Category: Personal

Personal stuff and others that are not technical, doesn’t have source code, etc.

ASCII Table of Correlatives

February 3, 2012

Recently I needed the table of correlatives in pure ASCII form and I couldn’t find it online, so I built it (it took more time that I’m willing to admit):

┌───────────────┬──────────┬────────────┬────────────┬───────────┬──────────┐
│               │ Question │ Indication │ Indefinite │ Universal │ Negative │
│               │ ki–      │ ti–        │ i–         │ ĉi–       │ neni–    │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Thing -o      │ kio      │ tio        │ io         │ ĉio       │ nenio    │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Individual -u │ kiu      │ tiu        │ iu         │ ĉiu       │ neniu    │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Reason –al    │ kial     │ tial       │ ial        │ ĉial      │ nenial   │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Time -am      │ kiam     │ tiam       │ iam        │ ĉiam      │ neniam   │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Place -e      │ kie      │ tie        │ ie         │ ĉie       │ nenie    │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Manner -el    │ kiel     │ tiel       │ iel        │ ĉiel      │ neniel   │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Quality –a    │ kia      │ tia        │ ia         │ ĉia       │ nenia    │
├───────────────┼──────────┼────────────┼────────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
│ Amount -om    │ kom      │ tiom       │ iom        │ ĉiom      │ neniom   │
└───────────────┴──────────┴────────────┴────────────┴───────────┴──────────┘

I used the DOS box drawing characters and only single lines. Double lines in some common fonts were broken. And the beautiful Unicode box drawing characters were broken in several fonts.

If you admire the table of correlatives as much as I do, maybe you want to buy some schwag with it: http://www.cafepress.com/correlatives (disclaimer, I’m selling that stuff).

Isn’t this a great notebook to take to your Esperanto lessons:

table of correlatives notebook — Not allowed during exams

Moving to London, joining a startup

November 1, 2011

Personal

London by Jim Trodel

I’m making a lot of changes in my life. I’m moving to London… tomorrow. I’m really excited about it. I wanted to live in London for a while already. In that topic, do you know anyone that wants to share a flat in the London Bridge area?

Also, I’m changing jobs. In London I’m joining a startup called Watu. Well, I’m part of the founding team and I’ll be the CTO, which for now, it’s just an overly fancy way to say the coder, but I like it. We are solving the problem of managing employees from publishing the open positions at a company to interviewing, to paying salaries, to assigning and managing shifts. The whole deal. I’m really excited about it and I’m looking forward to it.
Uptime: 100%

October 1, 2011

Personal Technical
Balance by Tony Roberts

This is the first time I see this:
```
-------------------------------------
pupeno.com
Service: pupeno.com
Outages: 0
Downtime: 0 hrs, 0 mins
Uptime: 100.00%
-------------------------------------
```
It was always above 98%, often above 99% and I was proud of that because it was my own crappy server doing it. But now I’m proud of not caring about it, letting someone else solve a problem I’m not interested in and focus on what I am interested in. 100% uptime provided by WordPress.com.
Changing my pictures workflow

September 16, 2011

Personal

Canon camera by Kazuhiko Teramoto

I been using iPhoto for a few years right now and I like it a lot. Before using iPhoto I was manually marking who was in each picture and where it was taken, so when I saw iPhoto could do it almost automatically I bought a mac. Yes, iPhoto was a big part of buying a mac.

Some time afterwards, I got a DSLR, starting shooting in raw, and as usual, shooting a lot. I rarely remove pictures. I don’t see a reason, my hard drives get bigger faster than I take pictures. My collection has around 35000 pics, at least, and lot’s of raw too. This is not what iPhoto is designed for.

I looked around and Apple’s Aperture is the only pro photo management software that keeps all the features I need and like from iPhoto (faces and places mostly). Since the latest iPhoto is not very robust (it actually crashed on me once and I had to restore everything from backups), I decided to migrate to Aperture.

Something that surprised me about Aperture is that it doesn’t prompt me to delete the pictures after importing. I searched on the interwebs about this and apparently, it’s a feature. When people asked how to delete pictures, people replied: “Don’t! If you delete pictures after importing, your pictures are in only one place, if something happens to them, they are lost.”

One should be careful when getting advice on how to use an Apple product as the Apple fanboys will defend whatever Apple believes we should do even if it makes no sense and kills kittens in the process. But this actually makes sense. I had my computer crash during the import procedure and take all the pics with it. I’m glad iPhoto didn’t get to delete the pictures in the camera when that happened. Both Aperture and iPhoto are capable of ignoring duplicates when importing and I would expect any other useful picture management program to do the same.

I decided to embrace the workflow, I bought a bigger memory card for my camera and now I don’t delete the pics from the camera until a couple of days later, when my several backups solutions managed to backup the new pictures.

Another reason to do it this way, and delete pictures by formatting the memory card, is that it’s the only way to ensure there are no extraneous files on the card, taking space, that neither the camera nor any program need or understand.
Openair cinema in Interlaken

August 13, 2011

Personal

I just watched The Blues Brothers in an open air cinema in Interlaken, Switzerland. It was a cinema built in a square on the main street. Free with a bar.

They lend blankets for you to put on the chair or cover yourself if you are cold. Some people came with their own cushions. I suppose they are regulars.

On top of that all the bar staff were dressing as the Blues brothers and so people too. Others just Blues Brothers t-shirts. During the movie people would laugh really loud, cheer, shout.

It was quite an experience.
A little personal success

August 6, 2011

Personal

This page, my blog, pupeno.com, is now hosted on WordPress.com instead of my own server; and that’s is a little personal success. Let me explain.

I tend to be a control freak. I have my own servers. I run my own nameservers. I used to run my own mailserver but some time ago I switched to Google Apps for Domain. I used to run my blog in my own server, keeping my own set of plug ins, even modifying themes when necessary.

Last weekend I published Why I love Smalltalk and it got picked by Hacker News. That traffic killed my server. I spent the whole weekend restarting and tuning Apache. You see, I can run my own server, use Puppet, keep it clean and up to date but I’m not a sysadmin. I can pretend I am for short periods of time but I’m really just a coder. I was forced to have a crush course into server tuning and I eventually got it more or less stable. By the second wave of traffic it was not trashing anymore. I have better things to do with my time that tune a web server so I decided to move and I did it.

It is a personal success because I’m giving you up control. I can’t install whatever plug in I want now. I can’t modify themes. I’m not using my own nameservers anymore. I’m giving up control and simplifying my life when I have a natural tendency to make it more complex than it is.

At the moment, my beloved pupeno.com is not ny any of my servers. Nothing. Every service related to pupeno.com is running on third party hosted solutions. I’m letting go, sleeping better and being happier.

Only a couple of hours after I migrated my blog and went it sleep it was picked by Reddit. More than double the traffic of Hacker News (that is, Hacker News minus my server downtime) and I didn’t woke to a burning and smoking server, just an impressive traffic chart and even more comments. I’m happy.
Startup Weekend Lausanne 2011

March 21, 2011

Personal

The Eneo team

This past weekend I participated in the Startup Weekend Lausanne 2011, my first startup weekend ever. It was amazingly interesting. I worked on an application called Eneo. Eneo allows you to talk with people around you using your mobile phone, people that you don’t know, so the next time you are stuck at the airport waiting in a 3 hours delayed flight, you don’t have to eat alone. Find someone else in the same situation and go for lunch.

I think the application has great potential and I was told that the jury didn’t understand it. I don’t know, they spoke in french. Supposedly the event was going to be in french and english but was all in french… I was bored when I wasn’t coding.

I’m thankful I didn’t present an idea, I would have done a poor job of doing it. I now wrote a list of things to do when presenting an idea. I was going to publish it, but it’s gold so I’ll keep it to myself, at least, until I use the techniques. Muahahaha.

I chose a company to work with, but the guy with the idea decided not to work on it because he didn’t get enough people. It was him, one designer and me, a programmer. I was surprised. Then I saw most groups were more than 5 people, some may have been even 8. For me that’s absolutely crazy. The startup sizes that make sense for me are 2, 3 and 4. Any less and it gets lonely (tell me about it!), any more and it gets crowded.

When the group I was in disolved, I turned into a free developer and the four or five groups that didn’t get a developer already started to pitch to me (now they did speak in English ;), at the same time. It was crazy. I think I got a glimpse of how investors feel. At any rate, immediate ego boost for a developer. If you are a developer I recommend to attend this events, is great for you and great for the event.

While working on our project I did make some mistakes. One was working on a mobile application. I haven’t done mobile in a while, I’m not fast at it; not weekend-fast at least. Give me a week and I’ll be rocking your phone, but in a weekend, no. I decided I wasn’t going to code, but I’m a coder and in less than two hours after joining Eneo I was writing code. I paid a step price when I tried to make the application look mobile by using jqtouch. I never used jqtouch before so there were a lot of things not working and I wasted precious hours on it. Big mistake.

My second mistake was trying to make a product. I wanted to woo the jury by showing an active product with users already. I failed to do that. I should have gone straight to coding a demo, not a finished product. What we ended up with was half product half demo, not good at either.

Here’s the app running in a desktop browser (imagine it’s a phone):

Next time I’ll do better.
More sense of humor

March 4, 2011

Personal

If you are going to fail, fail funnily, like Tumblr…
My idea got validated

February 14, 2011

Personal

Some time ago I had an idea for a web application. That idea was essentially Gist. I couldn’t convince people to go after it, thankfully because I wouldn’t like to compete with a Brad Feld backed company. It’s nice to see that the idea was good, as Gist got bought by RIM. Congratulations Gist!
A mistake for Nokia

February 11, 2011

Personal Technical
I think this partnership with Microsoft was a mistake for Nokia. It was great for Microsoft though.

Every time you show an old Nokia phone you get the same comment: “Oh, those phones were built to last, I went through 3 iPhones and the Nokia still works…” or “That is the only phone that will not blend”.

But Nokia’s obsolete software is killing it. They need to provide truly smartphones. They had three options:
- build their own
- use Android
- use Windows
I think they already tried to build their own and failed. That’s very hard. A giant like Microsoft tried to build their own and failed. It’s very hard to build a software platform.

Apple did it by being the first ones and providing the coolest product ever. Google did it by doing it for free. They are both a success because they have thousands and thousands of applications on their platform by now.

Microsoft haven’t done it. As powerful as Microsoft is, they still haven’t cracked the smartphone market, and it’s very likely they’ll never do. They are up against Apple and Google and both of them have years of advantage now (previous efforts by Microsoft are useless today).

Now Microsoft has a chance to do it because of the deal with Nokia. Nokia is likely going to put Windows 7 Phone whatever on the hands of many people. Those people will get use to Windows, but not to Nokia and may switch to HTC or another provider in a blink of an eye. Microsoft wins, Nokia loses.

I think Nokia should have done with Android. I know it’s hard to differentiate yourself with Android (what’s the different between a Samsung and a Sony/Ericson phone these days? They both run Angry Birds), but Nokia could have done it by making a tough phone. There’s a lot of people today not using smartphones because they won’t last in their pockets. Nokia could build a smartphone for them.

Maybe Nokia decided against Android because of their past mistakes with Open Source projects and companies. At any rate, I think they are making a mistake right now.