Weekend

Weekend, grandious weekend.

Went to Coimbra friday night, ate something on the way and ended the night talking with Paula, turning the hands dirty with the newspaper, talking about music and hearing Dwelling (that will make a showcase in Coimbra preety soon) and Tenhi (finally I have Kauan's edition with two bonus tracks).

While Oriente's CD fair isn't nice at all, my saturday was marked with a visit to the Quebra Costas market in Coimbra, looking to used books and a big load of used records...

A nice end of afternoon was passed in Tuttimedia's offices having a nice chat, and then getting ready for a travel to Porto, to attend to "Enough Dark Ambient" concert, where Falésia was going to be given. And so I went, it was a great event and in a great venue. Arriving after 5am, I was damn tired, and still am - I guess I'm getting old...

I took a lot of ideas for Merankorii from that concert, tho, so, Sunday, while heading to and on the train to Lisbon I started to make some ideas to start taking form. Also, I used that time to read some stuff on text-based virtual worlds, and also took some ideas from it.

Paula borrowed me the first season DVD of "My Family", and I wanted to see a couple of episodes of it on the train, but - guess what - while the DVD states that "This disc has been produced to meet or exceed all relevant DVD specifications", they keep going saying that "Should you experience playback problems, please contact your hardware manufacturer", which I won't. I plugged the DVD into my drive, and didn't manage to watch it because the DVD is corrupted (while they say they follow DVD specs, which they don't) and the justification is also written on the DVD box: a symbol saying "Copy Protected Macrovision", which is the same to say that this DVD has some sort of DRM that is keeping me from viewing it. Way to go, assholes, you just lost one potencial customer.

I just uploaded the gig's pictures, so, if you're interested, see part I and part II.

Trains

I lost the chance of an earlier train and the discount of a two-way ticket thanks to the misleading Portuguese Trains website. Thank you, assholes.

Stuff I've been doing lately

Well... Since I didn't post for a while, here's a quickie:

Friday I met two nice restaurants and two good wines. With the company, it was joyful. Arrived late at home, so Saturday I only took the train to Coimbra after dinner. On the train I almost prepared the presentation about the Music Industry and DRM for next saturday in Moita - Portugal. I have to cut it off a lot since I have only one hour (Q/A included) and almost 60 slides.

One thing that bothers me a lot is that stupid thing so many people started to innocently claim after Steve Jobs saying it, and one example (the latest I read) can be seen here: the claim that (physical) CD's aren't infected with DRM. Unfortunately, that's untrue.

Yesterday I finally tried to use my cellphone as a modem, via bluetooth. I wasn't really into it since everyone claimed it was a pain in the ass. Well... It wasn't. I just did

sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth start
sudo modemlink

chose, "bluetooth", and activated bluetooth on my cellphone (Motorola E1, for the record). It found the cellphone, and asked if that's what I wanted as my modem. Clicked yes. After that

sudo gprsconnect

It asked what my cellphone operator was, but it is none of those listed. So, I chose "other", clicked "connect"... Et voilá! It couldn't be easier.

One bad thing in the talkers world is that all the talker bases there are aren't being developed anymore. Sometimes some vapourware appears, but the smoke soon dissolves. The exception for that is Mamnuts and PyTalker, unfortunately both maintained by me. Which also means that if I stop working on that... Well, not anymore. A new effort as arised, and I hope it won't be vapourware. Tints purposes a talker standard and a protocol. Around the protocol itself an implementation of it in C will appear, and python bindings for it. Then, a server, a talker (notice the separation, compare with a webserver and a website) and a client. The first client is not going to be a telnet interface, but you can virtually create any kind of client, from an interface to telnet, telnet-ssl, an webite, a XMPP plugin, an interface to Second Life... Well, you name it. The concept is really good, and if it doesn't die, I'm almost surely to be an early adopter.

Finaly... SellABand appears to be down. Anyone knows something about it? Update: Finaly, it replies. 500 Internal Server Error. Update 2: Hmm, seems that it just suffered an update.