Pete's (aka Jorge Amodio) Blog

Megaupload, Piratería y Cambalache Netero

2012-01-22T17:45:00.000-06:00

Casi imposible en estos días abrir una página de web de noticias, redes sociales o chequear mi correo electrónico y no encontrar ninguna referencia, artículo o comentario sobre el tole tole con MegaUpload.

Pese a que no es uno de los temas de mi mayor interés, pero tiene que ver en parte con mi participación en distintos foros para promover el libre intercambio de información en Internet, y que no me gusta hablar por boca de ganso, me dediqué a explorar y leer un poco más sobre los detalles de esta acción por parte del Departamento de Justicia de los Estados Unidos, incluyendo la lectura detallada de las 72 páginas de la Acusación (Indictment) emitida por dicho Departamento.

Algunas aclaraciones de rigor. Me interesa poco o nada defender a las compañías disqueras, a las megacorporaciones, a los estudios cinematográficos, al DOJ, FBI o cualquier otra agencia o institución de tres letras. Sí, me interesa seguir promoviendo la libertad de expresión, el libre intercambio de información en Internet y la menor intromisión de los "manda más" de acá, allá y del más allá también. Así que comentarios o sanatas sobre el imperialismo yanqui, los malvados de la disquera X o distribuidora Y, están de más y al dope.

Para un dinosaurio de la red como yo, quizás situaciones y eventos como estos hacen reflotar viejas anoralgias (añoranzas llenas de nostalgia) sobre lo tranquilo que era la red y como podíamos dejar información sin preocuparnos de robo de identidad, o si algo no funcaba llamábamos a nuestro "amigo" al otro lado de la línea para resolverlo sin necesidad de pedirle permiso al Tío Sam o garparle a un abogado.

Claro, pese a que de alguna forma nos rebuscabamos para tener un dialogo interactivo vía IRC, Talk, o hasta video con CU-SeeMe, nada como las videoconferencias que puedo tener hoy en día con familiares, amigos y colegas alrededor del mundo o el inmenso caudal de información disponible en línea para mi trabajo o regocijo.

Internet ha crecido de tal forma que hasta muchos consideran el acceso a la misma un derecho humano, erróneamente en mi opinión pero sin restarle importancia a como Internet ha cambiado muchos de los aspectos de nuestra vida cotidiana, no solo la posibilidad de comunicación o comercio, sino también la forma en que socializamos.

Es ilógico el argumentar o insistentemente apuntarle el dedo a Internet como el medio o causa principal de muchos males. Si bien es cierto que en cierta medida facilita el crimen, no significa que sea la causa, y la confusión y zona gris que genera este tema, complicado con el hecho que en Internet no existen fronteras, motivan acciones desmedidas (como incautar cientos de servidores a lo bestia) o propuestas de ley - como SOPA - que intentan poner control por medio de interferir con la arquitectura y funcionamiento de la red. (SOPA proponía algo así como borrar los nombres de las calles en los carteles de cada esquina para que los chorros no supieran como llegar al banco para afanar.)

Algunos parecen ver la piratería en Internet como una causa noble, leyendo los comentarios en un sitio de noticias me cruzo con un tarado (con nombre y apellido) que afirma tener más de 7 Terabytes de películas y música pirateados, y ahora se la pasa distribuyendo por varios lados incluyendo Facebook y Twitter, enlaces para generar ataques a varios sitios en Internet. Verdaderamente, a tipos como éste aparte de pedirle el documento, deberían hacerle un análisis de sangre y orina antes de darle su cuenta para poder acceder Internet.

Julian Sanchez publicó un artículo muy interesante en ars technica sobre SOPA, Regulación en Internet y la economía de la piratería, donde afirma que a la industria de contenidos seguramente algo le cuesta la piratería -sino no meterían tanta guita en el Congreso para promover legislación como SOPA. Pero realmente la reducción en piratería que esto puede generar seria mínima y con un alto costo para todos.

Ahora la operación de MegaUpload era legal o no ? A primera vista el negocio sonaba como bastante legal, simplemente un megarepositorio público de archivos en la red. Pero eso es lo que se veía de frente, ahora empiezan a saltar en detalle como operaban estos quías, realmente al borde o más allá de la ley.

Varios argumentan que el accionar de la justicia fue una movida para promover legislación como SOPA. En realidad el argumento va para el otro lado, este accionar es clara demostración que la justicia bien o mal no necesita de SOPA para tomar acción. Por otro lado los de MegaUpload estaban bajo la mira y el microscopio bastante antes de que se escribiera la propuesta de ley.

Es Pepe DOTCOM culpable ? Realmente no soy juez para determinarlo, lo que sí creo después de ver unas cuantas fotos, el hacerse llamar DOTCOM, en las chapas de su vasta colección de autos poner cosas como GOOD, EVIL, GOD, STONED, GUILTY, MAFIA y otros detalles más, resulta muy sospechoso. Muy boludo no es, porque en el 2010 encanutó algo así como 42 palos verdes. El que sí parece ser medio boludo es el pobre programador que estaba en Turquía que en el mismo año se conformó con solo 100 lucas.

Lo que sí es perjudicial para Internet en casos como MegaUpload, es que en primer lugar ponen en movimiento a las autoridades para tomar medidas extremas que con el afán de hacer justicia y aplicar la ley entran como elefante en un bazar arrasando con todo.

También afecta que empresas que actúan de esta manera le dan más motivos y combustible a quienes quieren forzar y promover más regulación en la operación y uso de la red.

Lamentablemente también pone en duda el desarrollo y adopción de ciertas tecnologías como el almacenamiento remoto de información en "la nube."

Mi esposa es artista, y yo hago desarrollo de sistemas electrónicos, la piratería nos afecta cotidianamente.

Después de leer unos cuantos comentarios defendiendo la piratería como algo noble me pregunto si al final Discépolo tenía razón y seguimos en el Cambalache, y "El que no llora, no mama, y el que no afana es un gil!".

Atentos Saludos
Jorge (el gil que sigue garpando por música y películas)

And One More Thing ...

2011-11-02T06:53:00.000-06:00

I just finished reading Steve Job's Biography by Walter Isaacson.

I'd describe it with just one word "fascinating."

Sorry Steve, I've got my copy of your Biography on my Amazon Kindle, but as I went from chapter to chapter, and through different stories, I had my iPod Touch on the other hand reviewing old documents, keynote speeches and product launches on YouTube.

I feel that Isaacson did a superb job to portray Steve Jobs as many of us imagined he was, it was really interesting to read the histories behind some of the products, the birth and rebirth of Apple as a company, the creativity and inspiration from Pixar, but the most interesting part was to get to know Steve in a more human plane, as a partner, a friend, a husband, a father, a dreamer, a human being.

I've always been a geek, a technology lover, and I may had some instances when I probably got in trouble to voice my opinion when I thought something was really a piece of shit.
I really took the time to read the biography enjoying every paragraph and reflecting after each story or event.

But one of the things that kept floating on my mind while I was reading and now that I just finished it, is: Why we don't have more people like Steve Jobs ?

And this question intersects with some reflections after reading another of my favorite authors, Sir Ken Robinson on "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be creative."

I strongly believe the answer is very simple: we don't let them be.

It is not something personal, as "we" I mean "the system", particularly the educational system and how we react when we notice that some kids are "different". Hellooooo, we are all different !!, but the system has been designed and ran as we were all equal and it is focused on moving the kids through it following a standard and fixed process. Yes there is such thing as "gifted and talented", but people like Steve Jobs probably would have never passed the test.

One of the typical reactions when "we" find that a kid is different, instead of having a system that can adapt to her/him, we try to force the kid to fit into it.

I think you should listen at what Sir Ken Robinson said at one of the best ever TED Talks.

I went through situations like this personally, we didn't know what it was and that ADHD even existed, and since it is on the genes, now being a parent I'm going through it with my kids.

It struck me when I read about Job's fourth grade teacher who challenged him to solve math problems with a giant lollipop as a reward, but later the challenge was most interesting and motivating than the reward. He was one of the lucky ones to have that teacher. I was lucky too when I was in secondary technical school and the priest that was the school's director saw me so enthusiastic and motivated on the electronics labs and other activities that he let me be on the labs all day. By the last year of school I was teaching my own classmates about digital electronics and microprocessors.

I feel that my kids are also lucky, because so far we've got teachers that can see beyond and recognize their natural talents, personality and creativity.

But it can't be that way, it can't be that by "luck" our kids have a chance to be what they naturally were born to be.

One of the things that I really regret about Steve Job's early departure, is that he recognized that we need a revolution in education, and that technology can play a big role on it. He was poised to do great things about it.

I just hope somebody follow on his legacy and we keep trying to create a better future for our kids and their kids.

Cheers
Jorge

So long Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T23:50:00.000-06:00

It feels somehow strange writing about somebody I never met in person but that had a substantial influence in my professional career and on my personal and family's life.

Sure, we all knew that Steve Jobs was going through a challenging fight and his resignation as CEO of Apple, Inc. was a clear signal that his health was rapidly deteriorating.

But many of us always wished for the iGenius to stay with us for much longer.

After reading some of the many testimonies, anecdotes, histories and messages when I learned about the sad news of Steve passing away, I started reflecting how much he influenced me and my family, and changed our habits and lifestyle forever.

I was about half way through of my career in electronics at a technical school when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple. I was already fascinated by digital electronics and microprocessors crunching code for a Motorola MC6800, entering every byte by hand on a hexadecimal keypad. In those days programming was kind of and art of black magic and 512 bytes of RAM were a lot!!. I didn't pay much attention to Apple until they launched the Apple II, which at that time I couldn't afford but loved the design and how they put it together.

It took me a long time to have the first Apple product in my hands, and old Powerbook laptop with the trackball, provided by the company I was working at that time. I really liked MAC OS, it was simple, intuitive, easy to use and reliable. I really regretted when Steve Jobs left Apple, while they continued to develop some interesting products, they lacked the WOW factor that Steve was so good to inject on them.

Meanwhile Steve was getting busy at Pixar and NeXT, Inc. About that time I was already deep into Unix and drooling to have a workstation with a Graphic User Interface, so I started following very closely what NeXT was doing in hardware and their NeXTSTEP operating system derived from Unix. After establishing the first international connection to Internet for Argentina via SURANet, in 1991 I had the opportunity to visit Glenn Ricart who was in charge of the Computer Science department of the University of Maryland and Principal Investigator at SURANet. It was a great visit, when we arrived at his home where he invited me to stay, I almost had a heart attack when I saw he had a NeXT computer on his home office !!! What a marvelous piece of hardware, the animated GUI was fantastic, the resolution of the screen, even black and white was formidable, and best of all, it was running Unix !!. So bad that commercially was a product that was way ahead of its time and to expensive to grab market share trying to compete with PCs and the other jewels of that age from Sun Microsystems.

What about Pixar?. If you didn't like Toy Story you are from another planet. Besides the history that was entertaining not just for the kiddos, the technology and creativity behind it was amazing.

Even at the end of the movies, one of my favorite things from Pixar, this original idea of adding bloopers for an animated film. Did you cry with Toy Story 3 ?

And then he got back to Apple, the iMac was born and NeXTSTEP mutated into Darwin and then on MAC OS X. Now with a good paying good and anxiously to have an iMAC I got my first generation iPod and the half dome iMac G4, which became our family preferred tool for managing pictures and videos. It later became the machine my daughter Veronica, not yet three years old, learned how to use a computer.

It was a lot of fun for her and also for my son (he is on the right on a Windows PC, bummer), MAC OS X was so intuitive and easy to use that they didn't have any problems using it.

Veronica always enjoyed using this computer, that we still have and still works. Five years later and few MAC OS X upgrades and she is having fun creating her own music with Garage Band.

Meanwhile I was listening to other music on my first generation iPod, which later got company of the first iPod Nano I purchased for my wife to avoid getting mine hijacked.

And then came the new iPod classic, my home office got the new iMac G5, and the iPod touch. When I purchased my first iPod Touch I was blown away, I did like it as a music player but much more as a small portable computer. I quickly installed ssh to have remote access to my Linux servers, and later the new generation with camera and Face Time, I was feeling part of the Space 1999 crew with an improved Commlock on my hands.

I truly believe that being able to run so many applications on the iPod Touch (currently I've more than 150 installed), particularly the Apps for Twitter, Facebook, etc., got me more involved in Social Networking. My son has his own iPod Touch and it is almost an extension of his body, it is his preferred gaming platform, his window for searching on the Internet (parental proxy in the middle) about subjects he is reading, news and school homework, and sometimes he also listen to music, including the Beatles !!

My wife loves Angry Birds and some other games like Glass Tower, several nights I went to bed to find her sleeping with the iPod on her hand with angry birds flying around.

With the iPod and iTunes I enjoy much more buying and listening to music, what a great deal being able to buy the track I like and not an entire album with songs I don't like, the music industry had it wrong, Steve Jobs was way ahead of the curve.

We don't have iPhones yet, not because of Apple, just because we are tied to our existing phone contract and I'm not willing to pay the exorbitant rates phone companies pretend for the data services. We are planning in the near future to add an iPad to our collection of iDevices, it will be a great tool for my wife to have her portfolio and presentations of her work and classes on an iPad.

We got sad when we heard the news, but my eyes got really wet when I saw this video of "The Woz" talking about his friend and partner.

So how much Steve Jobs and Apple have impacted our lives ?

Much more than I expected and ever thought, he was truly a visionary, a doer of things that never being done before, a true believer of "Think Different", a genius.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

So long Steve Jobs, God Speed and Rest In Peace, God bless your soul and your family and friends, you will be missed and remembered.

Sincerely

Jorge

Books and more books ...

2011-10-03T10:53:00.000-06:00

Lets see if this works ... It has been a while since I wrote my last post and the Blogger UI changed, kind of nicer than the old one but I've to get used to the new one now.

In our family we love books, actually we are book freaks, if there is something we anxiously want to know or understand what do we do ? we buy, get it from the library, read at the bookstore, or steal a book !! (just kidding).

Besides loving books, I really love my Amazon Kindle (I'll write a separate article about it), what a great device and awesome service, and we the new Kindles, Ohhh My. My son is anxiously waiting to get one, and he already gave me the speech that at school the Kindle is an exception on the electronics gadgets policy (good try son!).

Adding to the real tangible dust collecting old fashion paper books, we have started our digital collection of eBooks. Over the past few days I spent some time (and a some bucks) taking advantage of a great offer from O'Reilly and Associates. If you own one of their titles on paper, for some of them they offer you to get the eBook version, DRM free, for few bucks, so I did it.

Given that our digital media library is getting hard to manage, iTunes became our default tool to manage our Music titles. Couple of weeks ago I finished to suck up and digest into iTunes more than 400 audio CDs, that together with the tracks and albums we purchased on iTunes, take about 50GB for about 6,200 songs.

That took care of one part of my digital clutter.

I'm not quite sure how many books in total we have in the house, the easy answer is A LOT. My son has a bookshelf on his room, but also shares with my daughter another two bookshelves upstairs, my wife has her own large bookshelf in her studio with art and jewelry books, and obviously I've my own collection in my home office. Add few more in the family room, our bedroom, here and there. and I'm sure we may be able to start our own little library for the neighborhood.

On the digital side the current number is much lower. I've a directory in my desktop machine where I drop all sorts of stuff, the current count for eBooks is about 160 taking 1.5GB, but that's very small compared to a total of about 98,600 files taking more than 43GB, which includes manuals, application notes, papers, reports, electronic components datasheets, schematics, journals, brochures, catalogs, etc., etc., etc.

Sometimes it gets hard to find something and most of the time I rely on my memory and doing search of directory trees. So I started my quest for tools to help me getting all this sea of knowledge and digital clutter somehow organized.

I always like to share with my friends what I've been reading, both in paper and electronically, I've been trying to keep the Reading List on my LinkedIn profile, but that application is really ugly and hard to maintain, so early this year I switched to Shelfari that now is part of Amazon, and lets you embed the code to share your bookshelf on your blog or web page.

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

It takes time to update, but since now it is part of Amazon it is quite easy to transfer your Amazon purchases to your Shelfari collection, still does not have a lot of integration with other Social Media tools besides Facebook, and I'm a little bit pissed-off with Facebook to re-enable the connection.

For local management of my digital library and keep track of what I send to the Kindle, I been relying on having things organized on directory trees but it was getting out of control, adding that for the same eBook I may have different formats such as PDF, mobi, epub, etc. Searching for how to organize collections on the Kindle I stumbled on Calibre. At first I was kind of hesitant to install it, but after reading some reviews and comments and decided to give it a try,

It is a free and open source eBook management application, it's still under development and may have some glitches but so far seems to be working fine for me. It creates its own directory structure and database of objects you add to its library, nice feature is that you can download and edit the metadata for each object including the image of the cover, and for pdf files it takes the first page of the file as the cover.

Another nice detail is that you can browse your library collection as you do in iTunes with coverflow. I recently organized a large number of papers and reports related to "Internet of Things" and took this shot of how they look on Calibre.

An extra plus for Calibre is that it recognizes when you connect an eReader device such as the Kindle to your computer and lets you quickly find what objects are in the Library and in the device. One thing I don't know how to handle efficiently is creating and managing collections on the Kindle from the PC, there is a plug-in for Calibre but since the collections file is part of the "system" for the Kindle, every time you make a change you need to restart the Kindle which makes it a cumbersome procedure. So for now after I send the stuff to the Kindle then I manually organize it into collections on the Kindle.

So far I'm happy with this new way of keep things organized, for sure there is room for improvement and it is subject to change in the near future as new tools pop up and I try different schemes, I can surely say that my productivity increased since I don't have to spend too much time to find articles, books, etc.

For those guys looking to develop application to increase integration, it would be very nice to have something where you can add your notes, comments, references, etc., I didn't spend any time yet searching for a tool that provides that functionality.

Time now to stop writing and start reading !!!

Cheers

Jorge

Gran Hermano 2011 y el pajarito - Parte 1

2011-04-17T11:41:00.000-06:00

Motivado por varios mensajes que he recibido de simpatizantes, colegas y amigos, preocupados por sí se me soltó un tornillo o con el pasar de los años ya se me estaban empezando a volar algunas chapas, paso entonces a darles una previa confesión para aquellos que han mostrado su preocupación al notar algunos mensajes vía twitter en relación al reality show Gran Hermano 2011 (aka Big Brother) que actualmente produce y emite Telefe en Argentina.

Ante todo, debo sí confesar que con mi esposa afirmativamente vemos y estamos medio enganchados con Gran Hermano. La cosa es que Telefe Internacional es la única señal televisiva que recibimos de Argentina por parte de nuestro proveedor de servicio satelital y sinceramente aunque a veces el show nos parece una pavada, nos resulta divertido, y como siempre le digo a Lorena que por más que sea un reality no deja ser un show de televisión donde más que nada importa el rating y la facturación, y que por medio de la edición y compaginación de la catarata de material que colectan diariamente necesitan generar el conflicto y la separación entre bandos para maximizar la recaudación generada por las votaciones semanales.

Dado que uno no deja de ser geek, algo que me llamó la atención de esta edición de Gran Hermano fué tanto ruido con el tema de twitter, paso a contar.

Hace un tiempo atrás luego de mi participación en TEDx San Antonio, y mi primer tweetup donde tuve la oportunidad de conversar largo y tendido con Robert Scoble (alias Scobleizer), uno de los bloggers y twiteros sobre tecnología más reconocido y activo, tuve la oportunidad a establecer contacto con varios grupos de personas muy interesantes dedicados a la utilización de herramientas de Social Media como vías de promoción y relaciones públicas para negocios.

Uno de estos grupos es "The Bumpers" o #BMPR (Business Media Public Relations), con este grupo nos reunimos con frecuencia para discutir y compartir experiencias sobre el uso de Twitter, Facebook y otros servicios como mecanismos que empresas y negocios pueden utilizar para sus relaciones públicas, varios de los miembros en el grupo se dedican justamente a esa tarea ofreciendo sus servicios profesionales a varias empresas locales y nacionales. Sin dejar de lado el aspecto social, también se dan oportunidades donde motivado por la realización de un evento en particular o simplemente una buena excusa para pasar un buen rato, nos pongamos de acuerdo para casualmente disfrutar de una cerveza entre amigos.

Debo confesar que siendo un veterano pionero de Internet todavía ando arañando la cuestión de Web 2.0 y asombrado y aprendiendo sobre Social Networking y las nuevas herramientas, así que más allá de que en cierto grado resulta divertido rememorar aquellas viejas épocas de andar armando quilombo en IRC, se me ocurrió hacer una especie de experimento informal basado en el tráfico de twitter generado por los fans y seguidores de Gran Hermano 2011.

Esto es en realidad un anticipo, dado que originalmente pensaba publicar algo después de la final del programa, pero impulsado por el temor de que alguien me quiera enviar al manicomio anticipadamente, aquí les suelto la primer parte del rollo. Mi intención es completar con una segunda parte y análisis final.

La mayor actividad de tráfico gira alrededor de la utilización del hashtag #GH2011, así que mi primer inquietud fué ver que servicios y herramientas existen hoy en día que permitan capturar parte de ese tráfico y que es lo que se puede medir. En segundo lugar, dado que ya he pasado prácticamente la mitad de mi vida en línea, ver qué tipo de reacción y respuestas recibe un vetusto de Internet como yo al inmiscuirme en medio del dialogo de los pendex (bah, raramente existe un dialogo). De más está decir que más de uno me mandó a comprar una peluca o un sombrero, o simplemente a cagar, aunque hubo bastantes también con buena onda y ganas de conversar.

Van entonces algunas de imágenes preliminares generadas por uno de los servicios que parecería ser bastante estable (pueden hacer click en las imágenes para verlas más grande).

Esta imagen muestra que tipo de información es posible agregar por medio de este servicio que va archivando tweets, procesando ciertas estadísticas cuya visualización se actualiza periodicamente. Cada uno de los seis grupos que muestra esta imágen puede verse con mayor detalle.

Por ejemplo aquí se muestra cual es el origen de los tweets, en esencia que herramienta o aplicación de twitter han utilizado los usuarios para enviar sus mensajes. Algunas observaciones que se pueden extraer de esta gráfica por ejemplo asumiendo que la mayor parte de los usuarios se encuentra en Argentina, de quienes envian tweets con el hashtag #2011, hay mas usuarios de Twitter para Blackberry (6%) que para iPhone (2%), y que la gran mayoría (49%) envia sus tweets utilizando el cliente de web.

Esta gráfica muestra cuales son las 20 palabras más usadas en los tweets. Obviamente la de mayor frecuencia es el propio hashtag.

Sin duda el cuarto poder está en un claro proceso de adopción de herramientas de Social Networking, resultando evidente que se está dando una transformación que gradualmente está convirtiendo a medios unidireccionales como la televisión en algo más interactivo.

Aclaro que todo este verso no me quita lo cholulo, y está noche estaremos junto con mi media naranja frente a la caja generadora de bobos viendo la última gala de expulsión de Gran Hermano 2011 de Argentina.

Feliz Domingo para todos (como diría el del peluquín) me voy a preparar el morfi ..

Cordiales Saludos

Jorge

Flour Tortillas and Chicken Fajitas ...

2011-02-13T12:13:00.002-06:00

If you read my previous post you probably already know that I love baking and eating bread, but besides the Italian genes from my ancestors, our family now has its mix of Mexican genes, so my wife and kids love Mexican flour tortillas and so do I.

Then here you go, a simple recipe to make white flour tortillas

What do you need:

2 1/2 Cups of unbleached flour
2 tbsp of Baking powder
1 1/2 tsp of Salt
1/2 Cup Vegetable Oil Shortening (I use half a bar of Crisco's)
2 Cups of warm water

What to do:

Mix in a bowl the flour, baking powder and salt.

Incorporate the oil shortening with your hands until it is uniformly mixed with the flour.

Start gradually adding water (you may probably don't use all the 2 cups) mixing until you have a nice ball of dough. Let it rest for 10 minutes.

Separate the dough in small portions, and knead to form little balls. Using these proportions I normally get out about 16 tortillas. Don't over knead the dough.

Put back the balls in the bowl, cover with a kitchen towel and let it rest for 30 minutes.

With a roller press the ball to form a flat round tortilla, an easy trick is to roll first to obtain an oval shape, turn it 45 degrees roll over again, and again turn 45 degrees and roll over.

Place the tortilla in a hot flat pan or griddle and cook from both sides.

Now what can you do with them ?

Chicken fajita tacos !!

I sliced chicken breast halves into 1/3" thick filets and put to marinate with salt, pepper, dried parsley, lemon and lime juice for 1 hour, the griddle I used for the tortillas on the other side has a nice grill, so I put the chicken fajitas to grill in there.

And as you see to the right on another pan frijoles refritos (refried beans) to heat up.

While the chicken is cooking you can drop some lime juice or what was left from the marinade, don't overcook since chicken breast can dry up very quickly.

My kids love when we spread some frijol on the tortilla and then complete the taco with the chicken fajitas inside, add some salsa, pico de gallo and Enjoy !!

Cheers
Jorge

Baking bread... Very simple recipe

2011-01-29T07:24:00.007-06:00

If you visited my Picasa Web Albums or my "MorfiChupi" album pictures on Facebook, you probably noticed that I really enjoy cooking. The passion for food and cooking seems to be in our family's genes, my dad is passionate about it, and let me tell you he is an amazing cook, for some time he had a small deli in Buenos Aires. My two brothers are also masters in the kitchen, they both went to culinary schools, and my youngest brother still works at a pasta factory. When I was a bambino my grandma with her cousins owned one of the best and most traditional Italian restaurants in downtown Buenos Aires (Il Napoli, across the Luna Park stadium).

My grandparents were from Italy, and I remember when we all got together every Sunday for the classic Italian family feast. The process started early in the morning since everything was home made from scratch, the breads, antipasto, spaghetti, ravioli, meats, salads, desserts, well you get the picture.

When I get on the kitchen to cook, it is like therapy, it lets me disconnect from the brain intensive geeky programming or electronics design work I do. It also brings back those pleasant memories of my family and those fantastic Sunday meals.

If there is something that I always die for is good bread, better said, artisan breads, in particular Italian and French breads. I won't deny that some of the chain or supermarket bakeries have good products, but there is nothing better and close to an artisan bread that the one home made with your own hands.

To make some basic breads the process is very simple and with few steps, measure, mix, knead, raise, punch, form, proof, bake, cool, eat.

I won't get to much on the details and basic concepts and techniques of bread making but I'll recommend you one of my favorite books:

Ultimate Bread
by Eric Treuille & Ursula Ferrigno

What is interesting is that while the book is printed in Great Britain, Eric was born in France and he started very young working at his uncle's boulangerie (bakery shop), and Ursula was born in Italy and grew up on her father's farm in southern Italy.

The book takes you from the fundamentals of breadmaking and the essentials techniques with plenty of great pictures and includes over 100 recipes for many different types of breads.

In a future article I'll share some comments about other breadmaking books I've and that are among my favorite cooking books.

Wanna get started ? Nothing better than a simple recipe to make a plain bread, what in France is called Pain Ordinaire or Pane Rustico in Italy.

What do you need:

1 small pack (4oz) or 2tsp of dry yeast
1 1/2 cups of water
3 1/2 cups of unbleached bread flour
1 1/2 tsp salt

What to do:

You obviously start by measuring and mixing the ingredients.

On a measuring cup put about 1/8 cup (125ml) of warm water and sprinkle the yeast in. If the ambient temperature is too low you can drop a little pinch of sugar to get the yest fermentation process going, stir until the yeast is dissolved and put away for 5-10 minutes.

Meanwhile mix the flour and salt in a bowl, you will get better results if you stiff the flour before.

Make a well like a crater in the center of the flour and pour the dissolved yeast.

With a wooden spoon start mixing slowly some of the flour on the side until you have a creamy gooey paste combining the dissolved yeast with the surrounding flour.
This is called "the sponge method."
Now cover the bowl with a kitchen towel and put away for about 20 minutes.

You will notice that the yeast and flour gooey expanded and became frothy with some holes from bubbles created by the yeast.
Very gradually and mixing with the wooden spoon start incorporating the rest of the water into the center and mix the flour from the side, it will slowly start to form a moist dough.

If you need to add more water to get a firm dough, add one tablespoon at a time.

Don't worry if the dough is sticky and look very moist, its better to have a moist dough than a dry dough.

Time to put some muscle. Take out the dough from the bowl into a lightly floured surface, go easy with the flour since we are only using it to have a non stick surface so we can knead the dough.

Knead for 10 minutes, if you feel that the dough is too difficult to handle, knead for 5 minutes, let it rest for 5 minutes and knead for another five, until you get a smooth and elastic dough.

When you are done kneading, put the dough ball on a clean bowl, cover with a kitchen towel and put on a warm place (not hot !! we don't want to cook it).

We'll let it rise until it doubles in size, depending on temperature and other conditions it make take about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.

Magic !! now we have twice or more the original size, but full of bubbles.

Very gently make a fist and with your knuckles slowly punch down the dough to release some of the gas that formed inside.

After you punch it down let it rest for 10 minutes.

Now is time to give our bread some form, in this case we will do a long wide loaf.

Take the dough out of the bowl, gently spread forming sort of a rectangle and fold from the side 1/3 to the center.

Now fold the other side to the center.

Very gently with your palm start pressing to seal the two folds in the middle.

Then with your thumbs create a small indentation in the middle to finish sealing the union.

Turn the loaf over and with your hands keep forming the loaf extending until it gets to about 15" long. Put the shaped loaf on a floured baking pan, cover with a dish towel and let it proof until it doubles in size.

It may take 30 to 45 minutes. Depending on how long it takes your oven to warm up, you can start preheating it to 425 F.

An easy way to determine if the proofing is done, is to push gently with your finger the center of the loaf, if the dough springs back slowly you are golden, if it is too firm bad luck but don't worry it is still edible, but don't over proof it, it is preferred to put it early than late in the oven.

Before you put the loaf in the oven, cut some slashes on the top, it is not just for decoration, it helps the dough to expand without generating cracks on the sides or the bottom. Put it in the oven and let it bake until golden (30-45 minutes).

Don't open the oven every five minutes !!!

When I do this type of rustic breads I like to use a nice trick to create some additional moisture and obtain a more crunchy crust, open the oven and spray the loaf with a mist of salty water.

Let the loaf fully cook. Uncooked bread can give you an indigestion.

An easy trick for this type of breads to find out if they are cooked or not, is to turn them over and knock in the underside, if it sounds like nobody is home (slightly hollow) your bread is done.

When you take it out of the oven let it cool on a wire rack or grill, if you leave it in a flat surface the bottom will become soggy.

WAIT !! until it cooled down to cut.

Voilà, you just made your first Pain Ordinaire.

Next recipe ? Jorge's mega-bagels

Enjoy !!

Jorge

Contacts network visualization via LinkedIn InMaps

2011-01-25T10:40:00.001-06:00

When I worked in large scale networking, to have a clear understanding and view of the overall network architecture it was always helpful, and in my opinion a very good practice, to put together high level topology maps, just a simple graph showing how each of the most relevant nodes in the network were physically and/or virtually connected to each other.

Visualization is a very powerful tool when you have to deal with a complex and large number of "relationships", it helps by giving you a graphical representation on how those relationships are interrelated and in which sections of the graph you need to increase or sometimes decrease the number of connections, it also helps to identify single points of failure or choking points, and drives one to make better decisions.

With the advent of the new social and professional contact network online services, such as LinkedIn, managing your contacts and how them become part of your relationships universe became much easier. I often had to dig into my memory to find where I met this person or how we got to know each other, and if by any chance her or him knows somebody else I know or I'm interested to know.

Yesterday LinkedIn posted on their blog How to Visualize your LinkedIn network with InMaps, it sounded pretty interesting and it looked very cool, so I gave it a try .... here is my InMap

Nice !! At first glance it's clear that my contacts at LinkedIn are segmented into groups with a little bit of clustering and some lines between groups.

But if you take a closer look, you will notice on the top a group of contacts in orange which represent very interesting people from the Social Media arena that I met in a recent past. This group of people obviously today rely a lot on Internet applications like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, etc, to build relationships and communicate, but the map shows something very clear, from the ones that I know and are in my contacts list, there are almost no relationships with my contacts in blue (heavy honchos of IT and Telecom) or in pink (Internet development and policy making).

This means that I've a huge potential to serve as a bridge between my Social Media contacts and the other two groups.

By knowing in advance a little bit of what is on each side of the bridge I may now be able to identify common matters that may help to have better representation of Social Media in Internet policy development forums, and have this particular group get to know more about Internet infrastructure.

The power of information it is not just collecting mountains of it, but how you mine, digest, represent,and visualize it, in this case literally "connecting the dots" to help you make more informed and effective decisions.

If you are a LinkedIn user with at least 50 contacts give it a try.

Nice job LinkedIn ... two thumbs up !!

Cheers

Jorge

My Bookshelf

2011-01-21T12:37:00.001-06:00

Very often while talking with friends and colleagues about a particular subject the standard question about what books you have read or are you reading comes up. I love books, my adorable wife loves books too, and our kids got the gene, so it's not uncommon in hour house to see books almost everywhere.

Add to that that I'm sort of a pack rat about published material but not to the grade to be considered compulsive (please don't ask my wife). Once in a while some of the books that nay be old editions, outdated or that don't have great value for us get donated.

We are not the kind that sometimes hide what they are reading being afraid that we'll know what you know, be sure that with that attitude what we really know is that you are a moron, but anyway, we love to share with anybody the grateful experience when we find a book or any other published material that we enjoy or serve our needs in our profession. We are also outspoken, trying to be diplomatic and polite when some material really sucks.

Lorena short time ago received some books to review, and I just received my first one to review from O'Reilly Media (Building Wireless Sensor Networks: with ZigBee by Robert Faludi), so we'll use our respective blogs to share our reviews and comments.

Then let me share my piece of our bookshelf, and this will also help me in the age of the Internet, Web 2.0 and Social Media to answer the recurrent question of "What are you reading?" with a simple and short URL to this article.

I've been trying to keep an updated reading list in my LinkedIn profile, but the client interface is horrible and I didn't find anywhere how to share, even searched Amazon down to the sewer lines, who is providing the ReadingList Application for LinkedIn.

Then somebody recently invited me to join Shelfari, at first glance I really liked the web interface and the fact that the bookshelf looks like a shelf, even with a small picture of the books covers. Also in case you don't know, this site has been around since 2006 but they got acquired by Amazon in 2008, so I don't expect them to have funding issues and will be constants enhancements and integration with Amazon. I started then the process of putting together the virtual version of my bookshelf.

Be aware, I'm a geek, so bare with me if what you see on the shelf are mostly technical books, but you will also see many titles about cooking (we love to cook), finance (interesting ones but we are not rich yet), and general topics. And like anything else that it is nowadays in cyberspace, this bookshelf is a work in progress and subject to change without notice, I'm still in the process to update the list and obviously new books will be added as they arrive.

Then without further delay let me introduce you to my new Shelfari Bookshelf.

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog
Share a book review on Shelfari, where this reader meets fellow readers.

As you may see on the shelf, there are several books that are listed as Kindle Edition, yes I fell for it and I'll write soon why I love the new gadget and how it is helping in my profession and passion for reading.

Note: I didn't took the time to go and double check for the actual edition of every single book I've on the shelf.

Hope you like it and find it useful ...

Cheers
Jorge

My first tweetup

2010-10-10T08:01:00.007-06:00

I've heard in the past the use of the word tweetup, one of my preferred definitions for it is the organized or impromptu gathering of Twitter users. I always thought about it as a bunch of kids coordinating via twitter where to hang out on a given night.

There is no doubt that many of the Social Networking tools that take advantage of the reach and ubiquity of the Internet have changed how we establish and develop new relationships and how we let others know more about us (in some cases much more than we want or think we are making public, thanks to lax privacy settings).

Many years ago I joined LinkedIn, I thought it was a good tool to keep all contacts in a single place and keep them updated, so if Joe goes to work for another company or moves to Mars I'll have (if he lets me) the latest contact info and updates about his whereabouts.

I don't remember exactly when I created my Facebook and Twitter accounts, but lets say it was more than two years ago, initially I didn't care to search for friends or old colleagues and classmates, it was until like a year later that I started to follow some folks in twitter and get annoyed by the constant updates, quizzes and stupid games in Facebook.

At the beginning I found that twitter was very disruptive, it took me a while (and I've been dealing with email since the early 80's) to control the habit to check email every few minutes and now I've got this little bird chirping every few seconds. But at some moment there was an inflection point, and that was when I installed the Seismic Twitter App on an Apple iPod touch. I was already using the iPod touch to keep an eye on email and as a last recourse ssh terminal, ohhh yes and to listen to music. But now with the twitter app I was able to read and send tweets when I was not at my desktop working, even on the road when I was able to get WiFi access (I'm not an SMS kind of guy and texting from a regular cellphone keypad is a pain in the neck), then I started following people and being followed.

I don't take twitter as a very serious communication channel, so I may once in a while tweet a brain fart, some ironic joke or acidic comment, but also share a good laugh with local and remote friends and family.

I'm not anti-social but in many situations I've to pass the shy-geek threshold to become social, my wife keeps telling me that I need to socialize more and get out of my cave (office) and meet new people.

One event that got me very excited and ready to get out of the cave is that on October 16 we'll have in San Antonio our first edition of TEDx, then I was exchanging few tweets and emails with Rob La Gesse (@kr8tr) who works at Rackspace which is one of the major sponsors for TEDx San Antonio. Rob mentioned that Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) was going to be in town and that they were planning a tweetup for Friday night (October 8, 2010).

Being one of the most active technology bloggers and noise makers, I've been following Scobleizer for a while, I thought that may be interesting to meet this guy who happens to have over 143,000 followers in twitter and became sort of a tech social media celebrity.

Rob mentioned that also Rocky Barbanica (@RocmanUSA) who has been Robert's producer for long time was going to be at the tweetup and many other interesting people, both Robert and Rocky now work for Rob at Rackspace and they are the major driving force behind a project called Building 43. Rob's primary mission at Rackspace is to help customers and startup companies even if they are not Rackspace's customers, and seems that they give him a great deal of slack to do whatever he thinks must be done to follow that mission.

Then I received the invitation and discovered another service (twtvite.com) that I didn't have a clue it existed, and showing what other twitter users where planning to assist.

At this time my shy-geek threshold was blown away and I was more than ready to show up at the tweetup. I was feeling like in my old days of ham radio amateur operator going to a hamfest or radio club gathering.

I arrived few minutes earlier and Robert Scoble, Rocky, Bruce Hughes (@jbhughes), and few others were waiting for some snack food and sharing beers, soon after Rob arrived and we started talking, it was almost instantly that I realized that the "Helping Startups mission" was no BS, and my shyness was totally gone and started talking about what I've been doing and I'm doing now (which involves a very exciting startup project of which I'll write something in the near future), we talked about technology, company funding, beer, food, later Chip (@ChipLaFleur) arrived who just moved into San Antonio from Michigan, then others started to show up, like Jennifer Navarrete (@epodcaster) who is sort of Lady Podcasting in San Antonio, and a very avid Camp organizer.

Bruce, Chip & Jorge

For a moment I was teasing Matthew Egan (@ImageFreedom) about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), he does SEO Consulting and I always found those SPAM emails offering that type of service very annoying, but talking with him and also with Ryan Kelly (@pearanalytics) from Pear Analytics I realized that some of these folks take it very seriously and it is not only a question of having a better placement on search engines than having a better and more reliable website for your customers or followers.

Everything went so fast, it was not a very large group but the conversations were so interesting that time was flying much faster than I expected, and then I met Nan Palmero (@nanpalmero), what a great and energetic guy, and since he was born in Uruguay across the river from Buenos Aires where I was born we increased the transfer speed of the conversation switching between spanish and english, he is one of the officers of TheBMPR another social media community oriented to business, media and public relations.

Didn't have much time to take more pictures, I think Jen took some, but couldn't resist to at least have one with the big guy that even when he is getting bombarded with updates from more than 23,000 people he is following, he can put aside his iPhone and have a great conversation with you.

Robert Scoble and Jorge Amodio

Thanks again Rob for the invitation and for making it happen, and even when tweetups normally don't need or have big sponsors, thanks Rackspace for let them make it happen. And obviously a big thanks to all that participated, it was a real pleasure to meet all of you and have a chance to socialize out of the cave.

It was a fantastic experience and now I'm looking forward to the next one.

Cheers
Jorge

Love and Tolerance

2010-10-02T10:35:00.001-06:00

My beautiful wife wanted to share our feelings after learning from the news that another kid committed suicide because he was considered "different" and victim of constant bullying.

What's wrong with our society ?, why this has to happen ?

And don't blame the Internet. No doubt the advance in technology and communication services has enabled us to share (sometimes without our own knowledge) vasts arrays of information, but what is missing here is the role WE as parents have to play to transmit the correct values, morals and education to our kids, and teachers, counselors can't be missing from the equation.

As parents we ARE part of the solution, we CAN'T ignore or avoid the responsibility.

My son wrote a poem few years ago about how it feels being bullied ...

Love and Tolerance by Lorena Angulo.

Regards

Jorge

IGP Blog :: US and Canadian Governments support Chinese-style censorship of DNS in ICANN

2010-08-07T16:24:00.000-06:00

Following up my previous article about ICANN's GAC letter, here is a good article from Milton Mueller, member of the Non Commercial Stakeholder Group and author of the book "Ruling the Root: Internet governance and the taming of cyberspace".

IGP Blog :: US and Canadian Governments support Chinese-style censorship of DNS in ICANN

Milton in his article explains briefly why the tone and attitude reflected in GAC's letter is an outrage to free speech and another move to use ICANN as a regulator/controller by proxy.

I'm not sure that as Milton says, the main instigator behind this letter is the US Government, I'm pretty sure that there are many governments that have their level of anxiety growing to exert some control over the Internet.

Hard to say what is going to happen, but I'm sure that the next few ICANN's meetings will be interesting to watch. Get the popcorn ready !!!

Cheers
Jorge

ICANN's GAC has spoken

2010-08-06T22:25:00.000-06:00

I have not been using much this blog to write about my incursions in the world of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names). Until now I've just been posting some comments on my facebook page and various email lists.

So, bare with me as I start using this space to post some comments, opinions and what is going on in the world of ICANN.

Two days ago, one of the structures of ICANN called the Governmental Advisory Committee or GAC (get used to this, ICANN is a vast sea of acronyms and jargon) sent a short letter about MoPo (Morality and Public Order)

Several people are starting to read the letter between the lines, trying to guess what the GAC is cooking behind walls.

One of the paragraphs of the GAC letter says:

"The GAC firmly believes that the absence of any controversial strings in the current universe of top level domains (TLDs) to date contributes directly to the security and stability of the domain name and addressing system (DNS) and the universal resolvability of the sytem."

Hmmm, controversial strings ???

they also say

"In this regard, the GAC believes that procedures to identify strings that could raise national, cultural, geographic, religious and/or linguistic sensitivities or objections are warranted so as to mitigate the risks of fragmenting the DNS that could result from the introduction of controversial strings."

What do you read there then ?

What are controversial strings, who defines what is or is not controversial ? and what GAC members are thinking about "fragmenting the DNS" if ICANN approves a string that they don't like ?

The last paragraph says

"The GAC therefore recommends that community-wide discussions be facilitated by ICANN in order to ensure that an effective objections procedure be developed that both recognizes the relevance of national laws and effectively addresses strings that raise national, cultural, yada, yada ..."

and ends with the cherry on the top

"These objections procedures should apply to all pending and future TLDs."

Pending ?

Do you know what is pending ?

.XXX :-)

So one can read here that GAC will most surely try to block moving forward with the agreement to add .XXX to the DNS root zone, this will be a show of power since the ICANN BoD (Board of Directors) may take the decision of ignoring the GAC advise and objections and move forward anyway.

Do you think the BoD will have the guts to do that ?

Cheers

Jorge

The Stolen Signature

2010-07-29T08:32:00.003-06:00

A plot for a new book from author Dan Brown

Inspired by the multiple articles and reports around the recent signing of the Domain Name System root zone and the incipient deployment of DNSSEC, which for many reporters and correspondents is the source for spin and numerous gaffes related to what was really done and what still needs to be done to have a fairly secure DNS.

Since many of these reports have a dose of science fiction, wrong or fabricated information adding to the confusion of the general public and casual Internet user, I decided to exploit my own creative inspiration for stupidity and posted some comments in Facebook about a suggested plot for a Dan Brown's book that could be called "The Stolen Signature"

The Plot:

A group of cyber terrorists kidnap and torture the seven templars of ICANN to obtain the smart cards holding portions of the magic key that protects the Internet Domain Names.

Meanwhile a group of VE, CU and NK Special Ops break into ICANN's east and west facilities and steal the HSMs (Hardware Security Modules), while Sigfried and Hans Hunter from KAOS take control over the K server in Budapest used to propagate a new fake DNS root zone and redirect all financial transactions and access to critical infrastructure control systems to a secret datacenter on the dark side of the moon built by the covert Chinese Space Domination Agency.

But they didn't take in account that Rod "Astroboy" Beckstrom had a secret DNS-CERT running on his backyard and after a period of Public Comment and Policy Development Process he was able to retain the outside consulting services of Prof. Langdon and Kaminsky the Wizard SecuGeek who established an ICANN Working Group that discovered that the entire operation of the cyberterrorists was developed using a pirate version of Microsoft Windows 12, that for backwards compatibility includes all the exploits of all previous versions of Windows, something that became a "feature parity" imposed by the evil twin brother of Mr. Ballmer.

Still thinking who could be a good female character. Somebody play by Angelina Jolie ??

OK, enough waste of time, going back to the grind ...

Cheers

Jorge

The Next Billion Internet Users

2010-05-09T20:56:00.038-06:00

On April 29, I had the chance to watch remotely some of the presentations and panels during the INET Washington DC Conference organized by the friends of the Internet Society Chapter in DC.

The main theme of the conference was "Internet 2020: The Next Billion Users".

The agenda was packed with interesting presentations and discussion panels that went beyond just the technologies associated with Internet and telecommunications in general. There was a lot of talking about policies, regulations, politics and a vast array of issues that have substantial influence in the evolution of the network and how fast it gets more users.

Lot of juicy information that was particularly useful for some personal research I started a while ago to collect references and raw data for a book that is still on the initial stages of evolving from an idea to a more structured work related to "The Internet of Things" (obviously the first idea that got discarded was to call the book "TITS").

Anyway, one of the topics that really caught my attention was an analysis about from where we should expect the next billion of users. One of the panelists made the comment that the majority of the users will not come from the industrialized or developed world, where penetration of Internet services has been high and constantly growing for the past 20 years.

It won't come from Africa either, where there is a huge potential for growth but many issues, particularly with infrastructure and an abstract view of "return of investment" driving growth. Yes China, India, and south Asia continue to be potential areas with large populations that could drive growth, but also have many issues that will condition how fast users are added in this region.

Then what is left among other areas that has the potential to contribute new users ?

Latin America.

While Latin America may not have the same population density as other regions and hardly by itself has enough people to contribute 1 billion new users, many argue that it has the higher potential for growth given that penetration of telecommunication services in a comparative basis is still low, and despite some issues here and there the economies kept growing, and the region had somehow a period of political stability for several years.

Without digging too much for data into the numerous and never ending reports from International Organizations, NGO's, Think Tanks, etc, etc, which can get you dizzy with numbers, I have to say that I generally agree with this statement, Latin America has a big potential for Internet growth.

But I'm a geek !!! so I need data, facts, and if in a graphic format, much better ... then I found a great resource from the abominable king of search or world domination new evil (aka Google, some people are starting to refer to Larry and Sergey as Pinky and the Brain and their quest to take over the world, who is who is up to you).

If you have not seen it yet, the tool from Google is the Public Data Explorer, I found that one of the available datasets is the number of Internet Users as part of a larger dataset of World Development Indicators from The World Bank. The actual data source is from the International Telecommunication Union, World Telecommunication Development Report and database.

Then using this dataset on the Public Data Explorer I first created a graph showing the growth of Internet users for over a period of almost twenty years starting in 1990 for a selected group of developed countries.

On the graph is easy to notice that from the early nineties when Internet left academia and have an explosive growth the curves show an exponential trend until around 2002 when the switched to more like a logarithmic trend or slightly linear trend. In the United States is clear that besides some rural or isolated areas, there has been an incredible penetration of services and the market has reached some level of maturity and saturation.

Now lets look at a selected group of countries from Latin America.

I was expecting to see a graph where Brazil had a predominant lead given its large population (~192M), but it really surprised me to see Mexico that has about half of Brazil's number (~106M) and on top of that seeing that the curve also switched from exponential and growth seems to have also reached some plateau. It makes me wonder if the actual data is correct and complete.

Anyway, as you can see from the graph there are several countries that still show exponential growth, but as Mexico others seem also to be slowing down like Peru, Chile, Argentina, and probably Venezuela. I didn't take the time yet to analyze telecom services penetration statistics and other statistics but I still believe that there is still there huge potential for growth. Then, what's going on ? Are there any particular roadblocks that are impeding growth ?

I didn't do much research yet but based on past experiences and some indicators it is clear for me that the lack of clear regulations and a real competitive market are hurting a lot. A common denominator in several Latin American countries is the monopolistic behavior of the big telcos, probably limited capital investment in infrastructure, slow rate of adoption and regulation that facilitates e-commerce, but the one that hurts the most is the lack of a long term plan based on a strategy that takes Internet as one of the fundamental resources to drive development and innovation across the board.

Perhaps it is time to take a closer look or ask Brazil what are they doing ?

After all I was just looking for this graph ...

Anyway, if you are interested in reading one of the many reports that provide this type of information here is a recent one from Development Sector of the ITU (ITU-D), Measuring the Information Society, 2010, abstract:

"The latest edition of Measuring the Information Society features the new ITU ICT Development Index (IDI) and the ICT Price Basket - two benchmarking tools to measure the Information Society. The IDI captures the level of advancement of ICTs in 159 countries worldwide and compares progress made between 2002 and 2008. It also measures the global digital divide and examines how it has developed in recent years. The report also features the latest ICT Price Basket, which combines 2009 fixed telephone, mobile cellular and fixed broadband tariffs for 161 economies into one measure and compares these across countries, and over time. The analytical report is complemented by a series of statistical tables providing country-level data for all indicators included in the Index."

Cheers
Jorge

Nuevo Blog sobre Internet en Argentina

2009-03-12T16:57:00.010-06:00

Para facilitar compartir los avances en el proyecto de reconstruir la historia de Internet en Argentina, hoy inicio un nuevo blog dedicado exclusivamente a este tema.

El blog está abierto a comentarios y va a ser uno de los canales de distribución para algunas de las historias, imágenes e información que vayan surgiendo de este esfuerzo.

El URL del nuevo blog es: http://blog.internet-argentina.net/

Desde ya muchas gracias a quienes poco a poco se van sumando a este esfuerzo y queda abierta la invitación a aquellos que quieran contribuir con sus anécdotas, opiniones, sugerencias y críticas.

Atentos Saludos
Pete

Deja Vu

2009-03-02T13:54:00.008-06:00

Tratando de retornar al pasado, resulta interesante la experiencia de reencontrarme con viejas memorias e imágenes de aquellos días en los que frenéticamente buscábamos la forma de conectar Argentina a Internet y que no fuera para el beneficio de unos pocos.

En el proceso de reorganizar viejos archivos, volver a leer después de tantos años, cientos de mensajes de correo electrónico, propuestas y proyectos que lograron concretarse y otros que solamente quedaron en papel, recordar viejas conversaciones y porque no discusiones sobre como seguir adelante pese a la falta de recursos, comienzo a sentir que quizás en nuestra mente maravillosamente se preservan todos esos “bits” a los que uno no está acostumbrado o entrenado para recuperar con facilidad.

Que fantástico sería si los muchachos de Google inventaran algo que permitiera hacer un búsqueda en ese vasto repositorio de conocimientos y experiencias que tenemos bajo el cuero cabelludo, que en mi caso ya queda poco y no ayuda para evitar que se evaporen los recuerdos.

Mientras leo esas reliquias de la experiencia que me tocó vivir, me transporto y pierdo la noción del tiempo, a medida que esos recuerdos retornan al presente ya se me hace cotidiano sentir la sensación de “déjà vu”, que pese a convertir mi bocho en una licuadora termina resultando una sensación placentera al recordar viejos amigos y anécdotas que difícilmente alguna vez vayan a parar a /dev/null.

Por otro lado con la objetividad que ahora proveen el tiempo y la distancia, comienzo a asombrarme y a admirar lo que tras el trabajo conjunto, muchas veces sin alguna coordinación o plan maestro se logró concretar.

El trabajo de recompilar esas memorias y poco a poco registrarlas en un texto escrito, a veces resulta un poco extenuante, pero tengo que agradecer sinceramente a un viejo amigo, Eduardo Suarez de la Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata, que no solo me esta dando una mano con recuperar y recomponer una gran cantidad de material sobre la historia de redes en Argentina, si no también que me “hace la pata” casi en forma cotidiana en extensas charlas nocturnas, altas horas de la madrugada para Eduardo, donde de la conversación se estimula el search engine natural y las piezas de un complejo rompecabezas empiezan a tomar su lugar.

Gracias Edu, nos "vemos" en la noche :-)

Jorge aka pete

Historia de Internet en Argentina

2009-02-21T18:00:00.010-06:00

Hace rato largo que varios amigos y viejos colegas me sugieren que me ponga escribir sobre la formidable experiencia en la que tuve el privilegio de formar parte allá por mediado de los años 80, en los que un grupo de geeks to be contribuímos con los primeros pasos para que Internet se convirtiera realidad en Argentina.

Si bien suelo ser bastante "verborragico", el escribir no es una de mis mejores cualidades, pero creo que sí es realmente importante el aprovechar estas herramientas con las que contamos hoy en día para preservar un poco de nuestra historia y transmitir la experiencia a otras generaciones.

Obviamente lo que logre escribir va a ser un relato de como me tocó vivir esta experienca desde el punto de vista personal y no la "historia oficial". Fuimos muchos los que contribuímos a esta experiencia que también se extiende al resto de Latino América y el Caribe, y solo con la participación de los principales actores sería posible lograr reuinir esta información, un esfuerzo que mi viejo amigo José Soriano viene tratando de impulsar desde hace tiempo.

A veces el mayor obstáculo que encuentro es que tengo que escarbar en mi memoria para sacar a flote viejos recuerdos y buscar que documentos, fotografías y otras piezas de colección sobrevivieron varias mudanzas.

Pero pese a todo, y en particular gracias a mis largas conversaciones nocturnas via chat con un viejo colega de la Universidad de La Plata, Eduardo Suarez, muchos recuerdos estan reflotando en mi memoria y ya retomé la rutina de ponerme a escribir cotidianamente sobre esta experienca.

No tengo la menor idea de cual vaya a ser el resultado final, inicialmente voy a comenzar a publicar poco a poco lo que vaya logrando terminar en pequeños capítulos en una sección de mi website personal, y a medida que avance aparecerán otros capítulos.

Como siempre digo a varios amigos, correcciones, adiciones, sugerencias y crítica constructiva son bien recibidos. Quejas a otra parte ...

Aquí va entonces a modo de anticipo la primer versión de la página de introducción

Introducción

Ya se han cumplido más de veinte años desde que un grupo de entusiastas dábamos los primeros pasos que culminaron con la incorporación de Argentina a Internet.

Realmente poco o casi nada se ha escrito o hecho público sobre esta experiencia formidable desde un punto de vista histórico.

Desde mediados de los años ochenta, y por más de diez años, antes de partir hacia el norte, tuve el privilegio y la oportunidad de estar involucrado con el incipiente desarrollo de Internet en Argentina.

Estas páginas no las escribo con el objetivo de obtener algún tipo de reconocimiento a nivel personal. Siempre trato de evitar el tema cuando otras personas se refieren a mí como uno de los padres de Internet en Argentina. Realmente el esfuerzo colectivo de un gran número de personas y una secuencia particular de eventos en los que tuve el privilegio de formar parte, fueron los que dieron pie a la incorporación de Argentina en Internet.

Aparte de quizás contribuir a preservar un poco de nuestra historia, en realidad estas páginas son en reconocimiento a quienes contribuyeron para que Internet en Argentina se convirtiera en realidad.

Esta historia tiene muchas caras y muchas voces, y estoy seguro, como siempre ha sucedido en el pasado, la misma va a generar algunas controversias (después de todo tenemos sangre latina, no?), pero voy a poner mi mejor esfuerzo para representar los hechos en forma objetiva pero desde un punto de vista personal.

La historia cubre el periodo desde mediados de los años ochenta hasta mediados de los noventa cuando comenzaron a aparecer los mayores proveedores comerciales de servicios de Internet permitiendo el acceso a todos (bueno … casi todos :-) ).

Dado que ya ha pasado suficiente tiempo desde aquellos días, y que actualmente no estoy asociado con ninguna de las instituciones que formaron parte de esta experiencia, (algunas de las cuales ya no existen), para hacer la historia más completa e interesante, por primera vez voy a incluir comentarios e información que no creo que hasta ahora se haya hecho pública, sobre el trabajo detrás de bambalinas para que ciertos eventos se concretaran.

Es importante también tener en cuenta el contexto en el cual se desarrollaban estos eventos, como la situación política del País, la infraestructura y regulaciones de los servicios de telecomunicación disponibles en ese momento, y la disponibilidad de recursos.

Sin duda, con el pasar del tiempo mi memoria haya perdido algunos bits de información (aparte de mi cabellera) y seguro me olvide de mencionar nombres y eventos, así que desde ya mis más sinceras disculpas.

Correcciones, adiciones y crítica constructiva son bienvenidas para quienes quieran aportar a esta historia.

De más esta decir que todos los comentarios y opiniones son propios, y no representan en principio la posición oficial de las organizaciones en las que estuve involucrado o de aquellos con quienes tuve el privilegio de
estar asociado.

Jorge Amodio alias "pete"

Back on writing ...

2009-02-21T13:17:00.004-06:00

Well, back on feeding Google's dominance of on-line content :-), I wish they had the ability to develop a tool to give me more time to get more done from my never ending ToDo list.

Well I had to admit that many of their tools have increased my productivity and facilitated generating and posting content on-line.

I've been quite busy for a while trying to get multiple projects done.

Unfortunately I'm out of the Microchip PIC32 Design Challenge but at least got some nice prizes and an honorable mention for my design. It was a very interesting experience and a good opportunity to learn new tricks and meet other folks with common interests.

But IMHO the voting process got a little bit skewed and somehow the challenge became more sort of popularity than a design contest. Anyway, on one hand I feel some relief since I can continue to complete my design but now without ties to the rules of the contest.

I've been helping my beautiful wife to get the first version of her jewelry website up and running, she is creating amazing and unique artistic jewelry pieces. Her work with Precious Metal Clay has already been published in the 2008 PMC Guild Annual book, and she is getting fantastic comments and feedback on her Flickr Photostream.

It seems that I'm catching up with Web 2.0, or is it catching up with me ? :-)

I'm sort of reorganizing my on-line presence. I was able today to change this personal blog to blog.amodio.biz, it was jamodio-brainpad.blogspot.com before. I didn't notice that there are many more options now connect things here and there, and I've lost count of how many profiles I have out there and need to be updated, but at least this one was a quick and very smooth process. My kudos to the Google folks for making it so much easier.

On the "Social Networking" side, while I still keep LikedIn sorta as professional personal profile and as a contact management resource, I've been spending a lot of time (may be too much) playing with Facebook.

I had my account for a while but initially didn't have much interest or took the time to search for old friends. In the past few weeks I was able to reconnect with many friends and old colleagues, so far it's being a nice a experience remembering old tales and things we did together, and after many years share pictures and see each other kids.

Being an expat for more than twelve years now, I've a constant demand from family members and close friends to keep feeding them with images, so I resorted to another great tool from Google and uploaded some pictures to my Picasa Web Albums.

I've been using Picasa since it's beta version to organize pictures on my computer at home, some of the latest features are very useful, and getting some pictures on-line is quite easy now.

One thing I'm still behind, is to keep this blog up to date, perhaps I took the wrong approach when I created it trying to make it too formal and structured, so I'll try something different now and adopt the habit to start writing some thoughts, ideas, comments and experiences more often.

Cheers
Jorge

The never ending list ...

2008-02-06T11:52:00.000-06:00

Well, after a long while seems that I found the time and inspiration to get back to the blog editor.

After the years I'm starting to realize that I'm and I always been a hyperactive and multitasking kind of person.

My To Do list is allways full and many times I put more stuff there faster than I take it out, pushing some lower priority things down to the bottom.

I wanted to be more active in the blog community but that's one of the things that actually got constantly pushed down on the list to leave space for other higher priority projects.

The fact that I'm posting this entry does not mean that I finally got to the bottom of the list, I just moved up the priority for blogging and finished few projects that were demanding time, and that I'll give it a try to start blogging what I am up to in a more regular basis.

One project that I had on the list for a long time was my personal website. While I've been always involved with the internet and developed some sites, my forte is not website design and much less now that the technology enables much more creative and artistic sites. I just go for some basic layout and mostly content.

The site is a work on progress and will still be for some time since I'm collecting all pictures, documents and memories that I'll gradually add to the site as part of my biography.

Another project I consider almost finished is my personal electronics lab. Thanks to eBay and the fact that other people's junk may become your own treasure, and that in my past I made a living fixing junk, I now have basically everything I wanted for the lab.

As you will see from the pictures most of the instruments are old and actually obsolete but they work for what I do and the cost was insignificant compared with the actual costs of some of them today.

One major entry on the list is to finish writing the history about the first steps for Argentina into the Internet that I mentioned before. I'm not sure yet when I'll get it done but I'm expecting to receive some additional material from Argentina very soon and I'm spending time writing every day. Since I'll host all the information on my website now that the overall structure is done I'll probably start moving faster.

There are other things like some projects related to LJCV Electronics and getting some old HP Series 80 back to work, but I'll post about them on separate entires.

I guess I can now add one more done mark to my list.

Take care
Jorge

Lets Save The Planet

2007-03-19T10:15:00.000-06:00

Well it seems that after a long time and a great effort from different organizations around the world our leaders (well not all of them) are starting to get the point that Global Climate Change is not a conspiracy theory written by scientists and environmentalists.

There is some hope that we will finally see some real progress soon.

What do you can do ?

First of all become active in your local community, contact your local representatives and tell them your concerns and the need for a real and serious global agreement.

Add your signature at NextGenerationEarth, you will be sending a powerful message to politicians and business leaders around the globe that climate change is a battle for our common future.

And second, SAVE ENERGY !! and if you wish start an "Energy diet"

My wife believe I'm a freak when I hover around the house turning off lights that are not necessary, I'm not going to deny that I freak out every month when we get the electricity bill but on the other hand I've been always convinced that we normally waste a lot of energy, and you don't need to drive in the Vegas strip to realize that.

I recently started to replace many of the old incandescent lamps by compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL), these lamps can save more than 40-70% and while they may be more expensive than the incandescent they are getting cheaper every day and will not only help you reduce your electricity bill, they last longer, and you will be contributing to reduce overall energy consumption.

Check some of the facts at 18seconds.org, you will find interesting to learn that if every home in the US replaces one incandescent lamp by a CFL, the effect on greenhouse gases would be equivalent to taking 2 million cars off the road.

It's our planet and it's our responsibility to take care of it.

Our kids and their future generations deserve it

Cheers

Online Collaboration

2007-02-28T12:24:00.000-06:00

If you have read some of my previous posts you already know that I’ve been around in the ‘net for a long time. In those old days we didn't have such a vast collection of services and tools, the most advanced service we had for a real time conversation was writing to somebody’s else terminal or the Unix talk utility.

But I’ve been always convinced since then that the internet technologies (that’s the name of one of the companies I founded many years ago) were a very important factor to enable and facilitate collaboration and teamwork.

Since early January and part of February I spent a considerable amount of time participating in the online Vanishing Point Game.

This game was commissioned by Microsoft as part of their launch campaign for Windows Vista, and it was developed and run by the company 42 Entertainment.

The game consisted in a set of four puzzle boxes (one for each week), each box contained a dozen puzzles and was opened at the start of each week and a fictional character named "Loki" (the “Enigma Director”) guided us through the game history line and providing clues.

Besides the clues embedded in the actual puzzles and the ones provided by “Loki”, additional clues were provided with real world events around the world, starting with a spectacular light show in the dancing waters of the Bellagio Casino Hotel fountain in Las Vegas, skywriting in Sydney and other US cities, impressive digital projections over the façade of landmark buildings in Canada, Singapore, Germany, England and the US.

The grand prize ? A suborbital flight to the edge of earth’s atmosphere aboard the Rocketplane vehicle.

Besides the attractive prizes (which I won none), and the challenge to solve the puzzles, my real interest was to experience first hand the actual state of the art of online collaboration in a complete different context, not work related, completely unknown people of different ages and background around the world.

I’ve been always involved in discussion groups via e-mail lists, such as NANOG, IETF, technology forums, etc. In this particular instance after some searching I joined the Neowin.net community where I found some interesting information exchange related to the game.

Over 80,000 registered to play the game, hundreds if not thousands were participating in forums such as Neowin, or unfiction.com, real time chats on IRC, etc.

Since the early Internet days we had some sort of implicit and self imposed net etiquette, that if you recently had a chance to participate in some IRC chat rooms seems to have been completely lost.

To my surprise and enjoyment, the experience I had with the Neowinians was in all terms excellent, while the forum has moderators there was no need for them to get involved, a great exchange of information an ideas with a sharp focus to solve the puzzles and have fun playing the game was a constant.

I’ve not seen one message with obscene content or inappropriate language and the level of collaboration, also including exchanging information with the unfiction folks, was tremendous. The puzzles that were supposed to be solved in a week time frame got solved in just a couple of hours.

And it was really fun to be part of that (well what do you expect, I’m a geek!!), at one time we had one Neowinian from the UK streaming audio with great music and live comments about what was going on in the game.

After the game was over we had a chance to join a webcast conference with the Rocketplane folks and learn more about their pioneer work in developing commercial human space travel. Few days later another webcast with the 42 Entertainment folks about their experience and challenges putting the game and events together.

My prize ? I got to join a great new online community with interesting and talented people that openly exchange ideas, experience and information about Information Technology and other matters, and a great demonstration that online collaboration is still alive and a powerful way to get great things done (open source somebody ?) .

Cheers

Internet en Argentina y América Latina...

2007-02-17T11:02:00.000-06:00

Los Primeros Pasos

Hace unas semanas atrás un viejo y querido colega y amigo me contactó para participar de una iniciativa que él viene promoviendo desde hace tiempo, y que consiste en cierta medida en preservar la memoria histórica de quienes como José dice tuvimos el privilegio de ser algo así como "los pioneros" en el desarrollo de Internet en América Latina.

Couple of weeks ago a long time and dear colleague and friend contacted me to join an initiative that he has been promoting for some time, it has to do somehow with preserving the historic memory of whom as José says had the priviledge of being some sort of "pioneers" in the development of Internet in Latin America.

José Soriano, entre otros, fué una pieza importante para el desarrollo de las redes en América Latina y en particular en su natal Perú donde con mucho esfuerzo y limitados recursos dió vida a la Red Científica Peruana (RCP).

José Soriano among others was an instrumental piece for the development of networks in Latin America and in particular in his native Perú where with a lot of effort and scarce resources he gave birth to the Peruvian Scientific Network (RCP).

Esta historia tiene muchas caras y muchas voces, inolvidables recuerdos y anéctodas que vale la pena rescatar, así que me siento halagado por la invitación de José y espero contribuir con gusto viejas memorias y lo que ha sido ésta experiencia desde mi punto de vista personal.

This history has many faces and many voices, unforgettable memories and anectodes that are worth to preserve, I feel flattered by José's invitation and I hope to gratefully contribute those old memories and what has been this experience from my personal point of view.

Pioneros Internet

Gracias José por tu invitación

Passion for electronics

2007-02-16T22:09:00.000-06:00

Since my teen days (early 70's) I was always fascinated and intrigued by electronics, I use to add lamps, wires and switches to at that time the equivalent of Lego's, and destroy all sort of electric appliances we had at home.

Things got more interesting when next to my home (in Buenos Aires) a small company established a representation of the Japanese audio equipment manufacturer AKAI.

This company imported different products completely disassembled, some parts were produced locally and the final product was assembled, calibrated, tested and packed in this place.

Somehow I managed to get in there and slowly I started to learn, first packing the final products and its manuals, mounting some mechanical parts, soldering the different electronic boards, and later calibrating and testing. It was a lot of fun and excitment when in those days an 8-track magazine player was Hi Tech !! (AKAI CR-80).

But there was a particular event that marked me for the rest of my life and gave shape to what later became my professional career. One day the company owner returned from a trip to Japan, and among the goodies he brought from there was a handheld electronic calculator with bright red glowing numbers. I've seen before other desktop chunky ones with nixie tubes but this one was different, it was really small for that time.

I had to resist my temptation to put the screwdriver on it, I had a vague idea of what was inside but I didn't have a clue how the thing worked, to satisfy my curiosity and anxiety to learn more about it I started asking about it to one of the young engineers working there. Jorge Perez (which whom later I had the pleasure to work with for a couple of years) had the patience to introduce me to logic gates and digital electronics, my brain was about to explode.

It was clear then that I was headed to get my education in a technical school with a career in electronics, which took place at the PIO IX school in Buenos Aires.

Gracias Jorge por mostrarme el camino ...

First time... it's always painful ...

2007-02-16T20:00:00.000-06:00

Well it seems that I finally decided to create a blog account and join the blogsphere.

Do I need a blog ? may be, not sure. I've been with the internet mambo-jambo for many years (since '86) when with a group of other crazy folks like me we started a small project that later became the foundation to get my country of origin (Argentina) on the 'net.

Will see what comes out of this, I may post some entries in english, some in spanish, and most of the time mixing both.

I apologize in advance if I post any non-sense while I learn how to use this service.

Happy surfing ...
Later