loquo.com is definitely the main ads service in Barcelona (Spain?) . If you want to find a flatshare (people willing to live in Barcelona can't afford to leave on their own or buy a property until the house market completes its explosion), something second hand, this is the place to go!

loquo.com sucks. I am not talking about its old school user interface ... At the end of the day, what's matter most in an 'ads' website is to find what you're looking for !!!

loquo does not have any kind of advanced search:



You can't filter anything. Most of the ads specify "only girls", so if you're a guy you'll have to read these hundreds of "solo chicas" ads. You can't filter by area or anything in the description.

By contrast, London based and free service moveflat.com offers the most useful search filters "ever ever":




Another problems is the repetition of ads. Adding an add is free so most people add their add many times to make sure they appear at the top of the search results. Loquo displays the results order by date of publishing and you can't change the order ...

Fortunately, Yahoo! pipes rocks and will help us to filter loquo search results using the RSS feeds. I have created a pipe you can tweak to adapt it to your needs. Here is an example of the output for 'a monitor OR pantalla OR LCD with price<= 150€:

The fact that loquo was bought by ebay and since then no major feature was added tends to comfort me in my opinion that innovation comes mainly from the small guys. The creators probably got some money and left ...

Once again, the contrast is huge with moveflat.com created by an amateur who does not make money of it and did it for the sake of doing things well and help other people ...

Reading the excellent blog from RedHill Consulting (http://www.redhillconsulting.com.au/rails_plugins.html), I was not sure of how to install the plugins so I thought I shared the snippets (and post to my blog I use as a public knowlege database).

Adapt the code for version 1.2 ;-)

Warning I: you should install the redhillonrails_core only once (!)
Warning II: you need to have subversion installed.

In October 2006, I decided to use a google product - Blogger Beta - to manage my blog. So far, I am not sure it a wise idea because so far coz I don't like much the templating system.

Like today, I have lost about 1 hour fighting with the horribilis XML language used by the blogger beta template system. So I thought I could share my "google beta hack" with the world. I was looking for a way of integrating an addthis.com button to the bottom of each post. After a quick googling, I found a post with a snippet explaining how to do it. Unfortunately, it did not work because of stupid XML rules (grrrr).

I could not put the code in the post because blogger doesn't deal very well with html source code, so you can download this snippet here (only 3 lines)

That will generate a addthis.com bar which will look like:

As far as I am concerned, XML in this case, adds more complexity but nothing else ! What's the point of languages if humans can't read them, there must be a way of making better abstactions to represent the template and layout of a blog!!!

By the way, I am typing this Post using Google Docs & Spreadsheets ;-) I sold my soul to Google! At some point, we'll have to find a soluton to free ourself from this corporation ...

I feel sometimes that the interface of ubuntu is a bit frustrative, I tend to look for a menu I have used only once for 5-10 minutes. I wish we had 3D IA user super-friendly interfaces instead of these hierachicals seventies menus ...

Set up a 1hout timer to enfore breaks and save yourself from RSI and other disagreements

System / Preferences / Keyboard



This is brillant!

Desactivating the sounds at startup (and other beeeeeeps)

It took me quite a while ...
It is hidden in Menu System / Administration / Login Window, then in the Tab Accessiblity: Sounds




Uncheck the "Login screen ready", that's it!

I wish one day sofware engineers (especially those who design mobile phones) will understand that the beep beep are a source of annoyance for the majority. Moreover, it so ironic, most of us don't know how to desactivate these sounds ...

Configure the applications launch at startup

Menu System - Preference - Sessions then in the right tab "Startup Programs"

Take a snapshot when you can't use the "Print screen"

Sometimes, the print screen does not work, like when you are opening a menu. It's a bit frustrative but fortunately, there is a solution:
http://tips.webdesign10.com/how-to-take-a-screenshot-on-ubuntu-linux

Use Gimp:
o take a screenshot with the GIMP, find the following menu option: File —> Acquire —> Screen Shot. You will then be offered some options for the screenshot such as length of delay and whether you want to take a screenshot of the entire screen, or just a window.

Just select the option "the whole screen" and set a 5s delay :-)