Alcides Fonseca

Last week I installing some OSes to decide which one would stay (in the end it was Windows XP) in my desktop, and I accidently formatted the Storage Partition. The important stuff was replicated in my macbook, so I didn’t lost anything I can’t download again. But this has alarmed me to worry more about backups.

I was booting up the desktop after 2 months (in which I was kind of banned form the basement¹) and it was making a louder noise than before. I opened it up and checked that the dissipator was full with dust, so much that is was black! And the computer is only one year and half old! So i removed it and cleaned it. I noticed that the thermal compound wasn’t that good when I remounted it. I booted the computer and it would shutdown after 1 minute because of processor overheat². So without a working desktop, I got worried about backups again and I decided to buy a NetStore.

I ended up buing a MyBook World Edition 500Gb which also has a funny story that you should also read. When I was getting ready to backup stuff to the external drive, my macbook wouldn’t boot! The screen was gray with a darker apple logo and a AJAX-like spinner that would never end! Verbose mode gave me no idea on what was going on. A few more reboots with cmd+V, and nothing. I inserted the Leopard CD, opened Disk Utility and found out that it would recognize my harddrive, but no partition. No backups could be done then :S

From the nowhere the next boot succeeded and I am right now backing up all my stuff to the external disk. But I’m not sure if It will reboot next time…

Ironic how both of my computers died on me right before I was backing up. This should teach you something right? If you don’t have a secure backup plan, do it right now! the 79€ a 500GB drive cost will be nothing compared to how much you will lose if your single drive fails.

I suggest you make daily backups of your most important folders (SyncToy in Windows, rsync in everything else) and weekly backups of your system. When I got my workflow perfect, I will post about it.

¹ Have you noticed that all great genius work in a basement?

² I later bought a thermal compound kit and applied it, but no luck. I guess I’ll take the computer to MBit.

BBC News published an article by Richard Stallman about Bill Gates leaving MS, but the restricted digital empire of proprietary software and DRM still remains.

Although Stallman may be right towards some stuff he writes, I strongly disagree with him about the following piece:

Microsoft’s software is distributed under licenses that keep users divided and helpless. The users are divided because they are forbidden to share copies with anyone else. The users are helpless because they don’t have the source code that programmers can read and change.

If you’re a programmer and you want to change the software, for yourself or for someone else, you can’t.

If you’re a business and you want to pay a programmer to make the software suit your needs better, you can’t. If you copy it to share with your friend, which is simple good-neighbourliness, they call you a “pirate”.

Well, this is called commercial software. As long as their license is legal in the contry it is being sold, they can make the rules they want. And if everyone wanted to share with their friends, they would have no sells at all. If you buy that product, you agree to that license, so if you break it, you’re a pirate. It’s very simple, and I don’t see why can’t you understand that. No one is enforced to anything, you have the right not to buy it (as I presume you are using that right).

You’re just too narrowed to GNU/Linux that you can’t accept other software philosophies/practices. That’s why even many FOSS believers are not with you anymore. Why don’t you try to spread your “product” (GNU) or your philosophy without beating up on Microsoft? Just leave them alone, if what you believe is better, people will choose to adopt it.

¹ for whom I had a great respect until this (English)

Being less academic by being more academic: I was impressed by the new labs director – Prith Banerjee. One of his key points was that HP research would have to engage a lot more deeply in peer review through scientific and research journals. This idea makes so much sense- rather than a board at HP trying to work out whether an idea is really advancing the state of the art, the world will let HP know. This is open source/co-innovation thinking, and absolutely the right thinking to do.

I have regularly hammered IBM for having no “consumer” touch points. I came away from Bristol realising that HP has plenty, and its helping the company better understand Everything As A Service.

Source: “James Governor’s Monkships”:

Interesting how HP research works, tightly connected to the academic world (of which I don’t have the best idea). From my experience I’d say things get pushed forward more quickly in the enterprise world rather than when they’re in the academic one.

HP’s view of Everything As A Service and how they apply it to their business is also interesting.

Right now, in Portugal and in other places like the US, our schools are lowering the bar (making tests easier) to have a higher percentage of students with passing grades.

This is wrong because the only thing that its raising is the bar of mediocrity.

Tests should be hard not because we like failing grades and angry students but because hard tests force students to evolve their reasoning and deductive skills, memory, and a lot other brain activities.

Já aqui tinha escrito sobre os exames deste ano terem sido bastante fáceis, mas recomendo vivamente lerem este post do Pedro Melo, e as razões porque diminuir a dificuldade dos exames não é de todo uma boa ideia.

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level.

Source: Show Us a Better Way

My hat off to The Power of Information Taskforce for taking the UK government into the 2.0 era. Would it be that hard for the Portuguese Government to innovate in this area?

While I am poking Adobe, I noticed that the new Adobe Reader 9 release will include Adobe AIR. Hmm, does Reader use AIR? or is this yet another attempt by a software vendor to stuff unwanted, unneeded software on my machine? Oh, I see. AIR is needed to run an AIR application to allow me to use the Acrobat.com website. I’m still calling shenanigans.

So, 33.5MB download (just download) for Reader 9. Goes up to 52.4MB if you choose to download the “eBay desktop” application too, and it’s checked by default. How about letting me skip the AIR download too? Didn’t we just go through this with Apple?

Read the whole On Searching and Distributing article by Mark Finkle.

Good news for AIR application developers, but it’s kind of a nasty way to distribute they new framework. Adobe and Apple are making Microsoft looks like an angel now¹…

¹ It appears that since their OOXML cruzade they have been less evil than before, or that’s just me?

Projecto Quark! Mostra as “insuspeitas relações entre a Física e o Jazz”

Qual a relação da Física com a música Jazz? E porque é que há tantos físicos a gostar de Jazz? O que é o Live physics & jazz? A comunidade “quarkiana” responde no próximo sábado, dia 28 de Junho, num encontro que reúne no Departamento de Física da Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra (FCTUC) estudantes de todo o país, incluindo os Açores, amantes da Física, bem como professores e investigadores e, ainda o Jazz ao Centro Clube.

Sessão de encerramento da edição 2007/08 do projecto Quark!

21h30: Apresentação do projecto Quark! e sessão formal de encerramento com a presença do Presidente da FCTUC, Prof. João Gabriel Silva.

22h00 – 23h00: Palestra “Miles Davis – tradição e modernidade” por José Miguel Pereira do JACC seguida de debate sobre o tema “As insuspeitas relações entre a Física e o Jazz” por José António Paixão, José Miguel Pereira e Inês Ochôa

23h00-23h30: Concerto com a banda jazz FUSE (a contrabaixista, Inês Ochôa, é aluna do curso de licenciatura em Física da FCTUC)

23h30-0h30: Sessão de observação astronómica no terraço do Departamento de Física (Joana Marques, Secção de Astronomia e Astrofísica da Associação Académica de Coimbra)

Obviamente que o fecho das actividades dos quarkianos foi skippada, mas ainda apanhei o final para ver os putos todos entusiasmados. A apresentação do Miles Davis foi engraçada, intercalada com músicas e gravações das diversas fases, que nos deu a entender um pouco da história dele. O homem passou a vida dele a inovar em diversos estilos de Jazz!

O painel que se seguiu sobre as ligações entre a Física e o Jazz foi espectacularmente curta! Não querendo dar uma abordagem muito científica, preferiram fazer analogias entre os dois campos, o que fez acabar o assunto em muito pouco tempo, e inteligentemente passaram para o concerto. Já este foi mesmo espectacular. Os meus parabéns aos FUSE e espero mesmo que tenham grande sucesso!

Terminou o dia no terraço do Departamento de Física, e para pessoas que não ligam mínima a olhar Júpiter, valeu pela paisagem da Universidade e da Cidade (e pelos raios laser que levavam a net do polo2 ao 1).

Scripting Enabled is a conference and hack day in London, England in September 2008.
The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve. We talked about improving the accessibility of the web for a long time – let’s not wait, let’s make it happen.

Organized by Christian Heilmann. I wish I could attend it!

People who are bicultural and speak two languages may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages, according to a U.S. study.

Read the full article in Reuters (via web pruned by monkeys).

What about switching programming languages, does it change your personality (or at least the way you face your real-life problems?)

KungFu Panga! (trailer) The movie that will make me go to cinema after a long time!

Acknowledging that the transport medium is important (FTTH as mentioned by Mike Coop earlier will very likely solve the problems associated with the instability of copper links and provide a stable platform for full HD delivery), it’s important to realize that IPTV is in strategic advantage when it comes to real time audience ratings and subsequent profits from selling much better targeted advertising and intelligence that can be delivered to TV producers.

IPTV and the Future by Nuno Póvoa show some points on why IPTV will be the next television, together with some aTV-like devices. So what about some BitTorrent magic there too?

Comércio electrónico, segurança dos dados pessoais, regulação e mecanismos de protecção foram alguns dos temas discutidos na conferência “O Consumidor na Sociedade da Informação”, que decorreu a 19 de Junho, na Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, em Lisboa, realizada pela APDSI – Associação para a Promoção e Desenvolvimento da Sociedade da Informação, e na qual estive presente como moderador de um dos painéis. Foi uma conferência importante e aqui fica uma resenha do que lá se passou. Os tópicos principais:

• DECO e a controvérsia no direito à cópia privada
• Compras online: desconfiança face ao digital prevalece
• Banca online satisfaz
• Consumidor responsável/empresa sustentável
• O pesadelo dos tarifários no móvel e o combate perdido para o spam

Excelente artigo do Paulo Querido

After some Nokia bashing after the interview where they said OpenSource was not ready for the telco/entreprise business, today it was announced that , together with Morotola, Sony-Ericsson, NTT and other telco companies they will start developing a common UI framework that will be released under the Eclipse Public License ( which means it is opensource, royalties-free and less restrictive for companies when it comes to copyleft).

You can read more about this in OpenGarden.

I guess competition is always a good thing, right? So excluding the elites phone and bussiness-oriented (WM, BlackBerries and Palm), there will be Android vs Symbian, and both being OpenSource, that’s a good outcome either way.

O que eu de maneira alguma esperava e, certamente, a tutela também não, era que os próprios alunos adoptassem a última explicação que referi e, mais, dissessem “basta”. Pelo que ouvi a vários entrevistados, não querem exames que defraudem as suas expectativas; querem exames que meçam o que efectivamente estudam.

Artigo completo em De Rerum Natura.

Não que seja o meu caso (Eu já tive a minha quota parte de complicações, há dois anos atrás), mas apoio essa atitude contra o facilitismo!

Ten big new features in mac os x snow leopard

There aren’t any new features that end-users will see, but for us developers/sysadmins, it’s going to be an interesting release!

So regarding Google’s new favicon a lot of people noticed that in Firefox3 and Safari, the favicon for Google Reader was changing a lot.

Someone commented in my flickr page what seems the reason for this behavior:

dblume says:
Tipped like that means you have new content to read. If it is flat, there are no new items.

We know what they’re doing in there. They’re hacking pythons. It’s barbaric and we won’t leave until the last snake has been saved.

You can’t miss the whole story at TechFaux!

Dave Winer writes about the need to rethink conferences

“Why are you going to that conference?” asks Jack.

“Just to hang out with the people,” says Jill.

It’s a cliche and nothing new. As long as I’ve been going to conferences, almost 30 years, that’s what people say, and do. Everyone’s in the room for the first few speeches and panels, but their eyes are fixed on their laptops. And after an hour or so, most of the people are out in the hallway.

I have a mixed experience regarding conferences. The Scientific ones I get to go are almost empty. Maybe because the speakers are professors or researches who usually aren’t that good in stage. But sometimes you do get lucky and some conference gets interesting (WMSU). Then you have the commercial ones (I’ve been only at TechEd2007 Barcelona and Techdays08 in which the hallways were empty! Yeah, some of the presentations were boring, but people just moved to the next room where the presentation was going better). Then you have misc conferences under some topic ( Technology, Design, Entrepreneurship, etc..) and those I’ve attended were cool enough for people to be there and focused!

I don’t have that feeling that conferences are boring, but that maybe just me. Unconferences are becoming quite popular, but I don’t think that will make traditional conferences go away. I really think the format of Take Off is the best for that content (although I may have to rethink the schedule) and maybe a panel after lunch would be interesting. If you think otherwise, be free to contact me with any alternatives.

Also regarding conferences, Seth Godin rants about organizers spending too much time thanking people. I disagree with him about this. I believe it’s important to let people know who made that event possible. Maybe it’s an organization, and you can’t have a photo (or maybe you can) or it’s a sponsor, and without them your conference would suck, and you should really give them some prime time, even if it’s only in the “thank you” form. Of course, you shouldn’t spend more than 2 minutes in this, but you shouldn’t replace it with some photo slideshow!

Look ay Yahoo today, not only the lost their ‘chi’, it is reacting to outside forces and have no control over their destiny. Some 40 to 50 senior executives and engineers have left Yahoo since the beginning of the year – at a pace that appears to have accelerated in the last few weeks. At least five key executives, including Vish Makhijani, senior vice president of Yahoo’s search group, and Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of the company’s network division, were reported to have resigned this week. Microsoft is making some smart ‘Tai Chi” moves, whether they get Yahoo or not does not matter. Even if they don’t get Yahoo, they have done so much damage to Yahoo that drastically reduced their threat to Microsoft…all without spending a penny. That’s a good move. In an effort to highlight its efforts to recruit engineers with Internet search expertise, Microsoft this week placed an ad in the San Jose Mercury News, based next door to Yahoo’s hometown of Sunnyvale, Calif. Either I have the company, or I get its brains. I am good with both.

Source: Innovation Playground

When it comes to blog engines, everyone thinks about Worpress. I’ve worked with it a few times and it’s nice, but it could be so much simpler! Well, I found that solution: Chyrp. A small and simples MVC-like blog engine. It is the old PHP+MySQL combo, which is perfectly fine for the purpose (means I could deploy it in almost every webserver without any hassle).

It does not have the community that Wordpress has, but I was really happy with the pluggins in the website. Comments, Textile/Markdown, Analytics, Gravatar and even a Tumbler package that allow you to have your own tumblr. OpenID is the only thing that seems to be missing.

Oh, and for you geeks, the GPL code is hosted at GitHub ;)

If I ever go back to a blog, I’ll definitely think about using Chyrp.