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Today I read on the GetAutomatix Forum that Getautomatix for Ubuntu has been discontinued. That’s sad news since we were all pretty used to it. Everything outside-the-box was installed with a single click and was a great improvement for the end-user experience. Now I can only hope that someone will resume the development with a new project. These guys are now working only for the distro Pioneer Warrior.

The original message by the authors is:
Well the day has finally come, development of Automatix has been discontinued. We are doing this, NOT because we think Automatix is no longer necessary on Ubuntu and Debian, but because all of the Automatix developers have become wrapped up in more pressing commitments.

I, Jared, have been asked by Technalign Inc. to assist in the development of the next version of their GNU/Linux distribution, Pioneer Warrior. I will use what I have learned as an Automatix developer to make Pioneer Warrior the best GNU/Linux distribution for the average user.

Arnie, and the other Automatix Team members, currently are too involved in their personal lives to do justice to the Automatix project as well.

We thank our loyal users for the years of support they have given us, and we wish them well on their journey in the world of free software.

Edit: I do want to clarify something, Automatix isn’t entirely dead yet. Only development of Automatix2 for Ubuntu has ended. We may still decide to develop Automatix3, which will be a whole new app, however if we do, it will be exclusive to Pioneer Warrior. The reasons for the exclusiveness are, 1. because Technalign has paid for our server and hosting for the past year and 2. because we can easily work with Technalign’s developers.

Si quieres ahondar más en el ahorro de energía de tu mac, en vez de de conformarte con las opciones por defecto del sistema, puedes instalar SmartSleep.prefPane. Una utilidad que te permite configurar qué debe hacer el ordenador cuando está inactivo, pero teniendo en cuenta la batería restante.

Si por ejemplo a tu portátil le queda un 20% de batería probablemente querrás que el ahorro sea el máximo, mientras que cuando está por encima preferimos algo menos de ahorro y no sufrir los continuos apagones. La utilidad permite hibernar (se guarda el estado en disco duro y no hay consumo de batería) y ponerla en sleep (la batería solo mantiene el estado de la memoria RAM).

Si andas por ahí con tu portátil seguro que lo encontrarás de utilidad.

Pues sí, el sábado 23 de Febrero celebramos la primera PHP Barcelona Conference, y fue todo un exitazo: de participación, de organización (no se nos descuajaringó la agenda), las instalaciones (Bocanord) eran fantásticas así como los medios que pusieron a nuestra disposición; la mejor sala del complejo, un equipo de proyección de cine y buena voluntad a raudales.

Por mi parte, quedé muy contento con mi presentación “Optimización de aplicaciones PHP - Client Side“, puesto que la pude desarrollar con muy buen ritmo en todo momento y me dio tiempo a explicarlo todo. La verdad es que me comí 6 minutos del piscolabis, pero con sólo 30 minutos era una locura intentar explicar los entresijos de la optimización de caché del navegador, peticiones http, compresión de ficheros javascript, etc.

La audiencia se portó de lujo y la verdad es que la presentación salió rodada. ¡Prueba superada! :-) Del resto de presentaciones, la que más me impresionó fue la de Arno Schneider (Continuous Integration, Xing), por el grado de preparación y la profesionalidad con que Arno fue desgranando el temario tan complejo que presentó. Un 10 para ti Arno, con esa calidad de presentación puedes ir a cualquier conferencia internacional con la cabeza bien alta.

También quedé impresionado con el nivel de trabajo y organización desarrollados por Oriol Jiménez y David Gaya, los auténticos cerebros detrás del evento. Ahora se merecen un auténtico descanso, pobres… :-)

En fin, todos coincidimos en que nos hemos quedado con MUCHAS ganas de celebrar más y mayores conferencias, así que ¡estad atentos phperos!

El Sábado 23 de Febrero tendré el placer de realizar una presentación en la Primera Barcelona PHPConference. La verdad es que alegra (y acojona) que haya tenido tanto éxito de participación… ¡Nada menos que 150 asistentes en la primera convocatoria!

Estoy seguro que nos lo vamos a pasar fantásticamente, haremos bastantes contactos a nivel personal y profesional y podremos sobre todo vernos las caras algunos de los que estamos en este mundillo del PHP por estos lares catalanes.

Espero que los nervios no me traicionen demasiado en mi presentación, ya que si bien he realizado otras para grupos más pequeños (max. 15 personas), incluso algunas en inglés para presentar prototipos de aplicaciones en proyectos europeos, ésta será mi primera presentación en una conferencia de desarrolladores, y ante un auditorio tan grande…

Pero como dijo aquel, quien no se arriesga, no gana :-)

Ah, por cierto, mi presentación se titula “Optimización de aplicaciones PHP en el lado cliente“, y en ella explicaré una serie de mejores prácticas para reducir el tiempo de carga de una página web. La mayoría de estos trucos están extraídos de la fantástica keynote High Performance websites: 14 rules de Steve Souders, jefe del equipo optimizador de Yahoo! También hay algunos truquillos de cosecha propia, provenientes de mi experiencia en el desarrollo de la Home de Atrápalo.com.

De la mano de Many Tricks nos llega esta excelente utilidad gratuita para renombrar archivos en lote llamada File list. Nos permite hacer las tareas básicas de renombrado de ficheros, como cambiar la extensión, cambiar mayúsculas/minúsculas, añadir un número secuencialmente en los ficheros, reemplazar las apariciones de un texto, hacer tareas de ordenación o crear nuestras propias expresiones regulares… y siempre nos permite previsualizar el resultado final antes de hacer “el mal”.

Además permite crear “droplets” que nos permitirán arrastrar un conjunto de ficheros y automáticamente se renombrarán todos sin tener que hacer nada más, siguiendo claro está, los patrones que hayamos configurado para ese droplet.

I have owned 5 laptops for the last 6 years, which are a lot of laptops if you ask me… From a Toshiba Satellite with DSTN screen, going next to an IBM Thinkpad 600x and owning only macs since then: Powerbook G4 550 titanium, Powerbook G4 1Ghz 12″ and, since yesterday, a shinny (second handed) Macbook 2 Core Duo.

All those machines were bought second handed and sold consequently. I have been lucky enough with all of them to never consider buying a new (from stores) laptop. And as such, I am very impressed with a lot of aspects of my new Macbook:

- Spectacular reflective screen (both in terms of size: 13″, 1280×800 and visual quality).
- SPEED. Much better than my lovely Powerbook G4 12″.
- Great design all over the place (it’s from Apple anyway).
- Battery: more than 4 hours (woow!).

This computer is going to stay for a loong time with me!

Well, this has not been a good year overall for me, but it seems it might end a little better than it started… FIATC, my burned car’s insurance company is doing a straight good job, so I will get a fair compensation for my car’s lost, hopefully over the next week. Hurrah!

Now that it seems 70% of the cash invested in my poor 2 years old Honda Civic is going to be restored, I am looking for some candidates to choose the car that will drive my ways everyday… Honda and Mazda are my favourite brands by far as they have excellent cars in terms of motors, design and quality overall. This weekend I’ll have to take a tough decision, which car will I buy? An Honda CR-V, HR-V, maybe a Civic again? a georgeus Mazda 3?

Today has been a strange/fine day for more reasons… I proudly work for Atrapalo.com (Barcelona) as a web developer, and we have spent part of the day decorating our offices with Christmas related themes… This is our humble contribution to the party, an IT department megamacho poster with a snowy touch:

Ain’t we creative people sometimes?

Merry Christmas!!!

Sadly, the subject of this post is not related in any way to the console game.

Following is the actual state of my beloved car (as of beautiful, useful and non problematic), a 2005 Honda Civic which always worked like a charm.

The Civic was correctly parked in front of my house when yesterday at 3am the car next to him started burning and the flames took by assault my car as well: this is known as the ‘simpathy effect’, I was told by a local policeman that I’m sure doesn’t know a shit about fire in general and combustion in particular.

There were firemen and policemen (Mollet’s local police and Mossos d’Esquadra) all over the place, but none of them seemed interested in investigating the origins of the fire. The cars were retired by our insurance tow trucks and the place was partially cleaned by 6am.

I’m pretty sure there won’t be any investigation. Yesterday I made a formal complaint at the Mossos d’Esquadra police station, but they had made no report of yesterday affairs and were uninterested overall.

Sooo… my car is 80% burned, but I luckily had a total risk insurance and will see tomorrow how can I recover most of the car’s value. I hope then to buy the same car model, as I am a loyalist to those material things that have worked well for me (except for computers and electronic gadgets).

Thanks for all the support I’ve received these days.

If you want to test the Firefox 3 new features on your Ubuntu Gutsy installation, but don’t want to loose all the Firebug niceties for developing web apps, here are some quick and dirty steps:

- $ sudo apt-get install Firefox-3.0 (upgrades/downgrades to kernel 2.6.20… weird!)

- Go to the Fireclipse site and download Firebug-1.1.0b10.xpi. This is a modified version from the firebug original, compatible with Firefox 3.

- Open Firefox 3, install the xpi by drag & drop to the firefox window.

Voila! There you are…

Firefox 3 is in its early stages and it shows: there are some cosmeting issues here and there, the enter key doesn’t work in the url field, etc. Anyhow, you can test whether the browser’s memory consumption has gone to less crazy numbers, and how quick is the rendering of its new Gecko 1.9 engine. You won’t screw Firefox 2 with this installation, so there is nothing to loose.

If your are brave people (like us) and put to test this Firefox 3 beta, please tell us your impressions!

Here you are a survey regarding addictness to Apple… I have only scored 56%, but I know I can make it better :-)

56%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

We actually have at home an iMac 20″, powerbook 12″, ibook G3 13″, ipod touch, ipod nano 2nd generation, ipod 4g 20Gb… It sums up 6 Apple items. I know we are in the middle low range of Apple fetishers, so… How many Apple products do you own?

You can test your Apple loyalty-or-whatever-it-is here.