nuno vs the CVS plugin on eclipse

If you're an Eclipse user, you probably already noticed how CVS comes as a plugin already available on the default package.

This is nice and neat to set up a new install and grab your projects without further worries.

On my case, that was the nice type of experience that I had when installing eclipse for the first time on my work laptop, a mac.

Things went smoothly, I got online to grab the documents from the CVS and no worries whatsoever.

However, my nightmare started when after a few days I've started eclipse and the CVS would simply refuse to work for no apparent reason. I know that at this point someone would say: "there is no such thing as no apparent reason" - and in true honesty I agree but have no clues about what changed.

This issue started in last February.

I've tried to solve this annoyance in numerous ways, first by uninstalling eclipse and reinstalling, then I tried the cocoa version of eclipse to see if it work differently and finally resorted to the world wide web.. to no avail on this case.

Using eclipse started to become a real nuisance. Tried asking some opinions to experts but none would come to the rescue, the most common advice: use a PC.

It just seemed that I couldn't get eclipse back to factory defaults: darn mac.

Well.. I'd be happy in using an operative system that would make my life simple but I'm also too stubborn by nature to quit from my intent of solving this trouble.

From February to this part I've reached a stalemate in my quest. I managed to get CVS access from Eclipse but the downside was the fact that I was using a fork from the eclipse project called "EasyEclipse" (http://www.easyeclipse.org)

It was indeed "easy" to use but it was also seriously outdated from the current stable version of Eclipse. This week become problematic to use an older Eclipse version because my team will all be using the stable version to ensure that everyone has the same environment.

Wish I could complain but it was guy who wrote the default environment documentation and there was simply no other way around other than facing my issue with CVS once for good.

And today: rejoice!

I've discovered how to solve this CVS nuisance. A lot of people know how to install plugins from within Eclipse. But what few people probably know is how we can also uninstall them just as well.

And uninstall I did..

I'll share this little secret: Click "Help" -> "Install new software" -> "Already installed" -> select "Eclipse CVS client" -> click "Uninstall"

After this, just restart eclipse and install CVS again from the default eclipse repositories.

So simple to fix and so many headaches to find the solution...

:)

virusremoval.pro begins

Yesterday I've announced the virus removal community forum across the good people of boot land.

The feedback response was surprisingly good. The site had been started little over four weeks ago and counted with an average of 100 daily visitors, yesterday we've peaked at over 1200 unique visitors.


This kind of response is truly motivating. The quality level of the ongoing discussions is also very good, there is a lot to be learned and we do have the conditions to give malware authors a really bad headache.

:)

Email robustness

Ever since I've first got my own personal domain as http://nunobrito.eu some years ago it became possible to use my official email address as mail@nunobrito.eu

Instead of having several mailboxes I've decided to concentrate them all at my gmail account using email redirection.

It's simple, worked well.

However, the server where my domain is hosted would often become offline for several days in a row due to the sheer amount of people trying to access the other services hosted there.

This brought me for the first time to a fragile situation because I would no longer be receiving emails while the server remained offline.

I've devised a manner to provide email robustness at no extra costs and without requiring a server.

It's very simple.

- The first step is registering your domain with goddady. If you've already registered with their service then it's fine, otherwise I'd seriously recommend moving to this particular registrar.

- Then register for google apps standard edition: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
Input your domain as the domain that will host the apps, don't worry because this won't mix with your site in case you already have it developed.

- After registering your domain with google apps, look on this page regarding how to configure the mx records at godaddy: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33353

But my favorite part is this automatic tool to do it quickly: https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/google/gmail_login.asp

The above link will automatically configure your domain to use gmail as the mail service.

- At this point the email is handled by google apps, let's manage your site:
https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/example.com (change example.com with your domain)

- After login, click on "Email"

- Click on "Change URL" and select the URL that is hosted by google so that you don't need to use your own domain to log onto the webmail service.

- Click "Email addresses" and then add a user.

- Select a user listed there and add "nicknames" to the user. This means the possible email addresses that will be used to route the messages.

- Log onto the webmail service and set the routing of all messages onto anywhere you want, just like you would do with a normal gmail account.

- Done!

You are now routing all your messages sent to your official email address onto anywhere else you need.

Good luck.

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Now my official email is robust and no longer depending on any server.

:)

Back to my roots

This is my final week in Pittsburgh. I've completed the second semester just like all other students from the MSE program.

Pittsburgh was really nice but now it's time to return onto Portugal where the remaining two semesters will last until December.

I should be happy now. The most difficult times should have passed and things from here forward should actually be more fun: I'll be coding and creating the studio project that we have been planning for so such a long time now.

However, I'm not happy. Returning to Portugal means a direct confrontation with the army in my country. From my relatives I can only gather some whispers and rumors. Even my lawyer is mute as the stormy days approach the road ahead.

Upon the idea of returning to my roots I feel similar to a small kid returning home after doing something wrong and afraid of a reprimand from his father.

And in fact, the army is still like family to me. They helped me as a teenager when the future was not promising, providing the tools, resources and discipline necessary to survive.



Now it's time to discover the world outside my "adopted family" even if it means facing the anger or disappointment of those that expected me to continue in the same career.

But this path is not easy. Usually I don't get tired, I might get exhaust and need to sleep for a good night or even get a good coffee to start a fresh day, but right now I'm just getting tired of all these obstacles.

Guess I need to remind myself that we all have a purpose and I'm still defending what I believe to be correct.

I might not be happy about the future but I'm certainly happy to have reached this far in my goals for life.

Even if I could go back to the past and be faced with the same decisions, I'd still do them. Wouldn't trade the knowledge, people and memories for anything less than a chance of truly start living with freedom of choice.

And having a choice really makes me smile.

:)

Can our legacy outlive us?

Thought this is sort of a tabu matter, no software developer or webmaster likes to wonder about what will happen when they are no longer around to assure the survival of their legacy works.

Unfortunately, I'm already forced to think about these matters due to certain attributes and choices of my life that might shorten my available time span to take care of them.



Over the years, I've done software and helped raising websites with people that now depend on my direct support to keep things going on daily basis.

Every now and then a new situation appears that needs to be solved. Today one of the subdomains was reported as hosting a malicious page, meaning that someone from the outside managed to break our perimeter defenses and use our server for their malicious purposes.

Our server was automatically shutdown by the hosting provider until I could talk with them and remove the malicious page.

I love keeping things tidy and running well but I'm certain that when I'm no longer around to assure this type of service, few other guys will be available or willing to carry forward the needed support to provide the things that we achieved over the years.


It would be unfair to so many that trusted in us as guardians of their knowledge to fail in this task. Websites like boot-land.net and projects for winbuilder deserve to endure long after the initial authors and patricians are long gone.

My own memories, hosted at nunobrito.eu are also depending on my own administration to be available.

This is clearly a solution that cannot last for centuries to come. One idea would be moving to the platform of a bigger provider like google, yahoo, microsoft, flickr or facebook.

But none of them work will likely work like we need. Anything hosted on their platforms is outside our own management and can be lost at any given moment.

How to solve this?

Thought a complete automation and debugging of issues that occur is never possible to achieve, it is possible to prepare the path and mechanisms to allow others to follow our steps and also ensure that this process is simple to keep things moving.

--------------------

The first worries are costs that are divided between hosting costs and domain renewals.

To support these costs, the publicity gathered from the bigger sites is currently enough to keep the site self-sufficient. Revenue from publicity is directly deposited on a specific paypal account and is driven from two separate advertising channels to ensure redundancy.


The first step to solve the matter of domain renewal is concentrating all domains on the same registrar (I've chosen godaddy as they are the leading provider of this service). This is not as simple as it seems, the most important domains such as winbuilder.net and boot-land.net are hosted on dominios.pt that are aggressive about domain transfers. Will try to solve this.


The second step is automating the renewal process. Currently, as paypal is the standard web payment tool, I can automate the automatic withdraw of funds to keep registrars happy.

Once the domain renewals are solved I will focus on the hosting plans. Currently we have two servers. One of them is directly sponsored by R1Soft. Unfortunately I'm unable to get in contact with them to transfer the sponsoring to the second server that has far better conditions than the first.

At the current state we are having a server that is expensive (110 USD/month) and barely used along with the new server that costs around 140 USD/month.

The most problematic situation is the new server. 140 USD/month cannot be payed from paypal. This bill needs to be settled with a credit card or direct bank transfer from an account located in Germany. The problem is that credit cards have a limit date on years that are valid. This is not a solution that will last for long since we'll always be vulnerable to a lack of payments on the bank account that is used for this purpose.

Contacting the hosting company to support paypal as revealed itself a fruitless effort. They are afraid of paypal and will only keep the traditional payments.

There's a saying in Portugal: "If maome doesn't go to the mountain then the mountain will go to maome". Guess the next logical step is opening a bank account in Germany. Being an european citizen and having good friends in Germany it shouldn't be too difficult thought I'm not yet sure if it is possible.

From this point it would be needed to ensure that paypal transfers enough revenue onto the german account at each month.

One thing is certain, without assuring hosting bills to be paid flawlessly our projects will be vulnerable to extinction.

--------------------------------------

Assuring a good flow between expenses and revenues is essential. But unfortunately this isn't something that a software engineer can code as a program to be compiled and executed.

We will always need a human operator to ensure that things keep running even when something unexpected occurs. So, the challenge is preparing the management of our financial balance to someone of trust. But how can we asses if someone is truly trustworthy for this task?

Too many open variables at this time to properly solve this challenge, guess we'll need to use a credit card for the next 2~3 years and renew this value at each year until a new hosting provider is found or otherwise really open a german account to get this settled.

----------------------------


The second point is server administration. How and where can we find people capable of managing our servers?

The technology is fairly standard but none of the servers follows traditional implementations, they were customized for speed and performance when subdued to heavy loads or special behaviors by winbuilder projects.

I know how to get things working, how can others learn to do the same?

It would be nice to completely outsource winbuilder projects to run from other service providers and ease our administration tasks but who would be willing to support terabytes of demand per month and providing gigabytes of space on their disks?


--------------------------------


Things are not easy for us but none of the folks at boot-land quit when faced with challenges nor will I quit from finding a decent solution while I'm still here.



When considering all the adversities required to ensure that our legacy can outlive us in the Internet, most people would say that we are simply outnumbered.



And perhaps they are right. The odds of ensuring that so many different services with such complex characteristics survive the endurance of time is simply nuts.

But having strong odds against this endeavor doesn't make it impossible to achieve. With a good strategy we might just be able to use our own resources to reach the expected results.


There is no way of supporting the costs of renting the services from a cloud computing hosting or hiring specialized support personnel. Given all these constraints we might as well dive into building our own robust cloud and administration solution to allow our legacy survive in years to come.

We wouldn't just be reinventing the wheel, we'd be redefining a whole new vehicle to take us where we need to go.

Perhaps this is indeed nuts but a worthy challenge as nobody else seems (yet) be considering this type of issue and we do have a tradition of moving ahead of the game..

:)

Are we romans?

For a long time, Europe lived under the rules of the Roman republic and later, the Roman empire.

Throughout this time, roads were built and civilization was brought to places where the people previously had habits not too distant from those on the ice age.

Roman civilization meant education, health and wealth to those who embraced roman culture as a way of exchanging goods and traveling in security to other provinces.

However, the West Roman empire where France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Italy exist today was progressively torn apart across the centuries by successive invasions of barbarians from the Northern parts of Europe until the roman empire in the west ceased to exist, marking the start of the medieval ages as we know them.


This remark in history is a true contrasense. If at one hand we had such an advanced culture in terms of technology, culture and organization - what went wrong to let the barbarians took over?

The explanation is plain brute force from the barbarians and faulty roman policies in terms of administration.

We see the roman history filled with heroes that shaped the republic and empire to success and falls across the ages, yet, even the barbarians admired the roman culture and attempted to replicate the same level of culture to no avail most times.


What can we learn as a lesson of history?

Civilized cultures are not prepared enough to survive against brute force threats from the outside or even weak management policies.

We see the same issues plaguing computer systems nowadays. Computer users attempt to secure their own machines from outside threats but are unable (or unwilling) to keep them tidy with effective security policies.

The barbarians are today's malware authors that use conquered computers as slaves to power monstrously sized botnets that serve as weapons to attack companies and organizations across the globe.

This is the reality today. We have barbarians and we have civilized citizens trying to work. But we still have little means to fight back the threats and propose truly efficient methods to fight them back, instead, we rely in defense and few actions are taken to go after the wrong doers.

Looking to where we are headed, will we let history repeat itself with the fall of a civilized Internet?

I think we should learn from the lessons of the past that we cannot close our eyes to the enemies at the border and expect that our own organization will be able of solving these menaces some day.

So, I would like to propose a roman-like concept of cooperative defense for the internet world.

Back in the old days we would see farmers picking up anything at their hand to defend their lands. This reality is not far from today where computer users install antivirus at their machines to keep them protected.

However, would it sound reasonable for you that a farmer is truly capable of defending himself against an aggressive tribe of barbarians that are professional hackers?

Something is truly wrong in this picture. Over the next months I will dedicate my effort to prove that we can indeed be romans. Prove that civilized people can fight back the attacks from barbarians and level the weights on each side of fence.

Let's begin.

Finishing up the second semester

It's been 4 months since I've arrived to the States and now it's time to go.

Pittbusrgh was very nice to me. The people, the university and the town were pleasant and welcomed me inside their traditions and culture, making me feel as part of this place instead of an outsider.

I will soon finish the second semester and head back to Portugal but things won't be easy there.

From an educational perspective I'll be working to implement our software engineering studio project and will also be doing an independent study proposal on a topic that was self-proposed.

The tough part for me will be finding a place to stay, where to study and how to manage my situation with the Portuguese army alongside with balancing my financial status to ensure that I can support all these expenses.

But things are moving forward and a lot of people are helping. I can't predict what will happen next but at least I'm happy to still be studying and getting closer to complete another step in the MSE challenge.

:)

Link exchange with MSFN

MSFN is one of the oldest and most respected sites when it comes to Microsoft discussions. It was created in 2002 with the purpose of sharing knowledge regarding how to tweak windows to work how fans intended.

Over the years it has specialized on the customization of unattended windows installations, some of the most popular tools that spawn from this forum are nLite and vLite that reached a global scale success.

Boot Land started in 2006 when MSFN was already a giant in the Windows arena. Over the years we have also grown to the point where we have become giants in our own domain.

MSFN and Boot Land have mutually exchanged links. To date, we are the only forums recommended on MSFN and we also come a long way to deserve such attention.

My personal thanks to everyone who supports the boot land community!

Virus Removal Pro

I've started a new project last week, it's a new community forum entitled "Virus Removal" that can be found at http://virusremoval.pro

Boot Land was and remains a success in terms of a community focused on the development of boot disks but I've been feeling that it is also time to expand to other themes that are also important and interesting to explore.

Funny, but I've first started creating boot disks to repair my computer after it was attacked by a virus. So, in a good sense I can say that both activities have also been part of my routine ever since I was a kid.

This new community has a lot of good things.

I've used myBB as forum software, the strong point is that it won't require any costs with licenses since it is free, also, I can add plugins in a really easy manner that doesn't require editing any file. In overall it is a very simple and straightforward software to use.

The domain itself is very easy to remember and straight to the point. Our forums at Boot Land are also being used to help kickstart the forum and bring new visitors.


Last but not least, virusremoval.pro already counts with the participation of valuable experts in this field.

-------

So, it seems we have all the right ingredients to start a good community that can actually contribute with something fresh and useful to people around the Internet.

:)

http://freeflippa.com donated to the owner of http://flippa.com

Last year I started a project meant to provide a free alternative to the services provided by Flippa, a website dedicated to "website flipping", the art of selling websites that were just created.

I've chosen the domain http://freeflippa.com and shortly after opening the doors for this new site, the owner of flippa.com approached me by email with concerns about trademark assurance.

Following the european laws, nothing would restrict me from using this specific website domain since it is not a trademark recognized in Europe or the States.

Nevertheless, I'm not the type of person that enjoys "cybersquatting" and removed any resemblances on the site that would compete against the paid services provided by flippa.com

Two days ago I've decided to clean up my portfolio of domains and remembered that I still had freeflippa. Decided to send an email to the owner of flippa and I've transferred freeflippa.com to his ownership at zero cost.

Webmaster projects are very attractive to some extent but I guess that I'm just not cut for them.

Will rather stick with software development, it was nevertheless another episode on my life to keep in memory.

:)