Mi-a placut entry-ul lui stash la cafeina.ro cu Best of Montreal, asa ca uite aici un Best of Toronto. Alte idei cu ce sa bag in lista trimiteti la gepetto@gmail.com. O sa las gaura la ce nu stiu.

Cea mai buna banca : TD
Cel mai bun furnizor de internet : Rogers
Cel mai bun furnizor de televiziune : Rogers
Cel mai bun serviciu de telefonie rezidentiala : Bell
Cel mai bun serviciu de telefonie mobila : Rogers
Cel mai bun serviciu de telefonie long distance: Startec
Cea mai avantajoasa companie de asigurare : Bel Air
Cea mai avantajoasa parcare în centru : Green parking, oriunde s-ar afla ele, especially Green Parking pe Esplanade
Cel mai bun magazin de închirieri video :
Cel mai bun magazin video cu filme de arta sau europene :
Cel mai bun restaurant grecesc din Toronto:
Cel mai bun restaurant cu fructe de mare :
Cea mai buna retea de restaurante pentru mâncat la prânz :
Cea mai buna retea de restaurante pentru micul dejun sau brunch :
Cea mai buna cafea:
Cea mai buna berarie :
Cel mai misto parc acvatic :
Cea mai scumpa masina :
Cea mai buna masina :
Cea mai misto zona urbana :
Cel mai fain parc urban :
Cel mai misto festival interior:
Cel mai misto festival de strada :
Cel mai bun magazin pentru casa :
Cea mai buna zona de cumparat o casa in Toronto :
Cea mai buna zona pt case în GTA : Woodbridge
Cel mai fiabil lant de benzinarii: kinda strange sa zice fiabil, dar ma rog, imi place Shell
Cel mai bun lant de farmacii :
Cel mai bun IMAX :
Cel mai interesant muzeu :
Cea mai faina gradina zoologica :
Cel mai bun parc provincial langa Toronto :
Cea mai faina statiune de ski pt începatori :
Cea mai faina statiune pt avansati :
Cel mai bun magazin de electronice : Future Shop
Cel mai bun magazin de computere: Canada Computers
Cel mai bun ziar :
Cel mai bun magazin de mobila :
Cel mai bun magazin de haine casual :
Cel mai bun magazin de costume si sacouri : Moores
Cel mai bun magazin alimentar etnic: T&T sau Highland Farms
Cel mai bun furnizor de carne de mici :
Cea mai buna piata de fructe si legume : Kensington Market
Cea mai buna zona cu ferme de legume :
Cea mai buna zona de livezi :
Cel mai bun furnizor de piscine rezidentiale :
Cel mai bun furnizor de arbusti si peisagistica : Humber Nurseries
Cel mai bun furnizor de torturi speciale (nunti, botezuri) : Amadeus
Cel mai bun bucatar sef restaurant pentru petreceri :
Cel mai bun furnizor de vinuri românesti : LCBO la Bayview si Sheppard
Cei mai buni furnizori de preparate din carne :
Cel mai bun magazin alimentar:
Cea mai buna înghetata :
Cel mai bun magazin de mare suprafata : Highland Farms pentru alimentare, Costco in general
Cea mai buna bere la doza: Creemore, hands down

• PDFs do not reflow, so you are stuck with the page format / aspect ratio / proportions that the pdf brings with it.
• Margins can occupy the most of the page - even if it has margins on 2 sides which if eliminated would rescale the text to a legible size kobo does not.
• Scaling is not granular enough - 100, 125, 150, 175, 200 - I'd like scaling by 5% not 25%
• When scaled, next page and previous page actions disappear - instead you move inside the scaled viewport - again, poor margin management, as margins do not count - kobo should work the text not the page (text+margins) - Next page and Prev page should always be available - maybe central button should switch between page mode and viewport move mode.
• When scaled, the page is positioned odd, again, no way to actually position around text not margins+text.

All this makes pdfs on the kobo a hit or miss - I've found pdfs that look readable and pdfs that are completely unreadable (font too small to read) - text is 30% of surface, rest is occupied by empty margins. There's always the choice to convert those pdfs to epub with calibra which will allow them to reflow, ie text size can be controlled. However, even that could be a hit or miss proposition, as certain styles in the pdf convert poorly.

Overall, I find the kobo a worthwhile device. Having read books on various pocket pcs and the iphone, I can handle small fonts and quirks of display. the epaper is indeed very nice, reading on the kobo is not tiring on the eyes. Also, completely legible outside under the sun.

Other things about the kobo:

• It sucks I can't just put files on the device using explorer. I can see both the card and the memory as drives when the kobo is connected, but I can't just drag files there, I have to use Adobe Manages crap to transfer.
• When I unboxed the device, it had a film over the screen and some text on that film. At least that's how it appeared; that the film had the text printed on it. Surprise! After taking down the film, the text is on the screen, it was the last page displayed on the device... and it remained active until I unboxed the device. Checking the battery, showed >50% battery life, even with this page being displayed on the device since production. WOW! It's very strange to see anything on the screen when the device is sleeping also; you have the impression that this text drains the battery, but it's not. changing pages and the device cpu is what drains the battery, not keeping the screen alive.
• There's some ghosting from the start page: I can faintly see a "Welcome to your kobo ereader" under every page. It'll probably go away at some point.

The "unreadable" one - notice the margins that occupy at least 50% of both the width and the height of the page.

The "readable" one - the margins are smaller, which makes text size decent (trust me) to read. Of course, if it actually filled the page vertically, that extra 15% would've made it even better.

The "stupid" one - it's a pdf with images in it (scans) of pages. I call it the stupid one cause it's the worst type of pdf there is. However it was readable due to the aspect of the page somewhat matching the kobo screen.

And now a .lit converted to epub - when the epub is nicely formatted, this is the perfect reading experience.

EDIT: All above images were done with "Whole Page" option. A good option is scaling 100% which will "fit-horizontal". It's basically what I have set as default now.

...and another one of my favorite songs:

Clint Mansell - Lux Aeterna

btw, this song was later remixed into the trailer for the LOTR - 2 towers, not the other way around: wikipedia

Requiem for a Dream (soundtrack) (wikipedia)
Requiem for a dream (movie) (wikipedia)
Requiem for a dream (movie) (imdb)

Clint Mansell - Lux Aeterna (Paul Oakenfold remix)

Animatrix - Lux Aeterna

the true blood opening credits:

and the Jace Everett song:

I want to write a bit about fragmentation because it seems to me it is one of the coming stories in web services these days. There is no reason to have so many identities scattered all over the web. In a sense, all these new services are counting people multiple times. You have accounts on all of them, and you might use all of them but they are not integrated even when they do the same thing.

Email is not a fragmented technology because of cross-server sending. but I can see that if email was invented today it would be fragmented because the companies with the servers would only want to send the email inside their company and would require people to have an account on their servers to be able to receive email.

Web. Can you imagine what would happen if web servers would only talk with clients of the companies that host them? Well, you can, just think AOL circa 10 years ago. The unifying thing for the web was the common protocol, http and the willingness of all to work with it.

This is a problem for all new services that we use. Think of twitter and buzz, think of gowalla and foursquare, think of facebook and myspace. I can't have a single identity and interact with all of these services based on that identity. I have both a twitter and a buzz account. And I don't want them. I'd like to be able to interact with buzz from my twitter account. This does not mean that I want to import my twitter feed into buzz. I don't want to have buzz at all. Strike that, my buzz should be a proxy to twitter. A non-identity service. When I post something on twitter, I post the exact same thing on buzz as well, thanks to Tweetdeck. It might seems like a unitary thing but the data lives on 2 servers. I might be able to go and edit the content on one service and not on the other and the illusion of "same" dissapears.

One such service that fragmented early and still is not integrated is IM. It's a crying shame that I have to have 6 IM accounts and I can't have just one. And there is no technical reason for this other than greed from the companies that have these services. They want the accounts, they want to be able to count these users because these users mean advertising money. Does it matter to yahoo that I only have a yahoo account to IM once in a blue moon? NO! They'll happily count me as a user, and they probably ask for 10$ for me when they negotiate their sale. Technically, there is no point why IM could not be integrated. It would require allowing adding to the contact list of emails of people that are not on your network. Then it would require a cross-service IM protocol to communicate with those users in chat sessions. As a matter of fact the technical solution is already here, jabber/xmpp would make it oh so simple. But there is no force in the world that could bring to the same table Microsoft, Yahoo, Goolge, AOL, Facebook and whoever else is out there making IM servers and end this nonsense.

An upcoming fragmented service is video-conferencing. It is similar to IM but far more complex. I remembered about this one when I heard Apple pitch their own iphone video call feature. Think about how many of these video call services there are. Skype, the nokia 3g one, now the Apple one. Add to this all the video chat options in the IMs. You can't video-call from an iPhone to a nokia phone unless you're using skype. walled-garden right there. Apple's video call works right now only between iphones. What a mess. And there are no prospects of this getting better. A funny thing about this is how skype is concerned about Apple shutting them down from the iphone to promote their own video-call feature.

Now think again about email. I can send an email to a hotmail account from my gmail account and I can receive email back. I can download all my email from gmail using imap and store it on my local linux server and can still see it when I switch from gmail to a local solution. Cross-server usage. Based on a common protocol and exchange rule. Email is full of those. MX, POP3, IMAP.

It is up to people who host services to understand that there is greater value in allowing "externals in" than in forcing externals to create an account with you. What I mean is that they should allow people who don't have an account on their system to be added as connections and be usable to people who already have an account with them. The problems are not technical but human/business. And business problems are oh so hard to solve. I believe by this point that there must be a business school in US somewhere that teaches MBAs that fragmentation is a good technique to make money; just because it is so prevalent in the modus operandi of todays companies.

Is there a solution out there?

Add: I keep finding more and more example of this cancer of fragmentation. Think the video coded problem of late. The solution to x.264 being proprietary IS NOT making a new coded that is free and splitting the market. The correct solution is making the x.264 coded free in the first place. How much money do the owners of x.264 think they'll make? For the sake of all 6 billion of us, make the damn thing free !!! DRM is another chapter. I keep buying books and music that is riddled with proprietary drm that is incompatible with other drm schemes and players. I pretty much buy useless bits that might be useless by next year. Even if these schemes survive, they fragmented me into user's of this company's drm and users of this other company's drm. For what end? To buy the same media more than 1 time?

* pdf support in iBooks on iPad later 2010
* farmville for iPhone yay

iPhone4

* side of iPhone 4 is the antenna? Is this safe? It's going to be in contact with your hand.
* pixes / linear inch = 320. human retina can distinguish only 300 - 960 x 640 display (amazing). IPS display
* wifi hits again, new iPhone can't download nyt website. Think we've hit the limits of wifi.
* quad-band phone, HSDPA/HSUPA . 7.2Mbps down, 5.8Mbps up, 802.11n.
* 3-axis Gyroscope tells pitch, roll, yaw, rotation about gravity... 6 axis motion sensing. Puts wiimote to shame.
* compass? don't know if 3gs had it.
* camera goes from 3 to 5 MP, "backside illuminated sensor".
* records 720p video at 30fps. tap to focus now for video as well. iMovie for iPhone. 4.99$

What is the relationship between Leo Laporte's http://twit.tv started tech network and the newish http://thisweekin.com started up by Jason Calacanis? Looks like http://thisweekin.com leeches on the concept put forward more than 5 years ago by Leo.

Jason has been on Leo's show numerous times and I'm sad to see this happening. I looked in both site's About to see any link between the 2 concepts but see none. If Jason is such a savvy investor why didn't he invest directly in Leo's venture?

What's next? If Leo starts up another "This Week in ..." show, Jason's company is going to sue them for naming rights?

What's more sad if this is true is that I got to the thisweekin.com website vie Jason's ranty email about Goldman Sachs, and at the end of that he describes thisweekin.com as a model of "creating a business" and "angel investing". I call this the "angel of death model". It's creating a business via pirating a naming concept.

On my way back from Montreal, I was listening to some Fresh Air podcasts. This one on April 20th 2010: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126108594 is an interview with a New York Times reporter deployed to Afghanistan. He's talking at a point about handling a sensitive piece of information that he got his hands on. It's about a bigwig taliban being identified in a group of random taliban arrested in Karachi. The event ended with the reported muzzling the story at the request of the government, at least temporarily. When the reporter got his hands on the news, he went back and forth trying to get more data, and even after he got all his facts the paper didn't just run the article, they waited and assessed the situation.

Contrast this to the Gizmodo case where they jumped ahead with the new iPhone 4 article (http://gizmodo.com/5520164/this-is-apples-next-iphone), and in the end they are facing a messy situation, with police investigations and such.

For the life of me I don't understand why they didn't talk to Apple first when they got their hands on the device. There was probably a lot of goodwill they could have bought from Apple if they just sent the phone back. They could have negotiated an agreement about a controlled release of a review. Anything but what they just did. Was it worth to break their relationship with Apple over a prototype? Will they ever gonna be invited back to any Apple event? Probably not.

Comparing the 2 approaches to handling secret information/news, Gizmodo appears to be very unprofessional.

I stopped just outside Montreal yesterday to buy gas. On the pump there was this sign asking me to go inside and pay first before putting gas in. See, there's this paranoia going around that people are going to steal gas, like anybody would risk a misdemeanor for 50$ worth of gas. But hey, I went inside wondering how we're going to do this because I wanted a full tank.

The 16 year-old at the counter just asked me to leave the credit card there. Say what? I mean, people are afraid of double-swiping of CCs in pumps in Toronto, nevermind leaving your CC inside for 3 minutes. They can do anything to the card in 3 minutes.

Apple recently decided not to allow applications written in 3rd party languages in the AppStore. By requiring people to develop in Objective-C and the like, they pretty much require you to run on a Mac. This would ensure a sale of hardware. If you develop in Flash and transform your app to iPhone/iPad executable you could bypass this requirement. You'd still have to have a developer license so you can submit the app to AppStore but you could do it from Windows.

I can see this whole Apple debacle not going so well in Europe. They have experience there fighting Microsoft and they will not put up with Apple either. It's debatable whether Apple needs European sales, but be sure Europe is going to investigate them before 2010 ends. The idea here is that barriers of entry should not be artificial. Like Microsoft keeping the specs for certain things hidden from developers. I always despised Apple for requiring developers run a Mac. there was no reason why they couldn't port the developer stack to Windows and they would have gotten more app submissions. But that wouldn't sell hardware, would it?

Another angle to this story is what Adobe is going to do. Apple just dissed them and they would be in their right to react. All this while Adobe was one of the few companies that were loyal to Apple throughout their history. Still now, even though Adobe releases for both platform, professional users of the Adobe programs are still Mac users. If I were them I'd switch my tools to be primarily for windows and I'd refuse to develop for the Mac. Actually, they could just release their Mac software 6-9 months later then the Windows version. Let's see how apple would like it. If anybody tries to copy Photoshop or the like, just sue them. It would probably be a good moment for Adobe to enforce any patents they have. There's got to be something they can challenge Apple with.

It's clear by now that the masses love the iP* devices. And they don't care in which language the apps are written. They love it cause its simple and intuitive and does not crash. However, I think Apple is losing the geeks; and this ultimately might be their demise.

EDIT: Apparently, Adobe is already working on releasing <canvas> enabled versions of flash/illustrator and dreamweaver. Watch this:

Quote: "I think this is a key point: Adobe makes money selling tools, not distributing viewing software. Those tools must address customer needs. If Flash Player is the right choice for some projects & HTML/CANVAS for others, no problem: we get paid to help you solve problems, not to force one implementation vs. another."

He got it right. If you look at the Flash 10 versus JS/HTML5: The Tour Guide you'll see that JS/HTML5 is very close to being able to provide all the features currently offered by flash. RIP flash player, but Flash the editor/tool will keep on living.

EDIT2: Apparently the new TOS has to be accepted by developers before April 22nd so it is not bundled with iPhone OS 4.0; it comes before 4.0 ships. Via comments on: http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2010/04/iphone-os-4-0-announcemen...

EDIT3: Tip of the hat to Kevin: http://www.peerbox.com:8668/space/start/2010-04-09/1#Is_Apple_Totalitarian?

Awesome post/rant and comments here: http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2010/04/steve-jobs-has-just-gone-mad.html

http://theflashblog.com/?p=1888 - Apple Slaps Developers In The Face - Lee Brimelow - Platform Evangelist at Adobe focusing on the Flash, Flex, and AIR developer communities.

I grew to love gwt more and more. Here's a little bit of code that I never though would be possible to write:

Window.enableScrolling(false);
width = Window.getClientWidth();
height = Window.getClientHeight();
Window.addResizeHandler(new ResizeHandler(){
 
    @Override
    public void onResize(ResizeEvent event)
    {
        Window.enableScrolling(false);
 
        width = event.getWidth();
        height = event.getHeight();
 
        canvas.setWidth(width);
        canvas.setHeight(height);
 
        draw();
    }});
canvas = new Surface(width, height);

Let's be clear here, all this java code is being converted and run as javascript on client side. What does this do? Well, it disables all scrollbars, takes the size of the window and makes a canvas out of it. When the window resizes, it resizes the canvas. And it all works.

hmmm, new Surface()? Yes, I'm using the gwt-g2d library which seems a bit more mature than the canvas object from gwt-incubator. The gwt-incubator doesn't handle keyboard yet which is a major booboo for me.

Lectura obligatorie:

http://cafeina.ro/2010/04/01/romania-tara-misterioasa/

grats stash, scrii mishto.

Raspunsul e banal: credite. Majoritatea oamenilor traiau intr-o economie bazata pe credite date extrem de usor. Creditele pot sa dispara, si odata cu ele dispare si viata pe care ele o aduceau. 2009, creditele s-au oprit si economia a picat. De ce facea oricine 1500 - 2500 euro? Lacomie; si faptul ca firmele la care lucrau aveau bani din credite sa ii plateasca.

Simplu pe doi, un fraier sau o mamica/tatic din Romania care sta la bloc baga botul la un acoperis nou sau la o schimbare de calorifere samd. Nu are bani sa plateasca sumele aberante cerute, asa ca merge la banca si ia credit. Nah, astia sunt fraierii care tin economia in picioare... creditele alea dau de lucru la o multime de firme de constructii, care dau salarii aberante nu numai la muncitori; ca aia s-ar cara in spania daca n-ar face 1500E/luna ci si la manageri etc... toata lumea isi ia masini tari, nu dacii, si uite asa creditele lu mama tin in viata si dealership-urile de masini ... samd. Nu trebe sa ia Patriciu un credit de 1 miliard, ajunge sa ia 1 milion de romani fiecare 10,000 E imprumut sa tii o tara intreaga in viata. Intrebarea de fapt e de unde da mama banii inapoi pentru credite? Pai simplu; faliment nu e un cuvant inventat inca in Romania, cere la baiatul din Canada sau vinde un apartament la speculanti.

M-a izbit faptul ca in 2008 Decembrie cand am fost in Timisoara, fata de 2006 cand fusesem anterior, erau de 10x mai multe sedii de banci. Erau mai multe banci ca birturi, zici ca eram in Elvetia nu in Romania. Si nu faceau nimica aceste banci. Vorbind cu oameni care lucrau la ele am aflat ca afacerile erau zero, nu aveau bani de dat imprumut si conditiile de imprumut erau din vorba lor imposibile. Adica erau ca in Canada aprox, aveau un prag la gradul de impovarare, nu stiu exact cat.

Cine a fost afacerist pe bune in Romania in 2008 nu doar un afacerist de vreme buna e afacerist si acuma. 90% din ei nu mai sunt. Cine a luat salar 1500E si s-a prins ca se strange surubul si a acceptat sa ia 500E e probabil angajat si acuma; nu somer. Cine nu a dat toti aia 1500E pe rate la o viata ca in Vest probabil o duce la fel si acuma, multumitor dar nu extraordinar. Dar in nici un caz nu e inapoi in blocul parintilor.

I extracted this technique from http://www.gamesforthebrain.com/game/oooze/ . Unfortunatelly it is commented out in their code so I'll have to test it myself:

Declare 2 canvases in html something like this:

<div class="content"> 
        <canvas id="canvas1" class="canvas" width="695" height="500"></canvas> 
        <canvas id="canvas2" class="canvas" width="695" height="500"></canvas> 
</div>

Add styling to make them appear on top of each other:

.canvas {
    position: absolute;
    left: 0;
    top: 0;
    width: 695px;
    height: 500px;
}
 
#canvas1 {
    z-index: 100;
}
 
#canvas2 {
    z-index: 50;
}

notice position absolute for canvas, so both appear on top of each other, and z-indexing.

javascript initialization:

game.currentCanvas = 1;
game.canvas1 = document.getElementById('canvas1');
game.canvas2 = document.getElementById('canvas2');
game.context1 = g_game.canvas1.getContext('2d');
game.context2 = g_game.canvas2.getContext('2d');

now in the draw() function, draw in the 'other' one , (ie not the current one) and flip them at the end:

var oldCanvas = this.currentCanvas == 1 ? this.canvas1 : this.canvas2;
this.currentCanvas = this.currentCanvas == 1 ? 2 : 1;
var canvas = this.currentCanvas == 1 ? this.canvas1 : this.canvas2;
var context = this.currentCanvas == 1 ? this.context1 : this.context2;
 
context.clearRect(0, 0, this.width, this.height);
// more drawing in context
 
// brings current canvas to front and takes the old one to the back
canvas.style.zIndex = 100;
oldCanvas.style.zIndex = 0;

Cred ca Nesi a "nailed" jocul farmville: "e stupid si abrutizant". Si are dreptate... eram ieri in mijlocul unei sesiuni de clickait de vreo 5 minute cand mi-am dat seama ca la fel ca si un fermier idiot care da cu sapa la buruieni, noi clickaim pixelii in ordine.

Nu e normal. F farmville.

Si in plus e flash, si e lent si iti rupi perii din cap pana se incarca si pana iti da controlul. Nici macar nu e true-3d sa poti sa te uiti prin spatele fermei, e doar o mizerie isometrica. F again farmville.

I really like Kate for Windows. I liked it when I was using linux, and I like it even more on windows now. I can safely say that it blows out of the water all general purpose editors I've seen on windows.

Unfortunatelly, I got an issue with one of the plugins in kate, the file system browser one. Whenever I point it to c:\ in windows 7, the cpu just goes up to 100%, memory starts to grow and at some point I get a Runtime error. You'd think by this point kate dies, but it keeps on going, using 100% cpu and making life miserable. As a matter of fact, you have to wait about 10 minutes before you can open the task manager and kill the beast. I think it's a textbook case of a busy loop triggered by something in the structure of my C:\ root drive.

Anybody out there have the same problem?

I'm using kate 3.4.0 on kde 4.4.0 on Windows 7

BTW, I really really hope this is a joke.

This thing scares me silly:

This is all we need, corporations having a political arm. Communism was a joke compared to what this could lead to.

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2010/02/murray_hill_inc_for_congress.php

http://www.murrayhillweb.com/pr-012510.html

“It’s our democracy,” Murray Hill Inc. says, “We bought it, we paid for it, and we’re going to keep it.”

This is exactly how you would imagine a corporation talking about democracy and why this should NEVER be allowed to happen.

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/avfjo/the_best_democracy_money...
"artman 14 points 7 days ago[-] It's like Snow Crash, The Jagged Orbit and The Syndic all coming together into one nightmare."

found in the forest one cool mushroom ppt:

TEST!

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/01/the-chess-grandmaster-apples-i.html
Netting it out: The best way to think about iPad is as the device that inspired Steve Jobs to create the iPhone and the iPod Touch. It's the vaunted 3.0 vision of a 1.0 deliverable that began its public life when the first generation of iPhone launched only two-and-a-half years ago, and as I wrote about previously HERE, it is a product that is deeply personal to Steve Jobs, and I believe the final signature product on an amazing career. I would view yesterday's launch in that light.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/01/the-ipad-is-the-iprius-your-co.html

About how .avi, .mkv and flash could do for the iPad what .mp3 did for the iPod
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/87921/ipad-as-video-device-not-so-much/

In a funny twist about the inability of iPhone/iPod/iPad to play flash, this will probably force websites with video players to switch to html5 solutions sooner rather than later, given the apparent availability of html5 video in n-1 browsers as of this month. With this, the history of the flash format and its closed ecosystem is about to end at the hand of another closed ecosystem (apple). History will no doubt repeat itself at some point in the future.

Been feelin' in a good mood today. Here's some music for ya'll

Darude - Sandstorm ... still after all these years this tune still rules

Awesome photo-blog and a great post today, must see: http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/10/01/29/