BBC lança seu Player “Embedável”

A BBC, uma das mais tradicionais empresas de mídia do mundo, finalmente apresentou um Player onde seja possível “embeddar” , desculpem o neologismo, seus videos em outros sites.

O player é bem simples e como era de se esperar feito em Flash. Confiram o Player embedded logo abaixo.

Vejam mais detalhes neste link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/later/series30/episode07/kt_tunstall/

Colocando São Paulo no Weather do iPhone

OBS: Este post esta desatualizado e os procedimentos a seguir NÃO devem ser usados com os novos iPhones que possuem Firmware 1.1.2, 1.1.3 e 1.1.4. Agora não é mais preciso fazer isso pois o iPhone possui suporte a letras e caracteres especiais.

Para os usuários de iPhone um dos grandes problemas é que o teclado virtual não permite o uso de caracteres especiais como ç ou letras acentuadas, já discutimos isso nos comentários dos outros posts, com isso não conseguimos escolher a cidade de São Paulo na aplicação de Weather do iPhone. O Ricardo Vilar achou uma ótima dica de como colocar São Paulo na lista de cidades do Weather.

Para saber mais veja aqui: http://www.iphonemod.com.br/?p=4

No final tudo fica guardado em um arquivo de configuração, os famosos arquivos .plist, neste caso especifico fica no seguinte arquivo de configuração: /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.weather.plist.

PS: o arquivo plist é binário, para transformar ele em um arquivo Texto use o seguinte utilitário Web: http://140.124.181.188/~khchung/cgi-bin/plutil.cgi

Trying to share technical knowledge within a company

I am an optimistic most of the time, I really believe that people, mostly technical people, always want to evolve, to learn new stuff and to try new ways to do their day by day tasks. Thinking about that I always wanted to start some initiative to share the knowledge in the company and to create an environment of mutual contribution, but to accomplish that first we must satisfy some basic requirements:

• people with knowledge to share
• an environment with freedom to speak about anything
• people who wanna learn and grow

This is very basic, right? You need people, with some knowledge to share in an environment that allows you to speak freely and in the other hand you need people who wants to learn and to discuss.

We are trying to build this kind of initiative at the company, but it can be surprisingly difficult to implement such a obvious thing, something everyone should clearly understand the benefits.

From the beginning, it all started with the international conventions we always sent our technicians, the problem is that we always sent people to international events but when they return, we never took the initiative to share what they saw and experienced. That’s a big issue, we can’t afford to choose one person out of some hundreds of employees and be comfortable with that person keeping everything it learned for himself.

Then we started a weekly technical meeting, open to everyone at the company, but specially driven to developers and technical teams (Sys Admin, Telecom, Support, Developers, etc), the first 2 meetings went relatively well, with reasonable number of attendees. The third only had 1/4 of the previous audiences, then I thought: ” it may be the subject”, was to specific, besides the point that was a very interesting technical presentation. Then the next presentation was worst even with a relevant subject for most of the technical employees. Ok, so “Houston we have a problem”, discussing with the other managers they started to send messages to their employees asking then to attend the event, communicating that the technical presentations (we called it TechTalks, original hum?) was something and to pay attention to it. Boom, the next session was packed, totally full, lesson learned: obviously communication is very important, you need to spread the word throughout the company with e-mails and posters with a clear content programming for the next sessions.

Then after another two sessions we experienced another disaster in number of attendees, the I sad “should be some critical project the developers were working on and didn’t have time to attend”. But we know that there are always lots of projects behind the schedule and lots of priorities on our daily tasks, but we need to plan and to destinate part of our time to learn and talk with other employees, with different skills and points of view, I believe this is strategic for the company.

So after some months doing this I’ve learned another thing, it`s difficult to find people that want learn and share. The target audience matter indeed, they need to understand that this initiative, these sessions, aren’t to satisfy the managers or the directors, it’s for themselves, it’s a time they have to learn and to get better, to grow, and unfortunately there are people who doesn’t really care about it and that’s a problem. In the end it always get us back to the attitude, to the technical profile we have in the company. It’s necessary to change the culture, the attitude and I still believe this knowledge sharing thing is very important and I am going to keep pushing this initiative as far as its necessary so it will walk by itself. But the culture issue…. hummm… that is very, very… very complicated and I going to talk about it in the future posts.

An apple in my gadget farm

I definitively have a thing for gadgets, thank God my wife loves me and understands my needs related to electronics and my obsession with BestBuy, eBay, the chinese little store with that, really necessary, electronic stuff

Well, one of my e-passions are mobile gadgets, in special the smart ones. So last week, I was organizing some old boxes (yes, I keep the boxes) and found the boxes of my SonyEricsson P800, the old mate P900, the Treo 680 (which I gave to my wife) and more recently my Nokia E61 (SIP til the end) . The objective of this post is to say that I finally got an Apple device, and it is an iPhone, which unfortunately I can’t fully use here in Brazil (at least as a phone) because the guys out there are still trying to get rid of the AT&T lock.

I am a long time Apple critic/admirer, I am a PC guy, an open source guy, and Apple is purely against anything that means open, everything they develop is tightly attached to their own products and systems and you can’t do anything, Apple doesn’t want you to do it (at least not officially), it’s a totally controlled environment. But they are really good at Marketing, Usability, Design, the Experience, the MacOSX is really good and the community around Apple products is something for a MBA case study. These attributes are the reason I got an iPhone, when you enter into an Apple Store and try the Iphone it’s really something unique. So I got mine a few weeks ago and now I can write about my impressions on it.

I have some mixed feelings about the iPhone so far, it is a beautiful piece of hardware and the OS interface is really simple and surprising and now I have a “Unix like” device that fits on my pocket (if properly hacked), but that’s it. In terms of “out of the box” functionality, the iPhone is very limited, I feel like I’ve bought a $600 alpha product, anyway Apple is not known by it’s concern in having the most complete product (I mean, in number of features and compatibility, they don’t allow you to use Ogg Vorbis!!!). Apple is known for the way it packs the whole experience, the box, the interface, the form factor, the ads, the environment at the Apple Store, the whole thing is perfectly prepared to seduce you.

You can find several sites with lists for what is missing and what is broke on iPhone, but what I really miss and would make me move away from my E61 definitively is: Copy and Paste, video recording, digital zoom on the camera, native multi-IM client, native To-Do list app, native integration with MS Exchange ActiveSync (not just IMAP), full bluetooth OBEX support for transfering and receiving files (ANY kind of files) , a SIP/VoIP client and, of course, an unlock alternative solution (that’s really optional if they keep the current hacks working like they are doing with AppleTV)

What is being really fun for me right now, is to research and try all the hacks that are popping up all over the web, and keep updated with the community, they are really mapping and documenting everything, without any help from Apple. I’ve even installed an Apache on it

Now talking about Brazil, there are some rumors in the market that Vivo and Claro intend to launch the iPhone, and already started negotiations with the big fruit company. Of course, the price will be prohibitive, as always happens down here, and they will probably link it to the same 2 years kind of contract AT&T is offering back in US.

Anyway… more about my experiences with iPhone to come.

PC sales explosion in Brazil

Recently we are experimenting an explosion in sales of branded PCs (like Dell, HP, Toshiba, Positivo, etc) in Brazil, for the first time, the expected PC sales during 2007 is threatening sell as much as TV sets. Industry estimates 11,7 million TVs will be sold, and nearly 11 million PCs. In 2006 some 8,6 million PCs were sold.

“Between 2005 and 2006, 8 million people went from poor to low-middle class. That’s an astonishing amount,” Positivo Chief Executive Helio Rotenberg said in an interview to Reuters. “And the middle class has more money and more credit. This is an explosive formula.” Positivo is the leading Brazilian computer manufacturer and estimates overall PC sales will grow 35.5 percent a year through 2010.

The government program called “Computador para todos” (Computers for all), that offers tax exemptions for low cost computers running GNU/Linux, to be paid in up to 36 months, will have an upgrade on its configurations delivering PCs with LCD monitors, the amount of money is about 600 million BRL (almost 300 million USD). Last year, approximately ~150k computers where sold and now they expect to double it, including cheaper laptops as well.