soledad penadés

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I think I'm going to move to Subversion all the websites which still aren't versioned. It's so annoying to change things locally, test locally, then you want to upload them to the server and there's always some change which it's not updated and booooom!

With SVN (Subversion) it's much easier. You continue building your stuff locally and when you're happy with it, check it into your Subversion server. Then you log into your hosting server with ssh, and in your /web directory do something like svn co http://mysubversionserver/project/trunk . - that will associate the /web directory with the subversion repository path /project/trunk. Meaning that each time you do changes and commit them to SVN, you can get all the changes rolled to your server by simply connecting with ssh and running svn up in the /web directory.

Obviously for doing this you need a hosting account with ssh access. Most of them do not have such thing, and I really can't understand how could I survive without ssh access before. Even for simple things such as deleting a directory, ftp's and sftp's are terribly slow :-)

There's more sophisticated people which are using build makers like ant or the famous capistrano to deploy stuff but for the moment I still don't need that degree of complexity; it's not worth the effort yet.

If you read my Thurday's post, I was terribly undecided about what to talk about (doesn't sound too good, heh!), but after forcing myself to revisit all the special and interesting issues or topics I have been involved in lately, I finally decided that I really needed to talk about communicating and more specially, making yourself understood. So here they are… the slides for Being Understood by Soledad Penadés. (I presume they are not self explanative so I'll probably extend them in an article soon).

The presentation itself wasn't nothing spectacular but I think it went terribly well, given that it was the first time I spoke to strangers and in english. We were a reduced number of people so we could have some interesting chat instead of being a traditional speech, which was pretty cool.

I tried to use keydoob for making the slides; keydoob is a little thingy that (obviously) mr.doob prepared for a couple of presentations he did, but as I couldn't manage to find certain files and also I was beginning to feel the panic attack at 3AM I decided to go for some HTML+Javascript+CSS. I used Script.aculo.us and Prototype for the little Javascript involved, which could be thought of as absolutely overkill but anyway, it was a quick hack ;-)

The good thing of this is that as the slides are HTML with a css style sheet only for screen, if you try to print them they will appear as raw HTML with all the content still looking meaningful. In fact, if you use Firefox and have the Web Developer Toolbar installed, try deactivating all the linked styles - it should do :-)

BarCamp itself was great. It was very very motivating to see so many active people, so many presentations lined up, on so many different topics. I really liked that willing-to-share atmosphere. And in a way, it also confirmed that dream idea we had once of organising an event like that, where people could organise themselves and their timetable, wander around the spaces and join whatever they liked more. And the next half an hour, maybe present something.

So, congratulations and thanks to all the organisers and attendees for the insane amount of work required for bringing it all up and running :-)

For the ones which do not know about, BarCamp* are a different type of events, they are meant to be called unconferences, in the sense that it is not about 100 people listening to someone for 2 hours but each person giving a short talk about something of their own. So the listeners become speakers at certain times, and as there are several rooms, talks are simultaneous. These events are always highly busy and they get booked blazing fast, so I already assumed that I wasn't going there, with no tickets and 2 days away of the event.

How wrong I was… I finally got a ticket for BarCampLondon2 and now I have to think about something for a talk!

I should have been less pessimistic and stop assuming that I wasn't going to get a ticket ever, and think about that talk instead. Oh well… no more regrets, let's see what can I work out (just in case I end up doing the talk…), taking into account there's amazing people like Matt Wescott already signed up, so the level is interesting.

Watch out for finding out how it ended… heh…

Hacía ya tiempo que venía pensando en separar lo profesional de lo personal. No tiene mucho sentido suscribirse a una página esperando leer temas sobre web dev y acabar encontrándote un post sobre libros interesantes. Así que después de darle vueltas, y copiando descaradamente a mr.doob, me compré msdoob.com, donde por ahora hay una portada cambiante y un blog con desvaríos. soledadpenades.com se queda para lo profesional :)

(Sorry for the spanish only post; basically all the non-serious stuff goes to msdoob.com RIGHT NOW!)

Or that it seems. I tried to enter my full name (which makes up to the big figure of four words) and the system decided it was too much for it. No more than 29 characters are allowed when specifying the full passengers' names.

It shouldn't be much of a problem if it wasn't by this stupid hysteria surrounding flights and security, and the lack of education of some British people which do not understand that there are places in the world where people have more than one name and one surname. Then you show them a passport with the name in full and they get shocked and do not know where to look at, and what is which thing, even if you're pointing at your surname and saying explicitly: this is my first surname, and this is my second surname. And those two words over there are my name - yes, my name is actually two names.

But they look at you like if you stole your passport or something - even if the photo clearly shows that you are indeed you.

In a way, we could also blame that stupid spanish/catholic tradition (I don't know if it's still in use) which dictated that all names to be used in a christening should appear on the Bible and otherwise they should have a biblic name appended at wherever point suit better (whether it was the first or the second name). So most of my generation (and previous ones) ended up with superfluous names prepended or appended to the name that we really use, and we have to revive the extra name for the paperwork.

At the end, the problem is that these long names are unpractical in most of the times. While most of the forms in Spain can accomodate my full name (although not my sister's, funnily), I still haven't found any place in UK where I haven't had to crop or summarise my name somehow.

I must recognize, though, the creativity of the clerks and functionaries is excellent. Within two years here, I have no less than seven variations of my full name, with solutions like:

• abbreviating all except the first surname (feels a bit like american high school movies, like J-C, M-S, etc)
• using only the extra name and the first surname (I don't use to respond to that name so when people gets to me using it I usually ignore them until I find out they are speaking to me)
• using the extra name and mispelling my first surname (lots of variations on this one)
• using the extra name and the second surname (makes my mum feel proud)
• using first name, first surname (more normal)
• using only the surnames (this makes me feel like being at school again)

But getting back to the point, why didn't they just limit the maximum size of the form input boxes? Or maybe they could have added one of those nasty and annoying "Allowed characters count" messages which do a countdown while you enter the data until all of a sudden turn the field's background colour into a bloody red which makes you feel ashamed and cry painful tears of guilt!

It would have been easier and I wouldn't have had to reenter again much of the info in the dropdowns which as expected, is so much of a pain to fill again when there has been an error, that the programmers decided to not to implement it. I wonder if they are preparing each form manually for a site of such a big size as british airways.