Twitter is dead!

Well, I hope the title got your attention. :)

No, Twitter is not dead yet, but I think it is just over hyped. I personally don't see the point in telling the world + dog about what I had for dinner, who exactly I am meeting with and where am I going.

Further more, what's the point of reading that about others? Is this a new kind of reality shows? What is so interesting about looking at what others are doing exactly? You can see some insane twitting by people like Jeff Pulver, a highly regarded technology investor. What point is served by his exposure? the glorious 5 minutes of fame?

Maybe its me, maybe I don't get it and won't get it, but my personal belief is that twitting, friendfeeding and the likes are at a hype point and the famous chasm won't be crossed to the real world (I hope so ;) )

Some new software

A few software projects which I have been (and probably still am) a heavy user of have released their new versions in the last few days.

The first is eclipse with their yearly release, the good things that I quickly saw was the release of the 64bit linux version as part of their download options. The bad includes no svn support built-in, and the fact that the product keep on stumbling with the built in update (RC4 crashed after an attempt to upgrade to release).

The second project releasing (finally!) is gentoo releasing 2008.0 a few month later than expected, nothing really new in this release (but this should probably be the case of all releases in gentoo) so I updated my profiles and did a quick 'emerge --newuse -uDv world' and there it is. I hope that the gentoo project will wake up from its recent hibernation.

Those open source projects are both great - allowing one to confide and rely on them - keep it up!

Innovation everywhere

I have been to a few conferences and heard a panel on innovation in which one of the speakers (whom I will not name) talked about focus and repeated the phrase "don't innovate in the backoffice, keep it to your product"

I don't think that this is a good idea. Innovation is an ideal which leads to better overall performance. Creative thinking is not something that is limited just to your product and boundaries for innovation are not a good thing.

I think that good companies should innovate in many areas. A short list would be: transportation, employment terms and compensation, IT, working with the community and many more. Some of the best companies you know are well known for innovating outside their product (google's 20% is a good example).

To sum it up, don't limit yourself. Innovate everywhere.

Working on the edge

Got myself a new computer (amd x2 4800, 6GB memory) and decided to test a new distribution of Linux. For a very long time I have been a fan of gentoo which has been serving me for the last few years without needing to reinstall.

However, walking on the edge means that I would like to test some new stuff once in a while and as gentoo is a playground I already know I have decided to try and check its derivative - sabayon linux.

The LiveDVD was very promising, bunch of stuff I didn't knew or never bothered to configure - mainly compiz which worked without a hitch on the 780 based motherboard.

Installation worked well - chose ext4 as a partition (hope not to regret it soon). Now something like 230+ packages need update. Almost everything seems to be installed - so this is probably a bloatware OS although compiz didn't auto-start.

I am now going to install eclipse and my development environment and will give this distro its chance, probably be back to gentoo soon ;)

Events and more

I have visited two different events in this week ending. Wednesday was a mashable blog mingling event of which I was quite disappointed, little screening, little room, little food and lack of name tags meant this didn't turn out quite well. The fact that the place turned into a bar without notice when the event ended didn't add much either.

Another event was the garagegeeks event, quite different from the mingling parties I was at the last few times, some interesting people talked and I got some strings to check. Also some talked complete nonsense at some points, but maybe in some other post.

Still - events are good, I can use them to verify my idea and check the general industry directions so I'll probably keep going for the time being.

Transposh logo

After a few iterations I have decided to go for the following logo for transposh.


Some technical stuff - created on inkscape 0.46, the original is a .svg file which takes about 14k uncompressed.

Hope you like it, any comments are welcomed.

Trusting on google

Ever since I have heard about google apps I had been ambiguous with the service, mainly
considering the fact that I love doing IT and have established the infrastructure required for a company a couple of times already.

The main concern I have with the service is regarding privacy issues and trusting that google won't be looking at my stuff if they ever decide I am competing or something like that.

I have decided to go for it because of some major reasons:

1. Cost - can't be beat
2. Sharing - I can use those services everywhere while others worry about server security
3. New stuff factor - By installing a real company on the platform I'll learn some new skills
4. Reversibility - I'll always be able to go back to my own hosting

Wish me luck