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Posts in english.

Microsoft Does Not Own OOXML

Avi Alkalay 4 Comments

This is a reply to David Nielsen’s “OOXML and Microsoft” post. Since comments are closed there, I am writing here.

David, there is nothing wrong in Microsoft opening such an important spec. We should welcome this step. But there are several things that we should take care here:

  1. There is already an approved, open, internationally standardized spec for office documents: ODF. So OOXML can be another spec, but can’t be another standard spec for the same purpose. The standardization push is not welcome. It is simply too late, amongst other issues.
  2. Microsoft opened their spec not because they wanted, but because they needed to, after ODF acceptance as the ISO standard. If Microsoft will be successful in its anti-ODF campaign, they won’t need this openness status any more and I bet OOXML v2 will be closed.
  3. Microsoft does not own the spec. OOXML is Ecma’s document. What MS Office implements is a something that is today compatible with Ecma’s OOXML. But Microsoft already announced they can’t wait for ECMA to add new releases. In fact, there is no guarantee that something like MS Office 14 file format will be open or integrated into ECMA’s OOXML spec. This is an excerpt from Microsoft’s Brian Jones blog and shows how Microsoft does not own OOXML:

    To your last point, it’s hard for Microsoft to commit to what comes out of Ecma in the coming years, because we don’t know what direction they will take the formats. We’ll of course stay active and propose changes based on where we want to go with Office 14. At the end of the day though, the other Ecma members could decide to take the spec in a completely different direction.

  4. Microsoft is trying to fool everybody saying that OOXML is different from ODF. ODF is “a standard for office documents” while OOXML claims to be “a standard for office documents and compatibility with legacy office file formats”, just to not have a 100% overlap. But the “compatibility” part makes no sense because OOXML is textual XML and the legacy formats are binary. OOXML and legacy .doc, .xls, .ppt may have similar organization or structure but is impossible to be “compatible”. But even if OOXML wants to have a relation with legacy, the spec is incomplete and does not provide a mapping like “this OOXML tag is related to that stream of binary bytes in the legacy format”. In the National Bodies meetings to discuss OOXML standardization we proposed to include this mapping (then legacy .doc would become a truly open spec), or remove the compatibility statement from the spec title. If removed, OOXML would still be a beautiful spec, but could not be accepted as an ISO standards because of its full overlapping with ODF.
  5. OOXML reinvents the wheel and has many obscure parts. As a specification, currently OOXML doesn’t have a quality grade to be a standard.

Creating OpenSearch plugins for Browsers

Avi Alkalay 1 Comment

I just came across a Mozilla::Developer page that teaches how to let visitors on a site easily add that site’s search function into their browsers as a plugin.

If you are reading this in my blog and you select your browser’s search tool, this is what you’ll see:

OpenSearch option in browser’s tool

You’ll get the option to permanently add my blog’s search function to your browser. If you select it, you’ll have this:

OpenSearch option added to browser’s tool

To make it, I followed the instructions on the first link and created my OpenSearch description file. Look! Technorati, Microsoft, and many others have OpenSearch-enabled websites.

Zeroconf your Network

Avi Alkalay 4 Comments

I remember the days when I was configuring DNS and DHCP for a small home network with only 2 or 3 computers.

This is not needed anymore since the invention of Zeroconf. As Wikipedia says, “is a set of techniques that automatically create a usable IP network without configuration or special servers. This allows inexpert users to connect computers, networked printers, and other items together and expect them to work automatically.”

Zeroconf got my attention when I installed Ubuntu Linux in one of my home PCs and it automatically started to show hostnames instead of IPs of my other home computers on the same DNS-less network. On my other Fedora Linux hosts, I had to manually install the avahi-tools and nss-mdns packages and I got the same functionality — as described in the Fedora Post-Installations Configurations.

Still without a local DNS server, each host can be pinged, SSHed, browsed, SMBed, etc using the hostname.local model, not the their IP anymore. So the machine with hostname floripa broadcasts itself as floripa.local. The same happens for all machines.

But I still missed this functionality when using my laptop booted on Windows. This OS was unable to understand the Zeroronf broadcasts until I installed the Apple implementation for Windows called Bonjour that can be downloaded from here.

To have a better, visual understanding of what Zeroconf can do for you, the Avahi website (Zeroconf implementation on Linux) provides a series of screenshots of regular applications discovering services in the LAN. Most notable is Konqueror — KDE’s file manager — using the zeroconf:/ URL to browse LAN services.

Now I finally know that my home doesn’t need things like Bind/DNS anymore.

Worshiping Joyce in Rio

Avi Alkalay 1 Comment

Some time ago, my New Yorker cousin came to visit Brazil and I wanted to make sure she was leaving with her iPod full of brazilian specialities. A few weeks later we exchanged this conversation by e-mail.

  • “Im listening to music you sent me while writing (I really like Joyce!…although right now im listening to Paulo Bellinati)” — she said
  • “Joyce is a godess. I worship her every time I need a good something-between-samba-and-bossa-nova in my ears.”— in my reply

Joyce’s voice singing Bossa-Nova is probably what gets closer to the true spirit of Rio de Janeiro city.

Ipanema beach, Rio de Janeiro

Enough talking. This is some of her works. While listening, close your eyes and imagine a calm sunday walk in Ipanema beach.

(pictures link to the location they where found)

New Laptop

Avi Alkalay 15 Comments

I am sort of away this days because I got a new laptop. Check it out.

Lenovo T61

My previous laptop was a IBM Thinkpad T40, Pentium M, 512MB RAM, 1024×768 screen size, CD-RW, Cisco WiFi/b, no bluetooth. Served me well for 4 years.

The new one is a Lenovo Thinkpad T61, Intel Centrino Pro (dual core), 2GB RAM, 1440×900 screen size, DVD-RW, Intel WiFi/g (see this comment to make it work), bluetooth, integrated SD/Memory Stick/xD/etc card reader, Firewire interface. Much better. Details on Smolt.

I am writing this while Fedora 8 (including some Livna packages) is being installed over the network, as you can see.

Please Encrypt Your BitTorrent Client !

Avi Alkalay 8 Comments

Some evil ISPs implement traffic shaping to specifically limit BitTorrent bandwidth. This brings slower downloads to you and your peer.

All modern BitTorrent clients have encryption capabilities but most of them came disabled by default.

Please configure your client to encrypt connections. You will have faster downloads even if your ISP does not limit your traffic, but because your peer’s ISP does that.

By the way, today I started to use the ultimate BitTorrent client for Linux, BSD and UNIX: rTorrent. It is text and console-based, superlight, superfast, runs very well in my K7/192MB machine, accessible from anywhere through SSH and a screen window.

To install it:

Debian: bash$ sudo apt-get install rtorrent
Fedora/Red Hat: bash$ sudo yum -y install rtorrent

To enable encription I added this line to ~/.rtorrent.rc:

encryption=allow_incoming,try_outgoing,enable_retry

Mobile Codes for Increased Productivity

Avi Alkalay 12 Comments

Man, this is the coolest thing I discovered this month.

Before what I am going to show you now, the only ways to transfer data from your computer to your mobile device was to send an e-mail to yourself and read it in your cell, or through bluetooth, or infrared.

There is a new thing (for me) called Mobile Codes (or QR Codes according to Wikipedia, or Datamatrix) that combined with your mobile’s camera and simple software, will let you actually read the content from your computer screen.

OK, lets explain it with some images to make the concept more user-friendly. Look at the following image.

Think Open :: Think Linux

Yes, I know the image says nothing to you, but your camara-equiped mobile device is able to read “Think Open :: Think Linux”.

We can play with more stuff. The URL for this blog post is here (with a note attached):

http://avi.alkalay.net/2007/11/mobile-codes.html

Lets add some semantics. You can directly call an international number as 00551112345678 using the following barcode:

qrcode

Or SMS “Hi, I just discovered this barcodes that will make my life easier” to same number with this code:

qrcode

The Details

Some modern Nokia phones already come with the software needed to decode this datamatrix. For my Nokia E61i to work, I installed on it a free (registration required) program called Kaywa Reader (their site doesn’t list my model so I selected E65 and it worked fine). So I just shoot the software, point my mobile’s camera to the datamatrix and it instantly decodes the content.

To generate this images, I used the QR Code Generator by Winksite and the Nokia mobile code generator. In fact it all started when I found the Nokia Mobile Code website, almost by an accident.

Oh, and there is a handy Mobile Barcoder Firefox plugin to help me transfer URLs from browser to cellphone.

Install in your cellphone and have fun.

The iPhone Accelerometer

Avi Alkalay 2 Comments

A sophisticated mobile device can do more than just play MP3s or make calls.

I had a lunch with a friend that hacked his iPhone to work in Brazil. Many people are doing that (or paying somebody to do it for them) around here. And he showed me something very interesting.

The component that causes the screen to rotate based on the position of the iPhone is called Accelerometer, and it can do much more than that. It can provide programs the spatial position of the device.

Same accelerometers were used in IBM laptops to stop and protect hard drives if the user is shaking the computer too much.

Watch the following video I just made at lunch. It shows an old mechanical game that we all played when we were kids to learn about gravity, control and concentration. Now in the iPhone.

The game objective is to change the angle of the “table” to let the gravity make the ball move to the desired position. Thanks to the embedded accelerometer and fast graphics processor, the game feels very real.

Android and the Open Handset Alliance

Avi Alkalay 2 Comments

I like this kind of announcements and alliances. Makes me feel that openness and the right things can be successful.

Open Handset Alliance

The Android (formerly GPhone) platform (or parts of it) will compete with Windows Mobile, Symbian, S60, QTopia and other Open Source initiatives as Open Moko.

For developers there is nothing to download yet (expected for November 12).

Currently there is no single mobile platform that makes me truly happy. Symbian+S60 is the most advanced but still very proprietary. Windows Mobile seems to have a great future, and all Open Source initiatives are currently mediocre. Access (former Palm Source) is also going towards Linux but still feels proprietary.

If Android takes off — I mean, in a mature way — we will have the chance to use mobile devices as our computers: installing whatever OS we want.

I wish to welcome the OHA initiative and hope they can learn from the problems and mistakes of the GNU/Linux community to avoid them: ecosystem fragmentation because of too much platform packaging (a.k.a. too many distributions), overall lack of project management with architectural vision, too much religion, lack of true integration between different software components (because there is no real cross architectural vision), and lack of true support from proprietary hardware components manufacturers (a.k.a. lack of descent device drivers).

From the list of alliance members I miss names like Nokia, Red Hat (as a big Java player) and IBM. But I believe this is question of time.

ODF versus CDF

Avi Alkalay 5 Comments

There are some news popping on the web about ODF to be substituted by W3C’s Compound Document Formats.

Read them carefully, read other sources too and try to understand first before making assumptions.

Entities like OpenDocument Foundation are switching opinions in a quest for some sort of Universal Format, that still doesn’t exist, promoting CDF.

CDF is a W3C specification about mixing various XML idioms in one document. Things like SVG or MathML inside XHTML, etc. It is a good thing and an inevitable consequence of XML per se.

In my opinion, CDF is more suited to be used in web browsers and online. Some of its sub-specifications are still unifinished or incomplete — as CSS3, required for essential things like pagination.

The most irritating statement by OpenDocument Foundation is a chart from their site that says some several bizarre things:

  • OOXML would be compatible with legacy MS formats. If they can explain how a textual XML format can be compatible with a binary-only one I can accept it. Well, I won’t because I know they can’t.
  • CDF would be compatible with legacy MS formats. This is even worse. While a OOXML document may have same structure as its MS legacy binary equivalent, CDF is still completely different, built on top of technologies created for completely different purposes. If even OOXML can’t be compatible, CDF for sure isn’t compatible too. This is just a CDF-overselling incorrect argument.
  • ODF does not have an interoperability framework. What an “interoperability framework” means for people that does not even understand what is compatibility? In the Open Standards era, the proper use of them is already a simple path to interoperability. Want more sophisticated ways? Build tools around these Open Standards and you are done.
  • CDF would be big vendor-independent. That’s OK if W3C wants to stay independent. But CDF will go nowhere if no big vendor adopts it. And to be a real viable alternative to ODF it must prove its value to these big vendors.
  • ODF does not converges desktop, server, web and devices. Just one example that kills this argument is Google Docs. They are making a good (server) job letting (web) users upload, edit, maintain and download ODF documents. Google Docs is starting to be available for mobile devices too.

There are some people playing with CDF, mostly developers. Nice articles can be found in IBM developerWorks about it.

A successful format also needs user friendly software that implements it, cause I don’t expect my mother to write rich CDF docs in Notepad. That’s were the importance of OpenOffice.org (and all its derivatives) appear to help the ODF ecosystem.

So yes, use CDF to make great standards-oriented web pages, instead of proprietary Flash or Silverlight. But to say that CDF can be a universal format for office applications and documents is to overload the technology a little bit.

Tourism in Croatia

Avi Alkalay 2 Comments

Some relatives just came back from a trip in Portugal and Croatia.

About Croatia, they said was impressive and unexpected. Cities are wonderful, beaches are great and people are beautiful. Everybody speaks Italian and English as second languages.

Croatia in the map.

The say the best trip is to rent a car in Italy and drive south-east through the shore into Croatia.

NO Gimp, YES Picasa

Avi Alkalay 2 Comments

While all Linux blogs are talking about new Gimp 2.4, I’m very happy with Picasa.

Yes, I know they have different purposes but Picasa does everything I need with my photos. It is intuitive, powerful, extremely easy to use, fast and nice.

You may say F-Spot is the OSS equivalent but I couldn’t spend more than 15 minutes using it before giving up.

Thanks to Picasa, my last trip photos are really shining, much more than previous Kuickshow+Gimp combination of tools, much faster too.

And did I mention they also provide a Linux version for Picasa ?

Renumbering Categories in WordPress Blogs

Avi Alkalay 13 Comments

There are some situations you may want to manually change (or hack) the category numbers of your WordPress.org blog. Here is how.

Supose you have posts category named “Wine” with ID 15 and you want it to become 1015. You probably already have some posts categorized as “Wine” too and you want to make the number change reflect in their metainformation.

You’ll have to execute some SQL commands in 2 tables: wp_categories and wp_post2cat. Have access to WordPress.org blog MySQL database with PHPMyAdmin or even the plain mysql command and execute this steps.

  1. Don’t trust your eyes or memory because if you forget something or mistype a number, you will make a mess in your blog database. Write in a paper a note for yourself with the category name, previous ID and new desired ID: 
    Wine: 15 ➔ 1015
  2. Change the category number from 15 to 1015 in the master categories table: 
    UPDATE wp_categories SET cat_ID=1015 WHERE cat_ID=15 LIMIT 1;
  3. Renumber all posts categorized as 15 (old Wine category number) to 1015 (new category number) in the posts metadata table: 
    UPDATE wp_post2cat SET category_id=1015 WHERE category_id=15;
  4. WordPress.org also uses the same wp_categories table to classify the links on your blogroll (or sidebar), so you’ll have to change the records associated with the Wine category too, if some: 
    UPDATE wp_link2cat SET category_id=1015 WHERE category_id=15;

There is no visual change for the readers of your blog, everything will look the same. This is only for you, if you want to organize categories in ranges while WordPress.org naturally creates them in a sequence.

Flash Player now supports advanced MPEG-4 content

Avi Alkalay 10 Comments

Adobe’s press release says it all: lab version of o Flash Player 9.0 supports latest and best multimedia technologies.

Thanks to YouTube and other online video services, the Adobe Flash Player browser plug in is probably the most popular video player in the world. But before this version, only the proprietary and now inefficient FLV format was supported.

Tinic Uro, a multimedia software engineer at Adobe explains that the Player now supports:

  • H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
    The best, most sofisticated and advanced video codec, capable of high quality, low bitrate video performances. H.264 is the standard for HD-TV, HD-DVD and BluRay. H.264 is better than MPEG-4 ASP/Xvid/DivX.
  • AAC and HE-AAC (a.k.a AAC SBR)
    The ISO successor of MP3, for audio. MP3 is already very good, extremely popular, and still supported by the MPEG-4 ISO standard and Flash Player. There is no practical advantage on AAC over MP3 for the music you load in your portable player, but HE-AAC achieves much better quality on very low bit rates (desired for streaming) than MP3.
  • MP4 file format
    The MP4 container was designed for many types of usages, including streaming over the Internet. An MP4 file can carry many video, audio, subtitle, scripting, VRML, XML and other metadata multiplexed and in parallel.

All this formats are parts of the ISO MPEG-4 standard.

This is a much expected update for the Flash Player and its users. Every new video on YouTube is being compressed with this technologies since June and the old ones will be converted over time.

We will see quality and speed improvements in multimedia content happening in the right way. Also, the formats of the video files people exchange will converge into a single one based on MPEG-4 standards: MP4 files containing higher-quality-for-megabyte H.264, AAC and subtitle streams.

This is also good news for the Linux and open community. A number of good MPEG-4 related authoring tools already exist and are maturing fast: x264 for video compression, FAAD/FAAC for audio, and GPAC and others for MP4.

Telekomunikatsya Problema

Avi Alkalay 1 Comment

I am here in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, in a LAN house using a dialup connection that gets down every time shared with more 5 other computers.

Do you remember the dial up hell time? This is worse.

OK, the price is as low as the quality: 700 sums per hour. 1276 sums = 1 USD.

I think I’ll write a formal request to Uzbekistan government to change the name of these places from “LAN Houses” to “Shared Dialup Houses”.

Towards Central Asia

Avi Alkalay 2 Comments

Tomorrow we are traveling to Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, Kashgar in China and a few days in Moscow.

Central Asia Map

When I tell this to people their first reaction is always “WTF are going to do there?”. Well, I try to reroute this question to my girlfriend, because I am still not sure. I even don’t know how she convinced me to do this trip. But with her company everything will be a pleasure.

I’ll try to blog the most I can from there, but I guess this region and some parts of Africa are the most remote locations in the world, so I can’t promise any single post.

OOXML: ISO Reports from All Countries

Avi Alkalay 5 Comments

Jomar Silva from the ODF Alliance Brasil, provided a link to all reports received by ISO regarding the OOXML process.

Jordanian report (J1N8726-27.doc) is just hilarious.

Even with 44 pages of technical comments (J1N8726-04.doc), US approved OOXML.

Spain’s single comment (J1N8726-02.doc) shows a situation almost lived in Brazil too: “There is no possible to get the necessary consensus in the mirrow comitte to support either of the other positions”.

Brazil’s report is J1N8726-01.doc.

And the list goes on.

Linux as a Standard Compared to OOXML

Avi Alkalay Leave a comment

When Microsoft says OOXML is good because it promotes choice for users, they are telling a fallacy. They are transfering to the standard a role that should be on the product side.

The OOXML standard versus the Microsoft Office product.

Everybody knows that to have many products that use the same standard is the right thing for the standard and for the users.

GNU/Linux (not just the kernel) positioned as an OS standard and as a brand gets weaker when many different distributions package it in different ways and flavors. The result is that the mindset of what GNU/Linux is is not a consistent concept across the industry in general.

Of course in the case of OOXML Microsoft is pushing it in an artificial way, and on the Linux scenario to have many distributions is a natural process, but just think about it.

Basic Subversion Repository Management

Avi Alkalay 3 Comments

(This is a shared personal note, suggestions are welcome.)

Create a Subversion repository for a project, say The SVG Blog Icons:

  1. Create the repository on the hosting panel with a project name (e.g. Blog Icons) and project ID (e.g. blogicons).
  2. Import the files: 
    bash$ cd src/
bash$ ls
blogicons
bash$ export EDITOR=vi
bash$ svn -m "First import" import blogicons http://svn.alkalay.net/blogicons/trunk
  3. Start over with a fresh copy: 
    bash$ mv blogicons blogicons.old
bash$ svn co http://svn.alkalay.net/blogicons/trunk blogicons
  4. Create a repository for pointers to official releases and register the official release the files imported represent: 
    bash$ svn -m "Links of official releases" mkdir http://svn.alkalay.net/blogicons/tags
bash$ svn -m "Official 20070518 version" cp http://svn.alkalay.net/blogicons/trunk http://svn.alkalay.net/blogicons/tags/20070518
  5. Check how it looks pointing the browser to http://svn.alkalay.net/blogicons/

Manage project files:

  • Add files 
    bash$ cd blogicons
bash$ svn add newfile.svg
bash$ svn add newfiles.*
  • Remove files 
    bash$ cd blogicons
bash$ svn rm oldfile.svg
bash$ svn rm oldfiles.*
  • To embed the file’s meta information in itself as a comment 
    bash$ cd blogicons
bash$ echo "<!-- $Id$ -->" >> file.xml
bash$ echo "/* $Id$ */" >> file.c
bash$ echo "// $Id$" >> file.cpp
bash$ echo "# $Id$" >> file.sh
bash$ echo "# $Id$" >> Makefile
bash$ svn propset svn:keywords Id file.xml file.c file.cpp file.sh Makefile

    Every time changes and commits happen, the $Id$ tag will be replaced as this examples:

    <!-- $Id: file.xml 148 2007-07-28 21:30:43Z username $ -->
/* $Id: file.c 148 2007-07-28 21:30:43Z username $ */
// $Id: file.cpp 148 2007-07-28 21:30:43Z username $
# $Id: file.sh 148 2007-07-28 21:30:43Z username $
# $Id: Makefile 148 2007-07-28 21:30:43Z username $

    People use to put the $Id$ tag in the beginning of source files. The example show how to put in the end, but that’s because it is easy to represent it here in the documentation. You should put $Id$ tags in the beginning of the file.

  • Commit changes to repository 
    bash$ cd blogicons
bash$ svn -m "Changed color to red on icon A, moved the circle shape to left on icon C" commit

    Use descriptive comments favoring WHAT changed on files and not which files changed.

Nokia E Series with Wireless LEAP Authentication

Avi Alkalay 14 Comments

So looks like some people are having problems to configure LEAP in their Nokia E-series phones as E61i or others. This is a guide:

  1. Go to Settings->Connection->Access Points
  2. Create a new access point with any name you want
  3. Use the following configuration:
    1. Data bearer: Wireless LAN
    2. WLAN network name: the SSID of your WLAN which is found by a WLAN scan or provided by your sysadmin
    3. Network status: it is probably Public, but my company’s WLAN name is not broadcasted, so I need to select Hidden
    4. WLAN network mode: Infrastructure
    5. WLAN security mode: although some people report WPA/WPA2 work for them, 802.1x is the only option that works for me
    6. Enter the WLAN security settings subpanel
      1. WPA/WPA2: EAP
      2. EAP plug-in settings: leave only EAP-LEAP enabled/checked using the Options menu
      3. Put the cursor over EAP-LEAP and select Options->Configure
        1. User name: Put the user name they gave you, in my case is my e-mail address
        2. Prompt password: I use No
        3. Password: your password (for LEAP use a very complex password for security reasons)
    7. Homepage: http://avi.alkalay.net/2007/08/leap-nokia-e-series.html so you will have bookmarked the source of this information 😀

With this configuration I am able to connect to my company’s WLAN, which uses Cisco routers and access points. By the way, EAP-LEAP is a proprietary WLAN authentication protocol created by Cisco, and looks like it is considered obsolete.

I also noticed that if the GSM SIM chip is not inserted (offline mode), the phone behavior of getting connected is more difficult. It does not recognize a Hidden WLAN and I had to force the connection. With a GSM SIM chip inserted everything works nicely and as expected.

Looks like only Nokia E-series phones (E61, E61i, E70 etc) running the S60 platform can connect to LEAP WLANs. Same generation Nokia N-series phones (N73, N80, N95) can’t, because they were not designed for business environments — the kind of environments that uses Cisco’s EAP-LEAP.

Bossa Nova to Samba to Choro

Avi Alkalay 2 Comments

Before the famous Brazilian Bossa Nova type of music we had Samba and before that, Choro. Each style evolved from its predecessor.

Many will translate the word choro as cry but nobody is sad. In old Portuguese, choro refers to the vibration of the strings of the acoustic guitar. But yes, it makes me cry when I listen to such a beautiful music.

Choro is a style being played for more than one hundred years. In the 1950’s people started to forget it because the Bossa Nova movement was flourishing and stealing the scene. But then a bandolinist called Jacob do Bandolim took it over playing in bars his wonderful compositions as Doce de Côco and since then Brazilian big cities, specially Rio de Janeiro, find enough room for all styles. In fact, one can find Choro shows 7 nights per week in Brazilian cities as Rio and São Paulo.

Around the end of the 1890’s Samba appeared as a direct descendent of Choro. Identical in rhythm and as melodic as Choro. But while Samba values more percussion and dancing, choro is more concerned with musical solos and harmony between instruments, as we can hear when the trombone plays together with the trumpet on O Trombonista Romântico.

Choro is Brazilian Jazz since before Jazz even existed.

The samples here are played by the outstanding duo of Zé da Velha e Silvério Pontes playing trombone and trumpet, a very uncommon combination of instruments for Choro, together with other excellent musicians from groups as Nó em Pingo D’Água, and other independent musicians.

Zé da Velha e Silvério Pontes first albumThe harmony between them is so unique that I can say they are the best “chorões” in their old school style nowadays. Particularly about Zé da Velha, the trombonist, some people say he plays as he speaks, and his voice recalls his trombone playing. Just listen the famous Alvorada to understand that.

Other wonderful songs they registered in their recordings:

Some SVG Games

Avi Alkalay 14 Comments

I’ve been using SVG more as an offline drawing language and not much as a technology for the web. But I met a friend in a bloggers conference this weekend and he mentioned something obvious, but that I never looked for: an SVG Tetris game. Of course there are many other SVG games.

Check it out:

SVG is just the language to represent graphics and get input. Game logic is actually written in JavaScript.

Web developers are used to mix (X)HTML with JavaScript. Maybe it is time to start thinking about mixing SVG and JavaScript to see proprietary technologies as Flash or Silverlight to be less massively used. For that, better IDE tools for JS+SVG will be required and browsers and platforms must find a more standard way to render audio and video (a feature covered by Flash and SL, but not by SVG).

OOXML: Brazil Says NO

Avi Alkalay 60 Comments

After a very difficult and inconclusive meeting in ABNT (Brazilian Technical Standards Organization) office last tuesday, the standards process director had to analyze the audio recording of all the meeting, review some facts, review again all 63+2 comments produced by the technical group about the ECMA specification, and conclude that a NO for OOXML is the correct position for Brazil in ISO Fast Track process.

Brazil will fill the ISO form with a NO and will attach the 63+2 technical comments to it.

I was a member of the technical group that have studied OOXML specification extensively. I learned that it is unbelievable how ECMA (same guys that put together the JavaScript standard!) can think that a wannabe spec like OOXML is ready for submission. It is incomplete (does not provide mappings with legacy standards, since compatibility is OOXML goal), too long (6000+ pages), fully tied to a single product, uses deprecated substandards, promotes bad practices (embedded binary objects), has clear proprietary hooks (like “formatAsWord95” XML tags), reinvents the wheel all around (date and color formats etc), and most of all does not have a standards-grade look and feel required for a universal and (virtually) eternal document format (doesn’t have to be perfect, but can’t be that imperfect).

Shame on you, ECMA. Your position as a trusted standards organization was severely damaged.

In my opinion, the YES-voting countries are not reading the OOXML specification, are making a pure political decision or simply don’t have a standardization process. This is not to mention that they completely ignored the fact that a similar standard — ODF — already exists. Neither is the case of Brazil and our ABNT.

Countries that will absent their vote probably had a tough time in the decision process with a lot of conflicts between political ramblings and technical facts. This was almost the case for Brazil and our ABNT, but we got the courage to do the right thing.

In parallel, ABNT is turning the OpenDocument Format into a national standard and will adopt and promote as it is: a truly open, universal and independent format for digital documents.

This is a happy day.

Media news that link here (a.k.a. egotrip):

Links to other sources:

What’s Your Personality Type?

Avi Alkalay 1 Comment

You Are An ENTP


The Visionary

You are charming, outgoing, friendly. You make a good first impression.
You possess good negotiating skills and can convince anyone of anything.
Happy to be the center of attention, you love to tell stories and show off.
You’re very clever, but not disciplined enough to do well in structured environments.

In love, you see everything as a grand adventure. You enjoy taking risks for love.
And if things don’t work out, you’re usually not too much worse for the wear!

You would make a great entrepreneur, marketing executive, or actor.

At work, you need a lot of freedom to pursue your own path and vision.
How you see yourself: Analytical, creative, and peaceful

When other people don’t get you, they see you as: Detached, wishy-washy, and superficial

I knew that already…

Top Movies of My Life (so far)

Avi Alkalay 2 Comments

Looks like people really enjoy talking about movies.

Lets leverage that with a blog meme and learn from each other which new movies people suggest us to watch. This is my unordered list.

Antonia

This is the best. Very feminist, dense, funny sometimes and beautiful. I wish I could have this DVD at home, but can’t find it on stores. It is an Oscar winner too.

Contact

I really like how Carl Sagan articulated the relationship between science, faith, religion and believes in this story. Its a very well done movie, and I am looking forward to read the book.

Festen

This is the first Dogme 95 movie I saw, and also the best. I remember how everything was refreshing: the technique, the acid story, language. All.

In the end of the movie, people in the theater started clapping. This is rare. Only for rare movies like this.

Crna macka, beli macor

A.k.a “Black Cat, White Cat”, is the best comedy I ever saw. I should see more movies by Emir Kusturica, but every time his movies feature in a film festival in São Paulo, I can’t manage the long lines.

Cidade de Deus

From Brazil, based in true facts, very violent, very well done and very beautiful too. The actors are completely unknown and poor boys and girls that were trained to play, and did a really great job on this movie. Nominated for 4 Oscars plus another 48 wins & 22 nominations. Don’t miss it.

Lola Rennt

Outstanding movie. Refreshing in shape, style, music, and on its story with a bit of metaphysics.

The Butterfly Effect

I really doubt somebody would put this movie in a top list. I like the metaphor this movie provides about reencarnation and spiritual learning and forgiving. I have to admit I watched it a little bit high.

The Matrix

I’m talking about the first movie plus a few elements from the 2 others to close the context and atmosphere. Not the whole series.

For me this movie is very philosophical and is a metaphor about our addictions, illusions and a real higher life that we need to find inside ourselves. This and the Butterfly Effect are somehow related movies in this matter.

Is just great how successful this movie was in establishing a style, a sort of new way of doing fantasy movies and on popularizing philosophical subjects.

The Last Temptation of Christ

Although I believe the actual life of Jesus was quite different from this story, The Last Temptation of Christ is the one that gets closer. Specially his search for a bigger true and how the story puts Jesus as a plain real man — and not a god —, with conflicts and agonies.

Xanadu

I saw it for the 9th time on TV at 3AM, after returning from a party, and finally time has come to recognize it as a very beautiful movie.

Electric Light Orchestra‘s soundtrack is wonderful and remarkable. The movie is light, full of love, and people involved in its creation were just having a lot of fun. A jewel from the 80’s that is still being sold as DVDs with high prices in stores.

Fantasia and Fantasia 2000

The idea is simple: get pieces of audio beauty and add some visual beauty on top of them. You can do no wrong. I prefer the more abstract or surreal chapters, but I don’t skip the other parts every time I watch these movies again and again.

Copying Beethoven

From all great classical composers movies, this is the best.

Despite the small romantic affair, problems with family etc, I like the focus of this movie on the intense emotional and spiritual relation of the composer with its music, where the inspiration comes from and its transforming power in human kind.

Hero and House of Flying Daggers

Two movies from Yimou Zhang. The first is more philosophical and the other more romantic. Both have great landscapes, nice stories and excellent Kung-Fu/dance scenes.

Happiness

An excellent alternative american film. Very acid.

Love Actually

I think this is the best romance movie you can get.

If you join the meme, please remember to use trackbacks to get linked all around and leverage the blogsphere mesh.

Check also a list of top latin american movies.