Is this real realpolitik?

I was looking for a nice definition of realpolitik in English, and I go to this post and this blog. I haven't checked the video referred by the post by myself, but in it, a Muslim preacher in a Mosque located in Germany says:

These Germans, these atheists, these Europeans don't shave under their arms and their sweat collects under their hair with a revolting smell and they stink... Hell lives for the infidels! Down with all democracies and all democrats!

Reminds me of the sad events that happened in the Netherlands regarding the murder of Theo Van Gogh. It is sad that in a country so tolerant the intolerant find a place to preach their hate.

My view is that the video exposes what the extreme right of the Islam thinks about the rest of the world. First clue: It is not at all different of what the extreme right thinks, regardless of country or culture: My cause is the cause of god, yours is the cause of evil. Second clue: Extreme ideology is self-justifying, and once you are inside, you just can't see the alternatives.

This is the reason that the owner of that blog chooses to think his biased politic view can be categorized as realpolitik. While I appreciate that he is not as extreme and cartoonesque as the preacher, I think it cannot.

Hewlett Packard Pavilion zd8000 is out

It seems that I will still need around US$ 3000 to get the Laptop I want. I have been thinking, however, that maybe it is time to jump to a 64 bits machine. Any 17" Laptops with AMD64 CPU that you would recommend?

Idea for improving Microsoft Office

Now that is clear that it is ok to shamelessly clone ideas, and specially now that Microsoft and Sun are friends... While I was reading about improvements in OpenOffice.org 2.0 , I found one that in my opinion Microsoft's product really needs:

Recently-used file list extended to 10 items

For me 4 items is not enough. I loose a lot of time navigating my huge folder structure because my recent files are not at hand. I don't care if there is a supported setting, or perhaps a registry hack somewhere (is it, anywhere?) I want it to be by default 10, at least.

Reasons to use OpenOffice

Going to Tim Bray's blog a few seconds ago, I found this comment about the reasons to use OpenOffice.org software.

I would like to add the sole reason that makes me install it in my computer:

OpenOffice is a great for opening corrupted files that otherwise brutally crash Microsoft Office applications.

This i what I usually do when I have a problem:

1. Setup OpenOffice.
2. Open my corrupted file.
3. Save it, usually with all content intact.
4. Uninstall OpenOffice.

The moral of the story is that, for Microsoft, having such a high quality, independent implementation of their file formats is a plus.

I understand and, to some extent, agree with many of the reasons exposed in that article, but I must admit that it is not use for me to switch to a different product. I like Microsoft Office, and I know how to do my work with it. If my everyday environment weren't Windows, I would probably think different. If I worked for Sun... you bet! ;)

AdSense

I have to mention that I have added AdSense adds to my blog a few days ago. Otherwise, Scoble would make me feel like a bitch ;) Fortunatelly for me, Tim Bray has it too, and that makes me feel way better.

I hope you will appreciate the work I did on the color scheme and placing. I also tried some CSS code to scale it, but Firefox doesn't support it.

By the way, I am not expecting that you actually click on it, whoever you are. Let's say, as Robert says, that I only do it for the fun of it!

Desktop Search Wars II: Attack of the Deskbars

I have been using MSN Toolbar Suite for some days, but I avoided posting about it. As seen in this Robert's blog entry, blogspace is full of noise about the product already.

There are many things to like about the MSN Toolbar Suite but it also shows little glitches from time to time.

I hope developers will work better the hide buttons hack. In the current version you can save valuable screen space by hidding the button, but then you loose access to some convenient menu items.

The Toolbar Suite refuses to install in Windows 2003 Server, which many developers use as a Desktop Operating system.

In general, I like the idea of having a Deskbar, but I have to admit that I still don't get used to it. If just the Windows Taskbar would be more flexible... If it allowed to distribute things better...

What really makes me smile about the product is how similar it is to the Google Deskbar that have been available for some time, both trough Google's site, and trough Microsoft's site (Microsoft's distributes Google Deskbar as part of Microsoft's Partner Pack. Here I found a good explanation of it. In short, Google's Deskbar is a .NET product, a very useful one, and it helps get the .NET word out there).

Google's Deskbar and MSN Deskbar are so much alike, I think they look more like a product of some collaboration than of fierce competition. They both have this nice background logo (different logos off course), they both let you do customized searches in other sites. Google's version also integrates with Google Desktop, giving you the same functionality of MSN Toolbar Suite, albeit I am not sure how well that works.

I think it is worthy to try both suites, the MSN Toolbar Suite, and Google Deskbar + Google Desktop. But don't forget that having two desktop search engines in a computer will kill its performance and use a lot of hard disk space.

What is good what not so about The Code Room?

Update on 12/13/2004: I have read my post again, and I feel now that it is too harsh on the people that make The Code Room. So, for anyone interested in my feedback, have you ever had a bad day? I still think you need a turn in the direction I state in the post, but you are not that far. Apologizes.

Today, Robert Scoble pointed us to the debut video of a new MSDN TV show called The Code Room. Right now, the first episode is only available at TheServerSide.NET.

So the wave of reality shows has finally arrived to computer geeks? Actually, there are a number of things I don't like about the video. I have already posted too many comments on Scoble's blog (sorry Robert!), so I will use my own blog to elaborate a little bit.

I think you could understand the issue just looking at The Code Room's logo.

The small text under the title reads:

src="/images/code.gif

I can picture the designer feeling very geeky when he did that. The problem is:

1. It is wrong, you need to close the quotation marks at the end for this to make sense.
2. If you look at the actual code of the home page, it says src="images/thecoderoom_logo.jpg".

I know this is just a couple of stupid details, but from a geek's perspective, it is a a shame. It means that the text in the logo is like an "Access Granted" sign covering all the screen of a computer in a stupid Hollywood movie! A chill goes all the way trough the spine. Are you trying to sell me something? Are you trying to wash my brain?

I read on TheServerSide.NET that there is actually Hollywood people involved. This is no surprise. It reminds me of the day I saw Independence Day. Not only it was one of the worst "science fiction" movies I have ever seen. When they connected a laptop to an alien mainframe using TCP/IP and infected it with a virus, I almost vomited.

So, it is ok guys if you are not geeks, just don't pretend to look like geeks, or it will only make you look fake.

Finally, I have to mention that as it was the case with Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum, the three "human" participants trapped in the code room looked like cool, plain normal, real life geeks. Of the three, Chris Menegay and Scott Bellware have blogs, and I am reading them right now.

It is not clear for me what the target audience of the program is. In any case, if MSDN TV wants to improve it, perhaps having some geeks to "sanitize" the show will do it. Otherwise they can try asking the directors to make it more Dogme 95 like (what Scoble & co. do at Channel 9), or perhaps recording some extreme programming scenes using bullet-time effects ;).

I gave up on my first blog on MSN Spaces

Well, then only solution I found was delete it. Maybe the address will be available again in 60 days.

I wasn't able to do anything on it, so I had to use a little hack:

• Logged to my main passport account, I waited for the "Space temporarily unavailable" message
• I trimmed the URL in the address bar, up to, but not including my alias, and added "/SpaceSettings.aspx" to it. I was able then to click on the "Delete this Space" button.

My hypothesis is that when I created the site, it was to early and not everything was working well. Hence, some critical files weren't copied to the right folder, including "PersonalSpace.aspx". However, some pages were copied, like "SpaceSettings.aspx", "ThemeSettings.aspx" and "PermissionSettings.aspx".

So I was able to delete it, only because I was lucky and I got access to "SpaceSettings.aspx". Otherwise I would have needed to figure out a way to run "SpaceDelete.aspx".

Besides, I never received further news from MSN Support after the email from Abraham saying that they were working on MSN Spaces to make them work for everybody. Maybe they are too busy chasing bad words ;)

UPDATED 12/08/2004: I received a message from Blas at MSN Spaces support. It is a little bit late for him to help me, but I maybe I could still help others by describing to him the symptoms I experienced and my hypothesis on how the problem occurred.

Ideas for extending the usefulness of OPML to web bookmarks and NNTP subscriptions

I had the honor to receive email from Dmitry Jemerov, Omea's Project Leader at JetBrains today, regarding a piece of feedback I sent yesterday. My original message contained a feature requests and a suggestion. First I was asking if importing Outlook Express Newsgroups subscriptions would be possible in future Omea Reader versions. The suggestion was about including NNTP type subscriptions in OPML files.

In case you don't know the product here is a description from the product's page:

Omea Reader is an easy to use, all-in-one RSS/ATOM feed reader, newsgroup reader, and web bookmark manager. But what really makes it unique is the level of information organization and management features including lightning-fast searches, flexible filing, contextual access, and extensibility.

Omea Pro, still under development, goes even further:

Omea is an extremely powerful yet simple to use Integrated Information Environment. With Omea, you can access, organize, and quickly search all your digital resources, including e-mails, syndicated Web feeds, instant messaging conversations, newsgroup articles, favorite web sites, personal contacts, and even locally stored files (.doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.), all in one easy to use composite interface that's well organized and efficient to navigate.

Thinking a little bit more about my feedback, I think my suggestion of putting NNTP links inside OPML is the most interesting part. So I developed it a little bit more. I will include a slightly edited version of the email I sent to Dmitry as a reply today:

Hello Dmitry,

It is great to receive your answer! The news about OE newsgroups importing are great, even if you cannot make promises.

About putting newsgroup items in OPML, one possible gain I can think of is that OPML would then become Omea's standard format for exchange and backup of all kind of resources (needless to say, you can do exactly the same with your web favorites).

Users could then use OPML files to exchange, backup and restore their complete subscription sets, without going through three separated processes: copying an OPML file for feeds, manually recreating newsgroups servers and subscriptions, and finally copying their browser favorite's folder.

I see how Internet Explorer, Firefox and other browsers deal today with exchanging bookmark information, and it is clear that aggregators are doing by far a better job with OPML. I have changed the aggregator I use many times in the last months and I have had no problems (almost no problems, BlogLines OPML import feature really gave me problems!).

I finally settled with Omea Reader not only because it is fast, friendly and free, but because I believe it is very promising. I see a lot of convergence coming very soon in the area of browsers, feed readers, email, global, and local search engines (call it personal information management, or whatever you want) and Omea seems to be extremely well positioned with its resource plug-ins architecture.

Another gain: If nobody else is doing it, then you can be the one that kicks the ball first. Later, when other aggregators, newsgroups readers and even browsers are ready, they can catch up with your use of OPML.

Once again, thanks for listening.

Diego

Off course, the problem with this is that if the idea is good, I cannot be the first to rise it. I just don't want to do the search, because I am sure I will find the answer in the first results page.

UPDATED 12/16/2004: I want to make clear that it is not Omea’s feature of importing BlogLines subscriptions what sucks. I was talking about BlogLines’s own feature of importing OPML files. Everytime I try, it hoses the groups I have defined.

Not as polite as SorryEverybody.com

Be warned that you could find the content in this link very insulting. Insult is not intended on my side. The page uses extremely offensive language, as the title hints: F*ckTheSouth.com . But still, if you are a liberal American, or if you are not american (my case), or if you live in one of the blue states, or at least voted Kerry, you coud have much fun reading it. It raises many interesting facts indeed.

Blogging frenzy, acute addiction

I don't know why, but I am blogging like crazy tonight and I have already beaten my own record. Perhaps I even surpassed Scoble, but I know it is only because he went to sleep early, or something ;^) Let me see, whatever the cause is, it is obviously in his blog! Oh, he is off to Sillicon Valley. Yeah, he spelled Sillicon wrong, with double "l". Maybe he meant "Silly-con". I wonder why I cannot spot my own errors.