Amazon strange suggestion

I usually get my eyes over Amazon suggestions when I'm checking a book. I have found some interesting books that way.

I know too that they try to show more of what they want than what it is really relevant to me.

But this is really amusing.



Next time some one tells me s/he is a Dilbert fan I will look at him/her differently.

Rasputine: another entrance to MOO

It's nice to see old fellows coming back to MOOsaico. The excuse was that they could only use their IM client and there was no gateway to connect to a MOO. Things have changed now thanks to Pedro Melo with his Rasputine service.

No excuse now! Just had moosaico@rasputine.simplicidade.org as a buddy within you XMPP client. You can even use it with gtalk in webbed gmail.

Get in touch with Melo if you've a MOO or Talker you would like to use Rasputine.

And you can always help with new features for it.

No, that's not a new sociological phenomenon

Can someone please enlighten Baroness Greenfield and Prof Richard Dawkins about almost 20 years of IRC, MUDs and MOOs ? During these two decades they can find all the research they want about online social networking (no, it's not a new paradigm either): anonymity, gender swap, virtual sex, shyness, social gathereness. Yes, many people that otherwise hadn't socialize much, got in touch with others they appraised and, oh, got married since many years.

So, check all those academic papers, thesis, statistics and articles. Just change them for a 3D perspective so you can get the hype focus. Finally, just pour some water and a new article will come.

*sigh*

Portuguese Registration Certificate

In certain occasions my wife and I change cars between us. Being today one of those moments I swap the car register documents. And I was shocked. I've never realized what was on the back: a QR code! So many years with one and I've just discovered them last month.

But I've never seen a PSP or GNR officer with a scan device of any sort.

Color my code!

After being in touch with QR codes and learned about its possibilities I discovered that Microsoft has its own type of alternative, higher capacity code. It's called High Capacity Color Barcode. It's not a 2D code but a stream wrapped code.

Their intellectual property rights and the need for higher resolution scanners can give an advantage to QR codes. However it has a feature quite more interesting than the competition: color. This will certainly integrate better with brochures and colorful packages than with a black & white one.

So, QR codes start coloring yourselves!
Even if it's the same data within, the colors don't mean any information, it can be used more freely and inspirational.

I've tried some variations with my last code so I could feel the difference. The test was made with the conditions of my last post, taking snaphots from a Thinkpad T43 screen.

These worked quite well and I got the message from the code.



But the following examples did not.



I haven't made more tests to check the right contrast or quantify the minimal color space to make it work.

That's a job for the pro pals out there and I'll be waiting for their suggestions.

Start coloring it!

Long live the bar code

Surfing some feeds I got in touch with QR codes, the 2D matrix code.
Having more information and less error prone makes it much better than the traditional bar codes.


You have here an example which you can "decypher".

It was created online.

This start to be even more useful with a camera enabled mobile phone.
You can capture URL, phone numbers, addresses, you name it.
I used the QR code reader from Kaywa. I launched Opera Mini in my Sony Ericsson k750i and went to http://reader.kaywa.com/ to get the capture application. It didn't work. Maybe Opera Mini doesn't send the phone model as Kaywa is expecting. A messages appeared saying that my mobile wasn't supported.

I didn't surrender. Launched the default browser of the phone and it worked! The java application is quite simple and controls your camera just for snapshots. It takes a photo, analyses it and gives the result.

As a test, I used the online generator. All examples work well, url, phone, small sms, but text not as I was expecting. For a bunch of 60 characters it recognized very well. More than this it just couldn't find any code on the image. Even with L and XL sizes.

But, even with this limitation, it works very well and I think we have here a versatile way of passing information between some media. I can just photo a code, meaning an address, in a brochure and get right away the text in my address book. To be explored better.

There and Back Again

I've just started to check the possible Metaverse environments of nowadays.
Being Second Life the hype I started looking for alternatives and bumped with There. Right from its front page I can see some really nice advantages.


The rendering of the world is different, well made, a bit of comic style which I think it's great so we don't always need a recent graphics card. That way it's possible to have a large number of client types for several operating systems, devices and many internet access technologies. This is an advantage! I which...

Unfortunately checking the System Requirements made me delay the experience. It only works for Windows 98 and up, you must have a hardware accelerated graphics card.

Although all these arguments just collapsed the idea of a Metaverse candidate, I'm pleased to see they support 56k dial up connections – have to check that. However it can mean they don't do much media or world stream. But then again Quakeworld worked quite well over dial up modems and old computers. Ok, I'm looking for something better than Quake, but you get the idea. The world should be accessible by low end computers even if you get less rendering and even less colours. In Quakeworld I could play even if I had a 320x200 screen and not seeing much definition, against 800x600 adversaries that almost could aim to my body parts. I never won many times it's a fact, but I could play and interact with the world and the other users.

There are several more topics of such an environment should have, but I'll leave it to another time.

Let's then download the windows client and meanwhile create my avatar.

What ? I can't create an avatar ? I'm not using Internet Explorer and I can only create one with it ? WHY ?

I though that There, having a former Ebay architect as a CEO, was capable of attracting everyone and not entered in this naïf argument “I just work with IE”. It recalls me of the child in the playground that takes his ball away because he's loosing the game.

Well... Let's reboot and test the evil forces.