Wikipedia 10th anniversary

So today was Wikipedia 10th anniversary celebration world wide. 10 years in the tecnology world is like a whole era, and having a community project such as this has been incredible. Since it caught me by surprise, little I did to have a local celebration of wikipedia celebration. However the list was interesting and there were plenty of events in Mexico. However there were also other activities going on specially in the virtual space. So I did attend the IRC room and the facebook sites as well as some of the hashtags. However some of the interesting things that I did was actually using it. Spending time in the site and the more lesser known projects of the Wikipedia Foundation specially the specialized products.

There are interesting stuff going on on these sites and spending time getting to know it will definitely help you out in the future. Things like WikiNews, WikiSource, Wikiquotes, Wiki Commons and others. I particuarly liked the Wikiversity which is a complete school program full of information for every level.

Things like the Wikibooks is also another specialized site that will provide a whole library of ebooks published under a free license. Is interesting for authors that want to get a book out there for everyone to enjoy.

Wikispecies has also more scientific information and biologist might find it amazing repository of information that could help and they can provide the preservation of quality information about our world and the species living in those ecosystems.

Jimmy finally thanked everyone involved with the project and gave it’s video to the general public and published on the wikimedia site. My biggest quote was a testimony of what I experienced recently with wikipedia and other sites like google:

One of the most important experience with wikipedia was when I was talking with a friend. I remembered an episode from my childhood of Twilight Zone. An obscure episode from my childhood memories that I was chatting about, after doing a search wikipedia had a list of all the episodes and I could rescue the exact episode information …Within minutes I was able to watch Wikipedia again. Thanks Wikipedia for reviving my childhood memories.

Thanks Wikipedia for 10 years of incredible information and sharing the narrations, quotes and valuable information that have helped everyone.

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Codejam and Development Thursday

So today was a great day, well rather yesterday I guess. I spent a couple of hours late night with a bunch of other developers on a conf call and coding at the same time. This was a great experience coming from the somewhat disbelief of the events that are being undertaken by some of my peers. Don’t get me wrong, I believe the event is a good idea, but having too many events might become a distraction of the real goal. So I started a code jam just to see the difference.

So CodeJam’s big difference is what do you know that you want to share, and what we can do together as a collective. I think that smart people know how to work together, while not so smart people are satisfied by just talking about their individual achievements. So to avoid ending up with a group on the lather I try to come up with a more active group that could provide some insight into the coding development and learn it through the practical documentation.

Since I have a global call conference center at my disposal I tried to use it and start doing development with these couple of guys. The goal was to create at least the basic examples of the framework we were targeting.

The framework we saw was Raphael and Pyjamas. The first one was a Javascript framework for the manipulation of SVG. The second one was a python framework to generate multiple effects through HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Originally it was about Javascript but I think the current form goes beyond it and into new development of things.

We had lots of fun trying to solve the first examples and end up with a great satisfaction about being able to at least start understanding the framework. Unfortunately starting so late make us finish early as well. Not to mention that we just got to install it and configure it. I hope some of the guys stick to it and come up with something good on their own.

During the chit chat we came also with some questioning about the use of IDE, and how vim is very powerful but we need better information on how to use it. Something that I somewhat solved by finding a presentation on the use of VIM and PHP.

The next day was the Development meetup and well it wasn’t as good as I expected but eventually we got stuff out there. At least we shared some good links of projects regarding AppEngine, Javascript’s Frameworks for games and other interesting development of Google Maps. I also showed what we did the night before at the codejam meetup and well we got to talk about how to better organize ourselves. The meeting end up on a great note as we were talking about trying to pull out geeks from the university one of the baristos from the starbucks came and talk to us asking about being a student of one of the colleges I went at the beginning of the week and asking if we could contact them. Which was exactly what I did this monday. I hope that he email me so we can come down to something interesting.

Live from El Futuro 2010 in my hometown

Today was a day that many in my hometown were waiting for many days. The event enterprise by a friend called ‘el futuro’ but regardless of the odd name, it included great entrepreneurs with good explanation of what this social media and social marketing is all about. New services and solve problems and get rich while doing it. Even thought it still isn’t a proven model for many, for many others it has definitely generated wealth to some.

So the talks were pretty good with good data, things about the Internet economy in Mexico and other related markets like South America and Spain. The consumption is actually pretty good in Mexico and the potential market is actually there. However the Internet economics work interest ways and many people still see many reservation between the web society and the traditional society.

Does Linux users come to be good internet citizens?

This week I have been with my ankle recovering from a nasty twist that I suffered while playing basketball. Nevertheless I think that some of the most important talks I have had has been when I went with my friend Luis to get away from the intense heat and have a frozen coffee and enjoy of the free wifi. We had a talk on the future of Tabasco as far as web 2.0 and technology is concern. he told me that through his brother he manage to met a bunch of kids that want to start a web 2.0 venture. However this fear doesn’t just go to the web but to technology as a whole. Unfortunately we see that there is not enoughknowledge from the kids coming out from school about the web, business and ho to structure their idea. At the same time I think that one of the people I wil have more hope will be ex/linux users or people tha participate with GULTab. So far I have one reference that has been pretty positive. Vkn a college student that has taken some how of leadership in his school and have been strong on pushing FLOSS in his univerisity. He had worked on the college radio on spreading the FLOSS knowledge. He also have managed the development of FLISOL. He definetly has been a kid that has dkept on with the information about what free software and technology can do for everyone. However my question comes with what about the rest of the ex-GULTAB people, have they kept with Linux and free sofwtare?Lately I found a blogpost from Darkness that talked about the good ol days where GULTab was forming and the fun time that wee shared. After that however I saw a lot of the ex people from GULTab jumping in a conversation about what we can do in the future and revive the organization. Sadly I dont see it likely but I wonder what have they been keep doing and if they finally succeed in their enviroment. El_Diablo dissapeared from the internet but you can still see his old blog from 2003. Kamelott seems to be blogging still, al3jandro (Darkness) still is an avid blogger; eMac also has a pownce account and twitter; OnlyAngel still tweets and finally alzate who I still don’t know what he do besides his 9 to 5. I also don’t know much about mittohuffman except he works like crazy and Dav_0r that also have very little internet life. PCero still online but do very little from what I have googled. Maybe they are doing stuff but I dont know much about it. Anyway I do hope at least their linux love still on and the internet still not a foreign land.