João Prado Maia’s Weblog

I’ve been using pine for a long time now — I remember it was the default mail client available at my university‘s computer sciencie department. If I remember correctly, I think it was the first program I ever used in a UNIX system (back in 96?).

In any case, after more than a decade using this program, I just found out that you can customize the display of the message list within a folder. I noticed that the list of messages looked different while browsing the Wikipedia entry for Alpine.

My personal setting now is:

index-format=STATUS MSGNO SMARTTIME FROMORTO(33%) SIZE SUBJECT(67%)

If you go into the configuration section, search for the “index-format” entry (^W index-format), and then hit ? to go to the online help entry, you will get access to all of the documentation available for this. Very cool stuff.

• Bart Jansens documents his experiments with Varnish, a reverse proxy server that is making the rounds as of late. Varnish really needs better documentation.
• Pragmatic Programmer Screencasts – now with Erlang screencasts that should make it grokking this language a bit easier for newbies. I saw this a few weeks ago, and I can’t remember exactly, but I think no new screencasts have been published since?
• Google Doctype (kind of old news by now) – a new effort to build an online reference library by web developers for web developers. Do we really need another resource for web development articles?
• Writing Apache’s logs to MySQL – very old article, but still nice for someone that is not interested on deciphering Apache’s documentation.
• Profiling LAMP Applications with Apache’s Blackbox Logs – same for this one; nice overview of what’s possible with mod_logio

• Interesting way of using Apache to send large files to the client by using mod_xsendfile.
• Microsoft is still using an internal IE-HTML DOM that is not XHTML-compliant, even in XHTML documents.
• Dion Almaer wrote a simple video player that skips to specific portions of a YouTube video, using the newly released set of APIs. Lots of interesting ways to integrate with their content.

• eleven2 – Local hosting company from Houston that sponsored last night’s meetup. Love their design!
• Interview with Paul Tuckfield, the MySQL DBA at Youtube, about his work there on managing their database infrastructure.
• Hack to allow you to run different versions of Safari on the same machine
• Keeping track of website uptime with Pingdom
• Google Chart API seems interesting, even though I would probably just use JpGraph for my own projects
• Love the overall layout and colors of this chart from the Wall Street Journal
• Krumo, an Open-source project that provides a replacement for the var_dump / print_r functions in PHP

• Understanding the output generated by JSLint
• Comparing the benchmarks of PHP versions 3 through 5.3
• 10 principles of effective web design
• Really cool image zoom JavaScript library (very smooth animation!)
• Somewhat cool extensions to script.aculo.us to implement the iPhone wobble and illuminate effects in JavaScript
• Plotr, an interesting JavaScript charting library built on top of Prototype