I’m actively looking for .Mac alternatives. Being a satisfied .Mac subscriber since I have my Powerbook to sync my personal data between my work and my house in a efficiently and no-fuss way, I can’t help to feel that lately Apple is pushing it too much, and I don’t like it. .Mac is no more no less than a huge Webdav server and remote storage, everything else is rendered and published by your local computer.

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The thread about the P990i made me think about the fast evolution in mobile technology and I became nostalgic. This was my first mobile phone. The stunning GA628 with 125 hours talk time, SMS and just 160g weight. What was yours ?

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I just tried to compile speirs’s Fotobilder iPhoto Plugin to use a modified version of our internal (SAPO’s) API, and translate it to Portuguese. So I downloaded the beta from XCode2.2 and gave it try.

The last time I used a graphical IDE was on the glorious Amiga days, with the famous SAS/C compiler. I long adopted the trusty portable gnu utils/bash/gnumake/vi IDE. So I was relutant.

But XCode is beautiful. Apart for not being able to use “vi” decently, it just rocks. Without reading a single document or book, just out of common sense and knowledge I was able to install it XCode, the needed extra packages and frameworks, get the source code from speir’s SVN, change the target for 10.4, edit the widgets to Portuguese, compile everything and run the program.

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It’s old news for Internet standards but Google Talk has opened their server (not the service yet).

Enough to confirm it’s XMPP/Jabber. I was able to use my Gmail account both with Psi, iChat and AdiumX (libgaim based so all clients based on GAIM should work).

• Works with plain 5222 connections but you need TLS (Gaim clients and iChat support that)
• Works with SSL 5223 with any client, including Psi.
• You need to set “allow plain passwords” if your client has that option.
• S2S seems closed for the moment and no DNS SRV records are available for google.com, gmail,com or talk.gmail.com yet.
• No agents or components can be found while browsing (disco, agents or browse) for any of those domains.

There’s some integration with the GMail webmail already, namely:

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Well it’s out and lots of question have been answered both with the availability of the service and with a minimalist Developers FAQ on the site.

In a nutshell:

• S2S and DNS SRV records are turned off. They don’t clarify if they’re going to open them, many speculate they will. For now they ask us to send them an E-Mail asking for federation. I did and received an Automatic reply with a ticket ID.
• When we invite a friend to GMail from our account, regardless of it’s E-Mail domain (initially I thought It would happen to .com contacts), it’s added to the XMPP roster. This is weird because they don’t have XMPP S2S open yet so I can’t IM them. But it’s the proof Gmail has a strong unified contact list engine behind the scenes.
• There’s a group for Google Talk discussions available.
• There’s some people asking for Asterisk’s native protocol IAX too.
• The VoIP/SIP people is wondering if they’re going to use ENUM which would open the service further and contribute for interoperability.
• There are rumours that iChat could do voice call to Google Talk. Not true. Hoax.
• There’s no offline messages support. Rather than that, Google’s client uses GMail’s Webmail to send an E-Mail to your offline buddies.
• VoIP implementation and relationship with XMPP as not yet been reverse engineered but it’s on many people’s TODO.list, including mine.
• Just crossed my mind that if you want, you now have a very easy and well documented API to authenticate Gmail E-mail’s credentials.
• As you would expect from using XMPP you can logon with as many clients as you want (tried two) with the same account at the same time.
• People talked to me about Google Desktop integration but I haven’t checked.
• File transfers and avatars are not supported by Google’s client yet, so no JEP adoption advocacy for now
• Google’s client uses JEP-0115 to query/inform the other peer’s client capabilities and reports the “voice-v1″ capability.
• Google’s client doesn’t respond to disco queries.
• Google’s client doesn’t send or react to jabber:x:event messages.

UPDATE: There’s an interesting thread going on the JSF members list. And a reply from stpeter which I fully subscribe.

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Segundo o semanário “Expresso” deste fim de semana o actual governo prepara-se para fazer uma parceria com os CTT e no âmbito do “Choque/Plano tecnológico” dar um E-Mail a todos os cidadãos portugueses. O racional começa por ser o uso da Internet como meio privilegiado de contacto com os contribuintes como um instrumento de combate à fraude e à evasão fiscal (já se viu que a entrega electrónica do IRS é um sucesso) mas admite-se um uso mais abrangente, afinal de contas é um simples E-Mail na rede pública Internet. Fala-se também em certificação/garantia de recepção e entrega e mais, caso a mensagem não seja lida electronicamente é entregue fisicamente pelos CTT.

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Impressões gerais sobre a Madeira: Desenvolvida, Excelentes acessos e infra-estruturas em qualquer canto da ilha, túneis em barda. Qualquer monte por mais pequeno que seja, justifica um. Há quem diga que até são demais, que a ilha já parece um queijo suíço. Vias rápidas e estradas secundárias em número mais do que suficiente. Gente afável e aparentemente trabalhadora, moldados pelas suas origens e percursos na vida, muitos são retornados. Mistela de línguas e raças nas ruas, em certos sítios é difícil ouvir falar-se Português ou até encontra-los. Nitidamente a Madeira é orientada para o turismo e na minha ignorância arrisco conjecturar que é dependente dele. Boa gastronomia. Linda. Grande. Diversificada desde o mar verde e quente do lado sul, às cascatas, montanhas, picos, escarpas com teleféricos assustadores, cabos, campos, vales, florestas e jardins, piscinas naturais, vilas históricas, levadas…

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A few days ago, I blogged about FOAF. Since then I’ve been more aware to simple solutions/approaches to the social face of the technical web. A few days after I stumbled across XFN /XHTML Friends Network), another very simple way to represent social relationships through annotations on the most used presentation language on the Internet: HTML. What else is out there ? In the lack of a widespread adopted mechanism to represent user data and human relationships, there are many proposals laying around waiting for fame and fortune:

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Neste fim de semana prolongado risquei mais um item da minha TODO-LIST pessoal, fui passá-lo aos Açores à Ilha de São Miguel. A expectativa era alta mas a experiência não desiludiu, este pedaço de terra plantado no meio do oceano é um exemplo vivo das maravilhas que a natureza tem e do que este País tão frequentemente se esquece. Deixo-vos algumas fotos para se deliciarem. A voltar, numa onda menos familiar e com mais tempo para ver as restantes pérolas deste arquipélago.

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Por circunstâncias essencialmente casuais hoje estive presente na conferência intitulada “Plano Tecnológico” promovida pelo Diário Económico no Pestana Palace Hotel em Lisboa. Tão casuais que não imaginei quando saí de casa que viesse a destacar-me (orgulhosamente, note-se) como o único desengravatado da audiência. Mas confesso que fui também com alguma dose de curiosidade ao encontro. Quando a bandeira de campanha do partido agora no governo é um “Choque Tecnológico” para salvar a economia do País, sendo a minha actividade profissional e os meus interesses pessoais fortemente ligados à tecnologia e à inovação e tendo eu acompanhado muito de perto estas guerras nos últimos dez anos de actividade sempre queria ver se hoje entendia como é que nos vão chocar. Mas não… A conferência foi do meu ponto de vista, e como já devem ter percebido pelo meu tom de discurso, uma feira de vaidade cheia de altas individualidades ligadas a instituições governamentais, empresariais e de ensino, num habitat mediático, formal, congestionado com fotógrafos, conselheiros, câmaras de televisão e equipas de reportagem. The works!

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