The problem

As you might know, only a couple of sports - like football - have financial help and support. There are thousands of amateur (and courageous) athletes out there, who have to work, train, go to competitions, sleep, and find some time to have some sort of a personal life. And the day only has 24 hours.

The solution

Each time you buy men's underwear at http://hatitude.pt, the first thing you do is to choose the athlete you want to help. You can search athletes by name, region or sport. After choosing your athlete, of everything you buy, 25% of the value will be delivered to him. This way you not only get your underwear (made in Portugal, high quality stuff) but you have also helped an athlete.

If you're an amateur athlete, you can now sign-in at http://hatitude.pt and request to be added to the list of athletes. Hugo will guide you through the necessary steps, and have you added to the system. Afterwards, you'll get your unique URL, and you just have to pass it through your family and friends.

Portugal

Currently, the website is focused on Portugal and Portuguese athletes.

Shameless plug

I developed all the design, code, hosting and integration with the payment service providers (Credit Card, Paypal and Multibanco). If you have an idea and want to create something, talk to me.

I don't build them, due to the following text in the Apple Developer Agreement:

11. Apple Independent Development. Nothing in this Agreement will impair Apple’s right todevelop, acquire, license, market, promote or distribute products, software or technologies thatperform the same or similar functions as, or otherwise compete with, any other products, softwareor technologies that you may develop, produce, market, or distribute. In the absence of a separatewritten agreement to the contrary, Apple will be free to use any information, suggestions orrecommendations you provide to Apple pursuant to this Agreement for any purpose, subject to anyapplicable patents or copyrights.

In a nutshell, if you agree with the terms (and you have to if you want to publish something in the App Store), you are granting Apple a license to steal your idea/app.

Am I being paranoid? It already happened with Breathe and F.lux.

Android terms doesn't have this, so here you have it, this is why I don't publish my apps on the App Store.

Imagine you are in Portugal, you want to go surfing, but you don't know where the best waves are.

What do you do?

Well, you open your surf guide, see what surf spots are near enough, search for a beachcam on that spot, and after some thorough evaluation, you finally decide where to go. Now it's time to search for the spot on Google Maps, and get some directions.

Wouldn't be great if there was a simpler way of doing all this?

Well, there is.

That's why I made https://wheretosurftoday.com some time ago.

wheretosurftoday.com homepage

And how exactly it solves the problem?

After you give authorization to the website to access your location, you will get:

• 133 surf spots covering all the portuguese coast, north to south;
• Access to the beachcam link, if one exists;
• Specific information about the spot, useful to every surfer;
• Direct links to Google Maps, with the exact coordinates;
• Every spot has its own weather and swell forecast, in 3 hours slots;
• Surf score taking into consideration the spot specifics and forecast;
• Search based on geolocation (show only spots near enough);
• Navigate using the built in map;
• Hassle free, you don't need to sign up whatsoever, no ads;
• Easier to type domain, https://wtst.info.

There is also an Android app available. The big advantage of using the mobile app is that geolocation is a lot more accurate (since it can use the device GPS).

What's new?

Today is the launch of version 3.0, with adds the following features:

• A detailed forecast with score for the next 48 hours (every 3 hours);
• More information: sunrise, sunset, air and sea temperatures;
• More beachcams - now with 54 spots (in 133) covered;
• Easy navigation to previous and next spot;

Detailed forecast

Beachcam and map pointers

Navigation to previous and next spot

Every time someone asks me to explain why am I so excited about it, I would like to have some quick easy way of explaining it, or maybe some link to point to.

Today I've found the best, Explain Like I'm Five, Blockchain video, and I'm putting it here for convenience. Watch it, it only takes 10 minutes:

But my role on it is now over

excentric merged with Grey, a WPP agency, back in 2013 giving birth to excentricGrey, and for me it was fun to get back to the multinational world. But I missed the hands on, get your hands dirty, you know, being a doer instead of an enabler.

excentricGrey is now fully owned by WPP, and since the first of January I'm no longer part of the company.

Changing gears

My wife and I decided that I should stop for some time. Our third kid was on his way (borned in late February), so it was better for us if I could stick around to help. In the meantime, I started to poke around with some side projects that were in the drawer, learn new skills, and start building stuff.

First of all, design the new resume

I started working with the Internet in 1996. In 20 years, I made a lot of different things, had a lot of different roles and learned a lot of different technologies and skills. In summary, it's a mess, and is hard to fit it into one single bucket. So I tried to solve it by putting my entire IT career in a graphic. It was a fun problem to crack, and as a bonus, I’ve learned a lot about vector images (the CV is fully scalable).

My first (published) mobile app

Every day I had to go the office, I had to go by a bridge, the 25 de Abril bridge (in Lisbon). And every day was a lottery, I didn't knew how traffic would be. It could take me 32 minutes to get to the office, or it could take me 2 hours. And the unknown is a big source of stress for me.

The company who runs the highway that ends on the bridge have traffic cams, but the website interface was awful and cumbersome (there's a new website, but some of the original problems persist). So I decided to make a mobile app, for personal use, which would get the images from that website, present them in order, in one single page. And I use it every day for years.

Some friends saw it, and those who got the same problem asked for a copy, so I sent the apk to some of them. Those who had iPhones had no luck, since I only made the Android version. And people start saying that I should publish the app. So I did. Since last week, 25deAbril is available for install in Google Play, for free.

Surf and math

Surfing is more than a sport, it can be a mystical experience. It's hard to master, but when you manage to get up and ride some waves, you feel like the king of the world. But surf is also hard because it depends - a lot - on the weather conditions. There are a lot of factors in play, in order for you to have good waves to surf, and I always got attracted by this complexity.

After some study and experimentation, I started to be able to predict when and where the best waves would be. And my live as a surfer got a major upgrade. It's all about swell direction and swell size, crossed with the beach type of bottom, and beach orientation, multiplied by the wind speed and direction. Pretty simple, hum? Ok, if your name is Sheldon, I should warning you that I was being ironic.

So I coded this type of algorithm and dress it with a website, properly named Where To Surf Today, where you can see the best beaches to surf today (and tomorrow), shown by location (after all, you are interested in the best surf near you, right?). For weeks I checked the algorithm results with real time conditions, and fine tuned until I got pretty satisfied. It only have beaches in Portugal (at least for now), and I've just released version 2.0.

One last thing

Online betting is getting hot, a lot. You can bet on casinos, sports and even fantasy. You can bet with money, with credits, or be part of a fantasy league. Placard, the new betting game by the portuguese lottery is a huge success. New laws and operation licences are being drafted in Portugal, and in the summer there will be dozens of new players on the market. Did I say it's getting hot?

Betliga is a website I’m developing, which is now in pre-release mode, where you don’t bet (so kids can play it), you pick. There are football games (Portuguese League and Uefa Champions League for now), where you can have 3 picks: pick the winner, pick the number of goals scored, and pick if one, all or none of the teams score. For each pick you have 3 options, so it’s a very simple game.

After a game is closed, and its result known, the odds for the game are calculated and each player earns points if he got it right. There are competitions based on the week classification, month and season, some badges, the hattricks ranking (when a player gets all 3 picks right), and classifications for people with more opinions, likes and reach. Yes, being social is also prized here.

Targeting beginners, there are a lot of contextual help across the site, explaining the principles of the game, and teaching some betting concepts (like, for instance, how odds are calculated). People don’t have to manage credits, or decide how much they want to bet in a game. They just pick.

People can gather in groups, and create private leagues, where the classifications (and other scores) are calculated considering only the members of the group. This is great for groups of friends and family to finally know who knows best about football.

The regular season is ending, there are 2 more fixtures in the Portuguese League, and a handful of games in the UCL, but you still can join and have some fun at http://betli.ga

Everything will be ready for the Euro, hope to see you there.

Hard to imagine it? Don't worry, there's a video:

I so want to give you my money.

We are a step closer to distanceless sex™.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2014/01/21/tangible-mediaTue, 21 Jan 2014 08:15:58 GMTWiTrack is a device that tracks the 3D motion of a user from the radio signals reflected off her body. It works even if the person is occluded from the WiTrack device or in a different room.

WiTrack localizes the center of a human body to within 10 to 13 cm in the x and y dimensions (about the size of an adult hand), and 21 cm in the z dimension. It also provides coarse tracking of body parts, identifying the direction of a pointing hand with a median of 11.2 degrees.

Great for gaming, controlling household appliances and elderly monitoring & fall detection.

Watch the video and be amazed with the accuracy:

• The flight must last 60 seconds or more;
• The aircraft must reach at least 3 meters of altitude;
• The center point of aircraft must stay inside a 10x10 meters square.

For 33 years a lot of people tried to win the prize, and on June 13th 2013 the award was finnaly won by AeroVelo, a team of students and professors from the University of Toronto.

Here is the video:

Congratulations guys, Da Vinci would be proud.

For Apple fans, this is a nice way to know in advance what features will have the new iPhone ;p

Nice infographic from Intel with what happens in the Internet in a sigle minute.

I've been working with the Internet since before the invention of the World Wide Web, and, call me old school, I still heavily believe in RSS feeds to get information, since I don't believe in social media and services like Flipboard to get fresh, relevant information about all the different topics I'm interested in (which goes from systems scalability to biology, or from economics to user experience design).

From my 302 subscriptions, Google Reader states that I've read 9.789 items over the last 30 days, so I consider myself as a heavy user. But the usage is not confined to the interface, since I also depend on the Reader's API. Reeder in my iOS devices, Android reader, IFTTT recipes and podcasts, all of them depend on the existence of the Reader's API.

Additionally, I think Google owe us Google Reader. Google is subsidizing Google Reader from day one, which killed all competition. I started by using Bloglines, and later had to change to Google Reader, since it was becoming the de facto standard for RSS reading. Retiring Google Reader now is being evil.

So, what are my alternatives?

1. Do nothing, and rely on the rumor that Reader functionalities will be incorporated in Google+. I'm a Google+ aficionado, and I can see how this move will facilitate the sharing of information and increase the user experience on Google ecosystem;
   
   
2. Change to another web based RSS reader, where the challenge is to identify which. As noted previously, the API is a very important part of this decision, and I'm glad to see Marco's first attempt to have a very quick standard in order to facilitate the migration of the API to other services. Having said that, there are already some moves from several players trying to feel the gap (Zite, Feedly, digg), and some webpages trying to find out which are the best alternatives (see here and here);
   
   
3. Build my own web based RSS reader, using open source code such as tt-rss. The problem with this alternative has to do with the API issue, so I will discard this option for now;
   
   
4. Subscribe feeds by email, as suggested by the Copyblogger (one of my feeds). While it is a valid option, it has a lot of drawbacks, which would break my daily workflow, so I'm also discarding this for the time being.

Do you know any other alternatives?

It's only February, and the list for Christmas presents is already full.

Well, it’s 2007 again:

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

The very first time I saw the following video, I started to see it. The video is a documentary about prosthetic technology, used mainly to help people who had lost some organ or member. But, as you watch the documentary, you will start to realize that some people with this prosthesis actually have a better performance than before. Yes, the cyborg is coming, and is coming really fast.

So, if in a couple of years your son tells you he is going to replace is perfectly healthy arm with an artificial one, just to be able to throw a ball a couple of meters longer, don't be surprised.

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

RSS readers may need to visit the blog in order to see the video.

RSS readers may need to visit the blog in order to see the video.

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

Since the beginning of the world wide web, entrepreneurs and investors strive for high levels of engagement of their website, or what we used to call "stickiness". Time-on-site and page views by unique user are indicators everyone is trying to improve and boost. And that sounds reasonable.

Meanwhile, Cost per click (CPC) became the dominant advertising model on the web, and paradoxically, it rewards un-sticky websites.

Think Google: it's probably the more un-sticky website out there, with people spending just a few seconds in it, doing the search, reading the results and jumping out, with Google earning a few cents in the process.

Now think Facebook: people spend hours on Facebook, and the last think they want to do is to click an ad and go away. It's like going to a bar to socialize and never buy anything. This is why Facebook became the most visited site in the web, but generates only 1/30 of Google's revenue in paid advertising.

So, in a nutshell, Facebook's CPC advertising model will not succeed, they will have to think in alternative revenue sources (f-commerce, places, etc.) and webmasters should re-think their web strategy.

What do you think?

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

Note, it will be only available in "early 2011", so it will compete not with the present iPad, but most probably with the 2nd generation iPad. Prices are still not available.

Update: a nice comparison between the new Blackberry's Playbook, Apple's iPad, Samsung's Galaxy Tab and Dell's Streak.

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

What about using our sounds to select and manipulate sound? The following video shows an experiment where one can select parts of a music by singing along, grunting or even whistling:

Yap, today my jaws dropped.

Via O'Reilly Radar]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2010/03/25/select-sound-with-soundThu, 25 Mar 2010 07:53:51 GMTWhat happens when the text you're reading knows what you are reading? You have just encountered text 2.0.

Using eye-trackers, HTML, CSS and a lot of Javascript, these guys from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) are creating a all new reading experience, where text adapts at what you are reading, the pace of your reading, etc.

Still hard to imagine? Maybe this video could help you understand this amazing concept:

RSS readers may need to visit the blog to see the video.

Via hplusmagazine.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2010/03/24/text-2-0Wed, 24 Mar 2010 03:27:04 GMTWhen a video is worth a 1.000 words:

RSS readers should click here to see the video.

Skinput makes use of a microchip-sized pico projector embedded in an armband to beam an image onto a user’s forearm or hand. When the user taps a menu item or other control icon on the skin, an acoustic detector also in the armband analyzes the ultralow-frequency sound to determine which region of the display has been activated.

For more information, grab the paper (in pdf format) and watch the video:

RSS readers may need to click here to watch the video.

Via Mashable.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2010/03/03/your-skin-as-a-touchscreenWed, 03 Mar 2010 05:07:03 GMTJesse Schell, a Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of entertainment and technology, made a mind blowing presentation at DICE Summit last week about the current and (possible) future trends of gaming, the mix between games and social networks, and human psychology and quest for reality. Have you ever realized that Farmville has more users than Twitter?

Via SuperDuperDudes.

Watch the video (29 minutes well worthy):

RSS readers may need to click here to see the video.

RSS readers may need to click here to see the video.

Maybe is time for Google to bring back the Rasmussen brothers to Google Maps.

RSS readers may need to click here to see the video.

Last friday, he demonstrated this gesture technology on TEDs, and said it was already being used in Fortune 50 companies, government agencies and universities, and he predicted that it would soon be available for consumers.

Here is Oblong's demonstration video:

RSS readers may need to click here to see the video.

All I know about this new OS is what I see in released videos, and I must say it looks good. It looks like Microsoft engineers developed a new way of mobile interaction, but only life usage will tell if is it good or not.

Available in holiday 2010 (whatever that means). Watch the video:

RSS readers may need to click here to see the video.

RSS readers may need to click here to see the video.

RSS readers may need to click here to see the video.

The same video can be seen with portuguese subtitles (hint hint), and there's already a Ning group to do the same in Portugal.

RSS readers may need to click here to see the video.

RSS readers may need to click here to see the video.

The basic idea was to develop a machine where one could store used vegetable oil (instead of trowing it into the drain) and by adding some chemical compound, the final result would be something valuable and fun, candles.

So, we built a prototype, found the correct mix of chemicals and patented the whole thing. After this, Mário dived into the VC world and armed with a strong business plan and a lot of enthusiasm, was able to rise the capital needed to fulfill the dream.

Mário created a company, oon solutions, which in a couple of months will start selling the Candle Maker. And because nothing is beyond Mário's dreams, he managed to present the whole thing in TEDx, which is now available to public viewing. Watch it, who knows, maybe you also will start loving your waste:

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to see the video.

tip: click to image for a bigger version.

• Draw the outlines of the figures you want in your picture – anything from seagulls to a wedding kiss;
• Add labels for each of the items, as well as for the background.
• PhotoSketch will then find real-life images to match your doodles and put them together in a Photoshopped image that will make your jaw drop.

And before you say "it must be fake", download and read the research paper (in pdf), already evaluated by the scientific community.

Via A Source Of Inspiration.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2009/08/18/google-street-view-in-portugalTue, 18 Aug 2009 11:05:19 GMTCRISTAL (Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces) is a ubber simple user interface for controlling multimedia devices and home automation systems. It's a interactive table, much like Microsoft's Surface, with a huge difference: a camera placed on the top of the living room creates an image which is the interface itself. Confused? Watch the demo and wait for Christmas:

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

If you are interested, you can be the next speaker. Visit the Ignite Portugal website and follow the instructions. Still with doubts? Maybe the next Ignite presentation will convince you:

RSS readers should click here to see the video.

Millimetric precision, almost instant response, and above all, a live demo with the technology, not an environment controlled, video manipulated demo like Microsoft did. So, Santa, wait up for my Christmas request, will you?

It's a all new ball game in the human computer interaction, where one does not need a controller to play and interact with the XBOX 360. Just be there and play. Watch the demo:

Natal is the portuguese word for Christmas, does it means it will be available in Christmas? If so, Santa, I know is a bit early to ask for presents, but unless otherwise, this is what I want.

Update 4 hours later: Johnny Chung Lee has some technical insights of this project in his blog.

Wave is a web-based application that marries multiple forms of communication and collaboration, including chat, mail and wikis, into a unified interface. Everything inside Wave happens in real time: You can even see a comment being made as the person is typing it, character-by-character

The Webmonkey blog post also has a screenshot of the service - since some lucky souls are already beta testing it - which I proudly stolen:

That's a terrific productivity tool, instantaneous (latency of low milliseconds) and licensed as open source. It becomes now clear why Google isn't interested in Twitter.

tip: click the image above to see it in a larger version.

I extended it to 65 moments, based on the honorable mentions by the original article and my own opinion. Feel free to use it, has anything else publicized in this blog, is licensed in a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

For a in-depth analysis of the diagram, jump to the original article.

It doesn't simply return documents that (might) contain the answers, like Google does, and it isn't just a giant database of knowledge, like the Wikipedia. Instead, Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions - like questions that have factual answers such as "How many Internet users are in Europe", "What is the weather in Lisbon?" or "What is the 307th digit of Pi?".

The service will opens to the public on May 18. Meanwhile, you can take a peek on this blurry video from Youtube:

Is Google in danger due to WolframAlpha? There's a growing discussion about it in the community, some call it the next Google, others say they complement each other. And since WolframAlpha as (yet) no known business model, I guess we'll have to wait and see...

• Europeans spent on average 1.5 days a month on the Internet in 2008, and by 2010 will spend 2.5, which represents a 66% growth
• Internet use on PCs will drop from 95% today to only 50% over the next 5 years due to increase usage of IPTV, games consoles and mobile phones accessing the web
• Online video is the most popular online entertainment application
• Content and communications services represents 65% of all time spent online, and commerce represents 33%
• Being one of the European countries with lower penetration, Portugal has today more than 4 million people using the Internet

This and much more is available in the study.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

• Addega to buy Corkd
• Google's Cadie
• Opera face gestures, the funniest of them all. Watch the video:

What else do you see out there?

Update: via comments, other pranks out there:

• TheMage points out that Warner Brothers acquired the Pirate Bay

Tip: click the image to see it bigger.

I wonder when did he learn to write...

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to see the video.

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables -- cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

Watch the video and start thinking about the possibilities:

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

UUorld (pronounced "world") provides an immersive mapping environment, high-quality data, and critical analysis tools. Great explanations are unfortunately scarce, but UUorld makes them easier to achieve through interactive four-dimensional maps

Very interesting for social, geographic and demographic studies.

For all out there who like to learn, beware, you can become addicted to it.

This was written in 1867. I'm not a communist (on the contrary) but this sentence makes me think.

You know something is wrong with your online banking security when you access cgd.pt (instead of www.cgd.pt) and you get an external page:

Note: before I post this article, I tried to find a contact form in CGD's homesite and warn them about this issue. Didn't find any. Even tried the website map.

I have to commute to Lisbon every day, through the 25 de Abril bridge. So, every day I need to check the traffic on the bridge, and choose the best alternative to get to my job. And since I'm a lazy person, and don't want to spend more than a minute checking the traffic, I've built a page in my blog with all the webcams I need to make my driving decisions. And it's now available to you all: Lisbon traffic through the 25 de Abril bridge.

Pretty neat.

RSS readers should click here to see the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

Today I found an amazing Ted Talk, by Dan Gilbert, titled "Exploring the frontier of happiness", which gave me a lot of helpful insights (and it toke me only 33 minutes). Dan speaks about our inability to estimate odds and value, and how than has an impact on our daily life. A must see:

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

For more than 2 years, Peter Schiff is making unbelievable accurate predictions (and warnings) about the financial crisis, and being mocked by other "experts". Guess what, Peter Shiff was right. The following video is a compilation of Peter's appearance in different TV shows. Watch Peter's accuracy and the arrogance of every other person:

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

The following video of a Vodafone Christmas card was captured with ScreenToaster, a online service that allows you to capture your screen. I'm still evaluating it, as this was my first usage of the service, and first conclusion is: it should capture the sound.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

And how can one use these past content, correlate it with other sources of past content and generate insights and value? For example, is there (or not) a correlation between bad weather and heavy traffic? Or between weak dollar and stock increases?

It will be easy with Zoetrope, a new tool designed to help track such information by letting users browse backward through time. The tool is still not available to public consumption, but I'm sure it will be the next web revolution.

I'm having a hard time to explain this revolutionary tool by words, so here is the video that explains it better:

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to see the presentation.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

As a joke, I try it with the PrintScreen feed. You can see a screenshot here or download the resulting pdf file.

Right away, one ought to notice the staggering growth rate in both revenue and earnings that Apple displayed in 2008. Apple’s real revenue grew 54.5% from $24.637 billion in FYE 2007 to $38.041 billion in FYE 2008 — a full $13.4 billion growth in revenues. Even more impressive is Apple’s 81.2% growth rate in adjusted net income. For a company that is trading at 12 times 2008 earnings, it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that Apple is severely undervalued. Especially since Apple currently trades at about 3.37 times its cash position — which is objectively and significantly lower than every other large cap tech company.

GOOG trades at 7.18 times its cash position, RIMM at 15.51 times cash, AMZN at 9.15 times cash, MSFT at 9.13 times cash, CSCO at 3.62 times cash, IBM at 10.96 times cash, INTC at 6.54 times cash, and HPQ at 5.15 times cash. What is more, only GOOG, AAPL and MSFT have no debt of the companies mentioned above. Apple has the largest net cash position than any of those companies and Apple has more net cash than RIMM, GOOG, AMZN and IBM combined.

Via Daring Fireball. That could explain today's gains.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

This timeline presents significant events and developments in the innovation and management of information and documents from cave paintings (ca 30,000 BC) to the present

Click the image to jump to the website and try it for yourself:

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2008/09/11/welcome-to-the-4th-screenThu, 11 Sep 2008 06:23:06 GMTThe following graphic, proudly copied from a TechCrunch post, blowed up my mind: I was expecting a big success for Apple's iPhone, but not this kind of numbers, this is huge!

Everyone is talking about the new Google's browser, coined Chrome. and the idea of launching a comic book to explain the advantages of Chrome a day before the launch is absolutely brilliant, and surely must be responsible for some of the hype generated along.

Since there is no Mac version available yet, I still haven't try it, but after reading some posts today, I'm glad I haven't:

• Ryan Narraine, a security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, found out that Chrome has inherited a serious security flaw from the old version of WebKit is based on: by combining a flaw in WebKit with a known Java bug, is possible to an attacker to trick Windows users into launching a Java file in one's computer. Try this demo to see the bug working (don't worry, it's only a proof of concept, the Java application that will be installed in your Windows computer will do no harm);
• The other issue has to do with Chrome Terms of Service, which I believe will be changed in a near future, since point 11.1 states, and I quote, "By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services". In my opinion, this make sense when we are talking of services like YouTube and such, but in this case we are talking about a browser, so, by accepting this term, I would be allowing Google to own any content that I would access through the Chrome browser, which is pretty abusive, don't you think?

In summary, I will wait for the version 1.1 of the browser, and for a change in the Terms of Service before trying it.

Watch the video below and see for yourself:

This is a all new ball game, it's time for TomTom, Garmin and such to speed up development and close the gap.

Note: I'm not affiliate with Blaukpunkt, I'm just looking for cutting edge technology.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

This kind of investigation is needed for a future where people and robots work together, with machines understanding what their biological colleagues are doing and acting in conformity.

Via New Scientist.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like, but fuller-featured Multi-Touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X. This is why they bought P.A. Semi. Possibly with Immersion's haptic tech. Slot-loading SuperDrive. Accelerometer. GPS. Pretty expensive to produce initially, but sold at "low" price that will reduce margins. Apple wants to move these babies. And move they will. This is some sick shit. App Store-compatible, able to run Mac apps, too. By October at the latest.

I was wondering what would be Apple's 2008 breakthrough product. Guess I found it. I recall to see some photos of this, but I lost them, do someone knows where to find some mockups of the possible MacBook Touch?

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

You can download the map (17.5 MB) by clicking one of the following links:

• Provided by FileFront
• Provided by MHGaming
• Provided by ..::LVL

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

It takes a while to understand it, but it makes perfect sense afterwards.

Via Technology Review]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2008/06/09/adapting-websites-to-usersMon, 09 Jun 2008 09:42:53 GMTEveryone knows some animals are capable of using tools to accomplish certain tasks, but what I didn't know is that some animals are able to build their own tools to get what they want. The following video is mind blowing:

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

And remember the 20/20/20 rule: every 20 minutes take a 20 seconds break to look 20 feet away.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

The A5 cracking team (the group behind this project) sell in their homepage a device costing $1100 (€700) that allows one to eavesdrop a call, store the conversation, and crack it in 30-60 minutes.

So, A5 seem to be easily breakable, and even further, a web service will soon be available in order to allow for everyone who could eavesdrops a GSM communication to crack the frames. In other words, it will a matter of minutes and a few hundred euros and even you will be able to listen to other people talks.

So, for all out there who have concerns about their privacy, be aware, your personal paranoid levels will rise. And it will also affect mobile operators, public pressure will be huge to have the problem fixed, and I don't know how to do it without upgrading the network and changing all the cellphones in the market.

Via O'Reilly Radar.

Update: Pedro Figueiredo has done a great job and translated the original post to english.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS reader should click here to watch the video.

Advertisers will spend £3.4 billion in 2008, a rise of 27% from the year before, according to new online ad spending figures released by eMarketer. Internet advertising spending will continue to show double-digit growth through 2010, passing £4.3 billion in 2010 and exceeding £5 billion in 2012.

Even considering that the UK market isn't the world market, it's a very good insight, which allows me to say we are on the right track to growth. In this case, numbers speak for themselves:

Google is offering to host your entire web app, not just the storage. It lets you use Google Checkout for commerce and Google Accounts for user accounts.

Via John Gruber.

Via Frederico Marques via twitter.

Image credits: Adam Darowski.

RSS readers should click here to see the video.

And then there were the bad guys (cause a tale has always bad guys), who found a way to break into someone's computer through a bug in the referenced browser. So, the company was/his installing a lock into a lot of personal computers, and someone has just found the master key.

Bad timing? Bad luck? Or karma?

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

I guess people at Cupertino doesn't use Gmail...

Update: the same problem happens with Gmail for Google Apps, and I don't know how to solve it. Need a hand.

This way, you will sell millions of iPhones worldwide, and will be doing what you do best: selling state-of-the-art hardware running a gorgeous, user friendly operating system.

Trying to gain from the mobile operators is buying a war you don't want (or need) to. Trying to gain from the developers community by restricting the free flow of creativity is wrong, and against the values of the Apple brand.

So, please, don't be greedy, change your mind, or they will force you.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2008/03/18/apple-please-open-the-iphoneTue, 18 Mar 2008 06:35:12 GMTAnother great Ted talk, this time from neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor which had a great opportunity for a brain scientist:

One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another

It's a very strong, emotional story, explaining the differences between our right and left brain hemispheres, told in the first person.

To all involved in the birth if this new website, my eternal gratitude for all the hard work.

FREE LOVE: the ongoing rise of free, valuable stuff that's available to consumers online and offline. From AirAsia tickets to Wikipedia, and from diapers to music.

FREE LOVE thrives on an all-out war for consumers' ever-scarcer attention and the resulting new business models and marketing techniques, but also benefits from the ever-decreasing costs of producing physical goods, the post-scarcity dynamics of the online world (and the related avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C), the many C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, and an emerging recycling culture.

Expect FREE LOVE to become an integral if not essential part of doing business.

The extense report gives examples of:

• Newspapers;
• Magazines;
• Telecom;
• Airlines;
• Car rental;
• Food and beverage;
• Photo prints;
• Student textbooks;
• Travel guides;
• WiFi;
• Navigation;
• Stock photography;
• Notes and photocopies;
• Finance;
• Games;
• Bikes;
• Music;
• And more.

So, if you have interests in the future of economics, fill your tea cup and enjoy the article.

Some of the features are:

• manage your mobile voicemail like email on your computer and on your mobile phone;
• turn your voicemail into text to make voice messages sharable, searchable, and most importantly actionable;
• take and make mobile calls from any browser or web page - such as iGoogle, Facebook, and many more;
• experience Caller ID 2.0 - dip into the social web and know not just who is calling but what the caller has been doing;
• have scores of web developers working at internet speed building new phone applications for you.

Watch the demo video and start drooling:

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

Click the image to see a larger version.

Update Feb 27 2008: Pingdom released a report with social networks downtime for 2008.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2008/02/26/social-networks-distributionTue, 26 Feb 2008 04:16:00 GMTOr how homo digitalis is different from the homo connectus.

I recently moved to a farm, in the mountain, far from the next post office. Cable companies don't find it economically attractive, and since the house already had a phone line, ADSL was my last hope. First trials tells me that whatever ADSL I will have, I will never be able to have a good connection.

Currently I'm connected through a UMTS connection, with an average of 500 Kbps speed download, which is fine for reading emails, follow my RSS subscriptions and even make some web browsing, but hard to watch YouTube videos and totally impossible to watch Joost.

I work in a very well connected environment: 3 different cables from 3 different companies enter our premises, in a total of 48 Mbps. During work time, Miro keeps track of my daily shows, and download them, in the background, while I'm running through the day job.

The lesson?

Being digital is different from being always connected. Mankind will evolve to a society where everyone is always connected. That will allow for a constant access to information, peer reviews and collaborative decision making, in real time. Technology will allow for new ways of social interaction, and experiences like My Football Club will expand to other fields of our society. Can someone imagine how politics will be in 20 years? Can someone imagine collaborative politics?

But we are not there yet: technology will need to deliver large bandwidth, everywhere, and the near future is not bright: WiMAX is still a promise, and the first optical fiber networks are being rolled out now, and ready in 5 years. So, Joost will have an handicap to Miro for at least 5 years. In this world of fast economy, the question that arises is, can they afford it?

This leads to the rise of a new business model, price comparison websites. This are websites than scan online stores, collect all the information about their products, organize it and present it to the customer in a easy, efficient way. Additionally, users can increase the value of information by adding reviews, comments, rankings and personal experiences.

Test Freaks is the new kid in the block. They went into public beta last December, and gave a step further: they collect information not only from online stores, but also from other websites, forums and blogs, which largely enhances the information available for the end user. Additionally, the allow users to add reviews to all the products, and finally, with all this data, they rank the product (with a proprietary algorithm) which provides a quick way for users to find the best products in different categories.

The web interface is very 2.0, with live search, user generated content and a lot of ajax. I'm still wondering where they get the money to pay the bills, since there isn't any visible advertising. Can they be earning it through affiliate programs? I wonder...

Better this way, this war was only stalling the development of the next generation DVDs, and creating a lot of confusion on customers head.

Yesterday, a new tool hit the radar, and is now possible to unlock, jailbreak and activate iPhones 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 OTB in less than 3 minutes. So, if you are one in the million that have a locked iPhone, grab the ZiPhoneGUI tool (available only for windows) and happy cracking.

Gene pioneer Dr. J. Craig Venter is one of the principal scientists who decoded the human genome and he was the invited speaker for this year Richard Dimbleby Lecture. if you have 43 minutes to spare, watch the video and try to answer the following question: what does the future hold in a DNA-driven world?

Update Jan 22: Excellent comment by Nuno Mendes.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the film.

It looks like 2008 will be the year of the phone.

Barry Schwartz studies the relationship between economics and psychology, delivering startling insights into modern life. His latest book, The Paradox of Choice, argues that the abundance of choice in today’s western world leads not to happiness but psychological distress.

So, if you 20 minutos to spare, watch it:

Which blogs should one read to be most up to date, i.e., to quickly know about important stories that propagate over the blogosphere?

My daily blog list is based on my interests, blog ranking sites, search engines and personal recommendations, and I'm pretty pleased with it. But sometimes, stories just get by, undetected by the radar. But now there is a new (and better) way to know which blogs to watch for.

A team of researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University spent an entire year analyzing data and developing a new algorithm for ranking blogs, based on a previous study for detecting disease outbreaks in water distribution networks (!). The study was done with data scraped from 45,000 blogs and 10 million posts over one year (2006). They used the 1 million links between those posts to see how information spread - following the chains of links in time back to the first post. And they have published their findings.

For example, reading the thirty top blogs picked their way captures around half the information in the blogosphere. The thirty top blogs ranked by the number of links they receive from other blogs - the basis of the popular technorati ranking - captures just 35 per cent.

And guess what, Planeta Asterico (there is a 50% chance you are reading this post through the Planeta's blog aggregator) is on place 43 of the list! So, point your browser to the website, choose you "budget" and start reading.

Related articles:

I'm a great fan of Lawrence's work, read some of his books, praise him for the creation of the creative commons license, and love the way he does presentations (with the slides synchronized with the speech).

Due to French law prohibiting the forced bundling of mobile devices with a specific carrier, Apple and Orange will be required to sell an unlocked version of the iPhone.

So, my iPhone will be available in France starting next November, starting at €399, plus Orange contract and flight price. Can't wait.

RSS readers should click here to watch the film.

Update: Don't click the search button, neither press the Return/Enter key! Just write "virus" (without the commas) and wait.

AntiRSI is a free software for Mac OS X that helps prevent RSI (repetitive strain injury) and other computer related stress. It does so by forcing you to take regular breaks, yet without getting in the way. It also detects natural breaks so it won't force too many breaks on you.

Rui, I wish you get well soon.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

Dear Steve, please take a moment to read it and think about the subject. And remember, 'one bad apple spoils the barrel'.

It's not really a personal mp3 player due to is size, but is definitely a breeze of fresh air in the market.

The big question is if the burning generates more energy than it takes to make the radio waves needed to weaken the bonds that hold water molecules together. Kanzius has admitted that this is currently not the case, but it could be, thus giving birth to the most disruptive discovery of the century.

More details about the process are not known, since Kanzius is applying for a patent, but you can see it working in the following YouTube video:

RSS readers should click here to see the video.

Read a book miles away
GPS (don't ask for directions)
Send a fax from the beach
Pay a toll without slowing down
Buy concert tickets from a cash machine
Video conferencing from a phone-booth
Open a door with your voice
Carry your medical history in your wallet
Attend a meeting in your bare feet
True video-on-demand
e-Learning

RSS readers should click here to watch the movie

A friend sent me a YouTube video of a paint artist making a painting in a live audience, synchronized with the music. It's a great video, and you should watch it to the end:

RSS readers should click here to watch the movies.

If this is true, Apple stock will go ballistic. Steve Jobs talked about selling 800.000 iPhones this year, and forecasted 10 million in 2008 (1% of market share). If what iSuppli states is true, the iPhone outsold all smartphones in the United States in July, its first full month on sale, accounting for 1.8 percent of all U.S. mobile handset sales. iSuppli forecast for iPhone sales this year is now 4.5 million.

Can't wait for the European (read 3G) version.

1. Apple's market share as a computer maker is on a strong up-trend. Is now 17.6 percent of the market, and pushed Apple to number 3 in the list of PC makers. Apple laptops and desktops have the "cool factor" that other brands just can't match (with the possible exception of Sony), and they are greatly popular with students and teenagers. A new generation of users (and spenders) is growing accustomed to Apple's operating system, with a strong feeling that Windows is lame.
2. Apple dominates the Mp3 player market, with a market share higher than 85%. The domination is global, not just in the USA. Think Europe, Japan, China, Australia, South America. Every single wealthy teenager on the planet owns or wants to own an ipod. The language changed, even if you are talking about a competition's product, you call it an iPod. And there is no competition on sight.
3. Apple retail stores are the best performing stores in the USA: it generates 4.032 USD per square foot per year. Why? Just walk in an Apple store, then compare it to any other possible high tech shopping experience: you will get the answer. Only a handful of stores are outside the USA. So, there's a lot of growth space for the company: new stores are coming in Germany, France, Italy and other wealthy countries. Here in Portugal, people is waiting for ages...
4. Apple dominates the music download industry. It's probably the only company in the world that is still making real money on music, with iTunes Music Store reaching the 3 billions songs sold last July. Everybody knows that Mp3 players worldwide are stuffed with illegally downloaded songs, but still, a percentage of those songs are payed for and Apple has a huge market share of the business.
5. With iTunes and Apple TV, Apple is set to be a front runner in the movie download business. It's the future, believe it or not. Maybe not tomorrow morning, but soon. The cost, speed and ease of use of downloading a movie and watching it on your TV is a killer advantage for the customer. The only block to this business are the big studios, but even they will have to adapt. Just wait.
6. Apple software is simply better. Look at how Vista has been greeted by users, it's almost a joke. And the best features are "apple looking". The operating system market is "viral": the more users run an operating system, the more likely other users will hear about it, experience it, choose it as a new standard. That's why Leopard is going to be a huge hit, boosted by the "halo effect" of booming laptop and desktop sales. And slowly, Apple is going to sneak in the corporate market. Yes, they all use Windows. And yes, a fax machine looked like the coolest thing around just a bunch of years ago.
7. Apple is targeting the upper level consumer, the people that spend extra cash to get the bestdesign and the "identity" effect of owning a gadget with a brand. Apple controls the entire processfor the entire product: software and hardware, production and sale. This translates in better margins all down the line.
8. The company is as strong as hell. P/E ratio at 37 might seem high, but it's pretty normal if compared to others (RIMM 63, GOOG 41, AMZN 109, YHOO 45). Dell, Hp and Microsoft have a lower P/E, but lower revenue growth expectations. Plus, Apple has a load of cash and zero debt.
9. And.. oh.. there's the Iphone. The Iphone is going for sale in the rest of the world in the next 12 months. And people here in europe are waiting for it like you await a messiah, not a piece of hardware. The proof? Apple is the only phone maker in history that gets a bite of revenue from the phone companies. That's extra cash, at no additional cost for Apple.
10. One more thing... Apple is the only company with the ability to disrupt the market. The focus on detail, the strong control on every step of the production phases, the huge investment in research, design and marketing make Apple a company with a huge future potencial. I put my money in.

RSS readers should click here to watch the movie.

This is the work of Dr. Ariel Shamir from Efi Arazi School of Computer Science.

RSS readers should click here to watch the movie.

Via Fábio Pedrosa.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2007/08/23/content-aware-image-sizingThu, 23 Aug 2007 07:29:39 GMTsubliminal messages can do. Personally, I never thought this would work a this level, it's pretty scary, if you ask me. Watch the video till the end, or you'll lose the best part:

Via Sérgio Rebelo.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2007/08/16/subliminal-messagesThu, 16 Aug 2007 11:23:28 GMTarticle about a Pulp Fiction dialog, presented with moving typography, perfectly synchronized with the text, with a lot of funny and creative details.

Later, I found out this presentation technique was named kinetic typography, and that is being explored in the School of Design at CMU since 1996, by Johnny Lee under the direction of Scott Hudson and Jodi Forlizzi.

But, after all, what is the definition of kinetic typography?

Kinetic typography refers to the art and technique of expression with animated text. Similar to the study of traditional typography of designing static typographic forms, kinetic typography focuses on understanding the effect time has on the expression of text. Kinetic typography has demonstrated the ability to add significant emotive content and appeal to expressive text, allowing some of the qualities normally found in film and the spoken word to be added to static text.

In the meantime, I've collected some of this movies, and arranged them in a YouTube playlist. If want, you can watch the movie explaining what is kinetic typography, or be still and watch the playlist (12 videos, aprox. 22 minutes):

RSS readers should click here to watch the movies.

Related article: Vodafone's kinetic typography with user generated content. An idea for a Christmas card.

• Evidence #1
• Evidence #2

What do you think about it?

• Macs bring a better overall value proposition
• Macintosh licensing fees are cheaper
• The Mac desktop spawns fewer calls to the help desk
• Mac users are more productive workers
• Macs last longer
• Mac OS is more secure
• Mac is just as cost-effective as Windows to manage and administer
• Add Macs while hanging on to your investments in other OSes

The war season is open, please send your flames.

This guys have made the t-shirt. Fortunately, the launch night has gone, since the temptation would be huge! >:-)

Click here to see the t-shirt. Note: spoiler ahead.

Update: It can get more evil than I thought:

A headteacher caused some distress by reading to about 400 children from the last page of the final Harry Potter book at a primary school in Somerset.

Via a BBC News report.

RSS readers should click here to watch the film.

Meanwhile, eMarketer expects online video advertising to nearly double in 2008 to $1.3 billion USD, and TechCrunch posted an excelent article, with a round up of the possible players in this market, worth reading.

Great times are expected in a near future.

RSS readers should click here to watch the movie.

Or maybe not...

RSS readers should click here to watch the film.

Meanwhile, Engadget got access to some pictures of the possible iPhone dock, as of the new Apple bluetooth headset. Will people be able to buy this tomorrow? Nobody really knows, but everybody is expecting really hard.

The stock market is also going crazy. On one side, it seems highly sceptical about the iPhone launch, with Apple shares dropping almost 3% in the last two trading sessions. On the other side, rumours refer to a "40% premium on the Apple share price", and the past days saw the birth of a new rumour: could Google buy Apple?

In the mean time, Opera launched is new Opera mini, the next generation browser for cellphones. For the launch, they mimic the Apple worldwide known "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campaign, with a comparison between the Opera mini and the iPhone. Come on guys, you can not compare software with hardware, the comparison is truly unfair. Could this mess be a result of the growing Opera Software internal problems?

As stated by the San Jose Mercury News, " There's hype, then there's iPhone hype".

RSS readers should click here to watch the film.

On games

EA is coming back to Mac. Need for Speed Carbon, Battlefield 2142, Command & Conquer 3, Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix, Madden 08, Tiger Woods 08, all to be released in July

ID Games unveiled the new next generation technologies for gaming. They will demo it in E3.

On Leopard

First, some numbers: 22 million active OS X numbers. 67% using Tiger, 23% using Panther and 10% using older versions. 21 months between Tiger & Leopard, 300 new features in Leopard. Steve presents 10:

  
1. New Desktop: transparencies, new 3D look, stacks;  
2. New Finder: improved sharing, integration with .Mac, Cover Flow;  
3. Quick look: live file previewing;  
4. Full 64-bit architecture: huge gains of efficiency;  
5. Core animation: simple to use, easy to add to applications;  
6. Boot Camp: use as a complement to Parallels and VMWare;  
7. Spaces: multi desktops  
8. Dashboard: web clip, using Safari to make widgets;  
9. iChat: share slide shows, presentations and movies through iChat;  
10. Time machine: one click backup, wireless to a Airport base station;

Leopard shipping in October. Basic version, $129. Premium version, $129. Business version, $129, Enterprise version $129. Ultimate version, $129.

One more thing

Safari 3 now runs on Windows XP/Vista. Safari is twice as fast.

One last thing

Apple will allow developers to write web 2.0 applications that work exactly like iPhone apps - can access all the iPhone services (make calls, send emails, access the address book). All the development is made based on the Safari engine, which is the same for Leopard, XP/Vista and iPhone. The demo, a corporate address database using ldap toke less than a men/month to develop, so you also can go live on Jun 29.

Update:

Amazing, only 2 days after the true iPhone ad, without having an iPhone, this guy was able to create a great iPhone ad. Let the hype begin.

RSS readers should click here to watch the movie.

Good luck.

We are able to view all entities, from the microworld to the universe, from a single perspective. By setting them up against a scale, we are able to compare and understand things which cannot be physically compared

It's an amazing experience, so try it out here and enjoy.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2007/05/30/universcaleWed, 30 May 2007 02:27:05 GMTwarning: the following material could lead you to a addictive behaviour (for 2 to 3 days).

Last Thursday, I went to YouTube and searched for bar tricks, you know, those proposition bets where you bet you can do something, which seems impossible, do it and earn some free beers (like in free software).

While surfing the YouTube search results, I found this BBC series named "The Real Hustle". Is this series, 3 con artists make some scams and extract some money from the marks (aka the victims). The basic idea of the show is to educate viewers about the different types of scams and how to avoid becoming a victim. After the scam, all the victims have their money returned and the con/scam explained.

If you are interested in topics such as social engineering, hacking, card and bar tricks, personal security and such, you will want to watch (all) the videos in YouTube. There are more than 30, with an average of 5 minutes each. The best way to watch them all is to begin by searching for all the movies uploaded by the user kamranakthar and then searching for "The real hustle".

But be aware, once you start, it will be difficult for you to say no to the next one. You have been warned.

Called Scratch, the software lets you build online programs, including animations, games and interactive artwork, by moving around simple drag-and-drop components. You can see it in action in the following video:

RSS readers should click here to see the video.

The graphics are astonishing, the data very well put on perspective, and all the navigation and looks of the site are extremely well accomplished. Again, great great site!

"It denotes a great experiment from the artist", "Yes, 15.000 euros is a reasonable price for it", "I can fell some sexual frustration from the artist" are some of the recorded opinions. It's a all new meaning for the world subjectiveness. You can watch the broadcasted show in the following Youtube video (in spanish):

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

<div><img id="..." onLoad="initLoupe(this.id);" ...></div>

The result is something like this (click here to see it working):

Thank you Steve.

It's a very good example of what is a neural network, and it learns with every play, so, come on, take a 2 minute break and have a go.

The error message received was this:

$(element).style has no properties[Break on this error] $(element).style.height = '0px';effects.js (line 369)

After some heavy Javascript debugging, I found out the bug: Mozilla browsers add nodes for white space (in my case, in between LI elements), so it was calling the wrong node for the BlindDown effect (it was calling a white space). Here goes the original code:

function commentAdded(request) {  new Effect.BlindDown($('commentList').lastChild);  $('commentform').elements[3].value = '';  $('commentform').elements[3].focus();}

The solution was to add a new javascript line before the Effect.BlindDown call, cleaning all white spaces. Here is the corrected code:

function commentAdded(request) {  Element.cleanWhitespace('commentList');  new Effect.BlindDown($('commentList').lastChild);  $('commentform').elements[3].value = '';  $('commentform').elements[3].focus();}

So, the lesson is: every time you use a lastChild call, be aware of the white spaces for the Mozilla browsers. Hope it helps, thanks to all who pointed the bug.

Update: after a lunch conversation, I've decided to post the bug in the Mozilla foundation bugzilla. If you want to, you can check the status by accessing bug #378593.

At the heart of The Filter is a music recommendation engine that is continually learning the listening tastes and choices of tens of thousands of music lovers. This huge collection of information is combined with your own likes and dislikes to create a personal understanding of what songs from your collection you will like to listen to and when.

It can be also used to create fresh playlists for your iPod, and to get a lot information about the music you are listening. It's great, for free, and with versions for Windows, Mac and Nokia phones.

Zotspot is the new kid on the block, with a disruptive business model: you earn money from using their search engine, earnings that you can keep or donate to one or more causes (e.g., charities or universities).

On top, you can earn even more money by referring Zotspot to friends. And you earn money from friends referred by your friends, and so on, until 3 generations. Confused? See the next image (taken from the Zotspot FAQ):

If you are interested in trying it, please do it by clicking the animated image below. This way you will be helping me pay this site hosting.

Happy searching.

Please don't try this trip if you didn't eat your cereals in the morning.

RSS readers should click here to watch the movie.

The 3 main reasons for this petition are:

1. the lack of focus: eBay is more concerned in merging technologies (like Skype) than to bet on evolving the online auction sector;
2. eBay and Paypal refuse to address fraud issues and the concerns of the user base;
3. the existence of several technical issues that result in slow and erroneous searches, portions of the site not functioning properly, etc.

Is this a good idea? Will it result in anything? I sincerely don't know, but I like it, is a form of active citizenship, and we all should be active citizens. After all, that's why we live in a democracy, right?

Hobo is an Open Source extension to Ruby on Rails which helps you build full blown web applications incredibly quickly and easily. Available as a Gem or Rails plugin, Hobo provides a simple, clean and elegant development framework which allows for rapid prototyping or production of the most sophisticated web applications.

Watch the screencasts and try to keep your drooling levels low.

I have compiled all of the available videos of this robot for your viewing pleasure:

Rolling

Swimming

Sidewinder Slither

Caterpillar Crawl

Walking

Climbing across a rope

Climbing up sand

Climbing up a river bank

Finding its dislocated friend

Morph demonstration

RSS readers should click here to watch the movies.

Even though I don't agree with everything stated in the movie, it is a very well done movie, so I decided to post it in my blog. The graphics are astonishing, take a look:

RSS readers should click here to watch the movie.

RSS readers should click here to watch the movie.

RSS readers should click here to watch the movie.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2007/03/23/irackFri, 23 Mar 2007 11:02:34 GMTLast week I spend it snowboarding in the French Alps with some friends. This year, for the first time, we had like 2 small video cameras, so people were always trying to film that "Roast beef grab", the "Backside 180" or the "Indy grab".

Whenever the camera was on, my friends were taking huge risks, doing big jumps and strange techniques, in order to stay "good in the picture".

The result? Three man down: one shoulder, one ankle and a visit to a french hospital to do some x-rays due to a heavy chest pain. Fortunately, I don't give a damn for great snow movies, so all I've got was tired muscles and a rested brain.

The conclusion? Technology can hurt you, beware.

It raced so fast the pulse exited a specially-prepared chamber before it even finished entering it.

So, it looks like João Magueijo and is Variable Speed of Light theory was right all along.

An Australian company, Emotiv Systems, developed a headset that uses a set of sensors to detect player's thoughts, emotions and feelings, thus making it possible for games to be controlled and influenced by the mind of the player.

The headset connects wirelessly to consoles and PCs, and is not available to consumers yet, but a private demonstration can be scheduled for developers at the 2007 Game Developers Conference.

Image taken from Emotiv Systems website.

Update: The New Scientist Blog has an article about testing the headset, entitled What geek wouldn't want to be a Jedi? Worth reading.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2007/03/05/think-to-playMon, 05 Mar 2007 06:45:38 GMThttps://joaobordalo.com/articles/2007/03/01/bye-bye-tv-hello-joostThu, 01 Mar 2007 11:23:05 GMTNopes, it's not about Hollywood oscars (elected by some guys nobody cares) but about the free initiative named Oscar torrents. I really don't know who is behind this, but I really don't care: 133378 voters is a pretty good number for the first edition.

The film which won more oscartorrent was Pan's labyrinth, and the oscartorrent for the best picture was to The departed.

See the list movies and access the torrent files here.

The site disclaimer is also a pearl:

OSCARTORRENTS®, and the OSCAR THE PIRATE® statuette design mark are the unregistered marks of no one in particular. No ©2007. Nothing to do with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences & ABC, Inc. All Rights Reversed. The Official Oscars is a sham produced by villiains in partnership with the cult of celebrity. By accessing this site you're probably comitting a felony somewhere -- but let your own idea of what is right and wrong be your guide.

Enjoy your movies.

RSS readers should click here to watch the clip.

On the back of a new NIN tour shirt , some letters were highlighted. These highlighted letters all come together to form the clause "I AM TRYING TO BELIEVE." In a breeze, someone discovered iamtryingtobelieve.com is an actual site, which discusses the usage of a Perapin in running water by the US government. Perapin, supposedly, strengthens the immune system, boosting the immunity against a lot of biological weapons, but causing a lot of side effects.

The author of the website seems to be someone who has stopped using Parepin. Users may e-mail him to ask any questions, but are greeted with a very creepy auto-reply:

Thank you for your interest. It is now clear to me that Parepin is a completely safe and effective agent developed to protect us from bio-terrorism. The Administration is acting purely in the best interests of its citizens; to suggest otherwise was irresponsible and I deeply regret it.I'm drinking the water. So should you.

It is now proven that year zero itself is actually year 2022, as indicated by the image located here (hint: look to the left of the first image, it's slightly hard to see!). This makes the year 2007 actually become -15 BA (Born Again?).

On February 13th, after the Nine Inch Nails concert, a flash drive was found on the stall floor of one of the restrooms of the Coliseum, Lisbon, Portugal. The flash drive had references to anotherversionofthetruth.com and contained "My Violent Heart" encoded as 320kbps MP3s.

This new site, on first glance, showed nothing more than simple, smiley propaganda. Another version of the truth is revealed (quite literally!) if you click and drag. Once new text is revealed, clicking a link takes you to a message board in which citizens of this particular setting are discussing many things about society, most of it being quite negative, scary, or depressing. Additionaly, three new audio files were revealed:

• opalo.mp3, discussing the Opal drug;
• ballgameOver.mp3, taken from the point of view of an "angry sniper";
• nohurry.mp3, detailing a police raid and showcasing the REAL truth behind it.

On February 19th, after a concert in Paris, another pen drive was left behind, this time containing a rar file. This rar file contained "Me, I'm not", one of the songs for the new album, and another file named 2432.mp3.

After a spectrograph analysis of the latest, new websites and a US phone number were found ('216.333.1810'). Calling this number people were able to listen to a new audio clip, with even more clues to the maze.

At this moment (February 23th), this is the list of sites already discovered:

• http://iamtryingtobelieve.com/
• http://anotherversionofthetruth.com/
• http://bethehammer.net/
• http://105thairbornecrusaders.com/
• http://churchofplano.com/
• http://www.consolidatedmailsystems.com/nooneimportant/
• http://www.consolidatedmailsystems.com/citizen_unknown/
• http://www.uswiretap.com/case_number_required/
• http://www.uswiretap.com/71839J/
• http://www.artisresistance.com/

This is the biggest viral marketing campaign I ever seen, combining web sites, phone numbers, pen drives left behind, spectrograph analysis and much more. Check here for even more information (yes, it's bigger than you imagine) and to stay updated about this issue.

The available songs for the new album can be downloaded here.

Sources:

• Echoing the Sound
• Wikipedia
• NIN Wiki

Update: A new phone number has been discovered ('13102951040') in a new tour shirt.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the letter, written in plain English:

"The rub comes from the music Apple sells on its online iTunes Store. Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI.... When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied."

"If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music."

This is nothing new, even for Steve Jobs. Back in 2002, he publicly grumbled a bit about the record companies and their reluctance to loosen up.

"If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own."

DRM is a very sensible matter, and we will hardly see a consensus around the issue. Here are a couple of videos showing the two faces of the coin:

• the first one is a video from ZDNet Executive Editor David Berlind, suggesting that DRM is C.R.A.P.
• the second is a very recent web documentary made by McCann Norway for the Norwegian music industry, explaining the history of music piracy so far and analysing the effect it has on the industry.

RSS readers should click here to watch the movie.

In Washington, people are discussing if one can marry with another even if they have no plans to procreate. Better, if the law is approved, every one who get married in the state of Washington, have three years to procreate, or get their marriage "unrecognized". In my humble opinion, The Defense Marriage Initiative must be the stupidest law I ever saw. (via Melo)

RSS readers should click here to watch the film.

The open source Atlas Gloves application can be downloaded at the website and operated from home using a webcam and two self-made illuminating gloves. Check out how to build your own illuminating gloves and download the open source application.

Watch the demo video.

About three and a half years ago, they talked about a new trend arising, what they called Generation C(ontent). I think we now can all agree that they were right, and that it culminated with the Time's Person of Year: You issue.

GENERATION C(ONTENT) is joining GENERATION C(ASH). If consumers produce the content, if they are the content, and that content brings in money for aggregating brands, then revenue and profit-sharing is going to be one of 2007’s main themes in the online space. It’s not like brands will have a choice: talented consumers are going to be too sought after to remain satisfied with thank you notes. Get ready for an avalanche of revenue sharing deals, reward schemes and sumptuous gifts aimed at luring creative consumers.

YouTube rivals are already following the trend, and YouTube must stay a competetive player, so it was just a matter of time. Here is an image of the Generation C(ash) pioneers:

By the way, shouldn't we be talking about Fon also?]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2007/01/29/generation-cashMon, 29 Jan 2007 11:25:45 GMTI'm developing my RoR skills on a daily basis, and I'm a member of the Portuguese Ruby Brigade, so I've a special interest on this amazing framework:

• RoR 1.2 is finally available, and you can learn more about it in this article on the official blog;
• Mário wrote an excelent article on RoR web servers evolution;
• There is a new book on the block, so I guess is time to use my CC again;
• Processing Credit Cards with Ruby on Rails

If you want to know more about RoR, take a visit to the official website.

Please bare in mind the fiscal year is different from the regular year: Q1 2007 is the time period between the 1st of October and the 31th of December 2006, so it includes Christmas 2006. In this quarter, Apple sold more than 21 million iPods, and more than 1.6 million Macs.

Since I'm now an Apple shareholder, I have a particular interest in the company evolution, so I decided to get some data and build some graphics. The idea is to identify trends in growth, which could help me in my stock strategy. Bottom line, Apple is a very good bet in the long term, very volatile in the short term (or day trading) due to the hype surrounding it.

Here are the 10 graphics I have to share:

	Revenue	Net profit	Mac sales	iPod sales
Evolution	here	here	here	here
Quarterly	here	here	here	here
With product line	-	-	here	here

The quarters are for fiscal year: Q1 2007 is October to December 2006.
Click in any graphic to see it larger.

Source: Apple Investor Relations and apple-history.com]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2007/01/18/apple-resultsThu, 18 Jan 2007 11:22:12 GMTWhen I saw (and wrote about) the Gapminder presentation, I found TED. And it changed my life. So, what is TED?

TED Conference

As stated in Wikipedia (and I quote):

TED (short for Technology Entertainment Design) is an annual conference in Monterrey, California that describes itself as a global community of remarkable people and remarkable ideas, which is debated by those who see it as a self-congratulatory meeting of wealthy attendees. Its content is extremely broad, including science, art, business, global issues, architecture, music, and comedy. Speakers are from a variety of communities. Speakers have included Jane Goodall, Freeman Dyson, Bill Gates, Billy Graham, Bono, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Richard Dawkins, and Steve Pinker.

And quoting the TED site:

TED was born in 1984 out of the observation by Richard Saul Wurman of a powerful convergence between Technology, Entertainment and Design. The first TED included the public unveiling of the Macintosh computer and the Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind. Several influential members of the burgeoning ‘digerati’ community were also there, including Nicholas Negroponte and Stewart Brand.

The punchline is "Ideas worth spreading", and that summarize it all. The talks from the TED Conference 2006 are available online, and have a great impact. My favorites so far (I haven’t watched them all yet) are:

• David Pogue - very funny talk on usability and design. Interfaces must be designed simply and intuitively for multitudes to use.
• Sir Ken Robinson - a session on creativity in the education system. If we don't value and reward creativity in our young people, we're wasting skills and talents.
• Malcolm Gladwell - in this talk, filmed at TED2004, he explains what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce.
• Han Rosling - an amazing talk about Gapminder. Priceless!

TED 2007 will start on the 7th of March. Until them, TED will be posting one new talk in the website each week, to download or watch online. For best effect, plan to listen to at least three, start to finish. They have a cumulative effect...

ChangeThis

Following the path of "Ideas worth spreading", ChangeThis is a new website by/for optimistic people. As stated in the website (and I quote):

ChangeThis is creating a new kind of media. A form of media that uses existing tools (like PDFs, blogs and the web) to challenge the way ideas are created and spread.We're on a mission to spread important ideas and change minds.

Some of the manifestos are very interesting, and there is a lot to choose from.

So, choose your format (video or PDF) and start refreshing your brain with ideas worth spreading.

RSS readers should click here to watch the movies.

Introducing Fab@Home: this website provides an open source kit that lets you make your own simple fabber, and use it to print three dimensional objects. You can download and print various items, try out new materials, or upload and share your own projects. Advanced users can modify and improve the fabber itself.

Here's a YouTube video of a Fab@Home Model 1 building a silicone rubber bottle:

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

RSS readers should click here to watch the video.

Meanwhile, I decided to make a (funny?) exercise:

• first, I compile all the rumours someone is talking about and made a list of terms;
• next, for each term, went to Google and search for 'MWSF 07' + term;
• finally, created the following graphic with the number of results:
  
  

The keynote will start at 5 pm GMT, so soon we will be able to know if this is (or not) a viable method for predict Apple announcements

No matter what, I believe that in our quest to exploit the "We" in Web, we must not sacrifice the "I" in Internet.

Read the full article.

The "Month of Apple Bugs" project, began on Jan. 1, and is being orchestrated in part by a security researcher who asked to be identified only by his online alias "LMH." This is the same researcher who in November ran the "Month of Kernel Bugs" project. LMH's partner in this project is Kevin Finisterre, a researcher who has reported numerous bugs to Apple over the past few years.

The security researchers told the Washington Post that, as with Apple bugs featured during the MoKB project, Apple would receive no advanced notice of the forthcoming security problems. The security researchers hope to use the project to dispel the perception that Apple systems are free of the security bugs that have long plagued Windows users.

In two days, as promised, two bugs have been publicized, all of which allows for remote arbitrary code execution:

• Apple Quicktime rtsp URL Handler Stack-based Buffer Overflow
• VLC Media Player udp:// Format String Vulnerability

Is this the end of the "bulletproof" Mac?

It's never too late to make new year resolutions, and the games itself help us to think about the world we are living. Political issues, ecological concerns and religious radicalism are every day issues, and we can/should/must have an active roll. No more "someone has to do something about it". It's up to you now.

So, play the games, spread the word, and think about it.

My girlfriend's father bought the new Sony HDR-SR1 (with 30GB harddisk) for a journey, recorded more than 300 clips, and now he can't do anything with it! Windows or Mac are not able to play (or edit) any of those clips, due to the lack of the proper codec.

He requested my help, so I searched for the codec in the web, just to find out that there are a lot of people complaining about the same issue. I drop the search when I found out that Sony itself does not support it in is own software. The solution? My girlfriend's father will have to wait for the spring. Now, imagine his face when I told him that.

In fact, this should be one of the worst years in Sony's life: look at the evidences. The Sony camcorders with AVCHD support are the new HDR-UX1 and the HDR-SR1. Beware.

The following is a short compilation of web games from Water Cooler Games and Social Impact Games websites. Play it, share it, think about it:

• Home Water Conservation - "Waterbusters" - A game to teach tips for water conservation around the home;


• Darfur is Dying - In partnership with the Reebock Human Rights Foundation and the International Crisis Group, mtvU launched the Darfur Digital ActivistContent, a competiton briging together student technology and activism to help end the genocide in Darfur. The game is a narrative-based simultaion where the user, from the perspective of a displacedDarfurian, negotiates forces that threated the surevival of his or her refugee camp. It offers a faint glimpse of ewhat it's like for 2.5 million who have been internally displaced by the crisis in Sudan;


• McDonald's game - The McDonald's game from Molleindustria. Be sure to try out the Italian version of the website, as a Pope Speaking Generator can be found here;


• Cyberbudget-France - The French government has taken a gaming approach to try and find a solution to the country's financial challenges. Budget Minister Jean-Francois Cope has launched an online Cyberbudget game that allows people to balance the books. The challenge is to ensure the €300 billion budget is spent wisely and that if tax cuts are made then services do not fall into deficit. There are a range of tests to face, including having to present the budget to a virtual parliament;


• "Madrid" - An online game expressing feelings about the March 11, 2004 train bombings. The game was online less than 48 hours after the incident.

Jamendo allows artists to promote and publish their music. Artists have the opportunity to show their creativity, and the public has a place to listen to, download, and share new music.

If you find an album that you like, you can share it on your blog, write a review, or donate directly to the artist. Some artists will even include the list of people who donated in the booklet of their forthcoming albums. A great site for both artists and fans. Everybody wins, except for the big record labels of course.

Here goes a short version of the original article:

• Dilatants, also knows as Non-Newtonian fluids, so named because it's properties cannot be described in terms of the concepts of classical fluids. For instance, they get more solid when stressed;
• Auxetic material - materials that get thicker when stretched. Pull them in one direction and they expand in another;
• Superfluids - liquids that flow without friction. They can effortlessly flow through the tiniest of cracks and will even flow up the walls of a beaker and out the top;
• Ferrofluids - magnetic fluids that can look spectacular. They're made from nanoscale magnetic particles suspended in a liquid;
• Dry ice. Carbon dioxide freezes at -78.5 °C and it's fun and versatile stuff:

It analyses audio streams over a Skype call in real time and illustrates the stress levels of the other person. As well as operating in real time the KishKish device can also record calls for analysis later.

The first video is from one against Net Neutrality:

Which do you prefer?

The game turns churches, bridges and other roadside objects into a fantasy land filled with virtual creatures, treasures and adventure. By pointing the gaming device towards objects as they pass by, players can defend themselves against attacking creatures, pick up magic artifacts or collaborate with players in meeting traffic.

So far the project team has developed two prototypes and is working on a third one.

In Backseat Gaming, a Pocket PC is equipped with a digital compass and a GPS-receiver to connect the game to the surrounding world. The real world acts as the gaming space, and the game content has clear connections to the roadside objects seen outside the windows of the vehicle. The game consists of a framing story and a set of game locations where local stories are told. The player can catch attacking creatures and pick up virtual objects that exist in the vicinity of specific roadside-objects. Watch a video clip< from a user test.

The second prototype, Road Rager, is a multiplayer game, which uses wireless ad-hoc peer-to-peer networking technology to enable game-play between car passengers as they come within each others vicinity. Contingent traffic encounters such as rapid meetings, protracted overtaking or gatherings, i.e. traffic jams or red light accumulations constitute an essential part of the experience of travelling along a road. Road Rager focuses on using these contingent traffic encounters to create a fun and compelling mobile game. The game is developed on a WLAN equipped PDA and uses a Bluetooth GPS-receiver to locate the player’s geographical position. Watch a video clip from a user test.

The third and current running project, Backseat Playground, uses a GPS-receiver, a handheld computer, and headphones, all connected to a laptop in the trunk of the car to create an in-car gaming experience developed around an interactive game which corresponds to the vehicle’s real-world route. The game begins with a radio newsflash relayed by the handheld computer. This radio newsflash places the passenger at the start of a murder mystery or a werewolf thriller. As the car travels along its route, the player receives further phone calls and walkie-talkie messages from characters in the game. The overall purpose of the game is to create a gaming experience where narrative episodes and embedded gameplay combine with the experience of travelling through the road network. To learn more check out the video.

The how-to:

1. The original link is //joaobordalo.com/xml/rss20/feed.xml.
2. I went to FeedBurner and create a new feed pointing to the above URL, which resulted in http://feeds.feedburner.com/JoaoBordalo
3. Added the following lines to my .htaccess file:
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
   RewriteRule ^xml/rss20/feed\.xml$ http://feeds\.feedburner\.com/JoaoBordalo [R,L]

Done. If you have any problems with my 'new' RSS feed, please let me know, by leaving a comment.

Update2: Following a suggestion from Joel, here are the direct links for the two videos: Animator vs Animation and Animator vs Animation II. The videos have better quality in the Atom Films website, but you have to pay the price of watching some publicity.

Update: Youtube decided to drop the video, so I had to browse for a while to find it in another "share your videos" service. So, here it is again, now from DailyMotion:

For those who never saw the first episode, here it is:

Still on robots, vertebrate physiologist John Long at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. is making an experience on robots mating and evolving. The idea is to better understand how vertabrates evolved, but I'll let you to read the full article.

This is easily the coolest technology I’ve seen in years: Go to the Creative Commons search page. Click on the OWL Music Search tab. (Depending upon the browser, you might need to run a fake search to get it to come alive — we’re working on this, but just type anything in the search bar). You’ll then see OWL’s Music Search interface. Drop an MP3 on OWL. It will analyze it and show you similar sounding Creative Commons licensed music. You select the part of the song you want to match; it finds the closest match it can find.

• Google CEO: free cellphones for all - Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, sees a future where mobile phones are free to consumers who accept watching targeted forms of advertising. Schmidt said Saturday that as mobile phones become more like handheld computers and consumers spend as much as eight to 10 hours a day talking, texting and using the Web on these devices, advertising becomes a viable form of subsidy.
• Google Earth in 4D - Google skipped right past the third dimension and landed directly in the fourth (time) by offering historical maps on Google Earth. Don't expect detailed high resolution photography from days gone by, but it's still interesting to see old maps overlaid on the satellite imagery of today.
• New Gmail Features - There are a couple of new Gmail features being currently rolled out: dropdown menu at the top right; new icons; embarrassment-reducing message notifications; The details menu has been revamped; and a "forward all" feature to keep others up-to-date if they missed a conversation. A visual clue on the next picture (stolen from Google Blogoscoped).

I wonder how it works with a white keyboard...

Via New Scientist Technology Blog.

This year tournament was held in Bremen, Germany, and here is one video (3m53s) covering a little bit of every competition:

If you want to, you can watch all the videos from the tournament, or learn more about this in the RoboCup website. See you in Atlanta 2007.

Note: I don't subscribe the opinion expressed in this video.

]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2006/11/06/sync-google-calendar-icalMon, 06 Nov 2006 11:44:36 GMTA short film with computer generated water. Can you tell the difference from the real thing?

But now will enter Windows Automatic Update, which will boost IE 7 downloads number. But what matters for me is that user preferences are bending for the free, open-source browser, Firefox.

My first thought was someone with a heavy traffic site had linked to this particular article, so I went to Google and searched for sites linking to this specific article. There are no sites or soever linking to it. Hummm, that's strange.

Then I got it! The title of the article is Food Poisining, which has a typo: it should be Food Poisoning. This is a inocent mistake, and by definition, a common one, so I decided to give it a try, and search in Google for 'Food Poisining'. There it is, in a fine 6th place.

update: The article in question was updated with a message explaining the mistake people are doing, and helping them getting the right way.

*Yes, I put my real birthday whenever is asked.

Stop imagining. That country exists, and I'm not talking about North Corea. Today, the US Senate approved President Bush's detainee legislation, so all the above statements are now part of the law in the US. But lets dig on this subject a little more.

The definition of torture

Torture is any act by which severe pain, whether physical or psychological, is intentionally inflicted on a person as a means of intimidation, deterrence, revenge, punishment, sadism, information gathering, or to obtain false confessions for propaganda or political purposes.

When I read this in Wikipedia, is pretty straight forward. But according to recent Bush words, while discussing the Geneva Convention, the definition of torture is to vague. The solution? Give Mr. Bush the ability to define it at is own will.

The definition of unlawful combatant

Again from Wikipedia, and I quote:

The four Geneva Conventions provide protection for people who fall into enemy hands. They envisage war in its traditional form, whereby people in uniforms fight clearly defined enemies in uniform, within a clearly defined arena. It therefore divides people into two explicit groups: combatants and non-combatants (civilians). There is a third group whose existence is implied in legal discourse, but whose existence and treatment are not covered in treaties. These are unlawful combatants, such as spies, mercenaries and other combatants who have broken the laws of war, for example by firing on an enemy while flying a white flag. Whilst combatants and non-combatants are provided substantial protection, a lesser level of protection is afforded to unlawful combatants.

So, unlawful combatants are those who have broken the laws of war. But when you fight suicide bombers, how can you ever imprison someone? The guys who could have broke the law of war (like killing civilians) are already dead! On what charges are those guys detained in Guantanamo? Are they all spies? Or is it because they didn't wear any uniform?

The definition of habeas corpus

As stated in the Letric Law Library, and I quote:

Lat. "you have the body". Prisoners often seek release by filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. A writ of habeas corpus is a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released from custody.

I'm no lawyer, but my first impression is that the writ of habeas corpus exists in order to protect the people from arbitrary and lawless states. Well, the US Supreme thinks the same:

In Brown v. Vasquez, 952 F.2d 1164, 1166 (9th Cir. 1991), cert. denied, 112 S.Ct. 1778 (1992), the court observed that the Supreme Court has "recognized the fact that`[t]he writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.' ...

Hummmm, it looks like the state is giving himself the power to decide when and how people can have the right to writ of habeas corpus. In other terms, the state is granting himself the power to manipulate the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action. Isn't this the first step for an arbitrary and lawless state?

Why is no one doing something about it?

What shocks me most is US citizens aren't aware (or don't give a shit) of this. In the name of national security, americans are passively seeing (and allowing) the death of democracy has we now it. And all this because they are in war against regimes that are not democratic, or at least not has we know it.

As Benjamin Franklin (one of the Founding Fathers of the United Stated) once stated, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Amen.

• If you have political sensibility, you will feel that there is to much of Al Gore's life in the movie. I guess is important to contextualize you in why he's doing this, but it made me feel uncomfortable;
• If you have real concerns (and plan to do something about it) about the global warming problem, you should watch the documentary: it has a lot of new data, and it has the ability to clear up your mind;
• If you need to do presentations and slide shows, than you must watch this documentary. Al Gore presentation skills are awesome, and the looks of the slides are just smashing. I guess I'm allow to say that Steve Jobs is no more the reference on the subject.

Summarizing, I suggest every one to watch the documentary.

The quality is not great, and I'm sure that in some days it will be impossible to watch any channel, just because I think the people from TVTUGA don't have the necessary bandwidth to accomodate a lot of users. Hope I'm wrong, good luck TVTUGA.

• Everyone who owns a wireless network has the problem of parasite surfers, those guys who grab your open network and use it for accessing the Internet. The common solution for this problem is to use some kind of cryptography (WEP, WPA, etc), but now you can do something different: with Upside-Down-Ternet you can still offer network access to the people, but the images they will see in the Internet will be upside-down, or even blured. Well, this will not resolve the problem of people using your network to download bittorrents or other type of "non visual" data, but it sure is a funny thing to do;
• Another common problem to people is how to surf the Internet in the office, without raising many eyebrows. So what if you could surf the Internet, but inside a Word document? Just like if you were editing an important paper to your company. Your office collegues will start to see you as the most productive, never surfing, always working guy, right? Just use workFRIENDLY to do it.

~/public_html/webapp -> ~/apps/webapp

when accessing to the URL

http://yourdomain.com/webapp

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--
window.location="<!--#echo var="REQUEST_URI" -->/";
// -->
</script>

Guys, you must see this: when someone is able to make a presentation on statistics with the entusiasm of a football game, you just have to love it. It was the first time I saw statistic so live and colorful

After this, I went to read more about this guy project, Gapminder, and I have just found my pro bono project for 2007. I will help in it, that's a fact.

Third, and while in the Gapminder website, I realize the tool is available for anyone on a Google service. Did you know that Google as a tools.google.com service? And that it's running the gapminder tool for you to try and explore? Me neither.

• AppleInsider shows a new Apple fillings for the iPod redesign. It seems Apple intends to abandon the Click-Whell interface, so my brand new iPod nano will soon be a museum piece.
• A video showing what the author called the OSX Leopard Mobile running on a video iPod, with stylus and sensitive screen. My first reaction was to curse for choosing the iPod nano, but than I realized the video is fake: it's a video simulating the user interface, and you can notice that by watching it very carefully. Watch the video below.
• Last, ThinkSecret says Apple will deliver a spreadsheet software (Charts? Numbers?) in iWorks'07, scheduled to launch on January 2007.

I wonder if NSA will look at this as they looked at the Furbys.

More information about Yahoo Video can be found in this Ars Technica article.

I think it will be a shopping cart system to help websites accept payment for their items online. The money site owners make will be deposited into a holding account at Google — just like AdSense works.

Can this be a PayPal killer? You can read the original article here.

That was fine, but after they put on their lipstick they would press their lips to the mirror leaving dozens of lip prints. Every night the maintenance man would remove them and the next day the girls would put them back.

Finally the principal decided that something had to be done. She called all the girls to the bathroom and met them there with the maintenance man.

She explained that all these lip prints were causing a major problem for the custodian who had to clean the mirrors every night. To demonstrate how difficult it had been to clean the mirrors, she asked the maintenance man to show the girls how much effort was required.

He took out a long-handled squeegee, dipped it in the toilet, and cleaned the mirror with it.

Since then, there have been no lip prints on the mirror. There are teachers... and then there are educators!

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

An example of stupidity at is best, in the Apple's Unsolicited Idea Submission Policy. Here is the proof.

Applications

CAPTCHAs are used to prevent bots from using various types of computing services. Applications include preventing bots from taking part in online polls, registering for free email accounts (which may then be used to send spam), and, more recently, preventing bot-generated spam by requiring that the (unrecognized) sender pass a CAPTCHA test before the email message is delivered.

There are different methods for implementing CAPTCHAs: they can be based on text, images, sound or logic puzzles. What they all have in common is the assumption that people will be able to solve them very quickly, but computers won't. Next, I will list some examples of different CAPTCHAs, and evaluate them on security and accessibility issues.

Test based CAPTCHAs

A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen:

In order to prevent computer recognition, CAPTCHAs have to include a lot of background noise, and play with the font and rotation of the letters in it, which can generate very hard to read text, even for humans:

In order to help people understand the text in the CAPTCHAs, some implementations use words taken from a dictionary. This helps people understand the hard-to-read letters in the text, but makes the CAPTCHA weeker to computing attacks, since the number of possible words is finite:

The Gimpy method

Gimpy works by choosing a certain number of words from a dictionary, and then displaying them corrupted and distorted in an image; after that Gimpy asks the user to type some of the words displayed in that image. In the example below, the user only needs to type 3 words from the 7 that exists in the CAPTCHA:

Click here for a live demo

Image based CAPTCHAs

A different approach is to use pictures to make human checking, since computers have a great difficulty to look at a picture and understand what's in it. The problem with this kind of approach is, again, the finite number of images used: depending on how many images are beeing used to implement the CAPTCHA, the attacker can grab all the images used in it, and "teach" his computer about them. So, people are trying to use free available pictures from services as Flickr or Zooomr to avoid this.

PIX

PIX is a program that has a large database of labeled images. All of these images are pictures of concrete objects (a horse, a table, a house, a flower, etc). The program picks an object at random, finds 4 random images of that object from its database, distorts them at random, presents them to the user and then asks the question "what are these pictures of?".

Click here for a live demo

The Kittens test

This is probably the cutest CAPTCHA I have seen: the user is confronted with a 3x3 grid of animal pictures, and 3 of them are of kittens. The user must click the kittens:

Click here for a live demo

Audio based CAPTCHAs

CAPTCHAs based on reading text - or other visual-perception tasks - prevent visually impaired users from accessing the protected resource. However, CAPTCHAs do not have to be visual. Any hard artificial intelligence problem, such as speech recognition, can be used as the basis of a CAPTCHA. Some implementations of CAPTCHAs permit users to opt for an audio CAPTCHA. Take a look at this audio based CAPTCHA test to see how it works.

Circumvention

Since there is nothing 100% secure, it's always possible to break a CAPTCHA, and that can be done in two ways: using or not using humans to do it.

One ingenious crack is to offer a free porn site which requires the user to key in the solution to a CAPTCHA - which has been inlined from Yahoo or Hotmail - before the user can gain access. Free porn sites attract lots of users around the clock, and the spammers are able to generate CAPTCHA solutions fast enough to create as many throw-away email accounts as they wanted.

The other way to crack CAPTCHAs is using OCR (optical character recognition) technology. The most well known project for defeating CAPTCHAs must be the PWNtcha, and a visit is mandatory, in order to understand which type of CAPTCHAs are most vulnerable.

Implementing CAPTCHAs

If you want to implement a CAPTCHA in any of the following programming languages - ASP, C, ColdFusion, Java, .NET, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby or Smalltalk - check the Wikipedia link.

Resources

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
• http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/
• http://www.captcha.net/
• http://www.boingboing.net/2004/01/27/solving_and_creating.html

Mac fans, like me, will love the interface similar to iMovie. The big difference is that this one is easier to use, even being web based (great job guys).

In order to test the service, I uploaded 4 Pixar clips and a song from Fatboy Slim, and mixed my first Jumpcut movie. If you have 7 minutes to spare, take a look at it.

Update: Published the "Making of". Bare in mind that this is version 3, since previous version was cut off to soon, and the first one add titles explaining each part of the process of creating the video.

But somehow the system is faulty, because the timing of appearence of the titles was wrong when viewing the movie, so I decided to cut all off and have only the screen capture.

Also, the screen capture has bad video quality, and some problems with the sound, but I blame that on my lack of experience with Snapz Pro.

When I made the movie, I wished to:

• Have one music across all movie;
• Mute the clip's music on the first two clips;
• Syncronize the disco lights in the second clip with the music;
• Add a movie title;
• End the movie at the same time as the music.

So, with no further due, this is the making of Birds of prey:

Rates are higher than Skype, and it always will, since they have to pay for two termination fees. And they are not all that competitive, see it for the portuguese market:

Note: all in network advantage is lost, so a call between two mobiles belonging to the same operator will also pay €0.35 per minute.

Update: Thanks to Joel for pointing Voipstunt, a VoIP service which allow free calls to land lines.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2006/04/04/jajahTue, 04 Apr 2006 10:50:00 GMTGM made a great campaign for it new SUV, the Tahoe. With a great user interface, you can build your own ad for the SUV, and with it participate in the contest.

The thing is, people are concerned with global warming and excessive oil usage, as you can watch on this comercials:

• comercial 1
• comercial 2
• comercial 3
• comercial 4

For how long will this be available on the site? How long does it take GM to apply censorship? Let us wait and see.

Comercials seen on Nina Paley's website.

Filofax

The most well known paper organizer in the world is Filofax. They sell a full range off different agendas, as of different form types that you can use. But I consider it quite expensive, and hard to hack. So, the purpose of this post is not to convince you to buy Filofax, but to show you different DIY (Do It Yourself) planners, that you can print, cut and/or bend, and make your own.

The classic

One great site for resources is D*I*Y Planner. Here, you can download a pdf file with more than 100 different forms, covering everything from action lists to project management to contact information to finances, dozens of variations on daily, weekly, monthly and yearly calendars, forms for creative people, covers and more. All you have to do is to choose which size you are interested in, (Classic, A5, Class 2-Up or A5 2-Up), print it and that's it.

PocketMod

I consider this one brilliant! With a very nice web application, you can build your own 8 pages planner. The application will generate a A4 or Letter page, that you can print. Than, with a small scissor cut, and some folding instructions, it will transform in a small, 8 pages book. Simply amazing, check the SuDoku pages.

The Hipster PDA

Invented by the 43 Folders people, the Hipster PDA intends to implement the GTD (Getting Things Done) in paper, and does it by using different paper colors and a binder clip. You can follow the simple approach in the original site, or get the D*I*Y Hispter PDA Edition.

The Moleskine hack

The guys from PigPog decided to hack a Pocket Reporter Moleskine to implement a simple version of GTD. In my opinion, you loose a lot of the potentials of GTD, but you gain a much simpler system to use. The main idea is to have colored Post-it tags pointing to different projects, the to-do list and others.

The Printable CEO

David Seah invented this form to focus his time productively. The Printable CEO consists of 2 parts: a list of activities that “have value” with regards to growing his business, and a tracking form for tallying up points over the week. The PCEO is evolving through time, and the guys from BlueFlavor adapt it for their own needs, and decide to post their own version of the PCEO.

Others

I strongly believe that tools should adapt to people, and not the opposite, so there is always people inventing their own planners. Jon Stokes, from Ars.Technica, did it, where is yours?

Pandora uses a nature approach since Pandora's recommendations are based on the inherent qualities of the music. Give Pandora an artist or song, and it will find similar music in terms of melody, harmony, lyrics, orchestration, vocal character and so on. So you will get similar musics, or as Pandora likes to call it, music with similar "genes".

On the nurture side (as in, it's all about the people around you), Last.fm is a social recommender. It knows little about songs' inherent qualities. It just assumes that if you and a group of other people enjoy many of the same artists, you will probably enjoy other artists popular with that group.

The article brilliantly explains the differences in these two different approaches, as some of the problems that can occur in each other. It ends with some results for different tests the author has made, it seems Last.fm is better.

Click here to read the full article

The system used was an old system with only 256MB's of RAM. Windows Vista won't even boot on that.

A netlabel distributes is music in digital audio format, online. Netlabels don't produce plastic, all their music is available somewhere in the net, in a mp3 or ogg format. And you can have them for free, it's yours to get it.

So, where is the money, someone could ask. Well, netlabels are in the business of creating brands, for themselves and for the bands they represent. And brands create value, so their business is to earn money from concerts and merchandising.

The question that arises immediately is, will they get it? The recent cases of the Artic Monkeys and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah says that there is a possibility. What I know is, that this way, more people can try, so we will have a lot of music to choose from, and those who are really good, will prevail. Like Nathan Torkington wrote in an article for O'Reilly Radar:

In the beginning, musicians were performers, who didn't need a perfect technique so long as they had the carry their live shows. When recording was invented, performers complained that the recording technology captured all their technical flaws and none of their charisma, and the infernal devices would put them out of business. Recordings created a new class of musician, people who sounded great on vinyl/tape/CD even if they had the stage presence of a wet fish and their live shows sucked. Now we see the value of a recorded piece of music heading to zero and that same class of hot picking wet fish is complaining because increasingly the only way to make money out of music is to perform live (which they suck at, remember).

You can find a lot of netlabels in the Netlabel Catalogue, but I decided to compile a list of portuguese netlabels.

• EnoughRecords
• Merzbau
• Mimi
• Necrosymphonic Entertainment
• Plastic4records
• Test Tube
• Yellow Bop Records
• You Are Not Stealing Records

If you know more netlabels, or know a place with this list is already set, please tell me about it in the comments section.

update: thanks to sal, two more netlabels added to the list, and a reference to a directory of netlabels and more.

update 2: just found this netlabel, wolf+lamb, who made is entire site code available for anyone who wants to release a similar service. This could be a major boost in the netlabel business.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2006/03/10/netlabelsFri, 10 Mar 2006 01:21:00 GMTPeople say that I'm a good person in problem solving. They say that because sometimes I get out of the box solutions, and they see it as something unusual. Well, I'm not a special guy, what I do is always trying to get the problem right, and that is half way to good problem solving.

When I was in university, I had a course named "systems analysis", and one day, the teacher told us a story on this matter, which I will share with you. Every time I'm confronted with a difficult problem, I think on this story and try to use the lessons learned. So, here is the story.

The story

Once upon a time, this five star hotel was having a lot of customers complaining about the time they had to wait for the elevators. In order to solve this problem, the manager gathered a multidisciplinary team, and told them to think about this and present some solutions in a week.

So, a week later, these guys where at a meeting room, and started to present some possible solutions. The architects told the solution was on building extra elevators, and already had some plans of where to do it. All they had to do was to convert some rooms to elevator halls and construct new elevators shacks all the way up.

The engineers said there solution was simpler, since all they have to do was to substitute the elevators engines with more powerful ones, and enforce the cabling in order to sustain the new tensions. This way, with faster elevators, times would be shorter.

The mathematicians came with another solution: they studied the normal operation of the elevators, and realise that around 50% of times, the ground floor was the beginning of the journey. So, there's solution was to had a programmable module to the elevators, and make them go to the ground floor every time they were idle, and stay there waiting for customers.

And then, was this guy at the end of the table, who said: guys, everyone here focused on the elevators for solving the problem. But bare in mind that the problem here is not about the elevators being slow, it's about people complaining about the time they have to wait for them. So, my solution is to put some mirrors between the elevators doors, in order to give people something to do while they wait. All people, in some degree, like to stare at themselves, to check for knot ties, see how the hair is going, etc. So, if we distract people while they are waiting, they will not realise the time they are waiting for the elevators, so the problem will be solved.

Since this latest solution was the cheapest and fastest to implement, the hotel manager decided to take it a try, so mirrors were installed in all elevators halls across the hotel.

Complaints dropped to zero.

• Yahoo's new design, via techblog.com
• Google's new webpage, via jamesyu.org

You can read what other people think in the comments section of the posts mentioned above.

Update 7/Mar/2006: Google is testing date ranges in the search box, see it for yourself in this ego centric url.]]>https://joaobordalo.com/articles/2006/03/06/majors-re-designMon, 06 Mar 2006 10:22:00 GMTI consider myself as someone abnormally concerned with efficiency. I'm always trying to find a way to execute tasks with the minimum waste of resources (time, money, energy, space,...), which is good, in a ecologic and generic way, but can be mind blowing when out of control.

During a day job, I'm pretty like John Doe: normally, I'm carrying more than one project at the same time, some where I'm really working on, others where I'm just waiting for someone to deliver some thing; when I get deep into something I usually forget other tasks, which can be tough, if we are talking groceries; So, I need a way to organize myself, to be as much efficient as i can.

I knew GTD (Getting Things Done) some time ago, and even use it for sometime, just to reach to the conclusion that is had to much overhead for my personal use. But it has some very good lessons in how to organize ourselves to better productivity, So, after some reading and digging, I decided to compile what I think are the best practices you can do to help yourself in being more efficient.

Stop and think

The first thing you need to do is think in all the projects you have in hands. Consider a project everything that can be break in smaller pieces (or tasks). "Organize a meeting" is a project, since it means "identify participants", "write an agenda", "invite participants", "get a meeting room", etc. When writing a project, identify (and write) all tasks needed to fulfill the project.

The second thing you need to think, is contexts. This is a valuable lesson from GTD, and works like this: during the 24 hours of the day, you live in different environments, or contexts. You start by waking up at home, you spend some time working (in different projects), you have (hopefully) some spare time. But this division can go even further, it can adapts to whatever you want. Some examples of contexts in GTD (the @ symbol identifies a context in GTD):

• @brainstorm: notes for when I'm brainstorming
• @calls: I'm on the phone now
• @chores: oh routines routines
• @computer: I'm on the computer
• @daily actions: I'm want to do this today
• @decide: decisions decisions
• @design & code: when I open photoshop
• @desk: I'm on my desk, can do some paperwork
• @email: I opened my mail.app
• @google: it deserves one, believe me
• @mac: I'm on my mac
• @online: I'm connected
• @monitoring: I'm waiting for someone to send me something
• @print: I'm going to the printer now
• @refactor: It's done, but it could be better...
• @read: so many things to read, so less time
• @schedule: have to schedule something with someone
• @someday soon: like, learn esperanto, painting...
• @web: look mam, I'm browsing!
• @write: needed, when you write posts this big

The anatomy of a task

Tasks should be written in this format: verb the noun with the object for this purpose.

The verb should be a "physical" verb, i.e., should represent an action that can be done in a short period of time: write, buy or call are good examples. Organize, plan or prepare are bad ones. The noun should be as especific as needed, depending on your special needs. A purpose should be always added, to help you remember what is your primary goal (or project). Here some examples:

Don't write "year-end report", write "get spreadsheet from work server for year-end report". Don't write "get with Joe", but instead "call Joe on Monday to invite for Friday night party". Of course, every time you have more than one task for the same purpose, you should have a project, and all tasks belonging to this project should be linked to it. Loose tasks can easily exist, and for those who are concerned with data integrity, just imagine that they are linked to a "loose tasks" project.

Tasks in context

Now, some of this tasks can be performed only in some contexts. "Buy GTD book from Amazon to learn more on GTD" can only accomplished under the @online context, so it should be linked to this context. And you should be able to find all tasks belonging to a context in a glance. This way, you can maximize your efficiency, buy doing similar tasks at once, even if they are for different projects.

Tools

There are some tools to help us achieving this, and I would like to mention the following:

• GTDTiddlyWiki, a self preservation wiki, that you can download and use in your own computer
• Kinkless GTD and iCal for Mac users
• The Hipster PDA, for those who like it in carbon

Planning

You earn a lot of time when you plan. Really. A good tip is to think (and write) what you expect from next week. This should be a very concise table, with 3 columns: project, moving parts, weekly outcome. Good examples are:

• "Year-end report", "Get room for meeting", "Have it booked by Wednesday"
• "Acme Air", "Send business proposal", "final read and send it by Tuesday"
• "Blog", "Contact page", "have it done by Friday"

By the way, this should be done at the last day of the week, never on Monday morning. Your mindset on weekends is completely different when you know that you already did this, then when you know you didn't. Trust my words.

With this table, you should end up every week day by planning the next one. This planning should be done in a calendar, where you should allocate slices of time to different tasks (or contexts) . Try to be fair on the slices, dont's waste to much time googling when you have a lot of phone calls to do.

Epilogue

The inspiration for these post came after watching this movie, it's a demo of Kinkless GTD, a free Mac OS X application, and is an excelent place to see GTD in action.

Hope is useful.

So, I decided to read the patent, and it's not that bad: the usage of rich-media applications is not covered under this patent. Instead, what Balthaser is patenting is a hosted application which enables normal people to build rich-media websites (or applications), there is, a rich-media website, that previously demanded designers, flash programmers and coders, can now be accomplished by anyone.

So, Balthaser is defending is own tool, pro:FX. The thing is, isn't this patent to broad? What is the definition of "rich-media application"?

In the same day, Google launched is new service, Page Creator, a website that enables you to create your own website, with the easiness and simplicity we know from Google. And after a peek to the Page Creator interface, my first question was: "Is this under the Balthaser patent?".

If is considered that Google (and others) must license this kind of technology to Balthaser, than we have just created a strong break on innovation, and I strongly believe that is not the objective of patents. They exist to encourage innovation, by protecting intellectual property, not for some guy to decide that put a Dreamweaver on the web is innovation. That was too damn obvious to be considered as an inventive idea.

I just hope someone get is senses, meanwhile, I'm happy to live in Europe.

With free code available, it became a simple matter of time for other clones to pop up trough the net like mushrooms. And Portugal is no different: there is at least two new ones, ouvidizer.com and domelhor.net.

The latest is Paulo Querido's new project, and caught my attention due to some great links I have found there:

• Belgium researchers were able to play the surrounding sound that was present during the painting of a south american vase with more the 5 centuries. You can hear people laughing, watch the video (in french);


• Following Tetris, Russia give us a new form of addiction, Putin Chess. The link from domelhor.net points to a portuguese written page, more on Putin Chess here;


• After Segway, Dean Kamen invented two devices, one able to purify 1000 liters of clean water a day, and the other one is a power generator able to make a kilowatt of anything that burns. More on CNN Money.

As you can see, it adds value, by helping one find news of interest, but the design of any of the webpages can be a lot better. Well, best wishes for everyone.

Something we ate tuesday wasn't that good, so we spent the last couple of days trying to get the fluids levels back. Meanwhile, the heart beat returned to normal, so I was able to take some time and make some improvements on this site:

• Licensed this webpage under the Creative Commons License. In summary, you can do whatever you want with work from this site, since you maintain the attribute of the original work. The specific license can be read here;


• Added de de facto icon for RSS sindication. It's more user friendly this way, and brings a little color to the site. Another advantage is to turn more visible the search results - guess orange squares moving are more eye catching than grey and blue text;


• Since not everyone knows what RSS is, below the sindication icons is now a link pointing to a page explaining what RSS is. The idea was inspired in Ivo Gomes blog. Any comments on the text are welcome;


• Added access keys to the site, is now possible to navigate using the keyboard. You can read all about this in the colophon page. Next steps are implement access keys for post commenting and search results, any ideas?


• Updated the colophon page, and added a site history section.

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.

• Can you send me one of this?

• 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.

• 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!!

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Rolling with Ruby on Rails, part I
  
• Rolling with Ruby on Rails, part II
  
• Really getting started with Rails
  
• Four days on Rails

• 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.
  

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.

• 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