Everything that I write here on Pintant is my own personal opinion – it’s not my employer’s point of view.
As many people here know here I work at Mendeley, in the Desktop team, designing and implementing Mendeley Desktop. Good fun! (seriously!).
One of the things that Mendeley Desktop can do and that I usually work on citations and bibliographies. We have plugins for Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, … I’m in charge of the integration with the CSL styles from the citation styles project.
Continue reading CSL project Mendeley contributions
Recently I came back from Fosdem 2014. This has been my 9th Fosdem – and I hope that many more will come!
I don’t want to write about what I saw at Fosdem: it took about 5 hours of non-stop work to do a work report (based on the notes that I took there). And I don’t want to do a copy-paste because mostly all the stuff that I wrote is relevant only for the Mendeley Desktop team but not many other people.
If you couldn’t make it:
If you are interested in free software (distributions, compilers, tools, software, system administrator): you will find something there: there are 22 tracks at the same time!
Also, the organization is amazing. And it’s free! Some rooms get full: a good opportunity to learn something new and unexpected, go to the Lightning talks or the hacker room… and catch up later using the videos.
So, once again: Thank you to Fosdem organizers and delegates!
A few days ago I saw in Brussels:
The shop was closed and had a sign saying that it’s open and no other information about opening times… so the sign says that it’s open when it’s open and also says that it’s open when it’s closed. It either says something true and useless, or false.
Just a quick link: if you are learning a language you might be interested in Read Lang webpage. Steve Ridout, an ex-Mendeleyan, is building it and making very good progress.
I could explain things here but it’s easier if you go and have a look. It will especially help you to read and understand texts, improve your vocabulary. Steve keeps improving it… any day might be like Matrix and learning a language will be effortless.
Good luck Steve!
I’m really happy that WordPress implemented WordPress autoupdates, a few months ago.
I have this blog since 2006, 7 years ago. When possible, I’ve always applied the WordPress updates from the dashboard, many times, during many years, without any issue (bear in mind that I hardly use any plugin in this website).
Long time ago I started programming a Ruby script, to learn Ruby, that was doing a login into my WordPress installation and checking if updates were available. I didn’t finish it (it was just a prototype). I can’t remember if it was August 2013 or August 2012. My rationale was that it always worked fine, so I should just have it.
And some months ago I saw the news: new WordPress version, with autoupdates, finally! So far so good, I’m really happy. If in 7 years the updates haven’t broken anything I hope that will not happen now. And it’s only the security updates.
I always use Debian packages for all the software, but not WordPress. I have multiple installations, and the Debian package is not updated fast enough in my opinion, for this particular case.
I also want to mention that WordPress enabled many users without technical knowledge to build quite good websites and express themselves. It played an important role making blogs more popular.
Some time ago I went to the Qt Developer Days 2013 (Berlin).
I could write many things about that conference. For instance, George and I wrote about 5 pages to report back to our team with the summary of different talks and so on.
But here I just want to mention: one of the keynotes was from Dan Dodge, founder of QNX (now part of Blackberry, has been acquired twice at least).
I didn’t know Dan Dodge, but he is an amazing speaker! If you could see him go for it. Sometimes the title CEO might indicate “no idea about technology” but he is very up-to-date, understands the developers and the software, etc.
Sadly I can’t find any good videos in Google Videos / Youtube and it seems that he hasn’t written any book.
Last month I went to the Python UK Conference 2013, in Coventry. It was a very interesting conference! It was my first time there. It’s a conference where the delegates really help organize it with talks, chairing sessions, etc. (all voluntarily).
I learned quite a lot: about Python and software engineering in general. Many talks were using Python as a language but the background was general software engineering such as unit tests, design, etc.
I’m really looking forward to going again next year. Almost all the Python Code Dojo crew were there so was interesting to see them again.
There are some links to blog posts.
Ah, I should mention: on Sunday there was a Raspberryjam: another building was full of kids with their parents playing with Raspberry pis and computers. To see nice 9 year old kids typing in the command line was priceless! And to see their faces!
Bernadette song: The Big Bang Theory
This is one of the top-10 moments of The Big Bang Theory:
I liked the lyrics, the singing… everything!
And after this song I had to go and listen to some of the songs of Helen Arney, such as:
As you might know I like Festival of the Spoken Nerd and Helen Arney is part of it.
And just using this post for some music, another song for Bernadette, some seasons ago (not so well sung but very sweet too!):
Fa temps sense voler em va sortir un acudit!
A la feina em diuen que tenim una fixació, perquè veuen que tenim el Caga Tió, el Caganer (en tinc dos a la taula). I jo els hi vaig dir que anessin a cagar!!
(bé, potser alguna fixació sí que tenim?)
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