Yesterday we went to see Carlos Chaouen playing live in a very small theater close to our place. It was a nice concert, with about 100-150 people attending, where Carlos, one of the classical cantautores in the coffee places of Madrid, played most of the songs of his last album, and also some of the best known ones, like “No me canso”, which is now famous here because of the terrible version performed by the former Mecano singer, Ana Torroja, in her last album.
Today, almost 10 years after the first time, I have just seen again lha das flores (“Flower Island”), a shocking, 13 minutes long, brazilian short film.
It can be seen at PortaCurtas in original version (brasilian portuguese). It’s low quality, but if you have never seen it, stop doing wathever you are doing, take 13 minutes of your precious time, and learn more about capitalism with the awarded work directed by Jorge Furtado.
Picture taken from one of the bridges in downtown Stockholm, Sverige, in July 2002.
I’ve been playing during the last week with these two very cool projects.
Audioscrobbler keeps a database with the music profiles of the registered users, based in the messages sent by plugins of the media players (there are plugins for a long list of players) when the users plays a song. Based on this, Audioscrobbler creates statistics, generates recommendations, and creates a network of people where the connections depend on the musical taste.
MusicBrainz is a music metadatabase with information about the names of the artists, the names of their albums and the concrete list of tracks included in each of the albums. But the very interesting concept is that the keys in the database are based on the physical characteristics of the audio CD, or the MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files. Any music player, using the provided API, can obtain metainformation on a concrete song, and use it for tagging. And it works!
The new version of the office suite is available. I’ve installed the beta version and have been using it for a couple of weeks without any problem. I’ve followed the instructions described by Clemmitt M. Sigler in this e-mail.
There’s an interesting comparison with MS Office 2003 in Anthony Barker’s Weblog. Linux Magazine has a preview of the new version.
There are also screenshots available, including several self-descriptive Database screenshots.
I forgot to mention that six months after the previous release, as it was planned, Gnome 2.10 was released. This version includes new features (improvements in the performance of Nautilus, better drag&drop support, and other small changes), hundreds of bug fixes and full integration with a video player (Totem) and CD-ripping application (Sound Juicer).
A LiveCD is also available for those wanting to try the new version of Gnome, without having to build from sources or wait for the packages of the distributions.
We’ve seen the new movie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet yesterday afternoon. I have loved it.
This article written by Martin Fowler, published two years ago, is a must read for those interested in the motivations of adaptive, people-oriented, agile methods for software development.
Time (especially in a technology world) flies, and 1971 is the prehistory of computers.
Fortunately, I have already some near future travel plans for Argentina and Germany