blog do chester

Confesso que ia deixar passar este dia em branco, pois cada vez mais me convenço de que a publicação na web tem mais potencial para fazer virar os grandes talentos do que as editoras, jornais, governos e datas comemorativas.

Mas não dá pra deixar de destacar o um catálogo monstruoso de quadrinhos nacionais que o Blog dos Quadrinhos está publicando. É quadrinho pra mais de metro – poucas vezes vi tanta coisa reunida.

O formato é simples, e, ao mesmo tempo, completo: cada site tem uma tira de amostra, o nome do autor e o link para ler mais. Dá pra queimar fácil o carnaval (ou o mês todo) lendo arquivos, marcando favoritos e assinando RSS.

Fonte: Cadu “Homem-Grilo” Simões

And OpenSocial 0.7 hits the door. Too sad I don’t have John Battelle’s balls to write down and publish predictions, otherwise I could be bragging about having expected “a serious version not until the end of January”, as I suggested to a few colleagues.

Taking off the bugfixes, I would like to emphasize the following features (condensed from the release notes):

• Standardized profile information fields. (…) standard fields that you can access about a Person (…) include location, schools, pets, movies, sports, and more.(…)
• Support for viral growth. (…) You can invite a user’s friends to install your application (…) You can also send an application-specific message (…)

Those were absolute show-stoppers when comparing OpenSocial to FaceBook – not the only ones, but the most visible. I did not check (yet) how well implemented they are, but at least now they exist – and that makes 0.7 the most important milestone since the public announcement of OpenSocial.

At the same time of this release, Google announces an important step for content container and app developers: the Google Gadgets specification (already used by Orkut and several other containers), which was not per se part of OpenSocial, will have a reference application handed over to Apache. This clarifies one big source of confusion, signaling the developers with more effective universality for apps developed for the platform.

A revista Casseta Popular nº 47 (de Outubro de 1991) apresenta esta pérola: uma entrevista com ninguém menos que Antonio Carlos, o Mussum (o link mostra ele, Tião Macalé e Didi salvando uma piada horrenda com atuações e gags impagáveis).

Para deleite da velha guarda, digitalizei as seis páginas da entrevista. Clique aqui para baixar (PDF, 3.8MB).

Heck, just when Java was getting free from the mammoth’s weight, MySQL gets caught.

I keep wondering how Sun will apply their “expertise” in MySQL. Ideas:

• Launching new versions with meaningless name changes to imply the idea of evolution (after all, it is “obvious” that Java = Java 1.0 or 1.1, Java2 = Java 1.2, 1.3 or 1.4 and Java5 = Java 1.5);
• Sell the software bundled with hardware that almost nobody wants, then open source it when almost nobody cares (like Solaris);
• Open source it under a license that simply does not allow it to be included in places other than inside other Sun products (as they did with ZFS);
• My favorite: start a “smart” marketing campaign saying that MySQL is the “dot in the dot-org” (if you follow the link, scroll down like there was no tomorrow, they trademark huge loads of crap).

Shiny future. The only positive thing I can say about that is that we have PostgreSQL, as a last resort.

A friend of mine called me this Sunday, happy as a child in a candy shop: she had just got herself a shinny new MacBook, after years lusting over my old-but-cute iBook G4.

Of course she wanted tips on how to do the basic PC things from a fellow Mac user, and I started by talking about cool software to install (thing such as Firefox, NeoOffice, etc.). But when I mentioned Adium (a multi-messenger client like Pidgin or Trillian – except for running on Macs, and not being ugly or clumsy), she said in a very candid voice:

“No, thanks, I can use Meebo for that”.

I got dazzled. Meebo is my favorite solution for IM when you can’t install IM software, or your network won’t let you connect on non-trivial ports – I even blogged about it when it was on its infancy. But using it as your main IM solution? That seemed like absolute nonsense for me, so I couldn’t even mutter a decent answer for her.

But after some time thinking about the subject, I realized there isn’t a rational reason for which you should use desktop software instead of a Web 2.0 application for IM – in fact, most of my IM nowadays is done on Google Talk – right from within GMail, entirely on the browser. And I almost didn’t realize it.

This episode made me think about how much of the resistance in switching from desktop applications to Web-based ones is based on real limitations of the latter, and how much is sheer inertia. And one interesting fact (easily noticeable after watching a few users) is that different people have different profiles of choice for web-based and desktop applications.

My theory was that power was the divider: heavy users of Word or Excel would never consider alternatives such as Zoho or Google Documents; people who depend too much on calendars would never switch from Outlook to online solutions; and so on. But seeing the new generations going straight to online apps (for things that they use heavily, such as IM) is making me reconsider that rationale.

It is hard to say when most applications will have compelling web-based alternatives, but it is even harder to argue that most, if not all, will have them at one point of the time. The fact is: programmers whose main motivation is seeing people use and like their apps (such as me) should really start to think more on the web as the default platform, and not as the least common denominator when multiplatform deployment is a must – a limited vision that sometimes still clouds my mind.

The times they area a-Changin’…

miniTruco is an implementation of the Brazilian Truco card game (also known as Truco Paulista or Truco Mineiro) for Java-enabled cellphones.

One of its features is its multiplayer ability over the Internet. That is done by having a server software that hosts the games, and this server has a (somewhat) well-defined API that allows clients to connect to it.

This post describes how to interact with that server, so people can write their own clients in any platform they wish. Although most Truco players are Portuguese speakers, it was written in English to reach a wider audience (and in light of the recent addition of an English-language option to the J2ME miniTruco).

Both the server and the J2ME client are free (GPL) software, and albeit other clients are not obligated to be published under such a license, they are encouraged to do so.

(mais…)

Ao invés de me frustrar quando vejo alguma bizarrice no mundo do software (e eu vejo muita, acreditem), eu simplesmente mando pro The Dailiy WTF (como fiz com essa).

Gone are the days of single-digit audience for Gecko-based browsers, but IE is far from disappearing (which is a good thing even for the diehard Firefox defenders and all five Opera users – after all, the lack of serious competition turned Netscape into Netscape 4 and kept IE improvement frozen after that). But tools such as Firefox’s Web Developer Toolbar (a swiss-kinfe of tools for debugging weird and browser quirks) make lots of people (including me) develop the whole front-end using Firefox, only switching to IE to see if things don’t break.

But they do. It can be argued forever whether Mozilla, Microsoft or you failed in following standards – but the fact is that neither of the first two will fix the site – it’s your job. In that sense, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar is a welcome addition to the web developer toolset. As its Firefox counterpart, it adds the ability of dynamically breaking down DOM elements, resizing the window to typical screen resolutions and other niceties that help finding out which elements are causing trouble.

It is still a bit 1.0-ish (it only works well un-snapped – and the resize button can get hidden on the upper corner when you snap) and misses a few functions from its cousin. But it’s a good thing to have, and having it released by Microsoft themselves is a good indicator that there is someone there paying attention to developers outside the one-size-fits-all-mammoth-development-tool world.

Estou terminando de ler o Liberal Libertário Libertino – Crônicas, mas posso escrever com segurança, pois se trata de uma coletânea de textos publicados no blog homônimo – beneficiados pela organização e conveniência que só as árvores mortas proporcionam.

Os textos do Alex Castro são difíceis de definir. Mas tiveram (e têm) um impacto muito forte sobre a minha maneira de ver as coisas – ainda que eu não concorde com tudo o que ele diz, sua visão meio que une o desapego budista com um jeito meio beatnik, meio Harvey Pekar de levar a vida, e isso gera um mundo de assuntos – e de crônicas.

Se as diatribes dele sobre consumismo ou sobre pessoas-que-acreditam-em-coisas (termo fantástico!) te agradarem, leia este livro com urgência. Se você se sentir ofendido por algum deles, pode ser que não seja a sua realidade, ou que você esteja vivendo em negação. Mas ao menos você já tem uma boa pista dos motivos que me levam a não ter carro nem fé.