The Ruby programming language creeps up as the 9th most popular programming language on the TIOBE Programming Community Index. Slightly overtaking Javascript. Being a Ruby programmer, this is nice news.
To my surprise, the Lua language (portuguese word for moon) jumped up from the 48th place to the 16th. The language was developed in Brazil and is being used more and more in games. I know that the talented developers from Unknown Worlds are using it extensively in their upcoming NS2 game. They even wrote a Lua debugger (decoda) two months ago.
The last 2 weeks I have been working really hard on my Product Innovation project. So naturally I’ve had little time to write a post.
I haven’t really told you about the project I am working on with my Portuguese colleague João. We are working on modernizing the distributing of medical x-ray photo’s. More specific, we are developing a software front-end for doctors to view x-ray pictures over the internet. If you think that this sounds complicated, you are right, that’s why it’s been taking a lot of time and effort 
But we were able to convince the professor and most classmates with our presentation this monday. The presentation itself was rather boring and not well prepared (I spend way too much time programming the prototype) - but the demonstration of this prototype was more successful.
Only one big presentation left for this course, and it’s the most important one. On december 12th, each group has 5 minutes to give their pitch talk. This presentation is supposed to convince potential investors and venture capitalists to fund our great innovation idea. I found some great tips from Garr Reynolds on how to prepare and deliver a great presentation. On Guy Kawasaki’s blog (a director of a VC firm with an amazing career) i read about The Art of Innovation, The Top 10 lies of Entrepreneurs and his 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint.
Besides all the work, I also had some fun Nathalie was here thursday till monday and we went to a goa party on friday. Good sound system, great dj’s and live’s, too much people and thus extremely hot and sweaty. Saturday we had a mustache party in our apartment as a homage to Carlos, our mustached landlord.
My parents were here to visit me from sunday till today. 3 diners with delicious food! Thanks l’homme père & la mama 
We also had lunch with a super friendly Portuguese colleague of my dad, Cpt. Carlos Mirpuri. Quite an experience. Too bad my parents had to leave so soon. The weather wasn’t good, and I feel that they didn’t get a proper view of my life here in Lisbon. Sorry guys that I was so busy with university projects..
I hope I catched up on old news now Time to start working on the new website for What’s Cookin’?
I was doing some research about how to give a good presentation when I found one by Hans Rosling about how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty.
In the video below from TED 2007, the master of statistics makes a simple point in a very visual and memorable way: “The seemingly impossible is possible. We can have a good world.” Hans showed with statistics what is possible in the world, then he closes with a big, unexpected, and memorable finish.
Really amazing how he can make statistics entertaining, yet powerful in supporting his message. You can find more presentations like this one on his blog.
(Bumped into this one on Presentation Zen, a blog about presentations)
Ai ai ai, I’ve been so busy on my product innovation project this week that I didn’t have time to post about our visit of Sintra last thursday.
I did upload my pictures here a few days ago. We visited the Pena Palace and the amazing Castelo dos Mouros.
Nathalie and me had a lovely diner that evening for our 3 year anniversary, joepie! Time really flies when you’re having fun.
But now I have to get back to work: We have to hand in our preliminary report in just 2 days :-/ bummer
Ha, it’s been a while since I posted. I know. It’s been a busy week at the university. I’m going to change the way I write blog posts. They’ve been taking too long to write, which is why I didn’t post that often. So from now on, I will try to make posts smaller.
Pillow Beach
The weekend before this one (27 October) we went to a really cool beach near Costa da Caparica. It’s a long journey to get there (especially if you take the boat to Trafaria) but it’s somewhat worth it.
The Kontiki Bar on this beach is amazing because it has these really nice pillows on the sand where you can lay back and relax with a drink while watching the beautiful ocean. Very relaxing. Somewhat like the Limonada on a beach (A really nice lounge bar in Gent) There were a lot of surfers that day because of the good waves.
I tried to get a little tan, but I guess I have some kind of Irish skin that just doesn’t tan.
Hints if you want to go there: Take the bus from Praça de Espanha to Caparica instead of the boat. They don’t accept foreign cards, so bring cash
PS (for the Belgian readers) : De locale Joeri was daar voor onze veiligheid
Foto’s are in this set
