Peter Stuifzand weblog

Poking from the sideline

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:30:00 +0100

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.

Running Facebook costs a lot of money

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 08:51:00 +0100

Advertising on Facebook:

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.

Keystoning

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:08:00 +0100

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.

X is dying

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 14:36:00 +0100

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

People used X in the past, but don't anymore.
Some people still use X, but will stop in the future.
People use X, but don't know what X is.
People use X, but you don't like it.
People use X, but you don't want them to.
I don't use X.
I know someone who doesn't use X.
I'm a sad and miserable person, just hating about things. Oh, and people use X.

And every time I used people above you replace it with customers, users, developers, companies, grandma's, moms, dads, your neighbours, or your pet.

Taking back "I don't know"

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 21:32:00 +0100

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.”

From idea to weblog to research

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:11:00 +0100

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.

Attribution

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:05:00 +0100

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.

Writing an essay

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 14:49:00 +0100

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.

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 12:33:00 +0100

The problem with starting to write yesterday and then complete an essay a day later is that it's easy to forget to circle back to your main point.

Put the obviousness into code

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 12:29:00 +0100

Let's get back to what I wrote a few days ago about where you can start. I gave an example about the search engine. I like to look at writing a weblog now.

There exists much software for weblogs. There are hosted versions and there are version that you can host yourself. And version that you can buy. There are even companies where you get a weblog as part of another website.

It is pretty obvious what a weblog is, but there are still many different ways to design one. My question is what do you have to do before can start to write? And then publish to the internet? And make it look like your own thing?

For me starting a weblog is actually quite hard. I wrote my own software. This software hosts my weblog. I write in Vim and then generate static HTML. But to start a weblog I need to create new directories on my web server and create a virtual host. These steps are automated in one command. But that's not the biggest problem. I also need to configure the weblog software to write the pages to the right directory and sync the files with the server. That's not one command.

I'm the only user of this software. And it'll probably stay that way forever, even though the software is freely available on GitHub. And I don't think this is a big problem.

The software is hard to use for some users. You can't expect people to start using Vim as their editor for writing weblog articles. For those people Vim is hard to use. An easier way to write longish pieces of text is by using a textarea on a web page and pushing "Publish".

That software I haven't yet written. And of course I shouldn't have to. I also think that installing WordPress is to hard. Installing software should be one push of a button or one command. I shouldn't need me to download a tar archive from a website and untar it and configure the MySQL database or even create a database and load an SQL file. This shouldn't be necessary. Also know that I'm not bashing on WordPress specifically. It's just that it is the most advanced free blog software we got, right?

But it should be easier than this. And also I want other software. It should be as easy as installing new software on my Linux box. One command and it's available. The software should configure itself. Or be pre-configured.

Just like other software that can write files to a config directory, web software needs a way to create its databases without user interference. As long as you don't touch my other databases I don't care what you need to do.

So maybe the question is: why can some software create files in my home directory and why can't other software create new database files in my database server?