My wife and I want to relocate to Canada soon. The reasons for picking Canada are actually many, but most of all Canada seems to be the perfect mix between job opportunities and quality of life. Settling in the US was also an option, but the fact is that even if we can do it, America simply doesn’t want us.

Canada, on the other hand, does trully welcome immigrants and that’s just one more point for it. The question then became where exactly to settle. We initially thought of Montreal. It’s still on the table, but we lately shifted interest towards Vancouver and Victoria.

I like the idea of living in such a beautiful place as the British Columbia. Besides, the climate is a lot easier for us to adapt to since we’re both from Southern Brazil, where climate is similar.

Having made the decision to go, it became a question of timing. We ended up letting the idea sleep for a while. It wasn’t intentional, but life has its way of getting us distracted. I now live in a very bad place, with all the known problems of megacities. But I also work for a company where I make a pretty damned good salary and even better benefits.So it’s hard to leave the company. Believe me I tried.

Now it looks as though I may have the opportunity. Although far from being written in stone, some possible changes in my business unit may actually provide me with the excuse I needed to leave as I may get a pretty good benefit package if I decide to do so.

It’s scary as heck leaving a job with no prospects in sight. But it’s not the first time I did this. Last time I decided to leave something I ended up at Intel a couple of months later and that worked well.

Fact is that if I really want to go, I will eventually have to do it and now seems as good a time as ever.

I still have to wait to see if the package will be available. If it is, I will probably take it…

Living in Brazil, I’m supposed to love soccer more than life itself. Problem is I don’t. I never really got soccer at all.

I’m a bit basketball fan. I used to play basketball and I just love watching it. Network TV all but completely ignores the very existence of a sport called basketball. It’s all about soccer. Sometimes you can see volleyball, but only if Brazil is in the World League finals.

I also like football, and I can’t really complain much about it. I do get about four NFL games in a regular season Sunday and most of the playoff games as well as the Super Bowl. But I can’t follow my team. Yahoo! solved that problem for me. I signed up for their NFL GamePass and have access to every single regular season game on the web. And a pretty good resolution, by the way.

But what about basketball? How can I watch the NBA? ESPN Brasil runs one, sometimes two, games a week. Hardly enough for me.

Recently I signed up for a service by globo.com that broadcasts some games every week. But despite their claim of being the country’s best streaming providers, the video quality was below bad, the streaming stopped every few seconds with a “loading…” message and the commentators spent the game talking about soccer and soap operas. I cancelled the service.

So I found about the wonderful world of pirated live TV streaming. My first contact with it came when I found myp2p.eu, where they maintain a list of live sporting events happening at any given time. The only problem is that I own a Mac, and most of the broadcasts listed there require some weird utility that runs only on Windows. And the quality usually is not that great.

Then I found Justin.TV, where I can now watch every game of pretty much any sport I can think of. Live and the quality is not that bad.

I was even able to watch today’s Formula One qualifying sessions for the Monaco GP without the stupid, annoying Brazilian commentator. Awesome!

I first came in contact with the Grand Theft Auto series back with Grand Theft Auto III, but it was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that really got me hooked. It was by far the best game I had ever played. And it sure became the game I played the longest, unless you count series, in which case EA NHL will continue being the leader for at least 15 years, assuming I stop playing it right now. Not going to happen.

But GTA was fun. The greatest thing about GTA wasn’t the missions. They were nice, of course, but the icing on the top was the freedom that I felt racing down the streets, eventually stopping somewhere and shooting pretty much everything in sight. Not politically correct, but it was fun. And San Andreas was just huge! With three major cities and several small villages and other locations, you actually felt like you were going around an actual place.

After San Andreas I played Liberty City Stories, which was essentially a port of a PSP game. It was a big step back from San Andreas, but it didn’t matter, because everyone knew it wasn’t supposed to be bigger. It was also fun, although not as much as with San Andreas.

So of course that Grand Theft Auto IV was going to face some really high — and likely unrealistic — expectations. I for one expected the next game in the series to be bigger than San Andreas. In my mind, I was envisioning something like 10 major cities and maybe a hundred of those villages and such. I thought that since San Andreas was places in a state, the next one should be the whole country.

GTA IV is not bigger than San Andreas. In fact, I believe it is much smaller. Even if it isn’t, it feel like it is simply because it is one single city. There’s no rural area or deserts like in San Andreas. It’s just streets and more streets.

Having said that, I still think GTA IV tops San Andreas overall. So it lacks sheer size. So what? It’s still amazingly fun to play. I can no longer go to the airport in Los Santos, get a plane and travel to Las Venturas, but I still can get a helicopter and try to land myself on top of the Statue of Happiness.

Where GTA IV really steps up is the characters. In San Andreas you could already have some relationships with girlfriends. That still happens. But now you have friends as well. Being great friends with some people in the game gives you some rewards, so although not required, there are some perks for being friends.

But the characters in the game are much more realistic than in previous installments, especially the lead, Nico Bellic. Nico — ultimately you — has a conscience — ultimately you. Nico will have many choices to make. Should he take revenge against the man who destroyed his life back in Europe? It all has consequences, and not always the consequences you’d expect. Without giving much away, sometimes what seems to be the right thing to do will really, really hurt you later.

It’s the first game I’ve ever played in which I honestly wasn’t sure what I should do in many cases. It wasn’t clear like in many games. It was just like life… if you’re an illegal immigrant from Eastern Europe with a dark past in the war.

How appropriate my current book turned out to be.

YOU KNOW what they say, all you need is a good idea. At least that’s how it works in markets that enjoy a lot of freedom. Anyway, some people in Germany decided to start a new company called KOfficeSource as–

–a consulting company with highly regarded experts in their field. KOfficeSource GmbH offers professional services around the open source OpenDocument-based KOffice office suite.

They also offer services to convert files to OpenDocument, which might actually have some demand, especially in Europe.

But services around KOffice? Yeah… good luck with that.[tags]koffice, the-clueless-gene, opendocument, odf[/tags]

IT TOOK some time, but the world’s second best newspaper — the first being The Economist, hands down — finally gave in to the pressures of the Internet and finally decided to open up a bit.

Everyone knows that Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” is roiling the newspaper world, and today we’d like to announce something on the creative side. We’re rolling out a new Web site for the Journal editorial page offering free access to all of our editorials and op-eds, video interviews and commentary. It’s as close as we’ll get to conceding there is such a thing as a free lunch.

The newspaper often brings op-eds by very influential people and thus is great read.[tags]internet, blogging, wall stree journal[/tags]

If you haven’t already, please take a look at part 1 of this tutorial series before continuing. That also goes for those who have read it but can’t remember it anymore — which is likely to mean everyone, since I wrote it ages ago.

In part 1, I promised that part 2 would make things considerably easier and I wasn’t lying too!

In the first part we played directly with the interfaces exposed by the Intel Active Management Technology. This gets the job done, but let’s face it–it’s boring. As it turns out, some really nice people at Intel decided to make everyone life’s easier.

Well, everyone who happens to develop in Java anyway.

For Java developers, Intel offers something called the Intel AMT RDK (for Reference Development Kit.) The RDK is exactly what it’s name indicates–a reference implementation. It’s a simple management tool developed in Java that you can play with. You can even find its source code available at the Intel AMT RDK website.

This is an excellent tool for ISVs wishing to quickly prototype iAMT applications using the Java language.

The coolest thing about the RDK is that it’s built around a series of classes called “building blocks”, which basically make all the work of accessing iAMT easier. For instance, you could do something like this to power the PC on, do something and then power it down again–

String Username= new String(“admin”);

String Password= new String(“P@ssw0rd”);

String IPAddress= new String(“192.168.0.6″);

try {

    RemoteControl rc = new RemoteControl(Username,

                                         Password,

                                         IPAddress);

    rc.powerUp();

    doSomethingElse();

    rc.powerDown();

} catch(Exception e) {

    e.printStackTrace();

}

As you can see, it’s a lot simpler than having to play with SOAP calls directly. We first created a RemoteControl object and then simply started issuing commands to it (powerUp and powerDown). It doesn’t get much easier than that.

The building blocks package comes with detailed documentation on the API, but seriously, nothing beats going through the RDK source code itself. It’s actually easy to adapt the whole RDK to become a part of a larger management tool. Play with it and you’ll see how easy it is.

Despite my usual rants re Linux in the desktop, I like Ubuntu. I’ve got to meet a lot of people from Canonical — the company behind Ubuntu — over the years and they all seem terrific people, which is saying a lot coming from me.

Mark Shuttleworth writes about this year’s Ubuntu Live event and what he’d like to see there–

I’d be particularly interested in talks that describe:

• large-scale government deployments of Ubuntu on the desktop (there have now been several)
• specialist deployments, for example high-performance computing clusters, or vertical market solutions
• virtualisation-based deployments where Ubuntu is the host or the guest platform
• large-scale server farms for hosting or web edge-of-the-network deployments
• appliances based on Ubuntu

With the exception of the first topic, the rest seems very appropriate and interesting to me as well. As I said, I really like Ubuntu. I still don’t think Linux belongs in the desktop, but if anyone can do it, it’s Ubuntu, for they seem to understand the concept of simplicity that appeals to desktop users.

Ubuntu Live 2008 will happen in July and since it’s going to be in Portland, I might just drop by.[tags]ubuntu, linux, ubuntu live[/tags]

ALTHOUGH one must be very careful not to take this data too literally, it is possible to have an idea on just how dominant Microsoft is in the operating systems market segment share by checking data released by NetApplications–

It’s also interesting to note how the iPhone is catching up with Linux, which itself has a meager .63% MSS. So much for “taking over the world.” Then again, Linux can have a wonderful 2008 and maybe it could reach as much as 1% or 2%.

One must hope the iPhone doesn’t grow anymore, of course.