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lunes, 26 de noviembre de 2012

The longest journey: the movie

One thing that I forgot to mention on my previous post related about my last freaking awesome weekend was the fact that I have proves about it happened, so like they say in Facebook "if there's no picture it didn't happen", here it's the video about my WebRTC DataChannels & ShareIt! project I did the last friday in front of 75 persons on the RealTimeWeb conference (sorry, audio in spanish... Having only about three minutes you don't have too much time to think in english and you can only hope to talk as fast as possible... :-P).



If you can't be able to see the video you can download it on MP4 or WebM.

Just to say that althoug in the video it "doesn't work" later I investigated and was a bug of Chrome v25 unstable (obviusly... ¬¬) and just closing the tabs and openning them again it worked the second time (now I need a new video to show that it happened... :-P )

Slides are availables on the RealTimeWeb site and also the ShareIt! repository.

The longest journey

The last 72 hours have been one of the longest and most full-filled weekends I have had ever.

First of all, the friday I did my first wide-spread demo and presentation of ShareIt! (if we don't take in account the little one that I did some weeks ago for the Python Madrid guys) at the RealTimeWeb conference here at Madrid in front of 75 persons (the biggest public I have had in a presentation). In short: an awesome success :-D It was just a little and fast presentation because the organization run out of time and also I needed to go the the 3 Day Startup later, but the fact is that in less of 3 minutes I did the presentation, showed a demo, and the public exploded in ovations :-D (the fact that being the (almost?) only one in all the world working in some really awesome high-edge technology just because it's not ready yet would be the cause... :-P) Also, the fact that I got some propositions from the UPM teachers to work on their investigation projects related with WebRTC and they also gave me some good ideas to solve the signaling problem are some really great news too, by the way... :-P Keep listening... ;-)

But if this was not enough, as I have just say I needed to go the the 3DS so didn't be able to participate on the hackathon of the afternoon (with some iPad-mini as prices, just some kind of deviavious temptation after my Galaxy Tab I won on the CUSL two years ago with PirannaFS was stolen the last week... ¬¬). What to say about the 3DS? Crazy, period. It was about just like a small-sized CampusParty but without my sleep sack under the table. Some of the projects were really interesting and in fact I needed to flip a coin in the last moment just to select between two of them about were to work (maybe with some telekinetics since It was complementary to my Priorities project... :-P), and the fact is that in the last three days I have work more hours than in a normal job week and spend more energies than in a month :-P Add to this the fact about going to bed not before of 4 o'clock and waking-up at 8:00 to be early in the morning on the event (I didn't want to do it, by finally they convinced me to take some beers all the nights... :-P) and now you would understand why this morning I seems a brain-less zombie :-P The bad news is that it was a one-shoot, so I will not be able to use the experience and propose the next year a better project (I was thinking about a "producer for genious" company to take out all the burocrazy and mind-disturbing things and let "genious" to concentrate on their work in a similar way movies producers take in account all the boring details and let the movies directors to do the magic) so maybe this is something I would change about it... :-( In any case, if I can, I'll repeat the experience :-D

But on the personal area the best news would be that after four years working on the private sector and forced to "back to the basis" (no job, no money and just have part-time university classes and being full-time freaking with my geek personal projects :-P) I'm remembering why I wanted to work on computers programming and how I spected my live would be, and yes, THIS is what I wanted (or at least is on the good way :-D). Maybe add some romantics and action-packet and this is the kind of blockbuster I would like to live ;-)

So in few words... in the last four days I would have sleep about no more than 16 or 20 hours :-P

viernes, 16 de noviembre de 2012

FirefoxOS and HTML5 myths

Recently I have had some discussions and mocks regarding being FirefoxOS as the platform of the future (they was the ones that joke about me being an Apple fanboy and now they got crazy with the Nexus 4 availability issues like Justin Bieber fans... :-P ), so this links would be useful to get the things clear: first steps about hacking on FirefoxOS and some HTML5 Myths unveiled. Just a piece of cake... :-)

Hosting anywhere

During this week I have got the good news that ShareIt! will be included as part of two PhD thesis (woah!!!) that it's something several light years far away about what I would consider a success (Stefan Dühring and Arindra Das, truly thanks you so much! :-D ) with the exception of an e-mail with a job offer from Google :-P

But in both cases they had problems to deploy and test the code locally because they didn't finish to get the concept of being a pure client-side webapp, but at the same time requiring a handshake signaling server and a DataChannels backend server, so both asked me about a non-existent node.js server that hosted and served the app (I got problems while developing ShareIt! and DataChannel-polyfill to change my mind from a client-server way of thinking to a pure distributed one, and the telling the truth the WebRTC specification doesn't help about this for the non-specialized people...). I got a little bit obsesed about this point and to prove that being a pure client side webapp there's no necesity of a hosting server (just a simple static file web server), inspired by a recent idea I got about using DropBox to increase speed of downloads (enabling more host peers) and as backup of peers transfer, I decided to retake the fact that DropBox can be used as a basic static web server and improve the support for it. This included change all external references to use secure connections since DropBox serve the files through a SSL enabled connection, and if the content is not secure the web browsers would complain to protect the user (and that's ugly). On the other hand this allowed to encrypt all the communications so it's a win-win situation :-)

But this was not enough, I needed to show more versatility, and got it: I found this blog entry that explain in an almost step-by-step way how to explote DropBox and GitHub as free static pages web servers, and specially for deploiment of webapps. Just a sweet :-)

So here we are, currently I'm able to serve and host ShareIt! on three different web services, all directly availables on the web and interoperable between them: 5Apps, DropBox and unexpectedly GitHub, and also it's installable as browser extension. Add to this the fact that Firefox 18 "Alder" now start to have native support for DataChannels and WebKit already has it (Chrome v25 will have to wait a little bit more), and we are almost up to a point where ShareIt! will be impossible to take down (I hope that on the RealTimeWeb hackathon I would be able to get a way to drop-off the handshake server and reach the Holy Grail of Internet... :-P).

Let's the revolution begin!!! :-D

jueves, 8 de noviembre de 2012

Scream if you wanna go faster

PageSpeed Insights is a webpage that allow to check the performance of a web page (specially about load time and bandwidth) both for desktop and mobile, but also give suggestions to improve it solving some typical errors, and also there are extensions for Firefox and Chrome to run it locally :-) At this moment it give a 73% value for desktop and 63% for mobile, I'll try later to make Google scream a little bit more (pun intended ;-) ).