Comprei um tablet MousePen 8×6, na ManiaVirtual, onde havia também comprado meu notebook LG. Estava bem mais barato que os preços do BoaDica e resolvi comprar, junto com um cartão de memória SDHC (depois explico porque :). O tablet é este:

Antes, porém, consultei como estava o suporte no Linux: como na página do Ubuntu tem como instalar este tablet, resolvi comprá-lo pois tem que ser fácil instalar no Debian. Fiz o procedimento (leia tudo antes de tentar, pois os comentários são mais atuais que o texto) e o tablet foi reconhecido só que a caneta e o mouse não funcionaram. Despluguei o tablet da USB do desktop e coloquei no notebook, que roda Debian 32bits, sem mover o tablet. Poderia ser algum problema em 64 bits: depois descobri posts que informavam que rodavam sem problemas no 64 bits. Os sintomas eram os mesmos: reconhecidos pela USB e não reconhecidos pelo Gimp ou mesmo o programa de calibração.

Se não funciona no Debian e dizem que funciona no Ubuntu, então é hardware: decidi devolver o tablet. A surpresa foi que ao colocar o tablet e a caneta no colo, começaram a funcionar! Seria o primeiro caso de tablet carente, querendo colo ? Decidi tentar outra explicação. Desconectei o meu mouse sem fio BatteryFree A4tech e coloquei o tablet com o mouse no lugar: funcionou perfeitamente! O culpado é este aqui:

Este mouse sem fio é bom, porque não usa pilhas e é alimentado pelo mouse pad. Assim é mais leve que os outros. Gosto tanto que comprei dois, um outro para a faculdade. O pior é que já desrecomendei o monitor 22” LG que tenho lá, pois notei que tinha umas listras horizontais que rolavam pela tela. Cheguei lá e afastei o mouse: Bingo!!!

Fico pensando quando tudo for wireless: meu vizinho controlando meu mouse com o Nintendo Wii NG :( Uma idéia é abrir uma fábrica para comercializar Gaiola de Faraday:

The weekend is over and so are the first DokuWiki Hackdays ever. I had a wonderful weekend even though I didn't get much sleep. Meeting all those nice people I only knew from the net was as much fun as I thought.

Besides a lot of socializing, playing Mario Kart DS and having beer and cola we got quite a bit done on DokuWiki. The XML-RPC interface got a lot of attention and patches, from which the DokuWiki FUSE file system directly benefited. Some bugs were fixed and some progress with supporting DokuWiki farms was made. We also added some initial stuff for better supporting mobile browsers and discussed possibilities to add oAuth to DokuWiki. Last but not least we talked about how to improve the FCKW WYSIWYG plugin.

		Florian is working on his Wordpress/DokuWiki integration. Pierre talks to one of the TWiki guys.
Michael and Chris are working on DokuWiki farming. Guy studies the FrOSCon program.		Upper row: Michael Klier, Michael Haman, Andreas Gohr, Chris Smith. Lower row: Pierre Spring, Gina Häußge, Guy Brand

Many thanks to Gina Häußge, Michael Klier, Chris Smith, Guy Brand, Michael Hamann, Pierre Spring, Florian Feldhaus and all those who dropped by to talk about DokuWiki¹⁾ – you made this a success. And a big thanks also goes to the FrOSCon organizers who made all this possible in such a uncomplicated way. Kudos.

I'm really looking forward to the next time and there will be one for sure. This was just too cool to not be repeated.

PS. Be sure check out Gina's post as well.

Similar posts:

• DokuWiki Hack Days at FrOSCon 2008
• 3 Days re:publica
• Wiki Event Calendar

As announced I spent the last weekend at the FroSCon 2008, in Siegburg near Bonn. For the first time ever, I had the chance to meet some of the people behind DokuWiki. And it was really great . We spent almost the whole weekend hacking in our own room on the FroScon area. Apart from updates to the XML-RPC backend we had a lively discussion regarding possible implementations of Wiki Farms with DokuWiki and I think there where also some ideas about WYSIWYG floating around. Because we where quite busy, I somehow completely forgot to attend any lectures during the whole weekend though .

On Saturday evening a social event took place, or in other words, there was beer¹⁾ and barbeque and we had a good time chatting about all kinds of stuff. Sadly I had to leave early on 15:15 on Suday to catch my train back to Munich.

All in all it was a really great experience to meet all those nice people, and it's cool to be able to connect a face and some good memories to an IRC nickname or and email address . I am really looking forward to the next event (maybe the CCC congress in december ).

Of course Andi and Gina blogged about it too!

As previously announced, this weekend marked the first ever DokuWiki meetup at this year's FrOSCon. I arrived at Siegburg/Bonn on Friday at around 19:30 and – after checking in at my hotel which I btw definitely recommend – spent the evening eating and chit-chatting in a nice Pizzeria with Andreas Gohr, Michael Klier and Guy Brand.

Saturday and Sunday were both mostly dedicated to coding¹⁾ and discussing DokuWiki²⁾, and thanks to this I actually did not attend any talks at all, although the keynotes by Andrew Tanenbaum and Rasmus Lerdorf as well as a talk about documentation were on my list. Given how awesome it was to meet all those nice people³⁾ for the first time ever in real-life and how much fun we had⁴⁾, I don't regret this a bit though Even the two guys from TWiki paying us a visit on Saturday seemed to feel comfortable

Sadly, I had to leave at around 15:50 on Sunday to catch my train in Siegburg (which then actually was cancelled thanks to some problem with its engine what then caused me spending one hour something sitting on the floor in the substitute train – did I mention that I simply love the Deutsche Bahn?). Even though I'm awfully tired and will prolly have to survive this week with this being the case, I thoroughly enjoyed the weekend, and I really hope there will be a next time for all that grouphugging and productivity boost, even if there are no DokuWiki stickers⁵⁾ or a drink-of-your-choice flatrate at some social event⁶⁾

With over 10000 competitors it is hard to pick out a few stars from the Games. However, what follows are my five top stars of the games ranked in order. My list is a little bias towards Britons who did well, but I think that’s fine.

1. Usain Bolt
2. Michael Phelps
3. Rebecca Adlington
4. Yelena Isinbaeva
5. Chris Hoy

What made these people special is not only their achievements but the manner of their achievements. Other people were billed as stars but failed to deliver - be it through injury (Liu Xiang) or an inability to perform on the day (Philips Idowu). Some athletes had exceptional Games and deserve honorable mentions, particularly Ethiopia’s Tirunesh Dibaba and Kenenisa Bekele. However, breaking world records or capturing the public’s attention is what makes a star.

My top 2 are international stars, and so is my number 4. The other 2 are now British stars, whose achievements will have been noted around the world - they state, quite simply, that Britain is a force to be reckoned with.

Usain Bolt set new records in the 100 metres, 200 metres, and - with his Jamaican compatriots - the 4×100 metre relay.

Such was Bolt’s dominance, that he was able to set a new world record in the 100 metres, despite starting his celebrations 10-15 metres from the finishing line. There was no messing about with the 200 metres as Bolt ran flat-out start-to-finish to shave 2/100ths of a second off Michael Johnson’s time.

The Jamaican relay triumph capped off a fantastic birthday week for Usain - the Fastest Man in the World™

Michael Phelps set himself the target of eight (8) gold medals. This would be a record haul at a single Olympiad, breaking Mark Spitz’s seven.

There were a couple of very close races, but Michael Phelps set history, along with 7 new world records. Phelps’s achievement is phenomenal and is unlikely to ever be broken.

Rebecca Adlington won two gold medals, and broke the oldest world record in women’s swimming. Hers was Britain’s first swimming gold in 20 years, and the first from a woman for 48 years. That was in her weaker event.

In the 800 metres, Adlington swam away from the field and broke a 19 year-old world record. Her triumph gives British swimming a major boost.

Yelena Isinbaeva is a darling of female athletics - she was elected female athlete of the year in 2004 and 2005 by the IAAF. Yelena is a serial breaker of the Pole Vault world record, and set another best in Beijing. Clearly playing to the crowd it took her three attempts to clear 5.05 metres.

Yelena has set 24 world records and needs to set 12 more to break Sergey Bubka‘s record. She also won the Pole Vault in 2004, and is almost totally dominant in her sport - having won the last 15 events she’s attended and is unbeaten in over 2 years.

Chris Hoy won 3 gold medals, all in emphatic style. Hoy’s power and speed left all his opponents trailing.

Hoy became the first British Olympian for 100 years to claim three golds at a single Olympiad - he won the men’s keirin, the men’s team sprint (with Jason Kenny & Jamie Staff) and also the men’s individual sprint.

The Olympic medal table is ranked by the numbers of Gold medals in every country except the United States. The Total Medal ranking is used as the measure by the United States. Whereas, the rest of the world rejects this as a true measure as it values Gold, Silver and Bronze equally.

As a matter of fairness there should be a ranked (points) system adopted. The Points Total is based on the British Press's 5-3-1 system used in 1908. However, some may favour 3-2-1 as the scoring.

The Overall Medal Standings on the Official web site breaks down the medals won into Men’s and Women’s. Plus you can easily see who won every medal for each country and in which events.

The top of the table is dominated by China, USA, Russia, the big EU nations, and Australia. What is apparant is that some big countries like India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Mexico and Brazil all underachieve. Whilst small nations like Cuba and Jamaica overachieve.

This is the complete Olympic medal table for the 2008 Beijing Games.

Blocs

China had an exceptional Games, exceeding what I expected them to achieve. They won a total of 100 medals, 51 of which were Gold. This meant China finished top of the medal table.

China particularly excelled at Artistic Gymnastics, Badminton, Diving, Shooting, Table Tennis, and Weightlifting. There was also a first gold in rowing, a couple of golds in trampolining, a couple in Judo, plus golds in Archery, Canoeing, Fencing, and Taekwondo.

China was not without controversy as there has been dispute over the age of five gymnasts. There was also controversy in the Taekwondo quarter-final between Britain’s Sarah Stevenson and China’s Chen Zhong. The Chinese has been awarded a 1-0 points win after Sarah had been denied a 2-point score for a last second kick to the head of her opponent. Scoring requires 3 of the 4 judges to press a button within 1 second of each other. Only 2 did. The decision was disputed and the win was handed to Sarah.

The United States of America also had a very good Olympics. Winning a total of 110 medals - of which 36 were Golds. I did think USA would just get over 35 Golds. However, on this occasion 36 gold medals was not enough to finish top dog, only to be leader of the (following) pack.

Eight on America’s golds were won by Michael Phelps in the swimming. America was particularly strong in team events, winning men’s and women’s basketball and beach volleyball; plus the men’s volleyball - with a silver for the women - and the women’s football. America also won both the 4×400 metre relays in the athletics. However, America’s usual dominance in the sprints was taken by the Jamaicans.

Russia came third in the table, with 72 medals, of which 23 were gold. A credible performance when you consider Russia only got two medals in the Artistic Gymnastics, 2 bronzes, and also fared quite poorly in the swimming pool - 1 gold, 1 silver, and 2 bronzes. However, Russia did very well in the Athletics, coming second to the USA with 6 golds and 18 medals in total, and in the Wrestling, 6 golds and 11 medals in total.

Russia left it late - the fourteenth day - to enter the top three, pushing Great Britain down into fourth. However, with the two golds in the Rhythmic Gymnastics and two more in the Boxing over the final weekend, Russia made third look comfortable. Russia achieved a medal clean sweep in the women’s singles tennis.

The United Kingdom (Great Britain) had a remarkable Games, winning 47 medals (fourth best), of which 19 were Gold (also fourth best). Amazingly this was the best haul since London in 1908 - when the British won 56 golds, often in events with no competitors and always with British judges.

This was achieved by winning 2 swimming golds (well done Rebecca Adlington), 4 Sailing golds, 2 Rowing golds, an Athletics gold, a Boxing gold, a Kayaking gold, and 8 Cycling golds. If only there were more cycling events for the women…

What was good was to beat Germany - who came fifth with 16 golds and 41 medals - and the Australians - who came sixth with 14 golds and 46 medals.

…mal wieder. Diesmal von Graphocephala fennahi - der Rhododendronzikade.
Was sie in unserer definitiv rhododendronfreien Küche zu suchen hatte - wer weiss…

Ein farblich grauenhaftes Foto - die Farben sind echt (ich schwör ), das ist die Unterseite einer Tradescantia zebrina - die sind so extrem lila. Wie die Zikade in grün-rot gekleidet auf die Idee kam, sich in einer Lila Pflanze zu „verbergen“ hat sie mir nicht verraten.

Noch eine Aufnahme, um die Augen wieder zu erholen:

besser oder? Nun ist sie auf dem Balkon „ausgesetzt“, so hat sie wenigstens die Chance ihren Heimat-Rhododendron wiederzufinden…

Wikis are about collaboration. It's no wonder there are many real life events around the topic as well. There are small grass root events like the Wiki Wednesdays in different cities around the world. There are big conferences like WikiSym and WikiMania. And many of the wiki engines have their own events too. Like the TikiFests from TikiWiki or the upcoming DokuWiki hack days.

But keeping up to date with what happens around wikis wasn't that easy in the past. Today my company released a new feature at WikiMatrix that should change that. It's called the Wiki Event Calendar and does what the name suggests. It is a central calendar on all wiki related events.

To make this work really well the calendar needs your help. If you plan to attend some event about wikis, or are maybe giving a talk about wikis somewhere, please check if it is already listed and if not, just add it.

To keep up with what happens in the wiki world, you can subscribe to the calendar via RSS and iCal subscriptions. Or you can search the upcoming events for locations or keywords at the website.

BTW, we also updated a few other things on the site. If you are looking for a wiki just have a look at WikiMatrix. Oh, and if you haven't blogged about WikiMatrix yet, do so!

Similar posts:

• Finding Professional Wiki Help...
• LinuxTag 2007
• RoCoCo Camp Day 3

The iPhone is a great device for accessing web sites while on the road. But things you look up on the road often differ from the things you'd need at home. Often the information you are looking for is directly related to your current location. This is why the new iPhone 3G comes with a builtin GPS.

Unfortunately the location data can not simply be used in a web application because Apple didn't add any possibility to do so in Mobile Safari.

But now you can access this information using a free tool from the appstore. The tool is called Search Quest. I mentioned it in my last blog post already:

There are two srceens. The first screen lets you enter a position using various options.
The second screen gives you the choice to use the position to do various things.

One (badly documented) feature of Search Quest is to use it to relay your location to any website. Search Quest provides two options to do so¹⁾:

1. calling Search Quest from your web application
2. calling your web application from Search Quest

Let's have a look at both options.

The first option is really simple: you just create a link using the pseudo protocol searchquest://. After the protocol you put the URL of your application replacing the http:// with an uppercas H. Like this:

<a href="searchquest://Htools.splitbrain.org/gc/loc.php">Get Location</a>

Clicking this link in Mobile Safari (and having Search Quest installed of course) will quickly popup Search Quest and then redirect the user to the given site. The current position is passed as variables in the GET request.

You can try it here: http://tools.splitbrain.org/gc/loc.php

Unfortunately this method has a disadvantage: Search Quest will not update the current position but will send the data from when it last updated.

The second method registers your web application in Search Quest itself. This makes it more likely the user will update the current position before accessing the web application.

To do this you need to create a special menu file on your webserver. I couldn't find a way to do this without this menu file. I also couldn't find any description of the format. But it is easy enough to figure out from an example. It basically configures a few texts and the URL(s) you want to have called with the location data.

I wrote a little example which will redirect you to the list of nearest geocaches at geocaching.com or shows a map with them. The menu file looks like this:

{
    G="1";
    T="Geo Caching";
    B="Apps";
    C=(
    (   
        {
        T="Please choose";
        },
        {   
            T="Nearest caches";
            E="The nearest caches to your location";
            S="http://tools.splitbrain.org/gc/nearest.php";
        },
        {   
            T="Show GC Map";
            E="Display the geocaching.com map";
            S="http://tools.splitbrain.org/gc/map.php";
        },
        {   
            T="Show my data";
            E="Display all your location data";
            S="http://tools.splitbrain.org/gc/loc.php";
        },
        )
    );
}

The URLs just do a simple redirect:

<?php
header('Location: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?lat='.$_REQUEST['lat'].'&lng='.$_REQUEST['lon']);
?>

To register the menu file in Search Quest you need to enter its URL in the second screen under Access Location-Based Web Apps. Here's a series of screen shots:

After the menu URL is registered once you can always update the menu file to add or change your service URLs.

If you want to try it, register http://tools.splitbrain.org/gc/ in SearchQuest.

Search Quest gives you a simple method to get access to your user's location on their request. Personally I like the first method better as it is simpler to desribe to your users: “install Search Quest on your iPhone and click this link”.

Hopefully Search Quest will add a feature to force an update of the location data when using this method in the future.

Similar posts:

• My Favorite iPhone Apps (so far)
• iPhone [yes, another iPhone post on the web]
• Live Video is still in its Infancy

Did you ever suddenly notice that something simple you've been doing for years could be vastly improved with just a little bit of tweaking? I did yesterday concerning the transfer of files with netcat (e.g. when nobody got sendfile installed and standard paranoia forbids simply using scp instead) and figured I should share my sudden “enlightenment”

#!/bin/sh
 
host=$1
shift
 
tar cv "$@" | pv -brt | nc -q0 $host 23000

#!/bin/sh
 
netcat -l -p 23000 | pv -brt | tar xv

Note: piping to pv is optional

Edit: fixed a word splitting bug and specified a default port

Nein, ich lese nicht die Zukunft daraus.
zur Begriffsklärung und weitere Verwendungsmöglichkeiten (bsp. werden Kraftwerke damit betrieben…) siehe: Wikipedia

Etwas aus der Rubrik „Was Großmutter schon wusste…„

Kaffeesatz fällt quasi jeden Morgen an, und ist ja eigentlich „übrig“ und wird meist im Hausmüll entsorgt. Dabei ist er sehr nützlich für den Gärtner (auch den Balkon- und Zimmergärtner).

• Er ist die „Trend-Droge“ für Regenwürmer , die ja bekanntlich besten Humus produzieren. Die Würmlinge fressen gern den Kaffeesatz, das Koffein darin macht sie überaktiv und sie produzieren mehr Humus, und mehr Nachkommen (die dann noch mehr Humus produzieren)
• in Kaffeesatz sind viele gute Inhaltsstoffe, die für gutes, gesundes Pflanzenwachstum wichtig sind: Stickstoff, Kalium, Phosphor, Mineralstoffe (und Coffein für die Würmer)
• in den Boden eingearbeitet lockert er verdichtete, lehmige Böden und verbessert die Wasserspeicherfähigkeit von sandigen Böden (für Gärten braucht es dann aber schon mehr als haushaltsübliche Mengen - mehr Kaffee zu trinken, um die Bodenqualität zu verbessern ist allerdings nicht ratsam)
• er säuert zu kalkige Böden an - gut für Rhododendren und Azaleen, Pelargonien, Hortensien, Kamelien, Engelstrompeten (aber ob ich die Monsterpflanze [sie nimmt den halben Balkon ein, blüht aber nicht] nun auch noch mit Kaffee dope überleg ich mir nochmal…) und Moorbeetpflanzen (Herbstenzian bsp.)
• Rosen werden kräftiger und blühen schöner und werden weniger von Schädlingen geplagt
• Kaffee ist giftig für Schnecken (auch für nackte spanische Wegelagerer) - gefährtete Pflanzen (Funkien beispielsweise und Studendenblumen) mit Kaffee besprühen und/ oder einen Banngürtel aus Kaffeesatz um die Pflanzen ziehen (muss leider nach jedem Regen oder nach zu enthusiastischem Giessen wieder erneuert werden)
• …

Also:
Auf den Kompost mit dem Kaffeesatz, gern auch gleich mit Tüte (sofern man eine Kaffeemaschine benutzt), denn die ist aus Papier und verrottet auch.
Oder trocknen und bei den Rosen in die Beete harken.
Oder trocknen und in den Ofen stopfen (so man einen hat).

The NSLU2 NAS device from Linksys is a great little gadget. Thanks to the nslu2-linux project you can run a full Linux distribution like SlugOS or Debian on it. Beside using the box as small fileserver or torrent slave, you can turn it into a feature rich juke box, to play your mp3 library or even last.fm streams.

All you need is a cheap Linux supported USB soundcard (the one I've bought costs around 12€), a USB hub and you have to run one of the available Linux distributions. Information about setting that up can be found at http://nslu2-linux.org or on my NSLU2 page.

Because the NSLU2 has a relatively weak CPU, and processing compressed audio is a CPU expensive task there are some caveats when it comes to audio playback. Uwe Hermann provides a nice comparisson about audio playback and streaming playback on the NSLU2 using various tools.

It turns out that Ogg is way more CPU expensive than MP3. Ogg, together with an external HD turned out to work only with annoyong crackling sounds during playback. MP3 seems to play just fine, so I had to convert my whole library to MP3 format. The following little script can help you with that. You need to have lame and the vorbis-tools installed to be able to use it. I also suggest to, if possible, don't do the conversion on the NSLU2 itself, as this will literally take ages to finish on a large libarary!

#!/bin/bash
# @author Michael Klier <chi@chimeric.de>
 
BIN_OGGDEC=/usr/bin/oggdec
BIN_LAME=/usr/bin/lame
 
ARTIST=$(ogginfo "${1}" | grep ARTIST | cut -f2 -d\=)
TITLE=$(ogginfo "${1}" | grep TITLE | cut -f2 -d\=)
ALBUM=$(ogginfo "${1}" | grep ALBUM | cut -f2 -d\=)
TRACKNUMBER=$(ogginfo "${1}" | grep TRACKNUMBER | cut -f2 -d\=)
FILENAME=$(basename "${1}" .ogg)
 
cd $(dirname "${1}")
${BIN_OGGDEC} -o - "${1}" | ${BIN_LAME} -S -b 160 -h --add-id3v2 --tt "${TITLE}" --ta "${ARTIST}" --tl "${ALBUM}" --tn "${TRACKNUMBER}" - "${FILENAME}.mp3"
rm "${1}"

Just execute it in a directory containing .ogg files: Note that the script will remove the .ogg files! You can also use a combination with find to make the whole thing work for multiple directories at once.

% ogg2mp3 *.ogg

The best option to play music on the NSLU2 IMHO is using MPD (Music Player Daemon) because it allows you to remote access the box with various front ends to control what's played. That way you don't have to constantly SSH to your NSLU2 to control the music player.

Setting up mpd on Debian is quite straight forward.

% aptitude install mpd

After the installation you have to edit /etc/mpd.conf to set your music and playlist directory as well as the bind address setting (I didn't need to touch the audio settings, they worked out of the box):

music_directory     "/mnt/data/media/audio/music"
playlist_directory  "/mnt/data/media/audio/playlists"
bind_to_address     "192.168.1.xxx"

For mpd in order to be able to serve the music it needs to own the files/directories. I suggest to also add a new group audio (if it doesn't exist already) to be able to access the music files as normal user.

% chown -R mpd:audio /mnt/data/media/audio/music
% chown mpd:audio /mnt/data/media/audio/playlists
% chmod -R 775 /mnt/data/media/audio/music
% chmod 775 /mnt/data/media/audio/playlists

After that, and whenever you add music to your library you have to re-create the mpd database.

% mpd --create-db
% /etc/init.d/mpd restart

Now you should be able to start playback by using one of the available mpd frontends like mpc for example. For details on how to do that please refer to the manual of the used frontend.

If you have an last.fm account, you can also log your listening habits by installing two additional programs.

% aptitude install lastmp lastfmsubmitd

The install process will ask you for your last.fm credentials. Note, at the time I've installed those the permissions for /var/run/lastfm and /var/log/lastfm where wrong after the installation and I had to grant write permissions for the lastfm user which is created during installation. You might need to restart both if that's the case for you as well.

% /etc/init.d/lastmp restart
% /etc/init.d/lastfmsubmitd restart

So, now he can log or listening habits. But, one of the main features I like about last.fm is to be able to listen to you friends/neighbours streams or streams by artists or certain tags. This is possible by using mc, a little shell script to fetch last.fm streams and adding them to the mpd playlist. Note that you need to have mpc installed to be able to use it. For example, listening to similar artists like Squarepusher all you have to do is:

% mcf a 'squarepusher'

The script also makes it possible to listen to neighbor streams etc., which is described in the help output.

That's it, we have a small, energy efficient jukebox . The only downside of this setup is that you still have to either SSH to the box or use a mpd frontend on one of your other computers to control what's being played. One possibility to ommit that, I am evaluating at the moment, is to use a bluetooth adapter and control mpc over my cell phone. Another possiblity would be probably to use my Nintendo DS along with homebrew and SSH . Once I've a ready to use solution I'll post it here as well.

Debian debuta. Anunciada em 16 de agosto de 1993, pro Ian Murdock, distribuição mais estável, mais atual, com mais pacotes, base de outras, etc., a minha distribuição favorita faz 15 anos hoje. Aqui vai meu presente (você trouxe o seu?):

The English Premier League kicks off today. It has the second highest revenue from media deals of any sports league in the world¹⁾ and about €800 million more revenue as a league than any of its European rivals.

This wealth has allowed the Premier League to attract many of the best players. The “Big Four” of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United have all appeared in the Champions League final in the past four years - Liverpool have twice. Last season’s final was competed by Chelsea and Manchester United. Liverpool made it to the semi-final. Due to the added income from the Champions League - Liverpool made around £18million; United over £30 million - it is hard to see the other teams bridging the gap. The teams in the UEFA cup barely make an extra £500,000. Of course, spending money wisely is possible and too often teams can waste millions on mediocre squad players.

An even bigger challenge faces the three promoted sides - all of whom will see their TV revenue increase by at least £30 million - to just stay up. The danger is that they blow the £30 million, increase their wage bill too much, and then get relegated. The other danger is that they won’t be brave enough to spend the money and will get relegated anyway.

In my opinion it is a two team race: Chelsea versus Manchester United. They have won the last four titles between them; United the last two. Both have invested heavily in their squad - United to secure Tevez for £32 million and Chelsea on a Bosingwa and Deco - this summer. Both have strength in depth. Manchester United are a more creative, free-flowing attacking side. Chelsea lack the flair of United, but have players like Lampard and Essien. They can also use their pacey full-backs to provide width. The defences are very strong - Chelsea probably having a slight edge when Cech and Terry are both fit and on form.

The difference from last season to this could be Essien playing in midfield rather than wasted at the back. He is a true engine for Chelsea and I am not sure United have that energy.

The obvious candidates are Hull, Stoke and West Brom. The others are Bolton, Fulham and Wigan. I’ll reserve judgement until 2-3 games have passed. My guess is that Bolton will struggle again, Hull will probably struggle to score, and Stoke won’t have the quality.

The team most capable of spoiling the party is Tottenham Hotspur. They may have lost Defoe and Keane since the beginning of last season. They may lose Berbatov also. However, the defence looks much more solid (fitness permitting) and the midfield with Bentley and Modric should be pretty creative. The challenge must be to turn Darren Bent’s promise into the finished article, and to find a genuine target man in the next two weeks.

I think Everton, Aston Villa and Portsmouth all come up a little short, whilst Manchester City and Blackburn are really only mid-table side.

The North East now has four Premiership sides: Hull, Middlesbrough, Newcastle and Sunderland. This will be good for rivalries in the area. I think Middlesbrough may have a decent season now they’ve found some goals in Afonso Alves; whilst Newcastle’s season rests upon Keegan inspiration. Sunderland could push on and become the top side of the region. However, if Newcastle can sort their ownership out and provide Keegan with £20 million in January, then there could be a Toon revival in 2009.

My team. Unfortunately, the summer has not been good. I do not think the first team has really been improved and the squad certainly has not. Too much rests upon Gerrard. If Agger can stay fit then he may emerge as the best centre-half in the league, but there must be question marks if Liverpool can handle the big pressure games after last season. A strong season by Liverpool’s three Olympians (Babel, Leiva and Mascherano) is vital to challenge.

I can hardly wait for the season to start… and luckily I don’t have long.

After a week with the iPhone it's time for another post . Apple's appstore makes it really easy to find and install interesting software for the little computer. Here's a list of software I really liked so far.

List and eye candy after the break.

Instapaper combines a web service with a native iPhone app. The webservice lets you mark web pages for reading later through a simple bookmarklet. But instead of just bookmarking it, it does fetch a copy of the site and creates an easy to read text-only version of it.

When you sync the iPhone app (over the air) these stripped down text version as well as the full featured HTML page is pulled to your iPhone for convenient off-line reading.

Zenbe Lists is an application, Apple forgot to include with the iPhone software for some mysterious reason: a to-do list application.

Zenbe isn't too fancy. You can create to-do items and put them in lists. A nice touch is that you can sync your lists to a web service and even share a them between multiple people. The web service is not as featureful as Remember the Milk or Todoist, but is free.

Stanza is one of those tools where you can't believe it's free. Stanza is a book reader for the iPhone. What makes it so incredible is the built in library browser which lets you download hundreds of free books from Project Gutenberg and other sources. Eg. the recently recommended book Little Brother is available through Stanza.

This is a simple utility your service provider or Apple should have included. But of course they didn't. UsedBudget logs into your T-Mobile Germany account and fetches info about your used up minute and SMS contingents and warns you if you approach the limits of your contract.

Twinkle is a nice looking Twitter client with a twist. Besides showing tweets and messages from your friends it can also display tweets by other Twinkle users in your proximity. An update with identi.ca support would this make the absolute killer app for me. If you agree, bug the developers about it.

This app only interesting to people living in or visiting Berlin. Fahr-Info calculates public transit connections. It uses the iPhone's location services to find the nearest stations and can display the network plan centered at your current position.

This is very simple game using the iPhone accelerometer for controls. The gameplay is simple: avoid the cubes. To steer, you lean the phone to the left or right. Of course the speed of the approaching cubes increases over time… Simple but fun.

The must have for every Unix geek. iSSH is a SSH client for the iPhone and quite usable already. What I miss is the possibility to do key based authentication.

This is the swiss army knife to location based services on the iPhone. The interface is a bit confusing at first, but once understood it is simple.

There are two sceens. The first screen (“where”) lets you enter a position using various options. You can use the iPhone's GPS but you can also enter an Address and use Yahoo's geocoder for lookup.

The second screen (“what”) gives you the choice to use the position to do various things. This includes getting a list of Wikipedia pages about objects near by, mailing a Google maps link to a contact or to update Yahoo Fireeagle. Frotz (free)

I wrote about Interactive Fiction a while ago. Frotz brings IF to your iPhone, together with a big online library where you can download games for free. Unfortunately the program seems to be a bit buggy currently. After playing for a while it starts to slow down real bad and you need to restart it. I hope this will be fixed in an update soon.

How often did you need a dice to play but had none available? Okay, didn't happen to me either. But this little app is just too beautiful to skip, even though it is quite senseless. It just displays up to five dices which you can throw by shaking the iPhone. It will even vibrate and make typical dice throwing sounds. Fun.