Passion for the craft

Denilson Nastacio's unsolicited advice to executive teams:

promote a passion for the craft rather than demanding a passion for the business. That is empowerment over chastisement. People who understand their craft are more likely to be enthusiastic about it, when people discover they can learn something new and become good at it, they are inspired; with any luck, even passionate.

When people are enthusiastic about what they do, and that boundless enthusiasm is backed by technique rather than unchecked madness, customers tend to love it too. And when that feeling of elation comes out of succeeding at a task or beating a competitor, chalk one up to a job well planed and well done, not for passion for the business.

Graphic from Creating Passionate Users

My own unsolicited advice? Read Denilson's full post, keep in mind his story about that goalkeeper's career, and enjoy being passionate (about something you can understand and can take away with you wherever you go).

Mmmm, I'm now scheduling a meeting with myself to review my latest career decisions. (Hi, M-the-sweet-hurricane! My being green with envy about your passion and focus on working on a radical career change also have lots to do with this meeting :-)

DRAE restful

Esto es http://rae.es/chulo ! Y es que, la URI es lo suyo.

sprintf_s() is not snprintf()

You are compiling some legacy code with Microsoft Visual Studio. You get a warning telling you
warning C4996: 'sprintf': This function or variable may be unsafe. Consider using sprintf_s instead.
Of course! So you just change that dangerous sprintf() for a sprintf_s(). The IDE tells you about an additional buffer size parameter, so you may wrongly end up thinking that you are getting the equivalent to Unix's snprintf() or the old MSV _snprintf().

Nope. If you read the docs, you'll learn that sprintf_s() is not truncating the string, but instead invoking the run-time invalid parameter handler, and usually terminating the program. Far better than letting a buffer overflow happen, but maybe not what you were expecting.

La mujer del viajero en el tiempo

Sábado pegado al sillón por culpa de La mujer del viajero en el tiempo. de Audrey Niffenegger. No creo que esta haya sido la última vez que lo leo.

Happy Stop Software Patents Day!

The problems with software patents go far beyond those trivial patents that get linked from time to time.

Usual disclaimer (stolen from Read This Blog!) applies here specially: IBM has its opinions and plans; I have mine. Any resemblance between the two is coincidental

Links are cool. Links are bad.

Some days I spend way too much time in my computer...







Drawn with Animatee in my lovely Nintendo DS.

My bank's money and my identity

Hilarious and insightful radio sketch (2 minutes) by Mitchell and Webb on identity theft

via Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram

Verbose business cards

Learned from Kellypuffs that linkedin users can get 50 free MOO cards. Enter Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle (and a bit of javascript).

Gmail will automatically invite some contacts

Gmail will automatically invite some contacts

If there are other Gmail users whom you frequently email, you'll be able to chat and see each other online without having to send an invitation.

This wasn't the default setting some time ago, now it is, and I think it shouldn't be. To make it worse, disabling this behaviour is not reliable. My privacy is not happy.

Falta chico con experiencia

Uno ya se va acostumbrando a que el papel del programador no se valore mucho, incluso por gente que se supone mejor informada, pero esta perla me ha hecho reir:

Falta chico con experiencia en programación PHP, AJAX, MySql, sistemas, etc. También precisamos un diseñador gráfico manejando bien Photoshop y Flash. Interesados enviar CV con datos completos, teléfono de contacto y horario para llamar. Si cumples el perfil puedes tener una entrevista de inmediato.