My presentation:
Good subject – i made it a bit too short for the alotted 20 minutes. I suppose i could have gone into more technical details. But an interesting subject all-round.
Note: Pascal Van Hecke told me it’s pronounced Waf.
Update: in PDF format: OAuth PDF
Good barcamp edition again, thanks to CraHan. The support aspects were spotless: he location (IBBT) was great, the technical support was above average, the food was tasty.
The location was interesting for me in more than one way, as i’m going to start work there on tuesday.
Presentations I attended:
It’s rumoured that Luc Van Braekel and Maarten Schenk shot films, so if you want to see a few of the presentations, it might be available.
Most of us, and some more geeks, regrouped at the nice roomy Netlash offices for a Girl+ITPro geek dinner (organized by Clo and Serge).
It was not the usual formula, as everyone floated about sipping drinks or eating fries, played on the weeWii, talked around the standing tables, sat on the cube-like seats. A very relaxed and pleasant atmosphere, thanks to the soft (and colourful) lighting and the lounge music.
A good ending to a full (and slightly saturating) day.
Some friends and i had a discussion the other day – we discussed the facts that US citizens can be pretty self-righteous, and in your face about it. If they see you doing something that doesn’t fit in their value system, they’ll have more of a tendency to tell you off, which can be quite irritating.
Now that set me thinking. Here in Belgium, we tend to have the opposite attitude. It’s none of our business, really. Liberty for all: they do their stuff, i do mine.
But that, to me, is the other extreme. In some cases, the excuse of ‘none of my business’ becomes laziness and cowardice. When seeing someone getting bullied, someone’s car getting broken into, someone’s property getting stolen, stepping in might get you in trouble. But it’s also ethically unavoidable.
So before getting all contemptuous on the WASP attitude, maybe we ought to look closely at ourselves. There must be a middle way.</rant>
Anyway, in that theme, a small movie:
Arthur C. Clark’s left us today. He spent his last years in Sri Lanka – those who saw The colours of infinity (slightly psychedelic documentary about fractals) might have glimpsed his back garden. I like to think he went in style, after what was certainly an interesting life.
He’s mostly known for writing the Space Odyssey triquadrilogy. It is pretty typical of its time: noble ideals, galactic schemes, and people who act like wax puppets. The Kubrick adaptation of 2001 was phenomenal – making HAL9000 a prototype for our AI nightmares.
I read a later novel of his (can’t remember the name though) which was quite different and (still) forward-thinking, with the adventures of an augmented woman looking for the reason of her existence.
According to “2010 – Odyssey Two”, we make contact with the wise beings from outer space, in yes, 2010. So he won’t be there to see it. Or to see it doesn’t happen, and the Great Ones won’t save our ass for us.
I’ve been trusting my Gmail more or less blindly, but yesterday i got an error page. A wake-up call. By coincidence, same day i read this post by Sébastien Wains on planet.grep: how to back up your gmail account systematically.
I’ve been looking at social networks a bit more closely, to use in some projects, and found some interesting resources: the microformats site is very informative. And for implementation in Rails, The Whiny Nil give some good resources.
Data news wonders if open source hype will survive the recession. The hype might not, but open source definitely will, because it’s from well before last recession. Plus their reasoning is wrong, because they assume companies pay employees to develop any old feature. While from what i see, employees paid to develop open source will develop the features their company needs, so they would have to do it one way or the other. This way they’re just building on the shoulders of giants.
I’ve handed in my notice for the 31th of march – which means that i’m in my last days here.
I’ve asked my boss for two weeks of holiday at the end – he flat out refused. I asked for one week – and the jury’s still out on that: no confirmation whatsoever that i’m going to get them.
Now i’ve finished up all the knowledge transfer and documentation chores last thursday. Which means it’s my second day here doing absolutely nothing.
Which is stressful, strangely. I’m at my best when i’m running at full capacity, developing, solving issues, organizing, feeling efficient and useful.
Now i feel guilty, for sitting there surfing on the customer’s time – while it is hardly my fault because my boss knows i’m totally idle.
Time stands still. I check out twitter, my feed reader, different planets every few minutes. I read up on misc subjects. I consider starting to work on personal projects on the workplace (and why is ruby installed on your machine ?).
Boy, is it boring. I’m going to start pestering my boss again, i think. Not like i’ve got anything else to do.
Note: this is my first blog post during working hours, ever.
As said i’ve cleaned out my feeds, and so i found some interesting pages, which might be a bit yellow around the edges and dusty, but are still worth a mention.
Lew manifesto: lew is a small scripting language, which i don’t know personnally. But i like the manifesto of the conceptor: while languages grow in features, they make simple actions harder. So he worked towards making a limited purpose, but really sparse language (through why who got it from Francois aka Shoob).
Yahoo embraces the semanic web. I think it’s the right way to go if you want to trump Google for search. Wonder if microformats are going to get worked in in the web standards. But then they might get bought by Microsoft, so let’s not cheer too early.
MIT list of 10 emerging technologies. Some are predictable (offline web applications), some less so (for me). One i’m looking forward to is the transmission of electricity without cables. I thought that was impossible since high-energy radiation tends to be, let’s say, unhealthy (you get lots of sores and your hair falls out). But they would work through magnetic resonance of two objects, which would only involve the two said object. Respect.
A while ago Smetty made an inspiring post about the need to clean out your digital closet. It’s true, when you open up your feed reader and there’s (1000+) posts waiting for you, it feels like there’s piles and piles of unread magazines lying in your back yard, crying out to you about wasted trees. It’s stressful.
So I axed the feeds i hadn’t read for more than 2 weeks, and i sorted out the rest (‘mark as read’ figured prominently).
Which brings me to my subject of today: i’m participating to the beta testing of AideRSS Google Reader Firefox add-on. Whatsit ? It’s a classifier of posts. It gives a rating to every post in your feed reader.
I haven’t figured out what the parameters are yet: the number of comments on the post, the SEO positioning, the del.icio.usness seem to play a role, but there might be other, less obvious factors.
At any rate, i love the idea (in fact i already thought of the idea, but it’s all in the execution), and i’m going to give it a good go. A program that filters out your feeds based on what you’ll find interesting – if it really works – means more time for the really good stuff.
So i bought into the marketing and got me a new Macbook Pro. The marketing people at Apple know what they’re doing: they added lots of bling-bling to their products. And they know the child in us (and in me certainly) totally falls for the bling-bling. I had a whole lot of real reasons to buy it, but let’s be honest – i was rationalizing my decision.
And glam it is: a slim silver laptop, with a wide screen that makes it seem larger than it is (15″4), a large trackpad and a keyboard that is almost silky to the touch.
At first boot you’re greeted with a whole sound-and-light show, that guides you through making an account and setting the locale. The image and sound card are more than OK. Then there’s the trackpad: it has iPhone-like features, letting you zoom in and out, an navigate back and forth at the brush of a finger (or more accurately, two or three fingers).
There’s a few gadgety features, like the dashboard, which is a kind of transparent overlay of wee widgety apps you can switch to at will. The windows whisking away gracefully instead of just closing. The 4 workspaces app is called Spaces and you visually slide from one workspace to the other.
But I’ve had it a few days now, so i’ve been seeing some of the wee disadvantages at having a, well, non-Linux system.
I suppose i sound a bit grumpy ! Don’t get me wrong: i’m still quite chuffed with the laptop. It’s a comfortable piece of hardware. I’ll just have to get used to some conventions. Plus i’ll want to do some customizing, throwing off everything i don’t need, and add some nice open source applications i’m used to. Neh.
** which i don’t read, of course. Which brings me onto an idea: what about an open law documentation project ? A bit like open source documentation projects – lawyers volunteer in bringing an abridged and simplified version of all EULA’s (30 lines max) onto a website. Like: “this basically says that you are forbidden to publicly criticize the project” – say.
*** pipe : alt-shift-l , { : alt-5 , } : alt-) , [ : alt-shift-5 , ] : alt-shift-), ~: alt-n, \ : alt-shift-/
So i ran several diagnostics following the kernel panic, and after eliminating all else i can say that it’s CPU or motherboard are done. And we all know what that means …
My dear desktop theBeast, you were a faithful companion to me for 5 years. I picked your components myself. You were a hot item back in the days. You drank from many ISPs. You travelled with me from Glasgow to Brussels.
You went through replacements of hard drives, RAM addition, and I replaced the CPU cooler because your old one sounded like a turbo propeller taking off.
Bygones. I will now scavenge you for parts, which will continue to bear testimony to your past existence. I don’t think i will miss you, but i will remember you fondly. Rest In Peace.
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