Although I haven’t bought yet the latest kid on the block, Modern Warfare 2, I think the numbers and technology involved is worthy of reflection:

• You can play on-line against other gamers
• It is available for PC, PS3 or XBox360
• At whatever time of day you find half a million other gamers
• It took the makers 2 years to develop
• Cost the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster
• Had sales worth 550 million dollars in the first 5 days.

If you’re on a Mac go and install 1Password, period.

No more struggling to remember all those usernames and passwords.. and it integrates beautifully with Firefox, Safari and more recently also with Google Chrome.

At least try it, seriously. I’m yet to find a person who is unhappy with this software.

If you’re on a Mac and looking for an easy and stylish to-do list software you might want to consider Things. It has a slick interface, allows you to keep items organized for different contexts (home, work, etc) and best of all (for me at least) you can very easily add tasks to it in one simple step using a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Space in my case).

With a version for the iPhone that syncs as well, this might be the productivity tool you’ve been looking for years now since you first read that wonderful (but hard to put into practice) book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. The cons will probably be the price and it being a desktop app but maybe you can live it that?

I’ve been using it for over a month now and so far I’ve been happy with it. To be honest it hasn’t boost my productivity. These things are like buying news shoes for running: the shoes won’t do the running for you!

Para freelancers e pequenos negócios que precisem de um software para facturação, podem dar uma vista de olhos ao Invoic€xpress. Já suporta o formato SAFT-PT que desde 1 de Janeiro de 2010 é obrigatório e também facturas electrónicas, entre outras funcionalidades.

É um serviço totalmente web-based e tem um trial de 30 dias grátis para se experimentar. Após o periódo de trial, consoante o plano escolhido, paga-se uma pequena mensalidade por mês, mas é também possivel adquirir pacotes de facturas a vulso por um preço fixo (para quem não gostar de pagar mensalidades).

Fica a dica. Aproveitem e se experimentarem e gostarem digam qualquer coisa.

p.s. O Invoic€xpress é um produto da RUPEAL.

http://ineo.pt/2010/02/podcast-goncalo-quadros-critical/

Do outro lado do oceano, as histórias são bem diferentes mas também valem a pena ouvir :) Aqui fica um vídeo de um painel com 6 estudantes de Stanford que criaram empresas nos seus 20 e poucos anos.

“Six young Stanford grads and entrepreneurs — Steven Garrity, Clara Shih, Kimber Lockhart, Jeff Seibert, Josh Reeves, and Tristan Harris — share their experiences starting companies and raising capital. While being in their 20s may seem to be an obstacle to outsiders, they said they “flipped” this liability into an asset — focusing instead on their raw ability to bring innovative ideas to life. They advise all young entrepreneurs to be persistent, opportunistic, and scrappy. “

define ('WPLANG', 'pt_PT');

I then used poEdit, a localization tool that works with Mac OS X and that can be downloaded from the poEdit download page. In poEdit, from the File menu select ‘New Catalog’. Fill in the information there and in the ‘Paths’ tab put the plugin directory. In the ‘Keywords’ tab add the missing entries so it looks like this:

At this point it should recognize all the text strings in your code and present a screen where you can add the translations. After that be sure to save the file as pluginname-pt_PT.po, preferably in a directory called ‘translations’ or ‘locales’ (but anything will do). After that you’re all set. In your code you should load the translation like this:

load_plugin_textdomain ( 'your-plugin-name' , FALSE , '/your-plugin-name/translations' );

And strings should have the form:

_e('Choose a Category','your-plugin-name');

That’s it. Let me know if you run into troubles :)

Resources & Further Reading for the Geeks:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin
• http://codex.wordpress.org/I18n_for_WordPress_Developers
• http://urbangiraffe.com/articles/translating-wordpress-themes-and-plugins/
• http://urbangiraffe.com/articles/localizing-wordpress-themes-and-plugins/

• Mental Rehearsal/Visualization – The process of creating pictures or images in your mind.
• Imagery – Playing out/imagining in your mind the way you wish for an event to occur.
• Self-Talk – The “voice” in your head that can be trained to provide positive affirmations during adversity and tough times.

from http://www.marathontraining.com/marathon/m_psycho.html

Do you use any of these techniques already?

What is the problem?

• Software architecture research investigates methods for determining how best to partition a system, how components identify and communicate with each other, how they evolve, etc.

• Do we know any large software architecture that has scaled immensely? Can we learn/take something from it? Yes, the Web and the Internet in general.

What can we learn from it?

• Client-server (separation of concerns)
• Stateless (requests can be processed by different servers for scalability)
• Caching (performance and fault tolerance)
• Uniform interface (URI represents object and state)
• Layered System (components build on top of other components)

Example

• Client-server => browser-httpd
• Stateless, Uniform interface => /car/parts/12337 => URI represents the object and asks for a specific resource.
• Can be processed by any server because there is no context
• Output in html, XML or JSON

Example 2

• Imagine you could just re-use the component by redirecting requests to it
• Example: user auth
• Instead of having the user auth encapsulated in the application we can have the userauth to be a webservice that can be re-used by any application – this is RESTful

The thing is, in order to learn, you need basically experience and to get experience you need to **do things that are useful**. This is not math therefore theory can only work for you to a certain extent.

First: **have interest, try to learn everything you can** by reading other opinions, for example add some of this blogs to your usual reading, they won’t teach specific things but will give you useful advices that you will remember when you need them, you won’t remember the exact thing but you will think “I know I read something about this and there was a really cool method for doing this”.

Second: **Program on your spare time**. Find a project you like (an obtainable project not some unreachable objective like programming the new Quake 4) and do it until you finish it. Practice, practice and practice, a lot of problems arise when you make even the simplest programs. Experience let you recognice patterns and adapt them to new situations. If you’ve done something similar in the past then you’ll do the new thing twice faster.

Third: **Share, comment and try to explain things**. One of the best things you can do is start your own programming blog. Try to explain others how to do things, you’ll find it’s a lot harder than you think. You may think you know how to do something but when you try to explain how it’s done and why, you end up doing a lot of research and actually learning how and why is done on the process.

Finally: **You will start developing your own thoughts an opinions that diverge the usual thinking or the opinions of the rest of the people. Share them.** Create a blog or whatever and express your new opinions. You’ll get feedback and will continue learning for it. For example, I read both Joel and Jeff blogs, sometimes I agree and sometimes I don’t. When I don’t, I either post to say why not or blog about it and in the process I always learn something, maybe through comments I end up changing my mind and that too is a good thing.

from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/94579/how-to-find-a-mentor/596714

“Take the Apple App Store, for instance. In a few weeks, developers can easily build an application, submit it to the store and immediately find out whether it has any traction. “They can vet the idea in the marketplace”

from http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/do-web-entrepreneurs-still-need-venture-capitalists/