Celso Martinho

Starting Saturday, 9h25am I'll be sleeping less, just a couple of hours a night, I'll have to shift my daily work schedule from 10am-8pm to 8am-6pm, I'll have less time for non-professional and non-family tasks (like blogging or building arcade machine replicas), drama and moderation will be more part of my life, gray hair will predominate, I'll be "controlled" by womens (yes I know, aren't we all) and yet go figure: I'll be TWICE as HAPPY as I am now.

Everybody knows Yahoo is doing it's European version of Hackday in London in early June. I've seen Yahoo's presentation about the US version on eTech and it clicked on me. It's a great idea for a variety of reasons: Team and company morale boost, tell the outside world what you have, image building amongst the developers community, a great way to find new talent and eventually recruit some, a free test-bed for your infra-structure and APIs, and a great environment for new ideas. And of course not less important, it's a lot of fun for everybody too, it's win-win. So it got me thinking (a lot) if Portugal has enough critical-mass for a scaled down, eventually tunned up concept version of something like this. While thinking, I decided to sign in for London and it seems I'm booked for it. And I might just go (although logistics at home will probably be complicated at the time, so I'm not 100% sure yet). Any other .pt persons attending this ?

Hitachi started shipping it's Deskstar 7K1000 hard disk drive for $399 USD. The verdict seems positive. While thinking about endless domestic media storage possibilities for this baby, it occurred to me that I've bought my first 20 MB HDD for the same price +- 15 years ago.

Really! This guy worships Steve Jobs in ways beyond reasonable (even for Mac users).

So don't ask how (or why) but I got my hands on the Apple TV for a week now. Much has been said about this cute living room apple fruit, but maybe the hacker's perspective hasn't gone into much analysis yet. Hacking was the trigger for me. I wasn't convinced by the iLife sync stuff nor the HDMI output, but the enormous list of hacks during the first week, while I was in San Diego, clicked on me. It was just too hackable not to have it, or, in the words of the Maker's owner manifesto: "If you can't open it, you don't own it". This USD $300 set top box is way beyond what it's supposed to do, and Apple doesn't seem to care (and I would applaud it if by any miracle they're ignoring the phenomena on purpose, strategically). So as an hacker, here's what I really like about this toy:

• It's small, it's very quiet. My wife likes it on the living room.
• It has 802.11n.
• I can use it as file server, a web server, a sshd remote server, and a bit torrent client.
• It runs on Intel with a stripped down version of OSX. Most software I'm able to compile on my MacBook Pro, runs just fine on the Apple TV. As a Unix junkie I am pleased to confirm that most (if not all) Darwin Ports and Fink apps definitively run.
• I can upgrade it's internal drive, If I really want. 40GB may be short.
• I can play HD divxs (well 720p at least) and MPEG-2 files. Or anything supported by Perian.
• I was able to copy a working full-fledged PHP5 binary, so all my controversial scripting apps work there as expected. Python and Perl are known to work fine too.
• I could run Linux on it if I wanted (which I don't, not yet).
• I'm eagerly awaiting for the kernel and drivers that will unlock the service USB port. It may be needed to use the box with external drives and hmm, a Webcam and iChat ?

Oh yeah, and it's nice too that it syncs with my iPhoto and iTunes. Those family photos do really look stunning on my 40" Sony Bravia. And yes, I've executed most the hacks described here, just in case you're wondering. And yes, the US version works just fine in Europe - they even used a standard C7 power-cord connector, so It's plug and play hack.

Paul Graham just posted a rather simple but objective essay about how he thinks Microsoft is dead, and the 4 reasons: Google, Javascript, Broadband and Apple. Enjoyable reading, as always.

Paul Kedrosky made a post entitled U.S. Home Prices as a Rollercoaster Ride which shows a pretty innovative perspective on the problem using a roller coaster video. Just for the parallel and the timing (and the kicks too), I wonder if I could get the same data somewhere for Portugal and do something similar.

This is our last night in San Diego. Had a nice dinner at Buca Di Beppo with Nuno and Bee which came all the way from Orange County just for us (thanks). We still have a few notes left from eTech (and a wrap up) to post but no time now. Meanwhile here's some presentations I found online already:

• Danah Boyd, Incantations for Muggles
• Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control
• Deus Ex Automata
• Extreme Productivity in the Enterprise: The User is the Developer is the User…
• If Paper Could Talk, What Would It Say?
• Ajax Unplugged
• Sufficiently Advanced Magic, Seth Raphael

Update: more presentations online:

• From Pixels to Plastic
• The Core of Fun (html)
• CorpseTwitter's presentation from Half-Baked session

Update2: presentations still popping-up:

• The Coming Age of Magic
• Scalability: Set Amazon's Servers on Fire, Not Yours
• Creating Alternate Realities

Update3: and one more:

• Community Marketing

Update4

• How to Innovate on Time

See you in Lisbon.

According to Apple and EMI, DRM is gone - a new era in digital content distribution has begun.

Attending eTech 2007 was enlightening but keeping the speakers's track can be just as interesting. During the conference I grabbed most of the speakers Weblogs for reference, and now I think I've completed the missing ones. So here's the list for you and the OPML file at the end. Enjoy:

• Charles Amstrong, blog2 (Collective Intelligence)
• Michael Bayne (Modestly Multiplayer Online Game Building)
• Scott Berkun (How to Innovate on Time)
• Paul Kedrosky (Investing in Data Center Construction)
• Danah Boyd (Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous)
• Avi Bryant (Applied Web Heresies)
• Michael Buffington (Your Web App as a Text Adventure)
• Jim Bumgardner (Advanced Flash: Exploiting Flash
• Mike Chambers (Apollo: Engaging with Web 2.0 Outside the Browser)
• Dick Costolo (1/2 Baked)
• Doug Cutting (Introduction to Hadoop)
• Jacob DeHart (From Manufacturing to The Attention Economy)
• Chad Dickerson (Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!)
• Cory Doctorow (The Magic Kingdom: Maximal Autonomy or Remote Control Creche?)
• Rael Dornfest (Announcements)
• James A. Duncan (JavaScript: It's Happening All Over Again! Zimki)
• Esther Dyson (Metaweb: The Semantic Web Meets Web 2.0)
• Lee Felsenstein (If Paper Could Talk, What Would It Say?)
• Seth Goldstein (From Manufacturing to The Attention Economy)
• Adam Greenfield (Toward a New Animism: Old Interaction Paradigms for an Everyware World)
• Brad Greenlee (Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers)
• John Hagel (The On-Demand Manufacturing Revolution)
• Marc Hedlund blog2 (Entrepreneuring for Geeks)
• Kevin Henrikson (Ajax Unplugged: Architecture and Tips for Taking Your Applications Offline)
• Forrest Higgs (Building a 21st Century Industrial Base Via Open Source Technology)
• David Hornik (1/2 Baked)
• Andrew Huang (The On-Demand Manufacturing Revolution and Chumby)
• Tara Hunt (Community Marketing: Your Customers in Charge)
• Jeff Jonas (Advanced Analytics in the Anonymized Data Space)
• Jeffrey Kalmikoff (From Manufacturing to The Attention Economy)
• Bill Katz (Patient-Specific Cardiovascular Modeling)
• Andy Kessler (Silicon is Invading Medicine)
• Amy Jo Kim (Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software)
• Raph Koster (The Core of Fun)
• Mike Kuniavsky (The Coming Age of Magic)
• Shuki Lehavi (Web Scale Computing)
• Don MacAskill (Scalability: Set Amazon's Servers on Fire, Not Yours)
• Matt MacLaurin (Cool Stuff from Microsoft Research & Live Labs)
• Dave McClure (1/2 Baked)
• Jane McGonigal (Creating Alternate Realities)
• Rich Miller (Investing in Data Center Construction)
• Tikva Morowati (Sonic Body Pong)
• Duane Nickull (Web 20-20: Architectural Patterns and Models for the New Internet)
• Quinn Norton (Body Hacking)
• Tim O'Reilly (The O'Reilly Radar)
• Chris Pendleton (Microsoft Virtual Earth)
• Allison Randal (Energy Innovation)
• Seth Raphael (Sufficiently Advanced Magic)
• Pasha Sadri (Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web)
• Mike Shaver (A Manifesto for Web Innovation?)
• Kathy Sierra (Creating Addictive User Experiences)
• Richard Sprague (Effective Integration of Speech for Interacting with Devices)
• Mike Stenhouse (Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control)
• Bill Tancer (Backing Up Instinct with the Numbers)
• Jonathan Trevor (Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web)
• Werner Vogels (Amazon Web Services: Building a "Web-Scale Computing" Architecture to Meet the Variable Demands of Today's Business)
• Matt Webb (From Pixels to Plastic)

OPML file with all subscriptions.