Technology

Kids-Xowit A couple of months ago I mentioned that I wanted to keep experimenting. At that point I had launched Xowit. Xowit is something I want to keep exploring and I have another two updates in the works with natural language discovery, and in-app reading.

ASL-3 You might have read that the most recent model from Anthropic, Claude Opus 4 might resort to blackmail if told it will be removed. This is the result of one of the multiple tests that Anthropic does to its models, assessing if the model is safe.

New trend My daughters call me a senior and boomer. I’m more a GenX’er, but I pick my battles. They are finishing their first year at uni, so they are in the perfect spot to all the new trends.

For many people not living in the UK, it will come as a surprise that the railway system in London is quite expensive and provides a really bad service. Train service is not a theme park.

You’ve probably seen the video presentation about Google Duplex, the new assistant created by Google that can make phone calls that sound totally human interactions to the human on the other side (and to anyone listening).

TLDR; VR on macOS means beta, crashes, unusable WebVR, and no games. But you get to learn a lot. This post explains my experience. It seems this time I’m one of the few non-professionals that has bought an HTC Vive and a Mac after June’s keynote.

I have a two year old mid-level Android phone (Moto G 2015) not capable of using Google Cardboard. My tablet is an iPad Mini “1” with iOS9 because it can no longer be upgraded.

In the late 90s there was some craziness in the air. Everybody perceived Internet was going to transform our lives. But we didn’t know how. Companies tried to grow at all costs, setting up what looked like crazy ideas.

For many people, disruption in Financial Services are new banks that are building the platform from the ground up. Not being tied to legacy systems, make those banks easier to operate.

I like Netflix. I really do. But there are a few things in their user interface that drive me crazy. You cannot remove a movie from continue watching. You’ve already watched a movie, don’t want to see the credits, but Netflix thinks you haven’t reached the end.

Tech startup founded by non-tech founders. Founders know little about technology, so they hire a CTO like they would hire an accountant. CTO is not part of management. Technology gets isolated.

There is a new report that associates Let’s Encrypt with phishing. So lots of people in Twitter started screaming because they read phishing and Paypal in the same sentence. Let’s Encrypt is a foundation that gives certificates away for free.

It’s in the news. Amazon S3, the popular object store crashed yesterday in one of their regions and affected multiple other sites, including Slack and GitHub. So here are some comments about it:

I’m sick and tired of reading articles describing how the banks are going to buy the new players in Fintech. Yes. It is going to happen. It has already happened. BBVA has already bought Simple and Atom.

Today I was reading this article about excuses from banks for crap services. Then I got to this sentence: Consumers need to understand that the balance you see is not necessarily your actual available balance because there are so many moving partsNo.

Yesterday I was using my bank account, taking money out using a debit card. No way to see the operation since the feed only has old/settled operations. Since the available balance was below what I considered safe, I moved back the money using the same card.

Today I went to AWSSummit London. It’s a free event dedicated to Amazon Web Services. The event took place at Excel London, excellent venue except for the occasional noise due to planes taking off from the nearby London City Airport.

Around the year 2000, I was doing some consulting work for the ISP branch of a Spanish bank. I was creating dynamic web pages (not many people in the IT industry will remember the word CGI)

In the last couple of months I’ve been able to see a growing trend with Snapchat. More and more people I follow in Twitter are testing Snapchat waters. Around a month ago, I installed the app, started registering, think twice…

I’m fascinated by AlphaGo. I truly am. A week ago I knew nothing about go. Now, I’ve read the rules but I haven’t played a single game. So I’m left to commentators.

There is some outrage in Twitter because it has started to implement some changes to its product. There was a change from stars to likes. I think I prefer stars because it conveys a different meaning: when I read something sad, I cannot click in Like, but I would click in star.

Broken Kindle anyone?A couple of months ago, we were flying back to London after the summer. My 12 year old twin daughters, usually eager video watchers or passionate console players, were avid readers at that moment.

A friend of mine sent to me a job offer. It caught both her and my attention because it shows a problem very common in Internet companies. The company in question is quite successful in its niche.

I was considering about buying one or two Amazon Fire, when I discovered they’re unlikely to come before Christmas. Granted, the price is amazingly good. 50 quid was already good, so 35 is almost incredible.

A few years ago, I was leading a small team in charge of developers’ tools and framework. We discovered a bug, and the easiest way to solve it was to make a change in a different piece of functionality that wasn’t technically right, but was being heavily used.

A couple of weeks ago, I had an interesting discussion in Twitter about how a Spanish Government body (AEAT, the equivalent of HRMC in the UK or IRS in the US) was offering different “services” in two different websites.

A few weeks ago, I’m not sure why, one of my daughters proposed to create a system to find cars inside garages at the shopping center. The car would locate itself using a GPS and then it would emit via radio.

A few months ago, I upgraded the firmware for my Sony Xperia U. It turns out that the place I used to download the firmware updates from, wasn’t providing new updates, so sometime ago, I migrated to a new source of firmware updates.

I have an old Dell Vostro 1720 and an Acer Aspire One AO110. Both are usable (and used), but have no battery. So when I got my shiny brand new Mac, I decided I had to look after the battery.

Today I wanted to talk about two acquisitions. On one side, Facebook and Whatsapp. $19 billion. There are many different opinions. Craziness. Logic. IMO the money paid is crazy, but the deal has a lot of logic for Facebook.

I tend to listen Techzing podcast. It’s a podcast about very different topics, recorded by two geeks, (or developers, and entrepeneurs). I don’t remember when I started listening them. I do remember I started because I wanted to practice English and it was great (Justin is an Englishman and Jason is American).

It’s widely spread that there has been a security breach in LinkedIn. At least there is a file with passwords in that social network. Even LinkedIn acknowledges it and suggests it will try to alert users whose passwords have been compromised.

I’ve been Google fanboy for a long time. I remember the invitation for Gmail I received around mid-2004. Gmail was a revolution. From 50MB mail space at the time, they offered 1000MB (1GB).

I have a two years old Symbian cell phone and a second generation iTouch. I guess that’s enough to explain that until very recently I didn’t pay any attention at all to mobiles apps ads.

I’m learning some technologies. I’m tempted to write new, but they’re not new. I’m learning Ruby on Rails and mobile development. I still have to keep learning Java, and Grails, but I have a project in mind and I wanted to separate clearly from my day to day job, for lots of reasons.

I’ve been a couple of days in Zaragoza (Spain), participating in Tecnimap 2010 last week. Tecnimap is a conference on IT for the Public Administration in Spain. I had presented a paper about one of the applications I manage: DocelWeb.

A few months ago I got a new Acer Aspire One A110. It’s an Atom N270 with 512 MB RAM and 8GB SSD hard disk and 8.9’’ screen. It came with a personalized version of a Linux distribution called Linpus Lite based in Fedora 8.

I wrote on the previous post that for a particular combination of search terms, Yahoo seemed to offer better results than Google. I read long time ago that in fact search was turning to be a commodity.

I like products coming from Google, and I’m usually less critic with Google’s errors than with others’. I use Google search, Gmail, Blogger… I even have a ridiculous financial position on Google (8 shares).

As I said on my last post, I think that integration of Video and voice chat could be part of a greater strategy. What would be that strategy? In my opinion it should have two parts.

Sometimes you realize you’ve written a weak post too late. It was my case with yesterday’s annotation. I thought nobody would even read it. But it seems that, because of a trackback at Gmail Blog, I was wrong.

I read it first on Google Operating System, but I haven’t seen too much buzz on the blogs I follow. For me today is the day Skype has definitively died.

I heard about MobuzzTV for the first time long time ago. I don’t watch news on TV, (I prefer to read than watch), so much less watch on the Internet. I didn’t pay much attention then.