babies

 

Taking the Time

I've just read a request for help on a newsgroup. The poor guy never had the right answer. He wanted to know if there was an alternative to a software application that was misbehaving. And nobody took the time to read where the problem was, or basically understand it.

Intelligence is a matter of time too. Intelligence is about development and development unfolds itself through in time. A trick many stupid do is to fake misunderstanding, as if misunderstanding was a mere accident. Something that just happens.

Rich people should be measured in time, not in money. Being rich is having the time to do what you want with those things you want (and you have!). And while this era is providing the general public with tons of material things, those who are not rich are getting shorter and shorter in time.

Time is sanity. If you are getting short of time, you can fill it with despair. It is pretty close to having someone on your neck. If you are filling this now take a deep breath, try to sit comfortable, relax your stomach and the rest of your internal organs, and start to think that you are the owner of your time. You may rent many pieces of this land that is your time, but you are the only responsible for it.

The minute we do so, we are compelled to start planning a new life based on this time-breaks, and how good they are. And we are on the rush again.

It takes time to make some time.

I must go now, I am late!

Connections

Computers will integrate with your life, much more that we can imagine. Now they are, let us say, a little connected. Mainly what really happens is that the applications installed in your computer are not very well at talking with each other. In this article we will consider interaction beyond the export to office menu entry we find on a few of them.

If you are Mac user, now you have a new approach called "Automator". You create a "workflow" of things to be done with the output and process of several applications who make use of this technology by adding actions in a list. Let's go to an example of this: imagine you are a news photographer and you want your photos published as soon as posible to your editor: well, you have to import the photos from your digital camera, copy them to a certain internet folder, and send a warning e-mail with the location, along with the report you have to write about the images taken.

With an automation script, you connect your camera to your notebook, double click on the run button on the "Publish To The Daily Planet" task of your Automation window (you have previously programmed this), and you can start preparing the text you think will describe the shots you have captured.

If you have to do the these tasks separately, you have to be alert on the import process, so you don't loose time when it finishes and go to the copy step quickly. It is really painfull to interrupt a thinking process to attend a copy-to operation. If your automation is clever enough, you can copy the files to another location if the first internet server is down, or publish them in a blog.

In a near future, you may be able to send flowers to your loved ones on their birthday, automatically, along with a message sent to you to alert yourself how a good person you are.

Linux users may know this things better as open-source software is good on producing open formatted output, witch integrates with ease, at least for Linux users whom are computers experts, most of them.

But for the vast majority, oh poor Windows users, things are quite fragmented. If your computer has survived the connection to the internet, and you have finally had enough of computer games, now you can do specific tasks and make a little connection between them.

Let us say that you are a musician, you can download a sample a friend has sent you by email, play it in your computer and add some instruments. Then you save the file in your harddrive, sent it back to your friend by email with a copy to another friend who will add the vocals.

You have used two applications that know little of each other, and if you go to see your singer, without your computer and the email has failed by some odd reason, you have to go back to your home and try it again. There is no workflow there. Workflow is like having the band playing together, over the internet.

Everybody know how to use the email, but email really is a poor tool. May be an internet folder, with a chat (or instant messaging software) get us a closer look of what may be a band playing togheter. Tracks are compiled in a folder (FTP, WebDav pr SFTP, you name it) accesible to all members of the band.

This folder has to have an automatic versioning system with the ability to store the history of every modification a file has suffered. May be a CVS or something like that. CVS is a technology software developers have been using for years to do that, precisely. CVS keeps a record of who made those changes, and even has the ability to lock a file to other members of the developing process.

With a stream server, they could "join" to play together like internet gamers do so well, and polish the song to make it sound really good.

These technology concepts are not new, but the building of the process ordinary people need demands an integration between tools and servers that will appear on the horizon as those ideas gets louder.

The feeling of this is like having your digital life all arround you all the time, and you use all the e-gadgets to put things together. Let s make a list: pda, cell phone, camera and music player, they may be a single artifact or not, but they have to have the same contacts list, agenda and have access to the same storage system. Lets go beyond: your credit card (your cell phone account is turning into a payment system), your gps, your wrist watch, and everything you may have with batteries has to work to make your life easier and connected.

We have a long journey to see this things happening for real. Integration means sharing, and sharing is no good for big corps, scary for the one who knows is going to loose something in the trade, and a difficult task for a heart that is not generous. And generosity is on the side of them who generates.

Who needs to go to the Moon?

This is humanity. You don't want to brush your teeth everyday, but you do it because you want to age with your teeth there. You have quitted smoking, good for you! And if you didn't and you want to, you are thinking in those reasons to finally do it, for once and for all.

Sometimes, there is a challenge in your life that makes you go, where you didn't expected to be. And that is humanity too. Marrying, having children, leaving your parent's nest, talking to her, looking at him in that way. Those feelings pushes you to boldly go, where you have never gone before.

Stuck in your car, in the middle of the rush hour, your mind will show you a future with flying vehicles, or teleportation devices. We need them so badly. We put our hopes in science.

Carl Sagan told me once that I'm made of the same things a star is made of, as he told to everyone of us, humans. In a starry night, I can feel he was true. I need to go to the Moon. But this is not a matter of feelings anymore. My children need to live in Mars.

We want to live longer, as this world turns a better place to be. This is a remarkable place, but there is no room for everyone. Mostly, because our specie is getting close to the saturation point when a single comunity of organisms is labeled as a plague.

Our cities are stopping the natural evolution of the biosphere, and we are chopping to many strings in the net of life forms. We are too many to make this world susteinable. Thus, we are getting to the point of extinction.

Of course I believe in what humans can do when we are facing death: miracles are short. And by the end of this century we will be transforming other planets to live in.

Next time you are in your car, stuck in the rush hour, lower your window and explain to the driver next to you that we are too many. He will understand what you mean.

WMF Security hole: Microsoft, you did it again!

There is a horrible security hole in every Windows OS (win98, win2000, XP, even windows Vista, the new unfinished version) right now. By loading an apparently innocent image, your computer may be infected with a virus. This warning may look like a virus hoax, but this time is true. It is unbelievably true.

The operating system shows images everywhere: on your email, a website, a pop up from your messenger, the small preview on the left of a folder window. The preview pane of the Outlook Express loads the image too, so you don't have to open the email to activate the virus, you only have to step over that email, and there you are.

The problem was always there, but now it was discovered and it is being exploited by malicious persons all over the world. There is also a tool which allows almost any ignorant fool to create a new image and add a new virus that is unknown to the every antivirus programme and therefore, will spread undetected. The antivirus approach renders ineffective, so there is no solution coming from the many companies who makes money protecting your computer.

There is no solution from Microsoft, either. It will be, they say, on January 10 2006. In computing times, five days is an incredible large amount of time in which hundreds of millions of computers are in danger.

Even when the solution finally arrives from Microsoft labs, the immunization of every computer will take a long period. In the middle of a pandemia that may arise, the virus will continue with the infection process even when there is a solution at hand. Or may be not that handy: you have to connect to the Internet to get the patch, and the Internet is the primary source of contagious.

In the past, it was unthinkable to have a very well known software failure without a solution. This is way this article may look exactly as a virus hoax. Indeed you may say they where prophetic.

A virus hoax spreads by an email you received, telling you there is a virus that harms your computer, and there is no solution yet so you don't have to open an email with the subject "yada-yada". Virus hoax are not inoffensive. They are made to collect email addresses of good willing people whom based on wrong information, are trying to protect their loved ones.

For them, I don't have words right now. I can't tell them that when there is a known virus there is a cure. May be this is a good moment to shout "run for your lives". For those of you still reading, there is an unofficial patch that you have to ask to your system administrator. It is called WMFHotfix. But Microsoft is asking its costumers not to install it, and to be patient for them to release the official hotfix. But people is installing it anyway, and they are trusting Mr. Ilfak Guilfanov, someone totally unknown for the vast majority of the world, until this very precise moment.

It is getting clear for all of us that Microsoft Windows is not a good choice to put our digital lives on. And that people is looking for better alternatives. Some good ones, are free.

Changes in this crazy world are faster, and faster than Netscape guys got so rich, they where broken and lost. Faster than a virus infection, Microsoft has to react or will be beaten by the power of choice.

Toby!