[Sat May 31 17:43:13 CEST 2008]

Yet another interesting application of Web 2.0 technologies to people's lives: learning foreign languages over the web. The sky is the limit when it comes to these types of web applications based on social networks. {link to this story}

[Fri May 30 18:22:47 CEST 2008]

About a week ago or so I read an interesting piece in the Spanish news about a Brazilian portal used by soccer teams to trade their players. It's one of those interesting applications of the new technologies to a traditional activity that makes a lot of sense, and yet I had never considered. {link to this story}

[Fri May 30 14:50:56 CEST 2008]

A couple of days ago, I had to go to a friend's apartment to share a document with her and teach her how to perform certain operations using MS Word. So, I brought my old Memorex thumb drive and proceeded to insert it into the USB port on her Windows XP desktop computer. As it tends to happen with many of these flash drives, mine comes with an executable file and some drivers to automatically load them and do whatever it wants to do on a Windows PC. It doesn't bother me, and I never removed them because I use Linux and my wife uses Apple, so neither the executable nor the driver ever load and don't get on our way. Well, that's not how things happened on my friend's Windows machine, of course. For starters, whenever the OS correctly identified the USB flash drive as a storage device, a frightening window would automatically pop up letting us know that a virus (curiously, one with the very same name as the executable saved there by the manufacturer of the thumb drive) was trying to execute. Unfortunately, there was no way back from there. Choosing the option to "clear" the virus would not work since, obviously, there was no virus. Then, ignoring the message would leave us in a situation where the flash drive would not be mounted and we couldn't work with the document I had saved on it. So, what to do? We tried removing the flash drive and inserting it into the USB port again. Well, now the OS identified it, installed the drivers needed to access it, still gave us the same frightening virus messages and... requested that we proceeded to reboot the system. What? Inserting a thumb drive into the USB port on a Windows XP machine requires a reboot? Now, that's great! So, we did. And what did we find when the system came back up? Well, the OS now noticed the storage device right away, but it was marked with a virus or security symbol (a shield) and attempting to open it to access its contents automatically showed the Choose an application to open the document with.. dialog. What? I'm just trying to browse the contents of a storage device, for crying out loud! What application do you want me to use to browse it? Windows Explorer, of course! Still, it didn't let us to. So, in the end we had to forget the idea of working with the document I had brought in my USB flash drive and we had to start another document from scratch. Don't you love user-friendly operating systems? I'm so glad I didn't have to deal with Linux —so cryptic and difficult to use— as I do every single day. Heck, if my friend had a Linux machine somewhere in her house we might even have been able to work! That's not what you use computers for, right? {link to this story}