August102009
On the Cheap
Cheap Merchandise mean cheap men, and cheap men mean cheap country.
August22009
The "Value-Added" Approach
Do you really believe…
- Do you believe that Steve Jobs gathered the troops before the introduction of the iPhone and asked, “Okay, great product. Now, what’s our value add?”
Scott McKain: Collapse of Distinction
July252009
"Stranger! Halt and regard me!”
Wary, I halted. Couldn’t see a damned thing through that fog, though.
“Hello,” I said. “Where are you?”
Just then, the fogs broke for a moment and I beheld a huge head, eyes on level with my own. They belonged to what seemed a giant body, sunk up to it’s shoulders in a quag. The head was bald, the skin pale as a milk, with a stony texture to it. The dark eyes probably seemed even darker than they really were by way of a contrast.
“I see,” I said then. “You are in a bit of a fix. Can you free your arms?”
“If I strain mightily,” came the reply.
“Well, let me check about for something stable you can grab onto. You ought to have a pretty good reach there.”
“No. That is not necessary.”
“Don’t you want to get out? I thought that was why you hollered.”
“Oh, no. I simply wanted you to regard me.”
I moved nearer and stared, for the fog was beginning to shift again.
“All right,” I said. “I have seen you.”
“Do you feel my plight?”
“Not particularly, if you will not help yourself or accept help."
— Roger Zelazny: The Chronicles of Amber - The Courts of Chaos
June282009
Acrobat.com and pdf embed in your website
Adobe’s Acrobat.com lets you embed pdf files on your website as I read it from RJ Jacquez at the Adobe in eLearning and Tech Communication blog. Smooth I say.
January182009
PHP MySQL and encoding
So here we go with new site design and all, and one thing that drives me up the wall is the encoding mess.
I have a hungarian lanuage blog, sitting in MySQL using utf-8 encoding. Wordpress reads it perfectly, in MySQL every special character shows up correctly.
Then I try to read it with PHP - page encoding: utf-8 -, and it says the text read is ISO 8859-1, and it shows a garbled mess with every special character replaced by a question mark in dark square.
So I have to salvage the Wordpress code and see how it reads the post content without messing up everything.
January162009
Book recommendations
In the last two months I have read some new books, and I would like to recommend some of them. Just in case you don’t know what to read.
-
Eric Evans: Domain Driven Design
A sensible approach to software and system design, with the goal to keep the model and the code in synch. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far it’s a good book. -
Donald A. Norman: Emotional Design
On the three levels (Visceral, Behavioural, Reflective) of design, why do beautfiul things work better, and why does he have an impossible to use tea pot. -
Joyce Wycoff: Mindmapping
An introduction to mindmaps, what they are, how to use them, and why is it better to make notes with coloured pens. -
Soren Lausen: Software Requirements - Styles and Techniques
The book promises practical advices, has some really good examples, and useful tips, and templates.
November72008
Diving into jQuery
This week I started to learn the secrets of jQuery. The reason is that I want to do some nice effects on my Fractured Bloughts and the main site - like the a rollable featured post link like the BrandfordMagazine with the Lead Article/Recent Post/About This Theme part -, and this seems a bit simpler and less memory/bandwith heavy than Flash.
Flash is not an abandoned idea, but that is a bit more difficult, at least for me, jQuery is “just” coding.
If you want to learn more, check out the jQuery Home and the jQuery UI Home, there are some really neat things there, including a lot of Demos and Tutorials.
November42008
My adventure with Apple
Got an iPod Touch two weeks ago.
Yesterday it died.
The Apple has skin that’s black.
October272008
Struggling
I have to admit that currently I am struggling. Struggling with all the stuff I took upon myself, with work, with keeping in touch with people.
Without going too personal, I just want to apologize to everyone that are waiting on me, be it an e-mail, a post, a visit, whatever.
Sometimes you make a bad decision, and by the time you realize you made a mistake you are in the middle of a commitment which can not be left until the contract expires.
Sometimes the best company, and the good money can’t compensate for the feeling of being utterly useless and working on totally aimless things.
And that can take you down quite a few notches.
Ok, lack of vitamins, exercise and such helps a lot with it, too.
October162008
The Sound of Silence
OK, the reason for not writing anywhere, not on my blog, on Tumblr and even owing a post to Zoli Erdos: first I had the flu, then I had a visit to France then my crooked grown wisdom tooth blown up, so basically I am a wreck.
Hard to write when you fight a toothache. But soon. When I can see.
