Good bye blogger

I'm moving this blog to http://felipec.wordpress.com/.

Wordpress is much better. For the ones still checking this blog I'm sorry for the lack of posts, I'm trying to change that in the new one :D.

Beware of MSN Messenger 7

As some of you may alredy know MSN Messenger 7 has been released, and people have alredy been adviced there is a new version of Messenger to download.

Beta versions of MSN Messenger 7 were quite frankly distateful, at least for me, but this new version I should say it's pretty neat. In fact it has so many new neat features that it makes me shiver.

Let's start with my favourite, second nick, or personal message. Believe it or not I already had thought of it, so I think it's a great idea. I would like to have to option to switch it off so those longly insane nicks doesn't bother me again.

But aside of the personal message you can thins "song I'm currently listening" option. It's displayed as a different thing UI-side. Of course, it will only work right on with WMP, but you can download a plug-in for Winamp and you can personalize it so you can display your rating of the song and a lot of crazy stuff. I love this one, I can't wait to implement it in Gaim.

MSN Messenger is now connected with MSN Spaces. I didn't know of that service but that's what scaries me the most. It's very integrated, you have a Blog, photos, music list, bookmarks, storage, friends list. And all that stuff connected with MSN Messenger and WMP. So you can import the best rated songs in your WMP library to your MSN Space, you can have your photos in your personal card in MSN Messenger, and you can even see the first part of your last blog entry there too.

You also have winks, which can be stupid for most of people, but it can entertain you a little bit once and then.

You have bigger emoticons. And you can just right-click and add them, no need to ask for them.

Support to write Ink messages.

Nudge, like Yahoo's buzz.

Those are the main things I can remember right now, plus a different UI.

So for end-users it's simply very neat. But for us, IM developers, writers of alternative clients, we have a new thing to worry about, and something to get our hands dirty with.

I guess we don't have a lot of time before we will start getting feature requests of this stuff in #gaim.

/me sighs

Some scientific stuff

Well, I've been very busy so I haven't had time to make posts here, but I just found something I would like to share.

I find this article on New Scientist very interesting and maybe useful for some people to understand life in some different maner. Enjoy.

Life's top 10 greatest inventions

I'm Ready

Well, now my lap is working again, since a while, and now I'm on the process of tunning it. I installed Fedora, Windows XP and a lot of packages and applications.

I've also been looking for job, not much, but a little bit more. Oh, and they didn't accept me as Developer in Microsoft, I guess I'm not that good enough, I didn't show it, or maybe it's true that they can't offer me a job. Anyway I'll be having another interview in the end of February but now for Developer in Test.

I've been also been doing things I haven't had the chance to do before, like excercise, reading, and watching TV. I'm a little bit bored. Where did my social life went? (as if I had such thing before).

Oh, yeah, that reminds me that in girl matters I'm totally lost, it's really a mess; good and bad stuff at the same time, when is this going to be just plainly good? Or at least more good than bad.

So I guess it's Hard Coding Time ™. I've been lazy enough and now I need to do lots of stuff.

Here I go!

Hail to Murphy

I said, new year, a good oportunity to clean up my laptop. So I did, after two days of backups and hair lost for possible lost information I finally had my shiny lapop with a good partition scheme, all my music organized and more, Linux & Windows neatly installed, totally updated and organized, with all the applications and developing tools I need and the source code of my projects ready to rumble, and I did some coding.

Also, I started playing Halo and got little bit addicted to it (I'm on "vacation"), it looks great on my laptop and I did a good advance.

It was too good. Why didnt' I see it comming? Suddenly, from one day to another, the Hard Disk Drive simply stopped to work.

Yeah, after a lot of work I could finally backup some data, but anyway my laptop is unusable.

This is Great... just great! I have a curse on laptops, I swear. I'm so pissed off...

I guess I'll start to believe what my cousing Kluzter says... I was having a good time, hence something bad should come... and it did, not only with my laptop but with life in general. I still have faith that things will get better soon, but meanwhile I can't make much of an advance in my coding projects, sorry for the ones that are waiting for something.

Black humor against women

I found this site, Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend, that provides a somewhat scientific and very funny way of demostrating the matter. Now I think I finally understand a little bit more my bad luck. It's good to see that there are scientific advances on these matters =P.

I also found this Joelogon's Foolproof Guide to Making Any Woman Your Platonic Friend. I have to say that I find it really funny.

After reading all this useful information, I got illuminated: if I'm a nice guy, and woman prefer jerks (proved fact), then I'll better become that, it's so logic I don't know why I didn't come up with that before! (just joking).

I think I have to make the warning that I'm not against women or anything, it's just that this site is so funny. And it has something near what really happens, which makes it even more funny =D.

A little bit of my favourite ones (at least the ones that are decent enough to be posted here):

Isn't "evil woman" redundant?

All the Real Life Reasons Women Have Given For Just Wanting to Be "Just Friends" section.

They are obligated to pass on their knowledge to the Psychological Warfare Division of the Sisterhood to Destroy All Men.

None of this has never happened to me...I...I have something in my eye...take me back from this horrid place!!!

Richard Stallman's interview

I read this interview of Richard Stallman at KernelTrap and I found it very interesting.

However I really find some of these ideas disgusting.

First of all I hate all this arrogance of the "freedom" thing. We all know freedom is good, but the definition of what is freedom is not something that simple; and by no means it's what a single person or a small group of people think it is. Saying this is freedom, this is not, you should get your "freedom" doing this and not doing that, seems to more like another control system, only that this one is camouflaged. Everything in order so we all do exactly what Richard Stallman wants. In the end that will lead to a world where all the software is "free" (freedom); which is not something bad, but the means for that end are to do whatever Stallman says. That doesn't seem like too much freedom to me.

I think no one should tell some other what to do. We should all respect each others' opinions and instead teach each other the facts that made us think that, so other people may think it by themself. Saying that people that write proprietary sofware are anti-social and that they should better not write anything at all, makes me think he is just standing far away from them... throwing rocks.

He seems to know a lot of why not to do so something he doesn't understand (creating proprietary software). Everything that exists, exists because it works, so does proprietary software. Probably there are much better approaches, but that doesn't mean proprietary software is wrong. The same holds true for Free Software, it's not the best thing to do, since nothing is perfect. We should not be so eager to say what we all should do, and what not.

You have to know your enemy, and your enemy must know you. Maybe in fact learning enough of both will make you understand, as I think I do, that radical solutions are just as bad than not doing anything at all. Not just throw "truths" in the air and say everyone that's not doing exactly as we say is just wrong, that's to understand so little of human nature: we are inperfect, and hence: we make mistakes.

To throw away Linus Torvalds' huge contributions as well as the amazing group of people that have made Linux what it is, including all the people that have been discussing design issues for user-space stuff and all that, just because Linus started it esentially for fun is plainly stupid. Good things are good things, it doesn't matter if they where done because of a strong philosophy or something else.

I think Stallman's assertion that 100% freedom is good, and everything else is wrong seems completely sortsighted to me. It's surely not because of the ammount of thought Stallman has put to the subject; it's probably because he has not taken the time to understand the "enemy", or writters/users of proprietary software, which is basically everyone.