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I know, I know, I've been lost for a looooooooooooong while now, yes. It's a little bit more than seven months since my last post. What prompted me to write here again? Mainly I re-visited the whole site after the new version came out, just a couple of days ago. (And now that we're at it, I still do not know what the new features are).

It's not that I've been so busy that I was unable to post. I did have some time to post every now and then, although I've been busy. I've been working on interesing personal development projects, full of bleeding-edge technologies like AJAX. I've also been enjoying my new computing environment sooooo much you just can't imagine.

I am still on Ubuntu Linux Dapper 6.06 full-time, and I can't feel better at it. It is stable, friendly and enjoyable to the point that I have a hard time whenever I have to use that other OS that almost everybody use. I am developing web applications on Linux using jEdit as my main IDE. Aptana, of which I talked about in my last post coincidentally, turned out to be too resource-hungry, even though I have a modern PC with 512Mb RAM and 3.0GHz CPU speed. I've been using Firefox as my testing and debugging platform (Sorry Opera, but Firebug has no equal when it comes to test and debug a web application using JavaScript and AJAX heavily).

Thunderbird is still also my choice when it comes to email. Opera still does not have WYSIWYG email editor and other minor but handy features that I need. Opera continues to be my day-to-day browser for my web surfing needs, and OpenOffice, Gimp, ImageMagick, Beagle, Liferea, Gaim, Gnome, Vim/Cream, MPlayer and MPD do the rest. I've been also using Ruby's and Python's scripting power to automate some tasks in my working environment.

I've also been vey busy following the socio-political events that have happened in Cuba, my country, in the recent months, almost all related in some way to the illness of the president Fidel Castro and the temporary transfer of power, and how this has impacted our society. I know some people get more interested in this blog because of my nationality than for my interests and the topics I write about. Feel free to ask.

Anyway, I'll see if I can make the time to talk here again every now and then, mainly about the technologies I am using and how they make my life easier.

This is absolutely entertaining and I ought to share it here with you. Although it highly possible that you already got to it. I was reading this wonderful blog post by an insider about how disappointed and frustrated are Microsoft employees today because of the embarrassing delays in the (featureless and already delayed-several-times) upcoming Windows version: Vista.

Article apart, which you can go and read and I encourage you to do so, take a look at the first few dozens of comments. I will quote below some of my favorites. This is really so enlightening about the inner workings of lazy giant caught up in a bureaucratic disaster.

"The migration to Vista will be a passive one, as someone else previously mentioned; appearing on new computers bought by companies.

The same for home users; a lot of people do not know enough to figure out what hardware upgrades they need ; so again, it will appear on new computers."

Is this what Windows has become? An upgrade no one wants, forced upon them because the new hardware they're buying doesn't support anything less?

Compare this to OS X, where people fall all over themselves trying to get the newest version running on their old hardware because there's actual value in the new features.

So Vista has its guts ripped out, slips, and we wait another 5 years for a potentially insipring version of Windows, meanwhile Apple ships another 3 updates to OS X.

I hope to God Office 12 steps up and kicks some ass.

"We could and should have shipped sooner with 20% of the current feature set. Seriously, what makes people think that anyone cares about all of these other features beyond the bullet points that will sell the product"

EXACTLY... It's about time we face the fact that the OS is nothing more than a hosting platform for REAL apps. Just like IE is for cool websites. We don't need apps on there done by us...calc and notepad are it. Let someone else "skin" Windows, let someone else write the stupid solitaire and let's do the security, kernel and move on. You honestly think anyone sits there wondering at the marvel that is Windows Explorer? No, they go in long enough to open an app or a file. Who gives a f--k what the folders look like, stop pretending that is important and requires a date slip.

MS is a big company and its getting ever bigger. Computer and software industry have to be quick and adaptable otherwise the inner bureaucratic mechanism will destroy the machine from inside. The managers are sitting in their ebony towers and deny the fact that there is a problem.

And the winner is....

Today's announcement is of course no surprise to anyone inside MS. The only surprise is that it was such a short delay announced.

Basically we do not believe Vista will make January 2007 or even March 2007. Anyone with any access knows what a frankenstein's monster NT is on the inside. At some point there is a law of diminishing returns trying to do anything to it at all, it seems like that limit is being reached today. The release is pushed back because of bugs but fixing those bugs will create more bugs. It is just godawful to be honest. And the process gets in the way at every step.

At some point we will have to do something and i know at least some in my team privately agree with me. We will have to throw out everything and start again. This is what Apple did with OSX, and sure it was painful, but it worked and now they're kicking our asses. We should have done that in 2000. Now it is even more obvious we should do it. Start again and just run a compatibility layer on top. Apple did it with classic why can't we???

IF we manage to ship vista at ALL then it is a miracle and the absolute last rev we can possible do working like this. It is insane the manhours wasted rearranging a house of cards. We need to START AGAIN PEOPLE.

I found these two excellent articles about Digital Rights Management (DRM) and why is necessary to fight against it.

The big DRM mistake
Learning to love big brother

Most people nowadays live unaware of the implications of all those restrictions that are imposed on us with respect to our rights over what we own. We live day by day without thinking "why am I not supposed to copy this or that?"

Back to the articles, I loved those quotations of George Orwell's book named "1984".

I was so glad when I read Jeremy Zawodny's personal opinion about all this DoJ vs. Google stuff. In spite of being a Yahoo! employee, he sincerely expresses his opinion on this matter, and he explicitely states that he's speaking for himself, and not on behalf of his employer. I like what he said and I mostly agree with it, as you could figure out by reading my original post about this issue.

Only one thing though: Why is he disappointed in the Government? People are disappointed when they get a response they didn't expect. I would have been disappointed if Google would have given all that information to the Justice Department, and I am disappointed because Yahoo and the others did. I would feel disappointed if my best friend stabs me in the back, but I would not feel that way if my worst enemy does.

So why would someone feel disappointed in the US government? Those kind of things are exactly what I always expect from them, so it's no surprise. No surprise at all.

I wonder if they really mean it, or is just a catchy title to grab some attention so that people go and click on it on their aggregators. Here we have this article titled Web 4.0 which is nonsense to me. First, all those stories about Web 3.0, which was and still is a good analogy to refer to what comes next. But it ends just there. Web 3.0 is still referring to what comes next, because Web 2.0 is in its infancy. And today I see this Web 4.0 thing, which makes me think that people are trying to go too far ahead without having passed through all the way there.

It's not the article itself, is what it talks about. It turns out that the terms Web n.0 appear all over the web in a more or less decreasing order, according to Google's graphic shown. I wonder why would someone want to name or mention in their pages something like "Web 8.0".