Back once again in Florianópolis

One of my more "live" updates... Just arrived at where I'm staying for the foreseeable future...

Srv. Natalina Machado, 243
Cacupe Florianópolis - SC
CEP 88050-010
Brazil

The place is 7.4km from work.

After 28hours of travelling from Amsterdam, past Frankfurt, Sao Paulo, and arriving in Florianopolis, I put my bike together and took this picture.

I'm almost done unpacking... I think I'll go get some sleep soon.

Building Internet Spaceships

I got a job offer in Brazil and I'm going to take it.

To me this is a dream opportunity, building games at a dream location: Florianópolis.

The company is called Hoplon. They build a sci-fi space simulation MMORPG called Taikodom.

I've always wanted to work with games. While the situation in Europe is improving through early 2010, finding gigs in Holland is still pretty hard. With this job offer I've had to turn down a gig for a small application I was going to develop for the iPhone...  So if anyone is interested in taking over this, you should be located in Amsterdam and have an interest in beer!

To all those I leave behind in Amsterdam. I'll miss you all. Come visit me some time.

Back in Amsterdam drinking Mate

So, here we are back in Amsterdam once again. Carina got me my first "chimarrão" cup as a present! I think I did a good job on my first very own mate cup!

The New Context!

this one you'll never forget! (Please relink forward...)

iPhone 3Gs vs Nokia 6310i - rant alert

I'm pretty sure i'd piss off Apple fans by saying the iPhone sucks. But lets be fair. The iPhone is suffering from Steve Job's crazy ideology setbacks.

This is just a rant, and I'm not going to go into specs. Its an unfair comparison after all. The Nokia 6310i, which was released in late 2002, kicks the iPhone's ass in functionality.

Sure, it can't render a webpage in colour. The screen is monochrome. And there's no streaming of audio on the Nokia either. However since the iPhone's got limited support for that, I think the Nokia's leading on several points. Here are my serious getups with the iPhone.

• Battery lifetime.
  The iPhone's battery, after geeking around just a little bit... simply goes flat. Seriously, what's up with that? I mean... I can literally see the percentage tick off of the iPhone when using it
• Bluetooth.
  What's up with Bluetooth support?! Has anyone ever seen such a handicapped device?
  
• Flash and Javascript.
  come on!!! Get with the program. We want to use the rich web applications. The iPhone won't load up any standard-compliant content rich web-applications, which just makes me a sad panda.
  
• Why connect to iTunes for updates?
  I can understand connecting to the PC for uploading music and possibly a couple of other media intensive things... Even for rescuing your iPhone case it crashes. But seriously? Why can't you download a kernel patch and apply it automatically over G3?

I never really wanted a Macintosh. It never attracted me. Lately I've been wanting a MacBook pretty bad because every developer tutorial out there seems to be using a friggin' Mac. But I'm feeling a lot of duality to Steve Job's ideological approach to Apple's products. C'mon guys, really... Apple's worst failures are problems that seemed solved long ago. To me it shows outrageous neglect.

Please oh please dear Google, get a little more aggressive with uncooperative companies and start giving them a well deserved whooping by competing directly with them.

appspot

Appspot.com is very much like blogspot.com, except its targeted at developers.

Google is making a great move in opening up its development platform to people. This way they are able to see everything that people create and take advantage of it.

There are a lot of concerns today about us using any corporate built tools online. Data is privatized by that corporation and can be resold. Its a genuine thing to do online... Grab some users, offer something free, once you've got your results turn it into a paid for service.

However, Google's approach to tackling the massive amount of data, that we produce on a daily basis, is opening up a lot of its infrastructure to the public.

There are a multitude of concequences to this. Google is now a direct amazon.com competitor. Amazon offers their S3 service, among others, for hosting. Google hosting isn't exactly new... But what is new is the way content delivery is shifting towards.

To cut things short. J2EE and servlets are finally going to be the development and delivery platform, with an immense amount of local websites sprouting up everywhere.

To tie the knot... You should soon see services supporting almost any production language fairly cheaply anywhere... Why? Because people have their needs. I would go into a conversation about why PHP should be scrapped, but I'm also still pretty sure I'll see a federated wave server running on Redhat using PHP for creating gadgets.

Gmail to Google Apps email migration

Gmail to Google Apps email migration can be surprisingly simple and painless.

It is a shame Google still has no point-click way of moving a google mailbox under a google apps domain. You really have to download everything and upload everything to your new mailbox.

This does mean you either need a nice connection or wait a long time :D