Opera Unite: the good, the bad and the ugly

So I tried out Opera Unite, and here are my first impressions:

Good:

• The Opera Unite proxy that allows you to serve even behind a firewall, very nifty. Even experienced SysAdmin's have a hard time with this in some cases. The Opera Unite solution Just Works™.
• Works fine cross-browser (on the client side)

Bad:

• No option to use Opera Unite with your own domain or proxy (very proprietary to me)
• No way to backup/sync collection of installed services.
• No real open social network framework features included, as I had hoped...
• PHP? Python? Java?

Ugly:

• The Opera Unite server simply is terminated when you close Opera, without warning! FAIL!
• No auto-update functionality for installed services
  
• Force-reinstall to reactivate a deleted service, huh?

So basically all you get is a very fancy proxy for hosting pages with server-side JavaScript, all baked into a proprietary browser, accessible from a proprietary domain...

Good idea for a Firefox Extension though... ;-) Oh wait! That allready exists (well except for the proxy part anyway)!

Status update

Hey folks, it's been a while since I posted. Just for my future referral (I don't keep a diary), and the interest of anyone that cares, I thought I'd sum up what I've been up to lately.

In December or so I decided I got fed up with Brazil (more about that in future posts) and started planning my trip back to Holland. So I quit my job in February and left for Holland end of march.
Thanks to the fact that I actively started looking for a job in the Netherlands as early as January it didn't take me long to get a new job in the Netherlands. So in April I started my new job as web developer at Q-pon.

So, as for Vulpes, that project is currently on hold due to lack of free time on my part. If anyone wishes to continue development on Vulpes, let me know!
LibFox, on the other hand, is now being developed on in an internal branch at Q-pon. Though I still need to ask my boss for permission to distribute the changes. There are some really neat new features in there though.

I also finally got myself a proper phone, a T-Mobile G1. :-) It's thanks to this phone that I finally have time to write on my blog again. (This post was written on my G1 in the train to work.)

So that's it for now. I will be following up soon with some more stuff I have been wanting to write down for a while now. Stay tuned.

LostBmx.com

Last week I finished the site lostbmx.com, for a group of Dutch BMXers, I'm pretty pleased with the result myself, so check it out. :-)

II Encontro PHP-Paraíba

Nem faz 6 meses que tivemos o primeiro encontro, e agora já vamos ter o II Encontro de PHP-Paraíba!

Será realizado no dia 07 de Março na Unipê em João Pessoa começando com o credenciamento às 8 horas da manhã. Eu também vou realizar uma palestra la, falando sobre sistemas de controle de versão, como Subversion, GIT e Bazaar.

A inscrição "custa" 1Kg de alimento não perecível e pode ser feita em: www.php-pb.net.
A grade de programação é a seguinte:

08:00 - Credenciamento

09:00 - Social Media e Wordpress: o poder dos plugins e themes PHP - José Fernando S. Carvalho "Fish"
10:00 - Desenvolvimento organizado com controle de versão - Alwin Garside
11:00 - PHP nas nuvens: Desenvolvendo para o mercado corporativo - Marcos Bezerra

12:00 às 14:00 - Intervalo para almoço

14:00 - Moodle: Integração de Sistemas em PHP - Gleidson Lacerda
15:00 - Aplicações Web Acessíveis - Diego Pessoa

16:00 às 16:30 - Coffee-break

16:30 - PHP Jedi - Boas práticas e alta performance - Felipe Ribeiro
17:30 - Caminhos para a certificação Zend - José Berardo
18:30 - Mesa Redonda para resolução do ZCE Practice Test

20:00 - PHPinga/PHPizza

Mais detalhes podem ser obtidas no site do evento www.php-pb.net.

Seven things you probably don't know about me

Happy new year! (oh and Mery Christmas as well...)
Yeah that's really late, I've been just really busy lately. And twitter also has reduced my need to post.

Anyway, I got tagged by Felipe Ribeiro to follow some meme that seems to be hip in the PHP community right now, and since he speaks so highly of me (crazy dutch nerd troll) I guess I'm obliged to follow his lead. ;-) So here we go, seven things you probably don't know about me:

1. I started coding with BASIC on an old C128 and later an Atari XE, when I was about 11-12 years old, way back in 1995.
2. I spend the whole day listening to game soundtracks, movie soundtracks and game soundtrack ReMixes while I work.
3. I'm shortsighted (myopic) and use contact lenses. 6.5 degrees in the left eye, and 6.0 in the right eye.
4. I'm heavily addicted to caffeine. On average I drink 4 to 5 cups of coffee per day. To detoxify I need to stay off the coffee for at least 7 days. Whenever I try I give up after one day because of the headache it causes. :-P
5. I'm epileptic.
6. The name "Yogarine" comes from a Dutch salad sauce called "Yogorine", which is a form of "Yogonaise": Mayonaise mixed with Yoghurt. Most people say it fits me well because I'm kinda... Yaknow... pale.
7. I'm an atheist, materialist and critical rationalist.

There you go, seven things you don't didn't know about me. Now you can all see what a wonderful, interesting and genius person I am!

Anyway, now it's my turn to tag. *evil laughter* Aaaaand I choose you:
- Joost Ruis, another crazy Dutch nerd.
- Rosivaldo Azevedo, even though he doesn't have a blog. He'd better create one!
- Andreas Gohr, a PHP developer I secretly admire, responsible for DokuWiki.
- Marcos Júnior
- Theoziran Lima
- Björn Verzijlbergh, another Dutch guy.
- Karlisson Bezerra, faz um quadrinho, vai!

Well guys, here are the rules:
- Link your Original tagger(s), and list these rules on you blog
- Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
- Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
- Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Have fun! ;-)