Category Archives: Technology

Mercurial is great for personal projects

Posted on
6

First, I hope this doesn’t become a flamewar about version control, it’s just what I’ve found useful.

Sometimes I feel the need to be able to go back in time when doing small changes. I don’t want to set up an external repository, creating branches or anything like that: just plain file revision control.

Whenever I feel that need I do:

$ hg init
$ hg add
$ hg commit -m "Initial import"

And I’m ready to go

The only thing I have to care about is the .hgignore file, to skip logs, cache files and so on.

If I don’t need version control anymore, I just have to remove the .hg directory and everything is like it was before.

By the way, I’m working on my new personal site: stay tuned for more!

Make your e-mail conversations better using happy faces

Posted on
4

I’m sure every one who uses email frequently, has suffered more than one email discussion.

Usually you may say things in an email that you wouldn’t say in person, or reply furious about something before counting to ten. This screenshot shows my little trick:

happy-mail.jpg

I’m using Apple Mail with Addressbook, but most of email programs support adding pictures to your contacts.

Find a picture of every of your colleagues, or people you write most and assign it to their contact info.

Make sure he or she is smiling, or with a lovely face, or even use a picture that reminds you of the best moments you have spent with that person.

Next time you are furious with that person (no matter what the cause is) you’ll see that picture and it might help you calm down and think in positive. It works quite well for me.

My top 10 commands

Posted on
9

It seems I’m a ruby guy after all:

$ history | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10
111 svn
61 cd
44 rake
36 l
32 hg
18 ./script/console
14 rm
12 screen
12 history
12 ./script/server

Net neutrality: a big issue

Posted on
1

Well, I’m used to the term tech neutrality maybe because is one of the current open fights here in Spain, but not so much about net neutrality. Two very different concepts but similar consequences. The opposite of neutrality here would be control. Control by an oligopoly (in the best case) which kills diversity, so killing innovation and slowing progress. Not a good idea.

I’ve found a short documentary (11 min) about this topic, quite well explained. Also, the video is open source and AFAIK, all the material has been extracted from the net (I recognised several clips from youtube)

http://www.youtube.com/v/8rNg_FVaPek

The site: Humanity Lobotomy. There you can watch the video in Quicktime or download in some other formats.

Via: Creative video presentations

Update: sorry, but I couldn´t resist. This other explanation may not be so detailed, but it´s really funny. Brought to you by Ask a Ninja

http://www.youtube.com/v/H69eCYcDcuQ

Firefox bookmarks rock!

Posted on
1

From a long time ago, I’ve been looking for some piece of software to manage my tons of bookmarks in an intelligent way. Some time ago I tried bbps, but I had to put the bookmarks by hand, so it was clearly not enough.

Some days ago, I was designing some kind of ubuntu sidebar for MOTUs, and started using the bookmarks sidebar. Today I’ve discovered the search function. I guess it has been there for a very long time, but I didn’t noticed.

Screenshot of the search function

BTW, if you care about the Firefox theme, it’s LittleFox, and with View->Toolbars->Customize... you can arrange (almost) all the items in a single (menu|tool)bar.