My plans for tomorrow are simple: a worldwide wide photowalk! Not taking photos across the whole world (I wish…) but a challenge from Scott Kelly to have a photowalk around the world. I’ll do my part here in the Lisbon and we’ll be around Alfama for a couple of hours.


Photo by luispedron

Worldwide Photo Walk - Lisboa, Portugal

Update - I already have my photo walk photos available

Hero Pattern

One popular solution to the operation issue is a Hero who can and often will manage the bulk of the operational needs. The Hero Pattern can work in a small environment when one individual has the talent and capacity to understand an entire system, including the many nuances required to keep it functioning properly. For a large system of many components this approach does not scale, yet it is one of the most frequently-deployed solutions.

The Hero often understands service dependencies when no formal specification exists, remembers how to toggle features on and off or knows about systems everyone else has forgotten. The Hero is crucial but the Hero should not be an individual.

I believe the best solution to the Hero Pattern is automation. However, it also helps simply to rotate individuals from team to team if the organization has the capacity. In banking, it’s sometimes mandatory to take vacation so any “I’ll just run this from my workstation” activities can be brought to light.

Scalability Worst Practices [InfoQ]

Lately I’ve faced this pattern, or maybe anti-pattern, more times than I ‘d like to, either for lingering around a “hero” or even being one. My experience tells me that Agile practices like Scrum, although never addressing it explicitly, when properly implemented can minimize this problem.

I’m not very happy with the current hosting of this blog: the platform is becoming a bit outdated, looks like no activity going on over there (I don’t like “dead” services) and the it’s becoming a bit too slow for me. I have paid hosting with lots of storage and traffic available, and with a fully customizable Wordpress installation available with just one click.
So sometimes, many times actually, I wonder why don’t I migrate to my own host, or at least to Wordpress.com, and end this once and for all. Probably because I have to buy a new domain, I don’t think I could fit a tech oriented blog like this under temujinphoto.com, and importing all the posts from one blog to the other won’t be an easy task.

Download Squad listed three Linux applications that “make us hate Windows”: Apt-get (and its graphical interface Synaptic), Compiz Fusion and Amarok.

Compiz Fusion adds Vista and OSX “like” eye-candy to Linux, even in my old laptop, and it’s one of the reasons why current distributions are more appealing in recent years. Amarok is a really neat media player, probably is the best way to sync an iPod in Linux and the next version seems to be quite promising. So both of these tools are great but neither of them makes me feel like I need them everywhere, on every computer I lay my hands on.

But if there’s one thing anyone who uses a Debian based distribution just can’t live without is Apt-get, a better Windows Update that manages the updates of virtually all the installed packages, not only from OS and selected tools (Internet Explorer, Office, etc…), and hardly requires a reboot to apply them (usually only a new kernel requires a reboot).

3 Linux Apps That Make Me Hate Windows [Download Squad]

My other blog, the one less geeky than this one, had a facelift.

anchorite

Film photography isn’t dead yet. The guys at Epic Edits think the same way and created a list of ten reasons why film photography still is cool in their latest posted. Actually it’s an update to an earlier post written in a sarcastic tone which caused some confusion, I guess they should have chosen a title like 10 things I “hate” about film for that post to avoid misunderstandings.

The latest incarnation of deviantART, one of the largest online artist communities, is out but this release, like all the others throughout the years I’ve been there, is more focused on “sleekness” and having a cool interface than adding real features.
deviantART still is missing the point in a few important issues: crappy RSS support or no API or similar among other things.
There’s no way to embed deviantART elsewhere, I can’t put my messages or my contacts photos on my Netvibes, I can’t put deviantART News on my Google Reader, I can’t use data via a public interface to create things like a desktop uploader or a cool mashup. In other words: deviantART is closed, outdated and monolithic and is clearly missing how the Internet is evolving, and a fine example of that is their FAQ item #335:

Are RSS feeds available?
to be updated……….

read more | digg story

Heather, besides designing the cool theme used on my tumblog, does a pretty nice job in sewing photos together (a.k.a. panography). And fortunately she does it quite often.

The Eclipse Project is home to a quite reasonable amount of sub projects, the list keeps growing every year, so to help the end-user the Eclipse Foundation arranges a simultaneous yearly release of Eclipse and all sub projects. Ganymede is the 2008 release, following Europa in 2007 and Callisto in 2006, and it contains Eclipse’s latest version (3.4).

Eclipse Ganymede