Entries from July 2009 ↓

Every once in a while I have wonderful conversations about life, technology and everything. Many times I end up talking about a myriad of topics. For example today I had lunch with Jonathan Greenwood (you should follow him on twitter here) and learned a great deal about many interesting things. I am always intrigued and delighted to rediscover that not everyone has my same brain, interests, browsing habits. Not everyone keeps track closely of the same spaces and same people I do.

So here is a random mesh of interesting links that I recurrently mention in my conversations, the common thread being – well it’s quite a broad one I’ll admit – entrepreneurship, social media, cool people and products, online videos, friends. You might have seen some of these already, but then again, maybe not.

Seedcamp

Seedcamp is a Micro seed fund that invests in start-up companies. I want to participate in the August selection round with my friend nocivus.

Vibram 5 fingers

The product site

Tim Ferris review

Gary Vaynerchuk inspiring videos

“The” online wine guy and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, pioneer of video blogging is quite a personality. Totally love him:

• His video blog on wine is here
• Personally I liked this of his keynotes. All his other keynotes here.

The story of Parrot Secrets

The story of Parrot Secrets, fascinating recount about a very simple (though controversial) e-book business.

Sorapot, a cool teapot

Sorapot, the teapot developed by a young designer and manufactured in China. Good video interview by Kevin Rose from digg.

Paul Graham essays

Really insightful essays about startups and innovation.

This is one of the first I read and it made a deep impression on me, years ago.

Tim Ferris on improving your blog

Video of Tim Ferris giving advice on improving your blog, very practical and analytical as always.

Diggnation

Kevin Rose’s video show about popular news stories on digg.

Two guys and a beer

Pedro picked up video blogging. Non politically correct, alcohol consumption, cursing. Promising!

Geeky and Entrepreneur news sources that I visit daily

http://news.ycombinator.com

http://programming.reddit.com

Equalway

Mirko Calvaresi’s site about grassroots italian buying groups – in Italian.

By the way

You should follow me on twitter here.

*lol*

Wow that’s a few links and videos. Enjoy and take your time.  I’ll be delighted if you want to chat about any of the above or if you found anything interesting.

And if you are any of the people mentioned above and are reading this, you rock and are an inspiration for me.

Lately I’ve been really impressed and experimented joyfully with
Compass and Sass. They make css/layout design fun again for me. Even if the whole tool chain is in Ruby you don’t have to touch any Ruby to use them – don’t misunderstand me: I like Ruby and I’ve been a Rails early adopter; my brain is very well tuned in with Python, that’s all -.

Compass makes the creation of a semantic layout using any of the
popular css frameworks (blueprint, 960, etc.) a breeze.

There’s ton of documentation around, for example this is what got me into it a while ago.

So today after a furious coding spree I achieved what I wanted. I integrated Compass into a default Pinax project.

To prove that I could quickly change the layout in an elegant way I tried to alter the default theme to have the menus vertically aligned instead than horizontally.

I know people love pretty pictures and screenshots so here is a taste of the end result:

And another one:

And if you find any of this interesting be my guest and peruse the newly created github project:

• The master just plugs in Compass without changing anything in the default theme. You can alter the layout by working in the media/sass folder and running compass -u in the media folder.
• The vertical branch includes the changes needed to come up with the vertical menu you see above. By looking into the media/sass/base.sass file you should see how to use Compass directives to include a 960 grid into Pinax.

Please note, this is nothing fancy nor hard, but I expect this integration to be a life/time saver in all my next projects.

Here is what a coding session of mine looks like when I am in full swing. This is specifically the coding screen. That’s a 1920×1600 resolution screen-shot . I obviously also have a browsing screen not shown.

In the image above I am immersed into integrating Compass into Pinax (full post on that will follow).

When developing under Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 at the moment) I have settled for a long time now on the ultra-productive tiling window manager Xmonad. Nothing I tried beats it. My fingers and my brain now are one with the keyboard short-cuts and the concept of mouse-less zen.

Yes I use vim extensively and yes I use screen with the new ubuntu screen-profiles. It rocks.