HTML5 Video and Mozilla

I’m going to skip the introduction and go right to the point: support Mozilla!

How? Use firefox and promote it.

Why? Because you want the web to be Free (not free as in “free beer” but Free as in Freedom). Because you value Freedom and knowledge!

Read these two blog posts:

HTML5 video and codecs by Mike Shaver, Mozilla VP of Engineering

Video, Freedom And Mozilla by Robert O’Callahan, Mozilla Developer

(originally via Slashdot)

If you use Firefox you are giving it a bigger market share and thus more power with content providers. After all, youtube would be worthless without viewers.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

What if a video site is online but no one can view the videos in it? Is it still a video site? Would it have any traffic at all?

I was planning on switching to chrome – after all, it is open source and firefox is slower, uses more resources and I prefer chrome’s UI in many aspects (but not all). However none of those things is nearly as important to me as keeping the web an open place and I believe in the importance of sites like youtube (we’ve all heard about videos on youtube documenting things like police abuse for example).

I’m no Richard Stallman and I not trying to turn anyone into Stallman but the choice between Firefox and Chrome is a close one to begin with. It’s not like I’m going to start promoting Linux (gNewSense at that) over OSX.

Codebits 2008

After the awesomeness that was codebits 07 I actually expeect 08 to be a lot better. It wasn’t imo. It still ranks as Legendary on the my personal scale. Food was a major let down tough

The talks I went too were a disappointment. Even Jack Motif’s XMPP talk was way too introductory for the audience (at least for me). More code less talk? Seriously looking at XML I could read in the damn specification was not fun. But I did get to ask a few questions and talk to Jack Motif and Pedro Melo a bit after the talk which made it worth it. Jack Motif told me to look at Wokkel and said he had written a lot of example code for it. I’ll definitivelly look at it sometime in the near future. And this was the best talk I went. Sadly on the second day I chose to sleep late so I missed Pedro Melo’s and Celso Pinto’s presentations. Both of which I’m told were “teh awesome 4tw” or something like that.

What was suprising is that this year, even though the talks @MAIN looked great on paper, most people went to the talks on the other stages. And judging from my experience they did the right thing – however I have no interest whatsoever in server-side js or web cartooning which seem to have been among the most popular).

Another fail was the super loud Rock Band playing while some of us were trying to code but people seem to have enjoyed it.

82 projects? Holly….! Sadly things run late (fail!) and I had to leave before people finished showing their projects – I’ll have to look at the videos later. A lot of people were doing some pretty cool stuff but sadly didn’t finish in time. As for my stuff, I’ll put it online sometime in the near future when I don’t have better things to do (like study for tomorrow’s exam – pratical code thingy whatever you want to call it… crap by any other name would smell just as bad)

I got to talk a bit with the usual suspects from Lisboa (ended up with an handivi sticker on my macbook) and Porto and also met a bunch of new people from all around (Lisboa, Porto, Aveiro, Coimbra, Faro, …) – some from FEUP! And ofc I learned a few things. I regret not having ended up joining some team and working on some project with more people but I did get to play (literally) with pygame and with django. Both of which I’ve been meaning to actually play with (more than just doing tutorial examples) for like 1yr.

Btw think putting the RFID stuff@codebits for everyone to hack was a brilliant idea. Congrats @ whoever had it. And congrats to the sapo.pt team behind this event. It’s the only one of its kind (and level of quality) here in Portugal. Granted that may not mean a lot but it is a great-omg-you-really-cant-miss-it event imho.

Oh! Got to play around with an EeePC 1000H (or something) and I liked it (thanks dude, whoever you were, I forgot cuz my memory is bad and it works worse without sleep). On coming back, word from relax is that everything (or close enough) on his 901 is now supported by Ubuntu. I dunno if I want one because I really need it or just because it’s a cool gadget and I’m rationalizing my lust. Whatever. I can’t afford it anyway. Not with the ginormous ammounts of money I’m wasting travelling around… this semester I’ll actually spend more time outside Porto than @ the uni… hell yeah! Which brings me to my need to work on my cibermouse stuff both for the Robotics course and for the competition at RTSS08 in Barcelona (yay).

I’m sure I left out a lot of stuff but I’m short on time and patience and this is better than nothing imo.

Twitter – What Would It Take To Migrate

It amazes me that a service that has this much downtime and is so incredibly limited compared to its competition manages to be number 1. I honestly wonder what the competition would have to do to get users to move.

That’s social network lock-in for you.

Got Handivi

I got my handivi invite yesterday, registered today but I’ll wait until november to start using it. I’ll be out of the country (from the 24th of October to the 3rd of November) and that way I can try it for 1 month by subscribing to TMNs internet service for 1 month (which isn’t exactly cheap at 7.5 eur/mo).

Antena 1 2 3 Podcasts

The Portuguese public broadcast service, RTP (the Portuguese BBC) has podcasts for some of its radio shows.

Thanks, kudos/props/wtv for the people (person?) responsible for this. I hope more of Antena’s 2 (music) shows get added soon.

Sadly, it seems that, at least at the moment, it’s only low quality samples (for SOMDESCAPE which is the only show, among those available, that I’m interested in).

PS: what’s up with using WMA and Real instead of making stuff available in (high quality) mp3? That’s lame.

friendsnippets.com

friendsnippets.com is for code what del.icio.us is for bookmarks. Just found it and fell in love with it.

link to my account.

Wordpress Related Content

Wordpress.com (where this blog is hosted) recently started appending

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

To every blog post. These are links to other blogs hosted on wordpress.com that are (possibly) related to it. This feature can be disabled but personally I like it

You can try it by clicking for example on one of my “not so new” posts (like this one) and scrolling to the bottom.

Google Web Services for Free

Dave Winer recently broke the news that Google will soon introduce a “Google Web Services”,  a competitor to Amazon Web Services. This isn’t much of a shock to anyone. The extra bit that is somewhat of a surprise  is the price: free. He then explains that the reason it will be free is that they can pay for it in the reduced cost of integrating new acquisitions into their infrastructures which would become, effectively zero.

I don’t agree with that. At least I don’t think that is the main reason. I think it’s just the same old business model – basic service is free, premium is paid. The same model you see in Google Apps and a lot of other business on the web.

The basic service will be limited, in terms of traffic and/or storage (file and DB) etc. This will be the most widely used by startups. The premium service will just be the same pricing model amazon – pay as you go, the only different is that you don’t start paying at zero usage but rather at a higher threshold. When a startup becomes successful its needs will grow exponentially. They will be using more than the maximum allowed for free, and they’ll need to pay. But that’s alright because now that they are successful they can afford it. And the 1% or so that will be successful will have subsidized everyone that didn’t make it and still give Google a nice profit. Let’s not forget that Google’s infrastructure is already here and even tens of thousands of failed ventures won’t make a dent in it. Successful ventures will generate enough cash to upgrade that same infrastructure. Specially as the cost of hardware continues to drop.

Off course I’m sure people at Google also thought of the acquisition factor. Past acquisitions have taken a lot of time to be integrated. I think it took something like a year for writely to become “Google Docs“. That’s a very long time on the web.

Combine the free GWS with the powerful web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails that allow single individuals to create useful applications quickly and the new marketting oppurtunities that the web2.0 has created and the cost of trying won’t be measured in millions, thousands or even hundreds of dollars. It will be measured in terms of hours – the hours you “wasted” trying. And that, in many cases, won’t even be “time wasted” but rather “experience gained”.

It’s a brave new world indeed.

Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price

Free: The Past and Future of a Radical Price

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail speaking at Nokia World 2007.

(via Guy Kawasaki)

Wikipedia Exposed

Quite an interesting read imo (don’t forget to start at the bottom of the page – damn blogs).

Relying on a publicly editable document for information on controversial topics never seemed all that wise to me. Nevertless I’ve found wikipedia to be a good place to start when looking for technical or basic stuff (such as when someone starts confusing the RC circuits for low-pass and high-pass filters) and trivia (manimal!!!).