Ecstatic Thinking

Facebook vs phone & life

2011-01-26T21:55:00.000+01:00

Recently I've noticed a strange thing - people tend to be more willing to add a stranger on Facebook than give them their phone number. How stupid is that? Your phone number says nothing about you. You're not obligated to answer your phone or reply to texts, you can always blacklist the really annoying people, you retain full control of your privacy. Facebook on the other hand, tells the whole

Are eBooks the future?

2011-01-20T13:07:00.001+01:00

I've always been very skeptical about ebooks. I hate to read long text on a computer screen and I've always liked the physical feeling of a book. Things have changed as soon as I got an iPad :-) There are a couple of things I underestimated previously: Online store This is a big one. Almost all the books I heard about over the past couple of weeks I was able to instantly get them right away,

Android Tablet Checklist

2010-10-05T16:46:00.000+02:00

Here's my checklist for an Android tablet. As soon as a tablet that meets the requirements shows up consider me sold!Must have: ~10" capacitive touch screen 1280x800 resolution (or better) Tegra 2 chipset (or better) Android 3.0 with Google Experience (Android Market, GMail sync, etc) 7h battery life MiniUSB/MicroUSB connectivity 3G/4G, WiFi, Bluetooth 3.5mm audio

Are tablets the future of personal computing?

2010-09-26T22:24:00.000+02:00

A week ago I gave into temptation and finally purchased an iPad. The device is quite amazing and very inspiring. First of all I love how touch screen interface works in more advanced apps like Keynote or Pages. On-screen keyboard works surprisingly well and I can type fast enough for my typical daily tasks. I really didn't expect that, but now I think tablets have the potential to surpass laptops

The real reason why Apple hates flash so much

2010-05-09T23:08:00.007+02:00

This is my private response to Steve Job's Thoughts on Flash. There's "open" That's true - Flash is proprietary technology. But so is H264 - it's a patented codec. How is one proprietary stuff better than the other? Besides... Apple, who is avoiding any interoperability with other devices suddenly defends openness and standards? So disingenuous. I mean.. come on! Apple says they created an

Cool things you can't have in Poland

2010-05-01T20:20:00.003+02:00

This really sucks, but Poland is far, far behind regarding online media. Here's a short list of things you can't do.Purchase music from iTunes storePurchase music from Amazon MP3 storeListen to PandoraWatch movies on NetflixUse Google NavigationBuy Android apps from MarketWatch TV shows on abc.com and the likePurchase Nexus One from GoogleDownload some of the free apps from Android Market (

Friendfeed is annoying

2009-09-13T23:37:00.001+02:00

Yeah, it's nice to be able to type your message once and have it automatically published on all your social sites. The problem is it's damn annoying to see the same message on every site. Especially when you get notified about them. Besides friendfeed makes you go thru their site if you want to see attached photos or links. Seriously, friendfeed degrades user-friendliness and readability of

Facebook Ads

2009-08-24T09:02:00.000+02:00

Google owns me. It probably knows about me more than I do. I store most of my life on Google. My photos (Picasa), my plans (Calendar), my contacts and conversations (Gmail/Gtalk), my interests (Reader/Blogger) and so on. In fact they own me so much that I've never dared to think that I could use a different advertising service than AdWords. That's hell of a brand loyalty! Until recently that is.A

Be formal, but not too formal

2009-08-23T22:39:00.003+02:00

Every now and then I hear different opinions on weather or not to do business plans, SWOT analysis, schedules, road maps, etc. I'm surprised how extreme some positions are. There are people who believe that hundreds of pages of documentation is a must before any actual work can be started, others take it for a total waste of time.Well, all these documents have a purpose - to provide information

Android - my $0.02

2009-08-22T12:49:00.003+02:00

So I've been using using HTC Magic for a couple of weeks now and I love it. I wouldn't switch to anything else right now and Android is definitely my platform of choice. But it ain't perfect. It is a bit more complex than iPhone and it could use some work on UI obviousness. It also has a lot of minor bugs, which don't really get into your way, but the overall experience isn't as smooth as it

Always talk to your client!

2009-08-21T15:14:00.004+02:00

Working at Aenima helped me understand a lot about business dynamic and client-provider relations. I always knew good communication is very important in any business relationship, but now I think it's like the single most important thing companies like us need to worry about.First of all project success rate dramatically improves with good communication. When all the risks and dangers in the

Neuro-usability Workshop

2008-12-01T17:26:00.003+01:00

Some time ago I was wondering how to make the world of IT and NLP work together. And there it was, a small conference called Neuro-usability Workshop, organized by YUUX and Neuralia in one of the Warsaw's hotels. The topic was the effective ways of measuring web applications' usability using neuroscience.We arrived at the conference just a few minutes before it started. There were not that many

When to commit my changes?

2008-10-22T00:25:00.003+02:00

A very common question SCM newbies tend to have is when to commit your changes? I've heard a lot of ideas, ranging from one commit per day to "commit when you need someone else to debug your code". All wrong. Very wrong. So I'd like to share my point of view.I think the best way to picture it is to imagine that you have 2 branches on one project and you want to port some changes between them.

Unobtrusive Date Picker Translation

2008-10-02T00:09:00.002+02:00

This will be a quickie.Some time ago I translated Frequency Unobtrusice Date-Picker Widget to Polish. I've tried to submit my translation, but got no response at all. So I'm just gonna post it here for the time being. Here's Polish translation for Unobtrusive Date-Picker. The widget is really nice, unfortunately the author isn't very responsive.

NLP and IT?

2008-09-30T23:54:00.003+02:00

As some of you know NLP is one of my biggest time consuming interests. Neuroscience has made its way into many areas of life including life coaching, therapy, marketing, trainings, sports, etc. But what about IT? Is there a place where NLP can make a difference in this market?Personally I think that there are places where NLP can change a lot. Usability is the first thing that comes to mind (

Hello again

2008-09-30T00:44:00.004+02:00

Hi! It's been a while since my last post, mostly due to a lot of going on and to the fact that I don't really do development anymore (but I'm still pretty close to it). Actually, I occasionally do some coding, and I'd like to announce my latest offspring, which is... on the other hand, let's wait until it's shippable. I don't want to spoil the surprise.Like I said - unfortunately I don't do much

Selecting multiple random rows from table in rails

2008-05-21T21:38:00.007+02:00

Some time ago I told you how to properly select a random row from a table. This time I'm gonna show how to select multiple random rows.First of all, we can't just select one row ten times, because we usually want to be sure that there are no duplicate rows in the results. Selecting again when we hit a duplicate is not a good idea performace-wise.There are 3 solutions to this problem and you

Should we care about non-js browsers?

2008-04-28T20:49:00.005+02:00

I love the idea of unobtrusive javascripts. It makes JS code much cleaner and much easier to maintain and makes space for browsers without JS or with JS disabled. However, there's one glitch - implementing the same feature twice (plain HTML and JS) takes much more time than just one of the ways.I like to do stuff "the right way", so I'm always happy to go with both options in our applications.

Crowdy panel

2008-04-21T20:45:00.004+02:00

Recently I've started using a few additional applications. One of them is PulseAudio which really impressed me with how easy it was to set up and use. I just love it - laying down on my bed watching a movie on my macbook having movie sound wirelessly transfered to my server's speakers! And it takes only one click to switch between local and remote speakers. And all PulseAudio servers in my LAN

Google up my life!

2008-03-05T21:07:00.003+01:00

Just a few days ago while I was cleaning up my bookmarks and reorganizing them a little bit and I realized something that kinda scared me.I use GMail for my private email and my company email (Google Apps). The same is true for Google Calendar. My life heavily relies on those 2 apps right now. I'm subscribed to a lot of feeds on my Google Reader account, which I check pretty much every day.

Tagging 2.0

2008-01-29T17:40:00.000+01:00

I've been using tagging for quite a long time now (well, who hasn't?) and, though it's extremely useful, something is still missing. The missing thing is the context. Words without proper context can be interpreted really badly. Here's an example...Let's say I have a program which stores all my photos along with their tags. I also have 2 friends: A and B. I just got a picture of A from B and

Oh, wait, it's oh-eight!

2008-01-29T02:01:00.000+01:00

Hello for the first time in 2008! It's been a busy time for me lately. The good news is I'm working on a cool new Ruby on Rails plugin to make it extremely easy to get all the benefits of unobtrusive javascript in your projects in no time! Still a lot of work to be done, but at least I'm past the hard part - I already came up with a stupid name for the plugin. The name is "JS on Rails".

Selecting random row from a table

2007-12-14T14:47:00.000+01:00

I've seen it just too many times. So i must say it. Using SQL query:select * from table_name order by rand() limit 1;is not the way to go! It's a performance killer as our poor database server has to generate random number for every row, sort the whole table by it and then just select the lucky row. There is a much better way to solve this, here's how I do it (in RoR):Model.find :first, :offset =

Base Auth is Out!

2007-12-08T00:18:00.001+01:00

Hello there, Ruby on Rails fans.So here it is, my first Ruby on Rails plugin - Best Authorization System Ever. I'm giving you one of the prettiest ways to solve authorization in your applications. A similar solution is already being used in one bigger commercial application and does the job fine so far! You can find out more about it in the README file. If you find this plugin useful, please

Once every 6 months I get a present...

2007-11-04T23:46:00.000+01:00

Just look what I found in my mail...