Vitor Rodrigues

Written from iPod touch. Touch screen keyboard sucks! I love my PDA with keyboard 5 minutes to write this post .

Second part, written from laptop: I only had about 10 minutes to play with the Ipod Touch before the employee kicked be out. He wanted to go home and I was the last person in the store The keyboard is really hard to use. My thumbs are too big, and it didn’t work when I tried my PDA pen nor a regular pen. I guess it expects a larger surface of contact, so I was only able to type with my fingers. My PDA (HP HW6915) has a regular keyboard, but even using the pen and touch keyboard is much faster than using the Ipod Touch one.

Apart from this bad experience, I didn’t have much time to try the device’s features. Only got to try the browser and I liked it. It displays the pages nicer than IE on Windows Mobile. It is also very slim, more than I expected. Still, not in my wishlist. I did like the iPod Nano and may get one sometime.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I have been running Yahoo Ads and Google Adense on my blog pages for over several months now. Although I am yet to make a few cents on advertising, the reason why I keep the ads running is that I do plan to write a detailed comparison of both tools sometime in the future. Google beats all of its competitors in context search and advertising, but in my opinion Yahoo is so behind only by self responsibility. From several constructive comments I’ve made on their YPN Blog, the answers, if any, were vague and the problems persisted, with completely out of context ads.

But today I found something really fun while browsing trough one of my articles, “The World is Flat“:

Food for thought:

• being Friedman’s book such an actual and popular topic, how can Yahoo not find any more relevant ads to publish in this page?
• Google paying for ads in the Yahoo network? This one makes even less sense   

Popularity: 18% [?]

I just finished reading the most recent best-selling book from Thomas Friedman: “The World is Flat”. It is definitely a very interesting read about how the world is becoming leveraged nowadays, mostly because of the surging of high speed internet connections all over the world and the opening of some cultures to the world.

I was both amazed and amused by Friedman’s research! It is incredible the large amount of trips and interviews the author did during the research phase for this book and the perfect location of each and every quotation and conversation. The way Friedman positions the real-world examples makes all of his concepts become simple and clearly understandable.

Along with the top quality research, another aspect of the book that captivated me was that describes several perspectives of the flat world, corresponding to several places in the world, from US, Latin America, Africa, Middle East, India, China and many others. It is also noteworthy the effort of the author in promote collaboration over and over again as the way to build our future.

 I definitely recommend this book, and give it 9 in a 1-10 scale. If you decided to read it, take a deep breath, because it is 650 pages long (english version) with a smaller than average size font. Good readings!

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After reading Alcides Fonseca’s post regarding is opportunity to become an MSP and asking whether other companies have similar programs, I would like to introduce two programs related with DB2 that are targeted for university students: DB2 On Campus and DB2 Student Ambassador.

DB2 on Campus: The DB2 on Campus Program is a project designed to promote the use of DB2 in universities. The logistics and delivery of the program is performed between the DB2 Express-C team, and the local IBM Academic Initiative representative. The program consists of the following items and activities:

1. A speech titled “The role of DB2 Express-C in the Information on Demand World”. This speech explains DB2 9 technology, with an emphasis on pureXML™, and encourages students to use DB2 Express-C, create university DB2 user groups, participate in the DB2 forums, and write documents about DB2. All of these activities can help them to advance their future careers.
2. Introductory DB2 courses to obtain DBA and developer skills.
3. Free DB2 books donated to the university library
4. Free DB2 certification exams offered to the students

I will be at University of Minho on September 19th doing the speech for the DB2 on Campus program. There was not enough time to prepare the full-day event, but if you or someone at your university is interested in having this full-day event happening at your university, please feel free to email me and I’ll put you in contact with the program’s manager in order to schedule the event (my email is vrodrig at us.ibm.com).

There is a DB2 On Campus Facebook group. Follow these instructions to join. 

Subscribe to the DB2 Express-C blog to keep updated on news regarding this free to develop, deploy and distribute database(1). 

DB2 Student Ambassador: This is a program for individual students that want to promote the use of DB2 at their education institutions. Though the program is voluntary, it gives students a chance to learn more about DB2, develop presentation skills and marketing skills. All of these skills will be valuable in their careers. At the end of the program, the student will receive a letter of recommendation from IBM including all the details of the activities performed. The more activities performed, the better the letter of recommendation! We hope this will help the student get a job more easily in the future.

I consider this to be an excellent opportunity to get involved and interact with developers from a huge project like DB2, distributed across Toronto and Silicon Valley laboratories.

More information  about this program can be found here: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/students_programs.html#ambassador

Although I’m only familiar with the DB2 programs, for the ones interested, there is also an IBM Academic Initiative program, focused on Open Standars, Open Source and IBM resources for the academic world.

The opportunities are out there, so just grab the one you like and boost your career

(1) Yes, it is the fully loaded version available for free, with one limitation: it can only use up to 4GB of RAM  

Popularity: 12% [?]

The executive committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) fell one vote shy of the nine required to approve Microsoft’s Open XML standard. It voted 8 to 7 in favor of approval with one abstention, the group announced last week.

The ballot description here: Open XML ballot

The voting details here:  Open XML US voting

It’s unfortunate that some companies didn’t add comments to their votes. I would be interested to know the reasons for Apple and Intel voting yes, being that they are not strongly affiliated with Microsoft.

Another topic that can lead to some discussion is the fact that the two government agencies present in the group had different votes. the DHS thinks that the existence of 2 standards is a good thing, while the Department of Defense did their homework and based their negative vote on the following technical issues with Open XML:

From the several government agencies present in the voting body, it is interesting to see the different voting positions. The Department of Defense clearly identified the technical reasons for their negative vote: 

1. Binary information in the standard that would lead to security concerns.
2. The referencing of unexplained backward compatibility modes that might pose a problem for third party implementers.
3. The use of proprietary file formats within the open standard appear to cause potential intellectual property ownership concerns.

The Department of Homeland Security voted yes, even though they also found technical issues with the proposed standard:

Although this is a though result to Microsoft, I do think that eventually Open XML will be considered a standard format. Microsoft may have to do some work on addressing some technical issues like the ones pointed by DD, but eventually they will get the majority of votes. They just need one vote, and most of the NO votes were “conditional approvals”, voted as NO per the voting guidelines. I’m sure they will try to do some lobbying as a mean to get the missing vote.

Source: pcworld.com

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When I moved to the US about 2 years ago, one thing changed in my life habits: I stopped downloading “illegal” stuff from the net. No more divx movies or MP3 musics. I started listening to online radio (www.sky.fm hs been on my top list since then) and using Netflix to all my movie needs. And the truth shall be told: I never really felt the urge to download this kind of stuff from the internet. Online radio has a good variety, and Netflix delivers the movies next day. Downloading movies would sometimes take one or two days for me because I never had much credits on eMule, so Netflix was faster than downloading and with better quality.

After I moved to Canada in the Fall of 2006, my music habits continued, but not my movie ones. I still go to the cinema, but there is nothing like Netlifx over here. I mean, there are alternatives, but not with the same quality/price/stock/speed. Netflix-alike companies charge more over here because people do not return movies some times, and some mail-mans also like to evolve their movie collection using those DVDs. I always wondered if Netflix would work in a less responsible society than US and Toronto example (which is everything but Canadian) just proved it won’t.  I even tried some online alternatives like amazon and iTunes but the ratio price/service didn’t satisfy me. Also, iTunes movie stock in Canada is miles away of Us or UK. So I replaced my movie renting with watching some online TV.

This week, when reading  about DRM in some posts on P*, I decided to investigate something I’ve heard about a few times over here: the Private Copying Act (pdf). Yep, it looks like in Canada downloading copyrighted stuff for personal use is not illegal. It is, however, illegal to upload copyrighted content. If you use p2p programs and you allow uploading while downloading, then you are breaking the law. Knowing about this Act was a good thing, as I started to use isFree a few months ago and I was never sure if it was legal or not. Another reason why I never felt I was “breaking the law” while using isFree is that the tv shows I watch (LOST, Heroes and CSI) are always broadcasted in my cable tv before they are available on isFree. That way, I was just using isFree almost as a Tivo system to watch the shows when I have free time and not when I’m cooking or biking.

The Private Copying Act also explains other thing that I never really understood: the high price of writable media when compared with other countries. It has been a few years since I paid more than 1 Euro per CD, and I always questioned myself how could they be so expensive in here. Well, I guess the $0.77 levy fee paid on each CD helps explaining that. One more mystery solved

This won’t change my daily habits too much, as I will for sure continue listening to online radio, and I’m thinking about buying a TV so I can make use of the cable tv subscription at home, but it makes me think more about buying an MP3 player to use when biking, hiking and filling it with the music I want, as long as I find a website to download it for free without having to do any upload

 

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New motherboard and HDD on the way. Next week my laptop will be submitted to several surgeries in order to find were the problem is. If my CD burner even worked, I would install ubuntu and see how it behaves in it, just to make sure that the problem here is not windowze…

By the way, has anyone seen similar behavior? Even if my system is not doing much, kernel is always at 1-5% and when it spikes to the 80-90%, then I can go for a coffee.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I decided to switch from prepaid cellphone service to a monthly plan… The plan price is $20 for 200 minutes…. Not so bad, BUT, there are some extra charges:

• $8/month for “system access fee”, whatever that is, considering I’m paying $20 for the service itself.
  
• plus $1/month for 911 access fee
• plus $7 to display the caller’s phone number. This is just nuts. I need to pay to see who is calling me. Note that the caller can still choose to show or hide his/her number.
  
• received calls are charged at the same price as made calls
  
• activation fee of $35, even after being a prepaid customer of them
  

 add the tax to it and the $20 monthly plan is now $40 per month… I’m still deciding if I should go back to prepaid… but for a country where I pay more for insurance per year than my car is worth (year 2000 ford focus sedan), nothing looks strange anymore…. I doubt that there is such thing as consumer protection around here…

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Just stumbled across this short article on BusinessWeek about writing a winning resume. Although we could elaborate more about the “science” of writing resumes, the three topics they focus on are very important, to which I add my comments:

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Um grupo de “assaltantes” entra num predio às escuras, vão direitinhos em direcção a uma secretária, roubam uma capa que diz Beta e põe-se a andar. Ou é uma tentativa de marketing, ou então os “assaltantes” trabalham na secretária ao lado. Só assim se justifica saberem exactamente o que “roubar” e de onde o fazer. 

Também é interessante o facto de que eles foram capazes de entrar no edificio sem activar o alarme mas não conseguiram sair…

Aqui fica o video:

E aqui fica o link: http://segredovodafone.blogspot.com/

Popularity: 3% [?]