Nethazard.net

13%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

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I’m more into free software, the Apple stuff sometimes is too restrictive for me. Which brings me to the next quiz:

78% Geek

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The questions on that one were funny. I was the geekiest in my office.

Popularity: 1% [?]

For those who have to code in PHP, there’s a nice feature in Emacs that makes your coding horror times less stressing and helps you avoid typos and similar dumb errors.

Emacs 22.1 comes with flymake mode, a nice tool that makes syntax checking while you type out the file by highlighting the lines with errors and displays the error messages.

You can enable flymake to check PHP syntax by adding the following code on your .emacs or whatever Emacs customizations file you use:


;; Flymake PHP Extension
(require 'flymake)
(unless (fboundp 'flymake-php-init)
(defun flymake-php-init ()
(let* ((temp-file (flymake-init-create-temp-buffer-copy
'flymake-create-temp-inplace))
(local-file (file-relative-name
temp-file
(file-name-directory buffer-file-name))))
(list "php" (list "-f" local-file "-l")))))
(let ((php-ext-re "\\.php[345]?\\’”)
(php-error-re
“\\(?:Parse\\|Fatal\\) error: \\(.*\\) in \\(.*\\) on line \\([0-9]+\\)”))
(unless (assoc php-ext-re flymake-allowed-file-name-masks)
(add-to-list ‘flymake-allowed-file-name-masks
(list php-ext-re
‘flymake-php-init
‘flymake-simple-cleanup
‘flymake-get-real-file-name))
(add-to-list ‘compilation-error-regexp-alist-alist
(list ‘compilation-php
php-error-re 2 3 nil nil))
(add-to-list ‘compilation-error-regexp-alist ‘compilation-php)
(add-to-list ‘flymake-err-line-patterns
(list php-error-re 2 3 nil 1))))
;; add php flymake support
(add-hook ‘php-mode-hook (lambda () (flymake-mode t)))


Its very nice to have on the fly syntax checking.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Last week I was invited to talk at the Unitec University in Monterrey about DRM and copyright, of course, applied to mexican law. Which is interesting since the mexican law allows for people to have a copy of a work for personal use only. This means P2P and basically all forms of file sharing are allowed.

This is the first time I talk about this topic. Even though I’m very passionate about it, I think I still need to learn a lot on how to deliver the right and complete message. Fortunately I recorded the whole chat on video (video coming soon) and will improve for next time. On the good side, everything got cleared up during the audience questions.

The public’s reaction was interesting. A lot of people there were surprised when I mentioned GNU/Linux and open source software. Others, for some strange and bizarre reason, insisted on me giving them advice on antivirus software and providing them with serial numbers for their software. No, I never mentioned or endorsed the use of unofficial (or cracked) serial numbers for their software. I don’t know where this guy got this idea from me.

But it keeps surprising me the fact that, every time I talk about software freedom, there’s a lot of people that didn’t have a clue that they have a choice.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Mako Hill has been talking about the Antifeatures, which are features that you don’t want but the product costs more when they don’t have them instead of costing more for adding them.

Sounds tricky? Well, maybe its more understandable with this last news story about Dell will charge $50 dlls to have XP installed. It is more expensive to have bad and old operating system, than a bad and new one.

Fortunately, there’s always the option of having the good and new Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating system on your Dell at no extra cost.

Popularity: 3% [?]

After today’s iPhone announcements and all the excitement that has been generated, I started thinking about the competition. The nokia n95 and all the other smart phones have little advantage over the attractiveness of an iPhone.

The features and the looks are nice. But the price? I can’t think of how a Nokia N95 at more than $500 dlls is going to compete with an iPhone 3G at $199 dlls standard pice world wide.

And it reminded me of a nice Dilbert cartoon:

Popularity: 4% [?]