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.

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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.

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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.

:)

New server!

A new server was added to power up our sites.

The new machine is a brand new i7 server with 8 CPU cores and a whooping RAM of 24Gb running under Ubuntu x64.

The configuration was a bit more problematic than expected. The older server had all domains managed with Plesk but this platform was not supported on the new hosting and I simply couldn't afford the added cost for a plesk license at each month.

So, I've decided to try out the free alternatives to cPanel or Plesk. My attention was first tuned onto webmin and virtualmin since they allow to manage most aspects from a server quite easily.

However, the management of virtual hosts under Apache soon turned out to be an headache to solve. Some bugs occurred and then it became very difficult to get things working as expected.

Disappointed with Apache, I've turned my attention to Nginx as a web server. However, the lack of documentation and clear examples also led me to fail using it as expected.

Last but not least, came lighttpd. It's reputation for performance is well know and I decided to give it a shot. It turns out that this server has reached a very mature and stable level of performance and was only an apt-get away from being installed on the machine.

Out of the box came the support for PHP just like I needed. Adding a new virtual host is a task as simple as adding a new line on the configuration file and restarting the server.

As for speed, boot-land.net is now loading at a blazing fast speed. Lighttpd is serving static files at a really great speed on a far faster server than ever before and I'm happy to see it working well.

I still need to configure some other details. Luckily I didn't had any sites requiring mod_rewrite



Attached is a screenshot of the new server in action, feels really good to see all works being distributed amongst the 8 cores with plenty of RAM to go about.

The monthly costs for this server are really high, especially if we take into consideration that the older server was fully sponsored by R1soft for free and that now I'm supporting the new hosting costs on my own.

But I was unable to get in contact with them and the boot land sites were in dire need for better conditions.

Let the fun begin.

:)

Bring on the bots..

We've been having a lot of fun over the past two weeks in our boot land server.

It's been a long while since the last time we got offline for such a long period of time (2 years?), at the time was required for overcoming the attack that we move from a virtual shared server onto a fully dedicated server.

At the time, our growth just seemed to keep going up unexpectedly and suddenly we were having thousands of visitors from all around the world looking for boot disk solutions.

This was two years ago.

Currently.. boot land grown onto thousands of daily visitors and terabytes of monthly information being exchanged from the server.

We've been happy and busy working on the new things that appeared ever since. However, there is still one situation that is challenging our capacity to survive the test of time: bots.

Given the current position of boot land as a popular site, we are experiencing a mass wave of bot machines that visit our site and associated domains (winbuilder.net et al), causing our resources to be quickly depleted into what people would call as a DDoS. Typically, this is a obviously a good way to ensure that a competing site is sent for oblivion.

And a strong DDoS it was indeed. The server was not prepared and a massive black out got installed for 5 days in a row.

But.. we're alive. Sometimes slow at serving pages, it's true, but we're winning back our server to the bots that were sent our way.

So, if for any chances the person(s) behind this recent bot incursion wind up reading this blog post, do note one thing in particular about boot land: we're here to stay, bring on the bots.

Isn't the snow fun?

And I've arrived to Pittsburgh.

The snow is everywhere, the cold as well but life is fresh as it hasn't been for a long while.

Why? This is the first time that I actually saw real snow inside a city.


Temperatures remain below zero celsius and I've took these free days to visit the city and saw all type of things from America that I had only seen on television.

Pittsburgh is a relatively small town when compared to others, but still sized enough to host the tallest buildings that I ever seen. And while writing this post I can only think: what a simple guy, never moved away from the village before, and in many aspects, it's true: living in small towns does carry some interesting advantages that I truly love.


It's good to be here. A good time to shape up my English skills and try to see all there is to see around Pitt.

Money also flies away from your pockets at an incredible speed, life is nowhere as affordable as I'd expect and simple things like lunch, dinner and coffee are pressing a tough toll on my savings.

But well. I'm still adjusting and thinking a lot about the things back in Portugal. My employment is still an headache to solve, the savings to endure the following months are also a worry and top all this with the constant pressure to think about your work at the MSE program.

Life is amazing, I seriously wouldn't imagine how it could change so much in less than 12 months and be here today.

The first MSE semester is completed!

16 weeks passed since we first began the classes in August.

My life took so many spins and turns between these weeks that I can hardly say anymore that I'm still the same person as I was 10 months ago, but, deep inside I don't think that I've really changed that much, what changed radically was the environment, the people and the challenges. The image that people had from "brito" in the past has changed to "nuno" but underneath the hood I'm still the same person.

The course is tiring but for the first time in a long time I'm really having fun.

Some of things that I enjoyed the most were the long nighters to get assignments done. Working at night in the computer department of Coimbra is simply inspiring, the whole atmosphere brings the right mood for creativity and I'll miss that.

Contrary to what I believed, the first semester focused so much on communication and solving people related issues that we barely talked about anything programming related - it's interesting that when you learn to talk with others, software development becomes so much easier and you can actually start to focus on the things that really matter.

It's not easy to live without a salary but costs are nevertheless balanced to some extent since we're in Coimbra and near to the family, contributing to seriously reduce my monthly expenses. My savings are still short but I'm working to improve them, one step at a time and things are still moving forward.

I still have some free time to enjoy Christmas with my family and then all of our class will fly to Pittsburgh in order to attend the second semester. A house has already been rented and my main worry for the moment is my job situation with my former employer. Somehow I have the feeling that things will get quite complicated within the next months.

But things will work out, all it takes is a bit of faith in the future and ourselves.

:)

WinBuilder Case Study 2009

I've published a small case study about WinBuilder in early 2009.


It's a report that gives some background about the evolution and state of WinBuilder along with associated projects up to that time.

This case study is mentioned at another paper report that I'm currently preparing and I think it would be nice to share this with other people interested in what we've doing with boot disks across the latest years.

Unfortunately, I've been a bit absent from the latest improvements and this might become an issue if I decide to carry forward with a WinBuilder report for 2010 but we'll see how that goes.

If you're interested in reading this case study, you're welcome to get it at the downloads section of my personal site: http://nunobrito.eu/download.php?view.12

:)

Show some Boot Land love.

The same company that created some years ago the popular foxmarks bookmarks plugin for firefox, has changed it's name to Xmarks and added some interesting services related to these bookmarking activities.

One of them is the site rank option.

Boot Land (at the time of this blog post) is ranked as #12.

This hardly seemed like a fair position so a message was passed along on the newsletter asking people to write in their words what was their opinion about the site.

The result was great.

We raised the number of reviews from 0 to 30 in less than a day, but more important than numbers was the genuine opinion of people regarding how they saw this community.

Here are some:

Best talents around the globe are part of bootland. Bootland is always way ahead of others in terms of technological development in terms of boot disk. This is the only site i refer for any boot disk related issues.
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I discovered the Boot Land site only recently and I've been impressed by the comprehensiveness of their content. A worthwhile visit if you personally maintain your PC.
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Bootland is very active with new updates, tools and scripts for keeping your set of rescue CD's up to date. They already have a Windows 7 boot project.

Reading these reviews is a good motivation to keep working. Sometimes it's sad as I see the quality work of so many good developers pass unnoticed and forgotten but these reviews prove otherwise. It's worth continuing to work and improve the current state of things.

We might not get a higher ranking than #12 but at the very least I'm sure that we rank #1 in the heart of everyone that is part of our community and that's the sort of ranking that really matters.

:)

5 weeks have passed!

Well.. five weeks passed from the expected 16 months of the intensive MSE program.

And believe me that "intensive" is not even the most appropriate way to describe the stress hidden behind each week.

The course is highly demanding. You're left with constant deadlines to deliver homeworks that seem to take forever to understand and complete in a satisfactory manner.

We need to account the hours spent studying, last week I've passed over 60 hours studying and this doesn't reflect the lost sleep nights to get something done on time under pressure.

It's been a very interesting experience and I'm nevertheless enjoying it very much.

Some of the things that I like the most, is the way how students are expected to behave like professionals with some level of experience at any given moment of the program. There is no room to argue that you don't know how to achieve something. If you don't know how, then it's probably due to the lack of the research to learn how to get it done in the first place.

My biggest difficulty is a class called MSS - Models of Software Systems. It involves a lot of maths (my personal nemesis) and even though my performance is somewhat below the average, I'm still working my way to raise the level of efficiency up to the expected level.

I'm also having some difficulty on other classes, my written evaluation of case studies and replies to reading questions are still not averaging a satisfactory level as well. I'm now spending a lot more hours trying to compose quality replies.

Guess I'm a slow learner, I like to do things slowly and the fast pace of the course leaves little to breath let alone do things slowly.

Well.. even the rate of my blog posts is a good sign of this lack of free time.. ;)

But heck, this is exactly what I was expecting in the first place.

This is a way of perfectly simulating how people who graduate from the MSE are expected to deal with stress and learn under tough conditions limited by time and constrained by an excess of work.

I'm loving it and after 5 weeks of work, I'm already clueless regarding what is left to dazzle us during the next 60 weeks..

:)

The MSE: at last!

Today started the official MSE classes. (hooorray!!)

The whole computer department with room for thousands is empty as we're still on the middle of the summer, and we, the proud 14 students along with a few hand picked teachers fill these halls with the classes that will later on build and shape my personal view of the software world. (crossing my fingers)

So far, so good. Having classes exclusively in english language when all students are portuguese is not something new as I've spent last year passing through a similar experience with the CCNA.

The biggest difference is the fact that studying become (finally) a full time experience to me.

Over the past decade it wasn't nowhere easy to consolidate new knowledge while fighting with professional constraints or hostile study environments.

This time I'm really having fun while living a long waited goal and yet quite nervous to some extent about the quality of my work as everyone is reviewed constantly by people that are beyond doubt experts on this craft.

The MSE is seen as the crown jewel that represents the people who teach computer science in Coimbra's University and they uphold the professionalism and devotion to this goal at an incredibly impressive level. Students are expected no less commitment and I'm really happy to work in this environment.


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

At this moment I'm not so worried about the complexity or costs of this demanding course but my mind is troubled because of my contract work terms with the military.

If I cut my ties, then I'll breach the permanent staff contract terms that expect a minimum of 8 years under their roof. I still had 3 more years to reach this timeline, and breaking early gives them legal basis to request a compensatory indemnization for the 3 missing years.

Guess that some negotiation needs to take place or at least a (significant) source of income needs to be retrieved as the penalty can easily reach between 10k~20k euros. Perhaps a new bank loan can be drafted or the some distributed payments be agreed but freedom comes with a price.

The question that bothers my sleep: What is the price tag to gain back my freedom?

Ninja pendisk site update

Recently I've began playing more often with Wordpress and it has become a good tool to deploy new websites.

So, I picked a small popular site that would be easy to play with - ninja - because it is the right tool for simplicity sake and the website should also be made as simple as possible.


One of the advantages that I like the most at wordpress is the integrated plugin system. Very neat. You simply look for plugins with particular features and click to install.

On the ninja site, I've decided to replace the old plain html pages with a wordpress CMS. The transition went smoothly and took less than a day to complete.

The biggest obstacle was finding a proper new visual theme and then adding back the text present on the old pages. One sad thing that could not be ported are the posts that were made on the old forum system.

I've decided to use the integrated forum simple:press inside the CMS to ensure that everything fall well together. This new forum system also brings some other neat features that might help make it more appealing for other ninja users.

For example, it's not necessary to register on the forums as it is using OpenID, people on participate on a given topic get email warnings whenever someone replies to their threads and so on.

Also, this is a good homework practice for larger projects. My next goal is to also port the http://nunobrito.eu from the e107 CMS onto wordpress.

Next would be turn of http://winbuilder.net and this would complete the round of site conversions. Why converting to wordpress?

Well, the main reason is flexibility to change things around. With e107 or static html pages is a real bothersome to add changes on the website or make it look exactly as you want.

Besides, the available plugins are really cool and I'm just scratching the surface.

I don't really like the fact that it's dependent to MySQL but for the moment there is still no other alternative.

If you have the time, don't forget to visit the new ninja site at http://nunobrito.eu/ninja and tell me what you think.

:)

Hardware limits

I'm tired.

Spent the last three days working around the clock to ensure that all my matters with this azorean island were solved. This involved in going back, forth and around the city on foot several times just to get all the required documents and trying to change my new residence whenever possible.

Also, I needed to return my rented flat back to the owner and you wouldn't believe on the amount of things still missing to pack and bring back to mainland. Many other good things could not fit my luggage and I either gave them to friends or plain left them on the garbage.

It was somewhat difficult to put our own stuff on the garbage, especially when you paid good money for them and attached some emotional links over the years as you used them and raised happy and good memories.

Certainly not easy and I'm glad my wife didn't come with me as she wouldn't certainly bear to see some of the things that went out with with trash cleanup - I won't even tell her the details.

I've spent a lot of money and time repairing small details in the house, fixing electrical light-switches, changing bulbs and other equipment that I had replaced since the originals weren't in good state.

I'm taking most of this stuff with me and my personal luggage is so, so, so heavy that my only hope is that they'll be nice and don't charge me the extra weight. I can carry 20 kilograms but my bags weight around 60 kilograms and they demand an extra 5 euros per extra kilogram if they're in a bad mood.

As if my bank account was not already in a bad state, an excess of weight overcharge penalization would only do wonders - but I need to bring these things back home.

Guess the human limits of my hardware are really starting to show some wear. I've slept too little over these days and gave no rest between the effort of getting things done.

Mostly due to my fault. I always tend to think that sleep is secondary and prefer to go out see some music concert somewhere and have fun even knowing that I'll have to wake soon in the morning.

At least things are going on track, with the student's bank loan it should become easier to balance the bank account back into positive state thought I'm still worried about the future but I'm drawing some good plans to keep things running under schedule as expected.


I'm not worried about life in general, just plain sad at this moment. Leaving the Azores for good was not easy. Life is good around here and I've built a lot a good memories from this place.

After living for two months in mainland one can note the difference in lifestyle, but this is a new important step and better things will certainly come along.

:)

Just got myself re-baptized

Two months ago when I went to the airport to collect my ticket after shipping all my things in the container, I noticed that my identification was missing - it has been mistakenly placed inside the ship container and I had no way to retrieve it.

Being late (almost 10:00 pm), I rushed onto a shopping mall where a citizen's office was still open. 15 minutes later, I had signed a declaration mentioning I had lost my identification and they gave me a temporary citizenship certificate to allow me flight back home.

I thought things had gone smooth as silk and this was indeed what happened then.

But today I went to pick the new citizen's card at the mall and a mistake was made - one of my middle names (Garcia) was mistakenly placed as one of my first names.

My mother only gave me one first name as "Nuno" but I was instantly re-baptized under a new name as "Nuno Garcia"

Oh well. I'm too tired today to fight the ID system and I've spent the whole day and night going from one place to another, so, guess I'll have to make some use of my new freshly reassigned first name and get used to it.

Go ahead and call me either Nuno or Garcia - for some unquestionable reason that I won't even bother to ask, both are now the same on my ID card.

:)

Back to the Azorean spirit

I've returned one last time to the place that I called home for the last 5 years.

Very strange feeling. I moved out of my house at Coimbra and did everything on the expected schedule to get the bus ticket, the airplane reservation, to arrive on time, to wait the necessary time, to endure the time between trips but something was not the same.

This was likely the very last time that I see my house the way has it had been for the past few years and will also be the last time I'll probably ever be here.

And my feelings are crossed. I miss the azores.

Life around here is indeed different. People talk about quality of life but after some time you kind of forget that there are places where life is not so pleasant.

Looking back, this seems like another life in a distant time but it has only passed little over two months, guess life in mainland can also change you.

So, to celebrate a new beginning I started out by going to dinner at one of my favorite spots. I didn't go out at night as I need to get up really early in the morning but I'm afraid that I'm not also being able to catch much sleep as it's 03:00 AM and no rest has yet come my way.

Well, I'll try to get some work done and perhaps get tired enough to sleep for a couple of hours.

:)

Google Social Network

Maybe old news for some but I've just tried out Google Social Network and it's impressive.

It allows to literally port a social network onto your website without the need to ask people to re-register themselves on your site.

One other cool feature is the fact that wordpress and phpbb already come prepared for google connect which means a lot less worries about integration and more free time to work out the gimmicks of the site.

This is a very approach to the same concept implemented by Microsoft (and others) over a decade ago when Passport was first introduced but with the twist that you have so much more control over the login registrations and are allowed to do a lot more.

At the moment I don't see myself using often this tool but it's certainly something to keep in memory for future projects.

Very good google, keep it up.

http://www.google.com/friendconnect

Remote posting to wordpress using Gmail

Wordpress is a really cool tool for running blogs but one of my favorite features (remote posting) was not working correctly with gmail.

This happened because wordpress itself has no support for secure connections. So, after googling for a good while, the solution presented itself in the form of a new script that is capable of handling gmail.

The article where this approach is explained is available here: http://www.mattromaine.com/2005/03/07/wordpress-gmail-mobile-blogging/

Fairly simple approach. Just copy the two files onto the installation folder of wordpress, rename the extension of both files from .phps to .php and you're ready to go.

As mentioned on the instructions, you still need to automate the calling of the wp-gmail.php script but that is the easy part.

As for setting up wordpress itself, don't forget that the pop address is "pop.gmail.com" and that it will use port 995.

Last but not least, the username should be as "example@gmail.com" where "example" is your real username to log inside your gmail account.

That's it, good luck!

:)