James Blake recently release a self titled album. It’s something that I have listening for quite a number of times. While playing the album and seeing some recent videos I’ve shot with my Canon 550D, I notice that my cat behavior and the music The Wilhelm Scream seemed to go along pretty well.
So I decided to do a video with some of those videos to the song The Wilhelm Scream by James Blake.
It did take a lot of work, but I just had to do it

Here is the result. I hope you like it. I tried to tell a history, although it is a bit non-sense but funny.

James Blake – The Wilhelm Scream (Lost Grouse) from Tiago Cardoso on Vimeo.

Oh, the kitten’s name is Puma. She quite happy even though it doesn’t appear to be so on the video.. you just have to thrust me.

Smart tourism is a great activity. It takes some effort and time, but with a tight budget you really can have great vacations and travel lots of cool places.
I’ve been lucky to do this practice for some time now. This implies not only to read a lot of information about the place I’m visiting, search a lot of hotel deals and reviews, but essentially, combining low cost and discount flights analyzing the best departure and return dates (depending on my work constraints) and places to visit.

I can only speak for my experience, but I think most of people when deciding to have some vacations only have a very generic idea of what and where they want to go. This make the action of seeing where my budget can take me really important and probably the first step even before I decide where to go.
I can check what flights can I take having 2 or 3 places to visit.

This practice helped me have great vacations: Madrid + Lyon and Provence, France + Cote D’azur, France + Alpes and Genebra; London + Sardina + Milan; Kuala Lumpur + Singapore + Perhentian Islands; etc..
The trouble with all this is the actual work. Seeing hundreds of flight, having an excel sheet to combine all the information takes a lot of time and I’m not able to do it exhaustible as it would take millions of flight combinations and time I do not have to do it.

So, why not use Artificial Intelligence?
A computer, with a little of intelligence should be able to perform such a search and give me my best options in an exhaustive way.
Travel Budget is exactly this, Smart Tourism on a web application.

We already have a alpha version. Here is a video.

It uses some innovative search algorithms and is implemented with Scala and Akka so it can scale well (actually I was very very pleased with Scala and Akka).
At this point, I’m really impressed with the results. It was able to surprise me with almost every search I did. Probably the most useful travel tool I’ve seen in a while!

When we reach a Beta version, we will open a limited Beta program. You can register for news right on the Travel Budget site so you know when it starts.

Just a quick note on TimeShot.
I’ve released the application a while ago but missed the opportunity to post a release note here.
Well, better late than never

Here is a demo video of it. It is the best way to understand it.

Go visit TimeShot to get the app and more info.

For the last months, we have been working a software to park aircraft and manage ground operations on airport facilities.
First of all, here is a demo:

This new complex application was built upon our recent actionscript 3 SVG framework.
Initially, this framework allowed to render a big scope of SVG, an easy extend to create innovative drawing and editing tools (like expectation list, shape recognition).
To enable Ground Operations, we decided to go one step ahead and do:

SVG + Semantics = Awesome!!

Semantics as in behaviours and context out of just drawing elements.
To this effects we used the class attribute from SVG nodes. Adding a class we can create “special” nodes that can relate graphical information with behaviour. To make this more clear, just imagine that you have any graphical SVG node (a path, a group..) a you add the class “collidable”. At this point all these node will have collision detection and send events of collision that you can work with after (alert, highlight, have collision movement,..). So, we have a SVG node with behaviour regarding its graphical representation.
Another example is physics. A graphical element allows you to set it as “physic body” and drag it around with physical behaviour.

This is a very powerful concept as we can add context and behaviour to random graphical elements created in a huge number of tools offline as come to live on the framework.

In the case of our new application, we have more complex classes, like “Aircraft” that following a structure, know exactly what and where landing gears are (and create paths when moving), know where the plane nose is and check where it is parked, know its body parts and had them collision behaviour or even now its silhouette and use it to extend it to simulate the 3-foot rule (safety distance between aircraft).

There is also classes like parking spots, hangars, hangar’s doors, so we can have, as an example, functional hangars of any shape or format.
So, the whole facility and ground is just a plain SVG that can be viewed at any time in any browser or application and that we can even change offline and use it again in the application. That is flexibility!

What was wonderful, was that all aircraft were “legacy” SVG material and we were able with small changes to incorporate them on the application directly from file.

We are doing other projects that also use this concept of semantics over SVG and it’s really great.

Last night it happened. Usually, I’m not shocked by news even when they are shocking ones, probably because of overexposure to Media; they just don’t seem that real most of time. But this was different, I confess that it shocked me and surprised me a lot. I’m not used to be this impacted by Internet or TV. Maybe it happened because it was almost personal. It’s not that I’m a Michael Jackson fan, although I really love many of his songs, but because I my youth I was a fan and it marked my relation with music.
My first vinyl (not really my as it was offered as a birthday gift to my older brother.. but we share) was Bad. I was about 7 years old and it was something special, I really listen to it; I even record it to K7 (piracy ??) so I could listen to it on my crappy Walkman.

I even remenber that on my street (the time when kids just hang around at the streets and play there) we were really exciting about going to see the Moonwalker movie at a friend’s house. Remembering now, that film is unimportant, but it really impressed me at that age.
Micheal Jackson had a weird development and strange living, but hell, he could never be normal, not with his talent and cultural surroundings.

This really feels like it was too soon, but it happens when it happens.

RIP

The road to the European parliament is over, although this election wasn’t noticed by many, judging by number of people that got off their asses to gone vote. Is the voting process obsolete; is voting to hard for our fast-tracking society; are we too fat and lazy to do it or is the EU just not in our hearts (started as an elitist communion) ?
Maybe it’s a mix of all these ingredients… well.. much probably. Nevertheless, we start seeing real changes on democracy. First with the election of Obama, that really broke the normality of the electoral “system” and gave hope to many and now, maybe as important (although, we must remember that we are talking about a north european country) a “pirate-based” (not those on Somalia) just got elected, getting two spots on the European parliament.

Pirate Party

The Pirate Party is the hot stuff to all Sweden youth. Some say that they got votes for defending free file-sharing that might not be all that good: people that produce contents should have their fair share (although a huge crib and 5 Bugatti’s may not be consider fair) . But, actually, I think they won over their fight for a more free and private web with less government surveillance. As paradoxical as it may seem, we use the web to share all our privacy with blogs, social networks, twitter, facebook, flickr and other more “parental control”  sites but still, the internet is manly used to protect and to communicate our most private issues. Trying to block the government right to see our mail (at least in Sweden) is probably the main reason they got their vote and rightly did.

But for me, the most important aspect of these two European sits is that they came from the web, from the internet comunity, from blogs, networks, social sites, from the buzz. Almost exclusive from these sources. This is a big change on the game! And the first of many that I think is fair to foreseen in the near future.

The web is taking over the democracy, actually accentuating on the “demo” part of the word. First, making people more active, more pro-active and aware. After it, more organized and clustered in ideas and movements. Thirdly, by having massive voting with near zero abstinence once the voting is “cheap”, available, being it on mobile or web. On this not-so-distant level, people will be more informed; citizens decisions will be more representative (we’ll see if more responsible or plain right ), but what is decided will give people a more direct sense of participation and responsibility to change the future.

This all seems to be great and it is, but when it will come all together and in all levels: national, local, regional, and “real-time” is when democracy will be more pure. This would be a revolution, having people being able to organize themselves and giving them the power to decide and execute directly. It will be positive in many ways: the catchphrase “they
‘re not doing anything right” would not be that valid anymore, people could really feel that they are making a change and that they have the power to actually make it, even if on a very local level. Most importantly, the interest of what happens, what is decided and done would not of any small group of interest but from the people; not meaning that this would be better every time, but would be definitely less perverse.

I’m talking about this like it’s 2099 but it’s already happening in several parts of the society. Take a look at this film that someone shared with me over the web, maybe you’ll be inspired and change something.

Us Now from Banyak Films on Vimeo.

I don’t know the future, but the revolution will be retweet!

oh.. Phoenix.

Recently I saw some posts about the port of OpenCV’s face recognition to Adobe Actionscript. That’s great news and one guy even did some enhancements. So, after I came across with this demo, where you get the choose a pair of glasses and they “stick” to you face, I thought that what would be cool was if you could draw the glasses or for that propose, any other thing. We have a nice Flex/Actionscript framework that enable us to draw SVG, so why not try it out.
After only a couple of hours, the app was almost running. Some edges cleaned and here it is!
This is very basic stuff: you stop the camera, wait for it to recognize you face, so it’s perfectly align with the frame and then just use the tools to draw!
Here is an example of me in a lame pirate costume

No more waiting, where it is. Enjoy… oh!.. and please send photos of what you were able to do… pleeeasse (actually, a comment with a flickr – or any other – URL is just perfect).
Nice face paintings:

(update your Flash version if needed)

We made a short video demo featuring some new tools from inevo’s Actionscript2D graphical Editor/Viewer. This demo shows mostly the camera manager, that lets users bookmark viewports,zooming,pan and rotation, witch most editors don’t support. It also shows how images are supported and run smoothly. Some features like Mirror action is also in it, witch is kind of cool. Here is the video with the latest developments:

This video was made over a new application we are developing for OneMileUp to empower airports facilities to control and manage easily their ground space, aircrafts reservations, arrivals and departures and services on their staying. This application is getting really shinning and the use of our framework as fitted like a glove! It was really easy and quick to start building it and see fast results.
I’ll have another post on this application later when it’s released. Hopefully, with a good demo video.

As some of you may know, our framework works with the vector graphical standard, SVG. On some great blogs, people have been talking about the irony of having a flash graphical editor that does SVG, but if you think about it, SVG is the standard for vector graphics and having the (and only) representation of our models and graphical elements in SVG is a big deal. Joining the power of Flex / actionscript / Flash creates a great framework to create graphical applications, far more powerful than any type of “pure” SVG development.

Why is it more powerful then SVG development? Well, flash has the ability to do many things like messing with transformations, image processing, Ui handle, bitmap drawing, printing and much much more. It’s actionscript, we can join in a bunch of other libraries – like degrafa, sigularity, box2d, papervision3d, etc.. – to optimize or extend our framework. It’s really amazing.

Having this lib producing and accepting SVG is really important to some applications when you want either to reuse graphical elements that you may already have or to output information that can be later reused on other applications and libraries. It just makes sense to use standards.

Hey, no time no see. Sorry for the long absence but me and Nelson have been working really hard on a new application for the apple store. This new software performs a series of tweaks and optimizations so your iPhone battery lives much much much longer (yes! 3X much). We been able to extend the battery life in to 34 extra hours!!!
The tweaks and optimizations kick in when your battery level starts getting lower, diminish the need for power and thereby extended the lifetime till the next recharge. It is really amazing, almost as amazing as OnLive, and works!

The application is not quite ready yet and still has to be approved by Apple (sure they will approve it and be as trilled as we are).
We always thought that not be able to use our iPhone just because we have no battery is a poor feature and a very demanding requirement from Apple’s hardware.

How does it work ? Here is a very non-technical descriptions of what it does, so anyone can follow:

On the sound/mp3 side as it starts getting a low battery it does in order:

• Takes out the electronic beats;
• Takes out the electric guitar;
• The singer will not sing so loud and can even whisper;
• Transforms the song in an acoustic version (no more electricity needed);
• Takes out the singer’s mic (even in acoustic, it’s used)
• Starts taking off instruments;
• If the bat is almost dead changes to “Only Triangle Mode” (if available).

On the video part, we have the:

• First action, takes out all special effects! (it demands a lot!);
• Gathers some battery from day shots (only works for sunny days);
• Car chase scene changes to foot chase;
• Shots at colorful African places change to darks, dull north European cities;
• In night shots, only public illumination is available (free electricity);
• Only fire illumination visible;
• People on videos only communicate in gestural language;
• Transforms all color to a more dark color of code 0X000000;

We are still working on the phone and talking part itself, but we are some difficulties with Morse code.
It will be also provided, for a more advance user a SD card so the application can save the all Internet to the card, taking the need to use the 3G connection.

Still no word on price, but here is a preview of a video on the iPhone.
First, with full battery:

Now with only 1/10 of battery (it can work for about 20 hours on this mode):