fragility

A few weeks ago, with the release of Jaunty, I decided it was finally time for my laptop to move into the 64 bits world. If I recall correctly, my Intrepid install was still the first Ubuntu install this laptop ever had, coming from the days of Hardy Beta, and during all this time I had decided not to move to 64 bits because I would always hear about something that still had issues on 64 bits. I decided to create a checklist of things I could have trouble with, and in the end many of the things on that checklist caused me no trouble at all, and the move was really smooth.

Stuff like video codecs, Virtualbox, Skype and Flash had no problems at all, as there are native builds of all these things for 64 bits already (yes, for a long time, I know). The only thing that caused me some trouble was Adobe AIR, and since I was until a while ago a twhirl user (and I’m now a really happy DestroyTwitter user), I wasn’t thinking about dumping AIR and go for something like Gwibber (or Tweetanium, which got my attention maybe even as a developer). So I followed this guide and replaced the suggested packages by libnspr4-0d_4.7.3-0ubuntu2_i386.deb and libnss3-1d_3.12.2~rc1-0ubuntu2_i386.deb which are the versions you need in Jaunty.

Apart from that, there were no other major hardware issues, even though my stubborness almost led to some. Suspend works fine (haven’t tested hibernating yet, but I never use it anyway), my new 640GB external HDD has a NTFS partition (because, well, I might want to share files with Windows PC’s) which also works perfectly (I had never tried to use NTFS on Linux before), and altough I cursed ATI at first, I know have a working dual screen setup with 3d acceleration mostly out of the box.

Back on Intrepid, I had 3D and dual screen with Xinerama, running ATI’s 9.1 drivers. Recently, ATI dropped support for a number of older cards on their latest drivers, and even though my laptop is one year old, it has a card which is basically an older card refitted for laptops (a X1300 turned into the more laptop friendly X2300). So the card is not supported by the latest drivers, and running older ATI drivers turned out to be impossible as they make this stupid version check against X.org. I had also tried using Ubuntu’s Display utility to setup dual screen, and it worked, but I had the same resolution on both screens.

However, I then decided to look up more info on XRandr, and I found out that sometimes you might need to tweak some things. I’m not going to explain the process here, because I’ve already done it here on my wiki.

Also, I haven’t yet done all the major renovations I wanted on my blog and wiki, but the idea still stands (and has been suffering some mutations over time).

Today I’ve started a new job as a PrimeIT consultant working for Sapo, which also means I’ve just left Faro behind and moved to Lisbon.

I’m part of the newly formed JavaScript team and I’m really happy with this new opportunity and with knowing that I’m working with one of the most (if not the most) awesome IT companies here on Portugal.

Desenvolvendo um tweet de há momentos, se o Windows que vem no Magalhães tiver uma falha de segurança que permita a disseminação de uma worm que mude a homepage do browser para um site de pornografia, e se as actualizações resolverem essa falha, será que o Governo também vai mandar retirar o Windows dos Magalhães, porque mesmo que isso seja resolvido com uma actualização o software com falhas não pode permanecer no Magalhães ?

É só um pensamento.

Following on a tweet, I thought I’d make a small post about some small things on the internet that I wish people would do differently, just for the sake of making everyone’s life a bit more simple.

Like I wrote on that tweet, I wish all video/podcasts had transcripts. I know that sometimes people prefer to do *casts because it’s easier than writing, so maybe that wouldn’t apply to *casts where people are alone, but on those which are made by more than one person, it could come in handy. That, or some kind of index, with times and subjects, something which could also be easily applied to those *casts made by one person alone.

Why ? Because I usually can’t stand to just stay there and just listen to the whole thing. If I’m doing something else that requires my attention, it will distract me. Some people might be able to listen to a podcast while they read something else (at least some people say they do), but I’m not that kind. And while I might not always be reading something, I might be doing something else that requires my attention not to be divided with a *cast. Some people might like to listen to podcasts while they commute, but I usually prefer to listen to some music and just “shut off” for that little while (which is usually between 20 to 45 minutes a day for me).

So this is why I rarely listen to podcasts. I might be more inclined to watch videocasts, while I eat or something, but even then I usually stop following videocasts after a few episodes. On those I’ve watched, most of it it’s not that interesting and I’ll probably just be interested in a few minutes of it, which I’ll probably end up reading about somewhere anyway if it’s really something of value.

Not to disrespect anyone who makes video or podcasts, but it’s just not for me, and maybe, just maybe, if you had those transcripts or that kind of index I’d go and listen to those little bits I’m really interested on.

Now this was supposed to be a small post about small things but I kinda lost myself here on a rant, so I’ll move on to something else:

Whenever you post a link to a video on the internet on twitter or some kind of chat, please post the damned title or just say what the hell it is.

I can probably just click it and look at the title on the browser window even before it loads the whole page and close it if I just don’t care, but why do I even have to do that most of the times ? Why do people just paste the link or write something like “OMG AWESOME ! CLICK IT NOW: http://www.youtube…” and can’t write a few words about what the hell that video is about ? I’ve probably done it a few times myself, that’s true, but whenever I remember it I try to give people the chance to know what it is and ignore it right away if they feel like it, or maybe save it for later if they can’t see it at that moment.

Personally, when someone pastes a link for a video without describing it and if it’s not directly aimed at me I usually ignore it. On this note, it was good to notice that youtube now shows the video title even when the video is embedded on another page.

There were probably some other small things I was going to rant about, but this is already too long for a small rant, so I’ll just leave it for later.

Here it goes:

If you want to know more, click here.

This has been going on for a while, and I’ve meant to write something about this before but I was also trying not to care. Why am I caring now ? Because I’m a bit tired of so much whining and I must let it out:

TWITTER ISN’T IRC 2.0.

And why’s that ? Let’s go back to the days where everyone was on IRC (some of us, like myself are still there). You would join channels about stuff you were interested on, channels formed by groups of friends or just random channels about nothing in particular. You were automatically exposed to everyone on those channels. Everyone could bother you from the start, and sometimes you would probably ignore it, but sometimes you wouldn’t and you might join in on some useless stupid discussion (I know I’ve had my share of those). You could then /ignore people or kick/ban them if you had the privileges, but you would have to take all the crap by default, no matter what.

Now I know I am just pointing out the obvious here, but Twitter is exactly the opposite: you only take crap from those you want to. You only follow those people you want to and you are interested in. If you then think they are not that interesting, or if they spam you too much or if they just annoy you, you can unfollow them or block them, but remember that you decided to follow those persons in the first place.

Same with followers. If someone wants to follow you, you might not be interested in what they say, but it probably doesn’t hurt to let them see what you tweet about. You can control your @replies settings if you really don’t want to interact with those persons. And if you’re really paranoid you can protect your updates. And if you really don’t want anyone to see your updates then what the heck are you doing on Twitter anyway ?

Also, Twitter isn’t the new Myspace/Facebook/any other social network with or without features X or Y. It’s just something different. Just because a bunch of horny teenagers are coming to Twitter looking to score, that won’t make it Myspace. Soon they’ll realize there are no albums of semi-naked angle shots and will just go away.

Now why are people saying most of these things anyway ?

This post concerns mostly Portuguese people. Twitter was recently mentioned a lot on some mainstream media, and there was a boom of new Portuguese users. Hear me out people: this is not the first time it happens. The same thing happened before on USA and other countries after mentions on mainstream media. So yes, you’re probably getting some follower requests from some users who you would more likely find on Myspace or the IRC from circa 2001, but that doesn’t mean you have to put up with them. Also, what’s with people complaining that “I’m getting too many followers”. I say again: block them if you don’t want them to follow you. Ignore them by default. Are you getting too many Twitter notifications on your inbox ? Well don’t be silly and create a Bacn label/folder for all that email you can just care about later and have it skip your inbox (if you don’t do this already, I pity you).

But in reality I think what I’m writing here is something most people do already. I’m sure many people take the same approach as I do and don’t feel affected by any of this. I think many of the persons who make these “Twitter are the new X” claims are just elitists. The same elitists who ran away when IRC started getting too many users back in 2000, because it was not that cool thing only some people used anymore. The same elitists who joined the social networks when these appeared but who ran away the minute they got a friend request from a 15yr old (I remember this happening a lot on Orkut). The same elitists who would say they were using Twitter and be misunderstood because people wouldn’t see the point of it, but they actually felt good because of that. But now those people do use Twitter, and the elitists don’t like it, so they started whining.

So please, do me and everyone else a favor: stop the whining and do something about it. As for me, I think I’m gonna start unfollowing “Twitter is the new X” claimers on sight.

This appears to have been echoing out through the web lately, so I’ll just do it one more time.

A few days ago, on January 22nd, Charles Wesley Cooper, one of the guys from the Telefon Tel Aviv duo passed away. And this happened just 2 days after their latest album was released.

In case you’ve never heard about these guys before, they are an electronic duo who’ve made three great albums of calm and beautiful electronic music, and their latest album Immolate Yourself is just perfect.

I hope everything works out for Joshua and everyone else who was around Charles.