Tonight is the premier of the long-expected movie adaptation of the Alatriste novels, created by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The plot is set in XVIIth Century’s Madrid, when the Spanish empire was beginning its decline. With Viggo Mortensen as Captain Alatriste and lots of other first-line Spanish actors and actresses in the cast, I can’t wait to see it (but I will, at least until tomorrow ;)

No queda sino batirse!

I have just downloaded Inbox during the lunch time and launched it, and then hibernated the machine, so I don’t yet have an opinion. But looks very nice!!

More comments when I test it…

Update: Yeah well… I can say it’s going to be very nice working with Inbox. The beta, though, still doesn’t do automatic processing of items, but looks very promising. I have decided I’ll pony up for it, without waiting to the MacZot or anything.

Via the Mephisto site, I’ve found that one of the projects that I have in the freezer (namely, the client-based syntax highlighter) already has a working implementation by Dan Webb. I don’t know how well it works yet, I’ll have to try it. I’m curious as to its support for nested languages and complex expressions (judging from the language definition files, it is only based on regexen, so I don’t know if Dan will have added support for that)

In any case, it’s in a more advanced state than mine and working on Safari, too! Cheers Dan!

Well, since Typo kept being a resource hog, and with all the pain that this move induces, I’ve taken the decision to try mephisto. Let’s see if with it, I’ll be able to keep the site running… I’ve begun by moving all my posts from Typo (had to put some dummy IPs for the older articles for that to work). The static pages, the themes with mint cookies and all that will soon follow.

Meanwhile, please be patient if you see some glitches. Looks like sometimes the db queries consume all the available memory :(

Update a few minutes later: Ho-humm… I like Typo but it’s still a resource hog, so looks like I will have to switch to Mephisto or something… oh, look, it says it supports multiple sites… I think I might be migrating sooner that I thought

ouch… too much without posting. Typo has been periodically segfaulting, to make it worse.

But I’m still alive. And preparing my comeback.

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Earlier this year, I realized I missed developing for the web. I haven’t stopped doing my late-night rails hacking sessions, but is not the same when you do it for a living and you have justification to do it all the time.

So, it is with great pleasure that I can announce that today, I’ve started working as a software architect for Polymita Technologies, my new employer, where I will be able to work on web based projects (architecting, most likely ;) again. They do BPM (Business Process Mgmt.) and similar kinds of development. Mostly Java™ based, for now, since that is what most middleware prefers. There will be time enough to show them rails in the future ;)

So, what is a polymita, I hear you asking? Well, it turns out it is a species of snail (or should I say gasteropod?) I would point you to the corresponding Wikipedia article, but no one has bothered to write one yet. And I am not the resident biologist, so I am not qualified to do it. Googling for that term, however, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Someone implemented indeed something that I’ve been talking on and off for quite some time now:

Ever since I moved to Textdrive and left my ADSL based self-hosted server, I’ve been missing the possibility of running Apache Gallery. I’ve wanted to make for a long time a ruby-based (or rather, rails-based) version of it for a long time, but never had the opportunity of setting some time aside to that task. Mostly because it involved compiling the imlib2 ruby support and things like that.

This port of Apache Gallery to rails, RGallery, looks not exactly how I envisioned it: I intended to use imlib2 (it appears to me more lightweight than the whole RMagick) and looks like it is database backed, while the original was simply filesystem based (arguably, this could have been the reason of its increased resource usage). However, it was dead simple to put a gallery online. Just upload a folder with pics, add a couple of text files for metadata, and voilà! No reindexing, no nothing.

I will try it soon and perhaps I implement it here, or perhaps not. I shall see… Of course, I am a bit constrained of space at TXD at the moment to store my whole full-res photo-library, but at least some pics… I hope to reduce anyway my resource usage once Typo becomes multiblog capable.

I’m about to finish ‘the Broker’, from John Grisham, which I picked up at the Chicago airport newstand, to help me pass the many hours of flight that I had before me.

Now, I’ve been bitten by the spy-novel bug and would like to pick on John Clancy’s series on Jack Ryan. I have seen the FAQ online describing the list of novels that compose the so-called Ryanverse. Now, my question is, should I read them in its published order or in its storyline order? What’s best?

And, while we are at it, any other spy-novel book you would recommend? I’m interested in non US-centric agencies, if such a thing exists (perhaps something by Ian Fleming?)

I’m slowly recovering from the jet lag induced by the ten timezones of difference between Anchorage and Barcelona. Haven’t worked much at nights (nor days for that matter ;)

<typo:lightbox img=”112641133” thumbsize=”small” />

I’ve finally bit the bullet and upgraded my flickr account (from the free one) so that I could upload my pics (because waiting for that mythical rails-based gallery application is unrealistic, if I want to show the pics). I uploaded the pics from the digital camera, and I am uploading the scanned pics from the reflex one in batches. You will be able to tell them apart from the lack of EXIF info, which incidentally makes them appear out of order. EXIF info is probably the most important reason that will make me buy a SLR camera one of these days.

Fortunately enough, the digital camera (a Nikon E4200) has the posibility of specifying the timezone you’re in, so I didn’t need to readjust the internal clock -only the drift induced by replacing the batteries. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until we were in Alaska, so the pics from Seattle will have strange timestamps.

Anyway, go see the Alaska set now. Don’t mind the Spanish descriptions, you can comment them in English as well.