There's no Place Like ::1

Finally, it’s out! During SHiFT08, me and Hugo Reis decided to get into the alt.prt.sc bandwagon, and create our own show called FRAK!

Being a big fan of Internet TV (consuming almost 5Gb of Revision 3 per week), I fell in love with this kind of indie production. And with this “new media” thing, it’s very easy to offer useful content to a huge geek crowd, even with a small budget.

So episode 0 is an experiment. We just present the show, talk about our objectives, and scratch the surface on some geek tech stories.

Sorry English readers, all the content of the FRAK Show will be in Portuguese only.

We decided to leak episode 0 to get some feedback about our potential viewers, and to see if it would be worth to shoot the next real episode. So far, we received a lot of thumbs up (apart from some minor corrections :)), which made us very excited to take the next step on the show. t There are a lot of stuff on our TODO list, including getting a generic, work on technical problems with editing, a website/blog, RSS/iTunes/Miro feeds, and some support for viewer’s feedback. For now, just keep watching my blog or follow me on twitter.

In the meantime, I would really like to thank Pedro Aniceto for allowing us to use the awesome TBStore auditorium, the guys from alt.prt.sc for the support and logistical help, and Nuno Loureiro for the hard video editing work.

Take a screenshot of your desktop right now, don’t change anything, post it on your blog!

Ever since the beginning, Phusion Passenger (aka, mod_rails) impressed me. I still can’t believe how such a small team managed to build a simple solution to this complex problem that is Ruby on Rails deployment.

I’ve heard in the past about the Passenger benefits. When I first tried it, the only thing I kept thinking was “this is exactly like PHP! this is exactly like PHP!”...

Moreover, using Passenger and Apache, you can get much better resource management, since it starts and stops instances based on the load of the website.

I think enough time has passed since the public release of Passenger. Since I’m still running this Rails blog on a Via C3 @ 533Mhz, I decided to replace my previous setup (lighttpd proxying to a mongrel instance, monitored by monit) to a new Apache2 + Passenger.

Working on a startup is certainly a great challenge that has both good and bad things. One of the worst things is the amount of blog posts I’ve made on the last 6 months: 15 (fifteen!). This is almost 1 post every two weeks. As a reference point, on my last job I was writing 2 blogs posts per week :-)

Anyway, 6 months ago I decided to take the challenge and work for a startup in Lisbon called 7syntax. 7syntax is a young software startup with a small team of great talents. The main project we develop is called handivi, and that’s the main motivation for this blog post.

Handivi is all about you sharing experiences with everyone or just your friends from anywhere. It’s a free, easy to use application for Java™ enabled phones on 3G mobile networks, where you can express yourself, create and socialize using photos, videos and messaging.

The first alpha version of handivi saw the light of the world by 29th August. Celso made a good job showing the alpha’s main features. It was a very exciting moment for all the team because we showed our “baby” to the world!

With this release, we managed to gather a lot of feedback from our brave testers. That feedback is extremely useful to us, since it will guide our development efforts in the near future.

In the meantime, I became the Lead Mobile Developer at 7syntax. This means I gathered a lot of knowledge about the J2ME programming, including device fragmentation problems, limitations of the current technology, under the hood details and optimization strategies. You can expect some blog posts about the things I’ve discovered, if I managed to get free time to write about them :)

If you want to keep in touch with 7syntax and handivi, please subscribe our blog feed.

Next week I will fly to Copenhagen, Denmark to participate at the YAPC::EU::2008. This year’s conference theme is Beautiful Perl. Although I think Perl can be used to make beautiful things, I never thought Perl code is or can be beautiful, even when I did Perl on a daily basis.

Being at 2 YAPC conferences (Braga and Birmingham), I quickly realized how great the Perl community is, and even though I don’t find Perl interesting anymore, I always look forward to meet great people and great minds at YAPCs.

I also took the opportunity to submit a talk that eventually got accepted. So on Thursday, 14th, I’ll be talking about Makefile::Parallel again. I hope that the talk can ignite some interesting discussions, and to gather some ideas about possible directions of the module.

It will be my first time too in Copenhagen and Denmark, so I’m really looking forward to know the city! If you are reading this and will attend to YAPC, get in touch with me and maybe I’ll buy you a beer :-) (I’m root (at) cpan)