Seen at the Tate Modern

Patents are no good. I know this for some time now, but I’ve never found a better way to explain than this…

Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don’t protect it.

Reality: No one gives a damn about your idea until you actually succeed and by then it’s too late. Even on the off chance that you do manage to stumble across someone who is as excited about your idea as you are, if they have any brains they will join you rather than try to beat you. (And if they don’t have any brains then it doesn’t matter what they do.)

Extracted from: Top ten geek business myths

This is definitely the geekiest piece of humour I’ve found lately…

(Via: The HTML Hell Page)

Ben Hammersley about code beauty on his talk “Eames, Bach, Michelangelo, and the DOM”

If it’s not beautiful, it’s probably wrong

You can watch the rest of “Fundamentos Web 2006” talks at Fundamentos Web 2006 en directo. Talks are in English.

Check the schedule if you are interested. Notice that all times are GMT+2

Warning: geek joke

$ chmood 777 fu
-bash: chmood: command not found  

If it were so easy to change your mood…

Now including… the time machine, so you can keep track of all your mistakes

In Vim 7.0, a new feature has been included which allows a user to jump back or forward to any point of editing. For example, I am editing a document and after a couple of minutes (say 10 min), I realise that I have made a mistake. I can easily take the document to a point 10 minutes back by using the command :

:earlier 10m

Or for that matter, move to a point 5 seconds ahead by using the command:

:later 5s

Another interesting new features are live spell-checking, tabs, and smart completion.

(Via: All About Linux)

This came when replying to The Open Source Personal MBA, it went longer than expected so I decide to share this here.

What I tried to explain is that currently, the PMBA project tries to help you acquire the concepts acquired in a standard MBA, so you solve the price problem, but only that.

Like in Open Source, the openness doesn’t bring perfection, mostly if you try to copy a wrong concept. Fortunately, when a critical mass of users appear, the small proportion of common sense gets noticeable and things begin to work.

Just in case, I’m using the metaphor of linux desktops some years ago, when they tried to clone windows. It’s a similar case: it’s not better because everybody uses it, whether it’s windows or an MBA.

Maybe we should begin changing its name to reflect its evolution. Something like “Principles Of Enterpreneurshipâ€?. It can’t be master since you can’t ever again assume to be a master. Things change too fast. Business is too generic, we want to focus on new big hits of the next years: a family who runs a small business doesn’t need to know very much about all these things if they want to stay small. In fact, I think this is all about getting big without exploding.

BTW, about the windows cloning, that came to me yesterday when I discovered an article about giving Ubuntu an OSX look. Well, you can try if you like, but don’t expect anymore than a slightly better look. I just love this quote:

Perhaps I just have higher standards, but the Ubuntu makeover looks like lipstick on a pig to me.

Warning I’m not calling Ubuntu a pig, I still consider it the best free desktop distribution.

In the meantime, if, say, hypothetically, you were pausing because you live in a country where the police brutalize people, and a policeman was brutalizing you, and you wanted to stop the music so you could try to figure out what the policeman wanted and perhaps there was some way if you could just hear him that you could get him to stop beating you with a riot bat, you’re already DEAD by the time you figure out how to make the pause button actually pause.

(Via: Amazing X-Ray Glasses from Sprint!)

Or how to turn great marketing ideas into a fiasco. If you are a phone company giving away free phones to bloggers and think that replaces advertising you’re dead wrong.

Blogosphere marketing only amplifies the quality feeling of your product. So if it’s worth having, bloggers will make it clear, but if your product is just crap, everybody will know.

So next time, think about it.

I have nothing to add to this…

Just get through it the first time. You can try that stuff you read about in magazines later.

Listen to the short (2:35) podcast episode at First-time Sex & the Beauty of 1.0.

Just in case you don’t know 43folders, it’s Merlin Mann’s site about personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better

I will be in London in October, from 10th to 18th. I’ve been waiting a long time for this. London is a city which attracted me a long time ago, but I’ve only been in Heathrow by now, so there I go.

One of the best points of Ubuntu conferences is I now know people in a lot of different countries, so if anyone living there wants to meet, drop me an email.

I will also be attending to the MySQL European customer conference, where I don’t know anyone.

See you in London.