Have you tried Wordle?

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

You can use any text, a rss feed or a del.icio.us username to create a “word cloud”, after that it’s possible to tweak colours, size, number of words and a bunch of other options.

It’s also possible to see the “word clouds” from other people. Great idea! Brilliant execution.

Here’s an example from my blog feed:

In my old job I worked in a very ordinary office, it was open space, with a dark green carpet, beige desks with green chairs too and everyone wore a suit and tie every day looking uncomfortable.

The office didn’t have anything that stood out, the view outside was great but you couldn’t differentiate one room from another except for the people in it (and their personal items) .

It was pretty boring and without surprise, creativity didn’t have a strong presence. Some may say “it wasn’t needed, anyway.” but the thing is, your working environment has a direct influence on your state of mood, your happiness and your productivity. Check for example, Carson’s ideas for their office.

Fortunately there are a lot of places in Lisbon to get inspired, the sun is most of the time shiny with nice weather, there’s outdoor cafes, some parks, nice museums (with free collections to watch) and the riverside is very nice to walk.

Sometimes the best way to get an idea or solve a problem is just getting out of the office for a while and comeback fresh.

I use TextMate on a daily usage, it’s the most useful program I have on my Mac and it simplified alot my development work.

At the same time, I also use SVN for version-control (but i’m looking at GIT…) so I was very happy to find a plugin for TextMate that enabled me to visually know which files were changed, waiting to be commited, in conflict, etc.

It reminds me of TortoiseSVN for Windows (a great tool, btw), so if you use Textmate and SVN I recommend you take a look at SVNMate.

Note: There’s also a built-in svn bundle for Textmate, simply use ctrl+shift+a on a file or folder to access a few basic SVN commands.