2010 was a great year. This was a not typical year for books. The list is quite short. This list is what I could remember.

Games

1. Most, but not all, I finished
2. 3 Cards To Dead Time
3. Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None
4. Agatha Christie: Murder On The Orient Express
5. Amnesia
6. Assassin’s Creed 2
7. Borderlands
8. Cities XL
9. Civilization V
10. Darwinia
11. Dawn Of Discovery
12. Democracy 2
13. Donkey Kong Country Returns
14. Dragon Age: Origin
15. Epic Mickey
16. Europa Universalis III: Heir To The Throne
17. F1 2010
18. Fallout: New Vegas
19. Fifa 11
20. Gratuitous Space Battles
21. Harvey Teh Attorney
22. Kirby: Epic Yarn
23. Little King Story
24. Mafia 2
25. Mass Effect 2
26. Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit
27. New Super Mario Bros
28. No More Heroes 2
29. Rock Band Beatles
30. RUSE
31. Settlers 6
32. Settlers 7
33. Shatter
34. Super Matio Galaxy 2
35. The Saboteur
36. The Secret Files: Tunguska
37. Thief
38. X-Com: AI

Movies

1. 2012
2. Alice In Wonderland
3. Alien 3
4. Aliens
5. Angels & Demons
6. Avatar
7. Bounty Hunter
8. Brüno
9. Clash Of The Titans
10. Crazy Heart
11. Escape From New York
12. Fantastic Mr Fox
13. Funny People
14. Ghost Writer
15. Gosford Park
16. Green Zone
17. Halloween
18. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Pt 1
19. Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire
20. Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince
21. Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix
22. Hot Tub Time Machine
23. Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus
24. Inception
25. Inglourious Basterds
26. Kick Ass
27. LA Confidential
28. Law Abiding Citizen
29. Murder On The Orient Express
30. Near Dark
31. Paprika
32. Paranormal Activity
33. Prince Of Persia
34. Princess Mononoke
35. Pulp Ficiton
36. Robin Hood
37. Shanshank Redemption
38. Sherlock Holmes
39. Shutter Island
40. Taxi Driver
41. Terminator Salvation
42. The A Team
43. The Blind Side
44. The Fisher King
45. The Silent Warrior
46. The Sound Of Music
47. Time Bandits
48. Twilight
49. Up
50. Up In The Air
51. Where The Wild Things Are
52. Zombieland

TV Series

1. Death Note
2. Fullmetal Alchemist 1-10
3. House S6
4. Lost S6
5. Naruto 1-20
6. Mad Men S01 S02
7. Breaking Bad S01

Books

1. Some of them I used the audiobook
2. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
3. Butcher’s Hill – Laura Lippman
4. Dramatica
5. Screenplay – Syd Field
6. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
7. The Blue Ocean Strategy – W. Chan Kim And Renée Mauborgne
8. The City And The City – China Mieville
9. The Comic Toolbox: How To Be Funny Even If You’Re Not – John Vorhaus
10. The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
11. The Murder On The Links – Agatha Christie
12. The Naked Face – Sidney Sheldon
13. Y: The Last Man – DC Comics

Brazilian guys, I’m sorry.

But keeping a two language site manually is simply not worthy.

I’m going to write only in English for now on since I write most about worldwide subjects.

Google will be responsible for translating everything for me 😉

There is a new button that will translate without any page reload, which is awesome.

Note: All Portuguese content were already deleted!

I don’t like much Adobe, but their commitment to Linux is above average. Flash for Linux never was great, but at least was close to their pairs on Windows.

The problem was with Flash videos, which is now the vast majority of its usage. The problem relies on pure CPU processing. The Linux version does not use the video card to decode the highly compressed videos used today. The result was a slow computer when seeing videos. The situation was really dire when you attempt to see more than one. The crash is almost certain.

But finally my days of browsing YouTube or porn sites only on Windows (which is a quite risky) are over! The new beta version of Flash (10.3) finally uses the GPU and is several times more stable. On KUbuntu, I added the repository ppa:sevenmachines/flash and installed the flashplugin64-nonfree package.

Hallelujah

The new version of the Unity 3D engine was just released and I’m super excited.

All the previous features continue there: great asset integration (several 3D, 2D, and sound file formats), programming scripts, and a great IDE. But now the visual performance is better, even with the new features enabled.

Pre-baked lightning is now included by default. It allows the creation of amazing scenes that most of the lights pre-rendered. It allows the video card to work on other stuff, like shaders. Speed is also better than the inclusion Ambient occlusion package. It analyses the scene/map previously and checked what parts of it will not appear depending on where the camera is and saves the information to be used in real-time. The performance gain is huge.

The animation manager is also a great plus. It seems very much like video editing, with curves and keyframes. It is now very nice to program animations, especially for designers.

UDK (Unreal Development kit) is also gaining a lot of attention from the media, but with a feature set somewhat similar (again, 99% of the game makers are not even capable of using the engine fully), it is quite an irresponsibility to accept the license that makes you give 25% of the profits to Epic (and after paying your distributor, marketing, etc…).

just saw the news about the Drupal 7 Release Candidate. I could not be more perplex with the length of its cycle. The code freeze was announced in September 15, 2009, so its more than a year!

I’m perplex mostly because of the nature of this software: an internet application. Because the internet environment changes in an incredible pace, its really counterproductive to stop accepting deep modifications for so long time. NoSQL databases are getting more and more used, JavaScript techniques getting more refined and the whole HTML5/Video is dominating news. Two years to launch a new version is quite a lot.

I have a hunch: Drupal 5 was a true revolution but had a quite short life cycle, coz Drupal 6 was released soon after. I believe several developers got pissed with that as they were forced to make a long conversion process from Drupal 4 to 5 and than from 5 to 6. Drupal 6 took quite some time to actually be used by old sites, because several important modules (Views and CCK mainly) delayed the port to see what direction D7 would take. The result is that Drupal 6 was coined “Drupal Vista: wait for the 7”. This might be forced Drupal core guys to extend the cycle.

The whole problem is now gone since most sites are now ported to D6. But I really believe that was not matter of the short-cycles-that-pressure-developers, but the lack of clear support from project managers. I say that because some even more complex programs are getting big supporters, despite the apparent paradox.

The most enlightening example is Google. Google’s most popular softwares adopted the strategy of the “fast iterations”. The idea is not to aim “quality at all cost” (typical for projects that release when it is ready) but “to fix as soon as possible”. Chrome is 3 years old or so and it is in version 9! The adoption rate is even bigger than Firefox! Android is in version 2.2 already and gaining more and more support of developers. Can you imagine a more complex software with a faster release cycle?

Faster cycles have several advantages:

• Gain easy testers with the early adopters
• Avoid that small enhancements being postponed for years just because is a “new feature”
• Avoid the proliferation of hacks-as-plugins that implement the small enhancements I just mentioned
• Revert wrong decisions often
• Encourage more people to participate to the core development, since their suggestions might be implemented soon after
• Avoid analysis-paralysis loop of each change
• Reduces the possibility of forks (what is the advantage of Pressflow if Drupal 7 was released quite after?)

I think Drupal community still is somewhere between The Cathedral and the Bazaar. They are still in CVS mentality of a centralized control and serialized development of features. We have to make features in parallel, not in series. So no more “feature freeze”, “guys, lets think about the next version… ideas?”. Every time is time to release a new features. It has to create several forks (and not only patches) that will work on each features and, when any of them are ready, commit into mainstream and launch as a new small version, like 7.1, 7.2, 7.3…

One last comment for those that think several people want stability over cutting edge stuff. It’s just to maintain a similar concept used by Ubuntu: time to time a given release will be considered “long term support”. And if Drupal 7.2 is LTS, for example, it could be released several other “features-releases” like 7.3, 7.4 and several “bug-releases” for 7.2, like 7.2.1, 7.2.2, 7.2.3… Fixed time support also gives business and people the right information for a proper planning.