O Blog do Gustavo Felisberto

O Conselho de Ministros aprovou ontem uma proposta de lei a ser submetida à aprovação pela Assembleia da República, que estabelece,

a obrigação de os fornecedores de serviços de comunicações electrónicas publicamente disponíveis ou de uma rede pública de comunicações conservarem, durante um ano, dados de tráfego e dados de localização relativos a essa comunicações, bem como dados conexos necessários para identificar o assinante ou utilizador.

Na Directiva 2006/24/CE, pode ler-se, no ponto 8:

Na sua Declaração de 25 de Março de 2004 sobre a luta contra o terrorismo, o Conselho Europeu encarregou o Conselho de proceder à análise de propostas relativas ao estabelecimento de regras sobre a conservação de dados de tráfego das comunicações pelos prestadores de serviços.

Leis semelhantes a estas (algumas bem piores, diga-se) foram aprovadas nos EUA, após o 11 de Setembro, levando ao encerramento de muitos Talkers, já que os autores se recusaram a manter dados sobre os utilizadores.

Mais uma lei que, a ser aprovada, irá permitir mais uma forma de controlo sobre a sociedade. É muito fácil para os governantes incutirem medos na população, neste caso, basta mencionar o vocábulo terrorismo.
E fazendo uso dos medos das pessoas lá vão arranjando leis que permitam controlar as populações…

Este post é mesmo só um aviso. O número especial dos Cahiers du Cinema sobre Ingmar Bergman e Michelangelo Antonioni chegou hoje aos quiosques portugueses (a revista saíu dia 30 de Agosto)
Sendo uma revista francesa e em francês, é provável terem chegado poucas, pelo que é melhor correr ao quiosque mais próximo

It is not official. Yet. But it seems that ISO will vote to reject Microsoft’s OOXML as standard.

Microsoft expects that a second vote early next year will result in approval, it said today.

I hope not!

Passei o fim de semana no BarCamp Portugal 2007. Gostei principalmente das apresentações do Pedro Custódio. Já tinha assistido a uma apresentação do Pedro no Take Off, que gostei bastante também. E não só pelo conteúdo, mas também pela forma. Não sendo informática, é um pouco difícil acompanhar algumas apresentações, de forma que é muito gratificante quando o orador usa um tipo de linguagem e apresentação, que facilmente consigo adaptar aos meus interesses.
Um dos aspectos mais positivos foi a possibilidade de falar com pessoas e respectivos projectos que de outra forma seria muito difícil conhecer. O HalfBaked também foi engraçado, principalmente nas apresentações. Independentemente de a maioria serem negócios de “brincadeira”, foi interessante perceber o levantamento de problemas e possíveis resoluções.
Talvez por isso, fiquei com bastante pena que o HourHack tivesse o seu post-it esquecido (?) na parede.
Já que o BarCamp apela a uma maior interacção entre os participantes, parece-me mais importante existirem actividades de trabalho conjunto do que apresentações, a que podemos ter facilmente acesso noutros eventos.
Oh well, talvez para o ano?

Sábado e Domingo e eu vou lá estar.

Quantos de nós em situações limite e outras não pensaram em pegar na mochila e partir rumo a lado nenhum e a todos ao mesmo tempo? Esse é um pensamento que me assalta com alguma frequência. Sair deste país (desculpem-me os patriotas) e (pelo menos) saber como as outras culturas se organizam no pedacinho de chão que lhes coube.
Isto vem a propósito da referência de “Pela Estrada Fora” de Jack Kerouac no Ipsilon da última sexta. Confesso que não li o livro, mas ao mesmo tempo que o digo como se fosse uma falha, apetece-me lê-lo só depois de partir…

I found out about Zotero, in the CHNM site, Center for History and New Media, that produces Zortero, a Firefox extension, and I think it is one of the best tools to organize your web research: webpages, notes, bookmarks, pdfs, etc
You can even export a webpage to a formated (APA, Chicago style etc) bibliography entry!
And you can use it with the openoffice or word plugin too

There is been a lot of discussion about Wired leaving Second Life. The author of the “The Long Tail” was somehow disappointed with the small number of avatars (30) that showed up to his book signing. Chris Anderson says that the problem of Second Life is that “there is nobody there”.
Well, if you are fighting for a presence in Second Life you must think that avatars have a real person behind, so fighting for a presence means that you are fighting not only with other events in Second Life but with events in Real Life too. Because you can not be at a concert in Real Life and at book signing in Second Life at the same time. Yet.
The other issue missing in all this is that the fighting for a “presence” in Second Life can not be done with the same methods that in Real Life. It is a new environment with new rules.
I would say that the whole concept of “having a presence”, in Second Life, in order to sell your product it is all wrong.
Second Life is not about have something there or even about to be there, it is about interaction. Of course, you must have a place there, but putting a building there does not make people go to your building. Well, they might go for a first time, to see what you have there, but if your building or place has things that are just there it will be very difficult to have avatars returning.
Big brands are going crazy with the possibility of be in SL, they want to be be there mostly because of the hype. They pay huge sums of money to enterprises to build beautiful buildings but, IMHO, they are missing the point.
If you want to sell your product in SL, the best way to do it is to create a community around your product. Because SL is about communities, not about buildings. So beside the place, you need a team not only to guide your visitors, but mostly to interact with them, to create new challenges and activities to your visiting avatars.
One other thing that can help is seeing SL as one of the tools available, a blog about your product, an account on Youtube or Flickr with information about your product in SL could help to create the community.

É verdade, temos já uma nova moradora nesta casa. Cabe-me a mim fazer a introdução. Poderia falar-vos da admiração que tenho por ela ou da alegria que sinto por a conhecer há tantos anos ou ainda das coisas importantes para que me chamou a atenção o seu espírito perspicaz.
Mas não vou falar de nada disso. Vou deixar que vocês o intuam a partir da sua escrita.
Bem-vinda!

I’m working solo again on this new secret project, but upper management wants, as normal, to keep up what is currently being done. At the place were I’m working they are trying to use some web based project management system. The one that is currently installed is dotProject, and I must say that I find that the tasks module just sucks.

I’ll try to explain why I think it sucks in two words: “dynamic tasks”

If one tries to create a dynamic task that depends on another task one gets:

CTask::store-check^ failed^ -^ A Dynamic Task may not depend on another task

Dynamic tasks are important in many contexts, but specially in projects that do not have a very clear predefined set of tasks.

So I’m on the look for something else. I like planner but it lacks task logs and completion status. Also one other thing that would be great would be a way to share the information about the document in realtime, and not depend on cvs/svn to share the project file. So something web based would be great.

Volta depressa amigo. Vai e vê, olha e aprende. Vai e não penses nos que ficam e apenas pensam no teu retorno. Vai e vê, olha e aprende. Quando a saudade apertar sossega o coração pois nós cá nos aguentamos. Vai e vê, olha e aprende, que nós cá contamos com o que vais juntar ao teu saber.

Abraço forte

These monsters have four eyes and two mouths and they are the subject of one of my favorite films. Susan Buice and Arin Crumley are the directors. They published the film on the internet and you can watch it for free. You can help them by registering on Stout.com.
Really nice film
(Thanks to MindBoosterNoori that told me about it)

Awards & Achievements:
-Really Didn’t Speak for 4 months
-Created film in 14 months using credit cards.
-World Premiered @ Slamdance 2005
-Attended 20 film festivals in first 9 months.
-Special Audience Award @ SXSW 2005
-Best New Directors Brooklyn International
-Launched video podcast the day the video iPod was announced.
-Video Podcast promoted by MySpace & iTunes.
-In 1 year of posting episodes 1 to 8 over 1 million views garnered.
-Theatrical self release to 6 major markets using Google Map have fans sign up and pull film to their city.
-2 Spirit Award Nominations n 2006.
-Won Undiscovered Gems Showcase Sundance Channel Audience Award in 2006
-First feature film event in Second Life
-First Feature Film Uploaded to YouTube

Well, when you start to use Second Life, you start to discover a lot of places that you could use in your classes or that you just want to return to. Of course, you can add the landmark to your inventory, but soon you will find that your landmark folder will be your firefox’s bookmarks worst nightmare…
To solve this by tagging and comment the landmarks, you can register at Gridmarker.
Follow the instructions in the FAQ section in order to get your Gridmarker hud and start to tag your landmarks from inside SL.
You can search others landmarks in the site too.
Here’s mine

One of the big problems in Second Life is to get the discussions to read later. This is very important when we are talking about Education related matters. If you have a meeting with your students in SL, you certainly would like to have a transcript to read later, to delivered it to the students that couldn’t attend, to discuss it in the classroom and you can, of course. Just copy/paste the chat to a txt file.
But the problem is that txt will be very difficult to read and follow. I noticed that all discussions in SL begin with a bunch of “Hi, Are you there”’s kind of thing and ii is very difficult to follow who’s saying what.
So, Kisa Naumova provided a very useful website where you can create a chatlog changing the look of that txt. You can search other chatlogs there too.
Don’t forget to get authorization from the participating avatars, the chatlogs will be public in that site!

I would love to go to this conference, but for £795 + VAT ?! And that it is only the conference, because if you’d like to attend two workshops you will have to pay £2185! Incredible!
Maybe they put something on teh website afterwords…

Chegou-me assim à caixa de correio um convite de uma grande amiga,

É já no dia 11 de Agosto que a Trasfega vai inaugurar nova exposição
de roupa e acessórios.
Será no bar-livraria-galeria Cem Medos, em Lisboa, no nº 99 da rua da
Rosa, pelas 19h.
Gostaríamos, por isso, de convidá-lo(a), a estar presente neste
momento de cor e criatividade, um verdadeiro regalo para os olhos e
uma indiscrição para o corpo.

O colectivo,

Cláudia Ferreira
Sandra B.B. Ferreira
Susana Azenha
Manuela Brito

Some time ago I answered a survey about Second Life ( I got my first L$300 because of that) and now Prof. Marc Fetscherin, from Rollins College, and Prof. Lattemann, from Potsdam University, published the study.
Although I do not agree with the first figure that shows the evolution of Web like:
1995 - 2000 - Web 1.0 - Website, Text, Flash
2000 - 2005 - Web 2.0 - Weblog, Wikis, Podcast, RSS Feeds
2005 - 2010 (…) - Web 3.0 - Virtual Worlds, 3D Portals, Avatars, MUVE’s, Integrated Games, Social Computing

because if we think a little we will see that virtual worlds already existed many years before 2005, I found the empyrical study very interesting.

90% of respondents have less than a year experience on Second Life. 70% access Second Life from home, 54% with a desktop. 67% of respondents are not afraid of giving personal information. Almost 60% are very likely to buy virtual goods from Second Life, and 42% are willing to use their credit card. 70% perceive Second Life to improve collaboration, 69% it improves communication, and 61% it improves cooperation between people. 56% of respondents perceive Second Life as easy to use. [1]

But the conclusion that got my eye was:

“People are using Second Life not to change their identity, but rather to explore and visit new places and meet people” [2]

Of course we have to see this report with caution (almost 250 respondents from witch 29% with a PhD degree), but it is very interesting to find out that people are using Second Life not to change their identity. Some time ago, I read a story about a couple in Second Life that have there a house exactly as they have in Real Life and for some time I was thinking that the main interest on Second Life will be to know about places and to cooperate and collaborate with other people, rather than create a whole new life. After all, one is enough, right?

[1] page 12 of the study
[2] page 18 of the study

note to self: shift + alt + 8 (or 9)

(porque é daquelas coisas que me estou sempre a esquecer…)

Well, I am using Kmail and KOrganizer in Mac, via MacPorts. As I said before, there is no email client so powerful like Kmail. I couldn’t manage to put Kontact working, but I will wait until it is ported to Mac.
The only problem is when I need to copy things between KDE and Mac apps, but now I found the solution in macosxhints: use xclipboard from X11.