Entries by Celso

Guy Kawasaki has a very interesting interview with Jeffrey Kalmikoff about Threadless, a social commerce T-Shirt website with one of the most innovative community driven business models recently seen, and it works.

What's with all the fuss about Apple putting personal info on the DRM free music you buy from ITMS ? You can play it on any device, AAC is a standard and it's documented so you can edit the headers, so what's up ? If you're paranoid enough to think anyone could use such info to track your illegal copies, just edit the files, put Steve Jobs on the headers and send him to jail, easy. The only thing I can remember to complain is the extra price for the doubtful extra quality, clearly some financial engineering stunt with the music sharks to get this through, but hey it's here. Bring the others and the competition, with the mass adoption this may have, prices can actually drop in the future.

I might just start buying music again now, well done Apple! What about Video now ?

Today, a particularly stressful day at work, a came across several E-Mail and IM threads about Google Gears with my friends and colleagues. I finally had the time to look into it more seriously and I feel I should point out that I don't share the global excitement everyone seems to suffer from.

Google Gears anticipates what browsers should have already and clones what Zimbra envisioned months ago, I fail to understand the wow effect, really. I had that wow when Zimbra demoed the concept over at eTech 2007. Sure, it's Opensource, and works with almost all platform combinations, and I'm not saying it isn't neat either, but stop the presses please, what about these questions ?

- What will it happen when Firefox 3 supports off line storage natively ? What's the point on disseminating something that I hope, will be deprecated within the next browser's major releases ? Or will it use the Gear's API ?

- Why should anyone download and install software on their computers to get these features ? Not the masses, that's for sure. It's hard enough to get your users to upgrade to decent browser, trust me.

- Since Google is such a big sponsor of Firefox. Why aren't they heading their energy on getting offline storage onto FF early and making sure IE, Opera and Safari adopt the same APIs for a change ?

Seems like a "we'll think about that later" situation to me. Maybe I'm just edgy today, or missing something here.

Anyone's dream I know. Are you from the past ? Check PlotKit and forget server side pie charts. PlotKit is a Javascript library for drawing graphics on your browser using the great SVG standard or HTML Canvas (for compatibility with stupid browsers). Very nice stuff.

A quick mention to this event, powered by ANSOL in association with SAPO.

Coliseu, ontem. Apinhado. Muito bom! Download já, se ainda não fizeram!

This is worth a note. After almost two years of development we're finally gone public with our SAPO Messenger for Mac and are going high-profile on it. It's been one of the must fun projects on the company, much to be learned from it (a making-of story is a must on this one, I'm convincing João, Pedro and the rest of the crowd to make one). The project is also Opensourced, also one of the biggest commitments and investments we've made with the community so far. So enjoy, we did.

This PDF details Wikipedia's design and architecture, by Domas Mituzas. Interesting reading if you're into web development, performance and scalability.

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 ?