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• #l10n Thank You

• via

  "Thank You" In Over 465 Languages.

• in the morning, Monday 10 May 2010
  Link | #l10n Thank You (Comment!)

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• at night, Saturday 8 May 2010
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• Quote

• You can manage 50 people through the strength of your personality and lack of sleep.

  — Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga

• around noon, Friday 30 April 2010
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• in the evening, Thursday 29 April 2010
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• I suppose it's old partner, but the beat goes on Da da dum da dum da da...

  — Eminem

• at night, Thursday 22 April 2010
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• Geek by nature, Linux by choice

• This weekend @andy_lupo and me will head north to Thessaloniki to present at the FOSS-Communities Conference some of the kewl technologies we're using at Indifex. Andreas' talk is titled "Multi-GB databases with NoSQL" and mine "Extreme Web Programming".

  Additionally, I was humbled to be invited from the local entrepreneur's club OpenCoffee to present at their weekend event. I'll talk about open-source business models and the lessons learned while building Indifex. The talk is titled "Transifex: Developing Open Source Software for fun and profit".

  So looking forward to this trip. I hope the weather is nice on Friday evening!

  

• at night, Wednesday 21 April 2010
  Text | Geek by nature, Linux by choice (Comment!)

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• Quote

• An entrepreneur is someone who dares to dream the dreams and is foolish enough to try to make those dreams come true.

  — Vinod Khosla

• at night, Tuesday 20 April 2010
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• in the afternoon, Tuesday 13 April 2010
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• at night, Tuesday 13 April 2010
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• Making things happen

• LWN.net interviewed Leslie Hawthorn, the main person behind Google Summer of Code. I liked how a small team in a big company Google can feel like a startup sometimes.

  I think the most important lesson I learned was to just get out there and make things happen, no matter how many mistakes you'll make along the way and no matter how many pairs of eyes are watching you make those mistakes. When I started with the team, I had no FOSS experience whatsoever and was quite worried about doing the wrong thing, and very publicly no less. Over time, I realized the it was far better to make as much progress as possible and make the inevitable course corrections required rather than try to get everything right from the start.

  I've also learned that a small group of people who are dedicated to making the world a better place can be incredibly successful in doing just that. It may sound like a cliche, but I never imagined when I started working on Summer of Code that I would have the chance to help so many individuals and projects make things better.

  (pic by CRUSTINA!)

• in the morning, Saturday 10 April 2010
  Startups | Making things happen (Comment!)

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• Quote

• Awesome teaching books might as well come with everything underlined by default.

  —

• at night, Monday 29 March 2010
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• Do you monetize your international traffic?

• Did you know that ~80% of the traffic on Google, Facebook and Twitter come from outside of the US?

  Fred Wilson (avc.com) has written an insightful blog post titled "Does Rest Of World Matter More Than The US?". Fred believes that localization is key to monetize outside of the US:

  The web sector needs to start working harder on international monetization. [...] Web services that are highly international today should invest in fully localizing their user experience and then start thinking about monetizing outside of the US.

  This is the reason d'etre of web services like Transifex: the vast majority of international speakers, who can stay on your website twice as much and have 4x more chances of buying something, if your website speaks their native language.

  Of course the US traffic can achieve (much) higher monetization than other countries in most industries, but the monetization does follow the high numbers of international visitors:

  Even if international traffic could only be monetized 25% as well as US traffic, when your international traffic is 80% of your total traffic, you would make as much money internationally as domestically. So that's a lot of potential out there to be tapped.

  An interesting comment was made by daveclark, mentioning that the cost of winning a local market shouldn't be underestimated. Businesses which 'inherently scale friction-free across markets' should 'game on', while others might need much more work than just localizing the user interface (think, for example, selling shoes or books). Lots of good comments on the article.

  Read the full article over at avc.com (thanks @gtzi).

• in the morning, Sunday 28 March 2010
  Text | Do you monetize your international traffic? (Comment!)

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• Sapere aude! (Dare to Know)

  — Horrace

• at night, Wednesday 24 March 2010
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• in the evening, Saturday 13 March 2010
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• Quote

• Wimps tend to talk a lot about problems, and brave people tend to talk about challenges.

  The belief that there's a solution to something converts it from a problem into a challenge.

  — moi

• in the evening, Thursday 11 March 2010
  Quote | Quote (Comment!)

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• Mercurial rebase and merges

• Epiphany!

  The past days I learned great things today about Mercurial.

  1. I found out Joel Spolsky's hginit.com. It teaches you the key concepts behind hg in a way which doesn't mess with complex internals, but focuses on what's important: the user experience.

  2. I found out that the latest version of the hgtk history window supports running an 'Outgoing' command, which directly marks the nodes which will be pushed.

  3. I noticed that sometimes when I rebase, I get a merged head node instead of a linear history. That is, the rebase doesn't work 100%. Not sure why this was happening, but I found a few hackish workarounds. The funny thing is that I also found a solution: I then rebased the branche's root node on top of the merged node.

  I now understand that the problem was much simpler: I just run accidentally hg rebase with --source instead of --branch. The first flag rebases a single node and the latter a whole branch. So, obviously, only the last node was "rebased" to look on top of tip. Instead, when you rebase with --branch, the branche's base node is rebased, and the history is, of course, linearized.

  Success.

  (The Beast playing some hoops at the office.)

• in the evening, Tuesday 9 March 2010
  Text | Mercurial rebase and merges (Comment!)

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• in the afternoon, Saturday 6 March 2010
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• at night, Friday 5 March 2010
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• ack

• ack rocks. It's like grep, but you can also ignore .svn-like dirs and backup files (foo~, foo#), specify file types to search, color highlighting. Sweet! Http://betterthangrep.com/

• in the afternoon, Friday 5 March 2010
  Text | ack (Comment!)

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• in the afternoon, Wednesday 3 March 2010
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