Starting Saturday, 9h25am I’ll be sleeping less, just a couple of hours a night, I’ll have to shift my daily work schedule from 10am-8pm to 8am-6pm, I’ll have less time for non-professional and non-family tasks (like blogging or building arcade machine replicas), drama and moderation will be more part of my life, gray hair will predominate, I’ll be “controlled” by womens (yes I know, aren’t we all) and yet go figure: I’ll be TWICE as HAPPY as I am now. 
English, Personal
Everybody knows Yahoo is doing it’s European version of Hackday in London in early June. I’ve seen Yahoo’s presentation about the US version on eTech and it clicked on me. It’s a great idea for a variety of reasons: Team and company morale boost, tell the outside world what you have, image building amongst the developers community, a great way to find new talent and eventually recruit some, a free test-bed for your infra-structure and APIs, and a great environment for new ideas. And of course not less important, it’s a lot of fun for everybody too, it’s win-win.
So it got me thinking (a lot) if Portugal has enough critical-mass for a scaled down, eventually tunned up concept version of something like this.
While thinking, I decided to sign in for London and it seems I’m booked for it. And I might just go (although logistics at home will probably be complicated at the time, so I’m not 100% sure yet).
Any other .pt persons attending this ?
English, Tech stuff
Hitachi started shipping it’s Deskstar 7K1000 hard disk drive for $399 USD. The verdict seems positive. While thinking about endless domestic media storage possibilities for this baby, it occurred to me that I’ve bought my first 20 MB HDD for the same price +- 15 years ago.
English, Tech stuff
Really! This guy worships Steve Jobs in ways beyond reasonable (even for Mac users).
English, Tech stuff
So don’t ask how (or why) but I got my hands on the Apple TV for a week now. Much has been said about this cute living room apple fruit, but maybe the hacker’s perspective hasn’t gone into much analysis yet. Hacking was the trigger for me. I wasn’t convinced by the iLife sync stuff nor the HDMI output, but the enormous list of hacks during the first week, while I was in San Diego, clicked on me. It was just too hackable not to have it, or, in the words of the Maker’s owner manifesto: “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it”.
This USD $300 set top box is way beyond what it’s supposed to do, and Apple doesn’t seem to care (and I would applaud it if by any miracle they’re ignoring the phenomena on purpose, strategically). So as an hacker, here’s what I really like about this toy:
- It’s small, it’s very quiet. My wife likes it on the living room.
- It has 802.11n.
- I can use it as file server, a web server, a sshd remote server, and a bit torrent client.
- It runs on Intel with a stripped down version of OSX. Most software I’m able to compile on my MacBook Pro, runs just fine on the Apple TV. As a Unix junkie I am pleased to confirm that most (if not all) Darwin Ports and Fink apps definitively run.
- I can upgrade it’s internal drive, If I really want. 40GB may be short.
- I can play HD divxs (well 720p at least) and MPEG-2 files. Or anything supported by Perian.
- I was able to copy a working full-fledged PHP5 binary, so all my controversial scripting apps work there as expected. Python and Perl are known to work fine too.
- I could run Linux on it if I wanted (which I don’t, not yet).
- I’m eagerly awaiting for the kernel and drivers that will unlock the service USB port. It may be needed to use the box with external drives and hmm, a Webcam and iChat ?
Oh yeah, and it’s nice too that it syncs with my iPhoto and iTunes. Those family photos do really look stunning on my 40″ Sony Bravia. And yes, I’ve executed most the hacks described here, just in case you’re wondering. And yes, the US version works just fine in Europe – they even used a standard C7 power-cord connector, so It’s plug and play hack.
English, Tech stuff
Paul Graham just posted a rather simple but objective essay about how he thinks Microsoft is dead, and the 4 reasons: Google, Javascript, Broadband and Apple. Enjoyable reading, as always.
English, Tech stuff
Paul Kedrosky made a post entitled U.S. Home Prices as a Rollercoaster Ride which shows a pretty innovative perspective on the problem using a roller coaster video. Just for the parallel and the timing (and the kicks too), I wonder if I could get the same data somewhere for Portugal and do something similar.
English
This is our last night in San Diego. Had a nice dinner at Buca Di Beppo with Nuno and Bee which came all the way from Orange County just for us (thanks). We still have a few notes left from eTech (and a wrap up) to post but no time now.
Meanwhile here’s some presentations I found online already:
Update: more presentations online:
Update2: presentations still popping-up:
Update3: and one more:
Update4
See you in Lisbon.
English, Tech stuff, eTech2007
According to Apple and EMI, DRM is gone – a new era in digital content distribution has begun.
English, Tech stuff
Attending eTech 2007 was enlightening but keeping the speakers’s track can be just as interesting. During the conference I grabbed most of the speakers Weblogs for reference, and now I think I’ve completed the missing ones. So here’s the list for you and the OPML file at the end. Enjoy:
OPML file with all subscriptions.
English, Tech stuff, eTech2007
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