Image by psd

Like everyone in web, I have an opinion on Yahoo/Microsoft deal, after reading a lot of post about this subject I don’t understand why all the tables comparing the earnings includes all microsoft divisions (HW , software, web, games) or at least that is what looks like, because I didn’t see any indication of the contrary and as far as I know Yahoo or Google don’t produce consumer hardware, games, OS or office suites with a licensing business model.

The tables should have been the numbers of Yahoo + the numbers of MSFT but only the web divisions and then comparing that to the numbers of income and profit from Google.

But for the analysis and predictions I will point to some posts were A list blogs have made a better job in describing the situation, effects and timelines.

• Techcrunch
• Enrique Dans

Read/Write Web

• SEOmoz

As a user how will this affect me?. well, first let’s make a list of the services I use on each one.

What services do I use currently or have used in the past on:
Microsoft

• Hotmail/Live Mail
• MSN Messenger

Yahoo

• Answers
• Buzz
• Del.icio.us
• Flickr
• HotJobs
• Instant Messenger
• Mail
• MyBlogLog
• My.Yahoo.com
• Pipes
• Site explorer
• Yahoo User Interface Library
• Zimbra
• Search Marketing

And for comparison the services I use on Google:

• Alerts
• Analytics
• Blogger
• Calendar
• Docs
• Gmail
• Groups
• Jaiku
• Maps
• Reader
• Talk
• Webmaster Tools
• Youtube
• Adsense
• AdWords

And I’m sure that some services I use are missing, but as a web user this could mean that I may need to start searching for alternatives to the services that I use on Yahoo, because if we look at this and this the services provided by Yahoo and converted or redesigned to comply with MS guidelines and corporate/web standards will be ruined and/or covered with ads. or I may not like them changed, as simple as that.

As a developer, what can I say? I haven’t used IE for the last 4 or so years and I have suffered with the incompatibilities caused by the MS browser, I don’t use any service or API provided by Microsoft, is there any?

As an advertiser, I have used only Yahoo or Google. But I have read about the new tools that Microsoft implemented for advertisers in their network and they seem to be really good. This may be the only good point in the acquisition for me if MS integrate the search volume and the tools of both companies.

An option was to see the videos on the computer (my computer has a bigger screen and I have the codecs to watch those formats on Linux), but the experience is not the same. So I started a search for a converter but the ones I found were for windows and these days I don’t trust anymore the free software for windows, in fact I don’t have a windows partition.

Then I found AlltoAvi and problem solved!. AlltoAvi is a software project that can be used in Linux and Windows. In Linux I only needed to install mencoder and worked flawlessly.

To convert a file you need to enter the directory where the files are located, filetype, subtitle and audio track IDs, bitrate desired, the codec you want to use to convert and the width and height of the output.

Example:
./alltoavi . wmv 0 1 650 DIVX50 320 240
will convert all the WMV files located on the current directory to DivX with a dimension of 320×240.

The videos were converted to AVI with a slight degradation of image quality but it was tolerable. In this case applies that depending on the quality of the input is the quality of the output, because I tried with a video downloaded from the web and the quality of the “original” was terrible, I guess that because offilesize restrictions. After the conversion the AVI file was full of compression artifacts.

After that I tried to convert some MKV to AVI files from some Anime episodes and the result was good. Burned the files to a DVD and the DVD player recognized and played the files without problems.

The lesson of this?. If you want to watch your videos on TV, DO NOT encode them to WMV!, AVI or MPG using DivX is going to get you better image/size and compatibility with DVD players.

Why those images generate significant traffic?, I don’t know the answer but my guesses are:

• A lot of guys still have a crush with Salma Hayek even after his pregnancy, which is perfectly understandable.
• The second season of Heroes is premiering in other countries.
• I really don’t have an explanation to the picture of the girl and the solar flare.

Other post that generated some traffic is the papercraft model of Master Chief. I assume that the traffic of this post is because the popularity of the Halo series for the Xbox 360.

Dale Dougherty

Saw this at O’Reilly Radar, and other “hands” are at Book Patrol

Photo by Jackson Boyle

Again several WEEKS passed without a new post in this blog.

Why?, well the main reason is procrastination, if we add to that the number of feeds on my google reader account, Digg, Techmeme, my day job, research for my projects and the time spent stuck on Mexico city traffic that would be a good excuse for not posting.

Everyday by the time I finished reading the most interesting stuff, I have some ideas for a good blog post. But I need to justify my paycheck so have to work in the stuff I was hired to do, so I write some ideas on Google Documents, make a mental note, a bookmark, or post something on my Tumblr. By the time I get home I work a little on my side projects, then do some research and suddenly it’s midnight and another day has passed without posting on the blog.

Even when this blog was in coma at the last page rank update it got a small increase, and the traffic is still coming (low but constant). So, it’s time to clean up the spiderwebs, dust off a little, and wash the windows to continue with this blog.

Today I couldn’t log on the admin section, searching a little I found that in the months this blog was without an update Dreamhost did 2 upgrades to Rails and that broke the backend. The blog was still serving pages because Mephisto creates a cache of every page requested as a static html file and if there is no change it stays in the server.

After freezing the Rails to a previous version (which I should have done long ago), everything was working again and I was able to log in again.

This morning I saw this great cartoon from Calderon, usually I don’t care about this kind of stuff but I found this amusing.

If you don’t know what does the cartoon is about here and here you can find more information about the issue.

I see in a post from furilo that the new MTV.es site was made with Rails

It has everything a site like that (or any big site) has to have: artists info, news, reports, features, blogs, etc..

The site was made by The Cocktail.

When you think on a feed reader you assume that it will show the articles in a chronological ordered list, because we are used to see the information in 2 dimensions, but, what happens when we add a third dimension?.

That’s what they did with Voyage a feed reader made in Flash. This is the type of application perfect for Flash, maybe you can do something similar with Java but I don’t know if it would be as light in resources as this one.

You get the latest articles at the front and moving the mouse up or down the titles move, scrolling moves you in the third axis which is the time line. To read an article you only click on it and the content will show while the rest of the titles fade.

You can add your favorite feeds and use it as your feed reader, there is no need to create an account because the app stores your preferences in cookies. Or you can just play with it as something new and cool, because it lacks some features that at least I like to have (mark/tag articles, search, folders, etc..) that some other readers include (web or desktop apps).

To make the wait for the release of Halo 3 more tolerable you can try to build this papercraft model of Master Chief.

The model is 13″ tall, has close to 2100 faces (over 800 faces for the gun), and is composed of 42 pieces (+ 10 for the gun).

The PDF files with the model and instructions are here

This is the creation of billybob884 and looks like it’s not the first creation, in the gallery you can see other papercraft models like Conker, Mr Satan, the RingWorld and more.

Found this wallpaper image at: KDE Look