Celso Martinho

A few days ago I went to FNAC and I was surprised to see literally dozens of USB PC Skype phones (see photo). By coincidence Slashdot posted an article today about this exactly. It seems that opening their API to manufactures and developers was a great strategic decision for massifying Skype hard-phones and gadgetry. On the other hand SIP is an open protocol, it's been here for ages, there's lots of SIP providers on the Internet some with Skype a-like competitive prices, and the best phone I could find was Zyxel's P-2000W_v2, and it's not much, compared to this "must.... have.... must... buy..."

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Technorati Tags: sip, skype, voip

This is my 2.6 PSP and this famous game doesn't exist on any store. Anyone cares for PSP's SDK for OSX ?

Technorati Tags: psp

Some guys with a lot of time on their hands and a lot of genius too, have decided to create the dream OS for anonymity paranoids (oh and criminals too). It's a bootable live CD based on FreeBSD and Tor which I mentioned a few posts before. It's China's communist party worst nightmare (oh and Bush's too). Creepy and interesting.

Technorati Tags: freebsd, tor

This is why the server content adaptation industry is dying in the mobile world. MiniOpera does a fantastic job on the client side with it's "Small Screen Rendering" technology and it's now available for most mobile phones and PDAs.

Technorati Tags: miniopera

Jabphone, allows you to call your friends on the phone using the Jabber Instant Messaging system. It uses libjingle, XMPP and Asterisk. All you need is to run GTalk (or any future client that supports Jingle), subscribe a specific gmail jid that acts as the gateway and you're set. As easy to type "call 351 21 500 5000" in your chat window. Pretty cool.

Technorati Tags: asterisk, gtalk, jingle, libjingle, xmpp

"Martelada" is the Portuguese word for what browser engines have to do to deal with the Web. The Web is broken in ways no one can imagine. I recently got involved in writing a small program to clone web pages and had to deal with rudimentary manual html parsing. Did you knew that: 1. Yahoo!'s Homepage refers to URLs in anchors without parenthesis or apostrophes just to spare a few bytes (and then they have a huge 30k banner at the same time) in the form <a href=/images/ihavestandards.gif> ? 2. Saw this on Slashdot. Instead of http://poke.w3.org/ you can just link to //poke.w3.org and your browser will understand that //=http:// ? Will work with parenthesis, apostrophes or nothing. 3. In Javascript or CSS (a newly created standard) you can easily see url(" url(' or url(//this.works.com and they all work, apparently. This may be common sense to any HTML parser developer or experienced web designer, but I was kind of shocked. And I'm sure there's hundreds more.

Technorati Tags: html

I'm actively looking for .Mac alternatives. Being a satisfied .Mac subscriber since I have my Powerbook to sync my personal data between my work and my house in a efficiently and no-fuss way, I can't help to feel that lately Apple is pushing it too much, and I don't like it. .Mac is no more no less than a huge Webdav server and remote storage, everything else is rendered and published by your local computer. What is it with Apple that the new iLife suite of application can only use .Mac to 1. Publish your website with iWeb, 2. Publish your Photocast, 3. Publish your Podcast ? Are the next versions of iCal dropping support for my private Webdav server too ? Is Mail.app dropping support for POP and IMAP servers outside *.mac.com too ? iChat dropping Jabber ? IMHO it is just not the way to go. Power users have their own servers and some local infrastructure that they want to use. OSX and iApps should allow these same users, often opinion makers that Apple used so wisely to create the OSX geek community and love brand awareness, to optionally use open protocols, more and more. Why piss on the 1% power user community while you have the 99% average joe/"couldn't care less" rest opting for your default ? Thumbs down Apple! Anyway, I found this and I'm digging for more. Related story: Ubuntu's guys are thinking an Opensource .Mac a-like service.

Technorati Tags: dotmac, webdav

Took the night to reduce my "stuff to look into" stack of URLs. Tor is a really cool concept network to completely distribute and anonymize er... "improve your safety and security" on the Internet. It's still in the early stages but you can already download your proxy client and/or server and try it out. Works fine on OSX.

Technorati Tags: anonymizer, tor

They promised it and they delivered it. After some internal tests with the @google.com domain, GTalk has just opened the S2S service to the public. Meaning you can keep your actual Jabber/XMPP account and talk to your friends at @gmail.com or vice-versa (pointed up in first hand by Melo). Google now uses an open IM protocol and has an open IM network. Another great day for Jabber.

Technorati Tags: gtalk, jabber, federation

Já que ontem quebrei a regra de não falar do trabalho, cá vai outra hoje por achar muito positiva e merecedora de destaque. Está a começar bem o ano.

Technorati Tags: softwarelivre