Vitor Rodrigues

• Wikipedia entry about Pi (PT here)
• Breve história do número Pi

Popularity: 2% [?]

It is a generally accepted idea that Apple has a fantastic marketing team. We see their ads, their launch parties, their website, their design, and we almost want to buy the product just because it looks cool, nice and great, but we didn’t even try it yet. Today I was surprised by another company’s marketing ideas. Believe it or not, it was Microsoft and it’s Vista marketing campaign! I should say that I know nothing about Vista, besides the fact that was launched this week and that was being developed for a long time. I still have no curiosity in learn about it or its new features, since I don’t plan to use it in a near future.

To the official Vista’s launch in Toronto, Microsoft built a very cool ice house. The house has been a huge attraction in downtown Toronto, and the house visitors have the opportunity to see the the new msft OS and Office packages in action. This was a great way of calling people and try to impose the “coolness” factor. I checked the house today from the outside and it looks cool. I will try to visit the inside part tomorrow to see how does a ice toilet works!

Despite the factor of the ice house being a huge attraction by itself, the location chosen (the same used by Sony for the recent launch of the PS3) was also very good. It was just outside the main entrance of the Toronto Eaton Centre, that is just the biggest shopping mall in Toronto (and the 3rd biggest in Canada), and currently Toronto’s top tourist attraction regarding number of visitors. What best location can you have to demo a product than a place where all the families go and most of the tourists also go?

After checking out the ice house, I decided to stop and the Indigo store inside the mall to read some magazines and look at the bargain books (sometimes you find really great value in there). And what was my surprise when I looked at the “Hot & New” section at the entrance, and it was all about Vista! There were more than 10 different books on Vista, from the Bible to the Idiots series. That I was not expecting, but I should say that it was also a good strategy. While I was reading a magazine close to the Vista stand, I would see people stopping and looking at the Vista books with plenty of interest and commenting about it. They definitely caught people’s attention to their product launch.

And at the end I came home thinking: if only Linux had an opportunity like this…

In other news: I gave a try to GIMP 2.3.14 and it rocks! Some very good new features. More on that soon.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I must confess that I haven’t learned Ruby yet, but its popularity is growing everyday. According to TIOBE’s report for January 2007, Ruby is 10th most popular programming language.

"The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming
languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of
skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo!
are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming
language or the language in which most lines of code have been written."

Java is still the most popular language, with C and C++ in the next positions. I found curious the fact that Visual Basic is the 4th most popular porgramming language, ahead of PHP and some other very popular languages like Perl, Javascript and Python. 

Popularity: 15% [?]