IKEA hacker

Yesterday, she sent me a link to ikea hacker, a site about stuff made from IKEA products. There I found out I’m not the only one using an ikea variera kitchen shelf as a PowerBook stand.

notebook stand

The main advantage is that it helps to cool the PowerBook since the shelf is perforated. At 2,99 euros (yes, that cheap) it’s certainly worth the money and it keeps the desk clean.

June 27, 2007 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

adegga screenshots

I’ve just published the first adegga screenshots. This first post is about some of the basic features.

  • The Cellar where you can catalog the wines you own.
  • The Tasted Wines list used to keep track of wines you have been tasting.
  • The Watchlist that lets you add your friends and other people you like and follow them on their wine discovery.

adegga watchlist

In the next few days I’ll be posting more screenshots and explaining some of the features over at the project’s blog.

June 27, 2007 | | Leave a Comment 

My Small Business Tools

This morning a long conversation over Skype reminded me of the amount of great (and sometimes free) tools that entrepreneurs now have access too. Here’s the list of tools I use everyday to run my business.

Web Tools

  • Skype. Free online quality phone calls to whoever is online.
  • GMail. Email. Fast and Free. And low level of spam.
  • Google Apps for Your Domain. I’m using this suite to run adegga.com emails and calendars.
  • Highrise. 37Signals tool for contact management. Used as simplified CRM tool for wine shops, producers, etc.
  • Adium and iChat. My instant messaging tools. Adium for hotmail, sapo and yahoo accounts and iChat for my GTalk account.
  • del.icio.us. Bookmarks manager.
  • bloglines. Feed reader. Where I read blog, news and such.
  • Wordpress. Open source blogging software. This blog and blog.adegga.com use it.
  • TextMate. My preferred text editor. It’s powerful and simple to use. I also use vi for server edits.
  • GoPlan. Project Management tool. I’m using it for bug tracking only.
  • SVN. Open-source revision control system.
  • svnX. An Mac OS X open-source GUI for Subversion
  • CocoaMySQL. Open source MySQL GUI for Mac OS X
  • XAMPP. This is the easiest (only) way to get a full development server working in 30 minutes.

What kind of tools are you using ?

June 26, 2007 | Tags: | 8 Comments 

Web Yardsticks

Coming up with ways to measure success or power has always evolved alongside history. The Web has changed many things in the way we perceive the world and doing so has also provided us with the tools to create new metrics (or Yardsticks)

Yardsticks
Photo by Charlyn W

While reading an article on Michael Arrington on wired I came across this quote.

Based on how many times other Web sites link to his content — an unscientific but accepted yardstick — Arrington is the world’s fourth-most-powerful blogger, according to Technorati.

unscientific but accepted yardstick is a great definition for how the Web works! On the Web, rankings and metrics are not defined by a small group of people inside an office but by a large group of people contributing to that ranking in some way.

So to name a few unscientific but accepted yardsticks and give some examples.

  • Web pages are ranked by PageRank. People vote on pages by linking to them.
  • Blogs are ranked by authority. Same as PageRank. People vote.
  • Articles are ranked by diggs. One digg is one vote. Again people vote.
  • Blogs have readers that FeedBurner can count. People vote by subscribing.
  • At adegga people can add other people to their Watchlist. Like on blogs, they vote by subscribing to follow other users.

That said why do companies keep trying to come up with projects without listening to their users. Why create and push information in one way instead of collaborating and purposing new voting systems, where people can “vote” by clicking, reading or linking. This is the way the Web works. This is exactly the advantage that no other type of system can offer. People want to contribute. Let them do it.

June 25, 2007 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job

Steve Pavlina’s 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job is an article that tells the truth on what we all know about having a job as opposed to be self employed.

Opening thought

It’s funny that when people reach a certain age, such as after graduating college, they assume it’s time to go out and get a job. But like many things the masses do, just because everyone does it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

Here’s the list os 10 points with interesting parts quoted from the article.

1. Income for dummies.

Non-dummies often start out on the traditional income for dummies path. So don’t feel bad if you’re just now realizing you’ve been suckered. Non-dummies eventually realize that trading time for money is indeed extremely dumb and that there must be a better way. And of course there is a better way. The key is to de-couple your value from your time.

2. Limited experience.

The problem with getting experience from a job is that you usually just repeat the same limited experience over and over. You learn a lot in the beginning and then stagnate. This forces you to miss other experiences that would be much more valuable. And if your limited skill set ever becomes obsolete, then your experience won’t be worth squat. In fact, ask yourself what the experience you’re gaining right now will be worth in 20-30 years. Will your job even exist then?

Consider this. Which experience would you rather gain? The knowledge of how to do a specific job really well — one that you can only monetize by trading your time for money – or the knowledge of how to enjoy financial abundance for the rest of your life without ever needing a job again? Now I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have the latter experience. That seems a lot more useful in the real world, wouldn’t you say?

3. Lifelong domestication.

Getting a job is like enrolling in a human domestication program. You learn how to be a good pet.

4. Too many mouths to feed.

You only get paid a fraction of the real value you generate. Your real salary may be more than triple what you’re paid, but most of that money you’ll never see. It goes straight into other people’s pockets.

5. Way too risky.

Many employees believe getting a job is the safest and most secure way to support themselves.

Morons.

Social conditioning is amazing. It’s so good it can even make people believe the exact opposite of the truth.

Does putting yourself in a position where someone else can turn off all your income just by saying two words (”You’re fired”) sound like a safe and secure situation to you? Does having only one income stream honestly sound more secure than having 10?

The idea that a job is the most secure way to generate income is just silly. You can’t have security if you don’t have control, and employees have the least control of anyone. If you’re an employee, then your real job title should be professional gambler.

6. Having an evil bovine master.

When you run into an idiot in the entrepreneurial world, you can turn around and head the other way. When you run into an idiot in the corporate world, you have to turn around and say, “Sorry, boss.”

7. Begging for money.

When you want to increase your income, do you have to sit up and beg your master for more money? Does it feel good to be thrown some extra Scooby Snacks now and then?

8. An inbred social life.

Many people treat their jobs as their primary social outlet. They hang out with the same people working in the same field. Such incestuous relations are social dead ends. An exciting day includes deep conversations about the company’s switch from Sparkletts to Arrowhead, the delay of Microsoft’s latest operating system, and the unexpected delivery of more Bic pens. Consider what it would be like to go outside and talk to strangers. Ooooh… scary! Better stay inside where it’s safe.

9. Loss of freedom.

As part of their obedience training, employees must be taught how to dress, talk, move, and so on. We can’t very well have employees thinking for themselves, now can we? That would ruin everything.

God forbid you should put a plant on your desk when it’s against the company policy. Oh no, it’s the end of the world! Cindy has a plant on her desk! Summon the enforcers! Send Cindy back for another round of sterility training!

Free human beings think such rules and regulations are silly of course. The only policy they need is: “Be smart. Be nice. Do what you love. Have fun.”

10. Becoming a coward.

Have you noticed that employed people have an almost endless capacity to whine about problems at their companies? But they don’t really want solutions – they just want to vent and make excuses why it’s all someone else’s fault.

When you work around cowards all day long, don’t you think it’s going to rub off on you?

Now how’s that for a reality check ?

Via Philip’s post on the CrowdStorm blog

June 25, 2007 | Tags: | 4 Comments 

adegga at reboot 9

I was at reboot last week for 2 days full of friends, knowledge, conversations, talks, presentations, demos and lots of fun.

This was my third time at reboot and finally this year I was able to present my new social wine discovery project - adegga. Guy Dickinson (which has also just launched his collaborative outliner tool - ThinkFold) organized this demo session.

Andre Ribeirinho's notebook sticker - adegga presentation
laptopstickers - Originally uploaded by TonZ
more here, here and here

Everyone had 5 minutes to demo their project. I explained what is adegga and moved into the concept of Watchlist. Then I explained how we developed a unique code for each wine (like an ISBN) and called it AVIN (more on this on another post). Last, I talked about the unique Moo Invite Cards that we created to start inviting some people to beta test our application. And that was it.

The conversations that followed were amazing and provided priceless feedback for the next steps of adegga. Thank you!

June 6, 2007 | | 2 Comments 

Internet Explorer Web Development Toolbar

I use Chris Pederick’s Web Developer extension for Firefox almost everyday. It’s one of my favorite web development tools. It’s simple and powerful at the same time.

However the development of adegga has produced the usual Internet Explorer problems. Since IE still has the majority of the browser market, not fixing them is not an option. Even if they take days of valuable developer time (and patience).

While solving a sessions issue I discovered that Microsoft (amen) has developed their own Internet Explorer development toolbar. It’s not as powerful as the Firefox one but it is still a big help in debugging all of those hard-to-fix IE bugs.

June 6, 2007 | Tags: | 1 Comment 

What is a Wiki ?

For all of us lucky enough to deal with the World Wide Web everyday the word Wiki is quite common but for all other people it’s just another strange word that the Web has turned popular.

So to explain the word and make it easy for people to understand why wikis are such a powerful tool, Lee and Satchi have produced another one of their Plain English movies, Wikis in Plain English

Wikipedia logo

It also helps to read Wikipedia’s wiki definition

The word wiki is a Hawaiian word meaning “quick.” Wiki systems are therefore designed so that their content can be made available in a quick and uncomplicated manner.

The word Wiki is being used in the name of some websites. For example on the most famous Web encyclopedia (Wikipedia). Also, some companies are starting to make enterprise products based on Wikis (Socialtext for example).

To ask or not to ask
I’ve been asked the question What is a Wiki a big number of times. While at Reboot (more on this later) I kept thinking how in a way the Web is actually creating a bigger digital divide between those who get it and those who don’t (and consequently those who use it and those who don’t).

It’s a good thing some people are trying to use the Web to its full potential and at the same time taking the time to explain some of the newest concepts (wikis, blogs, rss) in a way that many other people will also feel comfortable and may learn and starting using them.

June 5, 2007 | Tags: | Leave a Comment 

Mobile internet flat fee

I’ve been checking my email and rss feeds quite often on my mobile phone. Expenses with mobile access were getting pretty high. Finally my Portuguese telecom operator (TMN) has launched a flat fee internet access.

tmn - internet no telemovel
I wanted to know more about the new plan so I decided to visit their website. What a mess. How come these days companies still produce micro sites that make it hard to find all of the needed information.

There are a couple of problems. There’s the splash page (non-useful animated intro flash page). Them, because the site is also flash, it’s not easily indexable by google so some people will have a hard time finding it. When you finally decide to join you call the number (12300) and get another 30 seconds of selling pitch stating again all the advantages of the product via a recorded message.

I’m tempted to say that for such a simple product a simple one page (what, price, how to join) would be enough. Hey, but this is corporate stuff so no simple site is allowed.

Maybe I can do it in one post!

What
Mobile internet access with a flat fee.
You pay a price for unlimited time of use with limited bandwidth (100Mb).

Price
7,5 euros per month or 0,99 euros per day.

How can I join ?
Call 12300 and press 1.

There. That wasn’t that hard.

June 5, 2007 | Tags: | 2 Comments