O Blog do Gustavo Felisberto

The guid to cats that we all were waiting for.

Sometimes a problem has a complex solution. Others the smart solution is just around the corner.

For some days now Skype has released a new public release that has video support. Since day 0 the Gentoo users that were running the testing version could have an upgrade. A few more weeks and if no strange bugs pop up it will be marked as stable software.

So if you are still running the old skype and want to use the new one:

All in all there's something to give,
All in all there's something to do,
All in all there's something to live,
With you ...

14-06-2008

Paula Simões did a reply on the previous post about second life. Go read it as it is quite good and them come back for my re-replys.

Paula: You fail to point a single source of real revenue, the one that is capable of generating more revenue. You are counting on universities to keep pouring cash into the system? That is the worst Business Model ever.
And even believing that Universities would continue giving SL money because it saves them elsewhere:

One of the best advantages of SL is simulation. There are many examples, taken from several Universities: Law students practicing in a court room; medicine students practicing with virtual patients; students creating architecture models; etc.

I can barely agree with the first one, but the others? Architecture models? Medicine students practicing on a model? SL is a poor excuse for a simulated 3D world. The 3rd person perspective kills any lessons one might learn for architecture purposes. Just try to design a real house in SL and you end up walking over every peace of furniture there. And practicing a delicate surgery in a virtual model? Maybe practicing the theoretical steps would be possible but more than that?

Why would a company want to be on SL? That is the real issue. Find a BM that is capable of generating real revenue and maybe we can find a common ground. Until them, for me, it is just a souped up academic experiment.

A few weeks ago I attended some presentations about social 3d worlds. Two of the four presentations were about what can be done on Second Life and how to do it, another was about E-Learning and Virtual Worlds and the last one (actually it was the third) was by Marcos Marado and was a very nice retrospective about virtual worlds dating back to 1968. His presentation showed that many of these virtual worlds was eventually taken over my something newer. Surely many are still used today, but the user base dropped to a shadow of what was before.

My feeling is that the same will happen to second life. And why will that happen? Today I see two classes of problems with second life that need addressing:
Technical Problems
It is a very slow engine! It is open source code so the community should be able to fix it right? Wrong!! The problem is at a level that I do not believe a fix can be produced by changing the client code. As I saw last Saturday most of the performance issues come from the fact that the engine was designed to parse user produced content.

Economical Problems
Second Life is not a game. It does not aim to be a game. It aims to be a simulation of the real world, and it wants to be as perfect as possible. So good a simulation that money inside the virtual world is bought with real €€ and can be converted back.

Second life is an emerging platform for content production and distribution, just like the web was in 95. The main difference is the cost involved in a web presence versus a second life presence. Also back in 95/96 it was easy to imagine why should company A or B be in the web. With second life it is not that easy.

The company I work for (WIT-Software) launched it’s new corporate identity a few days ago. The new web site is up since…… some 15 minutes ago .

I hope you all like the new logo and image.

This is just a pointer to my guide about Gentoo on the Dell D630.

I’ve been trying to stress test a RTSP Streaming server. My goal is to see how many clients a particular server can handle. Apple has a tool called StreamingLoadTool, but virtually no information on it, also it crashes alot with:

ClientSession: Failed to bind a UDP socket.

after running for some time.

All other tools I saw where commercial windows based multi purpose test tools that would need a giant test farm.

With XCB and java graphical applications on recent distributions one gets:

java: xcb_xlib.c:82: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion `c->xlib.lock’ failed.

This is very well documented (just google a bit). So this serves mostly as a mental note for the way to fix it.

$ sed -i ’s/XINERAMA/FAKEEXTN/g’ /opt/sun-jdk-1.6.0.04/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so

or the libawt.so of your JRE. Remember that many programs may come with they’re own JRE and not use the one provided by the system.

Clear winner

A week ago I stared on my new work. I was at IPN and now I’m on the corporate world working at WIT-Software developing software for mobile systems as well as backend code for Mobile operators.
It was been a wounder full week, with lots of work and new stuff to learn.

As an added bonus last Week I received my last grade and now have my CS degree

Since I was a child I’ve always been interested in Aquariums, so this Christmas my fiancée offered me a 60 liter world. I’ve started it and this week I added some (21) fish. I’m very happy for finally having the chance to play with this. I’ll keep adding pictures here as time goes by.

Again I must say THANK YOU Raquel. One day at a time you keep my world turning.

There are some rumors that the Portuguese ISCTE is going to start a 2 years master program in OSS software. I must say that I find this a very dumb idea.

Software Engineering is an area in Computer Science, the same way Networks, Artificial Intelligence, Database, Operating Systems etc etc. OSS is a distribution model in CS.

The web development platform that we all love just released version 2.0. Go grab it while it is fresh.

The Wiki page I started about the Efika got a honorable mention award.

Over the last few months the Efika has been working fine inside the card box but I’m considering a new casing. Also the bin packages are a bit outdated. Must update that one of these days.

I must say the S. Francisco is a very nice place. But everything seems to be moving there. But why all this concentration of things? The internet promised us the freedom to be anywhere in the real world and at the same time work anywhere.

Now it is Wikimedia. Lets do a nice backup every once in a while just to be safe from earthquakes.

Hoje tive contacto com uma face menos agradável da América.

Um americano explicava-me que tinha comprado várias casas que arrendava. Já ia em sete casas, mas esperava chegar às dez antes dos 4o anos para poder viver dos rendimentos sem ter de trabalhar. Quando lhe perguntei se não tinha problemas com os inquilinos, por exemplo não pagarem as rendas, explicou-me que não havia problema pois a lei Americana impunha que quem não pagasse era liminarmente despejado (cinco dias). Mais, explicou-me com um sorriso de satisfação, o senhorio podia vender o que estivesse dentro da casa para pagar a renda em dívida.

Finalmente, quando lhe perguntei se teria coragem de despejar uma família em dificuldades, inclusive com crianças, ele olhou para mim com espanto e comentou “Of course, it’s my money!“.

Sei que poderia encontrar alguém com a mesma postura na Europa ou em qualquer sitio do mundo (a ganância é um atributo humano, não tem nacionalidade). Na verdade, o que mais me impressionou foi que esta pessoa é uma das mais inteligentes que já conheci, alguém que tem um espírito aberto, fresco, inovador, uma criatividade como raras vezes vi. E no entanto…

Criei um segundo blog, que pode ser visitado em http://paulasimoes.org/blog. Queria experimentar alguns themes do wordpress e estou bastante satisfeita com o Hemingway alterado pelos Ninja Monkeys.
O tema é absolutamente lindo. Experimentei antes um outro baseado no Hemingway também, chamado Japanese Cherry Blossom, do qual ainda gosto mais, mas que é também mais difícil de costumizar.
O tema tem uma solução que não me agrada que é o facto de partir os posts para ler mais, devido ao próprio layout, mas mesmo com todos os aborrecimentos que posso dar aos leitores, arrisco. Valha-me o facto das feeds irem com o texto completo. Entretanto poderei estar mais à vontade para ir testando o tema
Continuarei a escrever aqui, mas é mais provável que actualize o paula simões’ blog com maior regularidade, nos próximos tempos.

self-righteous:
confident of one’s own righteousness, esp. when smugly moralistic and intolerant of the opinions and behavior of others.