EVOL.reverse

Starting the day with a post on your blog can be anti-productivity but I’ll take the risk today.

Something I wanted to talk for some time now is Remember the Milk. According to the authors its the best way to manage online to-do lists. But what I really wanted to talk is how I found it.

While browsing the PostgreSQL website I noticed the small bottom link they have to TinySofa and got curious. I then followed the link and discovered Remember the Milk and also their one Linux distro also called TinySofa. My first though was “real entrepreneurs these guys”.

This is great example of how helping open-source projects can be a good thing for company. I can only think how much web traffic they get from that small link and the money they are not spending on marketing.

As for the application itself, it’s the Web 2.0 thing you could expect.

Update: In a conversation with prla he brought up a good question. He thinks this is an excellent, excellent app., one of the best Web 2.0 examples, both in terms of interface and features. The question is, will the user be more happy with the long feature list of Remember The Milk or by the simplicity of TadaList?

After reading the book “The Search”, the obvious thing do to (at least for me) was to try out the A9 search engine, and boy, does it rock. I installed the A9 toolbar into firefox and it supports diary entry notes for each different site I go, history, bookmarks, site info directly from Alexa.com, etc.., and you can even set preferences like ‘find results only in Portuguese’, ‘open results in new window’, etc. Another incentive they arranged is that you get 1.6% discount on Amazon items, not too much but just enough for me (and possiby many others) to use the toolbar.

Now, another obvious thing is that there are monitoring every single thing I do while I’m browsing the net. The Big Brother is watching me. After a week of spying, A9 promises my search experience will become much better, finding what I usually look for easier and quicker. Like Osho say, when people have a dream, you can always become their leader by promising what they want.

One feature I would like to see on A9, and by the way in Google also (and others), is the possibility of searching inside Amazon.co.uk instead of Amazon.com. I usually buy items there. Another feature I would like to see, this time in Amazon.com/.co.uk itself, would be to import items from my .com account into the .co.uk back and forth. By sloopyness I started too wishlists a long time ago and by now I have books in both of them and well.. you get the picture. Don’t know if this happened to anyone else, but it happened to me.

This question is like a loop in my head that arises every now and then. I think and write clearly and quicker in my mother tongue that in English, but for me, entering a site in a language I don’t understand is one of the worse experiences I can get on the web today.

I found a post about it called “Should you blog in English” where the author boils down the question to three factors: time availability, social ambition and scale. I totally agree with him, its an investment. Its all about how deep in the rabit hole you want to go.

I would say: go english unless you really don’t have any other option than to write in your mother tongue.

Nowadays it seems there’s a howto for almost everything, and I’m not talking about technical stuff.

It reminds me of a song by Bad Religion, called No Direction, that goes like this:

everyone is looking for something
and they assume somebody else knows what it is
no one can live with the decisions of their own
it seems so they look to someone else
to tell ‘em what to be
tell ‘em what to wear
tell ‘em what to say
tell ‘em how to act and think and compel others compulsively
until the world is all like them

Note to Self: I only have one life to spend so I might as well spend it being myself.

Complete Lyrics

In the begining of the month I said I would live the whole month in Évora with 250€ (house rent excluded). That has failed miserably. It’s now the 23th and I’ve spend 270€ already.

The main reason for this failure I think was the fact that I didn’t use a separate account to manage the 250€. Lesson number one: Having more money favors more spending. Another lesson, rather obvious, is that by eating at home I save more. Since many times, especially at lunch there isn’t time to cook, eating at the University has become an alternative to other restaurants because it is rather cheap (less than 4€ for a meal).

Drive less, walk more! It’s the best way to save these days. The gas price has gone nuts.

On another note, I read the latest post on Graham’s blog and a quote caught my eye:

“Here we are. So what is our purpose here? Well, we humans are as conspicuously different from other animals as the anteater. In our case the distinguishing feature is the ability to reason. So obviously that is what we should be doing, and a human who doesn’t is doing a bad job of being human– is no better than an animal.”

I wonder how this contradicts the search for emptyness, normally associated with Zen Budishm.

The guys at Steelpixel had a great idea. They are offering lifetime hosting starting at 150$, one-time fee. Read on because it is worth it:

VC or not to VC, that is a tricky question. Chris and I made the decision long ago that we would never take VC. We don’t feel it allows you the freedom to run a company the way you think it should be run. If you can’t do that, what is the point of running your own company?

We have kicked around a few ideas on how to get money to pay for things we need. We talked about borrowing Kevin Burton’s idea and setup adsense and have people use that for us. We decided we wanted to offer something in return for helping us out so we decided to use the same idea TextDrive did. We are offering two lifetime hosting packages to customers, starting now.

The money we raise will allow us to add more server capacity, increase our support response time (by make this our full time gig), and to focus on ways to improve the entire hosting process for our customers.

Somehow today I remembered the movie The Exorcist. I later went to the Wikipedia page that covers the film details and guess what, I found an actual 360º virtual view of the steps where Father Damien Karras dies. Creepy. Went to Google Maps and Yahoo Maps but it hasn’t enough detail on that spot to make it interesting.

I rented the DVD Last Days, to watch tonight. Yesterday I watched Wiker Park (2004) with Ana and I thought it was great. I went back to MovieLens today, a movie recomendation site after a few months of absence since I registered. I first heard about it when I went to Brazil and saw a workshop on recomendation systems. The system is rather interesting, it uses simple algorithms like K-Means and correlation, etc.. but I didn’t saw any movie recommended by it so I can’t say if it works or not

Other than that, today I was able to run for 20min in a row, wow, not bad.

Upgraded to the latest Dapper release of Ubuntu Linux and got this kernel panic:

Begin: Mounting root file system... ...
Begin: Running /scripts/local-top...
PANIC: Circular dependancy. Exiting.
[4294675.656000] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

A synatic “Mark all upgrades” and “Apply” fixed the problem.

Ryan Carson, one of the developers behind DropSend, a well-known service for sending large files over the Web, in a piece called “Will your Web App Make Money”, talks about how people vastly overestimate the number of paying customers they’ll get when deploying a web app:

If you’re offering a free plan to your customers (for example DropSend offers a free plan that enables users to send 5 free sends a month before they start paying) then expect to get around 98% or 99% of your customers on that plan. That means that you can only really bank on 1% or 2% of your total customers on the paying plan. In our experience this is true and other major players in the web app industry have agreed. This is about the industry average.

Coming from Ryan Carson this is especially interesting. DropSend currently has 17,000 users gained in just over five months. Their business model is based on subscription plans. Wouldn’t you expect more than 1% of the total customers would use the paying plan?

The article is published at ThinkVitamin, a new resource launched recently for web developers, designers and entrepreneurs, also powered by Ryan. I saw this via PlasticBag and as they say it’s already a pretty interesting looking site with some extremely cool people commenting and supporting the venture.

One of my laptop wings broke a few days ago. Its the end-of-life for this old Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 that will turn 6 years next August. Funny that precisely the same thing happened to Cláudio a few months ago, he had the same laptop with nearly the same age (a month older) and the right wing broke. I guess Toshiba had this pretty well figured out, ham?

I’m now inclined to acquire a Macbook Pro or a Thinkpad but this will not happen probably until October or so. Although I have the money to buy it now I also have to think about the next months and I decided I wouldn’t take money from my parents anymore. 25 years financially supporting a slacker like me is already more than enough and not easy. They are in good age to enjoy life, travelling or in any other way they see fit.

Tiago invited me and Ana to a stand-up show by Pedro Tochas, a Portuguese well-known comediant. It will be great, this guy realls rocks. In the mean time, my new ADSL modem has arrived! Me and Ana have upgraded to Clix 16 Mbits, the fastest home-user internet solution available at the moment in Portugal (I think). For my happy surprise, the modem supports Ethernet Work has also arrived, this time via e-mail. Have to prepare this week classes.

Google has launched the Google Calendar and they got it right as usual. I don’t want to think what will happen now to those couple of startups that were on the run for a web calendar. Close the doors probably.

Publico newspaper featured a two page article this week about Web 2.0 and “social networking” web sites. Many well-known sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, 43folders, etc.. were featured. Very nice article.

I’m the maintaner of the gprolog package under OpenBSD. GNU Prolog stopped building correctly a few months ago and I’m trying to fix it. Some related ideas follow..

I suspect the problem is related to the changes in malloc(3):

“..the userland’s method for allocating memory, has been rewritten to use the mmap(2) system call on OpenBSD. Traditionally, memory allocated to a system would be all together in one contiguous region. If an algorithm in a program behaved reliably but stepping slightly outside the area of memory it allocated, this was a bug gone undetected. With the release of 3.8, because of the way mmap randomizes the location in memory, this is no longer true.”

This new behavior seemed to break the compilation process.

Update: To those of you of saw the first version of this post you might have noticed I lost part of it. This was due to a problem with my internet connection while updating the post at the same time. Oh well, life goes on..