Paolo's Weblog, February 2007

Mercoledì, 28 febbraio 2007

What iLike

It's good to hear that iLike has been going well. I installed the iTunes plug-in some months ago and later removed it because:

a friend of mine told me about complex messaging system going on between iLike users, based on listening to specific songs: people is holding conversations using song titles as a communication channel. Since I usually shuffle on my entire library (often with muted sound), I can only imagine what kind of message I have been sending out;
after sharing all my music tastes for weeks, my profile pages sported as people with similar tastes a guy looking like Borat and a nice lady looking like his grandma.

3:27:23 PM

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Lunedì, 26 febbraio 2007

iPhone commercial

The new iPhone 30" commercial includes scenes from 32 copyrighted movies. No wonder Apple has been thinking differently about copyright lately ;-)

12:00:00 PM

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Giovedì, 22 febbraio 2007

I need your opinion

What do you think of the most expensive web site ever made in Italy?

The last two administrations of the Italian Government have been spending money (50 million Euro and more according to some sources) to develop the ultimate portal to promote international tourism in Italy.

If they weren't worried about other issues at the moment, they would be partying for the official opening of the Italia.it portal.

Now, my personal opinion is that the whole site totally sucks, but I'm not the intended target for the site. So if you are not an Italian and are reading this post, could you please quickly check Italia.it and leave an opinion? Will you still come to visit after surviving 3 levels of Flash intros?

6:09:00 PM

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Domenica, 18 febbraio 2007

Domenica, pizza!

There's pizza and pizza (and pizza, and pizza). This is how we do it.

Technorati Tags: pizza

3:34:09 PM

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Martedì, 13 febbraio 2007

Reading RSS feeds on a phone

Reading the manual of my new cellphone (you can only imagine how much interesting stuff is hidden in manuals) I discovered that the built-in web browser also supports RSS.

After testing it I must admit that in a way it is true, the browser does render RSS feeds, the only problem is that it's treating them just like a bookmarked html pages: you click it, you download it, you see a list of items, you can read a single item. No feed polling, no OPML import, no river of news, basically no nothing. We see a lot of implementations of this kind: done by people who don't use RSS and don't get it, building something that can render xml code, totally missing the point.

At this point I am wondering what kind of feedback all my blogging friends who have received free phones from Nokia gave back.

After switching to Google Reader I don't have a good feed reader for my phone anymore (BlogLines mobile as good, but the desktop counterpart was outdated) and miss reading feeds on my phone. Considering the cost of mobile bandwidth, a centralized service is the way to go (no sense downloading hundreds of feeds to my phone if I'm not going to read them). I guess I'll wait for google to fix their mobile version, they did the best river of news aggregagtor after all.

Tags: Nokia, n73, RSS, RSS Readers

5:01:03 PM

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Giovedì, 8 febbraio 2007

Yugma: free web conferencing!

This application is very, very, very, very interesting. I have been missing a screen sharing application for a very long time, from the little testing I did so far Yugma seem to work well, it's fast and it's free.

Since I spend most of my time trying to explain stuff that happens on screens to people on the other side of telephone lines (or Skype), I think this might have a significant impact on my work. [via Stefano]

6:39:33 PM

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Mercoledì, 7 febbraio 2007

New toys: Nokia n73

After about two years we have decided to upgrade company phones and today we received a bunch of brand new Nokia N73. Moving stuff from the old phone was clean and quick, and the phone comes with built-in Flickr support. Some googling got it to synchronize with my Mac also if it's not officially supported by Apple (why is Apple so slow keeping up with new Nokia models? Or Microsoft operating systems? Are they saving money on developer programs?).

For some reason Nokia has changed the size of the power plug, making all my old Nokia power adapters (I must have at least 10 of them) useless. There is an a little cable to convert the plug size... but I would need at least 10 of them!

I still have to figure out how the camera works, but Zeiss lenses and a pretty high resolution should provide interesting results. The screen resolution is amazing compared to the old 6630.

Today Vodafone and MySpace announced a deal, mobile is definitely going to be the next market for social networking services, just look at the how Twitter has been exploding recently (at least in Europe).

4:28:19 PM

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Lunedì, 5 febbraio 2007

Second weekend trying to fix my MacBook

After spending last weekend trying to fix my Mac, yesterday I backed up my account, erased everything, installed MacOS X from scratch and recovered from the backup.

The whole process did take about 6 hours, but everything went amazingly well, and my system was back with all my stuff. For the kind of magic that always happens when you do this kind of operations, I actually got 10Gb of additional free space on my drive.

But the issue I originally had with strange screen artifacts in Aperture it's still here. So I'm back to square one, on the phone with Apple support (but with a brand new 500Gb external drive and a full backup).

Tags: Aperture, Apple, MacBook Pro

4:57:34 PM

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