JulioBiason.Net

The year is 2010. To reduce production costs, Blizzard decided to join all its franchises into one single product. That’s when “World of Blizzard” was born.

On it, you can be a Protoss Zealot Hunter, in your quest to save the world from Diablo and his brothers.

One of the most popular races/classes is the Zergling Priest.

First of all, yes, I use Digg and Reddit. For those who don’t know, these are two of the most well-known “Web 2.0″ sites. People send links about some news (or something interesting) and other people vote for such links. The most voted links go to the main page, from time to time. It is interesting to see where the collective mind goes, even when you find yourself in one of the retarded corners of the internet.

The biggest problem with them is that there is no way to point that one history is the same as another posted already. While I’m not sure about it, I hope the both sites would consider that, if someone post a link that was already posted, it would count as a vote for the first story and not create a new thing so people have to vote for it again.

Even with link dup checking, there are still some problems: Imagine that I find something interesting in the web, so I post some very small description on this website with a link to the original story and post my blog link on Digg/Reddit. Then I just sit down and wait for people to come to my site and I get a lot of money from Google Ads (no, I don’t have Google Ads on this site.) This is called “link-hijack” by the Reddit community and, more than once, I saw links with “Non-Link-Hijacked” in the title, which means someone decided to pick the original link and post it instead of someone else blog.

There are some link-hijacks that are a little bit more complicated to catch. First, let’s say someone find an interesting image. You can post it on tinyimg, imageshack or even in your hosted Gallery, with all those lovely Google Ads. There is no link for the original story and, most of the time, since the image appears on several different places at the same time, you lose the track of the original. Also, there are some stories which are, actually, part of the same big event. One of the examples that comes to my mind is the “This is cool”, which appeared on Reddit (sorry, but it is quite hard to find anything on Reddit after more than one week.) It was a photo of Barack Obama pointing to something. Someone photoshopped it, putting some sunglasses and added the link with the title “More cooler”. Then it started: People added an explosion on the background (you can see it here, which was posted under the story “Cooler”), and people put a nanchuck on Barack’s hand (see it here) and posted under the title “Coolerer”.) So, the joke spawned over several different links, and over several different links. There is no way an engine would recognized them as the same thing (and, most importantly, are they the same thing?)

That brings a question: what it is more interesting, something that people say “this is interesting” or something that gets a lot of attention on the web (like the original link-hijack)? Personally, I think that the even behind such stories and links is the main factor. Posting a link which explains climate change is destroying the environment and another link where scientists make pretty graphs showing that there is no relationship between global warming and the decline of pirates are, in fact, different stories, but they are linked by the same event. And that’s the problem with those aggregators: they care about links, not events.

Now, to be completely honest, I don’t think anyone would come an easy solution for that. It is easier to track links than events. And how would you check if link X is really related to link Y? Again, you have to trust that the community would take care of showing that X and Y are linked (or not) by some mechanism (tags? direct dragging links to say that they are related?) The first think that comes to my mind is something like “Human Brain Cloud” does to create the relationship between two words: the more the people link those two, that relationship becomes stronger and all the other ones, weaker. The problem is: would you really expect that people would sit down and say that link X is related to link Y? Over and over again? Instead of just clicking an arrow that points up or down? No, I don’t think so. You’ll have to search the current links, see of there is anything related and create the links.

But, in the end, I can see that cool things would emerge. Like you could be seeing some news report about google, which points to another news about how the energy usage is going up in the world, which is related to another story about Finland hoping that big datacenters move there where it is cooler (so no need of air-conditioning) and energy is plenty. Too bad we can’t expect that people would actually sit down and relate stories.

As most of you already know, I’m playing World of Warcraft for a while. “For a while” means “time enough to create about 6 characters.”

Anyway, this morning, playing with my Blood Elf, I got myself asking “what the hell is this ‘dead scar’ in the middle of the map?” And the answer was easy to find on WowWiki. And, to my surprise, they have a pretty good explanation for that.

Which also made me think about the whole WoW lore. I mean, it is not the first time I got impressed by the richness of the lore. When I was playing with a Draenei and doing all the chained quests one right after the another, I got a pretty good idea of the events from the arrival of the Draenei to Azeroth, to the beginnings of the alliance between humans, elfs and dwarfs and the draenei. And the way the quests were designed makes this easy to get, as long as you follow them in order.

Before WoW, I used to play GuildWars. The way GuildWars works is quite the same way WoW works, except that the quests are designed to be done in just one place, then you have to complete a special quest, a “mission” in GuildWars-lingo, then you move to the next area, do more quests, open the mission and so on. It forces you to follow the lore, to learn what did happen in there.

In a way, like Gerald once told me, things get a complete different perspective when you realize that everything your character is is just a few numbers in a database. That’s the way I feel about most people who play WoW: they are just fighting the numbers in the database, not following a story where you play a character on it. They are munchkins, not RPGers.

PS: Isn’t it cool that the two androids in the Star Trek universe make a nice subject?

When you still had to use dial up to connect to the internet, a few people thought they could put they “My Dear Diary” on the web. It was more pratical do maintain, you could add things anywhere there was a phone line and a modem (hint: not many places at the time) and you didn’t have to carry a book under your arm. I’m not kidding about the “diary” thing: in the beginning, you could spot a lot of “today, someone kiss me, hihihi” things around. People weren’t afraid to tell how they were feeling and such, because it was so new no one you know would actually read that stuff.

And then, suddenly, internet became mainstream. It was a media everyone was looking to reach, like TV and newspaper. And it reached every house, at amazing speeds (if you still remember downloading things over dial up.) And then, suddenly, bloggers became “journalists” and the magic was gone. People wouldn’t tell their feelings, they would tell what they saw, ’cause that’s what “journalists” do. And then people dropped jobs to become full time bloggers, like a journalist without a newspaper.

So, basically, blogs turned from being “dairies” to another way to make money. It became another company-thing and less a personal-thing.

But, why the hell would I write a post about it? Because I’m feeling the need of a “dear diary”, but I don’t want that everyone knows it.

One of things I really like to do, sometimes, is hear different covers of songs. Once, I had about six different versions, from different artists, of “Helter Skelter”.

Today, listening to “In The Air Tonight” (by Phil Collins), I decided to check the other versions. You can hear 30 seconds of the music before buying in on iTunes, so… why not?

And, honestly, I think they all fail to deliver the meaning of the song. They are too happy, or so indifferent to the meaning of the lyrics that they sound almost boring. Now, there are some covers that are better than the original. Like “Mad World”, covered by Gary Jules, sounds way better than the happy beat by Tears for Fears that is amazing (it also makes the song seem way longer than it should.) But “In the Air Tonight” can be called perfect in the first version. It is dark, the music behind it keeps the pace with the darkness of the lyrics that is amazing. You can feel the real meaning behind the words by just listening to the music.

By the way, if you know any good covers of mainstream songs, let me know.

When I was 18, I had this dream of, when I get old, I would have a big, white beard, a long, white hair and ride my Harley Davidson everywhere. Time would take care of giving my white hairs and enough money to buy a Harley Davidson, so all I had to was to grow my hair and beard.

I had long hair some three, four years ago. When it got hard to handle, I cut it.

A few weeks ago I decided to grow my beard. And, honestly, I don’t look good with a beard longer than 3mm.

That made me think about something else I want for a long time: tattoos. I want some for a long time already, but that experience with the beard made me thing. I mean, when a beard doesn’t look good, you can cut it down and get your clean, shaven face again; when a tattoo doesn’t look good, you are, basically, screwed.

I still think about getting a tattoo, but I’m fucking worried about it now.

[2:23:32 PM] Julio Biason says: now I have two projects in my head
[2:23:46 PM] Julio Biason says: first one is a image gallery (much like Gallery), using tags, written in python
[2:23:51 PM] Gerald Kaszuba says: ooh
[2:23:58 PM] Julio Biason says: and something that I would call “Replicator”.
[2:24:02 PM] Gerald Kaszuba says: heh
[2:24:15 PM] Julio Biason says: replicator is my idea of “update all your social things in just one place”
[2:24:21 PM] Gerald Kaszuba says: nice
[2:24:43 PM] Julio Biason says: say, you want to update your picture? Just provide your password for, say, last.fm, facebook, orkut, twitter, pownce and it will upload to all of them and update all profiles.
[2:25:09 PM] Julio Biason says: want to write a blog post? no worries, we replicate it in your wordpress and last.fm (if you point that it is music related)
[2:25:15 PM] Gerald Kaszuba says: that’s quite cool actually
[2:25:18 PM] Julio Biason says: pictures? upload to orkut and flickr
[2:26:34 PM] Julio Biason says: i’m still not sure if I do it as an Gtk application, Cocoa application or a web application…
[2:26:49 PM] Gerald Kaszuba says: id go for web app myself
[2:27:22 PM] Julio Biason says: The good thing about being a web app is that all the other things are web apps too
[2:27:51 PM] Gerald Kaszuba says: well yeah… and accessable from anywhere
[2:27:57 PM] Julio Biason says: the bad thing is that i’ll have to save your passwords to access the other applications, and I’m not keen to putting my password somewhere (even if I wrote the app)
[2:28:16 PM] Gerald Kaszuba says: u can get them to type it in everytime!
[2:28:19 PM] Julio Biason says: Gtk would be a good choice, as I could (hopefully) easyly port to all other applications (using pygtk)
[2:28:33 PM] Julio Biason says: yeah, I could. but that would be annoying…
[2:28:38 PM] Gerald Kaszuba says: yeah

By the way, if you like those ideas, feel free to drop me a note and we can start working on them (I have everything set up for TAGallery, the web gallery, except that I don’t have any code yet.)

When the term “Web 2.0″ was created, it meant the websites would be built using user content, like blogs and such.

Then, at some point, social networks became on of the sons of the Web 2.0 revolution. Everybody jumped into that and now we have thousands of social networks websites.

It seems that there is a new thing going in the Web 2.0 scene: social aggregators. What it does is just keep people informed about the things you do in such 2.0 sites. You post something in your blog and it will show up in a place; you update your profile in a social network website and it will appear in the same place; you listen to a song and there it is. Mugshot is the one I know, but I guess there are more around.

Now, I feel it will be the next wave of Web 2.0 things is the “social profile updater” sites. By that, I mean a website that keeps all your information and, when you change something, it will update all your social network websites (as long as the website keep that information.) Say, you move to a new place and, instead of updating your address in all the social network websites, you just update in one place and the updater will update your profile in all of those. New photo? No worries, it will update all the websites.

Honestly, I kinda hope that this happens. I’m getting tired of updating my picture in five different places each time…

A long time about (a year?) Nightwish split. I can recall people saying that Tarja complained that Tuomas never tell her how was the “feeling” of the song, that she had to put her own emotions on the lyrics and figure out what they really meant. I guess it was written in her open letter, after the other band mates put an open letter explaining why they decided to keep going without her.

All that time, I followed that idea: Tarja was right, Tuomas was not a good leader and she was unrightfully thrown out of the band.

And then came the new singer and the new album Dark Passion Play.

And guess what? It is really awesome. They are back in the classical/metal mix, not the somewhat-classical/kinda-pop songs. Which makes me rethink the reasons behind Tarja being thrown out. One of the reasons said in the open letter form the band said that she became “too comercial.” Now, looking back at their latest album, the pop one, it really looks like they were trying to reach a different group. You know, one not in the metal/classical area. I can’t say for sure, but maybe someone pushed the strings to that direction.

I’m changing my opinion now: Nightwish is better without Tarja.

Incível como “Tropa de Elite” faz sucesso aqui no Brasil. Isso é uma das coisas interessantes sobre o filme. A outra coisa interessante é a quantidade de pessoas que realmente não entenderam o filme. A quantidade de piadas usando frases do filme é absurda.

Primeiro tem a Gang (”A loja que te entende”, mas que tem o pior setor de marketing do Brasil) espalhou vários outdoors com coisas do tipo “Em 2008, não espalhe lixo, ou tá com nojinho?” e “Em 2008, não brigue nos estádios ou pede pra sair”. A Claro (ou alguma outra empresa de celulares) saiu com uma propaganda com crianças querendo pegar o Papai Noel; um deles dorme e os outros aparecem dizendo “Pô sentinela, pede pra sair”.

Quantas piadas sairam sobre o filme “Filadélfia”? Nenhuma. Por quê? Porque é um filme sobre conscientização social. Assim como “Tropa de Elite”. Só que as pessoas resolveram ver o filme como piada. Ou seria que a violência no Brasil é piada? A corrupção na polícia é piada?

O filme é um filme crítico. Quantos não viram a crítica àqueles que puxam um baseadinho, dizendo que eles estão apoiando a violência nas favelas? Quantos não viram um pai de família, querendo fazer o certo e sempre com medo de tomar um tiro por aqueles que não se importam? Ou os filhos da classe média-alta com sua visão limitada do que é certo ou errado? Aparentemente, muito poucos.