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Two funny visual tricks to resolve common problems:

• Everyone who owns a wireless network has the problem of parasite surfers, those guys who grab your open network and use it for accessing the Internet. The common solution for this problem is to use some kind of cryptography (WEP, WPA, etc), but now you can do something different: with Upside-Down-Ternet you can still offer network access to the people, but the images they will see in the Internet will be upside-down, or even blured. Well, this will not resolve the problem of people using your network to download bittorrents or other type of "non visual" data, but it sure is a funny thing to do;
• Another common problem to people is how to surf the Internet in the office, without raising many eyebrows. So what if you could surf the Internet, but inside a Word document? Just like if you were editing an important paper to your company. Your office collegues will start to see you as the most productive, never surfing, always working guy, right? Just use workFRIENDLY to do it.

Anyone with a hosting service from Site5 could have this problem: when you have your web application in a directory symlinked, like

  ~/public_html/webapp -> ~/apps/webapp

when accessing to the URL http://yourdomain.com/webapp you will have an error (Bad Request). But if you add the trailing slash to the URL, everything will work fine. After some digging in Site5 foruns, I resolved the problem by creating a file, named 400.shtml, placed in the public_html directory, with the following content:

  <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
  <!--
  window.location="<!--#echo var="REQUEST_URI" -->/";
  // -->
  </script>

Hope it helps.

First, Pedro wrote on his blog about the most amazing presentation he has seen this year. Well, knowing Pedro as I know, I had to see it. He is very hard to please, so my curiosity was high.

Guys, you must see this: when someone is able to make a presentation on statistics with the entusiasm of a football game, you just have to love it. It was the first time I saw statistic so live and colorful

After this, I went to read more about this guy project, Gapminder, and I have just found my pro bono project for 2007. I will help in it, that's a fact.

Third, and while in the Gapminder website, I realize the tool is available for anyone on a Google service. Did you know that Google as a tools.google.com service? And that it's running the gapminder tool for you to try and explore? Me neither.

The desire to personalize the iPod as resulted in some really odd products. BusinessWeek as 9 more to show here:

In three lines of Perl.