Tsunami accounts

I have just read blogs posts from people that have lived through the Asian tsunami, here, here and there. Also the report by CNN. Tsunamis have been my worst nightmare all my life, not for any particular reason. I lived most of my life protected of the ocean by high mountains. I have been trough earthquakes, though. I cannot even grasp the level of pain this has caused to so many.

Thanks to Scoble for the links. And by the way Robert, your previous post really looked bad in the context of more than 10,000 (now 21,000) people dead. You better accept it. However, I still don't think you are really insensitive. Perhaps you didn't wake up to it at first.

I found something better than blogging

Clues:

• I think it is the ideal hobby for any geek.
• I get a lot of wonderful peer feedback.
• I would be absolutely happy if I got paid for it.
• I would do it full time.
• It is not sex.

Why am I selling my car in my blog and buying a SUV?

Coincidently, Robert is driving a SUV, and giving good arguments against it. I agree with him. It reminds me of when Philip Greenspun compared Java with SUVs. Of course, compared with SUVs, Java is not abominable at all.

I have considered SUVs a monstrosity for years, and I am craving for a new Mazda3 right now.

All that said, I have been living in the city of Santo Domingo for two years. There are so many SUVs here that it is unsafe to go out driving in my tiny sedan. It kills my nerves everytime my wife goes out in it with my young son. Add to this the terrible condition of the pavement, and the very aggressive driving style of the natives (and the well adapted non-natives).

Those are the reasons I am selling my car today, in my blog, and looking for a SUV right now.

Taking advantage of my PageRank?

I want to sell my car, a Chrysler Neon 1996. I don't have much time because I am travelling soon. I tried to upload it to a local car selling site but it is taking time. So I decided to make the experiment of selling it in my blog. I will see what happens, and I will take this post down on a later date.

The car works well, it has good mateinance (I found a great garage owned by two brazilians), and even when it has had a crash, the engine wasn't touched and the repair was so good, now it runs better than before the crash. I am asking a little less than what others are asking for this car here, that is RD$ 150,000.

See for yourself. It is not a new car, not jewelry, but if you live in Santo Domingo, it is great value for your money.

For more details, see my email address in my Profile.

Manu

What drives an Argentinean geek to check the NBA news? to the San Antonio Spurs site? Manu Ginobili does. Everybody loves Manu, and one gets this need to congratulate him for caring so much about what he does.

Updated June 30th, 2005: I have noticed in my stats that many women (I assume), living specially in Texas, come to my blog by searching things like "does Manu Ginobili have a wife?". Well, I don't want to spoil it Manu, but yes girls, I think he does ;)

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.

Somewhat impressed by SQL Express Manager, but not too much

I have problems connecting to local SQL Server 2000 or MSDE 2000 databases because an incorrect parameter in a call to the shared memory provider. Hopefully this will get solved when I upgrade my beta version of SQL Server 2005 to the latest (December) CTP code.

I am delighted to see that the program is really as lightweight as it should be, resource-wise. But I think it still lacks many fundamental productivity features like being able to copy an INSERT, DELETE or UPDATE script to the clipboard on a couple of mouse clicks.

I have had some lucrative datamining jobs in which the main goal was to some straight historical information from multigigabyte, badly normalized, customers billing databases. Lots of addhot queries, views, temp tables, replacements, data validation, interminable scripts, etc. For this kind of job I use a combinaton of Query Analyzer, Enterprise Manager and Access Data Projects, rocks.

Rigth now, I cannot imagine myself completing the same job either with the full fledged SQL Server Management Studio nor with its slim cousin.

I hope Express Manager will improve before version 1, but maybe Microsoft is taking the approach of making it only a toy, so to avoid the free product of competing with Studio Manager.

If this is the case: WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! (sorry, but you have to deal like this with people so smart ;). You are not competing with yourselves, but with the rest of the industry in this case. You want to ship products that are super usable and super functional, so people want to use them like crazy.

Well, maybe they are time constrained. In this case, ok, I understand.

UPDATE: From the SQL Express Manager December CTP Whitepapter:

Note Express Manager December 2004 Community Technology Preview (CTP) is not supported on a local computer that is running SQL Server 2000.

This explains that the shared memory provider is not working with SQL Server 2000. I will see later if this can be "hacked" by disabling this provider.

And yes, the rest of the whitepaper explains very well the situation. It also ask for customer feedback at their blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlexpress. Isn't blog the word of the year?

Microsoft's, Yahoo's and Google's synergism

I found this link today in a MSN Space (darn, I cannot remember whose blog it was, but I recall that it was a guy from Peru). It is an interesting 8 minute flash movie about Google, Amazon, Blogger, and their users debunking the press media by 2014. It is not that I agree with every hypothesis, but it is fun and provoking to see.

This movie helped me glue together some thoughts that I have had lately. So did the launch of MSN Spaces and MSN Messenger 7's reminiscences of Yahoo Messenger 6.

Just for email, currently I have a Hotmail account, a Yahoo Mail account (that I seldom use), also a GMail account, and I also have other two personal email accounts.

Fortunately, right now I can manage all my email in a single place: mostly Microsoft Outlook, or the web browser when my desktop is inaccessible. I keep a couple of MSN Groups and I have visited some Yahoo groups in the past.

I have an account in Orkut, I have been expecting a Wallop invitation from Robert (I have just learned that it was my fault, I didn't give him my email address, shame on me, I am so sorry Robert!).

Google has separate profiles in Blogger and in Orkut. MSN is doing now contact cards and Yahoo has been doing profiles for a while.

All of them are in the search engine business, although, Google is currently dominant by far.

I have only recently experimented the joy of Froogle, and MSN Shopping in the same day.

I think I can see clearly what the name of the game is for these companies, and I certainly can appreciate how huge it is. I am not meaning that I won't be surprised by their next moves.

But I also see some pieces still not there or still not glued enough. Orkut for instance is very experimental, and Wallop very closed. Inside Google properties, only Froogle seems to share authentication with GMail. Yahoo and Microsoft have unified authentication for their properties. Yahoo lacks, to my knowledge pictures uploading and good blogging tools. MSN Spaces lacks collaborative group blogging. Some companies outside this group, like Apple and Amazon, seem to have some pieces that these three companies would like to have. Yahoo and Microsoft seem to have the lead in mobile space. Hopefully one of them will think about buying Plaxo, and the others will clone some of its functionality. I hope Wallop goes public soon.

Google shares earning with you by allowing AdSense in your blog. MSN, on the other hand fills both sides of your blog with their own ads.

Perhaps in a couple of years it will be very difficult to tell one service from the other, and most people will either choose one company or have an account in each of them, as I do right now. I believe each of these companies will provide the frame for a huge amount of commercial transactions. Perhaps the day will come in which we will see the world dominated by Google, MSN and Yahoo branded Visas and MasterCards and micropayment services will flourish (I think right now Yahoo has the lead with PayPal).

It is almost like the Internet bubble, but this time for real and with only a few big players, as it was predictable to happened, actually.

One painful aspect of this is having to keep a different identity for each company. While the Internet is only one, and SMTP is only one, I still need maintain three different profiles, many different email accounts, and start two messengers (so far) if I want to be fully "wired". I hope in the next years this change. If just these companies realize that they have to work some things together and play nice, maybe they will shift their business models a little bit to match "the business model of their users".

I already feel the Internet as the extension of my mind and my life, and here is a guy that belongs to a generation that grew up watching TV (I seldom do nowadays), not surfing the net. So imagine what this will mean for our sons. Some kind of science fiction begins to look not too unreasonable.

I wonder what my universal information management tool will look like. This is the next grail for me. Will everything run inside Outook like NewsGator and Plaxo, or perhaps Omea, the next FireFox with more feed subscription power, or perhaps an Onfolio that doesn't crash when I try to import my "Stuff" folder from My Favorites? Will "Stuff I have Seen" ever see the light? Will A9 evolve to a more usable Web based information management solution? Or perhaps we will see something new and fantastic from Novell/Ximian? Once again, the pieces are scattered there and until they are glued together, there is no synergy.

Right now, the only thing that keeps me off saying that this is fantastic times to live is that tomorrow is not granted. If this nosense, brutal, mediaeval, stupid, tribal, religious violence doesn't stop, we will have nothing.

MSN Spaces Censorship

I am sure it is not the case with my never available MSN Space, but I have had some fun reading this article about how MSN Spaces censors the title of your blog. The funny part is that "Butt Sex is Awesome" got in unnoticed, while "Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov" (perhaps the problem is that Nobokov is misspelled?) was rejected.

I understand the root of the problem is that computers made with current technology lack common sense. Actually, if Marvin Minsky is listening, he could add this new case as a good example of it.

Practically speaking what I think would be a good solution would be to let you mark your space as adult oriented and have some basic mechanism to keep minors out, the same way MSN Groups and Yahoo Groups do, and the same way Yahoo Profiles and MSN Contact Cards do.

By the way, I want to send some warm greetings to my dear and young cousin Vladimir Novikov. I have just remembered you ;) If you look for your name in the Internet anytime soon, I hope you will find this page. And see you on January!

Changed comments system, leaving HaloScan for now

I have been using HaloScan for more than a year, and now they are announcing that they reached 100,000 customers. Congratulations! I am very grateful with you. The fact that I am trying now to live with the less sophisticated Blogger comments system has nothing to do with user dissatisfaction.

The actual cause is I suffer some kind of split personality thing, software-wise. On one hand I can enjoy like crazy while tuning code to make the most of every CPU cycle, or the most of every network round-trip in a distributed application, but regarding other things like blogging, I like just to be a spoiled user, and I don't want to look under the hood for simple tasks. This makes me some hybrid category of developer. Actually, when I develop something, I am not satisfied until everything that can be automated is automated, because as a user, I am so lazy!

This is the reason I have decided to minimize template manteinance. If I had the time and the patience right now to apply many patches to every new template I choose, I would instead build my own blogging engine and solve the problem once and forever!

So, what does HaloScan gives me that Blogger doesn't? I can only think of trackback. I have rarely used trackback, and never that I know has anybody tried to ping me. So, I won't miss it much. And MSN Spaces support trackback, so I guess Blogger will have to do it soon.

On the other hand, Blogger does a more beautiful job placing comments in post pages and showing the post text (for free), in the comments posting form.

The thing that I will resent the most is the collection of old comments itself. This is no art, howoever, loosing them forever feels like forgetting how to play a song I have composed (it has happened to me, too many times, believe me, and it hurts).

So I guess the right thing would be to donate something to HaloScan as a way to say thanks, and at the same time upgrade my free account with them so I can download all my old comments in a file.

By the way, Blogger does not import comments in any format. Shame.

MSN Space still unavailable

I still get the same error. I got an answer from customer support, but the problems are still uncorrected. I am not sure if they got the issue right from my explanation (my English could be even worse than I think). I never got to my space, so I still have no first-hand idea of what is the fun about.

Yeah, I know, I could open a new passport account and try again, but then, it feels like anti-ecological to create a passport account just for that. I am the kind of guy that feels guilty because pictures sent to bloggerbot cannot be deleted. Ok, ok, I will create it, try to do nothing cool with my space, and then I will ditch it so MSN can recycle it all.
The only thing I need now is some spare time this weekend.

Running on Omea Reader now

I tried the beta version of the JetBrain's program a few months ago and I have the perception that performance and resource usage has improved dramatically since then. Version 1.02 has become my main feed aggregator and newsgroups reader. I had been using Sauce Reader for some weeks and I can only now realize how much pain I have been experimenting because of its sluggish startup performance. I am sure that the Australian makers of Sauce Reader will get it right eventually, but the Czech have right now the advantage, and so I am giving them my hard disk space (both readers are free for personal use).

I also downloaded a trial of ReSharper, another interesting product made by JetBrains that adds some refactoring capabilities to Visual Studio 2003. I hope I will have time to test it in the weekend.

MSN Space temporarily unavailable

After a couple of hours, I still cannot reach my MSN Space.

Space not available
This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

Hundreds have already posted to their spaces. I had the idea that I was going to be one of the first. After all, when I first reached the page the "New Spaces" panel was empty. Maybe that is the problem.

UPDATE: Now it is the morning, and seven hours later I still get the same error message all the time. Maybe something went wrong when I created the space. Any way to get somebody at MSN Spaces to clean things up?

Anyway, I agree completely with Scoble says. There are some limitations to Spaces that are big turn offs for advanced users. Actually, even Blogger is a lot more extensible. I would add two items to the list of big limitations:

• No colaborative group blogs.
• No multiple blogs for the same passport account (I am not really sure about this).

UPDATE 2: A few minutes later I filled the feedback form and a message to support-by-mail for Spaces. We will see what happens.

Why we blog

I agree mostly with Dave Winer's answer.

...
Once I started blogging it got addictive. So the most direct answer would be "I blog because I am addicted to blogging."
I also like the idea that I can have a dinner with people I don't know in almost any city in the world.

The dinning part hasn't happened to me yet, though.

Changes to Links on MSN Hotmail

I noticed that since a couple of weeks ago links in Hotmail messages have changed. Now they use a script call but they open the clean original URL in a new window. This should make Peter happy, given he still cares.

More on MSN Messenger and MSN Hotmail

From Dare Obasanjo's main blog, new features for your Passport account:

Get attention. Consumers can reach out to friends and family by sending a "Nudge," an alert that shakes the contact's conversation window with an audible notification, or a "Wink," animated pictures that include sound and that can be virtually "thrown" onto the screen of a contact's Internet message (IM) window. New emoticons, backgrounds and theme packs from Microsoft Corp., including advertiser-sponsored packs such as for "Halo® 2",* round out the experience.

Stay connected. Through integration with MSN Messenger, consumers can automatically let their contacts know that they have updated their MSN Space. The MSN Messenger Contact icon "gleams" when an update is made, notifying others to visit the Space via the Contact Card.

Access the Web anywhere. MSN Web Messenger, shipping in 25 markets and 15 languages, enables consumers to access their MSN Messenger account and contacts from virtually any PC with an Internet connection.

Choose your online status. The beta release of MSN Messenger gives consumers more control over how they're seen online by enabling them to choose their availability status before logging into Messenger.

...

View online status anywhere. Through integration between MSN Hotmail and MSN Web Messenger, in select markets, consumers are able to see Messenger availability status even on PCs that don't have MSN Messenger client software.

Learn more about Contacts. MSN Hotmail consumers who have an MSN Spaces site will have a Contact Card visible in the Hotmail address book, providing friends, family and other online contacts with one-click access to their Spaces site.

Looks to me as if MSN is getting on par with what Yahoo has been offering for a long time already.

UPDATE: Thinking a little bit more about it, MSN Web Messenger is different from anything else I know.

New MSN Spaces and Updated MSN Messenger

I have just received the notification via Scoble's LiveMessage. I cannot believe the ammount of work that Microsoft has been keeping in secret. Actually, we will see how much is it once I get this working. Yes, off course I already created my own space, but it says "Space not available" as of now. And Robert, you are rigth, it's gonna be a bloggy nigth! ;)

LiveMessage

I have been wondering for some time about the service that Scoble uses for notifying his blog updates trough Messenger Alerts. Today I finally saw they had an open beta for blogs, and decided to create notifications for my blog feed. You have to click on the LiveMessage orange box to try it. You will probably see how useful this can be, although it is not very interesting for a blog that nobody reads :)

David Byrne has a blog... well, kind of

And it is good! Look here. By the way, I am enjoying his Grown Backwards a lot. Thinking a little bit about this, it is completely natural, taking in account all I know about him, that he has a blog. He seems to have arrived to it intuitively, because he calls it a Tour Journal, and it currently lacks a syndication feed. I will be reading it the next days.

My next notebook computer, hopefully

The next to be ready Hewlett-Packard zd8000 seems to be what I am looking for. However, it is still unclear if it will fulfill all my wishes. For instance, I think the mention of "plain" Firewire means it will not have Firewire 800. Also, there is no mention of Bluetooth. PCI Express is great to have, though. I hope the double layer DVD burners will be of the fastest when available. I also want it to be compatible with the new xb2000 expansion base.

Can I also ask for a reasonable price?

UPDATE: In the 3D demo in the store, it says optional Bluetooth and included Wireless b/g. It also says it comes with Expansion Port 2, so I guess it is compabible with the new dockstation. Nice.

Apologies accepted?

Pablo from USA sent me the link to the new (now old) ApologiesAccepted.com, which is an
answer to SorryEverybody.com.

On one side, there is still some confusion about the elections. Some say there is going to be a recount in Ohio, and that perhaps they will find some proof of manipulation. Whatever the outcome is, I doubt we will see the extreme right out of the power in USA for the next four years.

If you are a liberal American reading this, let me say that apologies are both too much, and not enough at the same time.

In any civilized country people have the right to give themselves a government. In any civilized country in which a party wins 51% vs. 48%, that winning party is not allowed to do whatever it wants. Any civilized country knows that its laws only apply inside its territory, and the government is not over the law. Outside its territories other countries laws apply, and when law doesn't cut it, you have to do what the United Nations say. Otherwise it is illegal. Any civilized country knows that its real wealth resides in the well informed minds of its people. In any civilized country all people can vote regardless of color, genre, cultural background or geography.

So if you want to look for once like a civilized country you know where to go: You fight for direct democracy. You make a formidable opposition in Congress and retake the power Congress has given up, and the more. You watch against brain washing in the media, and against violence in Hollywood movies that are supposedly for children. You apologize to the United Nations and help re-strength the effective power of the Security Council. You hand Iraq to the United Nations. You abolish electronic vote until it is really safe. You give national vote to Puerto Ricans.

And yes, you need to do most of it during the next four years, while the extreme right is in power. Otherwise, it is to your children that you will probably need to apologize.

Thanks to the other Pablo in Argentina for the Iraq In Pictures link.

Self-organizing empathy

Thanks to my friend Pablo who sent me this link to Sorry Everybody, from the States. I find it a comforting collective excersie of empathy. Since the people that manage the site are nerds, it also shows how cool geeks can get sometimes!

Some of us - hopefully most of us - are trying to understand and appreciate the effect our recent election will have on you, the citizens of the rest of the world. As our so-called leaders redouble their efforts to screw you over, please remember that some of us - hopefully most of us - are truly, truly sorry. And we'll say we're sorry, even on the behalf of the ones who aren't.

I hope Russell found the site already.

Looking at the galleries, some pictures made me break in tears. LOL, I need some sleep.

Stupid Geeks

If you want to experience how stupid and arrogant some geeks can be, I recommend this thread on Joel Spolsky's discussion forum.

Lack of empathy again? I think yes, and if one thinks that the less sophisticated are sometimes even worse, one begins to understand how some things are so wrong and not getting better in this world.

Philo, keep it coming!

Waiting for The Incredibles

My son and I have been Pixar fans from the very beginning. For me it started when I saw "Jr." around twelve years ago. For my son it came later... Well, maybe a short time after he was born three and a half years ago.

Add to this that Brad Bird is the writer and director of The Incredibles. We love The Iron Giant! I have always wanted to see something more from the people that made it.

For sure, my son and I have all the Pixar movies and The Iron Giant. By any chance, did you see who my son's favorite toys are?

We went today to the mall and asked at the cinemas when is the movie arriving to this country. They said on December! Darn!

DON'T YOU SEE WE CANNOT WAIT ANYMORE!!!

The Amazing Andrew Tanenbaum

I had no idea that the VoteMaster of Electoral Vote was Andrew Tanenbaum. I learned it yesterday via Tim Bray (one of my favorite bloggers lately).

Like many in this business, I have also learned a lot thanks to Tanenbaum's Computer Networks. Reading the content of Electoral Vote, I find myself enjoying once again his very personal style. This site is just proof of Tanenbaum's infinite curiosity.

Now that he has mastered RSS (thanks to Tim Bray), I hope to see him blogging soon. He is the kind of guy that needs to write his own engine in order to blog.

Speaking of the elections outcome and its effects on liberal techies, look at this little invitation:

Having dealt with political science, now computer science. If you are a senior majoring in computer science and are seriously thinking of leaving the country due to the election results, you might be interested in my international English-language masters program in parallel and distributed computer systems. If you are a faculty member in computer science, I would be very grateful if you would go to that Website and download and print the poster (a PDF file) and pin it to a bulletin board where potential students might see it and mention it in any classes you teach to CS seniors. Thank you.

Add a Ph.D. and you could get four full years offshore ;)

Tim Bray tells how it is to live and code in Canada

He says one techie from the US asked him for some information about working and living in Canada. Maybe it is happening? American people that are too angry with Bush are thinking about moving north. At least, this is the second time I read about this in the last two days.

I think it is not a good idea, but for egoist reasons. Well, personally, I don't want americans to saturate the canadian job market (I happen to be interested in eventually moving there). Again, I urge you to consider this idea instead ;)

A9 uninstalled

It really got impossible to use. There was no way for the toolbar to get notified that I was logged in, so no history, no bookmarks, no diary, etc. As a user, I qualify myself from average to bad. I really don't want to troubleshoot their piece of software. Enough I have with troubleshooting development tools and frameworks.

Then I went back to Google's toolbar, which is nice because of the BlogThis button. But after a while, I decided to disable browser enhancements altogether. No toolbars, no BHOs, no acrobat in a browser, but it makes Internet Explorer fly on startup, and it crashes way less also. No need for FireFox! Windows Explorer becomes very fast too, which was expected because of the way browser enhancements work.

I switched my home page to Google, after a couple of years of using "about:blank".

My first conversion

Finally I got one of my friends to blog. Before this, I helped other friend to create his photoblog, and another nice acquaintance to start. But now this is someone whose writing (in Spanish) I am sure many would enjoy: http://atormentario.blogspot.com/

I still have many friends that I would like to covert. Unfortunately, they don't even read my blog.

What I mean by empathy

I already mentioned the word empathy twice in references to the american elections. First it was on Scoble comments and second on my post for Russell Beattie.

I think I should try to make it clearer because this is something I have been thinking a lot lately: That by the way of certain cultural patterns, or because of lack of education and misinformation, people get deprived of their natural ability for empathy. That is, their ability to put theirselves in other people's place.

Here is an interesting link: http://samvak.tripod.com/empathy.html. From there I got this:

Empathy is predicated upon and must, therefore, incorporate the following elements:

• Imagination which is dependent on the ability to imagine;
• The existence of an accessible Self (self-awareness or self-consciousness);
• The existence of an available other (other-awareness, recognizing the outside world);
• The existence of accessible feelings, desires, ideas and representations of actions or their outcomes both in the empathizing Self ("Empathor") and in the Other, the object of empathy ("Empathee");
• The availability of an aesthetic frame of reference;
• The availability of a moral frame of reference.

I have the theory that the ultimate goal of human development is for everybody to be free of all kind of slavery (economical dependency, political and religious domination, race or gender discrimination, plain slavery, etc), and that the lack of empathy is the humanity first handicap to achieve this goal.

So for me, I don't care if you are rigth lending or a leftist, a liberal, libertarian, a vagabond or a mogul, American, Indian, Russian, Cuban, Italian, Argentinean, Arab or Jew. If you lack empathy you are not in my club (this is just a joke! as you know, empathic people always want everybody else to be able to join their club!).

Had I finished studying social sciences, I would like to do more research and perhaps write a paper about this. I will google it more tomorrow, maybe somebody already published it.

For Russell and other Americans that feel very disappointed today

In one of his recent posts, Russell writes:

Regardless, I just don't understand how so many people in the U.S. could vote for such an ignorant, cowardly, lying, close-minded, intolerant, wicked person. They voted for the worst in humanity: fear and war.

Well Russell, can't you see it? Your mind is working after hours, still trying to understand the other side.

The problem is precisely that most in the other side are not trying to understand you, or to understand the rest of the world, or anything else. Their minds don't work like this. They lack empathy.

I think I can express it better this way: Today I want to send you a big hug, and another for every other American that feels disappointed for the election outcome.

Keep going. The world needs you more than ever.

Electoral map joke, only for Democrats and Canadians

A friend sent me this yesterday:

So, before somebody comes chasing me, this is only a joke, ok? I am trying to have fun about the elections, and it is not easy.

I didn't have a vote in this election, as I am not american. Kerry didn't inspire me too much awe, but I would have voted him if I had a chance.

Even if I don't like Bush (who likes him outside Jesusland?), I don't blame him completely. His people (well, 51% of his people) will get the exact government they choosed on 11/03. I had my doubts about it on 2000, but now they have really made their choice.

I only wonder what is the other 48% of americans going to do for the next 4 years? United States of Canada doesn't look that bad.

Fire the boss: Tim Bray on the American Elections

I second that! This said, I am not sure I want to go deeper here with politics...

• People that comes here thru Google, just o and read Tim Bray's post.
• The ones that know me for real, let's dig deeper into it while we drink a cup of coffee or something else.

Bug found in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River

We have just finished watching Mystic River on DVD, and I think maybe I found an error:

The actors that do the roles of the kids Jimmy and Sean seem to be swaped in the opening scene. I say it because Jimmy has red hair when he is a kid and black hair when he is an adult. Sean has black hair when he is a kid and red hair when he is an adult. Even their haircuts seem to be exactly what they should be if they were each other.

But there is still another posibility: Maybe Clint Eastwood decided to play a subtle joke. Let's think the three guys were abducted and they are in the basement dreaming about what their lifes would have been haven't they got in that car, as Sean suggests near the end of the movie. Wouldn't it be possible that Sean and Jimmy admired each other so much that they dreamed about themselves with each other's faces?

Anyway, a very good movie.

PS: Does this make me a good software tester?

HP Presents New Windows Media Center 2005 Computers and Mentions New Notebook

This is the part of the press release that is more interesting for me:

HP also plans to announce a consumer notebook PC featuring the Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 operating system later this fall.

I hope it will be something like a better zd7000, and I hope I will have enough money to pay for it. Yes, I am into big 17" notebooks, with extremely good resolution and short battery life!

Adam Barr's blog

I am quickly becoming a fan of Adam Barr's blog. I haven't read his book yet, but I read his not-a-blog page some time ago, and I liked it. Perhaps, it was "One Example of Why People Dislike Microsoft Software" the first post that got my attention. I just wish others showed more often this attitude:

So anyway I go back to my office and my computer is still spiking its CPU usage, so I call the Microsoft helpdesk. It was actually pretty trivial to diagnose that the problem was that Windows automatic update was obsessively trying, and repeatedly failing, to install some update on my machine. What was a bit trickier was making it stop. The update was being pushed by the domain administrators, so neither I nor the helpdesk person had the ability to disable it. After various attempts (Microsoft helpdesk technicians can, if you authorize it, get access to your desktop remotely and try things directly, rather than instruct you), I finally had to reboot to safe mode, rename a directory, and then reboot. The CPU calmed down, although I guess the update remains uninstalled.
...
OK, so what can Microsoft do about this? Someone (maybe Einstein, maybe not)
once said "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a
different result." Perhaps Microsoft should fix Windows Update so it isn't insane. We could improve Task Manager so it reveals the path of each executable, and maybe some information like whether it is signed, and also let users snapshot process information so you can catch briefly-running processes. That's all part of the basic ability to figure out what the heck is running on your computer, that Linux does better than Windows. Then you've got Microsoft's historical over-reliance on GUI administration tools and the assumption that things will work, not break, and all the other questionable design decisions Microsoft has made over the years. Yeesh.

Being Adam Barr an insider with such a clear view of what needs to be fixed, one tends to think that eventually, Microsoft will do the right thing. Way to go!

A9: Competition to Microsoft's "Stuff I have Seen" from Amazon

I have just discovered A9 in my referrers statistics and I haven't still started using it, but for what I see, it really sounds interesting. An excerpt from the site: A9.com personalizes your search experience by remembering your searches and giving you easy access to all your history in several ways:

• Each web search result indicates whether it's new [ New ] or has previously been clicked on [ Clicked 2 weeks ago ]. [learn more]


• Every search you performed on A9.com is stored in the History column and organized by time. You can switch between your previous searches and the sites you've visited. With the A9 Toolbar, the list of all sites you have visited is accessible the same way.


• If you open the history column on a search result page, it will give you search results of your own history followed by a list of your entire history (as well as from your bookmarks and diary…). [learn more]


• Try it out: http://a9.com/amazon?a=oh.

I guess I will be using A9's toolbar instead of Google's for a while.

Tablet: The Personal Computer of the Year 2000, Back in 1988!

Browsing Stephen Wolfram's scrapbook has been so far a fascinating experience, and I am still at page 4 of 8!

Look at this for example:

Tablet: Personal Computer in the Year 2000 (1988)

Besides, I had no idea that he was once with Dany Hillis at Thinking Machines.

Hey, by the way, I nerver understand what those guys do, I am not even an ammateur, but just a fan.

Why do people subscribe to the main feed in MSDN blogs?

As explained by Robert Scoble, people subscribing to the main feed of the MSDN Blogs has been consuming too much bandwidth. Even worse, as Dave Winer states in a later post, it seems to be a nonsense.

Why would anybody want to subscribe to such a gigantic feed? I think I found two driving reasons:

1. Subscribing to the main feed is overwhelmingly easy.

2. Finding the individual blogs I could be interested in, is really hard from the blogger list.

Of course, I very often subscribe to blogs only after I have found them referenced in other blogs. However, if I had to come to the blog list page to find something interesting to subscribe to, the only tool I would have at hand would be Ctrl+F.

Also, just browsing the list is impractical. There are so many Microsoft bloggers today that I don't think anybody with a full time job will browse the list past the names beginning with C.

There are some things I think could be done to improve the experience. These are just a few examples:

- Implement the list as a table.
- Add columns with metadata, for instance traffic (as an heuristic measure of ranking), team or product, position, frequent categories, a gauge indicating technical level,etc.
- Add ways to filter and sort content based on any combination of those columns.
- Add a good full text search engine that returns a link to the blog (or the feed URL) with each result.

Maybe there is already something like what I describe.

My blog is dead, long live my blog!

Just another cliché: One picture worths more than a thousand words.

Tropical Storm Nine

While Buzz Bruggeman is expecting to blog about his second hurricane on Sunday, I am still hopping this will be the second false alarm I blog about (first was Odette last year). Look at the pictures of Tropical Depression 9 I copied from Weather Underground.


Now let me tell you I live in Hispaniola, that big island to the east of Cuba. Now look at this historical chart.


Scary, isn't it? It shows at least one hurricane with a similar path visiting my neighborhood. I cannot see that storm name, but it could be George. So, if it keeps its current direction and grows, it is expected to become a tropical storm on Friday and a Category 1 Hurricane on Sunday. At a first glance I would say it could be on my same longitude by next Thursday.
In any case, good luck Buzz!

Gates pitch on Jobs pitch on MSN Music Store pitch on Video

I have just read MSN Music is off-key, Apple says on CNET's News.com. The article mentions an interview in BusinessWeek magazine in which Bill Gates says that Steve Jobs is wrong in his notion that Internet video rental isn't an important market:

'Ask kids in the back of a car on a two-hour trip, 'Hey, would you like to have your videos there?' My kids would,' Gates said. 'I guess Steve's kids just listen to Bach and Mozart. But mine, they want to watch 'Finding Nemo.' I don't know who made that, but it's really a neat movie.'

Gates seems to have an amazing sense of humour, don't you think?

Robert Scoble reads the Dogme 95 "Vow of Chastity"

I have just suggested Robert to take look at the vow, and he did! Having a chance to interact with Robert in Channel 9 is so cool! I think it is one of the things that make Channel 9 so succesful.

I will also add him to my MSN messenger soon. I just need to wait until he creates his third passport account.

WinFS will be late, Longhorn on 2006, WinFX... Who knows

I have read all the information linked by this post by Chris Sells. I see all is very interesting news. I am not sure, but perhaps there is a possibility that WinFX will be released before Longhorn ships.

All updated questions in the Longhorn Developer FAQ are answered by the old friend of this blog, John Montgomery. I will refreshing my browser on his blog until he posts more details about this.

Does blogging make sense?

Lately, I cannot find anything compelling enough to blog about. It could be because my general mood: it is also becoming difficult for me to talk with people about trivial subjects. The most prevalent feeling I have these days seems to be that I know too little about too much. Besides, I happen to be introverted. So why should I find pleasure in blogging?

Let's try to do the tick of blogging just for the sake of it. I will begin with a recollection of some things that have happend to me these days.

Last happy moment: Today in the Olympic games Argentina won 89 - 81 over the USA "dream team" in basketball. Tomorrow the insolent team representing my country will try to get the Olympic gold medal, for the first time ever. Congratulations Manu and all, you made me cry! By the way Manu, what about transofming your "NEWS by Manu" site in a full fledged blog? Right now, it is so close to a blog that it hurts!

Last enlightment: Rich people spend their lives acquiring assets, while poor and middle class people usually acquire liabilities in the belief their are assets. I readed this a week ago in the spanish version of Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I guess I am just following Chris Sells' lead in my attempt to be a geek that understands money.

So, what happened to the Hotmail upgrade

Time has passed and there is no news about the capacity upgrade to the free Hotmail service. Only yesterday I received a notification of the new 2 GB limit for Hotmail Plus. I have seen no news after the one that said we were going to get 250 MB. I wonder if this is the last word.

Buttercup (pink-candle) is back blogging

She says that she "just didn't feel like posting stuff here". It is weird when you don't know the whereabouts of your blog-friends.

My English still sucks

I wish I could find my aunt's new email address. She is american, a teacher, and she sports one of the finnest English accents I have heard. Some years ago she offered to help me with my English.

So, dear aunt Amber, I wish you could read this and tell me for once what is wrong with it. I just know it feels very bad when I read it.

I have just made a search on the Internet, and all I found was who you are voting for!

IronPython to join the Microsoft family?

"IronPython is a fast Python implementation for .NET and Mono". I read about it for the first time a couple of months ago.

Today something unexpected happened. Not only IronPython alpha source and binaries have been made available under the Common Public License, but its author, Jim Hugunin has "decided" to join the Microsoft CLR team!

I can see, in my crystal ball, a brilliant future for dynamic languages on the CLR. Also, the future looks more cloudy for Java, since Hugunin is also the father of Jython (probably the most successful and most frequently mentioned example of a non-java language running on the JVM) and co-designer of AspectJ.

On a sad note, I realized some days ago that Smallscript site has been down for some time. Any news about David Simmons?

What was Michael Robertson saying just a month and a half ago?

In his blog, Michael's Minute, the title was Bill - I don't want your $1,158:

But truth be told, I don't want Microsoft's money, I just want a chance to compete and grow my company.
...
No, I don't want your money, I just want to compete without Microsoft terrorizing us and everyone in the PC business who works with us.

LOL! Ok, ok, I don't blame him for accepting the Microsoft's US dollars 20,000,000 for the Lindows brand. I don't think this is his sin. For many others, tough, he has probably lost all of his coolness.

Counter farewell

I apologize to everybody that has visited my blog lately... Sadly, I know it is too late for this. Today I found by accident that the Bravenet.com counter was injecting unwanted pop-up windows in my blog. I didn't realize it before because of Google's toolbar blocking feature. This afternoon, when the issue came out, I immediately commented out the counter code from my blog's template.

I don't think spending my time investigating Bravenet's policy is worthwhile. I will just ditch it once and forever.

Anyway, I have been using RE_INVIGORATE lately for statistics, and I am very satisfied with it.

And Google buys Picasa

These days you don't really need to be purchased by Microsoft. Google is just as good. I hope this means that Lorna, Tara and the other good people I "met" while discussing Hello, are getting a job with the seach giant.

Lookout purchased by Microsoft

Perhaps this is easiest way to get a job at Microsoft. All I need to do is create an insanely great product and have an amazing success.
 
As seen in the news this morning:

Hi, Lookout Users,

We wanted to send you a status note about what is happening with Lookout.
You may have already read the news on our website or in the press. Over the last year, Lookout has grown from a hobby project into a real product. It is still gaining momentum rapidly, and we've been delighted to read all the success stories from people using Lookout. A lot of this success has come from all the great help that we've had from all the users willing to sacrifice life and limb to help us test this product. Thank you so much for all your support, we hope you are recovering smoothly from your beta wounds!

As of today, Lookout is being officially drafted from a minor-league, small software company into the majors. Eric and I are very excited to announce that Microsoft has purchased Lookout. The next generation of Lookout will be an enhanced product with a lot more power. We look forward to leveraging the strengths of Microsoft and MSN in making a great product and hope to infuse some of our own "Lookout culture" into MSN products as well. This should be a great thing for everyone.

Some of you may have concerns about Lookout losing its feel as it moves into a larger company. Hopefully it helps to know that Eric and I are not worried about that. We've met the MSN team, and they are very good, extremely smart people. So, actually, to the contrary, we're excited to be part of Microsoft. Joining Microsoft allows us to take Lookout in directions that we never could have gone alone.

At the same time, we hope to maintain close relationships with you as much as we can, and we hope to continue to build software that is simple, elegant, and just plain works. Your input will still be as necessary as it was in order to bring forward great products. So, as we go through this transition, please let us know what you think! You can still contact us with any comments, questions, concerns, rants, or raves at lookout@lookoutsoft.com.

And, please don't worry, if you have become dependant on Lookout and don't want to change, you certainly don't have to. You can continue to use Lookout just as you always have for as long as you want.

Finally, if you do decide that you don't want to be contacted by MSN regarding Lookout updates or related products and services, you can opt-out.
Your privacy is of utmost concern to us, and you can read our new privacy statement, which is consistent with our previous policy and explains how we may use your personal information going forward here:
http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/privacy.html. To remove yourself, just send an email to optout@lookoutsoft.com We hope to continue working with you, so please don't click that link! But, if you must, we understand.

Thanks again for everything you've done, we appreciate all your help.

Mike, Eric, and the Microsoft MSN Team

I wish I understood Persian

Somebody known by the nickname "Inprise" posted a link to an article about Garbage Collection in Delphi .NET that I wrote sometime ago here on my blog. I think it is an Iranian forum about Delphi.

I am very honored! I just wish I understood what he says.

Will SQL Server 2005 Express finally kill Jet?

Well, I wish! After all, MSDE 2000 almost did.

For some time I have been expecting Microsoft to ship a product that anyone could use as a an easily embeddable, reliable, fast and of course, SQL Server compatible database engine to ship with their applications. I understand it also had to be free because of the open source databases out there, but I would have settled for it just being inexpensive.

I would say MSDE covered 90% of the requirements. But now Microsoft comes with SQL Server 2005 Express and its darn 256 MB RAM required (512 MB recommended). And some even have the guts to call it a "lightweight version of SQL Server 2005". If planet Microsoft continues to get farer from planet Earth at this pace, I will soon have to give up on flying so often between them.

Guys, for gods sake, there are still billions of computers out there with 64MB RAM or less, and they won't upgrade soon. And yes, this will either be your market (I would better say our market) or MySQL's.

Ok, I need to check the runtime RAM requirments for myself. I still hope they are kidding or there is some way to destile something of a slimmer engine. Otherwise I will conclude that Longhorn is getting most of its bloat from SQL Server code.

I also want to find out if SQL Express supports full text searches, something I cannot find an answer for in the documentation I have read so far.

But so far the installation just fails in my computer before writing any LOG file. At least I will be able to fill a bug thanks to Sara Williams and the other people at MSDN that struggle to keep planet Microsoft in reach.

Microsoft's own "rave": Visual Studio 2005 Express

Microsoft keeps surprising us developers with great news in every confference (well, news leaked out a few days before the TechEd Europe). The idea is extremely interesting, and it is obviously a big hit. Right now once you have downloaded the 2 1/2 MB loaders it is almost impossible to get any of the beta code. Download servers must be being taken by storm.

I read somwhere that John said the tools cost will be in the tens of dollars range (asides from SQL Server Express that will be free as MSDE is today). This puts Vistual Studio 2005 Express to compete not only with free tools but with Sun's Java Studio Creator, which apparently will be out really soon for 99 dollars.

Ok, I know... Everybody that cares already knows all this. I should blog instead about my cat... If I only had one.

And the winner is...

Throught Neowin.net: Hotmail will offer 250 MB to free accounts. Now the question is how is GMail going to implement Outlook and Outlook Express integration.
By the way, I had no idea that Hotmail Plus included POP3 access. Am I getting it right? Is this new? If it is not new, I think they should tune up their marketing.

The bets begin: how much storage will MSN add to your hotmail account?

According to this news piece on Neowin, MSN plans to announce their new storage limits as early as July.

I bet it will be 100 MB for free accounts. What is your bet?

causticTech: The Open Source Zealot

Ok, ok. I know this is not blogging, this is just linking. Well, this guy/girl deserves it. Before today, I though that Rory was some kind of "Charles Bukowski .NET". I was wrong, Rory is maybe "Henry Miller .NET" but this other guy just swears more, of course in a beautiful way. Here there is an incredible characterization of the
Open Source Zealot. I hope my OSZ friends read it and have fun with all the diarrhea.

Oh, perhaps it is Rory himself.

Web economy bullshit generator

Try this: dack.com > web > web economy bullshit generator Sometimes I wonder how talented people can say so much with a few words. Found via Don Box.

Blogging Hiatus?

After so many days, I don't even remember how it felt to write a blog. As I was absent from my blog many people came in, but nobody left a message. Why is it? It makes me feel lonely, I swear ;)

Fortunately, Salam Pax founda great word for us, and he hasn't been blogging since April. Anyway, Where is pink-candle? (absent since march) Where is Brian Harry? (Eric Rudder posts a lot more often).

From here I can see some kind of colective blogging hiatus. Could this ever have an effect on Dave or Scoble?

First Program

I found Lorna posted images of her first program. It is old style BASIC and from 1983. I don't remember exactly when did I write my first program, but it should have been only around one or two years before.

I am green with envy. I wish I had kept records of my early programming babbling like she had.

My take on USA politics today

I don't want this to become a custom. But I have to post this.

When I see Al Gore, one of USA Democrat Party's most important politicians, writing (or endorsing) something like this (found through Lornamatic), it makes me wonder why wasn't he elected president in 2000... Or was he?

Moreover, the administration has also set up the men and women of our own armed forces for payback the next time they are held as prisoners. And for that, this administration should pay a very high price. One of the most tragic consequences of these official crimes is that it will be very hard for any of us as Americans - at least for a very long time - to effectively stand up for human rights elsewhere and criticize other governments, when our policies have resulted in our soldiers behaving so monstrously. This administration has shamed America and deeply damaged the cause of freedom and human rights everywhere, thus undermining the core message of America to the world.

President Bush offered a brief and half-hearted apology to the Arab world - but he should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions. He also owes an apology to the U.S. Army for cavalierly sending them into harm's way while ignoring the best advice of their commanders. Perhaps most importantly of all, he should apologize to all those men and women throughout our world who have held the ideal of the United States of America as a shining goal, to inspire their hopeful efforts to bring about justice under a rule of law in their own lands. Of course, the problem with all these legitimate requests is that a sincere apology requires an admission of error, a willingness to accept responsibility and to hold people accountable. And President Bush is not only unwilling to acknowledge error. He has thus far been unwilling to hold anyone in his administration accountable for the worst strategic and military miscalculations and mistakes in the history of the United States of America.

Also when I read this kind of remarks by an USA retired general like Gen. Anthony Zinni, it helps me hope that my son will live in a safer and fairer world in a few years.

Almost every week, somebody calls me up, if it's not Mark Thompson it's somebody else, and says "What would you do now?" You know, there's a rule that if you find yourself in hole, stop digging. The first thing I would say is we need to stop digging. We have dug this hole so deep now that you see many serious people, Jack Murtha, General Odom, and others beginning to say it's time to just pull out, cut your losses. I'm not of that camp. Not yet. But I certainly think we've come pretty close to that.

I would do several things now. But clearly the first and most important thing you need is that UN resolution. That's been the model since the end of the Cold War, that has given us the basis and has given our allies the basis for joining us and helping us and provided the legitimacy we need.

We can't keep dropping paper on the UN, it's time for a group of adults, called the Perm Five, the permanent five members of the Security Council, to sit down and come up with some agreeable, mutually developed UN resolution that would allow other countries now to participate. And I think there are many out there at different levels, especially in the region, that would want to participate and help and before it comes too tough and too costly, we need to get them in. It will probably mean some of these Perm Five members and others will want to have a say in the political reconstruction and economic reconstruction, but so what?

If we create a free economy in Iraq, someday, probably sooner that later, some oil minister is going to cut a contract with the French. Guess what? That's inevitable. So why not start up front, admitting that. We need the UN resolution, that's the number one priority.

After getting that, I would first go to the countries in the region asking their help. I would do things like ask the countries to give us five or six officers for each of our battalions and regiments and brigades and above, five or six Arab officers that have attended our schools. For each of those units, that have gone to our command and general staff colleges, that not only speak English but know us, and we know them. And I'd put them on the planning staffs of these units, as advisors, as planners. If I'm a battalion commander down there in the middle of Fallujah or Najaf, I need more than some kid who happens to be of Arab descent and speaks Arabic that I drug over there and probably doesn't speak the dialect. I would like to have five or six of these guys that I went to school with, that I know, that would be there, that would be seconded there for me as planners, advisors, and to help me in these situations.

I would ask these countries in the region to allow us to build camps along the borders of Iraq, to train police, border security, and Army. I would lure the young men into these positions by considerable pay for what they are about to do, and they would deserve it. I would ask the Europeans and the others to help us build a training program, one that would last a long time, maybe even a year, to develop truly competent security forces with high morale, organizational coherence, the equipment and the pay that would make them proud. It may mean we're going to have to gut it out for a while. But it means that we have at least an end-state where we are going to put credible security forces and Iraqi forces on the ground. I would ask those countries that can commit those forces to help us, not only in patrolling cities that may be casualty traps, but in securing the borders.

There is a Ho Chi Minh trail here. Somewhere, somehow people are getting in the jihadis. I don't believe the Iraqis are blowing themselves up. They're coming from outside. We have insufficient forces to protect borders. I can't believe that we control all the major routes in and out from Kuwait and Jordan, when everyday I see another IED, improvised explosive device, blow up another fuel convoy coming down that road. Forces that protect road networks - that isn't a casualty intensive or difficult task - those are the kinds of forces under a UN agreement, that I think we can get in there to perform those missions, to use the Powell doctrine and putting some overwhelming force on the critical nodes, and the critical routes, and the critical infrastructure we need to protect. I would hold a conference somewhere in the region, ask the Arabs to sponsor it, although I would provide support.

I would invite every Iraqi business man I can convince to come, and I would invite foreign investors, and I would ask them to come together, hold this conference over a period of weeks, to define what these business men need to establish their business, to make it grow, to re-establish it, to protect it, the kind of investment they need, the infrastructure, but the key is jobs, jobs, jobs. Jobs for Iraqis. I would go to the contractors in there, and say, I don't want to see truck drivers that are coming from Peoria, Illinois. I want to pay truck drivers that are Iraqis. It doesn't take a hell of a lot of talent to drive a truck. Why aren't Iraqis driving trucks for their own reconstruction and redevelopment? Why are people from outside coming in, where they have no investment in protecting and providing for the security and the movement of those goods?

The Halliburtons and Bechtels and, and others ought to be encouraged to hire locally, unless there is a skills set that isn't present there. But I almost can't believe that you couldn't find that in there. I think we need to start talking about the kind of government we're going to eventually have in this nation. Is it a confederation? A federation? What kind of local autonomy are the Shi'a, the Kurds, the Sunnis, going to have? What will be the status of Baghdad? No one has talked about that structure publicly. We're about to turn this over to some interim council and we're heading towards, six months from now, an election; an election where the electorate is educated on how to vote Friday prayers from the pulpit.

There's no system of education for the electorate. There are no political parties that I see and have been developed openly - there are certainly some growing that I would be suspicious of. And I think that unless we come to grips with the form of government, unless we work openly and in a transparent manner to develop political parties, and this has to be under international UN supervision, and unless we run a program of education for the electorate, we're not going to like the results we see by the end of January when the supposed elections are going to take place.

Those are just a few ideas. But I think it takes quality people on the ground to be able to implement these, it takes international authority and not the U.S. stamp on it, because that's not acceptable anymore. It's going to be a period of time where we're going to have to bear the burden of the most severe security responsibilities. But we ought to at least plan for a time when we can turn that over, and at least share some of the less demanding security experiences and variances. And I'm convinced that if we open this up and get the UN resolution, there will be those that will come in and stand by our side, boot-to-boot, on some of the tougher missions.

We also have to stop the tough talk rhetoric. One thing you learn in this business is, don't say it unless you're going to do it. In this part of the world, strength matters. And if you say you are going to go in and wipe them out, you better do it. If you say you're going to do it and then you back off and find another solution, you have lost face. And we have got to stop the kind of bravado and talk that only leads us into trouble out there. We need to be more serious and more mature in what we project as an image. Our whole public relations effort out there has been a disaster. I read the newspapers from the region every night online, and if you watch Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, or even some of the more moderate stations out there, and you read the editorials in the newspaper, there is a different war being portrayed in that region. A different conflict than we're getting from Fox, CNN, CBS, et cetera. And we better get the two jibed somehow, because that has been a massive failure. And there again, we could use advice from the region as to how to go about it. Thank you for you attention. I'd be glad to take any questions you may have.

But Americans must vote first.

Where is Pink Candle?

Besides the fact she was the first human being placing my blog in her blogroll, I used to read hers. Where is she now is a complete mystery.

I guess if she had to return to her country, she could somehow find an Internet connection to blog about it. I hope she didn't stop eating as it was in her plans to save on some meals. I mean it seriously.

Alex is a Total Geek, and I like his blog

Besides the fact that I have seen a steep boost in my blog's traffic since Alex linked to me some days ago (I had 3 to 5 more people coming in a week!), I find Random Acts of Alex very interesting. I find myself reading his posts and laughing at the same time, but not in an overly strong way. Very healthy humor... Like it... Linked.

Rory vs. 9 zealots (revised)

I haven't read Rory Blyth's blog for a while, but today I did, and - as I should have expected - I found a true gem:

...I was descended upon by what looked like a roaming band of zombie youth. The tallest one in the group addressed me:

What he said: Hey, there, friend. How are you?
What I said: I'm tired.
What I was thinking: This is going to get weird.

What he said: Tired? That's life, friend.
What I said: Yeah.
What I was thinking: I was right. This is going to get weird.

What he said: Do you see these people I'm with? These are my nine friends here.
What I said: Oh.
What I was thinking: Oh.

What he said: Do you want to know something, friend?
What I said: Yes.
What I was thinking: No.

What he said: Not one of them is worried about being tired. Do you know why?
What I said: No.
What I was thinking: Meth?

What he said: It's because they've all found Jesus, my friend.
What I said: Really.
What I was thinking: Where? At a bus stop? Under the couch cushions while looking for change?

What he said: Have you ever thought about what Jesus could do for you?
What I said: Not much, really. Religion isn't my thing.
What I was thinking: If your god really is omnipotent and omniscient as your people claim, then he's directly responsible for my mother's stroke and the fact that my sister has been deaf since she was about three. If the Lord, or Jesus, or one of their henchmen ever happens to appeareth before me, I just hope that I remember, among the pyrotechnic light show that should accompany any such apparition, to kick God square in the nuts as a "thank you" for services rendered. [Note: If anybody is offended by this, then remember that God in his omnipotence is entirely responsible for my having said what I've just said - this was all God's will.]

What he said: That's OK, bro. I'll be praying for you.
What I said: Thanks. I really appreciate that.
What I was thinking: If you really want to waste your time praying, then could you at least pray for me to win the lottery?

What he said: Been to the pool in the hotel yet? We're all heading there later for a party. You ought to go.
What I said: Awesome.
What I was thinking: Mental note: Avoid the pool at all costs. In case these guys run into me in the elevator later on, then remember to take the cyanide suicide pill kept in the heel of my left shoe.

What he said: Well, good night, brother. I hope to see you at the pool later, and I hope that you'll one day realize what Jesus can do for you.
What I said: Totally.
What I was thinking: Maybe he could do my ironing.

I can really relate to Rory on this.

The inclination some people have to push their beliefs down to other people throats is one of many hints that made me figure out I wanted to get out of religion back when I was a teenager.

It is not to say all religious people behave like this or to affirm that the non-religious don’t. At least my friends that are religious don't ever do this with me, and even my mother gave up already.

But this is definitely a behavior that I found pretty normal and justified when I was into religion, and here is why: They taught me to believe that I knew better than anybody, and that the power of my religion was the knowledge of all those things that were revealed by God and than therefore cannot be questioned.

So, if you are not lazy, and you go out on the streets with the conviction that you know better who is going to stop you of doing this?

Later, after failing miserably many times, I figured out what was wrong. When somebody you don’t know approaches you to tell you he knows your problems, and also their solutions, what is your first thought? Clue: You think that you know exactly what his problem is, and also how to solve it immediately ;)

So my transformation from a religious person to a non-religious person was learning that I didn’t know better. Learning that I could hardly grasp anything, that my knowledge was not even enough for me, so how could it be responsible to tell other people to live according to my faith? I learned I was an ignorant, and ignorance is something that nobody will ever take completely away from me.

It is again an “arrogance equals stupidity” thing.

As I said, I didn't “lost” religion only for this. There were lots of other hints.

Besides, I don't want to begin preaching for atheism, agnosticism or nihilism. For me the whole concept of preaching is wrong.

Sometimes it is hard to remember that I found Rory's blog just because of his Microsoft dittoheadness.

Brian Harry is now blogging

He didn't really need too much encouragment to start ;) Go see what he has to say about Visual Studio Team System.

Jimaní and Fond Verrettes

Jimaní and Fond Verrettes are two towns in Hispaniola, close to the Dominican - Haitian border. Both were severely affected by the intense raining during the weekend. More than 500 have died because of the floodings, and even more have lost their homes.

I have seen images of packed dead bodies, adults and children, so horrifying that I wouldn't have the guts to publish them here.

Yes, those people died because of a storm, but more than this, they died so terrible deads because they were extremely poor.

I have never wanted to write about political issues here. But sometimes I just feel so tired of this unfair, stupid, fractal iniquity that repeats its pattern all around this world and in every possible scale! Things only change when the ones that have the power to abuse others elect instead to extend their helping hands. And this seldom happens.

Updated Thursday, May 27, 2004 at 14:48:

According to Reuters and The New York Times, the death toll rises to 2000 after the discovery of 1000 bodies in a remote Haitian village called Mapou.

Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation: Source Code Control and Item Tracking Demo

Happy to hear about Brian Harry again

As almost everybody else, I learned today about the Visual Studio Team System. Great news!

A few minutes ago I found through Wesner Moise's blog this article in Eric Sink's blog (for whom those are not so good news). There I read that Brian Harry is the guy in charge of Hatteras, the new enterprise-class source control system being developed by Microsoft.

All in all I am happy to hear again about Brian Harry. I first heard about him in the good old days of the DOTNET list. He was one of the fine guys from Microsoft that actually cared to answer my naive questions. Then I saw him in one video from MSDN TV, but lately he vanished completely. From time to time I google his name and I only find about his past work. I must say I was a little worried.

Now that he can talk about Hatteras, I hope he will get his own blog soon!

Actually, last time I saw his name was in the source code of a program I needed to recover the admin password of some old VSS database (that was of course mine). His name was part of the seed for the password hashing code ;)

By the way, I hope Eric Sink's business is going to be ok. I think it will.