Archive for July, 2007

Woman

July 29th, 2007

As the daughter of a bra-burning feminist (and a very nice person !) I have not been exposed to high heels, lipstick and perls in my childhood.

At home we talked about philosophy, geopolitics, read Lewis Carol and Gogol – fashion was absent. I’ve spent my high school in jeans and sneakers, totally unaware that other people my age were agonizing over wardrobe and hairstyle (in other words, i was a nerd).

Even now i’ve forcibly acquainted myself with the trappings of feminity, it still takes a bit of an effort. My shopping is in the ‘surgical strike’ mode. I’m more no-nonsense than seductive. I read IEEE Software, not Vogue.

That’s why it’s good fun for me to read the blog of a 100% woman (in french).

I recommend it: Sex and the City with a good dollop of sulphuric acid and gritty reality. The City being Paris.

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Posted in female, geek, so sue me

Pop

July 28th, 2007

A few days ago i posted about how i found much of the current web economy to be, well, fragile.

Last few days on the web news: Twitter’s absence of business model. A VC company funded them despite of this – I even read a post of some guy defending it: Business models are overrated.

Last time i looked, companies in the for-profit sector had to make profit. I think. I don’t claim to understand the subtleties of today’s financial world.

OK, business model is not necessarily equal to profit, but it means at least a well-reasoned expectation of profit. It’s an expression of the founder’s belief that they can make a living out of their venture.

So this, my friends, could well be the delicate sound of a bubble popping.

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Posted in economy, microblogging, web2.0

Glamour Pwnage

July 26th, 2007

My company gives me the opportunity to specialize in security. Will i do it ? That’s another story.

But it made me remember hacker scenes in films:

War games. A kid hacking into the Pentagon’s AI almost causes the Third World War to begin. My computing experience at the time consisted in playing with LOGO on an Apple IIc, so i thought it was pretty clever.
Tron. Very educational. Your computer is powered by little people looking silly in weird fluorescent clothing. Hacking requires Formula 1 skills.
Classic: Independence day. Computing genius hacks an Alien “Mainframe” with a laptop … in about 5 minutes
Swordfish: cracking into a network is fun: it’s like playing a game with big coloured shapes – if you get to the third level you’re in.
Antitrust – not too bad actually, some bits actually looked like they were written by half-geeks.

I know there are others of the same kind, but these are the ones I remember best.
You have to admire how hollywood turns the hours of drudgery and patience real crackers probably go through into breathtaking, adrenaline-laden wizbang. Too funny.

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Posted in Entertainment, security

Links on this rainy day

July 23rd, 2007

Bloody hell ! Vista’s barely stabilizing, and i haven’t even looked at the thing yet (more a Linux woman, myself), and they’re already talking about it’s successor ! Seven, makes me think of the movie – not a wildly attractive association.

Joox.net seems to be permanently down – maybe their headquarters were raided by the digital right protection ninja’s. However, no reason to panic: clones are jumping up all over the place. Not that i’m watching all that illegal stuff.

Everyone knows Digg, one of the top bookmarking sites. I mostly read headlines. Turns out there’s loads of interesting visualization initiatives. I like this one – can’t say i’ll use it too often, but brownian motions of information are a funny concept.

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Posted in data, web2.0

Links on this sunny sunday

July 22nd, 2007

I’m always in awe of kernel hackers, mostly because i have only a very vague idea about how you write an OS. On an equal footing are linux device driver hackers who reverse engineer proprietary drivers – voltmeters and assembler – because let’s face it, high-level languages are for wussies.

The kernel and driver programming are closely knit, of course – from what i understand (under Linux) device driver modules slot into the kernel. Well, no longer. The connection between both is being partially severed. Linus is doing the necessary to put drivers in userland.

The NY times talks about the poor state of the ‘net in Afrika. My sister was 2 years in the Ivory Coast, and during her stay it was difficult to mail, let alone VOIP. And forget it in the rainy season. After One Laptop Per Child, maybe we need One Access Per Village.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Coincidence

July 20th, 2007

The whole of our blognation has been writing about … a cocktail drink. Whoa. Interesting.

OK guys, i know you like a drink, and i know it’s free.

But think of people who read lots of feeds and are subjected to too many similar posts. Bo-ring. Waste of bytes. Try to show originality in your greed, please.

5 comments »

Posted in Bloggers, selling out

Huh ?

July 19th, 2007

Elise Huard –
[adjective]:

Benevolent to a fault

‘How will you be defined in the dictionary?’ at QuizGalaxy.com

‘Adjective’ ? ‘benevolent’ ? Mh. Well, at least the definition is not ‘extremely flatulent’, like one of my friends (from Koen).

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Posted in trivia

Web 2.0 soufflé

July 17th, 2007

For about a year, I’ve been thinking we’re in a new web bubble – or rather, a web soufflé. No popping, but inevitably, a noticeable slump.

And a few days ago, for the first time, i read someone saying the same thing (not in great detail, still).

The first bubble followed the opening of a new market: e-commerce. It became a bubble because stock of the new web companies was grossly overpriced. The market massively bought into Metcalfe’s law. Which proved an exaggeration.

This new boom relies on two commodities:

advertising (Google, MySpace, Twitter,Digg,…)
information and monitoring (LinkedIn, Technorati, Google Blog Search …)

Spot the trend ? New market: online advertisement. Google was right there, and is now effectively the biggest advertisement agency on the block.

But more and more players are wanting a part of that pie, through Google or not. You don’t have to have a major in macro-economics to get the picture: supply, demand, and resulting lowering price.

And let’s not forget that the advertisement budget is also dependent on how bullish the economy is feeling. When companies are saving, they also save on marketing campaigns.

Information will always be valuable – but again, dependent on how much you’re willing to spend for it. If a site lets you search the profiles of IT professionals, it is only interesting if you’re actually hiring.

I’m a fan of an economy that lets all kinds of goofy, creative and inventive sites emerge. We’ve seen people let loose their imagination, with nice results.

Only remains to be seen which ones will last. A lovely design and ajaxy tidbits won’t put bread on the table, in the long run.

1 comment »

Posted in sustainable, Tech, web2.0

GTD – the sequel

July 11th, 2007

A small while ago, i had to take a breather because for the first time in my life, i felt a job was getting the better of me, stress-wise. How sad is that – having reached your competence threshold at 31.

Then i realized two things: I needed a new method to manage the constantly changing environment, and two, stress is contagious. The second problem can only be helped by breathing deeply a few times after a conversation with one of the human spark plugs at the office.

For the first problem, i read Getting Things Done. I recommend it.

The principle is to write everything down. Everything. David Allen’s theory is that any open issues that are not recorded will stay in your RAM, and cause clutter and stress.

The second thing is to organize all this. Define ‘next actions’ for every open loop, store reference material, trash the rest. Sort it all in a way that makes sense, and allows you to retrieve what you need immediately.

The book goes into great detail, such as how you should organize your files, your mail, what kind of office equipment you need to implement it. It’s all very common sense.

There’s the obligatory “i showed my system to executive X and it changed his life” story. But all in all, the BS is at a minimum, the way i like it.

Well, i’ve started using this system – i have to admit that it helps. You have a sense of control. You may not be able to do every single thing, but at least you’re aware of it, and you don’t forget anything.

Of course there’s no free lunch: his system does demand some discipline. This is liable to go when everything goes haywire. But so far, so good.

2 comments »

Posted in developer, life

Blind Spots

July 9th, 2007

Philosophy – a word that has been integrated into our daily language, but very rarely in its original sense (love for wisdom ?). From what i understand, philosophy is trying to find out a different way of interpreting things, playing with concepts in novel ways.

I’ve given it a try. In a misguided fit of optimism, i bought Kant, Heidegger and Murdoch. Invariably, these had me staring into the distance after two paragraphs. I gave up and read Sophie’s World, aka philosophy for Dummies, instead.

We, as outsiders, see philosophy as a static thing, written in stone by old great thinkers. Wrong. Philosophy moves with its times: new areas are emerging, like Philosophy of Information.

I’m talking about this because last year i met Koen Vervloesem, who studied engineering, philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence, while starting up a career as freelance computing journalist.

I enjoy reading his blog (in dutch), because understandably, his is a different perspective. He combines insights in philosophy with knowledge of engineering. If you want to stretch your mental muscle, do give it a go. Today he’s talking about the blind spots in our thinking.

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Posted in life, philosophy

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