Video quality while on 3G
The same day I got the iPad 3G, I noticed a very contrasting video quality while using Wi-Fi and while using 3G. Videos watched on Youtube would have HD quality (Wi-Fi); same videos, while on 3G, would show horribly. Yet, videos on Apple, while on 3G or Wi-Fi, would show perfectly. All that whether using the app or the web browser, tested both.

Is it Youtube serving a very low quality video to 3G users? Is it AT&T doing it? Is it something built-in on iOS? ⌘ Read more

Thoughts on Flash
Steve Jobs shared with us this month his thoughts on Flash:

“Flash was created during the PC era —for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards —all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch vi … ⌘ Read more

Nixpkgs 0.12 released
Nixpkgs\
 0.12 has been released. See the release\
 notes for details. Meanwhile, the Nixpkgs trunk has been
updated
to GCC 4.3.3, Glibc 2.9 and X.org 7.4. ⌘ Read more

Hydra
Nix
and NixOS
releases are now built in Hydra, the new Nix-based
continuous build system. Hydra replaces our old Nix-based\
 build farm, which will be phased out soon. There are
several advantages over the old build farm: the build tasks for
a project are scheduled and published separat … ⌘ Read more

Linux.com article about Nix
There is an article on Linux.com about Nix: “Nix fixes dependency\
 hell on all Linux distributions”. ⌘ Read more

Nix 0.12 released
Nix\
 0.12 has been released. The most important change is that
Nix no longer needs Berkeley DB to store metadata, but there are
many other improvements. See the release\
 notes for details. ⌘ Read more

DisNix paper accepted at HotSWUp
The paper “Atomic Upgrading of Distributed Systems” (by Sander
van der Burg, Eelco Dolstra and Merijn de Jonge) has been
accepted for presentation at the First ACM Workshop on Hot\
Topics in Software Upgrades (HotSWUp). A draft\
of the paper is available. It describes Sander’s master’s
thesis research on DisNix, an extension … ⌘ Read more

NixOS paper accepted at ICFP!
The paper “NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution” (by
Eelco Dolstra and Andres Löh) has been accepted
for presentation at the 2008\
International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP).
It describes NixOS in much greater detail than last year’s
HotOS paper, an … ⌘ Read more

Website / SVN repositories moved
The Nix website has moved to nixos.org (hosted at TU Delft). The Subversion
repositories have moved to svn.nixos.org. See
this\
mailing list posting for information about moving existing
SVN working copies. ⌘ Read more

LDTA 2008 paper
Eelco Dolstra presented the paper “Maximal\
Laziness — An Efficient Interpretation Technique for Purely\
Functional DSLs” at 8th\
Workshop on Language\
Description, Tools and Applications (LDTA 2008). It’s about
caching of evaluation results in the Nix expression evaluator as
a technique to make a simple term-rewriting evaluator efficient.
Slides are [here](h … ⌘ Read more

Jacquard grant proposal accepted!
The Jacquard\
program of
NWO and EZ has granted funding for the Nix-related project “Pull
Deployment of Services” (PDS), which is about improving the
deployment of software and services in complex heterogenous
environments. The grant consists of 368 K€ for a PhD student (4
years) and a postdoc (3 years). If you’re interested in these
positions, please h … ⌘ Read more

Within ten days!

Thank you for submitting your registration to Microsoft Heroes Happen Here: 2008 Launch Events.

You can print this page for your records using the “Print” button at right. Please expect to receive a confirmation email from [long email] within ten business days.

The key words here are “within ten business days”. Ten “business” days. A confirmation email! Do you find that as crazy as I do? What in the world!? If there are using Exchange, and Microsoft web technologies to … ⌘ Read more

New NixOS ISOs

Image

New NixOS installation CD images for i686 and
x86_64 are available,
which is a good thing as the previous ones were already a few
months old. The new images are Nix 0.11-based, contain Memtest86+ as a
convenience, should support more SATA drives, an … ⌘ Read more

Yahoo! and the future of the Internet
Official Google Blog: Yahoo! and the future of the Internet

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft – despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses – to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between the … ⌘ Read more

Nix 0.11 released
Nix\
 0.11 has been released. This is a major new release
representing over a year of development. The most important
improvement is secure multi-user support. It also features many
usability enhancements and language extensions, many of them
prompted by NixOS, the purely functional Linux distribution
based on Nix. See the [release\
 notes](https://web.archive.org/web/20140913055323/https://releases.nixos.org … ⌘ Read more

Want the darn thing?
Beta of XP update made public, A blog by Ina Fried, CNET News.com

Microsoft issued a release candidate version of XP SP3 in November and expanded its testing earlier this month, promising the public test version would come at some later date.

For anyone who still wants to try the darn thing, Microsoft says, the beta should be up on Microsoft’s Web site later Tuesday and ready in final for … ⌘ Read more

Nixpkgs 0.11 released
Nixpkgs\
 0.11 has been released. See the release\
 notes for details. ⌘ Read more

OpenOffice in Nixpkgs

Image

Commits mailing list
There is now a mailing\
list (nix-commits@cs.uu.nl) that you can
subscribe to if you want to receive automatic commit
notifications from the Nix Subversion repository. ⌘ Read more

Two visions?
Mark posted yesterday that he will be working for Google, since out of the “ two visions” of the web, he says, Google is the right one. I am not web savvy nor I really care much about it, but I am sure there is more than two visions on the web, there is not right and wrong, but many, many, many shades in between. But the way I see it, the bottom line in my mind: he is going to work for someone who will pay him very well. Yes, bottom line is all a … ⌘ Read more

New build farm hardware at TUD

Image

Here’s what we have: 5 Intel Core 2 Duo DualCore machines
with 1GB RAM, 2 Mac minis with 1,83-GHz Intel Core
Duo-processor, another Core 2 Duo a UPS to deal with spikes in
power supp … ⌘ Read more

Nixpkgs 0.10 released
Nixpkgs\
 0.10 has been released. See the release\
 notes for details. ⌘ Read more

Nix 0.10.1 released
Nix\
 0.10.1 has been released. It fixes two obscure bugs that
shouldn’t affect most users. ⌘ Read more

Craigslist founder will not sell

The founder of craigslist, the free social-networking and classifieds Web site, said on Thursday he is not interested in selling out, just hours after MySpace.com was valued at $15 billion.

“Who needs the money? We don’t really care,” Craig Newmark said in an interview at the Picnic ‘06 Cross Media Week conference in Amsterdam.

“If you’re living comfortably, what’s the point of having more?” Newmark said.

[…]

… ⌘ Read more

Nix 0.10 released
Nix\
 0.10 has been released. This release has many
improvements and bug fixes; see the release\
 notes for details. ⌘ Read more

Too busy, too much money or…
Our College is trying to re-design. Our web manager has been assigned to some other project of more importance (Dean’s order), so he can’t tackle the conversion of the existing website to a full blown CMS driven one. Other than the locals we have seeing and sit through presentations and proposals, I sent emails –very brief ones, but to the point– to Dan Cederholm, [Dan Bejamin](http://www.hivelogic.com/ “Da … ⌘ Read more

Nixpkgs 0.9 released
Nixpkgs\
 0.9 has been released. ⌘ Read more

PhD thesis defended
Eelco Dolstra
defended his PhD\
 thesis on the purely functional deployment model. ⌘ Read more

Nix 0.9.2 released
Nix\
 0.9.2 has been released released. This is a bug fix
release that addresses some problems on Mac OS X. ⌘ Read more

Nix 0.9 released
Nix 0.9
has been released. This is a new major release that provides
quite a few performance improvements and bug fixes, as well as a
number of new features. Read the release\
 notes for details. ⌘ Read more

Service deployment paper accepted for SCM-12
The paper “Service Configuration Management” (accepted at the
12th\
 International Workshop on Software Configuration\
 Management) describes how we can rather easily deploy
“services” (e.g., complete webserver configurations such as our
Subversion server) through
Nix by treating the non-component parts (such as configur … ⌘ Read more

They advertise with the best
Imagine my surprise when I saw the following Google Ad showing under one of my posts this morning:

[Was a screenshot of a Microsoft MSN advertisement on Google]

I guess Microsoft knows who is the best, right? I mean, the only way to see that advertising (other than serving adds on your own web space) is by searching the web using Google. I think it is funny… and interesting. ⌘ Read more

Single sign on
Since I am going to start migrating all my web logins to a single sign on approach (using Chris Zarate SuperGenPass), I think the best way to start is by saving the bookmarklet I will have to use over and over. There is a Greasemonkey version available, which has much more features than this bookmarklet version. I will use the latest because it works with all browsers.

The bookmarklet is: Single Sign on.. Drag and drop it on you … ⌘ Read more

Patching paper accepted for CBSE 2005
The paper “Efficient Upgrading in a Purely Functional Component
Deployment Model” has been accepted at CBSE 2005.
It describes how we can deploy updates to Nix packages
efficiently, even if “fundamental” packages like Glibc are
updated (which cause a rebuild of all dependent packages), by
deploying binary patches between components in the Nix store.
Includes tec … ⌘ Read more

Sunday morning rants
As I previously wrote, I believe IE is no match to Firefox. I will tell everyone I know about its problems, I will show those to them if I can. I will praise the goods of Firefox, so everyone I know will enjoy web browsing as much as I am. But…

One thing is not using IE and another thing is not serving pages to those using it. That’s plain wrong. It is like going to a japanese restaurant and have sushi … ⌘ Read more

The worse Web Browser
Not too long ago I was an Internet Explorer fan. The pages I went to looked fine under it, the experience seemed rich. There were no complains. Then I started fiddling with CSS and moving away from tables. I experienced the advantages of the PNG format and I loved it. I experienced functionability I never saw before. I got tired of hearing about major problems and running security updates. I got my eyes opened.

I wonder why it took that long. Perhaps Mozilla Firefox was not that polis … ⌘ Read more

Philosophical confussion
I do not like unsolicited pop-up windows. I like even less unsolicited browser resizing. Missuse of web cookies blows and should be illegal. Junk and spam emails are a disease (well, not for me, since I use TMDA on my John Companies server and I get zero spam) that is getting out of hand. Porno and the sex industry for sure are a profitable business; most of the spam today adver … ⌘ Read more