I was searching for a solution to a small Spotify bug and found this user praise: Spotify is what napster was for ten years ago.

Then another user replied:

how do you mean?

ten years ago Napster was an illegal channel for sharing and downloading music, built p2p.

are you ironic and i missed the punchline?

Fair enough. But still this guy had a point. Spotify is not the same thing as Napster, but another milestone in the Music Industry transformation.

Napster started a revolution. I’m not talking about piracy, I’m talking about spreading the message that the current formats were obsolete and people had different musical needs. The success of the iTunes Store is a good proof of that.

Spotify, as I see it, is the beginning of the end of that revolution. Say goodbye to useless CDs and DVDs. Goodbye to paying for an album with a couple of good songs and crap for filling.

The next logical step would be a Spotify for video.

The only thing I’ve seen coming from the (music and movie) industry in the last 10 years has been the message that piracy was illegal, and immoral, and that it would kill the music and movies. Maybe they have a point, maybe not.

Recently, they’ve been trying to ban download sites in Spain. What then? Without P2P:

• I can only get movies on theaters (when/where they want) or DVD (how they want). Theaters are expensive (especially if you account for most of the movies not being worth the price) and I just don’t see myself going to a store or having to wait for a DVD to arrive to watch a movie
• If you want movies in VO, there are little options. Thankfully we have now one cinema playing VO movies in our town, but still not enough
• If you want TV Shows on VO you have to wait until the DVD comes out. Most of the successful shows are on TV, but delayed for weeks (or even months) and in Spanish

I found a quote yesterday that summed it up pretty well:

“People don’t go out of their way to pirate movies and TV programs; they’re not intrinsically bad people. They do it because often it’s quicker and easier than legitimate means. The quicker the film and TV industries recognise this and make it as easy to buy legal content as it is to download illegitimate content, the more likely they are to stem the flow.”

But I believe if they shut up for a minute and listen, they’d realize there’s people willing to pay, but they are not selling to them.

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One of the things I miss most is a way to lock the screen in OSX. There are some ways, but they all come to the same idea: “require password to wake up form sleep or screen saver” and then sleep or start screen saver.

There are some times when I don’t want my computer to sleep, but still want it locked: I’ll be away but…

• …downloading/installing something
• …want remote access
• …you name it

The problem with screen savers in mac is that there is no blank screen saver. They’re all beautiful OpenGL savers that look really nice (even when nobody is looking at them), but consume CPU and I usually found my laptop hot as hell when I come back.

It turns out that creating a blank screen saver is way easier than I thought.

1. Open Xcode
2. New Project -> Standard Apple Plug-In -> Screen Saver
3. Build it
4. Install it

The base template for a screen saver in Xcode is just that. A blank view. It’s not so efficient as putting the display to sleep, but it’s a start.
If you don’t have Xcode and/or don’t want to waste a couple minutes following the steps, you can download it: Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

I’m not uploading the source, since the only change from the template was to change the update interval from 1/30 of a second to 10 seconds.

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We opened this Monday with two talks. They are in Spanish but you can get the idea.

Introduction to Subversion by Victor Jimenez

Subversion is the RCS we currently use, and the developers know it well enough to do their everyday job, but the not-so technical people at the company have been expecting some training for a while.

Introduccion a Subversion from Jorge Bernal on Vimeo.

10 things you might not know about MySQL by Jorge Bernal (me)

MySQL is the obvious choice when we need a database for our projects, so many of the developers use it daily. I tried to show some aspects of MySQL which could be useful to them but not the first things you learn about a database.

10 cosas que quiza no sepas sobre MySQL from Jorge Bernal on Vimeo.

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

For a better video and more info about this kind of magic, visit MultiTouch.

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I think this “blinking” icon is the most intrusive form of notification that I’ve received from my mac. I barely notice it, just enough to remind me I have to go shopping.

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Since I didn’t have any MySQL public courses planned this summer, I’ve been using my work time from the last week in the new eBox website.

I’m still far away from what I’d like, but I’m proud my design skills have improved considerably.

For those of you who still don’t know what it is, eBox is a server for the easy administration of corporate networks. eBox was included with the last release of Ubuntu. See eBox in Ubuntu

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That’s why you enter the barcode directly. I’ll probably add some search by title or author, but for now, it works for its original purpose: save money.

Check it out at http://amedias.org/ibuy/

It’s an early release so it can be buggy. If you have found a bug or have some suggestions, leave a comment

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# Dictionary search
dict http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s

# My delicious (with tag support)
kd http://del.icio.us/koke/%s
as https://www.google.com/adsense/report/overview
gr http://www.google.com/reader/view/
fb http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/myfeeds
ga https://www.google.com/analytics/home/

By the way, I haven’t typed all these urls. In your firefox user dir (~/.firefox or ~/.mozilla), there should be a places.sqlite file.

Some sqlite love actually helps

sqlite> SELECT k.keyword, p.url FROM
	moz_bookmarks b
	JOIN moz_places p ON p.id = b.fk
	JOIN moz_keywords k ON k.id = b.keyword_id
	WHERE b.keyword_id IS NOT NULL;

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Add this to your ~/.bashrc

rgrep () { grep -rin --exclude=\*.svn\* --exclude=\*.git\* "$*" . }

And you get a handy grep replacement

$ rgrep function wp_head ./general-template.php:785:function wp_head() {

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