OnlineVortex - Because everything ends online

How does the Microsoft and Yahoo deal affects me

2008-02-08T03:46:00Z

Image by psd

Like everyone in web, I have an opinion on Yahoo/Microsoft deal, after reading a lot of post about this subject I don't understand why all the tables comparing the earnings includes all microsoft divisions (HW , software, web, games) or at least that is what looks like, because I didn't see any indication of the contrary and as far as I know Yahoo or Google don't produce consumer hardware, games, OS or office suites with a licensing business model.

The tables should have been the numbers of Yahoo + the numbers of MSFT but only the web divisions and then comparing that to the numbers of income and profit from Google.

But for the analysis and predictions I will point to some posts were A list blogs have made a better job in describing the situation, effects and timelines.

Read/Write Web

SEOmoz

As a user how will this affect me?. well, first let's make a list of the services I use on each one.

What services do I use currently or have used in the past on:
Microsoft

Hotmail/Live Mail
MSN Messenger

Yahoo

Answers
Buzz
Del.icio.us
Flickr
HotJobs
Instant Messenger
Mail
MyBlogLog
My.Yahoo.com
Pipes
Site explorer
Yahoo User Interface Library
Zimbra
Search Marketing

And for comparison the services I use on Google:

Alerts
Analytics
Blogger
Calendar
Docs
Gmail
Groups
Jaiku
Maps
Reader
Talk
Webmaster Tools
Youtube
Adsense
AdWords

And I'm sure that some services I use are missing, but as a web user this could mean that I may need to start searching for alternatives to the services that I use on Yahoo, because if we look at this and this the services provided by Yahoo and converted or redesigned to comply with MS guidelines and corporate/web standards will be ruined and/or covered with ads. or I may not like them changed, as simple as that.

Image by Franz Patzig

As a developer, what can I say? I haven't used IE for the last 4 or so years and I have suffered with the incompatibilities caused by the MS browser, I don't use any service or API provided by Microsoft, is there any?

As an advertiser, I have used only Yahoo or Google. But I have read about the new tools that Microsoft implemented for advertisers in their network and they seem to be really good. This may be the only good point in the acquisition for me if MS integrate the search volume and the tools of both companies.

Converting video files

2008-02-07T01:49:00Z

My daughter wanted to watch on the TV some music videos that a friend sent to her, but the problem was that some of the videos were on WMV format and our DVD player only supports DivX (in fact I think that no players with support to those formats exist, yes, I checked on Amazon).

An option was to see the videos on the computer (my computer has a bigger screen and I have the codecs to watch those formats on Linux), but the experience is not the same. So I started a search for a converter but the ones I found were for windows and these days I don't trust anymore the free software for windows, in fact I don't have a windows partition.

Then I found AlltoAvi and problem solved!. AlltoAvi is a software project that can be used in Linux and Windows. In Linux I only needed to install mencoder and worked flawlessly.

To convert a file you need to enter the directory where the files are located, filetype, subtitle and audio track IDs, bitrate desired, the codec you want to use to convert and the width and height of the output.

Example:
./alltoavi . wmv 0 1 650 DIVX50 320 240
will convert all the WMV files located on the current directory to DivX with a dimension of 320x240.

The videos were converted to AVI with a slight degradation of image quality but it was tolerable. In this case applies that depending on the quality of the input is the quality of the output, because I tried with a video downloaded from the web and the quality of the "original" was terrible, I guess that because offilesize restrictions. After the conversion the AVI file was full of compression artifacts.

After that I tried to convert some MKV to AVI files from some Anime episodes and the result was good. Burned the files to a DVD and the DVD player recognized and played the files without problems.

The lesson of this?. If you want to watch your videos on TV, DO NOT encode them to WMV!, AVI or MPG using DivX is going to get you better image/size and compatibility with DVD players.

Web traffic from image searches

2008-01-25T22:40:00Z

Checking the stats of the blog for the last 3 months, I noticed that the posts with more pageviews are referred from image searches. The images are from Salma Hayek in Ugly Betty, illustrations of Nathan Petrelli and Nikki from the Heroes TV Series, a test post for uploading images with the image of a Singapore girl, and a solar flare.

Why those images generate significant traffic?, I don't know the answer but my guesses are:

A lot of guys still have a crush with Salma Hayek even after his pregnancy, which is perfectly understandable.
The second season of Heroes is premiering in other countries.
I really don't have an explanation to the picture of the girl and the solar flare.

Other post that generated some traffic is the papercraft model of Master Chief. I assume that the traffic of this post is because the popularity of the Halo series for the Xbox 360.

The hand of Google

2008-01-20T01:43:00Z

While looking at a library book scanned by Google, I found this image, the hand behind the scanner revealed.

Dale Dougherty

Saw this at O'Reilly Radar, and other "hands" are at Book Patrol

Applying CPR to this blog

2008-01-19T23:31:00Z

Photo by Jackson Boyle

Again several WEEKS passed without a new post in this blog.

Why?, well the main reason is procrastination, if we add to that the number of feeds on my google reader account, Digg, Techmeme, my day job, research for my projects and the time spent stuck on Mexico city traffic that would be a good excuse for not posting.

Everyday by the time I finished reading the most interesting stuff, I have some ideas for a good blog post. But I need to justify my paycheck so have to work in the stuff I was hired to do, so I write some ideas on Google Documents, make a mental note, a bookmark, or post something on my Tumblr. By the time I get home I work a little on my side projects, then do some research and suddenly it's midnight and another day has passed without posting on the blog.

Even when this blog was in coma at the last page rank update it got a small increase, and the traffic is still coming (low but constant). So, it's time to clean up the spiderwebs, dust off a little, and wash the windows to continue with this blog.

Today I couldn't log on the admin section, searching a little I found that in the months this blog was without an update Dreamhost did 2 upgrades to Rails and that broke the backend. The blog was still serving pages because Mephisto creates a cache of every page requested as a static html file and if there is no change it stays in the server.

After freezing the Rails to a previous version (which I should have done long ago), everything was working again and I was able to log in again.

Late Hot Fuzz

2007-10-19T22:43:00Z

I saw in the newspaper that today opens in Mexico city the movie Hot Fuzz, which is a good movie to see but the reason of the post is to point the time it took to get this to movie theaters in Mexico.

This movie was released in Ireland and UK on February!, obviously is a British movie but was released in USA and Argentina a month later, then why took 8 months to be released here??

I saw this movie on May, because since April I found out about this movie from a video of The Fratellis (Baby Fratelli) which shows parts of the movie and the song is part of the soundtrack. after the trailer I decided that it was a movie I definitely wanted to see.

The DVD was out in July and I ordered it for around $14 plus shipping, about a month later I saw it in a store here for more than $45.

As you can see I've seen this movie (more than once) and it is going to be released today here in Mexico, I don't get why everything is late in this country, and the post I did about Dragon Wars is getting significant traffic from search engines because people want to know when is this movie going to be at theaters in Mexico, I guess that we can assume that we will have to wait at least 6 months to see it in theaters (I saw it a week ago).

Japanese TV shows

2007-10-14T23:32:00Z

I was bored and nothing was on TV, so I browsed Youtube and ended watching some japanese TV shows that are really funny.

Some of the shows are hilarious and some are a bit scatological in nature.

Who goes first?

2007-10-12T18:30:00Z

This morning I saw this great cartoon from Calderon, usually I don't care about this kind of stuff but I found this amusing.

If you don't know what does the cartoon is about here and here you can find more information about the issue.

MTV.es on Rails

2007-10-11T21:23:00Z

I see in a post from furilo that the new MTV.es site was made with Rails

It has everything a site like that (or any big site) has to have: artists info, news, reports, features, blogs, etc..

The site was made by The Cocktail.

3D feed reader

2007-10-11T20:44:00Z

When you think on a feed reader you assume that it will show the articles in a chronological ordered list, because we are used to see the information in 2 dimensions, but, what happens when we add a third dimension?.

That's what they did with Voyage a feed reader made in Flash. This is the type of application perfect for Flash, maybe you can do something similar with Java but I don't know if it would be as light in resources as this one.

You get the latest articles at the front and moving the mouse up or down the titles move, scrolling moves you in the third axis which is the time line. To read an article you only click on it and the content will show while the rest of the titles fade.

You can add your favorite feeds and use it as your feed reader, there is no need to create an account because the app stores your preferences in cookies. Or you can just play with it as something new and cool, because it lacks some features that at least I like to have (mark/tag articles, search, folders, etc..) that some other readers include (web or desktop apps).

Master Chief papercraft model

2007-09-21T18:13:00Z

To make the wait for the release of Halo 3 more tolerable you can try to build this papercraft model of Master Chief.

The model is 13" tall, has close to 2100 faces (over 800 faces for the gun), and is composed of 42 pieces (+ 10 for the gun).

The PDF files with the model and instructions are here

This is the creation of billybob884 and looks like it's not the first creation, in the gallery you can see other papercraft models like Conker, Mr Satan, the RingWorld and more.

Vista: an acronym

2007-09-04T01:35:00Z

Found this wallpaper image at: KDE Look

What I've been reading

2007-09-02T02:07:00Z

During this long time without posting anything in this blog, at night I have been (re)reading some interesting books that I'd like to recommend to you.

This books are of the cyberpunk genre and although it's fiction the stories and what happen to the characters or what they do is based completely in real techniques and risks in the computer security area, which is one of the areas I'm really interested in and is part of my day job even when nobody in the office has any idea of what is possible and the implications if we where attacked by some. And I won't even mention the procedures that are recommended to be followed in such a case.

If you are interested in this area I'm sure that you will like this books, even if you don't and just want to read a novel, after reading this series you may began to think different about computer security and your habits in your work or personal life and that will be good enough.

While the first books of this series are somewhat old, the latest is from this year.

Stealing the Network:How to own the box

This is the book that spawned the series, This one is about short stories of hackers and crackers and the techniques or tools used to gain unauthorized access to computers and information.

Stealing the Network: How to own a continent

While the first book focused on individual stories, in this book is a single story and some of the characters introduced in the first book return to form part of a group but most of them doesn't know that they are part of it and the main objective.

Stealing the network: How to own and identity

Third book of the series, is focused in identity theft and continues the story from the previous book with the same characters.

Stealing the Network: How to own a continent

This book continues the story from the previous 2 books and the chase of the master-mind shadowy figure from previous books, who is tracked across the world and the Web by adversaries with skill to match his own

All of the authors/contributors of this series are computer security experts and in each book there is some sort of behind the scenes of how this series began and the work involved in the creation of the books.

This is just part of the books I read in the last 3 months, later I'll post some more books that I think are good enough to recommend. Not all are fiction, some are technical and some are about business.

Dragon Wars

2007-09-01T02:58:00Z

In only 18 days it's supposed to be at the theaters the movie D-War/Dragon Wars on USA and the trailer looks good, but lately you can't tell from the trailers if a movie will be worth watching or not.

The theme (dragons) is not new or original, one recent movie about the same was Reign of Fire and it was a really disappointing movie, so I hope this korean movie is good.

Here is the trailer:

Direct link to video at Youtube

Blog Day 2007

2007-09-01T01:59:00Z

This blog has been neglected for too many days, and what better day to get back to blogging that Blog Day?

What is BlogDay?

BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.

With the goal explained above, here are the bogs I picked for this:

Del derecho y las normas, David Maeztu writes this blog about legal issues and his interpretation, focused on spanish law.
Techquila shots. Techquila Shots is about ideas and how things can be “improved” on the web, by Steve Poland
Loogic. Blog about internet business in spanish.
120% Linux. Rants and news about Linux with the comments of outime.
Living in Japan Is a Blog about an English-speaking foreigner’s observations and explorations. (like Kirai )

Those are the recommendations of the day, I promise that the next Blog Day will be many more.