Steve Jobs Calls AppleTV a Hobby

This video of Steve Jobs was taken during at the All Things Digital 2007 conference. The extracts from the complete discussion are quite interesting. What amused me the most is how he describes the Apple business being 3 things; one of them being a hobby :- the AppleTV ;-)

But the best part is Steve Jobs talking about iTunes on Windows and describing it as «giving a glass of ice water to someone in hell»! LOL...

Microsoft Surface Announced

Microsoft yesterday evening announced its new human interface environment named Surface. The solution is quite impressive and provides a coffee table type screen with multi-touch input, something like what has been included in the Apple iPhone but in a bigger format. Check out the Popular Mechanics Video on Surface.

Interestingly enough this is not a «brand new» idea or technology. Microsoft, Apple and Synaptic are just commercializing an innovate solution developed by the Jeff Han at the New York University called Multi-Touch Interaction Research. I had, for my current job, helped identify this solution as a new and more intuitive mechanism for user to data interaction. I still believe it will be an incredible advance in the way we visualize and interact with data! ;-) What is good is that both Microsoft and Apple are really bringing this to the forefront and into the mainstream...

Definitely something to watch!

Whoa! StarCraft II Finally Announced

I was no great fan of the original StarCraft. I was more of a Emperor - Battle for Dune or Dark Reign fan. This weekend Blizzard finally made the long awaited announcement that StarCraft II was in production and slated for release sometime in the near future [does that mean this year or next or ??? :- I wonder ;(]

The new version promises quick a fair bit of upgrades to the previous incarnation, including:

• More distinctive race attributes meaning that the different playable races will have specific gaming elements;
• Upgraded abilities for the original units that were present in the original
• Uses a 3D engine that "realistic physics and the ability to render several large, highly detailed units and massive armies on-screen simultaneously."
• Map editing to make your own battle grounds
• Provides multiplayer support but only through battle.net if what has been currently written is true.

The hype intrigued me to check out the initial coverage from the usual places 1Up.com, GameSpot, IGN, etc. The game itself looks pretty impressive. IMHO when you see images like these and play footage like this you hard pressed to wonder if you will be able to resist not getting the game. My primary worry is what kind of processing power this is going to require.

I do have one regret though, why is it not MMORPG like? With World of Warcraft, Blizzard is leader of the pack in this domain so why not apply some of these learned techniques to new games... maybe for the 3rd iteration!

For more coverage check-out this 1Up story.

Revisiting Ruby on Rails

While perusing digg.com today, I came across this interesting web page on Ruby on Rails tutorials. I had been following the developments of Ruby for awhile now but this page actually provided something useful: a set of tutorial links.

I was certainly intrigued by the flavor and depth of the list of help and tutorial sites. One link was especially useful and it includes an interactive tutorial: TryRuby!. Very nice...

Digging deeper, I found a really interesting video (it almost impressed me and that's no mean feat!): Creating a Weblog in 15 mins.

Conclusion: Going to invest some more time in a deeper understanding of Ruby on Rails.

Job Hunting Madness

So during my convalescence, I realized that it was definitely time to start exploring new job opportunities. There are many reasons for this decisions but primarily because I realized that my current job is not going anywhere and has little or zero growth potential.

I have had contacts with some of the major players in the IT world but with no luck for the moment.

However this is where I have fallen into a catch-22 type situation. Why? As it would seem that the IT/IS industry is much more interested in looking for young cheap staff (and I suppose more dynamic)! But what happened to the need for experienced professionals to be give guidance and strength to those IT projects...

My search continues, I have my CV and search engines posted on most of the major online job sites (monster, stepstone, ...)