New 2000 pieces puzzle

Just bought a new 2000 pieces puzzle. I did it for several reasons.

1. It’s been a long time since I spent a few hours on a puzzle. I miss the feeling.
2. Puzzle solving is one of the best exercises for the mind.
3. It’s way better than spending 12 hours in front of a screen. (ok, therapy)
4. I like Puzzle solving.

December 27, 2006 | Tags: day to day | 3 Comments

A better Web 2.0

Bruno Giussani had access to Gartner’s report Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.

The Hype Cycle for emerging technologies targets planners who advise their organizations on the adoption of emerging technologies. We feature 36 technologies that have great potential impact or that are being significantly hyped or underhyped in the marketplace.

Interesting to see Web 2.0 that represents several things (a set of technologies, a movement, an attitude) assuming a position of transformational technology.

Many people and companies will only accept a certain technology once is has come out in a report like this. This will certainly be helpful in making Web 2.0 better understood and eventually a better place.

December 19, 2006 | Tags: Web | 1 Comment

Dumb TV

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

Seen on Nobody goes there anymore–it’s too crowded.

December 19, 2006 | Tags: day to day, the-long-tail, tv | 1 Comment

Wordpress Widget for Pesquisa SAPO

A few days ago Bruno did a post (in Portuguese) when he decided to start using the new SAPO Search widget. Feedback was very good.

After that Ricardo complained that activating that search widget was too complicated for non-technical users. For those people that want to use SAPO Search Widget but don’t have tech skills, I’ve implemented a Wordpress Widget for Pesquisa SAPO.

How to install the Widget for Pesquisa SAPO

1. Make sure you’re using Wordpress 2.0, the Widgets plugin (don’t forget to activate it) and a Widget compatible theme (most new ones are).
2. Download the Widget for Pesquisa SAPO.
3. Unzip and copy file to your /wp-content/plugins/widgets/.
4. Activate the Pesquisa SAPO Widget under Admin -> Plugins in the Admin.
5. Go to the Admin -> Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets and drag the widget to configure it.
6. Have fun.

This is how the configuration looks like:

You can see the widget running on the sidebar of this blog.
Comment below if you have any problems / ideas / suggestions.

ps: Many people reading this blog are English speaking so I won’t replace the default search for now.

December 18, 2006 | Tags: day to day | 8 Comments

Time Person of the Year: You.

Time named all of us as Person of the Year.

From the article:

It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace.

Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom.

Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail.

This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.

What I mostly like about Web 2.0, the Long Tail, the Wisdom of Crowds, etc. is that it is not about a few things that everyone likes but about all the things that each person likes.

December 18, 2006 | Tags: Web | 4 Comments

If you don’t get Craigslist you don’t get the Web

That is apparently what happened to some Wall Street people while Jim Buckmaster CEO of Craigslist explained:

that Craigslist exists to help Web users find jobs, cars, apartments and dates — and not so much to make money.

the concept of serving customers first, and worrying about revenues later

that the company is doubling in size every year, as measured by page views and listings.

Craigslist goal-oriented homepage:

December 15, 2006 | Tags: community, craigslist, day to day, individual-motives, users | Leave a Comment

Twitter: What are you doing?

I’m doing a bit of Web experimentation on Twitter.

It’s a simple service that let’s you post short messages on what you’re doing. It sounds useless but as usual if your social network is there, then the service starts to be really fun to use. Tom does a good explanation on the usefullness of it.

I think Twitter feels like something between a blog and an IM conversation.

There’s already an API and (of course) a Wordpress plugin that updates Twitter each time you post.

With the API people are starting to do all sorts of automatic updates. I have mixed feelings about this. This sends the human factor away but at the same time it’s a real log of your life which sounds really interesting (if scaring). A filtering solution might be the use of tags.

As I said Twitter is an experiment. On the Web this kind of experimentation is a good thing. This is the way crazy ideas are able to be tested and maybe become working services.

I haven’t tested Jaiku but the service (created by Jyri who I’ve met at Reboot) adds a few extra layers of information, like location. I think Jaiku is prettier and richer (you can add pictures) and it has a sort of filtering that makes it easier to navigate the messages. Must try this one.

December 15, 2006 | Tags: day to day | 5 Comments

Opinion Democracy on the Web (after Le Web 3)

The events at Le Web 3 conference have reminded me how the Web is really a brilliant place for opinion democracy. The story and opinions on it are all over the Web. Tom Morris is doing a very good coverage on aggregating the opinions of a lot of people.

There’s are hundreds of both positive and negative opinions and the Web is the tool that is allowing all of this opinion polarization to happen.

If anything this whole story has sparked a huge discussion that it showing people the true value of the Web.

I think Euan Semple got it right in that these events

will strengthen the resolve of those of us interested in making things different

It is also good to hear that Lift, Reboot and SHiFT (will we have forgotten all this by then ?) are being referred has good places to make some follow up on this discussion. I’m looking forward.

update: I’m with Stowe in that if something was bad then people should not find excuses for saying that it wasn’t. I had an interesting discussion with Nuno over over (Sushi!) lunch yesterday and we both agreed with this point of view.

update 2: Loic has a long response.

December 14, 2006 | Tags: le-web-3, lift, reboot, shift | 1 Comment

Do users care about data portability ?

One of the things that made me use LibraryThing to manage my library is the ability to export my data. This feature has made me feel safe about trying LibraryThing because I could take my data with me if I ever decide to leave the service.

Yesterday, Tim Spalding posted about an interesting interview on the views of 4 social networks regarding data portabilty.

Steve O’Hear interviews Marc Canter from Broadband Mechanics, Andrew Anker from SixApart/Vox, Ben Werdmuller from Elgg and Curverider (both companies I never heard of) and Tim Spalding from LibraryThing.

There is a lot of interesting stuff on this interview. I particularly agree with Marc Canter in that:

“Users do care if for no other reason than they’re lazy and they don’t (want) to have to create all those relationships and upload their photos – all over again.”

I guess it’s really simple. Users are eager to get some Social Value from Individual Motives but first they need to be assured that their data is safe. And safety in not just about not loosing data but also about being able to really own their data.

December 14, 2006 | Tags: data-portability, day to day, librartything | Leave a Comment

MySQL hiccups at SAPO Fotos

I’ve been dealing with a few hiccups at SAPO Fotos. The normal stuff for a website that is over a year and has been growing quite steadily.

This is the TCP connections graph of the database server that’s is running MySQL.

It clearly shows that at some points in time the number of connections have a spike. Usually when this happens MySQL blocks the front-end from accessing the database machine after max_connects_errors failed requests (more details here).

A closer inspection to another graph (the slow query graph) shows that both events (slow queries and spikes) usually happen at the same time. So it was time to inspect the slow query log on MySQL and do some query cleaning. Fine tunning some queries with the help of Bruno helped reduce the strain on the MySQL server but there was one little thing really improved query speed.

The code was was doing something like users WHERE userid = '1' and by removing single quotes (’) and writing only WHERE userid = 1 it was able to perform a thousand times faster (from 40 s to 0,01 s). It was not doing it for the simple reason that using execute() from DBI was single quoting the parameters.

To solve this I had to use bind_param to identify the type of each parameter like this:

$sth->bind_param(1, $value, SQL_INTEGER);

And then do the execute().

The service is much calmer now and the graph looks like this:

December 14, 2006 | Tags: bind_param, mysql, quotes, tech | 4 Comments

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My name is André Ribeirinho, I'm an entrepreneur who lives in Portugal
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Adegga is a social wine discovery service. The idea is to take the complexity out of wine and allow people to discover wines based other people's choices.

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