Nethazard.net

There are several services to host your project’s code on the web for free. But recently there’s been some outages on “very reliable” services like Gmail, Amazon and let’s not get started with Twitter. Also some service policies may bother you like Google code rejecting a lot of software licenses, and Facebook will never delete your data from their servers. You must start thinking on a better way to publish the code for a project of yours.

The Free Software Foundation published an article about the free project hosting alternatives Sourceforge, Google Code and Launchpad, and what the problems are for each. They recommend Savanah, the free software hosting for free or open source projects.

El artículo de la FSF esta disponible también en español

What’s nice about it is that if you don’t want to host your code on their servers, you can download the code and host it on your own.

But if hosting is not your main concern, I like the fact that, because its free software, it can rapidly respond to support requests.

The features of savanah are:

• Support for CVS, Subversion, GNU Arch, Git and Mercurial
• Integrated bug tracking system
• Mailing lists
• And downloads area with mirrors

This is the only service I know that provides support for so many version control systems and its completely free. Since I use Git, this is great because I no longer have to be on the non-free (nor as in beer, or as in freedom) Github anymore, and with the features a big player like Sourceforge has.

The matrix code image is provided by David Asch under Creative Commons

The Levitating,
Meditating, Flute-playing Gnu logo is a GNU GPL’ed image provided
by the Nevrax Design Team.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Recently I had to edit a huge amount of files (239 in total) scattered in a bunch of directories and subdirectories.

What I had to do was add the Google Analytics script snippet to a part of a website that was being maintained by a pair of <your favorite bad adjective here>.

So, first I thought of using sed or awk or something like that. But the reality is that I don’t know how to use this tools and don’t have time to start investigating and testing.

But wait, I have Emacs! So, the first thing to do is find and list all the files you need to edit.

1. Open the parent directory

   Use dired to open the parent directory where all the files and directories are. Open dired with:
   M-x find-dired
   and enter the path for the directory.

2. Find the files

   Emacs will then ask you “Run find (with args): ”. So if you need to edit all HTML files, or in my case, PHP files, you type “-name *.php”. If you want all files regardless of type, enter “-type f”. Basically you can type in any arguments you want if you know how to use the find command.

3. Mark the files you need to edit

   A list of all found files will appear in a dired buffer. Now you need to mark the files you want to work with. Typically you’ll mark all files since you already filtered them. Press “t” to toggle marks and all files will get marked. Or if you want to hand pick them, move the cursor to the file line or name and press “m”.

4. Do the find and replace

   Type:M-x dired-do-query-replace-regexp to run the find and replace command. It will prompt you first for the text you want to find, then will prompt you with the text you want to replace it with.

   Then Emacs will start the find and replace operation, and will prompt you on every find if you want to replace the text or skip it. To replace, type “y”, to skip to the next find type “n”. To replace all occurrences without asking, type “!”. To cancel the operation, type C-g.

5. Save the edited files

   Now that you’ve made all these changes, you need to save the files. To avoid saving manually all files, you can open ibuffer

   M-x ibuffer

   Which will list all you opened files (called buffers). Now, like in dired, you need to mark the buffers you want to work with. To mark all unsaved files, type “* u” and then type “S” (that’s shift+s, for the capital letter) to save them.

Done!

Easy and without sweat.

photo by zyphichore on Flickr.

Popularity: 17% [?]

There’s been some reports on ISPs slowing down your Internet connection if you use BitTorrent or cutting your VoIP calls and many other nasty things.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a free software tool to check your connection for ISP’s bad behavior. It will spot IP packets which are forged or modified between clients, inform you, and give you copies of the modified packets.

Unfortunately for the non geeky users, there is no installer packages to easily install it on any Linux distribution, nor there is any GUI. Its a command line tool that you have to compile yourself. The project is hosted on sourceforge.net for you to grab if you’d like to make a package for it.

But anyway, its a great thing to have, if your ISP is messing with your traffic, you should know about it (and change ISP). I’ll be giving it a try soon, because I’m getting suspicious about this cable company in Monterrey city.

To run the tests, I recommend you to first use the wiki page. There’s a little guide to test different protocols.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I just bumped with this lecture about dreams and life. It’s by Randy Pausch, a virtual reality expert and now dying from cancer. He teaches us his last lecture, which is about how to conduct your life to accomplish your dreams.

It has a very emotional and unexpected twist at the end. Loved it.

Popularity: 2% [?]

A few weeks ago I posted about me giving a talk at Unitec Monterrey about DRM and mexican copyright law titled: “DRM: ¿derechos o restricciones?”. Basically is an introduction to what DRM and copyright is, according to mexican law.

I have finally transcoded and published it on Google Video. Slides are also available as PDF and Open Document ODP.

Popularity: 2% [?]