Archives for Work

Happy Birthday Opera!

Today Opera turns 15! To celebrate it, there is a lot of stuff going on, like a list of Opera’s most popular innovations. I have to note here that I’m very proud of being part of Opera Link, which is consistently mentioned in the list of innovations. Happy Birthday Opera!

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 [...]

The ultimate TODO app

I have been quite frustrated by TODO applications for some months now. They’re usually either too simple, or almost too complex and without features that I think are really valuable. In particular, there are two things that I don’t remember having seen in any TODO application: Possibility to “postpone” a task, so it doesn’t appear [...]

The Myths of Innovation

That’s the title of a really good book by Scott Berkun, the fella that was project manager for Internet Explorer when it could still be called a browser ;-) The Myths of Innovation is very easy to read, funny and has some food for thought. It dissects a bunch of myths about innovation and innovators, [...]

Opera Widgets redux

I never liked Opera Widgets too much. I tried them a couple of years ago, but I never saw the point. I even tried the games, but they performed so ridiculously poorly that I just gave up. What did I need them for? Around one year ago, however, I found the first useful widget, a [...]

Documentation and wikis

After a couple of (unrelated) recent events, I remembered that some/most people use some desktop “word processor” for writing and maintaining documentation. After years of working with Wikis for virtually all documentation, I have to say that I don’t understand why people still use those dinosaurs. Using a word processor for documentation feels so nineties. [...]

Opera Mini 4.2 (beta)

I have to say I’m impressed with Opera Mini. It’s a very good product that not only is innovative, but also is damn hard to get working decently in a plethora of ill-designed, ill-implemented, crashing-and-burning-at-any-error, incompatible phones. But somehow these guys bring the Internet to everyone that has a mobile phone that supports Java (a [...]

The shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot

I admit it. I’m a terrible developer. I write code, sometimes even write tests. But. I. don’t. test. my. programs. By hand, that is. And sometimes (usually) the coverage is not enough, and I end up making embarrassing mistakes. It usually happens outside of work, although at work I also have my share. The last [...]

Google translate WTF?

Maybe that’s something you all already knew, and it’s just me that arrived late to the party, but this is hilarious. I hadn’t used Google Translate myself too much (if ever; can’t remember), but the other day someone mentioned some “funny” translations in some internal mailing list at Opera: The first translation is… not correct, [...]

GPG confusion

Today I was playing with GnuPG, trying to add a couple of public keys to an “external” keyring (some random file, not my own keyring). Why? you ask. Well, I was preparing some Debian package containing GPG keys for APT repository signing (like debian-archive-keyring and such). The point is, I was really confused for quite [...]