OK, I would love to help Mozilla beat the download record but since yesterday I just have no more patience for server down/busy messages. Anyway, if ALL their servers are busy with people downloading, I am sure they already have the record on their hands (unless they planned less server power than the number they wanted to reach). So, since I don’t want to wait anymore, I just started downloading trough this torrent (for mac) a few seconds ago… OK, it’s almost finished (that was fast) so I am kind of curious. Here I go. If someone gets the windows torrent please post it on the comments. I hope Firefox3 rules (as its predecessors).

So here’s my little contribution to 30onAIR. Put quickly, someone arrives at you with a camera and you are supposed to have 30 seconds (or so) to say something, in this case about the conference. In my case, Koen the Weggheleire was the cameraman. This was on the second day. After day one, at the end of the day, we had dozens of (sponsored) bottles of wine following us around the hotel (together with the sandwich basket)… until almost 5am! By the way, nice to meet you all: Koen, Robin, Michael, Cyril, Tomislav, Georgik, Rostilav, Antti, Marco and everyone else I might have forgotten the name (like the guy hiding bottles of wine on his pants). Hope I see you all in Max/December/Milan again. Email me at meATfcolacoDOTcom. More info (Facebook, Hi5, MSN messenger) in my about page. Say something if you’re around Switzerland!

Highlighting again my geeks-might-have-sense-of-humor pseudo campaign I suggest you see some of my favorites, listed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRVqUt4BbXE (Silverlight premonition)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0DfLw2Yu7Q (The surreal salsa train)

Entire collection HERE and more at 30onair.com

Cyril also did put a Flickr Group in place. Thanks.

So here’s my first post from Milan, where I arrived yesterday and had a few hours to look at the city with my personal guide, Entrances’s Little Susan (Susaninha de Entradas). We didn’t saw each other for more than 10 years. She is in first picture below:

Second picture (above) it’s me smashing the balls of some bull illustration somewhere in the Duomo’s mosaic floor, which they convince me it would bring me lots of luck doing so. I wait for my turn after a dozen of other tourists and do the ritual. I was not that convinced about the good luck thing but I gave it a chance. It would be harder to convince me if it was a real bull, specially in a public place. There was already a huge hole on the floor. The balls were not visible at all, and they told me they just did a restoration of the mosaics less than one year ago. Poor bull.

I am kind of exhausted at this moment writing a post in a less than 10 minute break between two sessions. Kind of exhausted because after arriving and dropping my stuff at the hotel, wired everything and left the laptop doing a never-ending data restore from an external drive (details below). Then was walking around the city with Susana and Gian-Luca (her boyfriend), shopping at Armani for some gifts for my niece and nephew, and arrived back to the hotel a bit late after eating almost 1 Kg of Susana’s excellent home-made lasagna. And lots of cheese and sausage before that. With beer. And she was able to force me to eat a huge bowl of fruit salad, after all that.

After the food overdose I had to recover data and reinstall everything since my mac laptop, the one where I had everything, decided to die Friday afternoon, and Saturday my company got this new one I’m using now since it’s weekend and the dead one has to be sent to apple. By the way, recovering data trough migration tool into a new installation from time machine backups doesn’t work that smoothly, so don’t trust it religiously like most mac users. Specially applications seem kind of erratic and I might have to uninstall and reinstall everything in order for them to behave normal. The one I need most (Flex) had to be reinstalled about 7 times before everything was OK. I was burping lasagna (silently) between every installation. The sessions for 360 Flex started quite early and to be able to get in time for breakfast (as if I wasn’t still digesting that lasagna) I had to sacrifice even more the few hours I had left for sleeping. Anyway, coffee does wonders. The giant pizza I just had for lunch is probably having a chat with the lasagna (and maybe the full english breakfast) since my stomach is doing odd noises randomly (very convenient for being at conferences).

By the way, for everyone thinking that programmers and computer geeks in general do not have any kind of sense of humor look how Koen engaged people before starting his session, against 3 in other rooms (click picture to read):

OK, there’s still one (long) session to go today, then I just wanna sort out some stuff online and get out for a Tiramisu, or two. Arrivederci (or whatever it is for goodbye in Italian).

[Warning: might contain geek subjects]

So, I recently (that’s 4 months ago) resigned from the advertising stress and insane (and unrealistic) deadlines, most times set up randomly (by braindead accounting people who have no clue about programming/flash/3d-rendering/whatever). That was the best decision I took for my career, since I was basically trading my social life for not learning or developing anything new, just executing, non-stop and actually getting behind the technologies changing every day. I add an offer at the time from the company I am working at currently, to develop applications (web and desktop) for the financial/trading markets. So my days are spent now with a few of the things I was dealing with before (PHP and Flash) but mostly with something new to me that I am loving to work with, challenging and rewarding: That’s FLEX (developing with beta 3R3, soon to be an official release). And by the way, it makes a huge difference when your boss and accounting people understand how things work and grasp what programming and the technologies involved are.

To everyone who keeps asking what that Flex thing is, I found this post which explains it really well, from Ted Patrick, on his great blog:
Quoted:

I have wanted to cover this basic question for a really long time but it is a very hard question to answer. Flex is many things but I wanted to put a definition out there to help everyone see what it is, where we are headed, and why we created it. With all my presentations I start with “What is Flex?” and it is about time my blog had the same information. So here is my definition:

What is Flex?

Flex is a way to make SWF files!

At the heart of Flex is the ability to create SWF files that run in Adobe Flash Player. Distill all the features down and really it is a development paradigm that compiles to SWF. It really is that simple but often we make the definition much harder. Just like Flash can create SWF files, so can Flex but the way you develop is completely different.

Flex is for developers.

Flex was not built for animators, writers, accountants, it was written for software developers and the paradigm matches the development methodology you already know. If you know Java, C, C++, C#, Delphi, VB, PHP, ColdFusion, Python, Ruby, you can learn Flex with little effort. The goal when Flex was created was to make a development paradigm that developers could learn easily/already know and have that create SWF files for Flash Player (and now AIR). Flex has classes, components, a compiler, a debugger, class libraries, and uses XML (MXML) for declarative markup of components. The ActionScript programming language is based on ECMAScript 4 (the language standard behind JavaScript) and has full support for the ECMA XML standard E4X. It also has most of the UI components that you already use like buttons, lists, datagrid, combobox, tree but it also supports containers like HBox, VBox, TabNavigator, TitleWindow and many others. If you have written software before you can learn Flex easily. Better still is that Flex is compatible with all HTTP servers and any server side programming language, so the knowledge you have of servlets, php, ASP.net, JSP is really handy. Flex just lets you program the client side in a paradigm you already know and understand.

(more…)

Here it is: the very first post in this blog. And by the way, what is this all about? Well, this will be the place where I’ll post a lot of nonsense pictures, weird videos, useless articles I might come up with and whatever I decide to post, whenever I decide to post, after all, this is my blog.