Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible voyage

A friend of mine recommended this book, and I trusted him enough to read it 🙂 It was a good decision.

I’m not going to do a big description of this book, I only can say that I recommend it back to everyone. The book costs only $10 on a kindle edition, $0.37 second handed (I wish I lived in the USA to get those really cheap deals! my home would be full of books!).

Don’t only trust me and Mr Friend…

High ratings everywhere!

Summary: It’s a nice book, it’s cheap and it’s based on a real history (it even appears on Badass of the week)! Read it! now.. or on the future 🙂

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Unison Sync


Typical situation:

  • Photos&Music on Laptop
  • Photos&Music on USB drive

For my documents I actually sync to Ubuntu One and Dropbox (the 2G are totally enough for that, and Ubuntu déjà-dup scheduled backups are cool!), but I can’t sync my photos to online drives, I don’t want to pay for more space.

I was thinking on using rsync, but finally I decided to try something new (for me), Unison sync.

The unison-gtk graphical interface is easy, and the sync works perfectly!

apt-get install unison-gtk

The idea is that you create different profiles for different directories. In this case I create a profile for three of my directories: Documents, Pictures and Music

Creating a profile is as easy as: Path directory1 + Path directory2, and then unison will mantain this directories with the same data every time you run the sync. And that’s it, Unison will take care that the directories always hold the same data at the latest version.

I only had a problem with file permissions (As Always!). My external hard drive is formatted as Fat32 that does not support permissions. Unison refused to copy the files because it wast not possible to copy the permissions. The solution is easy, on the unison directory you have to edit the preferences files (for every profile) adding:

perms = 0

before the definition of the directories to sync. Once it’s done, unison does not try to copy the permissions.

More options for syncing directories are available 🙂 maybe I’ll try them on the future:

Conduit for Gnome –> This one actually seems really good.
Grsync –> rsync graphical interface on gnome.
Synkron –> Nice website! seems so professional.

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Playing With TileMill

For Module8, at ITC we have been learning about MapServer and OpenLayers. In my case, I also been playing with TileMill. Here I explain all the steps needed to create a small map with tilemill.

More!

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Emerillon

Some days ago while procastinating around I discovered a little software jewel:
Emerillon

Emerillon is named after the Émérillon, one of the three boats that visited New France under Jacques Cartier’s command in 1535. Émérillon is also French for Merlin Falcons.
Emerillon Website

How Cool is that?


uppercanadahistory.ca

1541: Cartier's Three Ships Grand Heremine, Petite Hermine, & Emerillon


hjoefuhrmanphoto.com

Émerillon - Merlin Falcon


That Cool!

But we are not interested in the name (though I like it a lot), the software is neat.
Emerillon is a map viewer for Gnome desktop environment. It features OpenStreetMap layers and a small, easy to use interface.
The feature list is not very long (not as long as Google Earth) but it’s a nice start for a good map viewer.

The beautiful part is that it features a plugin system (currently with 4 basic plugins) that eases extensibility:

  • Search bar (using GeoNames)
  • Placemarks
  • Map Coordinates (window center latitude,longitude)
  • Link Generator (for ggmap, bing, osm)

Screens!

There’s a lot of room for improvement, but it seems that the bugzilla page of the project is somewhat dead. The last commit (translation to Japanese) is from a week ago, but the last development commit dates from 2011-11-11.

It’s a shame.

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WebServices, Orchestration / choreography

Preparing a report about ‘Web Service Orchestration Chaining’.

First I was a little bit annoyed: Could it have a more general name? Orchestration and Chaining. I get the Chaining thing but the Orchestration? Am I supposed to grab a stick and start waving around to tell the web services how to be chained correctly?… And, yes! that is what Orchestration is!

This is an Orchestra

This delicious drawing comes from PedMorris, he has some nice drawings there!

And this is an Orchestration of Services

Ok, reading a little bit more:

In orchestration, the involved web services are under control of a single endpoint central process (another web service).
Web Services Orchestration and Composition

Orchestration refers to an executable business process that may interact with both internal and external web services. For orchestration, the process is always controlled from the perspective of one of the business parties.
web services orchestration -a review of emerging technologies, tools, and standards

Just reading that, when all of sudden a new term appears, Choreography (Yes, like dancing Web Services).

Choreography is more collaborative in nature, in which each party involved in the process describes the part they play in the interaction.
web services orchestration -a review of emerging technologies, tools, and standards

And again. This is a choreographed dance:


Actually this is a Sardana

And this is a choreography of web services:

So, we have that in Orchestration a service of one company/business is interacting with other services to, I assume, generate a result. While in Choreography, a service is only a “point” in the chain of processes to generate a result. First I was mad at it, but now I like the definitions.

Also I love the drawings, probably I will never forget this.


Orchestation of Web Services Presentation
Orchestration of Web Services Report

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Editing OSM: Merkaator

Finally, after a long time of saying “yes, I will edit my town in OpenStreetMaps”, I really started editing.

A full explanation please

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