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Este Sábado à tarde, a partir das 14h30, vai decorrer o primeiro Social 3d Worlds, um evento sobre mundos e ambientes virtuais que estou a co-organizar. Vai ter lugar no Departamento de Engenharia Informática da Universidade de Coimbra, no Pólo II.

Aparece! Vai haver dois workshops, gentilmente efectuados pelos rapazes da Beta Technologies, sobre Second Life e criação de conteúdo para este. Contámos ainda com duas apresentações, uma pelo Marcos Marado e outra pela Paula Simões. Temos um coffee-break todo catita portanto aproveita e traz um amigo(a) também!

A entrada é grátis e livre de inscrições.

Temos ainda um espaço amplo para com tomadas e wireless para quem quiser assentar e ver uns emails/feeds/etc.

Portanto se estás por Coimbra no Sábado à tarde passa pelo Departamento de Engenharia Informática - nem que seja para dar um "olá"! :)

Site oficial em http://social3dworlds.dei.uc.pt. - [Twitter] - [Crowdvine] (Rede Social)

Etiquetas: social3dworlds2008

Primeiro lugar? Previsível...

Certamente haverão gadgets com um maior potencial inovador e com um maior valor de mercado e tecnológico, mas tudo bem, é aceitável. Numa coisa de certeza o iPhone foi o campeão de 2007 - e provavelmente o critério que a Time está a utilizar - no número de notícias, artigos e posts escritos, ou seja, nos media.

PS: Outra da Time: Melhor jogo de 2007, Halo 3. Burrice!

Alguns dos artigos que destaco da edição de Julho de 2007 da Wired:

In Italy, CIA Agents Are Undone by Their Cell Phones (The Not-So-Quiet Americans) - "The CIA needs to get a Q. James Bond's gadget guru surely would have warned the agency about how easy it is to track calls made via cell phone. Now 25 of its agents are facing trial in absentia in Milan, Italy, this summer — undone by their pathetic ignorance of technology. It seems that cellular data exposed their operation to carry out the "extraordinary rendition" (read: illegal abduction) of an Egyptian cleric suspected of terrorist involvement from a Milan street in 2003."

Hacking NASCAR: The Ultimate High-Speed Photography Kit (Zoom Zoom Lens) - "Rick Graves can stop time. OK, not really, but he can freeze 43 NASCAR racers clocking almost 200 mph. How? The pro shooter modified his Hasselblad into what he calls a DistaCam — adding a high-velocity motor, locking the shutter open, and inserting a metal plate with a laser-cut slit. Whenever Graves triggers the motor, film zips past the slit at up to 1,400 rpm, capturing stills of the speeding cars. "Failure is a necessity," he says, "and a lot of times, success is luck.""

YouTube Does Science, From Fruit-Fly Fight Clubs to Stem Cell Extractions (Test Tubes Meet YouTube) - "Years behind the lab bench taught Moshe Pritsker that the trickiest part of any science experiment isn't the hypothesis, it's the method. The former Harvard researcher learned this lesson back in his student days, after carefully following the instructions on a specialized kit for isolating DNA. "Surprise," Pritsker says, "no DNA!" A colleague finally showed him how to make the kit work. And that gave Pritsker an idea: methodology porn."

What's Inside: Red Bull (Meat Sugar, Caffeine, and Bile!) - "Glucose - Like most popular soft drinks, Red Bull is largely sugar water. But don't count on its glucose to "give you wings," as the ad says. Multiple studies have debunked the so-called sugar high."

The Best Geek Vacations: The South Pole, Chernobyl, Tatooine (Geek Vacations Destinations) - "1 Tokyo - Skip the pachinko parlors and fish market, and head straight to Akihabara — the ultimate red-light district for gadget fetishists. After that, take in either the Ghibli (dedicated to anime kings Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata) or Bandai museums. Don't forget to save a day for the Sega Joypolis!"

Wired-Tired-Expired - "Hunt (Expired), Breed (Tired), Clone (Wired)"

JW: War Czar, Nanohealing, Wilf (Jargon Watch) - "War Czar - n. A position proposed by the Bush administration to coordinate actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute was chosen after several candidates declined."

CNN.com's Nicole Lapin Talks Up Citizen Journalists (This Is CNN?!) - "Sure, she could pass for Lindsay Lohan, but Nicole Lapin is not just a pretty face behind a news desk. She speaks five languages, was valedictorian at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, and at 23 is one of the youngest anchors in CNN's history. Plus, as host of CNN.com Live Video (formerly CNN Pipeline), the network's 24-hour online news service, the SoCal native is charged with pioneering the organization's future on the Internet. We spoke to Lapin about being a reporter in the age of citizen journalism."

Infoporn: Despite the Web, Americans Remain Woefully Ill-Informed (Putin? Never Heard of Her.) - "More than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, the world's richest information source hasn't necessarily made its users any more informed. A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989. Citizens who call the Internet their primary news source know slightly less than fans of TV and radio news. Hmmm... maybe a little less Perez Hilton and a little more Jim Lehrer."

Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense (This Just In: I'm Twittering) - "Twitter is the app that everyone loves to hate. Odds are you've noticed people — probably much younger than you — manically using Twitter, a tool that lets you post brief updates about your everyday thoughts and activities to the Web via browser, cell phone, or IM. The messages are limited to 140 characters, so they lean toward pithy, haiku-like utterances. When I dropped by the main Twitter page, people had posted notes like "Doing lunch and picking up father-in-law from senior center." Or "Checking out Ghost Whisperer" or simply "Thinking I'm old." (Most users are between 18 and 27.)"

Reviews: HBO's Flight of the Conchords, and New Music from Spoon and Ulrich Schnauss (Reviews) - "The First Word, Christine Kenneally - Incredibly, it's not just creationists who have been resisting the theory of evolution. As Christine Kenneally reminds us in her new book, giants like Noam Chomsky spent decades forcefully denying natural selection's role in the development of language. As a result, research into the origins of speech has had a lot of catching up to do. Here, Kenneally provides a useful introduction to the exciting new field of evolutionary linguistics. Breakthroughs — babbling dolphins, talking chimps, freshly discovered language genes — are coming so quickly now that Chomsky recently deigned to utter the dreaded "e" word."

Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused of Murder (The Trials of Hans Riser) - "Hans Reiser is waiting for me, standing on the other side of an imitation-wood table. The room is small, the concrete walls bare. A guard locks the steel door from the outside. There is no sound. Reiser is wearing the red jumpsuit of a prisoner in solitary confinement, though he has been allowed to meet with me in this chilly visiting room. There was a time when he was known as a cantankerous but visionary open source programmer. His work was funded by the government; he was widely credited (and sometimes reviled) for rethinking the structure of the Linux operating system. Now he is known as prisoner BFP563."

TechCrunch Blogger Michael Arrington Can Generate Buzz ... and Cash (The Loudest Voice in the Valley) - "One Tuesday morning in early May, Michael Arrington was sound asleep in his bedroom in Atherton, California, when three men burst in. Naturally, he was startled. His first reaction, he recalls, was to tell them to "get the fuck out." But he quickly realized they meant no harm. Clad in white business suits and speaking English with a Dutch accent, the apologetic men looked more like dandies on their way to a garden party than criminals. They were, it turns out, overeager entrepreneurs from Amsterdam making the rounds of Silicon Valley big shots. All they wanted — desperately — was to tell Arrington about their startup."

Autobots and Decepticons: A Photo Gallery of Our Favorite Iron Giants (Iron Giants) - "They started out as toys for boys, the robot successors to G.I. Joe. They morphed into Saturday-morning cartoons and helped shape a generation of geeks."

The Rebirth of Optimus Prime: Behind the Scenes with Director Michael Bay (The Rebirth of Optimus Prime) - "For two glorious years, Optimus Prime was America's hero. He starred in Transformers, a thriftily animated series (cynics would call it a half-hour toy commercial) that pitted Prime and his army of Autobots against the vicious Megatron and his Decepticons. On the small screen, these robots in disguise were more than cartoons, they were towering titanium gods, massive in their machine carapaces: tractor trailers, cop cars, fighter jets."

How an Obscure Collection of Japanese Action Figures Changed the Way We Play (Toy_Wonder) - "So many things we cherished in the 1980s sprang from dazzling collaborations between two giants. Apple: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Physical fitness: Jane Fonda and Olivia Newton-John. Wham!: George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. And for the beloved toys called Transformers, you can thank Ronald Reagan and George Lucas. Not literally, of course. The Gipper and the father of Star Wars never actually sat down in a room together, downing Mountain Dew and brainstorming until Optimus Prime burst from their skulls like Athena. Although that would have been cool."

Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World (The Whole Earth Cataloged) - "In 1765, a 22-year-old British naval officer named James Rennell set out to map the entire Indian subcontinent. Traveling with a small party of soldiers, he used the advanced technologies of the day: a compass and a distance-measuring wheel called a perambulator. During the six-year journey, one soldier was killed by a tiger, five were mauled by a leopard, and Rennell was wounded in an attack by angry locals. He survived, and his detailed maps and atlas, published in the 1780s, defined British understanding of India for generations. Years later, a British geographer wrote that, to Rennell, "blanks on the map of the world were eyesores." More than two centuries later, within the decidedly safer confines of Building 45 on Google's Mountain View, California, campus, John Hanke clicks the 3-foot image of Earth projected on his office wall and spins it around to India. Hanke, the director of Google Earth and Google Maps, zooms in for a closer look at
Bangalore. At first, the city appeared in Google Earth as little more than a hi-res satellite photo. "Bangalore wasn't mapped on Google's products," he says, "and it really wasn't very well mapped, period.""

Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future - "07.10.2017 | Washington, DC - I finally dumped my last laptop today. That big LCD. The full-size keyboard. Like a ball and chain, brother! From now on, Harvey Feldspar's Geoblog will emerge from a gizmo the size and shape of a Moleskine notebook. My new Senseo-Transicast 3000 is everything palmtops and cell phones have been struggling to become. I can already feel this device completely changing my life. And a wireless consortium pays me to promote it! You should buy one right now. See that handy link there? Did I mention the free shipping? This mobile is so location-aware, it can ship itself!"

For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU (The Human Advantage) - "Which is prettier? A picture of a black cat sleeping on a pillow or one of a curly-haired brunette woman in a miniskirt? I've got only a
few seconds to decide. I vote for the cat. I'm sitting in a laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, playing Matchin', a computer game developed by Luis von Ahn. In the game, two players — von Ahn and I, seated at different terminals — watch as pairs of pictures swiped off the Internet flash up on our screens. Our goal is to pick the one we think both of us will find more attractive, not necessarily the one
we personally prefer."

Etiquetas: wired

Hoje (e nos próximos 3 dias) estou em Lisboa para "atender" ao SAPO Codebits, um evento/concurso de programação organizado pelo SAPO. Só que até agora, nada de evento, nem de programação. Isto porque tive que levantar o rabiosque da cama às 5h45 da manhã (sim! 5h45!!) para estar aqui a horas de deixar a minha mala em casa do Daniel.

Isto o Senhor McDonald é um simpático e ofereçeu-me aqui Wi-Fi, para eu vir para aqui colocar 'coisas', basicamente.

Passando ao Codebits. Acho que vão ser 3 dias bombásticos. Sinceramente estou deveras espectante. Tenho aí uma ideia para o concurso, mas como ainda nada está definido, não posso adiantar nada.

Como devo ter Wi-Fi à borla lá no evento, vou tentar manter aqui o blog actualizado com novidades. Passem também no meu Twitter. Volta e meia ponho lá 'coisas'.

Até lá deixo aqui uma foto do Centro Comercial Vasco da Gama às 11 da manhã de hoje.

Stay tunned!

PS: Acho que há uma tag qualquer definida para colocar nos posts. Sinceramente já não me lembro qual, mas pelo sim, pelo não meto codebits.

Etiquetas: codebits

Pois é. Graças a uma ferramenta que instalei no meu Outlook, acabei de constatar que em cerca de 12000 emails, só 400 é que eram cá dos bons. Ou seja dá uma módica quantia de 3,5% de email em condições no meio de tanta 'junkarada'. ('junkarada' como um mashup com o termo Junk)

Eu sinceramente acho que deveríamos olhar para isto de uma forma positiva, senão vejamos. Para mim, e tomando em conta o aumento brutal do preço do petróleo, acho que se devia iniciar o mais rapidamente possível a investigação sobre carros movidos a Spam.

Era a solução para todos os nossos problemas energéticos!

Agora soluções fantasiosas como a Fusão Nuclear? Qu'é isso?

Ahhh... Assim já percebo.

É que ao que parece anda tudo aí agora com o "Kudos". :/ Vá-se lá saber...

Eu avisei. :/

É oficial! Fartei-me de ver janelas destas no Outlook 2007 (só hoje foram duas vezes) e fiz o downgrade para o Outlook/Office 2003. Tal é a qualidade do novo Office, que assim se junta ao Vista, na minha categoria de produtos fujam-deles-a-sete-pés.

Na minha última instalação do sistema considerei seriamente optar, ou não, pelo novo Outlook 2007 e consequentemente Office 2007. Depois de considerar os prós e os contras lá me decidi a dar uma oportunidade ao novo Office.

As aplicações convencionais, Word, Exel e Companhia, até se tornam giras e são mais agradáveis de se trabalhar, mas o Outlook, isso é outra história.

A minha experiência com tal programa começou logo mal. Demora uma eternidade a descarregar o email! E quando digo eternidade estou a tentar não ser mauzinho, portanto...

Após a eternidade a descarregar emails (a eternidade tem um espaço temporal de dias portanto vejam o quão lento é) tentei colocar o SpamBayes a funcionar. Digo tentei porque nunca funcionou. Quando tinha o add in activo, o Outlook 2007 pendurava no inicio. Tal foram os crashs que tive que fazer uma valente verificação ao meu ficheiro .pst. Estava sem filtragem de SPAM.

Lá optei pelo SpamBully, que afinal até é catita, e resolvi a situação.

Nos últimos tempos tornou-se insuportável. Desde a lentidão a descarregar emails (1 hora para 30Mb em rede local?), até à lentidão geral (sim o Outlook 2007 é tipo Vista, os recursos nunca são demais) e por último o facto de estar sempre a pendurar o que obriga a matar o processo do Outlook com todas as consequências que isso tem para o ficheiro .pst a longo prazo.

Portanto, bye bye Outlook 2007, que eu cá vou continuar com o 2003. Até quando não sei. Sim porque já começo a ficar farto de andar com o Outlook às costas, literalmente.