The softaholic blog

In opposite to many other crazy desktop and web applications, Hotmail knows how to deal with features over time: instead of increasing and enhancing them day after day (or year after year), Hotmail actually decreases the number and quality of its abilities.

A clear example is the new Windows Live Hotmail. I will not talk about how they stole the “live” suffix from infoscape because I stole it from Vodafone and, hum, well, the word sucks anyways.

The point is, they dropped important features such as automatic mail forwarding and autoresponse, unless you sign up to the premium service (which also unleashes the amazing POP3 access technology: sweet deal). Now I’m stuck with two @hotmail.com email accounts people uses to contact me in a regular basis, and I want to drop, but there is no way to bridge them with my main GMail address.

Hotmail in combination with Messenger was once a good communication platform, but now it is too limited, too full of ads and the name isn’t cool anymore. Microsoft, please move on.

I don’t now exactly why I didn’t blog this before, but something really weird happened to me on my third day as a Mac OS X user.

Some of the embedded systems I work with happen to boot downloading its kernel via TFTP protocol over ethernet network connection, which leaded me to use Mac OS X TFTP server for such noble purposes. It turned out that the default directory for TFTP hosting in Mac OS X is /private/tftp, which contains another directory called “private”, with a symlink to the filesystem’s root on it.

What is this crap? I thought, well lets rm -rf it all and start doing some serious business… after a few seconds, system crashes, a transparent black layer covers my screen and I follow on-screen instructions to reboot the system. Same black screen but this time early in the boot process: f u c k.

A call to the Apple customer service confronted me with the worst person I’ve ever spoken with, and a few rants after I head to the genius bar in the Apple store. This time a much more attentive person (I guess that’s why the face the public directly), who used a 10cm-blade knife to unpack my new MacBook said “bought three days ago? no problem, we’ll give you a new one and transfer your data for free”.

Phew! the data couldn’t be transfered, because any Apple device connected to it was crashing as well, but there was nothing really important on the HD (it was three days old!) so screw that one.

Conclusion: don’t do any monkey business with the /private/tftp folder and its contents if you don’t want to hit the genius bar (or any worst place) for all the wrong reasons.

Footnote: no one in the whole experience was able to tell why my computer died. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.

I wrote infoscape mainly because I considered that the feed formats were intended for presenting day-to-day information in new contexts and forms.

Sadly, not everyone shares this perception and 99% of the RSS-centric applications out there use the same user interface paradigm: an three-panel window displaying an endless stream of items organized by folder. In short, is like using Thunderbird or Outlook but getting hundreds and hundreds of emails a day.

This idea is right for people making a living out of digesting huge amounts of fresh content (journalists, bloggers, analysts, etc), but for many of us packing a few hundred headlines in tiny folders is a huge step backwards in information discovery.

Now that I’ve moved to Mac OS X and my beloved infoscape is not there anymore, the same irritating feeling of not having the right RSS  fetching tool hits me again. Suggestions are welcome.

• Allegedlly
• Sales kickoff
• Spokesman
• Lobbyst

Mac OS X is marketed as an all-in-one solution for the standard home user and even for the developer since the inclusion of Xcode in the OS CD’s. Well, here is the truth:

iChat: great instant messaging application when all your friends and family are geeks already enrolled to the Jabber revolution, otherwise Messenger for Mac, Adium or Fire are mandatory downloads. Don’t believe that the Jabber portability will save your ass on this because it is a real hell when your contact list is big (you have to manually rename or remove every single contact that has ever added you or viceversa).

Apple Mail: good for these not using many email accounts in weird ways. I use several mail accounts (company, personal, personal for junk, personal for IM…) and tie them all together with GMail accounts functionality. It can’t be configured to handle different “personalities” sharing the same outgoing server configuration, that’s why I use Mozilla Thunderbird.

Safari: No tabs supported. Do I have to say anything else? Oh yes, of course, get Firefox.

Damn it.

According to Slashdot somebody burned down its own house after leaving a Dell Inspiron 1200 unattended. Just when I’ve been granted with a Latitude D620 at work.

I guess there is no reason to panic, with several thousands of laptops being manufactured and sold every day around the world, the chances of someone misusing them are huge; and people doesn’t like to declare that the power cord was tweaked some way or near a heater.

However, I will leave my laptop unplugged every night, just in case.

Maintaining a blog is a difficult task, lots of people use to comment on your postings, and many enjoy linking to porn sites and viagra on-line stores on their signatures. Many of them actually invest in real-state and others share their mortage rates with the community.

With such commenters, one has often to attack freedom of speech deleting comments or making it harder to post them. Sorry pals, anonymous posting is now disabled.

Now I am supossed to explain why I’ve been missing so much time and where I was and blah blah, but I’m not feeling too much like doing so. Whatever the reasons were, the point is that I’m feeling like blogging again.

Accorging Google Analytics I’m still getting a few page views per day, and I’m also one of the top dogs on Google Search for keyword “infoscape”; so I guess some folks will continue enjoying my postings.

It has begun! One of the most successful collaborative communities before and after Web 2.0 boom has been recently hardly critiqued by Sam Vaknin, reputated columnist and book author.

This person is doing nothing than claiming the one of the many truths (please note that I’m not using words like “pros”, “cons”, “features”, “advantages”, “disadvantages”, etc.) of Wikipedia: its content is highly unmoderated and open to modification by individuals with particular interests or lack of knowgledge, among others.

Because of this, the Wikipedia should not be considered a reliable source in all cases and readers must have in mind that checking as many available references as possible will lead them to the most accurate view on a particular piece of knowgledge.

This doesn’t mean that Wikipedia is not a useful tool and a inspirational example of how internet can do thousands of people work together on building huge and useful things without particular or selfish interests.

I don’t think that Wikipedia will implode or self-distruct because of people editing or removing contents based on [political|personal|stupid|______] criterias… there is a lot of wonderful content nobody cares about which can be enormously precise and enriching for readers around the world: technology, science, biology, philosophy… I can live with the fact of normal people writing them and making mistakes as well as meny people I usually trust does.