Bullshit.

This is a reply to Hook’s rant about disliking Facebook…

I will not needlessly recap the article, as you can read it on the above mentioned address.

First of all, it is true that social web pages will gather your personal info, if you so choose and that is due to their nature and if you indeed to choose to participate, you cannot rant against that. If you’re a paranoid person stick to encrypted emails, chat and dark alleys without cameras. If employers have issues with people who had a good time during they education days, than I think it’s a safe bet, that workplace is boring.

If you do think your public image as the 14th century nun is important, than you should stay at home most of the time, just to make sure you don’t generate any ill content about yourself some place. And certainly don’t use the internet! It’s probably bad for you anyway ;).

Retarded people, who feel they’re actually worth something if they add a gazillion people on such social media sites, do exist, but it IS rather simple to ignore them. Just as you have stupid people writing comments everywhere, stupid people listening to lame music on their stupid phones on buses (actually they are a little harder to ignore), and so on… If you fall victim (are unable to see the big blue “Ignore” button) to their pointless quest, I feel for you, but don’t hold that against the service itself :).

What makes facebook special is that it’s not just a web page, but rather a platform on which third party organisations can build their services. Just like Firefox for example. They bot have some great and very useful plug-ins and, since it IS user generated content, some useless and very poorly made plug-ins. Again, it is the people that generate them and as such they are to blame for the quality. Only Apple upholds a certain quality by enforcing a fascist policy of submition to the App Store. Again, I conclude any and all crappy content is a fault of the users (the authors) and the users (end users) for writing and/or using them.

Additionally, Facebook being a platform, it can also be leveraged in other applications. You can use it the way OpenID is used, so for authentication on third-party and completely unrelated pages. It yould be used to automatically improve any contacts list with pictures and other data provided by users. Granted, their API is not the best, and they maintain it as a dead horse (almost not at all - at least for Java), but you can work with Facebook, using exclusively open-source implementations… You can even use c++ to tie in to the goodies. These language specific apis are unofficial, and as such facebook is not to be praised for them…

As for the facebook trying to be too many things at once, I’ve never viewed it in such a way. It is primarily a platform and if you’re not the kind of user that gets a stiffy for each new lame application, than it remains simple. It does nothing more than give you a small window into the lives of people around you.

It does have an integrated photo album, but not wit hthe same purpose of flickr and picasa. I wouldn’t use neither for my personal collection, since it will serve no purpose. Nobody will see it unless I explicitly rape people by email with it. Facebook provides just what I need. A place to upload my photos for free and people will be able to easily interact with them. The only real problem is, they take ownership of those photos…

They’ve also integrated a (poor) IM, but again, you can easily turn it off. Just like the Jabber interface in Gmail… Neat addition for people who need it. And it certainly doesn’t try to replace email. It just has a private way of communication (so you’re not forced to make everything public ;).

As for events: That’s probably one of the best aspects of Facebook, since they are user generated and thus, vary extremely. You can almost certainly find something of interest in your town and make your life less boring. Just last week, for instance a bunch of people met at Vienna’s subway (U-bahn) and had a crazy party on a train, all thanks to Facebook and the viral way news travels on it.

In general, as an Erasmus student I’ve come to appreciate Facebook. It makes meeting new people easier and provides you with an unobtrusive way to stay in contact. Even passively - just through updating your profile and following the updates of others - rather the whole point of it all. It so easy (and cheaper) to organise things - you don’t have to call 13 people, depleting your phone account, just to see who’s interested…

Concerning notifications and stuff, again this is a problem of ill educated users, who click on everything that comes in their way and thus add every single lame application. It is those tree hugers that generate the annoying notification, actions, reactions and all those dog farts. For us, enlightened users, options exists to ignore those pesky people or just their useless applications (and all content they generate).

I work at Marand, and we have leveraged Facebook and other similar websites on many occasions so far. Granted, it’s nowhere near perfect and it’s perfectly understandable not to like it, but to say semi-true things, or cut yourself and cry is plain wrong ;).

I’m sure I could go on, and I’ve surely forgotten something, but I am sattisfied for now :). If nothing else I’ve practised my written English, and Clarkson style humour…

Yesterday I’ve installed Amarok 2.0 RC1 to enjoy the spoils before they are released and who would have imagined it … today Amarok 2.0 was released! All rejoice. I hope it reaches kubuntu repositories soon…

This release brings many new features and the one I especially like is the Ampache integration :). I can has music all over teh internetz now :].

While there were still some issues in RC1, I sure hope the release will live up to the hype. I can’t wait for a new tank (ThinkPad) to fully enjoy the awesomeness that is (will be) kde 4.1 (kde 4.2)…

Amarock on!

Image via Wikipedia

It’s quite common to look down on Adobe Flash, in the open source community, since it’s not open and was until quite recently very poorly supported on Linux. It may not be quite open yet, many huge steps have been made in this direction and the level of support is certainly on the same level as or OS X and Windows. As far as the player goes. We might still be yeas away from actually seeing the Adobe Creative Suite running natively on Linux, although to be fair the step from OS X should not be difficult to make, but we do have many alternatives.

All arguments about this platform breaking system security and so forth are valid and have been proven on numerous occasions, so I’ll refrain form discussing them further.

To shed some light on my Flash background I need to mention, that I am a Linux user, so no CS for me, but despite this I have been working on many flash-y project at Marand. I’ve started working there as a lousy lazy beer drinking student a little over a year ago, with little to no experience with the things I ended up doing. I’ve also entered the halls of Marand with just a little negativity towards Adobe and any other closed platform. I still think that what Adobe is doing with Flash is fundamentally flawed, but that’s a nother matter to be discussed over a pint :).

The more I know about Flash and everything surrounding it, the more open it all seems. It’s like Enterprise Java. Sure, it’s enterprise and all that crap, but it would be useless without Spring, Stripes, Tomcat, JBoss, Eclipse, … Guess what. All these project are open source! That’s right, and the same applies for Flash. Sure, it’s core is rotten and closed, but right next to it is a flourishing comunity of open source project, without which I bet programming for Flash would be an economical madness (reinventing the weheel is not cheap).

Even the people of Adobe know that. They opened up some specifications, and in my opinion the best move, besides actively supporting Flash player on Linux, they’ve open sourced Flex. They even have a hub website for open source at Adobe. Neat, eh?

But if I still haven’t convinced you that the state of Flash is improving, there are other alternatives such as OpenLaszlo. The framework I first started playing with. My introduction to the RIA world so to speak :). It my not be on the same level as Flex, as far as Flash is concerned, but it’s not limited to Flash. The same applications can easily be compiled to DHTML.

But when your goal is to make a kick-ass Flash application you reach the limit of OpenLaszlo and begin to wonder if Flex is better for you. Because for Flex, you have so many neat open source project providing so many neat functionalities, that would take you weeks to implement. Some very sexy animations perhaps, some 3D magic, or any part of the usual plumbing you hate, but must take care of anyway. Flash is a platform and no longer some kid-with-a-boner tool. With just one glance at the Google code, you can easily see the variety of options, from site APIs (Facebook, eBay, …) to animation libraries. There’s even a Commodore 64 emulator written in Flash :).

The moral of the story is that now (that would be for quite some time now:)) we have an official Adobe endorsed way of making our programs for the Flash platform using entirely open source tools. For other ideas and a grasp of the size of the community visit osflash.org.

Image via Wikipedia

is back! The IT crowd is back! All rejoice. And it appears there is now an American remake of the show… One might call that rape!

Anyway, the show is now in it’s third season ;). All rejoice \o/.

As I came home today, at 6 a.m. and checked my emails (yes, I am a geek) as well as did a couple of stumbles before going to home, I noticed something different about Gmail. At first I’ve thought it’s all the Whiskey affecting my judgement, but now as I’ve had a more sober look at it, it really is different. At last they’ve introduced themes… It was only a matter of time if you ask me.

This is the theme of choice for now:

And this is how Google makes geeks happy:

Check boxes are foo due to poor KDE4 gtk integration :(. In other news, looking for themes made me find an option to allways use https. I don’t know for how long that’s officially there. Before it could be done via an Firefox extension.

The blog is back. Hail science! My dear old server box has finally died. I’m not sure what exactly is wrong with it - I had no time to play with it, so I just replaced it with another box. Which is good, since the new box is quite a bit more powerful.

In other news, there is no other news, since I’m too lazy to blog. But I do twit for quite some time now :).

Yesterday I’ve recompiled wine one last time. Well I may have to do it once more, but that’s not really the point :). The Point is, that I’ve finally gotten C&C 3: Tiberium Wars to work. The game is quite enjoyable and I fear it will have an impact on my sleep. So far it deprived me of two hours of sleep.

And yet I wonder… Are games really as bad as some people would have you think? Sure, you sleep less and if you’re not accustomed to recreating you’ll gain weight. But on the other hand, what would you be doing instead of playing? Go out and grab a beer? Six beers?! As a matter of health hazard that’s just as bad, if not worse and socialization is overrated anyway :p.

Back to the point. While it wasn’t exactly straight-forward, because at first the cursor was invisible and at times there is no audio (and I have to restart the game). Also annoying is the keyboard failure (some 30 minutes or so into the game). To get it working I had to downgrade wine, imagine that. But I’ll sleep better, knowing I don’t have those rotten windows anywhere arround

Today, totally unexpected, me and Anja had a totally unordinary day. Before we even fully woke up, the phone rang and Andrej told us to pack up our shit and meet him downstairs. We were going paragliding. After dringing a nice cup of coffee at the bottom cable car station and the discussion how people puke during these flights, we headed to the top. Ah, the modern day hiking. A cable car takes you 700m higher in 4 minutes, then a ski lisft continues, where the cable car left you. No sweat, 10 minutes later we were at the take off site. Another five minutes and we’re off.

What a day it was. No clouds, perfect weather, perfect wind and magnificent site. Amazingly the sea can be seen from 500m above Vogel (2000m above the sea level).

Both our pilots were young and crazy. Which was good, made a little more adrenaline pump throu our veins :). And I soon found out what 5g in a spin do to you. Not hard to imagine how people puke, but fortunatley that didn’t happen to me :).

The week is almost over and a successful week it was indeed :). Although I forced myself to take an exam on Monday I knew I would fail - and I did, we held the Firefox 3 Release Event which was in my opinion very successful.

It truly was a hot day and that was of no help to us at all. We went to grab a dinner Monday evening and I came home at 2 am. Not the brightest idea, since I had to be in Kiberpipa the next morning as soon as possible. I’ve made it there at 9:30 and was immediately made happy when I saw K4 technicians (and some of our crew) were working hard during the night. The stage was set up and there was a bunch of high tech sci-fi audio equipment ready to go :). Metropol was also ready for the party.

We’ve started the press conference on schedule and it all went smoothly. The press seemed happy, and were given enough time for individual interviews. The only problem was, we had no shirts yet to give to them. We promise to make up for that :).

After the press conference our guests with some of our own crew went on dinner to Figovec, while the others made everything ready for the talks and ate pizza \o/. You should have seen our goodie bag production line. It was really something of a group effort :). I’m very proud of our team! And the biggest surprise to our guests that day was that we’ve packed all goodie bags with wine :).

Te talks started with 15 minutes delay, but that’s why we’ve left plenty of time between each talk to compensate… There were no major technical errors during the talks, except when Zbigniew was on - he needed to play some sound on his computer, which was wired to a different power supply that as a side effect caused some brum in the speakers - but it wasn’t extremely annoying :). One thing we should learn from this is that perhaps we’ve started too early. At 15.00 people still tend to be at work.

Short after the talks started, the t-shirts arrived and we’ve started a somewhat chaotic distribution.

After the talks fry, who held the last talk started an improvised open stage - something we’ve wanted to plan anyways, but we’re totally too late to do it properly :(. He, with the help of Andraž Tori “forced” me to speak on behalf of Kiberpipa. Basically I had to tell everybody what Kiberpipa is and why they should come back next season. Primož told everybody what slo-tech and nest is and Polž had a funny speech about how computing has changed (he is also in the impro league).

With that over it was time for the party. We’ve granted ourselves one hour preparation time and we made room for the food and such. We’ve also prepared free Firefox cocktails and free wine. All in all I think the party was very successful, everybody seemed happy despite it was extremely hot. We’ve also recieved some positive feedback so far. Tristan loved it and so did she (Sorry, but you should really write your name somwhere on the page ;). Jure also posted on the fly notes from some of the talks - that will feed your appetite while you wait for the videos : Zbigniew, Gorazd, Markos.

We’ve had a couple of lovely ladies at the door to convince people they have to sign in and receive their goodie bags and t-shirts :).

It took a lot of energy and sweat to pull through the day, but we did it. And it was totally worth it! :).

It’s a good thing Astrodisco was in K4 so we had a great afterparty aswell :).

All that is left now is to publish the videos of the lectures in time. We’ll certanly try to do it next week :).

at Kiberpipa on June 24th, 2008. There’s gonna be a DJ, snacks and drinks, …

Stay tuned for more :).