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Nuno Brito
  • 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 it was imposed that we moved from a virtual shared server onto our fully dedicated server.

    At the time, our growth just seemed to keep going up like crazy 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 massive wave of zombie 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 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 was installed for 5 days in a row.

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

    So, if for any chances the person(s) behind this recent bot incursion wind up reading this blog post then 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.
    ---
    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.
    ---
    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.

    :)
| Date published: 2010-01-18T11:47:08-08:00
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