Sometimes, i hear a tune, and all of the sudden, my inner radio will play nothing else. Not that it’s extremely good or anything, it just won’t go away. The only cure i know for this is to indulge until i get bored.
So here goes:
Archive for May, 2007
Viral song
May 12th, 2007Clay Feet
May 11th, 2007As all know, Google is seeding a pod in our beautiful country. What i didn’t know, is that they’re getting a little help. 50 million euros go a good way to make a location attractive, never mind the beer and the chocolate.
They also started their own attack on malware. I like Google’s products/services, very user friendly, but they do try a little too hard to be everything to everyone (as Symantec and McAfee would tell you).
Not the first company to have those ambitions … we’ll see if their drive and brilliance will withstand growth.
Update: uh-oh …
Where the Sun doesn’t shine
May 11th, 2007Sorted out my proprietary library problems today. How ? Well, i was just about to send off a mail to the vendor, when i thought i’d upgrade the Java Runtime Environment. Didn’t expect it to change anything, but that it would look better in the specs. So i did.
And whoosh. Suddenly it worked. I still don’t know why, and i lost (too) many woman-hours on this problem. I was torn between cheering, and throwing my nice LCD screen through the window. So i just cleaned out my desk as a compromise.
Write Once, Run Anywhere, right ?
(my colleagues add: “and cross fingers”).
A hit of Freebase
May 10th, 2007
Yay – I’ve been given an invite to Freebase !
I’ve discovered that freebase is a very popular domain name, and that it also refers to some mean drugs. Also that some think it will prove as addictive as the name indicates.
Personally, i find it difficult to imagine an online encyclopedia (or structured data set) competing with crack cocaine. Scary idea.
Agreed, data and knowledge can become obsessions, but i’m pretty sure that however awesome Freebase proves to be, i’ll still eat, brush my teeth, and sleep at night.
You’ve been Joosted
May 9th, 2007By the way, i have 989 Joost invites left, so if you want one …
I tried to think if i actually know 999 people. I probably do, if you count the cleaning ladies where i work and the baker around the corner. But as to people who i’ve got the email from …
maybe i should do a spam attack with Joost invites, that could be fun. Of course, i’d probably get banned by my ISP like a big amateur (i don’t keep up a botnet, personally), so maybe that isn’t such a good idea.
Update: found out that the invites are now unlimited, not 999 (had not switched on my Joost in a while, see previous post).
The Dark Side of the Source
May 9th, 2007I know, I know. Defending open source is like jumping on the bandwagon when the train has already reached its destination.
Ever since I know of it, I’ve been in favor of Open Source: because the principle is nice, because it works, because it’s often free as in beer.
But once in a while I’m sharply reminded of why it is a GOOD thing. Today,for instance, when i spent the whole effing day debugging an application that used a closed source library with very unclear exception handling.
So the first few hours were spent on trial-and-mostly-error on the black box. Very, very tedious. Then I decompiled the darn thing, obfuscation and all, and tried to figure out where the problem was. Of course, the library was a signed jar, so recompiling for better debugging was not an option. S** of a b***. Pardon my french. I’ll continue to work on it tomorrow.
Open source is more than a nice principle. For development, it’s just plain easier – to debug, to include those nifty features you’d really like to have, to understand what exactly your code is doing.
And if a company can’t understand that, then I’ll try to avoid their software.
And if I can’t avoid it, well, may their managers suffer of bad itch in embarrassing places for every minute i lose.
Twitter it, and they will come
May 7th, 2007Seen several posts today extolling the virtues of twitter.
“if you can’t say it in 140 characters its not meaningful”
“give a sense of personality, of realness – authenticity that is needed to make your ideas trustworthy.”
OK … but that presupposes that what we have to say is interesting in the first place.
As you spread ideas, are you also interested in other people’s ideas ?
Is the main attraction not egocasting ?
At what point do the conversations become chaotic IRC-chatroom-like ramblings ?
What is the signal to noise ratio in Twitter ?
Note: i speak as a non-involved Twitter sceptic. And my better half makes guitars, so the value to my household logistics is nil.
My LibraryThing thing
May 6th, 2007LibraryThing is a nice collaborative networking initiative (i’ll stop using the 2.0 word), allowing you to put together a list of the books you own and love. This is very nice, because you can find other people who read the same things, talk about it, get recommendations, check out the zeitgeist and so on.
More to the point, you can add a corresponding widget to your blog showing books of your library.
But. There’s a catch (which is also LibraryThing’s business model): the books they list are imported from amazon.com. They need a sizeable database of books to work with after all. So when you put a LibraryThing widget on your site, you’re in fact including adverts for amazon. And i don’t like adverts on my blog.
On the other hand, i love books. Blogs are meant to share media, after all, and print is the first mass-medium.
So i compromised. I didn’t make myself an Amazon associate, clicking on the covers doesn’t make me any richer. I’m just showing my books. And i put a warning on top of the widget, so people know who they’re funding, should they feel the compulsion.
Hope that cleans the slate, though i’m not too sure. I’ll have to meditate on that one.
Barcamp Brussels today
May 5th, 2007OK, off to barcamp.
Far too early to be excited, but with heavy doses of caffeine i might be able to fake it.
Werner Ramaekers is streaming the event, if you’re interested and couldn’t make it:
Update: removed the widget – there was not enough bandwidth to feed 40 twittering geeks, so the streaming fell through …