Yearly Archives: 2008

How to fight your worries and be happier

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Most people have to feel really bad before they do things that make them feel a little bit better.
David Allen

That’s what happened to me about two years ago. I was overwhelmed with work and life: a lot of “stuff” was going on, and I was worried about too many things. One day, I decided to sit down and write everything that was keeping me worried. This only act of emptying my mind had a very powerful relaxing effect. I knew what the problems were, so I could figure what to do to solve it.

Weeks ago, I found that file in my hard drive, and it made me smile. Everything in it was either gone, irrelevant, or in process of being solved.

Some worries that I’ve fixed in the last two years:

  • Leaving home. This weekend will make one year since I left my parents’ house and moved with my girlfriend. No regrets at all.
  • Finish the warp website. This ghost was running after me since almost we released the previous version. Finally this year, it happened. It can never be “finished”, but it’s online and I’m pretty satisfied with the result
  • Dental health. My teeth were a catastrophic area. Since I left high school, I stopped brushing my teeth progressively, and it had obvious consequences. This year, after spending quite time, money and pain, they got restored and I got into the habit again.
  • More exercise. This falls into the “in progress” bin. I wanted to start running, and did it a couple of times. I still plan to do it occasionally. Anyway, I got myself a new folding bike and I go to work biking half of the days.
  • Learn and do more photography. Just watch my flickr feed and see for yourself if I’ve improved in quantity and quality

Most of the other things were either projects from work (which I dropped or passed on to someone else), or personal projects which still are in my “someday” list.

A new twist on the blog

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I have some new ideas to post in this blog, but they don’t fit into the current topics. It’s still a personal blog which should reflect my interests, and they vary widely over time.

I’m still thinking about technology, open source, photography, business and innovation but I’m creating a new topic about personal growth. All the “personal growth”, “self help” and “motivation” terms are sometimes associated to cheap marketing and books for the “losers”. I had the same thought before, and I’m still slightly affected by that prejudice.

But I believe in continuous learning, and learning about yourself and how to feel and act better is also part of it.

After much reading and inspiration from various sources along the years, I know that I improved myself in many different ways. Today, I can affirm that I’m happy, and helping others to be happier would make me happier to.

MySQL Conference 2009, I need an idea

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I had a sad time this year when I missed the MySQL conference, since I had much fun last year in Santa Clara. I can’t miss it next year.

As a MySQL partner, and after almost 2 years doing MySQL training, I sure have interesting things to tell in the conference, but I’m not sure about what.

I will be thinking about this in the next weeks, but I’d appreciate some help. What topics are you interested in?

Store countries with ISO-3166 codes in rails

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I’ve been trying to give rebirth to an old internal project at my company, abandoned circa 2006, and this is one of the code pieces I think it could be useful to others.

I wanted to store country information as an ISO code, so here is the plugin to make it work

It’s translated using the translation from the iso-codes package, so I guess it’s as good as it can get by now. If you want to contribute, please do it to the iso-codes package and let me know, so I can update it too.

iso_countries – Store countries using ISO 3166 codes

This rails plugin enables you to store country info only with the country’s ISO-3166 code

Example

  class Company < ActiveRecord::Base
    iso_country :country
  end

  c = Company.new :country => "es"
  c.country                 # => "es"
  c.country_name            # => "Spain"
  c.country_name = "France"
  c.country                 # => "fr"
  ISO::Countries.set_language "es"
  c.country_name            # => "Francia"

Download

You can get it from http://github.com/koke/iso_countries/tree/master

eBox premieres new website

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eBox-web-shot.jpg

Since I didn’t have any MySQL public courses planned this summer, I’ve been using my work time from the last week in the new eBox website.

I’m still far away from what I’d like, but I’m proud my design skills have improved considerably.

For those of you who still don’t know what it is, eBox is a server for the easy administration of corporate networks. eBox was included with the last release of Ubuntu. See eBox in Ubuntu

Shop in Amazon from your iPhone with iBuy

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Yesterday, I wrote a simple web application to buy from amazon using your iPhone. It’s meant to help if you are in a store and want to check the price of a product in Amazon and buy it from there.

That’s why you enter the barcode directly. I’ll probably add some search by title or author, but for now, it works for its original purpose: save money.

Check it out at http://amedias.org/ibuy/

It’s an early release so it can be buggy. If you have found a bug or have some suggestions, leave a comment

More aliases: Firefox keywords

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I keep on with my productivity little tricks. This time I’m sharing some of my firefox shortcuts. I’m not in the mood for explaining how to actually install these, so check out the excellent article Firefox and the art of keyword bookmarking, if you need help.

# Dictionary search
dict http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s

# Yahoo finance stock
fi http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%s

# Wikipedia page
wp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s
slang http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%s

# Search in MySQL website/manual
my http://mysql.com/%s

# BitTorrent search
bt http://www.yotoshi.com/?keyword=%s
code http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=%s

# Ruby documentation
ri http://www.google.es/search?hl=es&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aes-ES%3Aofficial&hs=3zt&q=%s+site%3Aruby-doc.org&btnI=B%C3%BAsqueda&meta=

# Google search (experimental version with keyboard shortcuts)
g http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&esrch=BetaShortcuts

# Google search (I'm feeling lucky)
gg http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&esrch=BetaShortcuts&btnI=Lucky

# eBay search
ebay http://search.ebay.es/search/search.dll?satitle=%s

# Post current page in delicious
pkd javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/koke?v=3&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)

# My delicious (with tag support)
kd http://del.icio.us/koke/%s
as https://www.google.com/adsense/report/overview
gr http://www.google.com/reader/view/
fb http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/myfeeds
ga https://www.google.com/analytics/home/

By the way, I haven’t typed all these urls. In your firefox user dir (~/.firefox or ~/.mozilla), there should be a places.sqlite file.

Some sqlite love actually helps :) 

sqlite> SELECT k.keyword, p.url FROM
	moz_bookmarks b
	JOIN moz_places p ON p.id = b.fk
	JOIN moz_keywords k ON k.id = b.keyword_id
	WHERE b.keyword_id IS NOT NULL;