Celso Martinho

A bit of fun about Christmas and US TV politics and news society.

Do not trust anyone. Everyone's fighting for their big chunk of easy audience and quick fame, at any cost. Don't bet your bucks on that good old trusty brand, you'll get burned or fooled or both. The Internet is going through the same process public TVs had when competition arrived (think TVI if you live in Portugal). I see the most absurd news and theories everyday. Being a relatively well informed IT guy, I read all my RSS feeds at end of the day and I find myself laughing most of the time. This whole "Ajaxified Web 2 bubble, Google is god don't argue, let's criticize the present and predict the future coz we have a vision and have read the Web 2 meme map from Tim" thing has just gone too ridiculous, really. The extreme example of this madness is perhaps this Googleness about everything. OK the company is a huge success, thats a fact. They have a very well oiled and productive service factory, fact. They're user centric and scratched all their strategy (and mission) on top of that. They're smart, IQ smart I mean. But for gods sake people, lets do some reality check here: Google is also money centric, they have a business to run, salaries to pay, very strong competition to struggle with. Anyone who doesn't believe these are their main goals above all the "don't do evil" crap is just too naive or just plain dumb, like we are (or were) when we are in-love, another well known state of stupidity and dumbness. I mean, I have a huge admiration on Google for their work and contribution for the evolution of the Internet, mainly for the path they've chosen to follow to get there, but that's it, let's put some perspective on all of this for the sake of objectiveness and rationality. What is it with this nodding if you applaud Google, bashing if you criticize it, fear and follow if they launch anything (even if it's just another thematic flavour on their flexible search engine, just to keep the weekly launch rate) ?? Did you ever think they don't even care about your so important reasons ? Web companies spend too much energy looking at Google's life and answering them back instead of focussing on their own, and creating value, sometimes better value like many have managed to do. Google hasn't spend one dime on TV ads or traditional media, think about it. Scott, a very good and competent Google engineer has spent the last months working with St. Peter from JSF, Justin from Psi, Joe Hildebrand from Jabber Inc, etc, on an open XMPP extension (JEP) for VoIP signaling. Out of this specs just released by JSF, Google kindly released libjingle with a nice BSD licence which implements the JEP amongst other cool things, these are the facts. Newsflash: "Google releases Google Talk code and API", "Tech Crunch: Google Taunts Skype, Releases GTalk API". Erhm... Has anyone checked the facts? Gotta have blood and drama right? Please. I wish a certain kind of the so called web journalists just shut their mouth for a while, take some vacations, do some homework, learn some basics and get back to us with non hyped factual news for a change. I could tell you a very similar story for the Web 2 hype but we're short of time, this is too big of a post by now. I'm on a bad day, you can tell. And I'm not linking nothing on this post too, thats it!

Technorati Tags: ajax, google, hype, news

I had a call from our law department today informing me of this and telling me to get ready 'coz this time it's finally going ahead. I'm personally not very stressed about this on the job, we logged pretty much everything already so it's more investment on storage capacity, some developments, different backup policies, it's resources and money, I will sleep over it. But I'm very worried about the precedent this law will create and the fact that it will help create a global conscience of fear and suspiciousness from your service providers and the law enforcers. It's really not related to the Internet roots. I also get this feeling that terrorrism is not really the real argument behind all this and that a lot of lobbying has been rolling in the backend lately but that may just be my paranoid side. Would anybody with two fingers of technology knowledge think that logging anyone's activity online could prevent terrorism or even help find terrorists at all ? I Don' t think so.

Technorati Tags: law, terrorism

Didn't resist any longer, got my PSP on Saturday and played all day. It's a fUntastic toy, and geeky too. Turned on the laptop just to register PSPWare. Had a nice dinner at our friend's place with our babies, good food great wine. We tend to appreciate and demand good wine as we get older and we fast become intolerant to lousy cheap easy-tasting bottles of it. Sunday, inexistent morning, stayed home all day playing WRC and watching movies. Finally went to the DeUS concert (with Absynthe Minded opening the hostilities) in Aula Magna which went right up to my top 10 best concerts ever. It was a good weekend.

Technorati Tags: psp, deus