soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

As I found about the news, I spent some time yesterday having a look at the project's files. It's always interesting to have a look at the internals of the software for curious-like-a-cat people like me… but honestly, I'd rather have the Flash player open sourced. That would help to fix, or at least to explain, those absurd issues one finds from time to time when working with Flash.

Even worse: each new version of Flash player introduces slightly different issues. Or bugs, if you prefer. For example, the latest one (9.0.115) has a funky way of playing sound files. If the sample is 44KHz, everything is fine. But if you had a one minute sample with a different rate (say, 22KHz), you can't simply say go to the second 30 and play, because it will instead go to the second 60 (and hence, finish playing!).

And yes, the issue tracker is now accessible to the general public and so you can directly report these odd behaviours directly to Adobe. See here, here and here for some flash.media.Sound errors already reported.

I'm sure if more people could have a look at the player source, these oddities would be fixed way earlier, or at least they wouldn't be released to the general public with a major bug like that one introduced so lightly.

It would also make easier to have updated versions of the Flash player in platforms which currently are always a step behind, because they need to wait for Adobe to release them, or do not have support at all, like Linux PowerPC (at least, it hadn't, last time I tried).

Unfortunately I have the feeling this won't happen any time soon. With DRM dangerously approaching the path of the player it would be quite surprising to have the source code so that everybody could find work-arounds to those restrictions if they feel like. And it would destroy Adobe's monopoly too, of course. Which I guess they prefer not to happen.

It's been a couple of interesting days already, got ideas for something fun and I'm using XCode quite furiously. Everything began since I got SDL working with OpenGl (what derived into a Linux version of the famously rotating triangle with pink background), then a couple of weeks later I made some additions which I'm further developing now.

But… what's going on with XCode3? It's just me the only one which has to close it and reopen it again every X debugging attempts? or maybe that's what the X in XCode stands for…

The symptoms are: you Build and Go (Compile and debug in ye olde jargon) and then one would expect the debugger to pop up. But nothing happens because a) it didn't rebuild at all or b) it couldn't attach the debugger to the process. So it runs as normal.

There's another weird thing, sometimes I add a new method in a class header (I'm working with C++) and when I write the method body in the .cpp file and try to compile, I get a message saying that there aren't matches with the definitions of the class, blabla. I solved this one cleaning all targets and rebuilding again, but if you know a better way of fixing it, I'm all ears.

Maybe there are hidden options which can be configured with

or something like that!

Event though, I must say that I like XCode2 way more than the previous version. If I had to choose a single reason it would be the removal of ZeroLink, then I would say the new finder, code folding, etc. (I never use its SCM features or design features so I can't tell)

It's some months since I began to meditate about the concept of data portability. You might have read already my concerns about proprietary file formats, but the data portability stuff I am referring to is slightly different; it's not about an specific proprietary program that you use for writing the greatest bestseller ever, but rather about external websites where you participate and contribute with your fair amount of data. And the problem (the need?) is to be able to import and export that data freely, since it belongs to us.

I am not sure what ticked me off. Maybe it was that my otherwise creative mind was beginning to run out of ideas for inventing passwords for each new website I had to sign up to, or maybe it was the captchas plague.

And OpenID came to the rescue. It's not perfect yet, and I still haven't managed to have a good play with it, but I like the idea. We don't confide our passwords to potentially catastrophic websites but we are still able to log in those sites and all that. Looks nice.

A little bit later I got hit by the facebook craze. I must confess I logged in just for poking friends, but it soon got tiring. It demands constant attention, like a tamagotchi, but in a perverted way, trying to steal all your possible data for lucrative data mining thereafter. That was easy to verify; I had a conversation via facebook's messaging system on a very specific topic and all of a sudden I noticed extremely targeted ads showing on the site. It was so accurate that it looked as if they had a mass of slaves personally reading every single message and assigning the best ads to them.

So I wondered: if we weren't to use facebook, where could we go? Not that I need to go anywhere; I am fortunate enough to share my name with only another well-known person (that I am aware of) and if someone looked for me, would find me quite easily.

But what if I built a new application which allowed you to perform all your social network duties, say, something in the lines of UberSocializr, and I didn't want to enter all the data from scratch, but rather import that from facebook? Would that be possible? And what about other sites like bebo, friendster, blablah?

Even more: why are social utilities useful? Which needs do they fulfill? They are useful for non techy users on first instance. They just register and have everything they might need: pictures, messages, videos, games, forums and friends. Oh and party events!

There are already several applications which can do the same, although not in the same seamless, integrated manner. An experienced user can build his homepage which acts as their profile page, with his blog, pictures, etc. But that's leaving the social side out. I thought that the FOAF concept could work for that, but I didn't buy it because you may like to have private friends and not to declare them publicly in your website, and I think that's not possible as of today.

More or less at that time, the DataPortability project popped out. I was happy to find that they presented some of the same solutions I had thought of. I can also say I strongly agree with what one of their members says:

If your service relies on capturing users, then I'm sorry, you suck

(Ian Forrester)

I like the whole data portability concept and I would love to see it materialise in a practical and effective manner soon. It's also good to see that more and more services are not only following but also empowering the trend, for example, allowing the use of OpenID while also acting as service providers for it. That will lower the entry barrier for lots of people which cannot or do not want to mess with technical details to enjoy this new way of doing things, and hence they won't get discriminated.

It is also going to need some evangelism to spread the word about these tools, although they itself could get easier and less cryptic. And I have the feeling that this won't work very well if the people in our near circles do not use these technologies, so I'm curious: are you actively using any of the solutions proposed by DataPortability yet?

Oh and in a slightly off topic way… it can be very fun to play with this data. 2D/3D visualization of data is just the obvious beginning, but if we aggregate stuff from several sources I think we can come up with some interesting results. Hpricot is calling…