Today i was reading the Ubuntu planet and i saw a very interesting post from Jono Bacon who mentioned a new and useful tool called Quickly. As described in the official site:
“Quickly strives to make programming easy and fun by bringing opinionated choices about how to write different kinds of programs to developers. Included is a Ubuntu application template for making applications that integrate smoothly into the Ubuntu software infrastructure.”
I gave a try to the tool and i can say that it really simplifies the process when you start to create a new PyGTK application, if you want to start a simple app and use Glade for the interface, you have to design the main window, load glade file, catch window events and others… the same routine every time. With Quickly, you start a new project from the command line and it created the whole necessary files and structures, it has commands to edit files, edit in glade, create debian packages and push bundles to launchpad… if you want to start to write quikcly applications start with the following commands:
- sudo apt-get install quickly
- quickly create ubuntu-project my_first_project
- cd my_first_project
- quickly run
Other additional commands:
- quickly package: create Debian package
- quickly release: push project to launchpad
- quickly tutorial: load HTML tutorials
- quickly glade: open quickly Glade project in Glade
- quickly dialog somename: add a GTK dialog window to Glade project
While i was traveling on a Boeing plane this morning (1am) from Ecuador to Chile, i was watching a movie in the Seat-TV system until something weird happens: all monitors from the plane got frozen with a blue screen and a few ones with a error message as:
warning: mysql_connect(), cannot connect to local MySQL server through
socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ (11) in /thales/apps/250paxeui/lan/backend/dbapi/dbConnection.php on line 9
could not connect, cannot connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ (11)
(yes, i turned on my laptop to copy the text,)
oh!, Lan is using MySQL + PHP as UI to let the user choose between movies, games..etc, that’s cool, which is not is why the MySQL server is down ? after that i realized that under my seat a mini computer was connected so i can assume that they are using a terminal client and a central server on the plane…there were no much to do… i think that somebody had to reboot the server twice to get the system back properly.
Interesting as free software is flying over the world 
Today is my birthday!, i’m very happy enjoying a great time with my wife… it’s being a nice day
When you have a pretty cool gadget as an Ipod Touch, you should give it an useful use…
Yesterday I started a new project called Gmote, a remote controller for GNOME applications, what’s the idea?, just control basic features of your running applications and Desktop using an external device with network access and a browser…
The UI is very simple to use, just select a communication port and an application template. Let’s describe how it works:
Gemote includes a very simple webserver, so you just need to choose the communication port where the server will be listening for incoming connections and the application template which describe the commands availables for the client connections, eg: if user wants to share Gnome control, the client will see a simple web page with buttons to control the audio: Raise, Lower and Mute. If user choose OpenOffice Presentation template, the browser will get buttons to control: Next, Previous and Quit.
The browser send the commands to the Gmote web server, every template define by configuration which commands are allowed to be executed and the server restrict which are not in the white list.
Steps to run it:
1) Start the service
2) Connect to your server with an external device using the server ip address an port like http://172.16.1.10:2009
If you want to try it, please download the latest snapshot version from: http://edsiper.linuxchile.cl/gmote_snapshots/
–
Dependencies:
- xmacro
- GTK
- PyGTK
- Glade
- Python
Last week I gave a talk about Monkey Project in Flisol 2009 Guayaquil (ESPOL), Ecuador. I presented a new benchmark of Monkey but now comparing the performance on serving static files with another web servers.
The test was made on my laptop Intel Celeron M, 1.6Ghz, 50000 request of a 200KB file with 20 concurrent threads doing the job, the benchmark was performed with Apache Benchmark.
I compiled the latest stable version of Lighttpd and Apache, the test was made 3 times per server and the result for each one is the average.
Monkey handle 1888 request per second versus Lighhtpd with 1716 and Apache with 1544. Obviously this numbers are not perfect but shows the great performance that 0.10.x is having with low memory usage and low cpu consumption, we still have to do a lot of improvements so stay tunned for more news 
Few minutes ago, I was reading an email sent by John W. Eaton, which is the maintainer and developer for the latest 16 years of the GNU Octave Project , saying that he’s looking for a job because he cannot get more funds in order to continue working on his project in a full time mode.
That email make me thing about how difficult is to get a job where you can do exacly what do you like to do, or if you are luckely, you will work with the technology and tools that you like. But if you have your own project, is very difficult to get sponsored, unless your piece of software became fundamental for some companies, some examples are Apache web server, Python, Gnome, etc. In other cases you are recruited to work with that technologies because you have the enought knowledge.
The good thing behind this “issue”, is that if your project is interesting, you will have a cool community supporting and contributing to it…
IT Companies that use open source software, should support them, support doesn’t means *just* donate money, but can be the way to donate the enought time to your employee to contribute as: time to give a talk, write some code, write some document, etc. In the other side, if you use an open source software and you are getting some money back with it, you should think about it… people as John W. Eaton need to get supported, why ?, because he’s doing a great work and you can give him the possibility to continue…
