Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz

When you put all three together, you’ll find out why. 1) Today is a bank holiday in the UK. 2) We don’t have and we can’t have aerial TV coverage, we can’t have cable TV, and we can’t have Sky because I am not willing to pay anything beyond what we already pay in tax for TV; 3) They are playing the 2007 World Champs in Athletics that we really want to watch. So, I have been assigned a little project: get us the games on TV.

Based on the position of the trees and the house, I am going to try to hit two satellites: Astra 1E at 19.2E and Astra 2D at 28.2E. With Astra 1E I can get Digital+ (Spanish Sky equivalent, but some programmes are free-to-view) and Eurosport DE free. With Astra 2D I can get most of the UK free-to-air (plus Sky Digital). I am not sure Astra 2D will work given the azimuth and the trees … but I’ll try it first.

For my reference:


Satellite at = 19.2 East orbit longitude (Astra 1E)
Dish elevation= 28.6, Azimuth= 158.7 (magnetic compass), Polarisation= -14.8
Polar mounts only: Main angle= 51.9, Downward tilt= 6.7



Satellite at = 28.2 East orbit longitude (Astra 2D)
Dish elevation= 25.68, Azimuth= 148.26 (magnetic compass), Polarisation= -20.76
Polar mounts only: Main angle= 51.9, Downward tilt= 6.7


I’ll be updating this blog entry throughout the day.

Update (11.23AM)

Hmm, it’s not going well. I can’t find signal on either one, I wonder if the trees are blocking all the signal (that’s what it looks from a visual, but I was hoping some signal to go through regardless). Anywa, the house has a flat roof, I have never been up there, but perhaps if I could set it up there … Time to explore!

Update (18.16PM)

Right, I figured out setting the dish on the roof was not an option, at least not for today since I need a very high ladder, which I don’t have. I think I will try next week end to install it by the east side of the garden. That should help to reach elevation and go over the trees.

To be continued …

Sun is changing its ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA, as announced in Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog on Thursday 23rd August. There has been a lot of mixed feedback. Most techies and engineers inside and outside Sun are criticizing the decision, as they see it narrowing Sun to Java technology. However, Wall Street did not seem to care much.

The stock went up 1.62%, while the Nasdaq index recovered 1.38% so one can possibly assume the market was insensitive to the change. While the volume was double the average, so was the market’s, so again no change.

This seems to be a change purely driven by brand awarenes. As Schwart’s puts it in his blog:

What’s that distribution and awareness worth to us? It’s hard to say - brands, like employees, aren’t expenses, they’re investments. Measuring their value is more art than science. But there’s no doubt in my mind more people know Java than Sun Microsystems. There’s similarly no doubt they know Java more than nearly any other brand on the internet.

It strikes me that as much as this change might help Sun’s marketing strategy, it will likely damage its ability to hire and retain smart engineers. Time will tell.

Have you have ever been part of the inception of a software system that later became big and complex? Have you later felt the frustration of not being able to make further changes to the core architecture? Did you end up being taken hostage by the software? I did.

We hope as developers to be able to adapt software as requirements and bugs arise, and to be able to organize our software releases accordingly. By doing incremental releases we hope to work with a stable code-base where we can release often. We then receive feedback more often and we are therefore agile and responsive to business needs.

Until one day we become legacy. A competitor starting from scratch has been able to innovate and quickly implement these new cool features the market really wants. We can’t catch up with them, because they don’t have the legacy we have: the other thirty thousand features we need for all revenue-generating customers we have.

We set ourselves to large regeneration plans, greenfield development. “This time around, we’ll do it right”, we say. Two to three years later, after again a cycle of incremental releases, we become again legacy.

And this is how the software industry is run. Competition between those entering the legacy stage and those on the startup curve is what keeps us employed. And yet this continuous hostage situation by incremental releases is what annoys me most about software.

There are two realistic approaches to solving the problem. You could plan upfront for a software life of 2 to 3 years and not 5 to 10 as some would hope. Or you could take the red pill.

I would rather see more people taking the red pill. It ain’t easy, I admit it, but it is possible. Architectural refactoring is extremely painful - you are basically breaking the system as hard as it can be broken before pulling it up together again -. I have done it, but don’t take my word for it, and look at Linux going from 2.4 to 2.6, at Windows going from 98 to 2000, at Mac OS going to X. They took the pain, and it paid off.

Let’s stop building software and let’s start thinking of software reconstruction. After a few incremental releases, do an architectural release. I know you need it. You know you need it. It’s your choice, the red pill.

LinkedIn’s CEO Reid Hoffman promised at the end of June to open the LinkedIn platform, very much aligned with Facebook’s publishing its developer APIs, and surely trying to experience some of the same growth Facebook is receiving thanks to opening their APIs. I hope however that LinkedIn is thinking about all the risks associated with opening up a business community.

LinkedIn will need to review and approve every single application out there consuming their services. The last thing you want is a pile a lawsuits on your desk because of misapproprated data, especially personal data covered by the EU/95 Privacy Directive, also implemented in the UK via the Data Protection Act, and somehow applicable to US companies under the Safe Harbor Agreements.

LinkedIn should focus on opening the APIs for its users. One of my main complains with LinkedIn is that it is very good at sucking my data, but it’s very hard to get some of that data back, let’s say synchronizing with my phone’s address book or even the more simple operation of importing my contacts into my Outlook calendar. That’s where I would like to see LinkedIn going, allowing developers to write such plugins, for us to access our own data. Anything beyond this very personal use of the data might end up hurting LinkedIn, and what is worse from a business perspective, possibly dillute it into another, smaller, does-it-all, Facebook.

After my move away from Gnome and Evolution, I have now been running KDE for three weeks straight and still going. I have found KDE to be a surprisingly stable and reliable platform. It’s hard to find something to criticize in KDE. It’s a really nice desktop setup: well oiled machinery where everything seems to run smoothly. Inter-application communication and integration of all the KDE applications is simply superb, and I don’t think there is any other desktop out there, proprietary or open source, where you can see such tight integration of its parts. And this is mainly thanks to Trolltech’s fantastic toolkit, Qt

Qt is a first class toolkit which has turned to be be a fantastic choice for KDE. Qt is probably the best graphical and utilities programming toolkit that truly looks like a native application on any target desktop: OS X, Windows or KDE. Developer productivity is probably as good as you can get with a C++ toolkit. However, Qt is GPL, and a GPL toolkit library is not a good thing if you are looking for mass adoption.

Qt’s commercial non-GPL license fee is actually not high at all, and most professional developers and software houses should be able to buy the licenses. The problem however is that if you start using the GPL version and then you figure out you want to go proprietary, you simply can’t. You must buy the Qt commercial license upfront. The problem lies with the grassroot developers: they won’t pay for the commercial license since the prospect of revenue is non-existent in the beginning.  When individual developers are faced with writing an application, many will avoid Qt because of its viral licensing nature. As a developer you want to have the choice of whether to make your app GPL or not, you don’t want your choice to be restricted by a license. Some of those grassroot developers turn to be writting the most popular applications for Linux, such as Mozilla Firefox, Gaim/Pidgin, OpenOffice, Evolution, etc. Guess what, the leading office, personal information management and groupware applications don’t run on Qt. And that’s where the users (and the money) is.

Many open source software houses sell software that is not GPL, and derive their revenues from support contracts and some professional services. It’s surprising that to date Trolltech has not moved in this direction and introduced a more commercially friendly license for Qt. This would be a complete change to Trolltech’s business model, and the dramatic increase in developers entering into support contracts for Qt would quickly offset any short-term loss of revenue from traditional licensing fees.

Sadly, it might be almost too late for Qt: Gtk+ has matured to become a good-enough toolkit, and although not yet as stable and tightly integrated as Qt, Gtk+ is sufficiently portable and usable. We have today because of that two opposed Linux desktop communities, with neither having sufficient momentum to be competitive with Aqua or Aero. It’s sad to see how and why Linux has lost the desktop war. The community had a unique chance to make Linux a valid choice for the desktop OS, especially with Microsoft leaving such a big gap between Windows XP and Windows Vista. Linux missed it and Apple took it to its advantage. If the Linux desktop had united forces years ago, Trolltech might had become the next Apple.

Perhaps it’s not too late. I am challenging Trolltech to license Qt on a royalty free commercially friendly license. I am challening the Gnome community to consider a radical merge onto Qt and KDE. I am challening the KDE community to open its arms towards the Gnome developers and the Gnome software. We can still make GKNOME a success.

After moving to KDE three weeks ago now, I am staying. At least for now. If I had to pick on something, my main point for feedback would be that the graphical user interface feels crowded, and its usage metaphors, albeit consistent, are rather complicated.

In KDE, configuration options are scattered all around the place. KDE is a great platform for the power user, familiar with tweaking and working with plenty of configuration options, but for the rest of us who just want to get on using the applications and not waste our time fighting with configuration options, a simpler paradigm for desktop and programs alike would be more useful. That simplicity is one of the design goals of Gnome: sane defaults, clean UI and few configuration options. Unfortunately Gnome has gone too far, and makes it sometimes either impossible or very hard for the power user to configure the desktop or an application to its own liking. While preserving for KDE’s power users the current ability to configure practically anything, the majority of users would however benefit from a cleaner and more modern user interface metaphor.

In July, Nielsen’s NetRatings changed its web traffic measurements to focus on time spent at a given site rather than the traditional page views, and page views per user (PV/UU). Since then, many web 2.0 sites, including communities, gaming, video, etc. have received this change as the Holy Grail of web ratings, even those whose ranking went down.

While it is true that time spent at a site increases  exposure to ad display, and possibly CPM, the time-based measurement paradigm is only applicable to countries with deep internet and broadbrand penetration. In countries in Eastern Europe, Russia, South America, Africa and South-East Asia, much of the population still connects via dial-up modems and hits are a much better metric. The ability to watch streamed audio and video in these markets is very limited; gaming is not responsive enough; and the engagement in  social networking is rather limited. Or as Yahoo Peter Daboll put it: “You’re never going to have one metric that’s the holy grail of Internet measurement.”

The sad thing about Nielsen’s NetRatings change from hits to time spent has not been the change itself, but all the FUD around it. This is one of the things about the internet, and an annoying one, evil viral marketing takes over is significantly less time than on the non virtual world where the power of scrutiny stops the FUD.

This 70s sunglasses retro-look inspired by our very own Victoria Beckham, “posh”, and America’s greatest exhibitionist Paris Hilton, is starting to become annoying. Strikingly similar to a fly’s eyes, generally esthetically unpleasant sunglasses are taking over London this summer. People covering their eyes with black lenses of the size of satellite dishes. Men and women, alike, being fashionable human flies.

I had never seen flies in the London underground, until now. A pest of human flies with big dark black eyes has taken over. Strange looking aliens from the X-Files are invading the tube.

I wonder if the devil still wears Prada.

It’s all around the blogosphere, Google News is going to allow limited editorial comments from those involved in the news. Basically, you get a chance to tell your side of the story if you are involved. Big wow factor. Google, our savor. Well, perhaps not.

For starters, Google TOS and robots.txt restrict others from accessing Google News content, i.e. you can’t crawl Google News, including those limited “editorial” comments. So whereas Google can scrape the Belgian newspapers, bend their arm, and get away with it, Google won’t allow its editorial content to be indexed elsewhere. Some talk about how Evil the corporation has become. Techcrunch talks about hypocresy

I would not go that far (of course Arrington’s usual yellow-press tone will surely say such things). I think Google has just either not thought this through properly, or is making a big deal out of an editorial possibility that will only used the odd time here and there. Google has played this PR campaign carelessly, and as a consequence are looking as either hypocrits or stupid.

How are they planning to scale the editorial model? Do you trust an algorithm to detect which of the comments should become editorial since the posters are involved in the news? The algorithm would basically be a sophisticated version of Turings AI test. But instead of machine vs human, honest human vs evil human. Maybe not. So, instead they have humans do this, check references, and approve a comment as being editorial. Imagine the fury of the masses when their comments don’t get editorialized. Good luck boys.

Anyway, I just think this is stupid. Noug’ said.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog published last week a study showing that online exposure to product and retailer information, as well as ads, changes consumers behavior. Yahoo! calls that Research Online, Buy Offline, or ROBO (btw, ROBO means theft in Spanish).

I can easily identify myself as one of those consumers in the study. It’s much easier to use the internet to find out exactly what one is looking for. Sometimes, I want (need?) to buy something, but I am unclear about what is available in the market that would suit my needs. For example, I want to install a multi-room sound system. However, as I do research on the internet, I happen to find many different types of solutions to this problem: wired, wireless, bluetooth controlled, streaming, centrally amplified, room-amplified, etc. So I end up doing my market taxonomy, then market research, then learning about the vendors and their products, and finally finding the retailers in my area where I can take a look at the actual products. I will then go visit the retailer and possibly buy offline. That’s what Yahoo! calls ROBO.

Well, actually, a few times, I don’t do ROBO. I research online, and buy offline. But then I go online to find the best deal based on price and retailer’s consumer feedback, using, for example, Kelkoo. I then buy online, and once the product arrives, I return it offline. I call it ROBOBORO.

Now, seriously, what is really interesting about the study are the implications the findings have for retailers. Back in the late 90’s folks talked about personalized online/offline merchants: your profile would be known to the merchant from your online browsing behaviour, and the offline presence of the merchant could use that information for better targetting products for sale to you. Admitedly, during the 90’s the internet was not particularly strong on privacy yet, neither was technology to make this personalized marketing possible, but think of the following scenario based on how technology has evolved since then.

Suppose you are browsing the web using your bluetooth enabled mobile phone, looking for a new portable music player. You do your research online, find what you want, but your wife tells you it’s time to go shopping and swing by the mall with the kids. So off you go. Once you enter the mall, your phone communicates with the bluetooth mall facilities. Those merchants in the mall with which you have a online trust relationship, access your relevant browsing history, and match against it. You then receive, on your phone, an offer like “Hello Bruno, we have the iPod nano on sale for only $79.99, all ready packed and ready for you to take home”. You swing by the store, swipe your credit card, and happily walk out of the mall with a new toy. Interestingly, the reverse also holds as a benefit for the publishers. The search engine knows who you are, and it could use some of your profile attributes for the retailers to bid on, besides the search terms. Let’s say you just bought the iPod at said merchant. That merchant is interested in selling you accessories for your new iPod, so whenever you are now searching for music related terms, you should be targeted with iPod accessories, instead of generic music store, or download ads.

Welcome to the future of one-to-one marketing.