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The Jabber community lost a dear friend this week. Peter Millard, long time Jabber friend, and Exodus author, passed away after a struggle with cancer.
I didn't knew him personally, but the quality and breadth of his work for this community make him a dear friend to all of us.
Peter has written about this loss.
My deepest condolences go to his wife Christina, and is daughter Zoe.
Technorati Tags: jabber
I'm still impressed with TextMate and although I still run into Vim from time to time, most of my work is now done inside the new sweetheart.
Of course, we are still in early stages of our relationship, and the old and trusted Vim can still regain is rightful place, specially with the newest version 7 (in late beta now).
Yet sometimes I see another set of possibilities with Textmate that blew me away. The latest one is this new concept, by Duane Johnson, of multiple arbitrary simultaneous carets (MASC). Go and see the screen-cast.
Great stuff.
Technorati Tags: textmate
Predictions, the stuff fools are made of.
Recently a couple of events, web-based services, and old style thinking have come together in my mind in a way that makes me want to write about it and share. Being about the future of the internet and the applications we will see after this Web 2.0 craze subsides, well, it just makes it interesting.
The most important part of the Web 2.0 hype are the simple and universal APIs that most sites are deploying. The value in those APIs are the desktop applications that we can now build using them, and not the sites that we can mash-up together.
You see, I don't buy into two things:
I think what you really want is this:
First, you want access to your data. The main pitch you see on Web apps now-a-days is access to your data everywhere. The point that they are trying to pass on to you is that if you put all your stuff online, you can jump online, and have it all. The key operating principle here is the "jump online". What if I cannot or I don't want to do that? Sure, you can get online on most of the world right now, but you might now want to do it, due to cost, security considerations, or other reasons.
I don't think that putting your data online is the total answer. My feeling is that the master repository of your stuff is your laptop. Maybe a future laptop without keyboard, or screen. Just storage and processing power, that you can hook up to public "screens and keyboards" everywhere. And in that situation what you really want is synchronization APIs. You want to synchronize your data with remote online services, because you want to share it with a closed group of people like your family, or publish it to the world at large.
So you would have it all with you. Maybe not all, given that each person data is growing to the multi-gigabyte size (my digital life fits in under 100 Gb right now, but that is excluding DVDs) but the working set that you need on any given point in time. And it would all sync with your preferred services online.
Second, you data is fragmented on the web. You have multiple "address-book-with-social-networking" services, but can you pull the network from LinkedIn and use it as a access control filter on Flickr? Heck, I can't even get a iCalendar file from Orkut with my friends birthdays, the last time I looked for it. The information is online, out there, but you cannot cross it in meaningful ways.
At least on my laptop, my address book is used by the email application, the instant messaging application and others. My calendar application can receive and aggregate events sent to me by mail or IM, and I can publish that information selectively. I can publish my photos to my family with something like photocast (excellent idea, botched up job on the implementation and lack of respect shown to the community) or Film Loops (another excellent idea that I still think lacks some touches, like accepting directly RSS feeds with enclosures).
That leads to my other point: browser based interfaces. The last year or so, we where blown away by the rich experiences provided by the latest in Web technologies. The three major webmail, our local Sapo Webmail, the 37Signals applications (no, I was not hired by them, it was a freaking joke, people!), or one of my latest favorites, Dabble (check the video). They are truly amazing and I bow to them, because I cannot imagine the amount of work behind each one, and dealing with the browser mess.
And it's only getting better. The WHAT-NG promises another leap in usability and richness of controls to our usual web browser.
Yet, I don't see any of those being better than a decent desktop with these features:
There are the some of the downsides of webapps, and I'm sure some of them will evolve and improve. But at the same time, so will the desktop.
In conclusion, it is my belief that the next jump will be made when the current APIs grow up, and start giving us support for synchronization and not storage/retrieval. The web-based services of the future will provide sharing points and views of our data, in some cases even up-datable.
That's the next step, the web 3.0 or whatever name it will be called. A sync heaven for desktop applications.
Some friends ask me regularly if they should buy a Mac now or wait a little more. Instead of repeating it every time, I'll write my reasoning here and let them decide:
Given all that, let me tell you my own plans.
I do plan to buy a 17" Macbook Pro as soon as I can get one in Portugal. My TiBook 800Mhz is five years old in a week, and I want to switch to a 17" screen, and the Yonah CPU is good enough for my modest needs in the next five years. Remember that I'm still pretty happy with my TiBook, and I'll keep it as my second/backup laptop, but I want to run a Linux VM for some work that I do that requires Linux.
I also plan on buying one of the the new Matrox external cards, probably the DualHead2Go, although my hormones want me to buy the TripleHead2Go. If I could get a Graphics card to plug into the ExpressCard slot of the new Macbook Pro, I would probably get two DualHead2Go for a total of five 17" displays.... Pixels....
By the way, this DualHead2Go cards are great. Instead of having a big 23" display, I can buy several 17" displays for less money, and I still have the felling that I don't loose all my real estate if one of the monitors breaks down. Monitor redundancy.
Now I only have to wait one or two months to get my new Macbook Pro.
Technorati Tags: apple, dualhead2go, intel, mac, macbookpro, matrox
When a person has a child and holds it in its hands, there is a kind of foolishness that takes over your entire self, it's like getting the answer to all the questions about life, the universe and everything in a instance, and finding out that Douglas Adams was wrong. You truly see that its much more than a number.
Predicting the future is also foolish, and not even remotely as fun, unless you are the one who will, when time brings us to it, laugh at this small notes I took upon myself to write.
Predicting the future, that's my plan in the next weeks.
Technorati Tags: future
The MySQL Users Conference is almost over in sunny California and the output for those of us we didn't make the trip has been overwhelming with over 100 blog posts in a few days.
MySQL is booming. There are three new engines: Solid, an old friend that I used for testing on my Telenet days and had to drop due to management distrust (lessons we learn when we are young: don't listen to management when choosing technical solutions); PBXT, a brand new engine, fully ACID-compliant with some novel ideas about database layout on disks (white paper worth a read); and Falcon, an MySQL.com engine, developed in house by Jim Starkey, a ACID/MVCC guru (two articles about his presentation). And as a final item in the storage engine department, Oracle renewed the InnoDB aggrement with MySQL. All in all great news.
I've also been collecting all the talks that are online, and reading all that I can find. So far the one I liked the most is from Ask Bjørn Hansen (online at his site). But there are others:
Some Flickr information, partly MySQL-related, was also covered in a recent O'Reilly Radar by Tim. This last one is specially useful for people dealing with tags (Hint, Hint, you know who you are :) ).
Unrelated to MySQL UC, J. Scott Johnson also made a presentation on php|tek about MySQL at Ookles.com.
There are common themes:
Other presentations I would love to see online, or some notes:
Great times for MySQL. Great times indeed.
Update: got a couple more presentations related to MySQL. I'm just linking them here for future reference:
I do hope Rui has made a mistake with his pills and is seeing things in a parallel universe (got to love the pun).
Are they idiots?
Finally! 1 Gb RAM, 120Gb disk, 256Mb VRAM, 8x SuperDrive DL, 5.5 hours battery life. 3.1Kg, 1/2 Kg more than my current 15" TiBook.
Now waiting 2 months to fetch one from FNAC.
Technorati Tags: apple, mac, powerbook, macbookpro
An excellent article about MySQL replication is online at OnLamp.com.
Definitively check it out.
Technorati Tags: mysql
Dear Google Maps,
sometimes I see those nice and shiny URL's in other people blogs, you know, like this one: http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=47.663427%7E-122.142801&style=o&lvl=2&scene=3688581.
It seems a nice and power-full URL, full of joy. Yet, when I click on it, my Safari browser is not able to load the page. I'm sure that the fault lies on those fun-loving-mac-geeks at Apple that don't know how to code.
So in the meantime, can you accept local.live.com URLs as a valid query on your site and show me the place I was asked to see?
Thanks,
Technorati Tags: google, googlemaps
From the Steve Jobs’s Commencement address at Stanford:
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.
Really a great quote. Via the now professional Daring Fireball.
Well, it was bound to happen.
I got a job offer. A great team of people I like offered me a change to work with some cool applications, and it will still be related to XMPP. The language will change but that's ok, because I also like Ruby :).
So sometime in the next couple of weeks I'll be starting to work at 37Signals. I wont talk about what I'll be doing, expect mentioning XMPP.
I had a great time at Sapo, and I hope they will do well. It was a great pleasure to work with Celso and all the gang.
PS: BTW, today is exactly one year since I joined Sapo.
