La historia de Internet en español

Subtitulada en español en todo caso.

Hace varias semanas hablé de un video llamado “History of the Internet”, la Historia de Internet. Se trata de un trabajo de Melih Bilgil para su diploma, pero mis colegas y yo lo hemos encontrado tan interesante que hasta lo hemos integrado a ciertos cursos en la universidad.

Claro, el video está en inglés, así que tuvimos que hacer un trabajo de traducción para poder distribuirlo a nuestros alumnos franceses y puesto que estábamos en esas me dije que por qué no escribir los subtítulos en español también.

Así que, gracias a la opción que permite subtitular los videos en YouTube, ahora pueden ver la Historia de Internet narrada en inglés con texto en español:

(Hay que hacer clic en la flecha abajo a la derecha, después en CC y buscar “español”, aunque pareciera que sólo funciona directemente en la página de YouTube)

Espero que sirva ;)

History of the Internet

Very nice video created by Melih Bilgil as part of his diploma project PICOL illustrating the history of the Internet from 1957 to 1990.

He uses the icons of his design to represent every element of the story. That and a well written voice over, make for a very interesting, easy to understand video. I’m actually considering asking my teachers to play this as an introduction to our web development classes.

Noticed the music by Matthias Grübel? I liked it a lot. Click on his name to visit his very weird web site, filled with photos and poetry, or go visit his myspace profile for more music.

Jerry Yang to leave Yahoo!

Yahoo! co-founder and Microsoft hero*, Jerry Yang is standing down from his position as CEO of one of the Internet’s biggest portals.

I know I have a résumé some around here… jobs@yahoo.com, you said? And the subject line? :P

* Microsoft offered $33/share a few months ago and Yang refused to sell. Today Yahoo! shares are too close to $10 not cry (or quit).

Photo jdlasica

The US President-Elect uses YouTube to Address the People

Times change and smart people adapt in consequence. That’s pretty much the definition of evolution, right? And it’s those who adapt, the fittest, who will survive. Well, today the one place where change is taking place is on the Internet and I honestly believe that only those who can adapt will survive.

A few months ago we learnt that the Queen of England (it’s actually the British Monarchy, but the Queen sounds better) had a Royal Channel on YouTube. We know that the Prime Minister has a Twitter account. Yesterday, President Elect Barack Obama addressed the Nation on YouTube:

Sure, the New York Times reported today that once he takes office President Obama will probably lose his e-mailing rights, but in the meantime, I think that using the Internet is a positive sign of someone who understands the world today.

Opening twhirl Links in Google Chrome

In spite of its bugs, I’ve been using Google Chrome as my main browser for a while now; mainly because it is generally fast and because it allows me to kill Flash whenever it bugs (often) without having to kill the whole browser.

I also use Windows Vista because I like it and it doesn’t feel slower than XP even on my computer.

Finally, I use twhirl to follow my Twitter friends. It’s far from perfect, because I’d like to have a single client that allows me to follow not only Twitter but all the social networks in which I might have an account, but twhirl does a good job in the meanwhile.

One thing that’s bothered me from the beginning though—and I don’t know if this is a Windows (Vista?), twhirl or Chrome bug—is that whenever I click on a link on twhirl, it will open in Internet Explorer instead of Chrome, which is set up as my default browser. I tried different settings, but I didn’t find a solution until today, so I’m sharing it here because I’m sure others might be having the same problem.

(Warning: this solution involves modifying the Windows registry, which if done incorrectly might prevent your machine from working properly. Following my instructions carefully should be safe, but use at your own risk.)

1. Open the Registry Editor by typing regedit in the Windows Start Menu.
   
   You may see a confirmation window if UAC is enabled on your computer.
2. Verify that the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ChromeHTML exists.
    
   If this key doesn’t exist, you can stop reading here.
3. Look for the key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.htm and change the (default) value to ChromeHTML. Repeat for HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.html.
   

That should do it!

Alternatively, you can also import this file into your registry: correct_chrome.reg

Google Chrome's killing who?

At Google people don't make mistakes, they're just overeager to launch a new product. At least that's kind of what they imply at the Official Google Blog when they announce A fresh take on the browser.

This fresh take on the browser is nothing more than an open source project, called Google Chrome, that the Mountain View company will be making available for download sometime today (probably in the morning Pacific time). It hasn't even launched and it was announced with a comic book, but still, it has already been touted "Windows Killer" by some.

Open source browsers are not precisely something new. Changes in the interface are something we're starting to get used to even though it might hurt a little at the beginning. Sure, there are a few technical changes from what we're used to that might make Chrome feel different from other browsers and Google does have an advantage over others in the field since they don't have to fear antitrust suits with every line of code. But how is this supposed to kill the OS?

It's supposed to run JavaScript like a charm, OK. But will it run Flash? Will it run Silverlight (or Moonlight for that matter)? (Believe me, this will be important in the near future.) Oh, and it needs Windows (and only Windows for the moment) to run on. And how's it supposed to run the large number of applications that are open my computer right now? On JavaScript? Please! So really fail to see who's getting killed here...

Anyway, here's a screen shot of some Google results this morning:

Curiously enough, none of the links points to a real page. Funny how when your site does it, the search engine doesn't really place it in first position.

All this said, I will be testing Chrome by the end of the day as objectively as humanly possible. I'll let you know how it goes.

The fox won't come out to play? Get it now!

So, the "Fox" (I know it's not a fox) is coming out for the third time today, but someone decided that "today" starts sometime when the sun hits the American continent...

I personally didn't want to wait until 7pm to get software that must definitively be ready right now (I sincerely doubt that Mozilla would put "finishing touches" a couple of hours before release) so I went to spreadfirefox.com to see what could be done.

It turns out all you have to do is play around with their download URLs a little and you can the fresh bits before their links are up. Since I'm nice, I'll share a couple of them and then let you figure out the rest:

• Firefox 3 for OS X in English: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=osx&lang=en-GB
• Firefox 3 for OS X in French: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=osx&lang=fr
• Firefox 3 for Windows in English: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=win&lang=en-GB
• Firefox 3 for Linux in English: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.0&os=linux&lang=en-GB

That wasn't hard, was it? ;)

Have fun!

Share your screen in 2 minutes with Microsoft SharedView

It took less than five minutes to go the Microsoft Connect website, download and install Microsoft SharedView to share my desktop with a friend.

The installation is as simple as it can be. Once installed, you use a Live ID to sign into SharedView if you want to create a session. The session is created in two clicks and you are given clear instructions to invite people to join it (see screenshot). Guests to your session don't even need to sign in to join.

When members have joined your session you can share specific windows with them and even let them take control of your shared window. You can invite one or more people to present your work or to collaborate. It works fine over the Internet, even across firewalls.

Microsoft SharedView is still a beta (then again, what isn't these days?), but I really recommend that you give it a try. Free download available here.

My weekends with TED

Those of you who know me personally, know that, as active as I might be during the week, on weekends I'm basically a vegetable. Well, I'm exaggerating a little, but I do like to take it slowly on weekends. For instance, I like to stay in bed late. I prepare for this on Friday night by leaving my laptop and all my remotes, as well as books or anything I might need in the morning, next to the bed. This way, I can stay under the covers as long as possible, which is usually until my body requires some energy input, or would like to output waste. Anyway, I'm starting to digress here...

Another thing I like to do on weekends is spending a while with TED. I should actually say on TED, but your mischievous little minds will probably wander where they shouldn't. At least until I explain what, and not who, TED is. From their website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

Every year TED brings together "the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers" who give 18-minute talks about what they do. Speakers include Chris Anderson, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Bill Clinton, Philippe Starck, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Frans Lanting; and I've only mentioned the "famous" ones here (by which I mean, the ones I know), but there's also "regular" people: mathematicians, anthropologists, musicians, physicists, computer scientists. People you've (or at least I've) never heard about before, such as Majora Carter (actually her talk is the one that made me discover TED), Kenichi Ebina (not everything is talk at TED, there also onstage performance), Ron Eglash, Robert Full and plenty of others.

Most of these talks are described as inspiring, fascinating, beautiful and even funny. I definitively don't mind spending my whole weekend watching these people talk 18 minutes at a time. That's why I've decided that every week I'll be sharing my favorite TED videos on the blog. Every Sunday, when technically possible, I will post here the videos I like the most in an attempt to get you inspired by these wonderful people.

So let's start with the one that got me started. Majora Carter's Greening the ghetto:

And so that you can see how diverse TED videos actually are, here is an extremely funny video from Ze Frank:

See you again with more TED next week ;)

Search different...

...with tafiti!

Tafiti, from Swahili "do research," is a new Silverlight application by Microsoft that approaches searching the Web in a rather original way.

Of course, egomania dictates that I must demo by tafiti-ing (?) my name, so here's the video (captured with CamStudio):

As you can see, you get to preview, filter and save results in categories such as Web, Blogs and Images.

There's also the tree view, which presents results in a, albeit, useless, but interesting way.

To test tafiti by yourselves all you need is a couple of things:

1. A browser. It can be any of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari on Windows or Mac.
2. Silverlight. Which you can get from silverlight.net, or better yet, just follow directions when you visit tafiti.com for the first time.

My only regret is that tafiti obviously uses search results from Microsoft Live Search, and I've already commented on what I think about those. As a matter of fact, look at search results from Google and tafiti, respectively, for the keyword "tafiti":

Sure, one of them looks nicer than the other, but who do you think I'll visit more often to get up-to-date results?