The rise of Jony Ive and the demise of Scott Forstall

When I learned about the firing of Scott Forstall, announced at the same time as the new responsabilities of Jony Ive, my first thoughts were: Not sure where the beef is, but it smells good to me: the future of Apple is called Jony Ive in my book, and if a climber as Forstall leaves while Jony moves up, it's good news, in my opinion.

Then I've read different reports regarding the issues between Forstall and other top executives, his refusal to sign an apology message about the issues with the Maps in iOS 6, etc... it all makes sense, and most of all, by using Om Malik words, possibly Scott Forstall considered himself the new Steve Jobs at Apple. He was not.

So all in all, I'm glad about these changes. And giving the whole design duties to Jony is about the best decision they could take at Apple, in 2012. His input has been essential, and every new product with his signature is a new demonstration of the true core of Apple: simple, stunningly brilliant designs to give shape and core to a long line of products from the best company in consumer electronics. Period.

Review of Pentax K5 II and IIs, posted at Pentaxforums

Looks like a worth review to read: available here.

"Dance electric", performed by Prince at Jimmy Kimmel Live show

The original broadcast of Kimmel's show included, along the closing credit lines, the beginning of "Dance electric". The complete version has been posted later:


2012-10-23 Jimmy Kimmel Live - The Dance Electric por F-emale

Prince performs "Rock & Roll Love Affair" at Jimmy Kimmel Live show

The guy knows how to make a good performance, for good. Even if the song is not terrific, like in this case, his talent onstage is undeniable.

The crisis reaches El País

When I was 14 years old, I moved from my hometown (a small village without newspapers sold anywhere) to a town in Andalucía. And around October 1981, I started buying El País on Saturdays and Mondays, and also on special occasions where there were bold news.

So I've been following wiht sadness that the crisis, and an awful management by first director and founder of El País, Juan Luis Cebrián, are creating big economic troubles for this newspaper, which is the reference in Spain. Last weeks it was announced that one third of employees will be fired, despite Cebrián having a contract with a salary of € 13 million in 2011.

But I guess this article, published by The New York Times, will give a good overview on the current situation, and the background story.

Now, the details about firing people while top executives keep huge salaries got me really infuriated, to the point I considered stopping the purchase of El País for good.

But last Saturday I had a look at my newspapers agent, and honestly, the panorama of newspapers in Spain is disappointing to say the least:

There are the following ones with national circulation, apart El País: La Vanguardia, El Mundo, ABC, La Razón, La Gaceta. Besides we have two local newspapers which are close to useless. And among the five national newspapers, four of them are clearly in the right side of the spectrum (clearly not my taste), and La Vanguardia is more or less at the center right. There used to be another one in the left, Público, but they stopped the paper edition due to economic problems as well.

In short: if you want a good newspaper in Spain, by now, and if you don't want to read right winded ones, the only choice is El País. Despite being managed by shameless executives who have no problems in firing people to keep their extremely profitable salaries.

Surprise, surprise: brand new iMac

Well, when everybody and his neighboor were expecting the new iPad Mini today, Apple took us by surprise and introduced a brand new iMac design which is much slimmer than the previous generation. Besides, they introduced the iPad Mini as expected, and unexpectedly as well, the new MacBook Pro 13 ' Retina Display, and also a fully revamped iPad.

I bet the guys at Microsoft and Samsung must be jumping of joy after this Apple event.

And for the record: I want one of the new iMacs as soon as funding allow it.

The making of a great "perol cordobés"

Yesterday, we started the season when we can do fires at the countryside (which is strictly forbidden in Andalucía until October due to high temperatures), and with this occasion, we prepared a truly delicious "perol cordobés", i.e., rice with different mixtures. This time it was iberic pork chops and some vegetables. And while we have made quite a few of this "peroles", I must say that yesterdays', our chef Ángel truly outdid himself.

Here you have a detailed visual documentary on how to do it:

First you need a great "perol", the recipient which gives name to this dish, and some good quality olive oil; and then you need as well a good fire to start working:

First you put onion, cut in small pieces; and you're going to fry it carefully:

Then you add green pepper also cut in small pieces, after the onion is half cooked:

And then is time to add tomato:

Onion, pepper and tomato will give the base sauce to make the perol, making a delicious combination of fried vegetables:

Once that sauce is ready, it's time to add the main ingredient; this time, as I said above, it was iberic porc chops, a very cheap ingredient which gives a delicious flavour to the dish:

You have to fry it before adding water:

And then, you start adding water, and let it boil for a good while; some people say a minimum of 60 min; I wouldn't go that far, but more than 30 min is a good idea. In total, you will add 2.5 volumes of water per volume of rice:

Now you can also add true saffron to give natural orange colour to the rice; and also some good quality white wine, such as my beloved Amargoso, a fino from the region of Montilla-Moriles, which you can add directly to the mixture; finally, you have to add the right amount of salt, which requires some experience for a perol this big:

Once it has boilt for a good while, and the chops have let their substance flowing into the sauce, it's time for the rice: yesterday, we added 1.900 gr, which is really a lot of rice; but we were 22 people, 11 adults and 11 children. So you add the rice, and from that time, you have to count roughly 20 min boiling, with some more water if required. With those amounts, you will have all water almost dissappeared at the end of the 20 min, and the rice will be perfectly cooked: not too hard, but not too bland either. Just the perfect point.

Here you have it, when the time is going close to the end:

And here you have the perol finished, right after removing it from the fire:

 You can see still some sauce around. In a few minutes, the rice will get embedded and there will be no visible liquid anywhere:

 And now, it's time to ENJOY!

 As you can see, it was good enough so that we would have been able to eat even more than 2 kilos of rice in this perol:

All in all, a great debut of season.

From Israeli people to Iranian people: We love you

Little things like this help to change the world much more than Very Important Conferences for Peace, IMHO:

"Dark" rehearsal, by Prince

Andy Allo has posted this rehearsal of an old favourite of mine, "Dark", from the much underrated "Come" album from Prince. And I truly love it: it seems the Return of the Horns is having much welcome effects on the overall sound of Prince and the New Power Generation.

Update: this post contained originally a link to a "video", which was in fact a black screen with the audio of "Dark" rehearsal. For whatever reason, this video, which was posted by Andy Allo at her facebook page, has been removed later.

The mess of Java and Mac OS X

I have been having a few issues lately with the installation of Java in one of my Macs. And after digging at many places, I thought it might be a good idea to write a bit on this, just in case it might be helpful for other people.

The relationship of Java with Mac OS X has been complicated, to say the least. For many years, Apple was directly providing Java as independent implementation, which was installed through their "Sofware update" utility, built in OS X. During all those years (which means, roughly the first decade of the 2000s), I had pretty much no issues at all.

Yet, since the release of OS X Lion (10.7), things are getting more difficult. Some months ago, and after realizing that Java was creating often some security vulnerabilities, Apple decided to pull the plug, and stop providing Java by themselves. Furthermore, in order to stop those security problems, at some point they implemented a system to automatically turn off Java after a few months without using it.

Since that time onwards, Apple decided to let users install Java by themselves, if they needed it. You can no longer download the last versions of Java from Apple, but from Oracle, which are the current owners of the Java system. It remains free, and in theory, it should be easy to install, yet you had to look for it by yourself. That should be all.

That's the theory. In the real world, it has become a big mess:

On the one side, most OS X users have a legacy Java installation, coming directly from Apple (in my case, it was Java 1.6). It remains functional unless you inactivate it.

On the other hand, Oracle provides the most recent update of Java (1.7) directly from their servers. You can download a nice .dmg installer file, which will install easily Java on your Mac.

So you can find two different Java implementations installed simultaneously on your Mac, something which is expressly "forbidden" by Oracle's Java.

Now, the problem comes when for whatever reason, Java stops working on your browsers. It happened to me a few weeks ago. And from that time, I tried hard to get Java working again, so that I could use some apps requiring electronic certificates which use Java.

I installed the last version of Java repeatedly, using the Oracle .dmg file. In all cases, the installer said that Java was correctly installed. But fact was that, when checking Java, it was not working in either Safari or Firefox, which are my usual browsers.

I searched all kinds of information, thinking it would be easy to solve the problem. But it was not, and despite the many sites providing suggestions for troubleshooting Java, I was stuck, and still it was not working.

At some point, I decided to use the last resource: re-install Mac OS X on my MacBook Air, which is running Mac OS X 10.7.5 (as it is not possible to install 10.8 on the first generation of MacBook Air). After doing it, I managed to get Firefox running the last version of Java. But still today, for unknown reasons to me, Safari does not work with Java.

Since my desktop computer, an iMac, runs 10.8, I decided to try with it. And in this case (again, for unknown reasons), I managed to install Oracle's Java without a single problem, so that by now, both Safari and Firefox are perfectly working with Java on my iMac.

But the worst thing, in my opinion, is that at this point, I have absolutely no idea on what was the cause of the problems in my MacBook Air, or why it has Firefox running with Java but not Safari, or why both are working fine with Java on my iMac. Really, I have no idea.

I am an advanced user of Mac OS X, which has been using it since it was in beta stages, back in 2000. And I think that, if I find the current status of Java and OS X to be a mess, it must be a catastrophe for average users with little experience on software installation.

In short: I think it's time for both Apple and Oracle to react and clear out this issue, providing a simple, effective and streamlined strategy to install Java, and to avoid problems derived from duplicity of installations etc. Furthermore, there should be official resources indicating how to solve specific problems, rather than letting users at their own devices, lost because of lack of detailed information.

Update on October 24: As if the situation was not confusing enough, let's add some more meat:

Apple has posted a technical note explaining in detail how to re-activate Java 6 (provided by Apple) in Mac computers which have installed Java 7 (provided by Oracle), since apparently, some people consider that Java 7 can create more problems than it solves. The article is available here.

Andy Allo: "People Pleaser", first single from Superconductor

I have heard the song properly, and I must say I am very positively surprised: loads of horns are always a good thing in a Prince song, in my opinion, and this is no exception.

But most of all, what I like of this studio version is that the production is tight and simple and effective. IMHO this song belongs to the very healthy line of Illusion, coma, pimp & circumstance / Glass cutter/ Feel better, feel good, feel wonderful: slick and powerful funk, and no complications around.

I have only two complaints: first, I miss the great Eric leading the horns; and second, I can't avoid to imagine this song in the voice of Prince (as usual with his protegees).

All in all, an unexpectedly good debut (in my opinion, of course) for Superconductor. My expectations have been lifted.

For those of you on valium, Andy Allo is the last in the long line of Prince's protegees, and Superconductor is her forthcoming album, which has been produced by Prince, and includes a few songs written by him (although I suspect the truth is that the whole album was written, performed, and produced by Prince, with the exception of the voice and a few other things contributed by his band).

On chocolate and Nobel Laureates

Believe it or not, this paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports a surprisingly powerful correlation between chocolate consumption and number of Nobel laureates, for different countries.

As if we needed excuses...

Virtual bailout for Spain in the works, according to The Wall Street Journal

In times of creative accountability, one should not be surprised by news like this: According to The Wall Street Journal, Spain is considering a "virtual bailout" with, seemingly, an activation of the bailout mechanism in order to appease markets, but without the actual request of additional money. In theory, this movement would be enough to reduce the Spanish debt primes to more reasonable levels (from  over 400 to around 200), enabling a progressive recovery of the economy in Spain.

I remain extremely skeptic, but who knows what the politicians can invent these days...

Education for All: 2012 Global Monitoring Report

UNESCO has published the Education for All: 2012 Global Monitoring Report, and it is making many headlines in Spain, because the Spanish education system does not fare too well, to put it mildly. It should be a good opportunity for professionals of education, from all levels, to reconsider what we are doing, and what changes might be needed in order to improve the situation.

The calm before the bailout: Malos tiempos para la lírica

Ignacio Escolar is a brilliant Spanish journalist, clearly located in the left; I often agree with his analysis, but this article in particular nails it: it addresses the strange, suspicious tranquility of the last days in Spanish media, where we see plenty of headlines around of pure noise, while in the mean time, the government is negotiating the conditions of the bailout with the European Union.

As Golpes Bajos said once, Malos tiempos para la lírica.

El País fires one third of its employees

In an ashaming story of success followed to scandalous, bad investments in other media, leading eventually to almost bankrupcy, the leaders of PRISA, the enterprise owning the Spanish newspaper El País, announced yesterday a reduction of almost a third in the number of employees; and this, despite the fact that Juan Luis Cebrián, first director and one of the founders of PRISA, had a salary of 13 million euros in 2011.

The problems in the world of newspapers are not something new; but looking at the main newspaper of my country to go down non-stop, thanks to the catastrophic management of Cebrián and company, is really saddening: not only the -once upon a time- undisputed leader of media in Spain is failing; it is doing so by using the worst strategies of capitalism, enabled to decrease costs at any price when dealing with workers, but unafraid of spending huge amounts to pay the management teams.

Firefox OS mobile

This might be the next big thing, or maybe a quick flop: time will tell. In the mean time, it seems Telefonica is going to play with Firefox OS in the coming months:

One year without Steve Jobs

One year of perspective lets you see his tremendous impact with more and more clarity.

Estrella Morente & Michael Nyman: Le di caza al alcance

Estrella Morente, whose talent goes well beyond being the daughter of the flamenco genius Enrique Morente, has released this week her new album, Autorretrato, which was supervised by his father. Her wonderful singing is displayed in this song with music of Michael Nyman, "Le di caza al alcance", based on a poem by San Juan de la Cruz.

It is pure beauty, in my opinion:

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Estrella Morente & Michael Nyman - le di caza al alcance- Autorretrato 2012.

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Bernhoft: version of Prince's "The One"

And keeping with the fantastic versions of Prince songs, here you have one I discovered recently thanks to a friend: this is Bernhoft's take of "The One", a song that has always blown me away. And I really like it:

Muse: live version of "Sign O the times"

Great version in my opinion:

Sufjan Stevens' 5 CD Christmas set

Sufjan has kept the tradition of recording a bunch of songs for Christmas, since 2001. This project, which was initially just a gift for his friends, found eventually an official release on CD. So there was a first Christmas CD set from Sufjan, released in 2006, including five EPs.

Now he's back with the same idea, and this time there will be another 5 CD set released for Christmas 2012, entitled "Silver & Gold" including songs recorded since 2006.

You have the full information here. And you have a first appetizer (rather than single) under the form of a 12 min song, "Christmas Unicorn", that you can listen here.




For those with an eye on the finer details, there is (it seems) an homage to "Love will tears us apart", from Joy Division, demonstrating once more that Sufjan is not your ordinary weird musician, but a fully fledged genius who, and on top of all his wackiness, has an extensive music knowledge. Icing on the cake, he has released a huge catalogue of songs in the last 9 years:

At the page http://music.sufjan.com, you have a discography of Sufjan since he became releasing music independently, in 2000. There are 9 "standard" CDs, which mean more than 1 album per year. But besides, there are 10 CDs released in the Christmas compilations (two sets of 5 CDs each, as explained above). Which means 19 albums in 12 years, and I'm not counting collaborations with others. Who said "prolific genius"?

If you take into account that there are many truly excellent songs in this discography, the outcome is quite clear, and I'd say once more that Sufjan is in 2012 what Prince was in 1987: a genius at the top of his capabilities, brave enough to go in many directions at the same time, and with such a flow of ideas that he's releasing music pretty much all the time.

By the way, Sufjan has completely exploited the independent business in music, and apart big releases through standard labels, he's got pretty much all of his songs available to direct purchase at bandcamp. Also in this aspect, he's surpassed the purple genius, who has spoken much about freedom and independence, but still today lacks a reliable independent channel to release his music.

Google passes market value of Microsoft

In 1997, it was impossible to figure out the current situation:

Apple is the number 1 company in technology, with a value far above that of Microsoft, which once upon a time saved Apple from bankrupcy.

And according to today's news, Google market value also passed that of Microsoft.

The times, they are a'changing.