The Brazilian Press Desperate for Bad News

It must be too hard to be the number one. The Brazilian National Soccer Team is currently on the top of the FIFA's world ranking, closely followed by the Spanish team, and this position brings a lot of pressure to win this World Cup Edition. They won the last international competitions (Confederations Cup, America Cup, and first position in South America World Cup qualifiers), starring great and, sometimes, heroic matches, combined with the natural joy that comes with the Brazilian style of playing. So, it is not a surprise to be considered the favorite by 40% of 30 thousand people in a survey made all over the world.

But a lot of success brings a lot of negativity. The Brazilian press has been extremely critic about the team, and they obviously get frustrated when Brazil wins. In the great final of the Confederations Cup, for example, Brazil won USA by 3 x 2, but the fact that USA made two goals in the first half (but Brazil turned the match, making 3 during the second half) was enough to the press start criticizing the defensive system. Nowadays, they don't like the player selection made by Dunga, the coach. Dunga's criteria were simple: the player should:

1. honor the Brazilian team uniform;
2. be part of the team as an individual, not an individual in the team;
3. be simple, fine with absence of luxury;
4. be humble, accepting decisions of the coach; and
5. be disciplined and master his tactical position in the team.

It ended up with a team without stars like Ronaldinho, Ronaldo and Pato; young promises like Ganso and Neimar; and undisciplined players like Adriano and Vagner Love. Actually, Ronaldinho  never was convincing when playing for the national team, always criticized, but now journalists want him, why? Ronaldo is fat, already stated as not prepared for the competition, but some still have said that he deserves being in the squad. Come on! Ganso and Neimar are doing very very well in national competitions, but, strangely, Santos is not wining recent matches. Are they unmotivated now? How can we deal with such immaturity?

Luis Fabiano is one of the main scorers, besides Robinho, but journalists are saying that he is having a goal drought because he didn't score in the last two matches. Come on! The last two matches were against Zimbabwe and Tanzania during the preparation phase where players were scared to get hurt before their first world cup match. The press is forcing an individualistic behavior, emphasizing individual achievements, but the coach was clear since the beginning, that they are a team and they will behave like a team. The international press is less pragmatic, maybe more realistic, perhaps. New York Times stated: "Brazil has what one former World Cup player called "a luxury problem" - too many supremely talented players and not enough room to include them all on a team sheet.".

I'm optimistic, I support 100% the Brazilian Squad and I can't wait for this Tuesday match against North Korea. The players will finally have a chance to stop or at least minimize those critics.

The Everlasting Presentation Language of the Future

Let's consider that you have to create a website with a dynamic presentation and you own a technology specially made for this purpose. Strangely, you do not use your own technology to make the presentation, but the technology offered by a competitor. Is it a recognition that your own technology sucks? Is there any other explanation?

Fact: following a link shared by a friend, I've reached an Oracle/Sun University sub-site that gives detailed information about the new Java Certification Program. This website was made 100% in Flash, an Adobe's technology. You may know that Oracle/Sun created a technology called JavaFx to compete directly with Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight on the rich client market. So, why don't they use JavaFx instead?

Making a gross comparison, Oracle's choice for Flash is like Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, using Power Point instead of Keynote to prepare his great presentations. Or Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, using MacOS instead of Windows (It's possible by the way :D ). Can you imagine Nokia's CEO using an iPhone? Google employees using Bing? No. But you can see JavaFx's owner using Flash. It is indeed a great recognition for Adobe, which was endorsed by a competitor as the best technology to present their products.

How would the JavaFx development community, who embraced the technology, feel? If the owner doesn't fully embrace it, why would they do it? Maybe I'm not exploring the web enough, but I haven't seen any website using JavaFx so far (I mean, without Sun's sponsorship). I don't know where the developers of the JavaFx technology can find motivation to keep working on its evolution. It has become a playground thing that people use to create demos and silly games.

Taking into consideration all benefits that HTML5 will bring in a near future, who will still consider the adoption of JavaFx in a long term perspective? This is probably the everlasting presentation language of the future. :D

Thoughts About Screen Light, iPad and Kindle

Some people complain but everybody reads a lot of text on computer screens. In my particular case, I think I read more text in computer screens than in printed paper and I´m not doing it alone. The press industry has been scared about the end of printed media. Many small newspapers have closed their doors and big newspapers have substantially reduced their staff, due to the fact that the internet has become a rich source of reliable information.

The light emitted by the screen may bring some fatigue to the eyes, but I've learned since my childhood that plenty of light is needed when reading to avoid any damage to the eyes. So, if I need light in every reading circumstance, maybe the fatigue comes from other reasons, such as a boring story, excess of reading, small font, low contrast colors and so on.

Therefore, for those who don't believe that iPad is a good book reader because of the light emission, they are wrong. iPad is not a good book reader for other reasons. The battery lasts for 10 hours maximum. The last thing a good reader thinks about is charging the battery. After all, books and newspapers do not run on battery. Users will probably forget to recharge it before they continue reading that intriguing story. As any personal computer, an iPad will take too much of your attention. Instead of reading, you will actually spend more time playing with apps, reading emails and twitting than reading interesting content.

Then I bought a Kindle. Wow! The good thing about book readers, like the Kindle, is not its ink-screen. A black and white screen is actually boring. It is the battery power that this technology saves. A single charge lasts for 2 weeks (when wireless is off because you don't need it all the time). A Kindle doesn't offer any other utility, but to read texts. It enhances features that we always miss in paperback: font resizing, searching and dictionary. Can't you see the tiny text? Just increase the font. You can find words and sentences in one book or in all books in your library. It works better than the search on your desktop PDF reader. We can see the meaning of every single word in the text thanks to a built-in dictionary. The fact that it was made exclusively for reading purposes, we keep focused on what we are doing instead of losing the focus with other apps. If you need apps, you have your iPhone or Android in your pocket anyway.

Besides all these advantages, the Kindle also saves a lot of physical space and contributes to the reduction of carbon emission, which makes me quite happy. You might think that I'm not so impartial this time, promoting a product, but I should say that the Kindle really got me and I'm reading a lot more because of it.