Weblog of Fernando Reig Matthies

New York Times:

The idea that you do not have to be a professional to create a good commercial is becoming widespread, in a trend known as consumer-generated content. Leave it to Apple to paraphrasing the company’s old slogan a bit think differently.

A television commercial for the new iPod Touch from Apple, scheduled to begin running on Sunday, 10-28 is being created by the longtime Apple agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day. It is based on a commercial that an 18-year-old English student and Apple devotee named Nick Haley, who says he got his first Macintosh when he was 3 created on his own one day last month.

His spot offers a fast-paced tour of the abilities of the iPod Touch, set to a song titled ‘Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex’ by a Brazilian band, CSS.

Mr. Haley said he was inspired to make the commercial by a lyric in the song, ‘My music is where I’d like you to touch.’

He based the visual elements on video clips about the iPod Touch and other new products, which can be watched on the Apple Web site (apple.com). He uploaded his commercial to YouTube, where it received four stars out of a possible five and comments that ranged from ‘That’s awesome,’ followed by 16 exclamation points, to ‘Makes me want to buy one and hack it.’

Via fscklog

Communications chipmaker Broadcom today revealed that it had developed the BCM21551, the first major cellphone processor to include both 3G cellular data access as well as other technologies in a single chip. The chip is ready for current and near-future mobile Internet access with connections to HSDPA networks (such as AT&T, Rogers, and some European networks) peaking at 7.2Mbps in ideal downloads, and the fast-upload HSUPA at up to 5.8Mbps; new, however, are the inclusion of a radio receiver for picking up calls as well as an FM radio tuner and an integrated Bluetooth module. These give any future phone using the chip true high-speed Internet connections without requiring a separate processor and the increased size or reduced battery life that often comes with the extra hardware, Broadcom says. Legacy access to GPRS, EDGE, and other legacy connections are also built in.

The Broadcom development may address a key complaint of Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, who in a European press conference said that 3G iPhones were held back primarily because of the poor battery life of current chipsets. Most 3G phones top at three hours of battery life when using the technology for enhanced calls or data versus the eight hours of calls for slower, EDGE-only hardware. However, Apple currently uses Infineon hardware and would likely have to switch suppliers entirely to use the Broadcom development in the iPhone.

Via Electronista

Wii Overtakes Xbox 360 in Global Sales:

Not only did the Xbox 360 have a year-long head start, but the Nintendo still isn’t producing Wii consoles fast enough to meet demand. I still haven’t seen one on a store shelf.

Via Daring Fireball Linked List

My bank here in Spain seems to have some problems, as their online banking service has not been available for a few hours now.

After calling there call center a few minutes ago, they didn’t gave me any solution other than wait. They didn’t tell when they expect the service to be Online again.

It seems their Interactive Voice Response System is down as well, as I did get a real person on the phone this time, instead of the IVR that responds normally.

Update:

La avería “ha sido importante” y el proceso de recuperación de información “va a ser largo”, según apuntaron las fuentes, además de subrayar que la página web volverá a estar operativa a lo largo del día y que los usuarios afectados “serán compensados”.

My translation from this article excerpt of a major spanish online newspaper: The outage has been a serious one and the backup process is going to take longer, different sources have informed. The online service will be back during the day and that affected users will get compensated.

It’s past 20:30 and the service is still knocked out. I’m interested to see who will get compensated and with what. Perhaps they are giving away some new iPod Nano’s to be announced tomorrow by Steve Jobs.

Update: finally this morning the service was Online again. The thing I’m still missing is some kind of official information as being a customer for more than 9 years of what has happened and if the where some new measures taken to avoid this same problem in a future.

Instead I got an Ad in an Email where they talk about 24H/365D availability and the security the Online service has among other banalities and that I can win a Mazda6 car by using their service at least 3 times.

Sigh…

When he was 14, Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba built his family an electricity-generating windmill using spare parts and plans he found in a library book.

Java needs an overhaul: “I like Jonathan Schwartz a lot, but I think that unless some drastic changes are made to Java, the move to JAVA as Sun’s ticker symbol is going to be as relevant as changing it to COBOL. I’m using Java less and less as time goes by, not more – the heyday of the language and platform has come and gone, and IMHO, it’s going to continue to fade from relevance with increasing speed.

That doesn’t mean I don’t use Java every day still. There’s tons of servers out there with services I rely on whose back end is running on a Java server of some sort. And my phone has at least a dozen must-have apps and games that are all written in J2ME (Google Maps, Instango Jabber client, MidpSSH, MobiTV, Opera Mini, Tetris, Lumines, various GameJump games, and more).

But in general Java is yesterday’s technology.”

Remembering Java Naming Blunders Past: “Jonathan Schwartz’s blogged today about The Rise of JAVA – The Retirement of SUNW. Just when you think that things have changed, along comes a reminder of the Sun I used to work for. The stock ticker rename is cute and all, but it does kind of belittle all those other things that Sun does well that don’t have anything to do with Java. Like, Solaris and those cool Thumpers.”

Russ: People have been tinkering with Java for years now, and there’s still no hope in sight. There’s something about the Java culture which just seems to encourage obtuse solutions over simplicity. As a Java developer, I was always so amazed at how difficult it was to use the standard Java Class Libraries for day-to-day tasks. Every app out there ends up having to include 20MB of .jars in order to get even the simplest functionality working because Java libraries are so low-level and incomplete. Having to write a loop to pull in bytes and assemble them into a StringBuffer myself if I want to get a web page is not only a pain, it’s also incredibly short of implementing the HTTP standard compared to something like libcurl. Why is this sort of basic functionality missing from Java’s standard install?