: Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:31:40 +0000 Updated: Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:31:54 +0000 |

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You can say whatever you want, I’ll keep saying that Ambient Music (the style of music you can listen in albuns such as Buddha-Bar, Café Del Mar etc) is merely a fusion between New Age and João Gilberto’s Bossa Nova.

Linux & Open Source ● Multimedia

Organize fast and precisely your MP3 files with ID3v2 tags

Published: Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:32:37 +0000 Updated: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:59:58 +0000 |

comments

This is a set of personal notes and a tutorial for everyone about how to correctly organize and tag MP3 files using the id3 command line tool.

General way to tag MP3 files:

id3 -M -2 [-v] [-t title] [-a artist] [-l album] [-n tracknr] [-y year] [-g genre] [-c comment] file.mp3

Recursively tag with ID3v2 a tree [...]

Linux & Open Source ● Multimedia

A Media Center at Home

Published: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:39:38 +0000 Updated: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:08:28 +0000 |

2 comments

Since we got a 52″ Samsung LCD TV almost a year ago as a gift from relatives, I knew it was time to attach to it a dedicated computer and have a full digital media experience in the living room. I’ll tell you here my experiences building and running this thing that makes all my [...]

Ecology & Environment

Earth Clock

Published: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:30:17 +0000 Updated: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:04:19 +0000 |

comments

Poodwaddle.com

Help save our planet !!

Linux & Open Source

I was invaded again: more passwords for you not to use

Published: Sun, 28 Dec 2008 12:44:36 +0000 Updated: Sun, 28 Dec 2008 12:44:36 +0000 |

1 comment

It took some time to have my honeypot invaded again in a useful way. They were attacking constantly but were using it only to connect to IRC rooms. Useless for me.

But yesterday a sweet cracker invaded it again and left behind about 240000 non-unique combinations of user+password he was using to invade others.

They were all [...]

Web 2.0

WordPress 2.7 Eye Candy

Published: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:47:10 +0000 Updated: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:47:10 +0000 |

1 comment

Although WordPress 2.7 is almost only eye candy, it is great useful eye candy. The user interface is much much more practical, AJAXed, nice and fast.

I recommend an immediate upgrade. It worked flawlessly with my complex homemade theme, my homemade plugins, plus all other plugins I use throughout my blog.

Web 2.0

Yawasp Ultimate Anti-Spam Solution

Published: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:20:07 +0000 Updated: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:36:53 +0000 |

3 comments

Spam fighting is a difficult job. Many spammers are too smart for Akismet and I was spending too much time cleaning comment spam.

Captcha-based anti-spam methods are ok but they hurt too much the usability and user experience.

Then I finally found Yawasp WordPress plugin that implements an innovative anti-spam method. It makes the comment form field [...]

Linux & Open Source

Compromised Passwords

Published: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:00:11 +0000 Updated: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:21:37 +0000 |

13 comments

I love to see crackers attacking my computers. I even wrote a Linux Magazine article about a successful invasion (portuguese).

Since recently, I leave a virtual machine with an easy password ready to be attacked, just to see these crackers’ leftovers, their rootkits and what they’ll do once they brake into my system.

Guess what. Once inside, [...]

Info & Biz Technology

Mac OS X as a Virtual Machine

Published: Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:27:30 +0000 Updated: Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:33:27 +0000 |

5 comments

Pay attention to this screenshot. This is Mac OS running as a VMware virtual machine.

Pretty cool as a proof of technology. But let me tell you, this is quite a useless virtual brick.

The UI is extremely slow. I had to remove the background to improve it a [...]

Community and Society ● Ecology & Environment ● Info & Biz Technology

Information Worker

Published: Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:46:52 +0000 Updated: Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:47:32 +0000 |

8 comments

Yesterday I met a colleague at IBM Brazil that moved to a world wide position. He is now living in Manhattan, New York.

His everyday routine, as most Information Workers nowadays, is to talk to people, make phone conference calls, e-mails, design and communicate strategies, make some data consolidation and reports, instant messaging, etc.

Since most of [...]

Chronicles ● Community and Society ● Web 2.0

Crossfox Firefox

Published: Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:35:14 +0000 Updated: Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:55:19 +0000 |

1 comment

The kind of thing you can find circulating in São Paulo, friday at noon.

Community and Society ● Metaphysics ● Travels

Escher’s Print Gallery Explained

Published: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:29:56 +0000 Updated: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:29:56 +0000 |

5 comments

I was oweing this for the lovers of M. C. Escher works.

Last July I visited the wonderful Escher Museum in Den Haag, Holland. One of my preferred works is the Print Gallery where a painting gets mixed with the surrounding real world in a precise geometrical way, as you can see bellow (borrowed from aixa.ugr.es/escher/table.html).

Metaphysics ● Multimedia

First Views of Our Baby

Published: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:40:40 +0000 Updated: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:19:16 +0000 |

12 comments

This is the 12 weeks plus 4 days ultrasound result of our baby.

We don’t know yet if its a boy or a girl. Stay tuned, it will be revealed in the next one.

He is growing fast and we are looking forward for his arrival in february.

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

var params = [...]

Mobility ● Multimedia

A Test with High Definition Video Conferencing

Published: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:58:58 +0000 Updated: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:05:24 +0000 |

4 comments

I just participated in very successful proof of technology with Siemens OpenScape video conferencing products.

We made a point-to-point SIP high definition video conference over a local area network. Another test used H.323 protocol. We also included my SIP-enabled Nokia E61i in the conference over the office WiFi network in a direct multipoint call simply calling [...]

Chronicles ● Info & Biz Technology

What is this ?

Published: Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:08:50 +0000 Updated: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:17:24 +0000 |

5 comments

In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a Hard Disk Drive (HDD).

Its weight was close to 1 ton and had a capacity of 5MB. So now please do not complain about the lack of storage in your 2GB pen drive.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Heaven for Brand Owners

Published: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:35:06 +0000 Updated: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:24:05 +0000 |

2 comments

There is this website called Brand Tags that lets people quickly tag brands that pop up in a web 2.0 style.

Then you can also browse brand names and see their tag cloud.

For example, Linux is associated with “penguin”, “free”, “tux”, “cute”, “free” etc. Windows gets “computer”, “crap”, “crash”, “monopoly”, “sucks” etc. Apple gets “apple”, “computer”, [...]

OpenDocument Format

OOXML in the ISO’s limbo

Published: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:25:16 +0000 Updated: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:25:16 +0000 |

2 comments

ISO has a press release about the 4 countries (India, Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela) and their appeal against the OOXML standardization.

The important part of it is this:

According to the ISO/IEC rules, a document which is the subject of an appeal cannot be published as an ISO/IEC International Standard while the appeal is going on. [...]

Gourmet

Concha Y Toro Terrunyo Carménère 2005

Published: Tue, 13 May 2008 07:36:20 +0000 Updated: Tue, 20 May 2008 08:43:58 +0000 |

comments

Great wine. Recomended. By the way, 2005 is a great year for chilean wines.

Info & Biz Technology

Unicode – Уникод – יוניקוד – يونيكود

Published: Fri, 09 May 2008 22:30:05 +0000 Updated: Sat, 10 May 2008 08:17:24 +0000 |

comments

Community and Society ● Info & Biz Technology

Iron Man and Programmers

Published: Thu, 08 May 2008 10:34:28 +0000 Updated: Thu, 08 May 2008 10:34:28 +0000 |

4 comments

The Iron Man movie is all about programmers. Being challenged and have to invent something that will make you get rid of hand work, the adventure of a project, to mold, test and debug, and the joy of having a prototype inspiring the next perfect design.

Just don’t miss it. The metal man movie [...]

Community and Society ● Web 2.0

Cool Election-Related Google Maps AJAX Application

Published: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:09:03 +0000 Updated: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:00:48 +0000 |

1 comment

Isn’t this web app very neat? You must interact to feel it.

Info & Biz Technology

Developers: ISO Standards Do Matter

Published: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:12:35 +0000 Updated: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:27:15 +0000 |

3 comments

Many developers are clamming that good specifications are more important than standards, specially now that the OOXML process opened to the public the dungeons of ISO processes and how the organization produces standards. This is a clear example on how ISO’s reputation is compromised.

But unfortunately “ISO standards” are what governments tend to use. These are the words they put in their Request For Proposals when they are going to buy things. These “ISO standards” are the words they use to claim how they’ll interoperate and trade across borders. And also how public institutions will interoperate with private institutions. Over time, it defines also how private institutions use [...]

OpenDocument Format

Norway doesn’t want OOXML (and I agree)

Published: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 04:20:09 +0000 Updated: Fri, 11 Apr 2008 04:20:09 +0000 |

1 comment

There was an ISO/IEC/JTC1 meeting in Oslo, Norway wednesday and the local community protested against OOXML and demanded more integrity in ISO’s processes. I couldn’t agree more.

Photos by Martin Bekkelund. More info on Zak Greant’s blog.