Rodrigo Duran: my_filter@bigworld

Filosofia do Sucesso , de Napoleon Hill Se você pensa que é um derrotado, você será derrotado. Se não pensar "quero a qualquer custo!", não conseguirá nada. Mesmo que você queira vencer, mas pensa que não vai conseguir, a vitória não sorrirá para você. Se você fizer as coisas pela metade, você será fracassado. Nós descobrimos neste mundo que o sucesso começa pela intenção da gente, e tudo se determina pelo nosso espírito. Se você pensa que é um malogrado, você se torna como tal. Se almeja atingir uma posição mais elevada, deve, antes de obter a vitória, dotar-se da convicção de que conseguirá infalivelmente. A luta pela vida nem sempre é vantajosa aos fortes nem aos espertos. Mais cedo ou mais tarde, quem cativa a vitória é aquele que crê plenamente: "Eu conseguirei!"

It's been almost a month since my last post. In the mean time some things have happened that are worth a register. I started using glasses when I was 15 ... now I am 31 and finally I got rid off those glasses. I went through a laser eye surgery called Photo Refractive Keractectomy (PRK) the 4th of December. After almost 3 days in the dark and feeling like a bat without its sonar, I started bearing some light last Monday (December, 8), took off the protection lenses yesterday, and today I am back to work. I still can't say that I can see it all very well right now, because the recovery process takes at least 15 days, and until then I am experiencing a little hypermetropy. But I am without glasses and I am trying to convince myself that it was the right thing to do (to get rid of them) and that I am happier now. Ok ... at least I am not blind ... :o) The last thing I did before having the surgery was to get myself certified on WebSphere Portal v6.0 Development. Now I am official

Searching for " findability " on the web I came across findability.org by Peter Morville, and there I found a reference to an interesting web application for tag visualization named Tag Galaxy . Based on a given tag, the application shows you your tag as a "planet" and related tags as revolving satellites. When going in detail to a given orb, the Tag Galaxy shows you a "world" of pictures from Flickr related to the given tag. Worth taking a look. Blogged with the Flock Browser

Last week me and four more colleagues were trying to develop, in a 4 day time frame, 3 personae to be used in our basic usability studies on Lotus Connections , at IPT . This week, I stumbled upon some posts from the Notes Design Blog that shows detailed information related to some old and new personae being used for Notes 8.x and Connections! Here are the links for the posts related to the personae: Meet our new persona! Links to all our Personae thus far I wish I found these posts last week :( But I'm glad I found them, anyway. Enjoy!

I read a really interesting article from MIT Technology Review from July 25, 2008, named Reaching for the Clouds , that talks about a new entrant in the web application infrastructure market called 10gen . In this market, basically shared between Google and Amazon, 10gen innovates exactly in the point where these two giants are more closed: the very infrastructure. 10gen creates an open source stack of tools for web application infrastructure, that is allegedly analogous to Google App Engine , being purpose-built to run in a cloud environment. In the article it is mentioned that they still don't have a business model that defines clearly how 10gen will operate (and survive). Although a bit naive, it seems interesting enough to take a look, wait and see...

Besides trying to get used to the tool, in this first post I am trying to describe why I should create this blog. Hmm... let's see. I work for Lotus Software @ IBM Brazil, and Lotus is all about collaboration (BTW, this blog express only my opinion and not my employees ... and so on...) I recently started working from home (at least formally), and sharing ideas with my team have become more challenging.Not to mention that I have also recently started my graduate studies on Software Engineering, and remote collaboration with my colleagues has been a hassle. I have to stop procrastineering and start formalizing things and ideas in such a way that other people in my team and in my social network can see. There are some activities that I am carrying out that might be of interest here, so I'll blog about them. I have to justify to my wife the reason why I am "working" in Saturday and Sunday nights ... In time, this blog will be bi-lingual (English and Portuguese). Oh, I a