SerSo.com

There’s no more waiting, the guys from Dreamhost where this blog/site is hosted sent a huge “humpf!” my way because, apparently, I am a security hazard for them with my old, old WP installation

Folks that know me say I am conservative, perhaps a tad too much in what concerns technology hehehehe. The truth is something else, though. I am a procrastinator, that’s what!

Anyways, this time around I am going to do it. I’ll have to go through the bore of adapting a new template as well, because I am taking the opportunity to “clean up” the site looks a little bit. When I am finished, I will share the experience here with a step-by-step how-to dedicated to you folks that would like to do the same and don’t have all the programming knowledge that is often necessary. Cool?

Meanwhile, please bear with the occasional downtime that the site may suffer as I go through this upgrade.

Thanks and Cheers to y’all!

-Sergio

“Success is not built on success. It’s built on failure. It’s built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe.”

— Sumner Redstone

While I don’t picture myself as a successful guy, so that quote actually doesn’t relate entirely, I had my quota of experiences and attempts that, huh…  err, failed. I do try to build upon my experience and now that age is taking its toll (hehehehe), I find myself doing a lot more introspection about “what went worng” and “what could I have done better” regarding all my aventures in adulthood-land.

I am particularly interested in keeping track of what did not go right with whatever attempt to create a business or going into some work project, job or venture. So, I decided to start a series of articles on that subject, here at serso.com.

continue reading…

Notwithstanding that I was firmly intent in keeping this blog fully bilingual, after trying so many plug-ins, add-ons and so on for WordPress (and after trying to take time to write one myself), I came to the conclusion that the effort was, well, fruitless.

Amongst many a reason for deciding to drop the idea, and a few more I could come up with, only two stand to be enough for my decision:

1. It’s easier to write in one language and keep consistency; one of the excuses I find myself uttering for not posting is that “oh, then I’ll have to translate, it’s too much work… to have it good enough, I must spend double the time, or more, in each post”. A known procrastinator of all things personal, the less excuses I give myself to push schedules, the better. And I like blogging, so let’s make an effort this time…

2. I already have a Blog in Portuguese. My Insonia also suffers from lack of attention because of my guilt feelings about not writing here. So, there it is my opportunity to also keep that blog consistently updated and keep up with the quality of my writings in my mother language.

Note that I am truly bilingual. Though I am Portuguese, and that is the language of my parents, I did learn English since I was little. As such, I do have a justification, right?

continue reading…

‘Just found out that there are indeed people scrumming in Portugal. This is excellent news for someone like me, someone who has seen frustrated all of his honest attempts to use ANY methodology whatsoever.

Scrum is a process, a tried and proven way to improve efficiency in development and not just that. I subscribe to it has beeing a true helper for any team.

There was also this managemnet concept called XPM (Extreme Project Management) which I tried to implement in a results driven organization but you guessed it: the business owners preferred the old and tried method of the whip, coupled with the Captain Kirk concept of management*

Knowing this, one would understand why I am not actually a believer in the idea that implementing processes that are rational, proven and efficient – albeit having acronyms that are somewhat funny – will ever be successful in this country’s business environment. Business owners and chiefs, the real big players here, seem to simply be stopped in time and very, very retrograde (not just conservative, they seem to dislike or mistrust even what was “new” back when!).

But I heard GuestCentric Systems is going fully Scrum, at least. So, congratulations guys, thumbs up!! However, let’s realize they are not exactly “from” Portugal, are they? LOL!!!

Well, pardon my bitterness, all of you well intentioned and forward thinking portuguese friends and unknown scentient forms out there, but since I arrived in 2005 there’s very little I have seen around here that could make me change my opinion. But I am still here, still trying, still strugling. And, chicken!, doing exactly what I am commanded to do. I need to put “the bacon” on the table, although I was never a Pig in Scrum anywhere I worked for.

Nevertheless, consolation and vindication is coming my way in unexpected forms. Imagine that the company I work for, indeed does have expertise and people like Andre Torgal that do know how to Scrum for real!!!

Cheers to you all!

* A simple and irrational way to get things done. Kirk asks the question to his Chief Engineer, Scotty: “How long to have it repaired, Scotty?” to what the Engineer replies “Putting all resources and effort to it, Sir, the best I can do is to have it done in two days…” to what Kirk commands, with no hesitation: “You have TEN minutes. Get it done.”

As you might have already noticed, I integrated BBPress with WordPress, right here. It was not easy, nor straightforward, unlike folks around the web might have had you believe it.

I will open a discussion in my forum about this, as I will post an article describing what I had to do to make it work. In the end, it was all about lack of clear and updated information on the part of those bbpress blokes, but I finally found out that you should not try to integrate the latest WordPress with BBPress ’cause of cookies integration. It was simple, after all and I had to downgrade my WP version to 2.5.1 and all was well and yes, straightforward from then on. What wasn’t simple was to find out about it!…

My project involves a lot of customization of BBPress and I will make it public domain here. My code and such will be published under some shareable license as well.

Cya around

Guess what: my template decided to act erractically right after i did… nothing!

It’s true, it simply doesn’t respect my choice for what page is shown HERE or not. I guarantee you that I had nothing to do it it (lol, of course I simply did something that I can’t remember or pinpoint just now… but I will).

Anyways, if you see something strange happening in the home page, it is simply because I am working on it and it will soon be stable.

Thank you and cheers!!

- Sergio

Indeed I am a well meaning guy. Sure, self-apraising that may sound, I belive I am entitled to say so when my intention was to provide language and 118n (thats the abbreviation of “internationalization” for you, hehehe) support in this site, just for the sake of it of course. Before you jump to any conclusion from the fact that you are reading this in English, let me say that my efforts indeed worked: I managed to get all WordPress strings (well, almost all of them, anyway) to show in Portuguese.

So, where exactly did I decide to stop and why? First off, I didn’t give up just yet. However, what happened was a succession of little anoyances and set backs that I should already account for and be used to (I am a long timer, after all…):

1 -

The translated language file: not even half translated, as I saw it. That’s besides the fact that many strings were not translated to  my liking (a personal opinion only). An example would be translating words such as “post” or “blog”, or even “password”. I personally do not use the translated equivalents for they may be equivocal or simply “not just right”. C’mon, even to you the pseudo-word “blogue” must sound very weird, huh??

So, that meant that I would have to review all the existing strings, however well transleted they would be. Note, this is not a critique to the folks that did it, not at all: they have made an effort and even did a good job, albeit some strings being obvious customizations for their own project and included their “name”, hardcoded (see the official files at http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/pt_PT/trunk/ and http://svn.automattic.com/bbpress-i18n/pt_PT/).

2 -

I had decided to integrate a bulletin board system into my site (forums ) and in the end, integrating the translatoin of the chosen software, bbpress, revealed to be quite not so straightforward… although it is from the same folks that brought wordpress to us

AND, last but not the least, i could not yet figure an easy way to merge .po files

In any case, my plan is still up, and what i intend to do in the end is that the whole site is seamlessly translated and multilingual, capable of just “showing itself” in any language at the click of a link or button.

Think I’m gonna make it? (…any time soon?)

Meanwhile, cheers from

Your truly

This time, I think I will stick to this one. Let me tell you, this has been hard to choose!! First off, I wanted to completely change the CMS for the site. I even looked into Java based systems, but ended up just changing the one in Wordpress I had already started customizing. And I give up, I really will not waste time trying to write my own cms, that would be useless, right?

Desta vez acho que vou ficar com este template. Devo dizer que isto foi difícil!! Até considerei um CMS em Java. Acabei por apenas alterar o site em Wordpress que já tinha começado a “customizar”. E, desisto! Nao mais irei tentar reinventar um cms!!

Com esta experiencia que obtive em fazer este mesmo site, que não é um blog , proponho-me a escrever uma template base que possa ser customizada, até porque quero melhorar o aspecto disto. Digamos que o que quero é criar um “engine” para customizar estas templates. É um projecto, apenas.

Porquê o comentário aqui? Simplesmente porque eu sou péssimo com graficos e apreciava ideias e ajuda nesse aspecto. Se alguém me quizer enviar ficheiros photoshop com ideias para templates, eu mencionarei os créditos ao publicá-los como skins…

Boa idéia?

Of course, right now it doesn’t look much, and quite humbly, the template doesn’t really help with a better impression, I realize.

Nevertheless, this concludes my effort in customizing (in cases, hacking) Wordpress so it does what I want. It did bother me, for instance, that some function have hardcoded formatting output or, even, simply do not allow any flexibility. I do value the effort, this is Open Source after all and it’s “free”.

Some of the hacking lead to more hardcoding (ya, it pisses me off…) because I also did this on my own time, and real, paid work always comes first. Otherwise, I would indeed contribute with stuff for the project. SO, this is sort of an apology.

Some of the projects I would like to work on, privately, would be related to PERL (not PHP) and that’s also a priority for me, but I did start this site based on Wordpress because it was simpler, faster and easier (?) to deal with. Disappointed with all perl based CMS thingies out there, and pressed for time, I had no choice if I wanted to make this happen as fast as I wished.

Just for a heads up, I am thinking in exploiting some ideas for MVC frameworks in Perl and, ultimately, integrating real business applications into a CMS framework. Seems a bit charged with ambition, but hey!, great ideas usually are. For now, I am happy I did publish the site.

( sorry but i didn’t translate this post yet…)