ricardocabellov5.5

Here it's a piece of my youthhood.

The Catalan TV channel TV3 used to broadcast Jackie Chan movies when I was 15 or so. I think it was on Friday night, like at 2am or 3am. I still don't know why it was that late. If that wasn't hard enough they used to put one of those long infomercials that can go on for an hour (no kidding). And if that isn't yet painful enough, the schedule would be always random. If the paper said the Jackie Chan was going to be broadcasted at 2am, it was usually 1hour later, so you had to watch that advertisement. My brother and I always joked with the name of the product calling it "Pa amb pernill" (catalan for Bread and Ham), because this is how it did sound to us.

Having a discussion about ADs that get stuck in your brain with sole today I remembered that one, and I tried to remember the name. Luckily I seem to have a good memory for sounds, so I remember how the name sounded like, "Pampanseel". After saying it (and know that I have better english) I guessed it was actually "Pump and Seal" as that was the product all about.

After all this introduction I'm sure you want to see the AD, thanks to youtube, you can.



And this is only 10min of the AD, you can seal EVERYTHING, the best demo was when they were sealing marshmellows as they expanded to fill the jar. This is what I had to suffer in order to see gems like Project A...



or Armour of God...



Oh well, I guess that's what you have to pay when your tastes don't follow the mainstream.

While writing this, I remembered a worst one still... I also happened to be a City Hunter fan, Tele5 also did something similar, broadcasting the episodes at 5am, but sometimes instead of City Hunter, they broadcasted Manuela instead.

You gotta love the melody...



So, I guess that must be why I don't have TV anymore... internet let me watch all I'm interested on without having to stay up late watching crap.

Since 8.10 alpha was released I've been (kind of addicted) testing all the new versions with Virtualbox. Tracking all the ups and downs and all that and checking how the development process was. The Release Candidate was finally out a couple of days ago, and I tested it on my desktop (upgrading), apart from a couple of glitches everything was running well and new versions of programs were finally there.

So, I tested the liveCD on my laptop and it also went pretty well, everything was working out of the *cough* box. Graphics card, Sound card, Wireless, Bluetooth and, most importantly, suspend. Also, the fans are super quiet, which is totally not the case when on bootcamp/Windows. Only the trackpad gestures doesn't seem to work. However, I decided to finally get rid of MacOS and Windows from the machine and just leave the Ubuntu.

So yet another one of my machines got converted o/, only the macmini at work is still running Windows, I guess I'll have to wait until I finish the project I'm working on before installing it there, which it may even have to be for Ubuntu 9.04 :D

Anyway, this looks great, I'm super happy :)

PS: The isight wasn't working, so after a search I found this and then this and then this, and after rebooting the machine it worked perfectly. Cheese and Skype works good, flash crashes when trying to use the webcam tho :( Go ubuntu go!

Having to press Fn+F11 to launch the compiler on FDT/eclipse is not really ideal. Here it's the fix:

Edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/options:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options

Add the line: options hid pb_fnmode=2

Save the file and execute the following command:

sudo update-initramfs -u

Reboot

I navigate quite a lot, and for years I've seen all these annoyances that I always think we should all punish their authors by leaving instantly the page.

You should leave the site when...

It modified the size of your browser.
They want to catch your attention, and as the content isn't good enough that's the last resource they have. And the excuse that they want to make sure the user has the browser big enough is just not valid.

It takes ages to load
And they weren't clever enough to make the loading time entertaining. Websites are supposed to be for more than 1 visit. If your loading takes ages, people will have the experience just once. I think you are missing the point.

You need to register before entering the site.
No way! That is so 1999. If you want to catch users/emails, be creative and find a way so the people wants to know more about you/the product and invite them to subscribe at some part of the experience, but if you make then register first thing you'll get a lot of a@a.com, if any.

The page is all full of ADs.
Specially in blogs. Good content creates money/opportunities in the end. If you have ADs around from the start you're creating a money pressure to yourself that is likely distort the quality of your content.

You have to watch a unrelated AD first.
That is very common on flash games. You have to see that AD before playing (supposedly while it loads). I find it very annoying and it makes the game lose a lot of its value and character. As in the previous point, your games are designed to earn money to yourself and not to provide a good gaming experience, which is what should be.

Am I missing any?

I could put a example of every case, but they don't deserve the publicity ;) Unfortunately, I don't think this will change anything, but somebody had to expose it.

Well, kind of predictable...

You spend a lot of time trying to improve your technical knowledge doing experiments all the time, and suddenly, a stupid idea pops, you tackle it in a couple of hours and that makes people go mad and your site ends up on the top 5 shakers list in Alexa.

That's worth a screenshot!



Can you believe that it's even higher than Zeitgeist? Anyway... I think the joke reached its end now. I have a lot of data of referrers and I'm tempted of doing a nice graph with it, but I'm feeling lazy.

Just a quick note by the way, the fact that I choosed that Rick Astley video wasn't really intentional for making it a Rickroll in HD, it was just the first video it came to my mind.

Yet another year I decided not to attend FOTB. Even being a couple of hours from where I live, I have always find it very expensive for what it looks. However, I was very tempted this year when I heard that Jonathan Harris was going there. I really admire his work and how he uses creatively the technology to execute nice ideas. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to see this

After the event, seems like everyone is mainly talking about his speech and how arrogant he was and daba daba. But, from what I was able to read on blogs, you could include me on the "He is right" group.

He has written an article illustrating his points here and, definitely, he is spot on, and what matters most, inspiring. In fact, to me it's quite on the same level as Ken Robinson message.

I guess I'm the perfect example of what he means, a lot of experimentation but no ideas on them. Well, this is something I've been trying to work on for a while already, and hopefully will have some impact on my work in the future. I'm still learning the language I think.

Anyway... Thanks Jonathan! Once again.

Yet another interesting movie everyone should see. It goes way more deep than the first one.

More info at zeitgeistmovie.com

This seems to be a sketch from one year ago:



On a side note... I love when we are in crisis. Seems like if there is a crisis serial killers and violence news disappear. I wish newspapers could just not release an edition one day if they though there were not real news. Ah yeah, I remember, it's all about the ADs.

Some months(?) ago Youtube released the HD version of their videos. Well, that's nice, but take a look at this... now we have Super HD!



:P

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Another step for being Windows/MacOS free! The alpha version was out for a couple of months already, but wasn't working too well. The beta runs pretty well the app I'm working on at work :)