Oscar Trelles

My recycled Linux box died today without any warning. Since the beginning, I thought it was the power source, but opened it anyway to see if something was going on inside, since I didn’t smell anything burnt. While moving components around within the box, I got this curious view:

and I remembered this thing about LA officials recommending manufacturers to discontinue the use of the terms ‘master’ and ‘slave’ on labels for computer parts supplied to the county.

When I first saw this a few days ago in CNN.com, I thought it was going to be everywhere, so I didn’t blog about it then. Maybe everybody else thought the same, or it is just so silly that nobody considered it worth a blog post However, the issue got me thinking after awhile…

Promoters of this ban sustain that “Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label (…)”. Now, those have been in use for how long? 50 years? more or less… so, how does it become an issue just today? I mean, it’s been a lot of time and I don’t know about anybody feeling uncomfortable about their disks labeled “master” or “slave”.

Besides, it’s just the labels marking components the ones that use those words. CMOs usually refer to non-removable drives in the same way, and those would be harder to change….

If you haven’t noticed yet, FullAsAGoog has a new menu item up there: ‘prefs’. Currently, that page allows you to configure the new languages now available for blog posts. That’s right, from now on FullAsAGoog syndicates blogs in languages other than english.

A significant collection of blogs in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and German has been made available for people that can and want to read their favorite blogs in their original languages. All you need to do is change you preferences and add the languages you want to read (default is english-only). Eventually, FullAsAGoog’s interface will be also available in all of these languages.

This is still a work in progress, but also a big step into the democratization of blog syndication, and for that Geoff deserves a huge kudos! I’m also glad to be a little part of this, as I will be collaborating to this project as an editor for blogs in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian… so, if you got blogs we don’t know about and you think they would make a good addition to the Goog, you gotta make a suggestion.

Here is what has been said so far:

Fullasagoog en espa

You know how can you change carriers without changing your cell phone number? Just do it. One thing that prevent people from getting a better service is the hassle that changing numbers represent, like having to re-print business cards, send out messages to friends and relatives, etc. But as of today, things will change dramatically.

I was reading this article in the latest issue of WIRED on my way to the office, and it says that due to new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules, telecommunication companies are required to let customers keep their numbers when changing wireless service providers. That’s huge! I wish this had come a couple of months ago, when I had to cancel my service and start over.

Still, contracts are contracts, and if you signed one, early termination fees are still up.

I just posted a review I wrote for the PHP Cookbook, the first PHP book I’ve ever read, courtesy of O’Reilly and the NYPHP group.

Before, everything I knew came from digging into the the online PHP manual at PHP.net, a handful of whitepapers, and lots of experimentation. This was the first time I had paper-based PHP referenced, and I actually enjoyed it.

PHP Cookbook offers a bunch of examples that can come in handy when you need some inspiration to solve a problem. If you’re into PHP and interested in the book, read on.

Tomorrow, Thursday November 20th, I will be delivering a presentation at the NYMMUG monthly meeting. The title of the presentation is “Application Development for Macromedia Central”, and we will be discussing the core concepts behind Central. For more details, location and RSVP, visit the NYMMUG website.

I should have blogged about this earlier, but since NYMMUG meetings are usually the last thursday of each month, I wasn’t too worried. But next week is Thanksgiving day, so they scheduled the meeting for this week.

I will be posting materials later on.

—-
Update:
I have just posted a zip file with last night’s presentation materials. You can download it from here.
Thanks to everyone that attended. Your feedback is most welcome.

Maybe it is only me, but the name isn’t really inspirational. As a matter of fact, it reminds me of those exercise machines from the infomercials Of course, no offense intended. However, I believe the new name stresses one of the main characteristics of the ex-Royale, and communicates it very well.

Flexibility is one of the major points that made Royale attractive to me when I first knew about the initiative. Although I got into Flash learning to love the Timelime, it can be successfully avoided for a number of projects. Further more, creating Flash movies on-the-fly has been one the things many of us have been dreaming about for some time. Now that is possible thanks to MXML, the markup language supported by Macromedia Flex.

Now, companies and developers using industry standards to develop Internet apps have nothing but greeen lights to jump into the production of RIAs, and take advantage of the Flash Player ubiquity to deliver richer experiences. And you were worried about Sparkle…

Saying anything else would be just repeating what you have probably already read in other blogs and news sites. So, I will just point you to the source of all the information available about Flex (I’m yet to finish reviewing everything myself):

Macromedia Flex

I’m still not going. As a matter of fact I’m starting a new big project the very first day of MAX. However, I was looking into ways to keep up with the happenings of the event from here. I found MAX Bloggers.

Max Bloggers turns out to be the first aggregator that includes non-english blogs in the mix (in our little universe of Macromedia related stuff). However, I can’t say MAX Bloggers is a multilingual aggregator, since it doesn’t offer any way to filter the languages I am able to read. There’s a discussion going on already over at Rewindlife on the subject, so I don’t want to talk more about that specific site, but maybe about why popular aggregators do not support multilingual blogs.

Last time I checked with Macromedia, the Exchanges were english-only, and I would think the same policy could apply to MXNA. It would be great if somebody from Macromedia could either confirm or refute this. In the other hand, Full as a Goog and Flog haven’t included non-english blogs as of yet, but being both very small operations, we can see multilingual support is nothing you can implement overnight. However, I know Geoff has something in hands at the moment, that’s all I can say.

Programming language filters and multilingual feeds support is not much of a problem compared to quality assurance. Including a blog to a subject-specific aggregator usually requires a review to measure the blogs relevance. Thing is, how many languages do the people behind the aggregators speak? In order to include a broader selection of blogs, they would either have to learn some more languages or get some extra help.

If you happen to love REM’s music, you gotta get this DVD.

I found it during one of my regular visits to the Virgin Records store located in Times Square. It was a surprise, since the production wasn’t being as heavily advertised as other new releases…

The compilation comes actually in both Audio CD and DVD, and the price difference was about 2 bucks. So, for me it was a no brainer. Further more, the DVD comes with interviews and live performances not available in the CD. The audio track of “Bittersweet me” is also not included in the CD, but you will find it among the rare videos in the DVD.

Friday stuff. Find out about yourself here.

Contrary to what the ladies say, we do not always miss anniversaries. A day like today a year ago, I posted my first message in this blog. Lots of things have happened since then, and it’s been mostly fun ever since I left Blogger and built my own system. I regret that my posting is not as regular as it used to be, but I believe that happens with every personal site when things get busy at work.

Anyway, I would like to thank everybody for keeping this site alive with your visits and your comments, even when all I have to say is worthless. Special thanks to Mario Klingemmann (the first to link back to this blog), Geoff Bowers (the Goog was the first aggregator syndicating my feed), Christopher Wigginton (the first ‘regular’ around here, and many times proofreader), Elizabeth (my wife, who’s always after my grammatical errors), and everyone who ever said nice things about this site.

If you have any particular requests, this is the time to ask. I’d have liked to do something special, like changing the design or something like that… how do you like the subscription feature for example? Every suggestion is welcome as always.