Verbose business cards

Learned from Kellypuffs that linkedin users can get 50 free MOO cards. Enter Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle (and a bit of javascript).

SuperHappyDevHouseBarcelona polls

Baby steps towards having a hackathon event that combines serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere: SuperHappyDevHouseBarcelona... two polls:

• Would you be interested in an event of this kind?
• How about a beer/coffee next week to get things started?
  

SuperHappyDevHouseBarcelona? Why not?

SuperHappyDevHouse is a non-exclusive event intended for creative and curious people interested in technology. We're about knowledge sharing, technology exploration, and ad-hoc collaboration. Come to have fun, build things, learn things, and meet new people. It's called hacker culture, and we're here to encourage it.

I've been wanting to attend to something similar to SuperHappyDevHouse since I first heard about it years ago, thanks to an intranet post by Tessa Lau telling how much she enjoyed one.

It shouldn't be too hard to find a handfull of people in Barcelona interested in a hackathon event that combines serious and not-so-serious productivity with a fun and exciting party atmosphere. Summer nights are nice, and probably there are higher chances to find available venues. Mmm...

Next actions:

• get first reactions from fellow hackers (and hopefully draft co-organizers)
  
• explore some venue candidates. I don't have high hopes of finding one that allows a dusk-dawn event (the format of the first editions), but a shorter/earlier hackaton would also be cool.

Menos es más

Avram Hershko, Nobel de Química 2004, en la Contra de La Vanguardia:

No me gustan los grandes laboratorios ni los grandes presupuestos para investigar (...) Como yo no tengo que pagar a mucha gente, puedo dedicar mi tiempo a investigar y no a buscar el dinero para retribuir a mi equipo.

Detesto a los sí señor. Para darme la razón siempre, ya me tengo a mí mismo; lo que aprecio es que me lleven la contraria, pero con fundamento; que me hagan pensar... Ésa es la principal virtud de los buenos júniors, que no dan nada por aceptado y que plantean nuevas preguntas a las viejas certidumbres. (...) Que tengan iniciativa; que no esperen a que yo les dé órdenes, sino que me sorprendan con sus propias y nuevas ideas, y que tengan más ganas que yo todavía de investigar. (...) Necesito preguntas, no que me den la razón.

Siempre me gusta ver que alguien progresa en algo técnico sin verse forzado a abandonarlo por la gestión. El Principio de Peter no siempre se cumple.

Equipos pequeños, diversos, con redes sociales extendidas: buenas recetas no sólo para la investigación, sino para cualquier tipo de innovación.

SendTo Clipboard coolness (TiddlyWiki links to your files)

The SendTo folder is a simple and powerful tool to customize Windows Explorer to simplify some recurring tasks. If you often want to link to files in your PC from your TiddlyWikis, you'll like this hack. It creates two new items in the "Send To" menu:

• clipboard - file url: Copies to the clipboard the file: url of the file or folder that was showing the "Send To" menu
• clipboard - new tiddler javascript url: Copies to the clipboard a javascript: url that, when pasted into the address bar of a Firefox tab showing a TiddlyWiki, will create a tiddler with the contents of the file that was showing the "Send To" menu
  

You can jump and just download and run the thing, a small .hta file, or take less than three minutes watching it in action in one of the lamest screencasts ever:

SendTo Clipboard Screencast from Xavier Vergés and Vimeo

Using it

• Just download the .hta file and open it. No, wait! Never open .hta files unless you trust its author or you have taken a look at the code.
• Provided that you trust me or that you have checked the code, you can now open it. Maybe a double click will be enough (your Windows associates .hta files to mshta.exe, a version of IE with high security privileges in your machine). Maybe you need to use the command line and type mshta path2twlink.hta.
• Follow the simple steps described in the .hta file, and you can start using your new shinny Send To menu items.
• You are expected to edit the file to customize what gets copied into the clipboard. It should be easy. You may get ideas to push the sendto+clipboard+javascript urls concept further; adding them to the tool should not be too hard.
• You are also expected to do some dancing, since this is DanceLikeMattHardingWare.
  

Lessons learned while hacking

• I initially wanted to use just a .js file. Getting access to the clipboard from a .js file is hard, so I went for an .hta. It turned out to be a good thing, because it ended up providing a way to avoid to the users the trouble of creating the shortcuts by hand and to me the trouble of documenting the recipe.
• The problem of using an .hta file is that I found no way to keep it invisible, that it has an unusual way to receive its params, and that I had to warn you about its dangerousness.
• I think that I've spent more time recording the lousy screencast and comparing video hosting services that coding. The number of times that I rerecorded the #@%! thing will remain undisclosed; I have my pride. Regarding the hosting services, after reading about them, I posted the video to google, blip.tv and vimeo.
  I still have no winner, but google's video quality was awfull, so I had to drop it despite its super cool feature of letting you link to a specific point of the video. Update: looks like the winner is http://viddler.com: links, comments and tags on specific points of the video, plus the best player of all (in full screen mode, showing the original size, the quality was just perfect): http://www.viddler.com/explore/xdexavier/videos/1
  

gotApi: docs at your fingertips

Stumbled upon gotApi.com. Its Fast Api Search, covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, Python, Java, Flickr... is fast, pretty and extremely useful.

Fast Forward to the 1940s: The Puppini Sisters

Just heard for the first time The Puppini Sisters, via a twittering kellypuffs. Here singing Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights.



*Sigh* I bet used to hate the Andrews Sister when I was younger.

Chicago 2.0 - Barcelona 0

Chicago 2.0 - Barcelona 0