I guess I’ve been too busy lately to post about the main theme of my social life during past weeks: the Apple gathering held last saturday in my old high school. What can I say? there’s nothing better than a bunch of local geeks sharing know-how, experience and, hehe, files.
The meeting started around 11am, when the first fanboys showed up with their MacBook (Pro) computers. When enough people was hooked up to the free WiFi (courtesy of the high school board of management), a superb workshop about Safari 3 addons was held by luman. He screwed up my working copy of Safari 3 but it was on the name of knowgledge: fair enough.
Geeks need to eat, too. So around 2pm a group of intrepid geeks drove to the closest fat dealer (we call it TelePizza around here) and brought the joy of pepperoni and baked mushrooms to the hungry masterminds.
When everyone was fed up with pizza and feeling sleepy, I had the chance to brag about my lame skills on Mac OS X programming, and publitize infoscape on the way, which is always cool. Slides available here.
What else… oh yes! the iPhone brought in by wincas was just as expected: delightful and accessible to everyone. I had the opportunity to play with it a few minutes (while everyone around laughed at my iUnfriendly fingers) and no doubt I enjoyed it. Maybe I should have bought one while in the US.
Wrapping up, it all was worth the organizational effort. The people was plain great, the food greasy, the downloads fast and the time flown. Do join us next time!
Turns out someone has sued Google for crimes against humanity. This insane (or maybe lucid) person has made his way into the US law system to officially claim that his social security number once scrambled reads the word “Google”. Yes, I thought the same: “What the…?”.
After a 7-month trip that has taken me to The Netherlands, Belgium and the US, things have finally settled down back in my hometown in Spain.Memories of good, bad, and awful moments have been collected and I couldn’t feel happier about the good ones. I just hope they last as long as the bad ones.
My Mantis bug-tracking site is finally on-line at http://cyberguijarro.com/mantis. It hosts my three major (minor) projects: infoscape for Windows, infoscape for OS X and disaster.
Note: Anyone can log-in as guest and report bugs using a guest account. Please navigate to the site for more details.
This is my world: my world, filled with my family and music and school and friends and hopes and worries. Sometimes my world moves too fast and sometimes it’s frame-frozen. But my world is mine; it is my chalk circle.
Douglas Coupland - Shampoo Planet
I’ve been lately working on a project which employed continuous integration as a day-to-day development tool. In brief, continuous integration means sistematically building (and testing) a project to ensure that common problems such as broken builds or unit test crashes are detected as early as possible.
Of course, this doesn’t make too much sense in personal projects, because one itself is the only contributor to the source code base (and we all now how to behave ourselves in private). But in collaborative projects, where many people checks out and in source code on a regular basis, a centraliced build system raising alarms when someone screws up is of great help.
Do you like the idea? well, here’s my suggestion for a cool pants free continuous integration scheme: Perforce (free up to 2 users) for source code control, CruiseControl (open source) for schedulling builds and gathering all the data, and finally infoscape (free, check it out on this website) to get round-the-clock notifications on build events via RSS.
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.
Google bots should not be having a hard time tracking my website changes lately… I’ve been in vacation for one week now and I only hit my desktop to check (personal) email and chat with my buddies.
mmmm… summer…
This morning I decided to unleash the freak any good tech freak carries inside and visit the Apple store in Valley Fair (San Jose, where Steve Wozniak happened to buy his very own iPhone the day before, hot chicks sold separately) to find out what’s going on in the field, like in a 1st person 3D shooter, but less funny because I carried no guns.
The store was pretty crowded and everyone had the word iPhone in its mouth (employees, customers, janitors…): groups of people were sorrounding proud Apple sales(wo)men who proudly opened and closed mouths with the crap we all have seen during the past months: youtube, google maps and glossy dialpads. I requested to see the monthly fee for the voice/data plan but no one offerer help (dodge this, AT&T).
Rumor has it that an European 3G version of the phone will be announced soon, and shipped before end of year by Vodafone and T-Mobile.