Raphael and i have got the same gut feeling: it’s time to read up on Erlang, a functional language with a facilities for concurrency.
I’ve been reading a blog by Joe Armstrong on the subject for a little while.
Of course, like with all gut feelings, this one could be completely off – maybe something revolutionary is brooding in the deepest darkest software underground that i don’t know about (probably even), but this one seems interesting anyway.
Eldorado is an excellent belgian movie. Dialogues, shots, off-beat humor, the lots: worthy of a Coen brothers film (not exaggerating). A lot of laughs, but also unexpected subtlety and tragedy. Loved it.
Ghent jazz festival last night, and i’m not at my freshest.
A few interesting links for this week …
Everyone’s raving about the 3G iPhone to the point of stupidity. Before you run to the nearest Apple Mobistar store to be trampled by hordes of frothing fans, consider this: an open source, open hardware (!) phone that has come out last week, and with much less ado: the Neo Freerunner. Nice, no?
Music links of the week: i’ve known radio Resonance for a while now – a maverick London radio playing the weirdest stuff. It ranges from experimental stuff someone made in his garden by beating together bits of wood, cambodjan music from the 20s, to golden oldies from forgotten times.
It turns out they’re not alone: if you want to broaden your musical horizons, and are tired of getting bored with the same old commercial stuff around the clock: WFMU. A user-funded radio – I’ve been told they raise money once a year. Their website gives access to (get this) comprehensive archives. Grassroot treasures like this help regain some faith in mankind (thanks Hendrik).
News that’s already a little bit old, but made me smile: Google being subponaed to deliver 12 Tb of data to Viacom. In paper format. *cough*
A last wee technical tip: i’m a big fan of REST – technique to use a certain type of expressive URL. Say http://myserver.com/users/tom/orders. What you don’t think about is that the data in question (tom) has to have URL-compatible format ! this means that you’re allowed alphabetical characters “-”, “.”,”_”,”~”. But woe upon you if that username contains an @ or an & (and yes, they exist)(ref).
My week on the Isle of Oleron: great weather, blue skies, sea breezes keeping the temperatures to loveably warm. The aromatic smells of mediterranean vegetation competing with brine and sea weed from the coast. Long trips around the island on rented bikes, swimming in the sea, eating fresh foods in the garden.
It’s still possible to be sad there, but it’s much harder to sustain for any lenght of time. Lots of light is good for the soul (even with factor 50 sun block twice a day).
The Age of the Guitar Builder is over for me. Seven years of perpetual storm ended up in us both concluding that we might be happier apart. To our credit, the ending was very civilized – no cheating, no entangled property, no children. Almost as if we knew deep down that it would come to this.
I expected to fall apart, but in fact i’m mostly stunned. There’s a whole area of my brain that needs reconfigured: the part wondering what he would like for dinner, worrying about him or asking him where i’d left my keys.
On the bright side, now nobody will complain if i install FreeBSD on a spare computer, if i hoard old pieces of hardware, or if i prepare dishes containing olives, anchovies, chicories, rabbit, corn, sweet and savoury combinations. See ? there’s always a bright side to everything.
For the last three months i’ve been working on a web application for VRT medialab channl.tv, together with Hendrik for design,usability and creative input, and under supervision of Werner.
Channl.tv was started by Werner as an initiative to gather videos from internet and to offer them to several devices. A step into a more modern way of watching television. It was meant as a proof of concept, with Apple TV the device of choice, because it’s more or less an open platform (well, it’s a mac os x and you can write software for it).
In the meantime the web application itself has grown somewhat. It allows to group those videos in channels, to subscribe to channels, to borrow videos from other channels, and to view them in a nice and ergonomic viewer. It is also a social network (oh no, not another one ? ‘fraid so) allowing you to check out what your friends are watching.
As an initiative of the VRT, it is also a platform to share and view VRT content, which is kept up to date. This makes it an unique platform to gather content and news around a particular theme.
The whole project is slowly gathering speed, growing out of its proof of concept phase into a full-blown application. We’re going to talk roadmap next week.
It’s exciting working on this project (in Ruby on Rails), I’m grateful to Werner for bringing me on board. I’m curious to see where we will take it.
We’re going to start inviting more generously in the next few weeks, so if you’re interested don’t hesitate to apply for beta, and most of all give us your opinion (there’s a forum on http://forum.channl.tv) – you could help determining what the next hot feature will be.