A little bit of everything
"A little bit of everything" is my personal web log. I will talk, as its title says, about anything that comes to my mind: technology, sports, cinema, music... I hope I can find the time and strength to write something once in a while. By the way, this blog expresses only my personal feelings and thoughts. Do not take any of my points of view as necessarily shared by the organization(s) where I (have) work(ed).
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Ayuda al desarrollo del DDR de CTIC
Queridos todos:
La Unidad de Movilidad e Independencia de Dispositivo del Área de I+D+i de Fundación CTIC Centro Tecnológico está preparando un Repositorio de Descripción de Dispositivos distribuído y colaborativo y os pide ayuda a todos. Por cierto, nuestro sitio web está en medio de algunos cambios serios así que disculpas si hay algún problema con alguna dirección de las anteriores o si hay alguna sección en inglés que no funcione correctamente.
Help developing CTIC's DDR
Dear all:
The Unit of Device Independence and Mobility of the R&D Department at Fundación CTIC Centro Tecnológico is preparing a distributed collaborative Device Description Repository and is asking for help to you all. By the way, our web site is in the middle of some serious changes so sorry if no English version is available or there is some problems with any of the web address above.
What is a Device Description Repository (DDR)?
It is basically a device database which keeps information about hardware and software device features. You can query a DDR in order to guess what vendor made the device, what the operating system version is, which web browser is installed, what sensors are available (compass, accelerometers, camera, microphone, ...), CPU model, primary and secondary memory installed, available storage, its physical screen size, its resolution in pixels, Bluetooth version and available profiles, audio and video codecs supported, and many other things. Mainly, mostly everything that you can know beforehand about the device, as DDRs keep static information which does not change over time. There is a good wikipedia entry if you want to dig more on this.How can I help?
Typically, DDRs receive evidences about the identity of the device and a query for one or more device features. Consequently, they respond with values for the device features requested. This is only one of the multiple use cases for a DDR, but I consider it is sufficient for you to guess their purpose. For example, when I access a web site, the web browser of my device (my desktop PC, my laptop, my mobile phone, my TV set, my Set-Top Box or my game console) send a message called HTTP Request which includes some information which helps identifying which device/browser performed such request. So we have prepared a very basic web site that you can access with any of your device and web browsers. In this way, we shall read the HTTP Request, analyze all the headers included and add the device to the Device Description Repository that we are preparing. WE NEED THAT ALL OF YOU ACCESS http://idi.fundacionctic.org/mobHeaders OR THE SHORTER http://bit.ly/headrs address WITH AS MANY DIFFERENT DEVICES AND WEB BROWSERS AS POSSIBLE. We want to have real hits from real browsers because we will not sniff information from existing DDR technologies such as WURFL or Device Atlas.And what do I get from it
So far, a response thanking you for contributing plus a sentence indicating if an identical web browser and/or device had already hit the site or if you are the first one which contributed those device identification evidences. After we have a sufficient number of devices and we have refined our algorithms, we shall enrich the site providing you with some information about your device. In the long term, we will release a free DDR technology with all the deployments sharing device identification and device features. Our intention is to finish the current state of walled gardens in device identification. A global universal device database should be ready for everyone so the developer community can focus their efforts creating high-quality adaptation software based on a trustworthy device identification source. Initially, this DDR will cover web adaptation but, if successful, who knows what might come? We have some aces in the hole which we shall share when they are mature.When will it be ready
We are not in a hurry. You have excellent commercial solutions such as Device Atlas or WURFL so you are covered for good device databases in the web domain. Old versions of the WURFL API and database are free and they might be very helpful for you to develop your own device database. The OpenDDR, with an approach more similar to ours, has recently been released. However, a first version will be ready in 2012 (if the Mayan prophecy does not stop us) and it is very likely that we have an early access version in the first half of this year.Please do not play tricks on it
Yes, some of you will feel tempted to make some HTTP Requests programatically, use user agent string faking software and browser extensions, flood our database, check security of the site and so on. Know that you will delay our results and it will be a pity but we won't do anything against that. We know it can happen and we shall bear with that possibility. You will be disturbing developers with the aim to provide new technology for free to the developer community. This is just an internal tool for us to catalogue all the devices which come to our hands and we are asking for help in the process.OK, I will contribute.- What to do? When to stop?
Just access one of the available web addresses (http://idi.fundacionctic.org/mobHeaders or the shorter good for mobile phones and other hard-to-type-with devices http://bit.ly/headrs) with each web browser that you have access to. If you update your device OS version and/or browser, please remember us and access again.Stay tuned
Yes, more news will come soon here and/or at CTIC's web site. We're looking forward to bringing good news! In the meantime we shall enrich our device database with all the devices that reach our hands. Will you help us? Thank you!Monday, January 02, 2012
Box.net client for Mac OSX
I own a paid account in Dropbox and I do love it. The extra Rat-Pack allows me to have infinite versions of the file in my Dropbox. I have already accidentally deleted important files more than once and the Dropbox web client allowed me to undelete it. The 50 GBs of the account are great, although if you intend to keep back-ups of old email inboxes and some other old stuff, you can fill it. It has happened to me.
Then came box.net with the offer of 50 GBs to iOS users in order to counteract the iCloud offer of 5 GB for free. So I signed up and I checked that there is no native client as there is for Dropbox. I saw people complaining about it and it seemed weird to me that there were Mac OSX users complaining. Why? Mac OSX can use Finder in order to access their box.net files via WebDAV.
You just have to bring Finder to the foreground, press cmd+K to connect to server and then write the URI to connect to Box's WebDAV: https://www.box.net/dav/. Then type in your login and password and there you have it.
So I have the Dropbox folder which keeps space in my hard disk, some Dropbox folders which are in the cloud (thanks to Dropbox's selective sync feature) and all the files in Box.net remotely accessible thanks to WebDAV and its Mac OSX's finder integration.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Converting NRG disk images to the ISO format in MacOSX
First step: install MacPorts (Direct access to the latest .dmg file for OSX Lion at the very moment of writing this post is here). MacPorts is a set of software tools which allow distinct open source software from other POSIX-like systems such as Linux. These open source software pieces include command-line tools and X11 tools. It includes a software packaging system very easy to use.
So easy, that, we only need to install nrg2iso by executing the command
sudo port install nrg2isoin Terminal. Then, just execute
nrg2iso inputfile.nrg outputfile.isoin Terminal's command line. Two things may happen afterwards: console output may show the advance in the task of converting the original Nero .nrg file to the more standard .iso disk image format; alternatively, the .nrg file may already be a .iso file simply renamed to .iso and console output will warn us about that fact. In this case, we only have to change the .nrg extension to .iso.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Survey illustrates iPad's effect on PC market
Tuaw has just published a post about how PC users spend less time after purchasing an iPad. It references a survey by AdMob and they say that "Among the 1,430 tablet own ers who par tic i pat ed in the sur vey, 77 per cent admit ted to spend ing less time with their per son al com put ers after buy ing a tablet, 43 per cent said they now use their tablets more than their per son al com put ers, and 28 per cent claimed to use a tablet as their pri ma ry com put er. Most tablet users, 68 per cent, spent at least one hour each day with the device, pri mar i ly for play ing games (84 per cent), search ing for infor ma tion (78 per cent) or email cor re spon dence (74 per cent)."
It must be true ;-)
Written from an iPad ;-)
It must be true ;-)
Written from an iPad ;-)
Monday, April 11, 2011
Trying to post from Blogger app in Android
So that is it. Just my first try blogging from the Android Blogger app.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
New social network item: gdgt gadget list in the sidebar
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