ricardocabellov5.5

In case you were wondering... and man... it feels good. So much space in my head now :)

Ayer, en el perfil de Marc de Facebook, me tope con esta perla.

Sole, al verlo esta mañana, comentaba que echaba de menos poder poner comentarios en tiempos especificos, como en soundcloud.

Dicho y hecho!



Seguramente el video terminara con demasiadas anotaciones pero por ahora el experimento ha valido la pena :D

This Christmas, visiting the family was a bit harder and made me think why we were still in London. I've been in UK for about 7 years already. The experience has been invaluable. Learning the language, meeting a lot of people, work opportunities and a long etcetera. I'm extremely happy I decided to have a part of my life here.

Some months ago, before leaving Hi-ReS!, I had to think what the plan was going to be afterwards. At that point, seemed logical to think that staying in London in case I had to meet someone in town for a freelance job was a good idea. But London was starting to get claustrophobic so we though about moving to a town "close" to London (ie. Bath). At the same time I was getting offers to move to United States which were very tempting, but somehow UK was still winning for being closer to Spain.

Now that I was already freelancing I found myself that there was no real need to stay in London. All the projects I worked on where done from home. That home could be anywhere, so why not moving back to Barcelona instead of to Bath?

We have a lot of stuff in London, so moving is going to be a slow process. Hopefully in April/May we'll be done. There are many people I'll be missing but I have the feeling I'll be visiting quite often :)

Seems like 2010 is going to be a benchmark for us :)

Skip to the steps.

The iBook G4 was not pleasing me anymore. Because not many Linux distros support PowerPC anymore I was stuck with MacOS (which, remember, I'm not a fan of). So it was time for a replacement.

After looking up some netbooks I decided to go the Asus EeePC route. The 1101HA to be precise. I found it quite cheap for the features it has (Decent resolution, 160gb, 10hours battery... all for £256). Bought it from Amazon and in a couple of days it was on my desk already.



Unfortunately it comes with a bloated Windows XP. I don't mind Window XP, but I don't like having Microsoft Live, Office Student Edition and all the ASUS crap installed. So first thing you end up doing is uninstall all that. Unfortunately again, the recovery mode comes with all that crap. Then I uninstalled too many things and had to learn how to reinstall the system from a USB key.

Anyway, the biggest disappointment was the graphics chip (GMA 500). The hardware side of it seems to be good, but the software side (drivers) seem to be poor. Basically, the chip supports OpenGL 2.0, but the driver doesn't. And you're not able to play HD videos. All because shitty drivers. Lame.

Not much you can do on Windows but wait until they release proper drivers (I won't even go into details of why they are not doing it). So next thing was installing Ubuntu on the side of Windows XP.

I installed Ubuntu 9.10. The process was as simple as it always is. However, once installed, the resolution wasn't 1366x768 as it was supposed to be. It was 1024x768 instead and no option to change it. So I assumed a couple of tweaks needed to be done. Here they are:

Steps

1. Install poulsbo graphics driver. Just use the PPA script from here.
2. Replace NetworkManager with WICD. With NetworkManager, the wireless stops working randomly. WICD can be easily installed from Synaptic Package Manager.

And that's it. The result is a very robust system. With 2D (HD videos play smoothly) and 3D Acceleration (OpenGL works). Funny that, for first time, Linux performs better than the OS that came with the device. Things are changing!

Lets just ignore the freak speaking on the video.

Marketing wise, am I the only one that thinks Microsoft and Apple work together? If they were really rivals, would Microsoft adopt the "I'm a PC" thing? I guess they need to work together so the free of charge option doesn't make them lose much money. That would explain why they never mention Linux as competitor but they mention the "rival", because the money goes the same place that way.

Yes, I love conspiracies.

EDIT:

Since I moved to Linux, one of the major frustrations was the lack of a decent Subversion client. I have tried many different clients during my time on Windows and on MacOS. My favourite from all of them, by far, was TortoiseSVN.

I've been using both RapidSVN and Eclipse's Subversive on Linux. I can't even begin to think how much time I have spent trying to fix corrupted folders and having to recursively remove ".svn" folders and copy on top of a clean checkout... I even considered stopping using SVN as such a bad experience made me feel SVN was a waste of time.

I don't know why, I though about searching for options again. You know, a new app that changes your computer experience may appear tomorrow. One of the search results was NautilusSVN, which, if I recall correctly, Spite suggested as an option some time ago. Turns out NautilusSVN has been renamed to RabbitVCS, seems they don't want to close themselves to Subversion only (which is good).

When I tried it some months ago I found it was quite rudimentary... command line installation as plug-in for nautilus, everything becoming super slow, crash again and again... Surprisingly, this time has been totally different experience. Straightforward to install, the file browser still performs fast enough and it certainly brings the TortoiseSVN days back.

Yes I know, "Use the SVN command line like real man!" yada yada... not!

EDIT: As per version 0.12 nautilus can get pretty slow over the time to the point that you have to wait 30 seconds to go up a folder. Apparently this is being fixed on 0.13.

I forgot to mention here that my first Android App is on the Market already (took me less than a month since I got the device, beat that Apple).



So, for such a simple thing I had to learn OpenGL|ES, create my own little Tween engine, and so on...

Thanks a lot to all the people that were kind enough to answer my noob questions!

Now... let's get going with the next App :)

Over the weekend I changed a bit the system. Now, whenever a new comment gets sent, it's first checked against Akismet, if it gets flagged as spam, the system asks the user to fill a reCAPTCHA. But for a normal (and honest) user the comment experience is still simple.

The main change is the reCAPTCHA step, that should act as a better firewall for bots than what I had before (a form token rudimentary system).

So far so good.

Whether it's prettier or not is something totally subjective. In my opinion it is much nicer in many aspects (spacing, cluttering, colors...)

Here it's a video showing some of the changes (so I save fingers):



Also, for the full effect, here it's the background I use:



Which is a matte painting done for this video.

Seems like I change my phone every 3 years. Quite surprising for a nerd.

This time I picked a HTC Magic.



Yes, it's an Android phone, that was the main reason.

Some months ago I realised I wasn't really using my phone, so I did a experiment of shutting it off. It was like that for about 3 months and it was an interesting experience. Like living on the 90s again, having to meet with people at specific places at specific times, ... Totally recommended. However, on that time I had a iPod Touch which made things easier (I could email sole if I was going to be home late from a wireless powered pub). I also used it to see the good things and bad things of the iPod Touch/iPhone platform, and guess what, as a Mac Hater I didn't like it much.

Recently the iPod Touch felt to the floor (while sitting down) and the screen got broken. That was the point when I stopped using it at all and started looking forward to getting an Android phone. (Although Mike very kindly managed to get it fixed. Mike, it's yours!).

So, now that I finally have the phone, I mainly have 3 complains:

1. WTF is with the headphones connector? Why not a jack? At least give me decent headphones!
2. Android OS doesn't really feel as snappy as the iPhone OS, plus the whole system ended up being a bit slower than I expected.
3. Apple sucks!. Apple "asked" to Google NOT TO put multi touch on Android yet. There are many evidences on the net that Android has the functionality ready, but it's not "connected". And guess what, my device does support multitouch by hardware, it's just waiting to Apple for the go ahead. Way to go Apple.

And you'll say - oh no! Another rant email! Not really, because apart from that I *really* love the device. It's like a normal computer in your hand (many apps runing at the same time, barcode/qrcode recognition, google apps interconnectivity, AR applications...) I really could do a very long list of things I like. Maybe the most important one is that developing for it is very easy and I've started :D I'm even planing to make a couple of games :P

You can track my progress on this here.

I got the feeling Android 2.0 will be released with the upcoming new Motorola handset, and it will bring multi touch and a few performance improvements (and many other things, but I'll be happy just with that).