Tag Archives: Opinion

Why the iPad is Better than an Inflight Entertainment System

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After all my trouble with air travel, I thought I should add some positive views here. And they all turned to be around the iPad, so here they go.

The iPad is a better inflight entertainment system because…

  • The touchscreen actually works. And when you touch it, you don’t disturb the person sleeping in the seat in front of yours.
  • It’s lightweight.
  • The captain cannot interrupt your movie or your picture to tell you some useless facts about the temperature outside or the altitude.
  • You get to choose the music and the videos that you want to watch. You should just remember to get them prior to boarding, of course.
  • You also get to choose the games you want to play. The choice of games is much larger, and it’s called App Store.
  • You can even read newspapers, books, magazines, in the same screen. Reading the latest issue of the Economist on my iPad is priceless. It’s good to avoid being limited to the “in-flight” magazine provided by the airline (“your free copy!”), which tends to be quite lame, no matter which airline we’re talking about.
  • You can answer e-mails while you fly (for the moment you cannot sent them, unless you fly in some airline that has a wifi network, and as far as I know, there are only a few with such a feature.)
  • You could write a novel in iA Writer or Ommwriter for iPad, for that matter, all while you listen to Liszt’s “Evening Harmony in D Flat Major”. Or you could prepare a blog post, like this one.
  • Coupled with noise-cancelling headphones, the quality of sound is years-light ahead of what those crummy airline headphones are able to provide.
  • The battery. A whole 10-hour flight on a single charge is absolutely possible.

‘Nuff said.

Random Thoughts on Partnerships

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A couple of months ago I had a very interesting conversation with a friend of mine, who happens to be a close business partner in many different ventures. During this conversation, one of his phrases, probably the simplest of all, struck me and stayed in my mind:

“Business is about giving and receiving”.

Now, don’t get me started on that chapter of “Friends”, where Joey writes a speech to celebrate Chandler and Monica’s wedding, and all he can come up with is a series of “giving and having and sharing and receiving” phrases. Stay with me; I will try to elaborate on this point. Continue reading →

Making traveling enjoyable again

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If there’s only one good thing we could take from the global grounding of planes all over Europe, it might as well be the possibility to enjoy traveling again. Even recognizing that the airline industry has been able to dramatically cut costs and times of travel, one can’t deny the fact that it has done nothing to increase the pleasure of traveling. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact.

To put it elegantly, traveling by plane is a pain in the neck. In the 90′s it wasn’t better, but at least the Twin Towers were still standing in their place and there wasn’t a new “terrorist threat” every year or so, making the life of the rest of the travelers an ongoing misery.

Taking a plane exposes you to a staggering amount of things that can go wrong, from the most complex to the most ridiculous. They keep on telling us that traveling is the most secure way to travel, but they say nothing about the ever smaller and more uncomfortable seats, about the shitty food they keep on serving and the increasing number of destinations they keep on sending our luggage, more often than not exactly the opposite one we are going to. Without mentioning the amount of cancelled flights without warning, the non-guaranteed connections, the unbelievably ridiculous schemes of ticket pricing (why a return ticket is cheaper than a one-way is beyond me) and the oh so many other things that make air travel an utterly miserable experience.

Oh, but it is the most secure way of traveling. Yeah, right. Continue reading →

suecia

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en suecia, al menos en göteborg, hay luces en cada ventana.

dicho asi, parece una tremenda boludez, pero es asi: mirando las fachadas de cualquier edificio, cada ventana tiene un velador entre cada cortina. siempre. de esos veladores de mesa de luz, con su pantalla color crema, dando una luz acaramelada, melosa, calida, que contrasta con el frio exterior. en medio de la ventana, un velador, en cada ventana de cada edificio de cada avenida.

es una ciudad donde las calles estan cubiertas de piedritas.

dicho asi, parece otra tremenda boludez, pero ayuda a que la gente camine sin matarse entre los manchones de nieve, algunos a medio derretir y otros transformados en montañas de hielo y polvo. hay piedritas sueltas, que ayudan a que el zapato agarre mejor la calzada, a medio camino entre arena y canto rodado, en cada tramo de cada vereda de cada avenida.

es un pais raro.

los restoranes estan repletos a las 15 como en españa, pero vacios a las 19 como ni siquiera en suiza. la gente desayuna panceta con huevo y porotos con tomate, pero no hay gordos en las calles; es mas, son todos flacos de un metro noventa promedio. son tan rubios que a los albinos les dicen morochos. en los tranvias, las maquinas que te venden el boleto tienen un boton que dice “english” pero que igual te da las instrucciones en sueco. la gente es seca pero cordial, parece que te van a mandar a la mierda en cualquier momento; y cuando te ven con un mapa se paran y te preguntan si necesitas ayuda, con una gentileza que desmorona. pronuncian las “a” como “o”, y la “y” suena como una “u” francesa. y si es una “å” con redondelito es diferente de si es una “ä” con dieresis. hay locales de venta de “gudis” por todos lados, vendiendo golosinas a granel; agarrate una bolsa en la entrada y paga a la salida, al peso.

deci que no manejan por la izquierda, como los ingleses, eso ya seria mucho.

Ask Me Anything

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Exactly what you have read: if you have any question for me, don’t hesitate and post it in formspring.me/akosma. I’ll be glad to answer it for you! Of course, iPhone-related questions are top priority. But progressive rock questions are, too. And of course, anything related to Argentina and Switzerland. And software in general. Well, that makes for a lot of subjects; start firing!

Who do you want to work with?

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When you are a kid in Argentina, there are invariably three questions that you’ll always get asked whenever you meet a grown up person:

  • How old are you?
  • What’s your favorite football team?
  • What do you want to be when you grow up?

The answer to the first question depends on the moment, of course, and it’s simply a test to see if you know how to count. The answer to the second depends on your parents (this is like religion down there) and the city where you live (but there’s a 90% chance your answer will be either River Plate or Boca Juniors).

The third question, however, is problematic, no matter what the answer is. Because at a large degree we build our lives around that “what do you want to be?” question, whether we like or not what we do, whether we believe or not that what we want to do is doable or not, or if it pays well or not, or if we will like at all, or if we will end up doing something completely different whatsoever by the time we retire.

This single question shapes a lot our lives, without even realizing it, and we pollute otherwise peaceful kids with the realization that there’s much more to life than school and Wii and friends and chocolate milk.

The problem is, for me this is clearly the wrong question to ask. We should be asking kids “who do you want to work with?”, instead. Continue reading →

About the JAOO Conferences

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This week I had the opportunity to attend the JAOO Developer Conference 2009 in Århus (Denmark), invited by Trifork, the company behind this and other fine events, like QCon and RubyFoo. Despite being relatively unknown in the Swiss landscape, JAOO is an event unlike any other, and here’s why you should attend next time.

jaoo

Continue reading →

Epic Interview: A New Literary Genre in the Tech Section?

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Here’s a simple recipe:

  1. Contact the most important people in some field.
  2. Sit down and ask a similar set of questions to each one of them.
  3. Record all the interviews and then write them down.
  4. Publish the resulting book, usually with great reviews (such as this one).

This does not constitute, by any means, a new genre; but it’s certainly a fashionable one in your technical bookstore right now. At least Apress and O’Reilly have realized that this simple technique yields epic books.

I have already blogged about Founders at Work, thus it’s worth mentioning that Coders at Work (which I’m reading right now) has just been released. Both books share a similar structure (as well as a similar cover), and both are highly recommendable, with interviews of David Heinemeier Hansson, Steve Wozniak and Paul Buchheit for the first, and Donald Knuth, Joe Armstrong and Brendan Eich for the second.

founders_work coders_work

On the other side, O’Reilly is very well aware of the force conveyed by this kind of books: their “/Theory/In/Practice” series of books has some gems which, I think, are really worth reading:

beautiful_code beautiful_teams masterminds_programming

“Beautiful Code” features interviews with Brian Kernighan, Charles Petzold and Yukihiro Matsumoto; “Beautiful Teams” (already my preferred book for 2009!) features Tim O’Reilly, Barry Boehm and Grady Booch; finally, “Masterminds” has great interviews with Bertrand Meyer, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling, Brad Cox and Anders Hejlsberg.

I think that the names of the interviewees, in each of the five books, speak for themselves. In all of them, I have found inspiration, advice, tips, humour, awe and enlightenment. The good thing being that, in most cases, you don’t need a Computer Science degree to read these books; it’s just a matter of empathy and sociology. Our world is driven by software, and the stories behind its construction are not only interesting, they are also important to understand the cost, the difficulty and the wonder that constitutes a piece of working software. These books are a way to approach the immense complexity of our society.

I really look forward to read more books of this kind! If I forgot to mention any other similar book, just leave the reference in the comments section below. I’d love to read your suggestions.

New RSS Feed URL

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A quick message to my subscribers: I’ve moved the URL of the RSS feed to FeedBurner, following the advice of my good friend Thierry Weber, so from now the new official RSS feed URL for Open Kosmaczewski is http://feeds.feedburner.com/kosmaczewski/feed.

rss-noreflection

Thanks for your support! Your comments, support and fidelity are astounding: you are a great audience! I look forward to continue serving you with code, tips, nice reading, and powerful rants in the future.

Update, 2009-08-08: for those wandering how to configure their WordPress installation to use FeedBurner, just follow these instructions. It includes a link to the legendary FeedSmith plugin.

Risk Management in iPhone Projects

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Let’s be frank: it’s not the best time to be an iPhone developer right now. In just one year of existence, the App Store seems to have evolved from the hottest to the lamest status, without any time to breathe in the middle, but with some warning signs every so often.

appstore

Several iPhone developers have publicly stated their opposition to the Google Voice fiasco (starting with Riverturn themselves, the developers of the application), and many have simply stopped creating iPhone OS applications altogether; just to name a few, Fraser Speirs, Steven Frank and Andrew Wulf have publicly stated that they don’t want to deal with the App Store process anymore. And I’m sure that there are many more developers evaluating this very possibility out there; when you have Om Malik or Michael Arrington bashing the iPhone, it sure creates a lot of buzz and uncertainty in the market.

However, and this is my official position, even if I do not agree with the current App Store policies, I’m not quitting the iPhone OS platform anytime soon. I’ll build more applications for the iPhone in the future – heck, I’ve got 2 already approved and 3 more on the approval process pipeline, with at least 3 more in the development phase. My plan, and what this article is about, is about managing the risk represented by Apple in this business. It might be hard, but it’s not impossible, no matter what others say. Continue reading →