Valkertown Home

I grew up learning to love doing difficult stuff, being constantly challenged, tackling difficult problems or scaling big simple problems; these are the things that gives me a thrill.

Recently I've been having troubles in finding new stuff in the programming world or in technology at all that motivates me enough. I have to note that this is after nine years of having a laboratory at my hands where I did build everything I wanted. I had a nice budget to purchase development kits and I did some serious projects using microcontrollers, wireless communications, fpgas, fpaa, embbedded processors, compilers, embedded systems, distributed systems, large databases and while the vast majority of the stuff I did purchase or build never got into a real application, I'm very proud of the ones that did . Right now, I'm building smaller systems in the sense of scale and complexity. It's fun to relax and think, but I have yet to decide which is the next big project I'm going to tackle.

I have a huge list of things that would need to be improved, right now I'm working on the Loovus project and the projects we do at Bora. These are highly challenging projects and require a lot of sofware to be developed, yet I want to keep improving my programming skills beyond the level they currently are. I have been improving my lisp and my emacs, I want to develop another nice system in erlang, javascript is very nice as it supports a lot of the things I learned to love about lisp and erlang. Even so I still need to study more and give it more tiem before I can figure out which is the next problem I'm going to tackle.

I'm tired of doing so many things sitting and not being out with my dogs. So now I'm learning how to ride a longboard, well not really I just got a very cheap skateboard and tested if I was going to like it before spending some real money on a decent setup. At first the board was incredibly shitty, it barely rolled yet it was good enough to start learning how to stand on it and push a bit; soon I decided at least I had to replace the bearings, the ones that came were absolutely useless. After that the board improved a lot and I'm being able to practice with it but now I'm beggining to understand why this board is so shitty and I'm not even trying to jump, the thing squeaks whenever I do any harsh movement and the tracks make hard to do any turning, the wheels are so soft that I suspect they will be gone very soon.

I'm incredibly clumsy at this moment but I feel how I'm improving each time I practice with my shitty board, I know that sooner than later I'm going to have to change the setup as the board is going to start hindering my progress very soon, but right now doing the kick and achieving some decent speed it's my current challenge, I've dropped myself with this thing in some small hills and I love the feeling. Now I'm certaing that I will continue doing this and practicing, I've seen some very nice hills around here that I would love to ride.

Right now I'm beggining the research on the setup I'm going to be buying, yet the naming scheme is aboslutely shitty and the information about specification of the parts is almost non-existent. It seems in this area you have to believe the hype or trust someone that recommends you some brand name, or the real alternative is to try yourself, the selecion is based mostly on experience. It's hard being an engineer and not seeing data about the stuff I'm going to buy. I guess I'm going to be wasting some money before I understand the art behind the assembly of the setup.

I have not yet complete protection but that thing is easier as for my current needs, cheap protection is more than enough but in this area I have more experience and it's easier to pick.

Wish me luck.

This is a small post about http://superfeedr.com, and now I'm enabling htt://pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com/ in this Blog.

PubSubHubBub is a protocol that enables the notification of subscribers when a publisher updates it's content. It was part of the core of Ostatus when Branbird was alive. Now it will enable me to do the ublog and this blog and people subscribe to it.

I need to figure out the details on how I'm going to use it with the ublog, maybe I'm going to mix it with the mimir as it's a news reader for me.

Also since this blog is handled by static generation I'm only pinging the SuperFeedr when I'm deploying new content. This should be improved as this is done with rsync and the ping with curl.

The current xml of this blog feed is too trivial and I want to improve it.

I'm hoping this change improves a bit the visibility of the blog, and how it can be used.

Since I'm not an irresponsible blog admin I've setup proper (permanent) redirects from old word press links back to the new format, also restored disqus comments on this blog so it's alive again.

It's curious how simple is this process compared to wordpress, it's nowhere near the features wordpress can offer but for my use case it has improved how many posts I write.

During this process I reviewed some old posts and noticed how many times I've moved the blog, changed engines and how many posts I have spent logging the adventures of this process. It's in the Archive.

With the brainbird shutdown it broke some image links, I don't know if I will fix them but probably as I really like to curate this blog.

The recent review of old posts gave me an interesting perspective on why this task is so important, in the end, it's me talking to the future me, reminding myself how I got here or there. I'm now really eager to continue writting and publish more details even if they appear irrelevant now.

This time I've decided to go a little further into customizing the original theme for Valkertown, now I've mixed in a theme from bootswatch, which show cases some nice bootstrap themes.

I like a lot what bootstrap provides as in some common elements and design guides for sites and lets you build pretty fast some good looking websites. I don't want to be yet another bootstrap site so the use is quite minimal and I'm keeping everything from the original theme, I'm just adding some elements that mix well.

Also I decided to keep using the µblog paradigm as in short posts which should be accesible via it's dedicated RSS feed, that I might end publishing into my not so used Twitter account

I'm falling in love with this simple site setup and using emacs to write, it simply removed all friction on publishing and keeping a lot of drafts.

I have setup the "mimir" back online as a simple webpage based on bootstrap, it's very simple and works well for me as a news reader replacement now that Brainbird is gone.

The URL for it is: http://mimir.brainbird.net

It runs every eight hours and collects everything from the RSS feeds I have setup.

I really would like to setup disqus comments back on the articles, I might do it soon, but will be hard to connect the old post with their original threads.

Viper as is an emacs mode that enables modal editing in emacs that tries to replicate most of vi(vim?) keybindings and some features. What I like about modal editing is that Io found easier to modify existing code and move around with few keystrokes, I never found vi/vim comfortable or smart enough to help me writting new code and emacs just excels when creating macros and the fact I love lisp makes emacs my tool of choice.

I don't use many emacs modes but I rely heavily in lots of custom keybindings and I have been using macros more and more and while I can even record macros that involve mode switching and mix and match of vi/emacs functions, I decided that emacs way feels more confortable in my hands.

So I've decided of turning viper for good now, I'm now learning more and more emacs movement commands for my macros and I'm loving it. It was a good experience, I still use vim a lot, but for now on, no more viper in my emacs.

A couple of days ago I decided to shutdown Brainbird as I got tired of keeping it alive and updated. It hasn't been used by most of the users for a long while and I dont have time for it's original purpose. Some of my friends might miss it, but the attention Brainbird received wasn't worth the effort and money I had been throwing at the thing.

I will scale down the server quite a bit now as the main load is now gone and I've been moving a lof of my stuff to static site generation and when not the user base is very small and the task doesn't generate the same load as Brainbird did.

I will miss the @Mimir which was like my feed reader, but I can generate a simpler thing from the script I was using to feed Brainbird.

So long, and thanks for the support of everyone who cared about my experiment while it lasted.

I just receive an Acer S3 for work, it's going to be my main machine for a long while, I'm typing this post it.

It's amazing how easy is to setup Linux in these things these days, yes I use Arch Linux and the setup is far from easy, but the hardware specific setup I had to do to have all the hardware supported was absolutely zero. And it's not that Arch does anything to provide improved hardware support, it's just that the Linux kernel provides so much hardware support these days that I have been experiencing true plug and play for a while now.

It does weird things for me as it now supports many power management features that can become quite annoying for me as I don't relly like auto-magic so I have been disabling most of them.

It only has two USB ports which is quite annoying, yet simple to solve with a HUB.

Poole is a pretty simple but quite handy static site generator that uses Markdown files as source and a single template file.

I like a lot the idea of static website generation as it simplifies a lot the site administration. Specially small sites that aren't updated often or maintained for a single person like this one

Paired with something like Initializr one can bootstrap a new site incredibly fast.

I tried moving from wordpress to octopres, but the lot of Ruby stuff I had to install and the fact I'm not that much into Ruby got me out of it. In fact I tried to setup this on Octopress but the html and styling is very tied to the default template wich I don't like that much. I like a lot the style I adapted for this site and I know it well so I decided to do it on Poole.

So today I moved and merged the blog and my public site into a single source using this tool and the files I got from exitwp.