Wired - June 2004

In this month Wired Magazine we are presented with one of the most beautiful design covers we have ever seen. It’s really well designed taking advantage of the excelent model that Pixar built for the forth-coming film The Incredibles (trailer).

The cover story is also the most interesting in this month edition. Welcome to Planet Pixar is the story of how Pixar has grown in the last years following some of the same principles Walt Disney used but innovating when necessary. How it recruited some of the best industry talents convincing them not to just join another good-paying company but a completely paxionate company. Paxion is the word that drives Pixar members into new realities and is what makes them believe that cheaper & faster will never beat longer-but-paxionate.

May 26, 2004 | Tags: magazines | Leave a Comment

blog.com launched!

blog.com has been launched! (via karlus). For now it follows Orkut’s invitation-only scheme. This is a very good approach since the service does not grow exponentially. This allows the programmers to fine tune things and launch new features smoothly.

In Portugal there a few blog services: blog.pt, weblog.com.pt and blogs.sapo.pt but they are all portuguese oriented. The blog.com seem to be the first independent , quality and international-oriented blog service based in Portugal.

So, congratulations to Andr� Restivo and the rest of the team!

By the way, rhe spain market for competing blog services is getting too crowded. They have: bitacoras.com, blogia, blogalia, Bloxus and zonalibre.org.

May 20, 2004 | | 4 Comments

Valuable Reference Cards

It’s always handy to have this Quick Reference Cards when you’re programming.
The list includes:
- VisiBone Web Designer’s HTML Card
- Cascading Style Sheets 1.0
- mod_perl Quick Reference Card
- PHP 4 Reference Card
- Apache Quick Reference Card
- Linux Security Quick Reference Guide
- vi Quick Reference
- XEmacs Reference Card
- CVS Quick Reference Card
And many more. Printing…

May 19, 2004 | Tags: programming | 1 Comment

What Would You Swap for a Gmail Account?

Gmail Swap gives an opportunity to get your hands on a Gmail account.

You can add your request to the Swap List. There’s is, of course, a Nifty, Neat and Noteworthy Swaps List.

This is why the Internet is such a Wonderfully Wide World.

May 19, 2004 | Tags: day to day | Leave a Comment

Sucess Stories: LoQUo

Launched last year, Barcelona community website LoQUo has been one of the most interesting project I’ve been following. From their press release we can read:

“www.loquo.com is establishing itself on Barcelona resident�s list of favorite resources for renting an apartment, getting a job, language exchange, selling a car, joining a class and just about anything else you can think of in between.”

According to LoQUo-founder Ubaldo, craigslist is the original idea behind loquo. However, nowadays, loquo has it’s own set of features developed by Ubaldo and his team with very hard-work.

You can read Best practices of a development: Loquo.com (spanish) and learn some tips from Ubaldo’s experience with LoQUo.

The democratic appeal of such a marketplace like LoQUo got to the point where they have sites for Madrid, Valencia and Alicante / Costa Blanca. There were about 190,000 visits (1,6 millions pages views) in March, 2004 and it keeps growing. Which is quite a fact for a service that started on Ubaldo’s living room.

One of LoQUo’s strongest features is it’s usability-oriented development. With the help of Salvador from clarostudio, Armando (sorry, no reference) and Eduardo Manch�n from alzado LoQUo’s usability can be considered a reference among spanish websites. Some of the features include no-registration posting and minimalist (yet very informative) site design.

Another good service from LoQUo is barna4free, a selection of free or low-cost alternative events put together by Charlotte Lemaitre.

Maybe a LoQUo Lisboa would be a good service (what do you think?) since there aren’t any quality independent classified listing services in Portugal. There some look-alike but not with this information-driven ease of use.

May 19, 2004 | Tags: day to day | 4 Comments

Think different: Outside log(o)land

log introduced the log@home scheme which allows each employee to have it’s own weekly work-at-home day. It’s still in beta stage so everyone can check what’s working and what’s not. Anyway, congratulations to log for the innovative enterprise thinking. We’re leading the trends in Human Resources. Cool.

May 18, 2004 | Tags: productivity | Leave a Comment

OmniGraffle Palettes

Free add-ons for OmniGraffle. How I love OmniGraffle. So simple yet so powerful.

May 18, 2004 | Tags: mac | Leave a Comment

Blog.com

I just read on Carlos blog (on of my favourite and daily reads) that Portugalmail (onwer of Portuguese blog service blog.pt) will be launching an international service on blog.com. this is good news. Let’s see how they get along with all the strong competition (blogger and typepad) as Carlos mentioned.

May 17, 2004 | | Leave a Comment

Benfica: Portugal’s Cup Winner

We have won the Portugal’s Cup. Eight years after the last win on a major competition. It feels soooooo goooood! We beat FC Porto 2-1 on the final!

May 17, 2004 | Tags: day to day | 1 Comment

Mourinho

The coach of Portuguese club FC Porto is a good (not great) leader. He has leadership and good comunication skills but an attitude problem. We all have a problem when loosing something but he just can’t deal with it. And that’s the part that divides good from great. I hope he does in his new club has good has in Porto but he’s just another coach with a bad sport attitude until he changes that.