flipthedolphin » New Media | Creativity | Business

June 22, 2008 – 5:39 pm

Posted in: flipthedolphin.com Comments (0)

New theme is on the way

I’ve been working on this new theme (the one you see right now on this blog) for a week. It’s not finished yet as you can see unstyled comment forms, unstyled links and unstyled single pages…

I have to fix a couple of bugs here and there, and there’s still a lot to do with the pages.

And yeah, the about link does not work anymore. Sorry, I’ll make a new about page soon. Unfortunately this theme won’t be available for download unless I find a way to fix the hardcoded stuff I put inside it (like the silly about text in the header).

Oh and by the way I definitely removed adevrtisements. You won’t see them on flipthedolphin.com anymore.

May 5, 2008 – 3:48 pm

Posted in: World Wide Web Tags: barcamp, iwordcamp, microcamp | Comments (0)

Attending a couple of barcamps

I’ve never participated in any of such events but this month I’ll be attending a couple of barcamps. The first one will be held this saturday (the 10th) in Milan. It’s the iWordcamp (with Matt Mullenweg himself). It will cover a lot of different topics about our favorite blogging script (and community): wordpress.

The second one (24th of May) will be a MicroCamp: participants are limited to 50 and it will be held in Milan too. Main topic will be the microblogging experience.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of those event. I’m interested in the business point of view (how suchs tools are used, the business model, and so on…). Also there will be an interesting technical point of view too (integration, development, features…).

I’ll be documenting both events with my camera (on flickr), on twitter and maybe on my blogs. Stay tuned.

April 25, 2008 – 1:18 pm

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Build a better relationship

Think I’m learning the lesson here. I just ended a 19 months long relationship with a girl I met at the university. Can’t really talk about her but I’m sure I did some mistakes here and there…

So today I found these two interesting blog posts, one on Dumb Little Man and the other on ZenHabits.

With today’s divorce rate climbing faster than you can swallow a slice of wedding cake, it seems that we need a lot more than just a bit of love to make our relationships go the long haul.

There are 6 ways to improve your relationship and 7 Deadly Sins of a Relationship.

Let me sum them up here with the 6 hints…

Give exactly what you want to get
Remember your partner is not a band-aid
Being in a relationship never made anyone blind
Say what you mean, mean what you say
Always assume your partner’s intentions are good
Remember the virtues of friendship

…and with the deadly sins (which are now 8)

Resentment
Jealousy
Unrealistic expectations
Not making time
Lack of communication
Not showing gratitude
Lack of affection
Bonus sin: Stubbornness

Enjoy your relationship. Have fun. Life is good (no… really!)

April 20, 2008 – 7:59 pm

Posted in: World Wide Web, flipthedolphin.com Tags: twitter | Comments (1)

Joined Twitter

Yes I did it. I joined twitter. Unfortunately I cannot receive SMS from Italy and it seems I’m not able to send messages too. I’ll have to stick with gTalk or the web interface.

Probably I’ll put a twitter updates widget into my weblog too. Totally useless but I like it.

March 26, 2008 – 3:59 pm

Posted in: Webdevelopment, World Wide Web Tags: api, opensocial, social applications | Comments (0)

Yahoo!, MySpace and Google to Form Non-Profit OpenSocial Foundation

The OpenSocial Foundation website will serve as the portal for the community to find all information about OpenSocial and the foundation as they evolve. Developers and website owners can now visit the site for the latest specifications, links to other resources, and the opportunity to get involved.

OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. Built from standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps with OpenSocial that access a social network’s friends and update feeds. By using a common API, developers can extend the reach of their applications more quickly, yielding more functionality for users.

About OpenSocial
OpenSocial addresses an emerging problem for developers who are eagerly building applications people can enjoy with their friends: before OpenSocial, if a developer built a “favorite photos” application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site. OpenSocial tackles this problem at its technology roots, providing common “plumbing” that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites.

The result is a vast distribution platform for social applications, whether they are for sharing photos or playing games or arranging real-world meetings or any number of other activities - everything is more fun, interesting, and useful when users can involve their friends and contacts.

Thanks to the Shindig reference implementation, most websites can have a proof of concept of OpenSocial applications up and running in days. That means websites need only to make this small time investment in order to make thousands of new social features available to their users.

Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, XING, and others. In time, OpenSocial will unlock more powerful and pervasive social capabilities across the entire web, as developers’ applications can easily reach users across any of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use.

This sounds way too interesting.

March 24, 2008 – 12:57 pm

Posted in: Software Tags: audioscrobbler, foobar2000, ipod management, itunes, itunes alternative, music | Comments (0)

iTunes Alternative

Listening to your favorite music shouldn’t be a resource draining activity. For instance I listen to the music while I do Java development with a virtual machine running Eclipse. I just can’t waste memory nor cpu.

iTunes got bigger and bigger. Loading times and performances are not among his best features so I searched the web for a so called iTunes alternative.

The best one I’ve found so far is called foobar2000. It’s a media player with simple UI and low memory usage. It also offers plugin support for new features.

While iTunes uses 54Mb of RAM, foobar2000 uses only 15Mb. This is also true if you minimize the two softwares to the system tray. 14Mb for iTunes, 3Mb for its alternative.

With the iPod Manager plugin foo_dop you can easily load your entire music collection from the device and listen to your favorite tracks.

These are the plugins I’m using right now:

Check it out. Have fun.

March 2, 2008 – 6:46 pm

Posted in: Webdevelopment Tags: apress, book, cakephp, web | Comments (1)

Beginning CakePHP book - From novice to professional

Finally we’ll see a fresh new book from Apress written by David Golding.

Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional is the brand new book about this fabulous framework. Finally a great addition to the not-so user friendly documentation.

The author says:

After poring over the online documentation, I realized there wasn’t much by way of an introduction to Cake. Most of the available resources require some sort of prior knowledge of web development to get a grasp on how to install and work in Cake. If you’re like me, you probably just want a handful of tutorials with code samples from square one that can get you up and running quickly and lead you in the right direction for more advanced techniques.

Furthermore, when asking a question on forums or chat rooms, many newbies get little help from the experts. Simple questions can get a response like, “Well, just read the online manual and API.” Sometimes we newbies need a very simple approach to the software, and this guide will do just that. We’ll start with installing Cake on a server and a localhost, what it all means, and provide some detailed code samples and visual snapshots to walk you through. By the end of the book, you ought to have a solid-enough foundation to give other advanced features a try on your own.

This manual is really welcome and I’m looking forward to get a copy of it. You can grab a couple of sample chapters at the author’s site.