Un poco de todo - Carlos Domingo Official Blog

Campions!!!

The champions league as well!!!

50 years ago it was Real Madrid in its first edition, this year it was Barcelona.

CD

My not so smooth Apple Bootcamp experience

I finally got Windows installed in my MacbookPro and in my case, the experience was less than smooth. First, Bootcamp gave an error before I could even make a partition and I had to repair the OS X system disk which I could not do initially since to do so you have to boot the computer from the CD with the OS and I did not have it with me. Once I repaired the OS X system disk (I wonder how it got corrupted as I hardly used the computer since I got it) I prepared the partition, burned the CD with the drivers and started installing Windows. The installation itself was pretty good but I was shocked to see that the installation of XP (first time I actually saw it) still look and feel as installing Windows 3.1, I heard that Microsoft has change the look and feel of the Vista installation, it was probably time I guess. The real problems started now. The drivers were not being installed properly, I had to removed some of them and install them again (the Bluetooh one was a particularly problematic one) and after thinking I was done, Windows asked me to reboot which I accepted and then it freeze while shutting down. After waiting a while I manually had to close the computer and restart and Windows will not boot. I rebooted the OS X partition and removed the Windows installation CD which was trapped inside (no way to eject the CD manually on a Mac, I guess putting an eject button was not within their design guidelines). Btw, first time I started OS X after the installation of Windows it took forever to start and since Windows was not booting, I totally freaked out thinking that no none of the two OS partitions will boot. After that, reboot again and Windows finally started. I looked to get online but no wireless icon or connection anywhere to be seen. I checked the drivers and saw that the wireless LAN driver was not working well so I try to reinstall it but nothing. I was suggested that it could be a firmware problem so reboot again, start Mac OS X and attempted to upgrade the firmware but nothing, I already had the latest version. Reboot again, start Windows (at this point, several hours since I first started...) and started trying things till a colleague found out that actually, the Bootcamp drivers for the wireless LAN do not work on Japanese MacBook Pros since they use a different wireless LAN card that the US ones, check a  thread about this issue here. I guess that I will have to get a USB wireless LAN for the time being...

Other drivers are missing but I cannot figure to which hardware they belong (the camera?) and at this point, I am not trying more things and I am just going to use it for a while to see whether it works well or not.

So not a very smooth experience but I must admit that when Windows was finally configured and I saw it start at the really high res of the MacBook Pro it was pretty cool and it feels very fast, faster than my current Sony notebook. So I hope that I do not came across more issues and I can finalize my switch to a Mac.

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Barca, campeon!!!

The Barcelona football team just won the Spanish Football League for second year consecutive with still three matches to go, pretty good. On May 17th we also have the chance to win the Champions League against Arsenal, I will be in Tokyo watching the match in the middle of the night with some friends, one of them from the UK so it will be fun.

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Del.icio.us inside discussion at Mindcamp

Alex Barnett (the only other European at Mindcamp besides me as far as I know) organized with two other guys (sorry but I did not catch their names but I think they were students doing a project on this) a session to discuss why corporations are not tagging their internal content (hence the del.icio.us inside title of the session meaning inside the firewall) as an alternative to the traditional hierarchically organized Intranets for finding corporate content. I argued that this is already done to some extent since the addition of keywording as metadata is something that all enterprise content management systems lets you do and is basically tagging. I got the impression that my suggestion that tagging was not that revolutionary as Web2.0 people tend to think was not very popular. One guy that happened to be standing next to me supported the idea in the context of tagging images in a photo library which I brought up as an example of a corporate application of tagging that is currently widely used (he worked for a stock photography company and he seemed to be very well aware of the issues as I am since one of our company products is a very broadly used digital asset management system).
I think that what makes del.cio.us revolutionary is the consumer aspect and how by having so many people tagging the same content (basically, the same web sites), the most commonly used tags emerge as the best way to describe that content and become their defacto metadata. The main difference is that in corporations, only few people are typically allowed to tag content and add metadata to it so that "wisdom of the crowds" effect never appears. Could ECM companies change that? Yes, very easily, just make the metadata editable so that every time you are finding a document or posting a document into the corporate repository you can add as many keywords to it (or tags as it is now prefered) and that effectively becomes del.icio.us. Would corporations want that? Most likely no, it is not clear that enough people will actually do that for the tags to become more useful than the officially sanctioned ones. Someone suggested that companies should have some sort of reward or micropayments system to incentive employees to do so. That guy obviously does not run a company, I highly question the extra benefit of finding things more efficiently against the extra cost. You want to reward employees to do their job and, for the majority of employees, that is not improving the metadata of corporate documents so you do not want them to spend time doing that. For corporations that finding content across the organization is very critical (like a consulting company), there are already solutions there like Autonomy's software that basically tries to automatically extract concepts from documents across an enterprise so that you do not have to rely on user created metadata to find relevant content in a corporation.

Some people argued that del.cio.us was not going to be used in corporations because people do not understand it. Again, I highly question that, metadata has been around for tons of years and it is a pretty selfexplanatory concept (metadata, data about the data, get it?), I will agree that people do not understand del.icio.us the first time simply because their Web UI sucks.

Dave Winer was there with a "you kids do not understand anything, I blogged for 9 years and RSS already solves this problem" attitude that did not really contribute much to the discussion. I do not see how RSS helps adding the proper metadata into corporate content.

One funny remark came up from an Amazon employee that said the real problem that Amazon had categorizing their content was that "Amazon has a lot of books". No wonder, weren't they called "the worlds largest bookstore" at some point?

CD

Technorati Tags: mindcamp2.0

MindManager presentation at MindCamp

The first presentation I attended at MindCamp was some sort of commercial pitch for a product called MindManager that claims to have 750,000 users, a pretty decent install user base. At first, it looks like some sort of digital white boarding tool so I was not too excited about it but the more the guy got into how to use it and what it does, the more interesting it looked. I particularly like the integration with the Research feature in Microsoft product that he demoed and also how he positioned the product as a tool to help to get things done (something I am very interested in, there were two sessions on this at Mindcamp but both Sunday morning so I missed them, too bad, I will have to read online about the discussion) and even more interesting, as a way to reach consensus on a meeting and track the discussion and the decisions, actions, etc. After some research on the web I found that there is an open source version called FreeMind that also looks interesting  (and free even, this in not cheap stuff, the basic version is more than $200 an the professional one is $350) so I will keep this on my list of things-to-do-when-I-have-time-that-almost-never-get-done and perhaps check it in more detail in the future. The idea of trying to map the mind while you are brainstorming and use that as a way to capture the resulting discussion and agreement and then use it to track progress against it certainly seems very appealing to me.

CD



Technorati Tags: mindcamp2.0

Lock picking at Mindcamp

So this year again there were few people teaching lock picking and I actually got to try one. The particular technique that a guy called Pablo told me is the following (check the picture to understand a bit better how it works although it is a bit fuzzy). You have a key that fits on a particular kind of lock but with all the pins very low so obviously, won't open the lock as keys have pins of different highs but it will fit on the lock well. With one hand, you put some pressure on the key inside the lock and then with something like a small hammer, start hitting the key on the lock horizontally till the energy of hitting the key will lift the internal pins of the lock and you will feel how suddenly you can turn the key and open the lock. Not sure I explain it well but it was pretty cool, it took me a couple of attempts but it was a really cool feeling when the key turned around and open the lock. In case you are interested in the topic, check out this web site.

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RFID implants at MindCamp

The guy wearing this t-shirt at Mindcamp2.0 was the guy that actually had the implants on his hands, you can clearly see them in the x-ray image. I have actually read about a club in Barcelona (Baja Beach, not a place I will go though) that they do RIFD implants for VIP customers so they can be identified and they can use it as a debit account to pay for drinks.  (check an article about it here). Will this eventually become popular so we will all have RFID implants in our bodies?

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Mindcamp 2.0 Recap, funny Microsoft employees introductions

So this morning Mindcamp 2.0 finished, I was not there as I only attend half of the day yesterday, I had things to do plus I am not really into sleeping there surrounded by geeks. The hours that I spent there, I had a lot of fun. Lots of cool and creative people. It look a lot more crowded (the space was narrower so it could just be my impression) and certainly more organized with people helping with Mindcamp2.0 t-shirts, etc.

It was already fun from the beginning when everyone introduced each other (last year I actually got there late since Jim and I got lost using Google Maps, no problem getting to the new place this year) showing a lot of creativity and humor. Here is a summary of some of the most amusing ones, specially from the Microsoft crowd (Andru joked about how unfortunate was that there were not enough
Microsoft people, probably 20~30% of the people there were from Microsoft with lots of Amazon people as well):

• One guy that introduced himself as "working on open source projects at Microsoft" (as you can imagine, there were quote a few laughs when he said that but Scoble mentioned that the product they were working on was pretty cool and that he uses it but I did not get what was the product about),
• Another guy said he worked on "Windows reliability" that also trigger some laughing
• A guy worked on Windows clustering to "help programs stay running through blue screens"
• One guy introduced himself as someone working for a company that just lost $40BB this week, many people did not get the joke, including me, perhaps because it was misleading, Microsoft has not lost that money, they are actually an extremely profitable company, Microsoft shareholders have lost the money though as their market cap dropped
• A Boeing guy (not Microsoft but worth to mention) introduced himself as someone interested in mass transportation (so certainly working at the right company)

I attended only three sessions as I was not there for too long and I wondered around and talked to people but in any case, it was worth spending some time there. I got some pictures in Flickr here.

Keep the good job Andru and look forward to Mindcamp 3.0!!
CD

Technorati Tags: mindcamp2.0

Nintendo and Microsoft merge/acquisition theory

Since this week was Microsoft's earnings announcement, that was obviously the topic of conversation with everyone in this industry. In a conversation with a former Microsoftie that certainly knows the company well (or used to at least), we discussed the following theory. Since Microsoft is still losing money on the Xbox and they are gearing up to compete with Sony they could either acquire Nintendo or spin out the Xbox division as a separate company and merge it with Nintendo. Why would they do that? Nintendo competes more with Sony than with Xbox, they have the DS that clearly competes with the PSP and Microsoft is not a player on that space. Nintendo is really focus on gaming while Microsoft is pushing the console as one step into an all-entertainment device for the living room (the same Sony is doing with the PS2 and soon with the PS3), Nintendo is successfull in Japan and understand the games that appeal to the Japanese (recently proven with the wild success they are having with the brain training games and the new DS) while Microsoft, coming from a PC background, does not understand console gamers as well. Microsoft goes after an older customer base of gamers while Nintendo tends to target a younger crowd. Sony has a broader scope in gaming that Microsoft could easily reach acquiring Nintendo. And hey, Nintendo is profitable while the Xbox is not and they are already based in Redmond so they would not even have to relocate them to Microsoft territory.

CD