Archives for Other

Dexter

It all started with my brother. He told me long ago that I had to watch the show, how good it was and so on. Completely forgot about it (sorry, bro!). But, last Christmas he bought me the first season on DVD.
So we started watching it. The first episodes were kind of “meh”. You know? [...]

Review of “Confessions of a Public Speaker”

I had been looking forward to this book since relatively long before it was published. Having read “The Myths of Innovation” and “Making Things Happen“, I knew that “Confessions of a Public Speaker” would be a good book. And all the reviews I had read seemed to confirm it.
“Confessions…”, as you can imagine, is a [...]

Vegetarianism

Lately I've been eating vegetarian at work. It's been more than one month since I started, and that also included the Christmas Party dinner (wasn't sure about it, esp. after hearing some awful stories about "vegetarian is the same dish as the other one, only removing the meat"; but finally I decided to go for [...]

Life in Oslo

WARNING: This is basically a rant. If you don’t agree with me, take my opinion with a grain of salt or send your trolls to /dev/null.
Today I read an article, linked by vrruiz on Twitter, called We’re Rich, You’re Not. End of Story.. My first read felt weird, but then I read it again, hours [...]

Slides for several talks now published

I had said that I was going to publish the slides for a couple of talks I had given over the last couple of months, and I just got around to actually do it, so here they are:

Software automated testing 123, an entry-level talk about software automated testing. Why you should be doing it (if [...]

The search for a Linux music score editing program

Some time ago I had promised a friend I’d bring some drum exercises the next time I went back home. Of course, I forgot so I taught him the exercises I could remember and promised I’d write some of those exercises and send him by e-mail. Thus, I had to find some Linux program to [...]

Predictably irrational

I haven’t written in some time, I know. I haven’t done much worth blogging about. Just a new release of the Kiva World Loanmeter widget, and also a couple of things at work that I’ll be releasing soon (including a small tool for managing database changes and some Perl module to parse Debian .changes files).
However, [...]

Watchmen and the annoying ad

Phew! It has been a long time since I wrote. More than once already, hmmm….
I went to the movies to see Watchmen. I don’t want to spoil, but I think it was a very, very good adaptation of the comic book. Actually, I think it’s the best comic adaptation I have ever seen. And I [...]

Kiva API, Javascript, Git and my first widget, oh my!

About two weeks ago I wrote about Kiva, a cool website that allows people to make microloans. Almost one month ago they had started a developer site, including an easy to use API to access the data (loans, borrowers, lenders, etc).
I couldn’t resist the temptation to have a look at the documentation and start thinking [...]

Kiva.org

Some weeks ago, Steve from Cranium Designs mentioned a website, Kiva.org. He linked to a very interesting video that showed how it works, and a couple of things really got me interested:

The whole lending-money-to-people-who-need-it (and to whom banks will probably not lend) really attracted me. You help communities develop, and you don’t even lose money, [...]