AsierArranz.com

Today is Thursday, and what better day to tell of one of the events that was unknown for me until I visited Madrid when I was in Open Movilforum 2009.I know about this event by its director, Ildefonso Mayorgas .

The Thursday is an event that brings Internet-related people. In today’s edition (no. 96) there are involved Red.es and eBay. A few thursdays ago Enrique Perez (in El Hormiguero Flipy) (the producer of Muchachada Nui) and Ruben Ontiveros (director and screenwriter of QueVidaMasTriste.com ) was in the event.

Now the Thursday is approaching to the 100th edition, let’s see what topics will be discussed in it.

The event is held the last Thursday of each month, in fact its alternative name is “Last Thursday.”

During the explosion of “Internet bubble 1.0″ there was more than one employer that was having lots of difficulties. Now with the rise of 2.0 there are many topics to discuss, and Thursday is speaking about all of them.

If any of you want to participate, in the Thursday website often you have a form like this or you can contact directly with last @ thursday . com if as they say on the web, you believe that your impressions may be interesting for the discussion.

Asier Arranz General

Translation pending… Available in spanish:

Suena el despertador… las 7:50, ducha, desayuno rápido y al metro, que desde Atocha a Ronda de Comunicaciones hay que coger dos líneas de metro y se tarda 1 hora en llegar.
A las 9:30 llego y entro a la conferencia de Sami Viitanen sobre los WRT Widgets de Nokia, etoy intentando conseguir la presentación que nos hizo, que era muy didáctica, cuando la consiga haré un post sobre los WRT Widgets. Son unas aplicaciones que se quedan en la pantalla principal y al hacer click en ellos se ejecutan. Están programados en HTML, CSS y javascript y pueden acceder a funciones internas del terminal.
Un ejemplo en el Nokia N97 que estaba allí:

Widgets en el N97

Widget del tiempo abierto (sin conexión)

También se habló de la Ovi Store que va a poner Nokia en marcha para que los desarrolladores distribuyan sus aplicaciones. Poco después me dí unas vueltas por la feria y estuve viendo cómo funcionaba de bien la Microsoft Surface, que debía haber unas 4 o 5 en toda la feria.

Otra de las pantallas que me llamó la atención fue la pantalla 3D que estaba conectada al decodificador especial de Imagenio, que ofrecía unas imágenes 3D muy nítidas, usando para ello tan solo un 15% más de ancho de banda en la señal recibida (recibe la imagen y un mapa de profundidades en vez de dos imágenes)

Poco más tarde aparecieron dos reporteras muy majas de Agora News, que me hicieron una entrevista y me estuvieron contando cómo lo tenían montado. Todas las entrevistas que iban haciendo las tenían montadas y subidas en media hora al Videoblog. Es una agencia de noticias íntegramente digital, trabajan sobre streaming y videoblogs.

Y eso es todo, la feria cerraba a las 15:30, pasaron demasiados canapés y pinchos xD, sobre todo sussi, carne, “chupitos” de ajiblanco (sabor a gazpacho), y mil cosas más. Después de picotear algo, de vuelta al bus, cuatro horitas y a casita.

Un par de días muy interesantes, en los que he podido ver muchas cosas. Y a hora a mi y a todos los que quieran desarrollar para móviles se nos presenta una pregunta, ¿Qué móvil comprar para desarrollar?

Nokia N97 vs Android G2 vs Nuevo Iphone

Probablemente sea uno de los próximos temas. Un saludo.

Asier Arranz General

I’m back, finaly I didn’t write from Madrid, you will know why later… ;) MovilForum has been great, I have met many interesting people who have very good running projects . I’ve also been testing HTC Magic and especially the Nokia N97, which I was eager to see it.
I have also been able to attend to a presentation about Nokia WRT Widgets and the Ovi Store.

The bus from Bilbao takes about four hours, and the first thing that I feel in Madrid is a tremendous heat (36 º C in the shade). I go to the Round Communications station by subway (¡Ironically there is no coverage in the subway station! !) and I arrive at the “City of Telecommunications,” is a complex of buildings of futuristic design with double glazing and have a central space with a large pond and a fountain that throws water to about 30 meters, all very green and wooded, with ducks! Here you have a panoramic shot that I get:

Panoramic shot of the views:

I enter in the building and after the check-in I meet with Open Movilforum frineds, who have the stand there. The venue is not too big but there are many exhibitors, mainly from mobile terminals and logistics services and fleets control.

I plug the laptop, in this case a good NETBOOK the Asus 1000HE, maybe one day I will post about it, it’s awesome with its 9 hours and a half of real autonomy, and the demos start …

PyNoki and NiiMe

The main demo that I went to present was PyNoki, it uses Open Movilforum API’s from Movistar to be able to locate people and to establish automatically 3G connections through an SMS. Surprisingly NiiMe attracts more attention, it might be because is more attractive to use the accelerometers to drive a car or navigate through Google Earth . The afternoon was very entertaining :)

At 7 pm I went to the hostel, a hostel for bloggers (¡¿?!) that Open Movilforum reserved for me, It was great for the price that have (26 €!) . It has a single bed, all furniture is new, the bathroom in the room is very clean and new, and especially it has a very well placed desktop with network cable included. The hostel is Hostal Martín . Highly recommended!

I was hoping to keep writing the blog that night, but Ildefonso Open Movilforum invited me out to be with a group that was in the Dakar Madrid making a presentation about Second Life by Wilhelm Lappe . I did more informal demos about NiiMe for those who were there, while taking some beer. We spent a good time :)

A day and a night with very good atmosphere, but there are many interesting things to tell that occurred on the second day of Movilforum 2009.

(To be continued ..)

Asier Arranz Curiosidades / Curiosities, Fotografía / Photography, Proyectos / Projects, Tecnología / Technology

My friends from Open Movilforum have invited me to go to the MovilForum 2009 event, (20th to 21th May) in the Telefónica Telecommunications City(Madrid).
I will do some demonstrations on the use of the open API’s provided by Movistar (thay are here).

The main demonstration will be PyNoki, but I have a some projects which I could add these API’s.

Tomorrow I will go to Madrid, then I will post all interesting things here. See you tomorrow ;)

Asier Arranz General 2009, arranz, asier, feria, movilforum

I’m going to make a comparison very fast and simple, where you will see that there is no color between the two companies that offer a similar price, but one is light years away from the other, and I know why I say this.

If you are looking for unlimited domains, unlimited transfer and good price, after reading this you will know what company is better.

Recently I have had my PHP webpages hosted on a server (Apache) at home. I have zillions of gigabytes of space and unlimited transfer in Powweb, paying about $90 a year, to host the projects NiiMe and PyNoki, becaus I didn’t want to exceed my monthly transfer with NiiMe downloads.

But with PHP pages on Powweb the horror began… the pages take from 7 to 20 seconds to start loading, was terribly slow. I contacted support and they told me that everything was going well. So I migrate the PHP webpages to the web server that I have in my home.

Tired of all this, I tried with HostGator…
Hostgator has a great control panel. In addition I contacted support because a Python script that I wanted to run on the server didn’t work, and within hours they changed the configuration of the server and the script worked. Customer care system by “chat” is simply great.

Web sites load at very good speed, in fact this page is loaded from Hostgator. So if you are looking for a very good, very nice and very cheap hosting, no doubt, test Hostgator. And no, they haven’t paid me for saying this xD

Regardless, the aligator eats Powweb. Ñam Ñam … :)

Asier Arranz General

PyNoki is software that I have developed that allows to interact with a mobile phone remotely, getting images, enviromental sound, actual movement factor and localization, allowing the server to act on the phone when given conditions are detected, by synthetizing voice, making automated calls from the terminal and sending text messages composed by the server.

This allows us to use this application with use cases like these:
- Control of mobility in elderly people (Check they are performing exercises / walks at certain times)
- Monitoring through enviromental noise and images, and reaction to changes (SMS, call, …)
- Reminder to do exercise if there have not been noticeable movements
- Monitoring of the terminal when entering a specific area
- Measuring the activity of the user of the terminal throughout the day
- Etc.

I have presented PyNoki to the 4th mashups competition organized by Open Movilforum, the project incubator of Telefonica Movistar. And PyNoki won!! :-)

The project will continue with many improvements that I will publish soon.

More in: www.PyNoki.com

Asier Arranz General

After a month of inquiries, it seems that I have found a solution. Until now, many models of Acer laptops suddenly display a white screen (called “white screen of death”), this usually happens after a couple of months after purchase.

It’s very difficult to identify the problem because it’s a random error, so I start to work in the solution because I prefer to touch my computer instead of sending it to the service. Many users have sent his laptop to the Acer Service and have returned with the same fault, with the screen replaced!!

I will send an email to Acer. Tehy could sen me an Acer Timeline as gratitude xD (If you are looking for lightweight laptop have a look)

I leave you with the disassembly video and photos in which is shown the exact point of the connector of the screen on which you must to exert pressure indefinitely. I used a paper folded several times , as simple as useful …

Ideally, a piece of rubber, but the objective is to do pressure (not much)

1. Open the laptop
2. Find the conector of the screen (the larger)



3. Put over it a non-conductive thing (folded paper, rubber…)



4. Close the lid carefully (first fit the side nearest the keyboard)
5. While we’re closing, watch that you are not moving the point of pressure and that it continues pushing the connector

   And eureka! SOLVED! , I have been over a month without white screen, before, i saw the white screen sometimes every day and sometimes every 2-3 day. A few days ago and before publishing this, to make sure I removed the paper and … white screen!

   Greetings to the unofficial Acer forums! I hope that this solve the problem for you! ;)

   Asier Arranz General, Tecnología / Technology

I have had a lot of problems with a spanish ISP provider, and because of that the blog has been 3 months offline (home server), more details in spanish article

Asier Arranz General