O Crominho do Técnico

Happy 30th birthday to me! :-)

That’s what Dee Dee Bridgewater calls him. Hear the full set here or just click play below (is it working?). It’s amazing. He never ceases to make me smile after the initial chords and notes. I always know I’m in for a treat.

For those of you interested in reading the full version of the article and do not happen to have access here’s the PDF.

I will write a bit more about it when I have some time!

Due to my computer abilities I have been appointed the lab’s internal IT manager. It basically entails nothing with the exception of communicating to the real IT people what the lab needs or fixing up some code in our PHP system for ordering and some databases.

One of my duties is to administer the mailing lists of the lab. When users get to the lab they are automatically added to the mailing lists unless something goes wrong and I have to do it manually. On the other hand, when they leave the lab, they don’t get automatically removed. Once their email expires, I get errors from the list.

It takes 2-3 months for their email to expire so by the time I get these error messages (on a daily basis!) I haven’t seen or talked to these persons for a while. Never before error messages have brought me fond memories.

Part of my life is pretty much exposed to everyone. I’m registered and active in social networks sites and I have a couple of websites. One of them is this personal blog and the other is a very public blog aggregator for science blogs written in Portuguese called Divulgarciencia, http://divulgarciencia.com.

Being exposed, public and fairly vocal about some issues, I’ve long been exposed to all kinds of emails. They can almost be clustered into two main groups: kind ones saying why they support me or not in different situations and really nasty ones that are generally offensive and question my integrity and ethics.

I normally try and reply to all emails except the really extreme cases of the latter group. When I get a nasty email I normally try to reply in a kind way saying that it may have been better to address the issue more calmly and perhaps in a more considerate manner. I emphasize this behavior carries with it a higher chance of promoting better communications and understanding among two parties. More often than not, after the second reply, things either get on track or they really get nasty. And that’s when I stop replying.

People often fail to understand the real power of being constructive. That means not only during in an argument, carefully laying out the arguments on the table, but also by being pro-active. Probably the best way to earn someone’s respect is by doing things that are respected by what they are and not by who makes them. That adds a lot to your arguments in terms of starting value because you have shown elsewhere that you either care about an issue enough to do something about it but also – and this is of utmost importance – that you’re not putting yourself in a position to only criticize in a non-construtive way. Think about it: Why bother debating things with someone that will never help any cause?

I’ve just described what I do relative to emails of people I normally don’t know but it applies to all parts of life: personal and professional. I was motivated to write this post because after several nasty emails over the years I needed to create one post to send people to when I feel there’s no point in continuing to argue over email.

When you’ve played and watched soccer for well over two decades it’s hard to get impressed. This past weekend Real Madrid player Cristiano Ronaldo scored an amazing free kick. It is amazing because it is beautiful to watch but also because we can witness how soccer can still be re-invented. This player has re-invented how we understand the game and expanded our idea of free kicks. Just enjoy it:

NYT wants to put blogs behind their new upcoming paywall. It seems that not even they know what is going to be happening with it and the rules. Interestingly, they may exempt famous blogs like Freakonomics and Paul Krugman’s (recent Nobel prize winner) from being behind the paywall.

Let me get this straight, they will put blogs people don’t care much about behind their paywall but not the most wanted and famous blogs because they are afraid they will just leave NYT ? Another grandiose screw-up by the NYT.

In Portugal, the opposing parties prefer to let the current government die slowly and painfully (in portuguese) than try to dissolve it and put a new and (hopefully) better one in place. This decision represents the current politics in Portugal: It’s a country where politicians care more about themselves instead of their country.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the people running the country use it for personal advantage instead of working for the country. We are no better than a third world country. In fact, we are inferior because those have far less education than we have. For how long I do not know.

Until the iPhone arrived in 2007, software developers didn’t really care much about mobile applications. Sure, there were some, but the mobile computer in a pocket wasn’t a reality. With the arrival of the iPhone, the way users interacted with an application were fundamentally different, still tied to the mouse and keyboard paradigm. Even on a phone, all interaction was keyboard based.

After the iPhone debuted, old and new developers specialized in making iPhone apps while some still continued to do Java based apps for the now ancient smart phones (eeeck!). So, as far as mobile went, you either did Java or you did iPhone. Fast forward some years and with today’s news of Windows mobile, we have multiple arenas: iPhone, Android, Windows mobile, Java, Symbian and MeeGo. There are now more platforms than we have in desktop: Windows, OS X and *nix.

It’s hard enough to have programs made for the three major desktops platforms, let alone multiple mobile platforms that are evolving at an insane pace. Moreover, Android alone already has multiple versions out, with different capabilities. I wonder how this will affect development of high quality mobile software. First and foremost, most software houses will focus on one platform and test the waters. Then, they will use their resources to port the applications to other platforms instead of improving and spending time on developing new concepts.

I love options as much as any nerd, but maybe there can be such as thing as too many options. Today I wondered about all this when I posed myself the question: If I have a great idea for a mobile app, which platform should I choose ?