Don't you just hate it when you click a link while you're on YouTube watching a video. Before you realize what happened you click the back button. Normally this will reload the page and start the video from the beginning.
But not today. It continued at the same point where I left. That's how it should be.
This is my first post with rssCloud enabled. It's not that hard, if you've have created the infrastructure already. The infrastructure can be found on github: github/pompiedom-rsscloud and github/pompiedom-ping.
I really love the thoughtful blog posts and videos from people who are in the middle of the thing they're talking about. Those people know what they are talking about and also have a way to make a change for the better.
Christopher Hitchens was a author and journalist and fighter against religion and absolute morality. His articles in Vanity Fair are both eloquent and interesting. Also see him speaking against dictatorships and totalitarian regimes of all kinds.
Eben Moglen is a law professor, who started the Freedom Box Foundation and talks about privacy, free software and how Facebook is a great way to collect information and help people spy on other people. He gives amazing talks about these subjects, which you should see if you think this is just a bit interesting.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Lawrence Krauss, astrophysicist and theoretical physicist, both talking about the wonders of the universe, the things we know and don't know.
These are mostly very long videos, but if you're only a little bit interesed you should give this some of your attention.
In How to change the world professor Moglen talks about how you can change the world if you know exactly what you want and exactly how to do it. And if you take a look at his fight against software patents and "spying for free" you will get an idea about how to understand what he means by changing the world.
Still, if I see these people talk and read what they write, I don't think I have a chance to make the same impact they had on peoples lives. You could ask, is that necessary? And I would answer, I'm not sure. But I would hate to lose the freedoms we have (or had).
But to get back to the title of this post, I sometimes feel like I'm yelling from the sidelines and poking here and there, but don't have any impact, at all.
So for me there is this way to get around this: I want to increase freedom for people and myself. Increasing freedom is a good thing. I don't have to impose rules on other people, I don't want to say: you have to this or that. I wouldn't like other people telling me to do this or that.
It now costs over a billion dollars a year to run Facebook, and delivering ads is how Facebook pays for this.
It's amazing how much money it costs to run some PHP doodads and spying for free.
Via: Daring Fireball.
In this presentation Kent Beck talks among other things, about a development technique called Keystoning. Someone from the audience asks him what it is. I didn't know it either and that means someone else probably also doesn't know. It's really useful for bigger features and I have used it many times without even knowing it.
What is keystoning? Change the user-visible parts last. This way the changes seem to have come really fast for the user. You can change a lot of code, without making a change to the user inferface.
Things that aren't alive, can't die. So if you write an article with the title "X is dying", you should make sure that X was alive in the first place. If it wasn't alive, you should try and be more specific about what you mean.
Possible meanings
And every time I used people above you replace it with customers, users, developers, companies, grandma's, moms, dads, your neighbours, or your pet.
In I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore Dan Pallotta wrote about business-speak:
It involves the use of words such as "space," "around," "synergy," and "value-add" with a healthy dose of equivocators like "sort of" and "kind of" to ensure that there is no commitment to anything being said...
Perhaps a solution can be found in a simple little sentence that gives us some room to think. “I don't know.”
I was told that you can't say you don't know. If you don't know something, you make something up on the spot. What happens if you have to know everything and need to give answers to all questions and you can't say or show you don't know? You make shit up.
So, maybe we should be more honest and just say: “I don't know. But if you really like to know the answer I can try to find out.”
While I was doing my morning reading I came across this weblog by Jeffrey Kegler about his parser called Marpa. My post is not about his parser, even though it's very interesting. This post is about the way the weblog guides and explains the work and ideas in the parser. It even includes historical information about where the ideas come from.
It made me think about the work Simon Peyton-Jones has done on writing a research paper. He explains that writing a paper helps your thinking. On the fifth slide he says that instead of first doing research you start with an idea (any idea) and then write a paper. In the course of writing this paper you will do the research needed to fill in the blanks.
Idea -> Write paper -> Do research
I would like to contribute that when you write software you can use your weblog to explain and crystallize your ideas to your audience. The weblog works as a guide and shows you where you are and where you're going. It may even help reflect on your progress and false starts.
Sometimes a story just gets an idea going. This time it was about linking and attribution in articles on the web. On Daring Fireball, there is a good example pointing to a bad example.
I don't understand why there aren't more links to weblogs and other places in the newspapers. I could guess, but I won't.
In The Age of the Essay Paul Graham wrote:
When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.
Seems just like the thing I did in my previous article. With the difference that I got a cup of coffee.