alinobairro

joaobordalo.com is out

2006-02-07T16:47:00.000Z

After 2 weeks of design, coding and others, joaobordalo.com is now officially launched, so this blog will be terminated. All posts have been migrated to, and new ones will appear only at joaobordalo.com. Please take a look and drop some feedback.

If you are reading this through a RSS reader, the new feed is available at http://joaobordalo.com/xml/rss20/feed.xml

Your rights online

2006-02-03T16:15:00.000Z

After a few days not digging, I've just found three pieces of news that worries me:

Going for tiger

2006-01-25T22:22:00.000Z

Ok, no more excuses, I'll upgrade to Tiger: saft and google earth only works with 10.4.4.

Bluepulse

2006-01-22T19:53:00.000Z

Guys, if you own a cell phone (who doesn't), you have to point your browser to the bluepulse website, sign-up, and follow the instructions. These guys developed one amazing software, described as:

A free program for mobile phones that allows you to run tiny, useful widgets for a variety of uses, such as instant messaging and RSS.

And it's true, and works like a charm: in less than 5 minutes, I was talking with my buddies in MSN. I'm going to try now the RSS reader.

The platform allows any one to develop new widgets, and I surely hope the business model motivates people to develop new functionalities and services. I'm really impressed with this, and I reiterate: go to the website and try it.

Trend watching

2006-01-18T00:08:00.000Z

Today's bloglines reading gave me a lot of interesting stories about possible technical, social and political trends. Here are a few, rescued from my last browser crash:

Yahoo seems to be experimenting a new way of online ads: in Yahoo Movies, search for a movie (I used Vatel), go to the bottom of the page, and in the Sponsored Links box notice the links for different ad types. Click one and you will see ads only about the tag you just selected. Nice move, gives you less visibility, but targeted ads with higher levels of attention;

Still in the advertising market, it looks like the marketing guys are getting there: The New York Times as a story about marketers getting really excited with three second messages in phone displays, all powered up by GPS positioning and location target adverstising;

An interesting post on why Yahoo Music is better than iTunes for home entertainment. I admit I will think about this, really;

A beautiful idea, sharing broadband to increase speed, is becoming a business case: two companies, Mushroom Networks and WiBoost Inc., are about to launch their new products. It looks like good sense is prevailing, take a peak at the article;

Lawrence Lessig wrote an interesting post about the need for regulation on the "net neutrality" issue. If you want to know more on this subject, try the Wikipedia definition.

Try ruby on your browser

2006-01-17T13:15:00.000Z

A beautiful interactive ruby lesson by why the lucky stiff, don't work well on Safari, use Firefox. More resources on ruby at squidoo lens, another bright idea for content organization.

The ultimate geek car

2006-01-11T14:40:00.000Z

I'm really sorry Santa, for being a pain in the ass, but with all the gadgets I'm requesting, I will need a car to transport them:

Can you send me one of this?

Ok, this was my last request.

Mac World San Francisco

2006-01-11T01:03:00.000Z

Dear Santa, is me again. I've just watched Steve's keynote (1h32m23s) and I would like to add to my wish list a couple of things:

the new iMac, with a Intel duo processor inside (2-3 times faster);
a MacBook Pro, also with the Intel beast (4-5 times faster), an iSight built in and a remote controller;
the new iLife 06, now with iWeb (amazing!);
the new iWork;
and a .Mac account.

Ahh, and a huge, huge one was a real Mac retail store here.

Late Christmas

2006-01-09T22:48:00.000Z

Dear Santa, I know I'm late, but can you please send me one of each?

this one for be able to speak with my mom while in the pub;
one of this, to impress girls;
and one of this, because it's so cool!!

Thanks in advance.

Google announcements

2006-01-05T15:38:00.000Z

Fresh from ArsTechnica, it seems tomorrow Google will announce a new video service:

The service, which will be an addition to Google's Video Search, will allow users to buy video content for pre-determined prices, and the company is expected to announce partnerships with the likes of CBS and the NBA.

Additionally, Google will announce Google Pack, several applications available for download in a single installation bundle:

Sources tell us that Google pack will feature a Google-tweaked version of Firefox, Adobe Acrobat Reader, antivirus software from Symantec, AdAware, Trillian, and Google's own offerings, including Google Desktop Search, Picasa, Google Earth, Google Talk, and all of the toolbar action you can shake a stick at. Oh, and I left out one other item: the RealPlayer.

You can read the complete article here

News dump, part II

2006-01-05T15:03:00.000Z

While printing (in recycled paper) a lot of Rubyonrails tutorials, some random cruising alerted me for some links and news:

The last days where fertile in new search engines, all of them pitching that are better than Google. Well, see it for yourself, by trying Lexxe and Previewseek;

Cingular as reached an agreement with PC manufacturer Lenovo to include HSDPA capabilities in their laptops. This way, ThinkPad owners will have wireless access to the Internet in the US and 90 other countries, either by Cingular's HSDPA or EDGE own network, or by Cingular roaming agreements;

Skype will announce WiFi and Internet phones at CES this week. A logic step from Skype, going to the hardware market, just like Apple and the iPod revolution;

Still on the VoIP world, O'Reilly decided to license his book about Asterisk under the Creative Commons license, making it free to download and distribute. You can download it here.

News dump

2006-01-04T11:42:00.000Z

Having nothing more to say, here are some news worth notice:

In the video world, BBC is opening is archive to UK public, and now you are able to download nearly 80 news reports (from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Tiananmen Square) and create something unique. Another great idea from BBC, like backstage;

Still on the video world, it seems that Microsoft is helping Entertainment Group to deliver Vongo, a new movie download service that allows consumers to view full-length studio films, concerts and TV shows. The site is open only to Windows users and US customers, so you have to use a US open proxy to be able to access it (tip: I used this free proxy, 208.21.64.4 port 80);

From ArsTechnica, GNU liberates VoIP with a new open source telephony stack. In my humble opinion, this could be the push needed for total interconnection between different VoIP providers: this could be the lingua franca for VoIP.

A beautiful piece of technology, Retrievr, allows you to search for photos in Flickr by making a sketch of what you want. Really nice and well done;

As everyone else, I'm waiting for AllPeers, a new Firefox plugin. This could lead to a all new P2P ball game. For now, you can take a peek to some screenshots here;

And finally, transform your iPod*, iPod mini or iPod nano into a full-fledged video recorder/player with the new iSee 360i. You have to see it to believe it.

Ruby on Rails

2005-12-29T21:24:00.000Z

I've just finished my first Ruby on Rails web application, and these baby rocks! It's true that you can develop 10 times faster, and it's so simple that you can do it from day one. What follows is a summary of my RoR investigation, from curiosity to my first working RoR web application.

I decided to study more deeply about Ruby on Rails some time ago, and now I had the chance. First, a visit to the official website, a jump to the screencasts section, and watched the screencasts. Seeing is believing, so you have to watch how to make a blog with RoR in 15 minutes (with installation), and how to make a filter for Flickr in 5 minutes (with CSS).

Next, some documentation, which I recommend reading it in the following order:

After these, I was really excited, to I just had to try it for myself. I have a Mac, and I was not willing to compile anything, so I started looking for a no frills package. Found one, Locomotive. Ok, free download, one application, double click and its on. Locomotive is integrated with TextMate, so I decided to extend a little further my investigation and also try it. A trial download, one application, double click, no frills. By the way, TextMate looks promising (more in some days).

Opened a terminal window (tip: open it from Locomotive, it will take care of all the environment variables for you), create a dummy database with sqlite (comes with Locomotive), did some script/generate scaffold xpto, edited some files, and voila, my first web application in RoR.

It's really easy to program in RoR, and still maintain a lot of power. It's a very well organized framework, clean and helpful. And if you are sick of doing always the same things, do yourself a favor and take a couple of hours to try it.

2005 2.0

2005-12-28T20:10:00.000Z

Everybody is trying to make a list of important things for 2005. Well, I was to, but decided to simply label it the "2.0 year". New business models are building from the peer-to-peer social model found in the net, and from the ability to explore the long tail of the market. In the first, digg became bigger then Slashdot, del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo, and wikipedia and folksonomy became part of our lexical.

On the second, iTunes Music Store proved to be a huge business success, eBay paid several billions to have Skype, and everyone is trying to take a piece of the AdSense pie. Maybe the best presentation summarizing all this, was made by Brandon Schauer, check is sources (in the PDF) for further reading.

But this year was also the year of Ajax, JavaScript frameworks and mashups. The web is now easier to use, easier to develop, and the API business model is growing rapidly, as stated by the growth of the mashup matrix. For an excellent example of a mashup, take a look at BlockRocker (GoogleMaps + Amazon + Craigslist).

Well, 2005 was a good year, hope 2006 be even better to everyone.

Podcast and Xmas

2005-12-22T16:34:00.000Z

Due to popular demand, this blog has now a podcast version: subscribe it by copying the URL in the Talkr chicklet on the right. Due to Xmas and so, I'm in a kind of offline mode: I'm sure after Xmas I will be able to post more frequently. See you then.

Talkr

2005-12-15T12:40:00.000Z

This blog is now powered by Talkr. For every post in, you can click on the "Listen to this article" link and have it read to you. Try this one and enjoy.

DropSend

2005-12-14T21:35:00.000Z

If you have difficulties sending big emails (up to 1 GB) try DropSend: it comes with an application for Mac & Windows.

Back to business

2005-12-12T16:19:00.000Z

Back to work, just to find out that I have +1600 feeds and +400 mails to read. Meanwhile, some news are to important to be kept unnoticed. Please the forgive me the lack of opinions, I'm running against the clock here:

Yahoo bought del.icio.us, and is experimenting with behavioral ads;
Skype launched is version 2.0 (now with video);
Dion released is "The Best Web 2.0 software of 2005" list;
Still in the Web 2.0 context, ZDNet has writes about new services and business models;
And finally, after all the work I had with my calendar solution, Rui points out Chandler.

Vacationes

2005-12-01T11:45:00.000Z

I'll be offline for some days (back on the 12th) for some surf & rest quality time.

Shared calendar

2005-11-28T19:28:00.000Z

I'm a Mac user at home, and a Windows user at work. I have my mail on a IMAP server, so I can read it in either systems without any frills. In the iMac I use Mail.app, and in the Windows box I use Thunderbird, and everything works fine. But I have a problem with my calendar. I love the iCal design, and I would like to have it in my Windows box. Not only for scheduling meetings, but also for ToDo management, sharing and publishing other calendars. I went to the web and to all the sites with "web application lists" on it, but didn't find any real good web calendar application: I tryied Planzo.com, but has a polluted user interface, and Kiko.com, which don't work in Safari, so I had to improvise.

After some googling, I found Yagoon, and if you take a minute to jump to their site, you will notice the resemblance with Apple iCal. For 30 bucks, this could be my best buy of the year, but wait, I can try it for 60 days, so it seems is going to be my best buy for next year. Ok, I have my iCal look-a-like in my Windows box. Now, how can I sincronize the two applications?

So, I went to .Mac pages for prices and conditions, but 99 dollars per year seems to much for a WebDAV server. Back to Google, I found iCalExchange, which is a free service for sharing iCal files. Ok, so now I have my "synchronizer". I tryied to publish and subscribe the same calendar from iCal and Yagoon, but I got a lot of permission errors, so I had to go for a two calendar solution.

I created two calendars on iCalExchange, named bonnie and clyde. iCal publishes (writes) in the bonnie calendar, and subscribes (reads) the clyde calendar. In the iCal, bonnie is coloured green and clyde is coloured red. This way, I know that I can change, erase or create green events, but I should not do nothing to the red ones. On the Yagoon side, it publishes to the clyde calendar (green) and subscribes the bonnie calendar (red), implementing the same colour code.

At the end, I can use two different applications in two different operating systems, having the same user interface and full syncronization (it even syncronizes ToDos). All for less than 30 dollars, and thanks to iCalExchange. Ahhh, and I can see my calendar live going directly to iCalExchange homepage. Rui, feel free to use this to write a new HOWTO for your blog ;)

OpenLaszlo

2005-11-25T20:30:00.000Z

From Ajaxian I found that OpenLaszlo added XMLHttpRequest in is version 3.1. I didn't know what OpenLaszlo was, so I decided to take a peek:

The OpenLaszlo platform allows developers to create applications with the rich user interface capabilities of desktop client software and the instantaneous no-download Web deployment of HTML. These applications run on all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems from a single XML code base.

Since a video is better than a thousand images, watch this 3m video (2MB) and take your own conclusions.

My iMac is back

2005-11-24T18:52:00.000Z

Thumbs up to Apple IMC Portugal. It took 10 days to substitute the motherboard, which is pretty good for portuguese standards. Unfortunally, the new one is like the other, a first generation board, so no Airport or Bluetooth. Well, back to the good user interfaces and a reliable OS.

Google click-to-call

2005-11-24T10:13:00.000Z

When everyone was waiting for a click-to-call service from eBay (after all, they paid almost 4 billion for Skype), Google decided to launched it first. Well, it's still in a beta phase, but you can take a look at the screenshot on the right side (more screenshots), and read the FAQ. I think the correct name for the service should be "click to be called", since you enter your phone number (yes, another personal information you're giving to Google) and they call you.

Free culture

2005-11-23T14:17:00.000Z

A very interesting presentation from Lawrence Lessig at OSCON 2002. A true call for arms in the fight against control and copyright, a must read. 32 minutes plus download time (8MB).

Google fade out

2005-11-23T14:07:00.000Z

What if Google will do most everything wrong, and is competitors don't? A tale from Jack Shafer (Slater's editor) called The Great Google Wipeout give us an interesting view of what could be a possible future.

Tuesday in the afternoon

2005-11-22T15:27:00.000Z

Yesterday I spent all night catching up my feeds. Due to personal reasons, I spent the last three days offline, and when I finally get to my bloglines account I had thousands of new posts to read. So I decided to do something about it (besides reading them), clean up my blogroll and add some new feeds I'm interested in. As a result, I have now more 6 blogs to read daily (ouch!).

Another good decision was to delete Google's AdSense from the blog. This blog exists for more then a year now, and I've earned less than 5 USD from it, so, bye bye AdSense. Essentially, I'm giving free publicity to Google, and they don't need it, right?

So, into the juice of those thousands feeds:

Talking about Google, if you want to include Google maps on your website, you should take a look at Phoogle, which allows you to do that with 5 (yes, five!) lines of php.
If you're a heavy user of Wikipedia, maybe you can find LuMriX useful. It's a Ajax powered Google Suggest look-a-like service for Wikipedia. Can make your Wikipedia searches faster.
Microsoft is trying to standardize Office 12 documents, in what they called the Microsoft Open Office XML. It's a good move, but it would be much better if they would follow the Open Document standard. Yes, I'm being naive now...
Amazon is preparing to launch two new great services, branded Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade. In the first one, you will be able to buy pages from a book, instead of buying the entire book, which can be useful in some cases (I don't see much utility in this, but maybe someone will). But the second service is a major breakthrough: when you buy a book from Amazon (70% of my books) you will be able to buy a search service for that specific book!! So, it's the best of the two worlds, I can read my book while getting a tan in the beach, and if I want to find something in it really quickly, I have Amazon Upgrade.
And the funny link is about the launching of the new iPod Invisa

Microsoft SSE

2005-11-21T21:41:00.000Z

Microsoft announced SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions), which can be seen as a two way item sharing (think bidirectional RSS). The extensions described in the Simple Sharing Extensions enable feed readers and publishers to generate and process incoming item changes in a manner that enables consistency to be achieved. For example, two or more will be able to co-edit a post, which can be a huge revolution in the blogsphere. If you are a technical person, you should take a look at the specification page, after all, Microsoft launched it under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Are the winds of change blowing from Richmond?

Lists

2005-11-21T19:07:00.000Z

The end of the year is coming, so are lists of anything. In a couple of weeks, TV channels, magazines and newspapers will start to deliver lists of people, inventions, events, etc. So, let me try to do it now, be the first one to annoy you with this:

The $100 laptop

2005-11-17T11:56:00.000Z

Thank you Nicolas and your team for this achievement, the $100 laptop. Watch the video where UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Nicholas Negroponte Unveil the $100 Laptop Prototype at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, and some photos on the MIT website.

Sony DRM breach copyright?

2005-11-16T15:15:00.000Z

This can be Sony's worst nightmare: first, Sony decided to distribute a rootkit in there music CDs, to be installed in your PC (without your knowledge), in order to hide is DRM software; second, Mark Russinovich discovered the existence of this rootkit, and make it public, which make people start to scream at Sony; third, someone took advantage of the rootkit and wrote a trojan codenamed Stinx-E, able to hide from Windows, so impossible to be detected and cleaned; fourth, Sony decided to provide an uninstaller to allow people to erase the rootkit, but this uninstaller raised new security holes; and finally, it seems Sony used some LGPL code, without delivering the source, so breaking copyright:

It turns out that the rootkit contains pieces of code that are identical to LAME, an open source mp3-encoder, and thereby breach the license.

This software is licensed under the so called Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL). According to this license Sony must comply with a couple of demands. Amongst others, they have to indicate in a copyright notice that they make use of the software. The company must also deliver the source code to the open-source libraries or otherwise make these available. And finally, they must deliver or otherwise make available the in between form between source code and executable code, the so called object files, with which others can make comparable software.

Sony complied with non of these demands, but delivered just an executable program. A computer expert, whose name is known by the redaction, discovered that the CD "Get Right With The Man" by "Van Zant" contains strings from the library version.c of Lame. This can be concluded from the string: "http://www.mp3dev.org/", "0.90", "LAME3.95", "3.95", "3.95 ".

Ridiculous

2005-11-15T22:52:00.000Z

So, after all the fuss around this issue, Sony decided to allow people to download an uninstaler for is DRM software. All you have to do is fill a form, download the software and run it. Know that you know that, don't do it. People from Freedom to Tinker found out that if you install Sony uninstaller in your PC, you are opening a huge security hole. Malicious users can execute code in your PC, all you have to do is visit one of there websites. Where (and when) is this going to end?

Peer-to-peer services

2005-11-15T19:05:00.000Z

There are a lot of different definitions for what is Web 2.0. Wikipedia as one, Tim O'Reilly another, and there is even a cumulative definition. Maybe Web 2.0 is about this: peer-to-peer services, where your peers helps you getting what you need, and in return you help your peers by participating. And this can be used for viewing television and videos over the internet, with Tioti (Tape If Of The Internet), for writing and reading stories, with Glypho, or for finding interesting stories with Digg. What I really now is that, like Mark Evans, I'm drowning in Web 2.0 apps.

Media Central

2005-11-14T18:59:00.000Z

Via pfig, Media Central (inspired by Front Row and CenterStage).

Anti-Sony manifesto

2005-11-11T11:47:00.000Z

So, Sony installs a rootkit in your PC when you buy a CD from them, in order to implement his DRM. This was discovered by Mark Russinovich in October (highly technical post). In my personal opinion, this an unacceptable behavior, and I'm not alone: Frederico Oliveira wrote what I consider to be the first anti-Sony manifesto, which I totally subscribe.

Happy birthday Firefox

2005-11-09T22:52:00.000Z

One year later, Firefox turns into a baby with 11.51% market share.

Update: these guys are serious about changing from IE to Firefox

Network neutrality II

2005-11-09T16:07:00.000Z

The discussion continues, and it reached the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the US. I'm really interested in this issue, since I work in an ISP, being a free Internet advocate, so you can imagine the duality I'm feeling these days.

Shaw Cable, a Canadian company, is limiting P2P bandwidth using technology from Ellacoya, so we can now say it already started. The technology is out there, and telcos are ready to start using it in large scale. This is a very important question, that goes from freedom to innovation, trough economics and technology.

I understand the economics of launching a broadband network, but I also understand (and agree) with Vint Cerf words. I'm waiting, and listening to the live hearing webcast.

Update: this issue has been digged

Security Toons

2005-11-08T20:16:00.000Z

8 years ago I gave my first presentation on network security. It's a hard topic, and the worst parts were explaining how cryptography works, and explaining software bugs as the buffer overflow or a race condition. Meanwhile, Wired as made an amazing job explaining the formers with an animation. You don't get the cryptography how to (guess prime numbers theory is really hard to draw) but instead you can have a glance at some moments of really bad software.

Update:NSA's site for CryptoKids.

Feed fishing

2005-11-08T12:11:00.000Z

Due to the lack of time, today's menu is about grilled feeds:

Microsoft keeps surprising, and is offering Visual Studio and SQL Server. It's free, even for comercial usage, but it's only a Express Edition;
An excelent how-to implement your own helpdesk company, using UltraVNC and some webservices. Requires heavy geekary;
Joined the Morfik Pioneers program. A very interesting application that will allow building web applications (AJAX) with a graphical user interface;
Finnaly, follow-me phoning, or how to implement bluetooth proximity detection with Asterisk.

The future is sooner than we expected

2005-11-04T18:08:00.000Z

Three news worth notice:

The newest player to arrive at the webOS arena is Microsoft. The old giant unveiled is web strategy, launching is Live program: a personalizable website, with a lot of Ajax and a cool concept, Windows Gadgets; a new webmail application, which mimics Outlook in a browser (have to see this working); a new messenger, with VoIP integrated and ability to call for any fixed line in world; and Office Live, which is not an online version of Office, but a set of free, ad supported, productivity business tools;
Sun announces services to convert Microsoft Office docs to Open Office compatible format. There is nothing special with this announcement, Sun is following the OpenOffice path. The thing is, this is a service to be offer by Sun Grid Utility, which is Sun's vision of the future, "the network is the computer". Or in other words, applications will be web based, all you need on your side is a browser and a web server running in our PC for local access to information, as stated by Jason Kottke;
Google has filed a patent to serve search results based on user profiles. That means that Google will start to work on all the information they have about us, like what are we searching for, what are the websites we visit most, and what are our social networks. It's a good idea to have Google showing me the links I care most, but this arise a lot of privacy concerns. For a peek on where this could lead us, watch epic.

Network neutrality

2005-11-02T20:38:00.000Z

Tuesday, I read on ArsTechnica about SBC's CEO Edward Withacre interview on BusinessWeek, where he declares, and I quote:

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?

How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

This is happening because ISP made huge investments in developing broadband networks, betting in the access business, and now are realizing that the real money is some layers above: companies like Google and Yahoo, are making huge profits, in advertising; Skype has a huge hype value, 'selling' free voice instant messaging, disguissed; and World of Warcraft(?), with millions of players, each paying an average of 10 euros a month, must be a case study. So, ISPs want a piece of the cake.

And the thing is, in some places, ISPs have monopolies, so they can, for instance, block all your VoIP traffic, and make you use their own product. You, as a customer, having no other broadband operator in your area, have no choice. And companies like Narus, are already making money with this: Narus product, not only allows ISPs to block almost any kind of traffic, as ISPs can decide to jitter the traffic, in order to avoid any legal constraints. From another article from ArsTechnica, the words of Jay Thomas, Nerus marketing president:

"But there's nothing that keeps a carrier in the United States from introducing jitter, so the quality of the conversation isn't good," Thomas says. "So the user will either pay for the carrier's voice-over-Internet application, which brings revenue to the carrier, or pay the carrier for a premium service that allows Skype use to continue. You can deteriorate the service, introduce latency [audible delays in hearing the other end of the line], and also offer a premium to improve it."

Can ISPs do this? Or should they be network neutral? This issue is being debated in several places, like ArsTechnica and LessigBlog, and there is a very interesting paper by Barbara van Schewick, which gives us an excellent economic framework for discussing the need for regulation on this matter.

It is an important matter for managers, regulators, and people concerned with the right to free information. In my humble opinion, this issue must be regulated: the temptation to do this kind of blocking and filtering, either in a monopoly, either in a cartel, is too strong. And with no regulation, we can be going to an ISP dictatorship.

Lost in translation?

2005-10-31T16:18:00.000Z

In 10 years, you will be able to be understood by anyone in the world. Talk to anyone in your preferred language (say English), they will listen to you in whatever language they want to (Spanish? Portuguese?), all this in real time, thanks to this translation goggles. A step back for the Esperanto community, a huge step forward for globalization.

Deskloops

2005-10-28T12:50:00.000+01:00

My iMac is having video problems: my screen is scrambled. After some goggling, I found out that my iMac serial number is in the range for the Apple repair extension program, so it has to be repaired. Meanwhile, back to Windows. But I surelly lack Exposé, and meanwhile, I found Deskloops, and my first impression is that, maybe, there are some ideas that can be taken to the next Exposé version. Apple dudes should take a look at this.

Evolution

2005-10-27T18:52:00.000+01:00

The world is evolving, and so are human relations. Media formats will be purely digital, and distribution will be in a peer-to-peer model. Search engines will understand what I want, in plain english. But should I say 'will' or 'are'? Is the future nearer then we think?

NTT is experimenting with human remote controlling. The idea is "to perhaps make video games more realistic", which can be very exciting, but having low voltage currents through my brain isn't my preferred definition of fun.
Videoegg claim is "internet video publishing as simple as it ought to be like posting a photo or frying an egg". Well, I don't know, don't have the time to try it, but it seems people from Six Apart really like this service: the partner each other, and now you can now post video in your typepad blog, as simple as frying an egg.
How will be TV in 10 years? Well, I don't know, but BrightCove as a really strong idea, and it makes sense. Just add mass adoption of broadband, dropping costs in video production, new reach media formats and home networks, and you have a all new economy model.
From the web2explorer blog, I found this "more-than-a-search-engine" technology, ePrecis. Read the post, and then try and throw some sentences to the text box

Data stored in your browser

2005-10-25T17:55:00.000+01:00

Back in the late 90's, I had this really crazy ideia of having data stored in the browsers of our web site viewers. We run against a lot of technical problems, so we had to cancel the whole deal. But today I found someone with the same levels of insanity (thank god i'm not alone) and definitely, a best programmer: combining AMASS with the TrimQuery SQL engine, he is able to store full SQL tables in your browser cache. Could this be the driver for new AJAX applications?

Quickies

2005-10-21T12:45:00.000+01:00

Here some quickies from today:

flock as landed. first experience shows me it's really beta: the del.icio.us integration works pretty well, but when i setuped my blogger account, the cpu just sky rocket (top even showed 103% usage!) and i had to kill it by hand. history search is a major add-on, but it's not working properly: i visited some sites, and try to search from some words that i seen in them, but the search results are not showing some specific pages. feed caching is another major break through, but why do i need to setup my del.icio.us account every time i restart flock? and i'm posting this using flock, and that seems to be working properly. i hope to post more on flock in the next few days.
OpenOffice 2.0 is out, with full support to the Oasis standard OpenDocument format. there is already a comparison with MS Office Spare some bandwidth, and download it via p2p

We share your pain

2005-10-20T14:28:00.000+01:00

From Melo, an amazing parody on a new Microsoft program aimed to lower the number of bugs in their applications. Watch the video, served from Akamai.

Quake 4 leaked

2005-10-19T00:36:00.000+01:00

It's real, but rumours talk about a virus in it.
2.65 GB file size, on a torrent near by.

Blog minor improvements

2005-10-18T13:24:00.000+01:00

Just added the HaloScan commenting and trackback tools (below), and started using the RSScache feed for RSS statistics (on your right). Please update your feeds, i really like to know my stats:

http://my.rsscache.com/alinobairro.blogspot.com/atom.xml

George W. Bush sings U2

2005-10-17T21:00:00.000+01:00

In an amazing audio copy & paste exercise, rx creates new versions of well known musics, all "singed" by George W. Bush. His website is here and my favorite music is "Sunday Bloody Sunday" from U2. What's yours?

Markl

2005-10-17T20:03:00.000+01:00

I was exploring this post from lifehacker titled "Subscribe to free, del.icio.us videos in iTunes", and, while on that, decided to go to the podcast directory from iTunes. For my surprise (and pride), "Ha vida em Markl" was in the top of the list, which is amazing for a portuguese podcast, even if it is from Nuno Markl. Thumbs up Nuno.

DVD 2 H.264

2005-10-17T19:42:00.000+01:00

Some of my friends had forked some months ago, and their descendants seems to really like DVDs. The problems is, besides loving to watch them, the kids really love to bite the discs, so, all the Noody and Nemo DVDs are getting quite disgusting. To fight this, my friends decided to think on a how to rip DVDs and store it in H.264 format.

Simple? Well, it looks like, the thing is, in total, we are talking of more than 1.000 DVDs, which can take a loooong time. So, they started to think on a distributed system that could offload the work to a network of computers attached to the Internet, each one contributing with spare cpu cycles, to do the job, which is pretty cool.

Meanwhile, I've found this application (Mac OS X and Be OS only) that can rip a DVD (even if encrypted) and store it in mp4 or h.264. It's called HandBrake, and his telling me that "Bowling for Columbine" will take 6h30m (!) to be completed. Come on boys, we definitly need that distributed network!

Prince of Persia

2005-10-16T20:34:00.000+01:00

Following the game webification path, found Prince of Persia in flash.

Things you can do with Gmail

2005-10-14T21:31:00.000+01:00

You can use Gmail to do a lot of other things besides reading (and storing) your mail. You can use it to:

manage a todo list;

find information on RSS feeds;

find torrents;

use it as a notepad;

filter spam;

storage a photo gallery.

Learn here how to do all that.

Wolfenstein 3D

2005-10-14T00:00:00.000+01:00

In this webification world, old games are rising from the grave. This time, it's Wolfenstein dressed in flash.A month ago, was a bunch of lemmings running in dhtml trousers.

You can comment...

2005-10-13T23:32:00.000+01:00

... this post, only if you use 2 or more webtools from this list. Try to say which ones do you regulary use, i'll try to evaluate coolness from there.

Windows DRM?

2005-10-13T23:23:00.000+01:00

From arstechnica today:

With all the excitement over Apple's video iPod and iTMS TV show downloading announcement this week, MTV's launch of its new "Uber" channel got lost in the hubbub. mtvU Uber is a new channel distributed entirely by broadband. Available via streaming download, mtvU Uber offers a mixture of existing MTV content (shows such as "Spring Break" and "Does This Look Infected") and new exclusive shows that feature input from college students using the Uber service. The show is being broadcast for free, supported by a traditional advertising model. It does not require a registration to begin viewing.

Unfortunately, when i tried to check it out, got this message:

In order to offer a broad selection of full-length music videos on-demand and free of charge, mtvU Über uses Windows Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect videos from unauthorized re-distribution.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's Windows Media Player Plug-in for Macintosh does not support Windows DRM.

Well, that's one less costumer.

Photos from trip to New York

2005-10-12T21:46:00.000+01:00

Finaly, the photographer decided to send it...

Google wallet

2005-10-12T10:55:00.000+01:00

Last 20 of June, the Wall Street Journal wrote about Google plan to launch a electronic payment service. Today, i found this page. The story behind this page is: last week, Tony Ruscoe decided to probe for working Google subdomains and found a few. One with high interest was purchase.google.com, so webmasterbrain.com decided to take a deep look into it, and here are their discoveries (they even have a screenshot). It seems Google is building a paypal competitor, isn't it?

If your cable tv crashes...

2005-10-12T10:34:00.000+01:00

This weekend my cable tv decided to not work anymore, so i had to re-invent my entertainment definition. For a couple of weeks now, i have my adsl link up and running, so i decided to make some web digging and see what was there for me. And here are the results: if you want to watch live tv channels from all over the world (+100), try BeelineTV; to the ones who like short funny movies, try darlugo, truveo or google video; if you want to watch some old movies or tv series (remember Flash Gordon?) you can always take a peek at Emol and download some, since they are copyright free; and if don't give a damn to copyright, and don't care for video quality, go to divxcrawler and download some of last month blockbusters. After this, who needs cable tv after all?

Update: my cable tv is up again, so i will be able to watch the soccer game tonight. Yes, there's a reason to have cable tv, after all.

Update2: just found a post here on using Google to find for open index webpages with movies. Just click here to see some results provided by Google.

Meanwhile, in the IM world...

2005-10-12T10:13:00.000+01:00

BetaNews as a rumour about Microsoft and Yahoo linking their IM networks. The main reason to do that seems to be the ever growing threat from voice chats, like Skype, which, by the way, as a new wireless voice handset by Linksys, the CIT2000. In my personal opinion, in order to survive, all IM networks will have to connect to each other, so this decision is only one more step to the inevitable.

Visual tour

2005-10-09T23:44:00.000+01:00

Today, is all about visual:
1) from a study on biological motion patterns, play with the sliders here and try to guess who's walking;
2) adverstising companies should take a look at the heliodisplay, it can really boost any old billboard;
3) a truly "fingertips" experience with this new computer interface, TactaPad, and since i'm only linking to visual experiences, watch the demos where one interacts with a Mac, and where one makes some drawings;
4) and finally, a personal site which looks exactly as is owner powerbook (requires flash player 8).

Google reader

2005-10-07T21:17:00.000+01:00

I've just noticed Google Reader, so I decided to give it a try. First step, export my blogroll from Bloglines: 20 seconds. Second step, import it to Google Reader. It's not working with Safari, and seems to do nothing with Firefox. Bahhh, it's friday night, I'm going for a beer.

P2P counter attack

2005-10-07T16:19:00.000+01:00

After losing the eDonkey battle, the P2P community responds with:

the revamp of suprnova.org; the same code and layout, but a new owner and a new name, newnova.org

a huge index of BitTorrent sites at isoHunt.com

and mixing BitTorrent and the l2p network, a fully anonymous P2P

1-1, I would say...

Web Office

2005-10-06T17:13:00.000+01:00

After the rumor of a browser-based office application suite by Google and Sun resulted in nothing, let me point you the browser-based office application suite by ThinkFree.

The unoffical web applications list

2005-10-04T13:56:00.000+01:00

A must visit, webapplist, RSS feed added to my feed aggregator.

Mail storage war, again

2005-10-04T12:19:00.000+01:00

So, we have gmail with is "growing every second" mail storage capacity (aproximetly 2.5 GB). Yesterday, I found 30gigs.com, a invite only free 30 GB mail capacity service. And when I was almost bloging about it, the heavy height contender debuted: the first TB (as in Tera Bytes, as in 1024 Giga Bytes) free(!) mail service, mailnation.net.

eDonkey is closing

2005-09-29T19:03:00.000+01:00

Seems like RIAA is going to win another battle, closing the p2p eDonkey network. In a testimony at a U.S. Senate Judiciary Hearing on the future of P2P, MetaMachine president Sam Yagan said his company (owner of the eDonkey network) was throwing in the towel.

The battle is lost, but the war continues: eDonkey is a server based p2p network, so all you need to shut it off is going for the servers. eDonkey is the most used p2p network, as stated by Slyck, so this decision seems to be a huge drawback in the war.

But if we look at the remaining networks, like FastTrack, Gnutella or BitTorrent, they all share the "no servers, use supernodes instead" implementation, there is, the supernode functionality is built into the client; if a powerful computer with a fast network connection runs the client software, it will automatically become a supernode, effectively acting as a temporary indexing server for other, slower clients.

And since supernodes come and go, all over the IP space, like digital mushroms, they are much harder to identify and shut down. So, light infantry is down, but we still have tanks and planes for the next battle.

Mash-ups

2005-09-28T19:20:00.000+01:00

I heard this term for the first time last week in Boston. I understood "sites that use two or more external sources to provide a new service". The first reference was Mappr, which uses Google Maps and Flickr APIs to geographically organize Flickr photos. But mash-ups are more than this, they have a huge fun potencial, as stated by this Zdnet's post.

Update: While thinking on the subject, I decided to make my first movie mash-up: five pixar movies and a soundtrack, and you have it, an all new video clip for Birds of Prey by Fat Boy Slim. While you wait for the download (6MB for a 6m49s clip) you can take a look at the Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix.

Identity 2.0

2005-09-28T18:49:00.000+01:00

An astonishing presentation from Sxip CEO Dick Hardt, about Identity 2.0. Very well contextualized within the Web 2.0 vision, and with great style (marketeers should also take a peek for new presentation ideas). If you have 15 minutes and 13 seconds (plus download time) watch it here.

Google WiFi VPN

2005-09-20T17:15:00.000+01:00

As mentioned before, Google is going for the WiFi business. First step, a WiFi VPN service: it's still hidden, but someone forgot to hide this.

Post shortage

2005-09-19T20:25:00.000+01:00

I'm in Boston, attending the VON conference, suffering from a 5 hours jetlag (even after 2 galons of Starbuck's coffee) and some problems with power plugs. In a day or two my brain will probably awake and maybe then some inspiration will arise. See you then. Ahhh, if you want something from the states, drop me a line.

Another step to the WebOS

2005-09-16T12:35:00.000+01:00

AIM, ICQ, MSN e Yahoo in a web browser near by with meebo

Go fetch!!

2005-09-14T22:56:00.000+01:00

Today, Google released is blog search service. It's a clean and useful service, and it was very funny for me to read other people references to my posts: i don't have trackbacks.

Meanwhile, a startup debuted in cyberspace today: truveo. They claim to have a technology which allows them to visual crawl through the Internet. Or, in more dumb words, they have crwalers able to watch movies and other visual content in the Internet, and categorized it. The few experiences I made resulted in impressive results. Try it yourself:

Zen Koans

2005-09-14T11:53:00.000+01:00

These koans, or parables, were translated into English from a book called the Shaseki-shu (Collection of Stone and Sand), written late in the thirteenth century by the Japanese Zen teacher Muju (the "non-dweller"), and from anecdotes of Zen monks taken from various books published in Japan around the turn of the 20th century.

101 Zen Koans here

Apple quickies

2005-09-13T12:36:00.000+01:00

Ever got stucked with a bootable CD in your Mac, unable to eject it, and wondering what the hell are you going to do now? Just press (and hold) your mouse button when booting, all media will be ejected. This and a lot more tricks in the Magical Macintosh Key Sequences

Does .mac worth the money you pay for it? Well, this guy thinks not, so he replace it!! Read this and learn how to do it yourself

If you live in Portugal (like me), you will have to wait a lot for the iPod nano. Meanwhile, why not do one yourself? Read the instructions, print, cut and fold, and sing your favorite song

eBay buys Skype

2005-09-12T14:36:00.000+01:00

It's official, as you can see in eBay and Skype sites.

Lemmings!!

2005-09-12T12:31:00.000+01:00

If you have work to do, don't go to this link. You have been warned.

iPod flea

2005-09-08T21:21:00.000+01:00

One word to caracterize this: brilliant!

Flickr spell checker

2005-09-08T19:45:00.000+01:00

link

It's now easier to buy porn

2005-09-08T11:39:00.000+01:00

original article here, bold it's my contribution to it:

PayPal, the global online payment service (is Visa and Google sleeping on the job?), today announced new micropayments processing fees for digital goods. The new pricing will provide merchants (read porn site owners) with a more affordable way to process payments for low-cost digital content such as video games (read porn films), online greeting cards, news articles, mobile phone content and digital music. PayPal's micropayments pricing is designed to give customers the convenience of a-la-carte purchases (read porn a-la-carte), such as 99-cent downloadable ringtones (read porn movies), without having to sign up for annual subscriptions (no one needs to know you love porn) or pre-funded payment accounts (porn when you want, no need to pre-pay it).

Apple quickies

2005-09-08T11:20:00.000+01:00

So, yesterday Apple announced:

the iTunes phone, nothing new, since SonyEricsson did it previously. And the fact of beeing iTunes vs Other Music Store maybe not an advantage after all, since operators are denying to buy the iTunes Phone: they want a peace of the cake in the music market. Let's wait and see what the future reserves to us;
iTunes 5, with some really neat new features. Still have to install and try it;
iPod nano, with one of the best claims ever: impossibly small.

A new PDA

2005-09-04T13:38:00.000+01:00

I'm using the Hipster PDA from some time now, with very good results. Today I found this. Tomorrow I will have a printer, will try it.
Update: It works like a charm, and here you can get even more ideas

Frei Internet in dam haus

2005-09-02T15:08:00.000+01:00

Deutsche Telekom will roll out a fiber to the curve network, allowing for 50 Mbps connections at home. And if you think that's all, what about a 6 week free trial at 25 Mbps? Maybe now is a good time to learn some german. More here.

Have a Mac mini? Need more disk space?

2005-09-01T17:11:00.000+01:00

Just stack one if this below the mini and you get extra 250 GB of disk capacity. It's beautiful, and so well integrated, that your wife will never notice you spent even more money with your hobbie.

Place your bet

2005-08-30T16:06:00.000+01:00

Everyone is talking about next week (Sept. 7) Apple announcement, but no one really knows what is all about. Please take your chances:

a) iPod video with iTunes Music Store selling video clips;
b) switching iPod Mini to a flash-based technology;
c) flash-based larger-capacity Shuffles;
d) a totally new category of devices;
e) the Motorola iTunes phone;
f) a mobile OS.

WebOS?

2005-08-29T12:35:00.000+01:00

Could this be the future of the Internet? Well, I thing it is, what about you?

Google talk

2005-08-24T17:55:00.000+01:00

Everyone is talking about it. Some guys even had the courage to dissect it, like Pedro and Celso did.

I choose the user perspective, so I downloaded the client, install it, and then... well... then nothing: there is no one to talk to, there are no smileys, emoticons or shaking windows, no sex appeal. Ok, I can see my gmail contacts there, but hey, they already have a IM (MSN, Yahoo or ICQ), 90% don't have a gmail account, and they don't understand a nut about Internet, they just use it. Finnaly, the voice quality is worst than others, like Skype and VoIP Buster, so, there is no reason at all for me to change to Google talk.

Guys, in the IM world, people don't care about technicalities. What they really want are those sissie features like a big face showing you the tongue, huge lips or annoying shaking windows. A success IM client must be specified by a marketing department, engineers don't have the skills to do it.

Remember Ericsson phones before the Sony joint venture: they were very good, robust and reliable, but ugly as hell. They were designed by engineers, for engineers. Market share, minimum. Now, add an excelent marketing department, some sissie colors and functionalities, and you get SonyEricsson. Do I need to say anything else?

gvisit is watching you

2005-08-18T15:05:00.000+01:00

Just added a javascript line from gvisit to this page template, to watch where visitors are coming from. Another usage for Google Maps.

Update: less than 24 hours later, people from São Paulo - Brasil, Oregon - USA, Hornchurch - UK and Lisbon - Portugal has visited my blog. Welcome, you can see the visitor log here.

Smileware

2005-08-18T14:55:00.000+01:00

please take a peek at Voo2do, a simple, beatiful to-do lists, with an amazing license: "if you like it, smile at a stranger today". Already done it, felt good.

WiFi from Google

2005-08-18T14:47:00.000+01:00

Business 2.0 is saying that Google will give free Wi-Fi access to everyone in the EUA. The money is in targeting advertising to a user's precise location, and in saving some million dollars per month in interconnection fees. So, Google is giving amazing search capabilities (with is search engine), advertising for everyone (with AdSense), huge storage capacity (with Gmail), and now, going down the OSI layer, access to everyone. Should we change the name from Internet to GoogleNet?

Back

2005-08-18T14:41:00.000+01:00

after almost 2 weeks of hard work, to find spam in my previous post (i thought blogger was stronger than this guys, looks not) and to be really pissed off with Portugal Telecom: they just disconnected my internet connection. posts now only from the office.

After the mouse, the keyboard

2005-08-03T21:27:00.000+01:00

Or should i say the iKeyTypePro? Debut in first quarter 2006 (earlier then the Vista thing)

Windows Vista only in Q4 2006

2005-08-03T15:32:00.000+01:00

Why all the buzz for something that will only be ready in 15 months? In my home town we call this vaporware...

Do you usually use eBay?

2005-08-02T20:40:00.000+01:00

Are you sure? Please read the following article and remember, as your mother told you, never click anything unless you're certain is clean.

Two wonderful gadgets

2005-08-02T20:28:00.000+01:00

From Pedro, Apple re-invented the mouse. And from Rui, a "wear in the ear" goldfish that give you a second chance.

Euro english

2005-08-02T20:22:00.000+01:00

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl

Bodyware

2005-07-30T13:09:00.000+01:00

There is software, there is hardware, and some guys bodyware there favorite operating system

Is John Dvorak reading my blog?

2005-07-29T20:12:00.000+01:00

Please notice my post from the 23rd here and John's article from the 25th here. See the dictionary definition? What about the next line (in both pieces)? I'm glad, or by John's reading my blog, or by having the same line of thought.

Doom trailer

2005-07-29T19:04:00.000+01:00

Do I need to say more?

Where is the Apple?

2005-07-25T17:45:00.000+01:00

First, Google launched Google Earth. Then, Microsoft launched MSN Virtual Earth. Are there any differences? Well yes, if you work at Apple HQ. Take a peek at Google picture here, and Microsoft's here.