I am going to break the golden rule that I should keep my personal views to myself at all times. I suppose this rule evolved because knowing where someone stands on certain matters might offend people with different opinions, and blogs like these should be about work and work-related views.

Well, I don't care. The professional world we live in is so detached from the human condition by now, that I need to draw a line. Not a day goes by where I don't think about world events and the personal tragedy associated with them. The buck stops here. I no longer want to blog about "fun stuff" without exposing that other side of me.

The article that led to all this is an interview with Robert Fisk. Which made me realize that today, wars are waged by proxy - the actors are a bunch of young kids we don't know, and the witnesses tell stories we hear little about. Soldiers and reporters (oh, and some collateral damage). With our televisions and computers as the ultimate proxy.

I try to imagine the reality on the ground in a conflict zone such as the middle-east, from any perspective. And I can't really. Imagine growing up or growing old in such a context. Day to day, for years on end. The mind boggles. When I merely broke my leg a few months back, an immense safety net of family, friends, medical care, compassion, personal attention, and empathy unfolded itself. Then, in accurate lock-step with my recovery, that same safety net retreated, going on standby again just as automatically. Life is darn good here, not according to some metric, but because of the knowledge that no matter what happens, life will still eventually work out ok. It's hard to imagine two situations further apart than life over here and life over there. The horror being that much of this is due to armed, man-made, conflict. Why, with all our culture and technology, are we as a whole still living in medieval times?

The injustice on this planet is obscene.

In his "How to Disagree" article, Paul Graham presents some insightful thoughts about discussion on the web. He proposes a 6-level "disagreement hierarchy" to identify and classify the different types of arguments made, from DH1 = "name calling" to DH6 = "refuting the central point". It reminds me a bit of the work of Karl Popper.

Imagine taking this one step further and turning it into a mechanism to improve blog / wiki / forum discussions: people can tag/vote on each comment to qualify it as one of the DH1..DH6 categories. A rule could be that each person gets associated with say the average voting result, and that a person cannot tag any other comment above his/her own "level" (or perhaps a single step above). The reasoning being that only people considered able to argue on a high level would be allowed to tag other comments as being on a similar level.

With such a system, one could then cut-off low-class entries when going through a lengthy discussion thread. Quoting one of the last paragraphs in the article:

But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier. If you study conversations, you find there is a lot more meanness down in DH1 than up in DH6. You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way

I think it would make discussions far more interesting, particularly controversial ones...

Seth Godin asks: How do I persuade you? Food for thought. And he makes an excellent point, IMO. See the TED site for an interesting talk by him from 2003.

The www.equi4.com website has undergone some surgery. New layout. More consistent. Simpler for me to maintain. Should also be easier to find things and less stale info, I hope. Same style and implementation as the new vlerq.org site. There are still a bunch of old-style pages remaining to be converted from the FreeWay WYZIWYG site builder to the new scripted approach. I'll be tweaking things further, let me know when you come across links that don't work or content inaccuracies, please.

Any modern laptop can easily store extensive details about every citizen of an entire country. But that's a pretty dangerous path, as these "leaks" illustrate (and perhaps many more don't). What is the best way forward, as a citizen? Avoid getting into such databases? How? No credit cards? No cell phones? Sending out all emails encrypted? Using the TOR network? It makes no sense.

Trouble is - all that data just keeps on getting collected. The big problem is that it's not just about what people do with that data today, but what someone might decide to do with it in the future. Where is all that data going? How come it's getting into all those laptops and CDs in the first place?

There is no need to delete anything, now that storage is so cheap (except perhaps in the White House, or while circumventing it?).

We're setting ourselves up to pay dearly one day...

From a weblog post (via Anarchaia) comes a fascinating story:

“Do you guys know Fermat’s Last Theorem?”

[...]“Everyone here knows that is it is Prof. Andrew Wiles who spent about 10 years to prove it. The final proof from him came in publication in 1994”

“It is correct. However, do you guys know how Prof. Andrew Wiles found these 10 years to dedicate himself to the Great Fermat theorem?”, he signed, “Prof. Andrew Wiles told me by himself, in order to focus on the proof of the Fermat’s Last Theorem, there was one year in which he worked extremely hard to write 20 papers and locked them up in his desk drawer. Then he would pick up two to publish each year. In this way, he gained precious ten years to allow himself to do nothing else except Fermat’s Last Theorem”

Unfortunately for me, this does not imply the inverse: spending 10 years on something does not guarantee that anything even remotely useful comes out ... but still, if this is true it's quite an amazing example of focus and perseverance!

Every morning, I turn one page in a calendar/book and revel in the power of images.

Last year, it was an incredible journey through India by Danielle & Olivier Föllmi (ISBN 9782732431079).  This year it is the sequel to "La Terre vu du Ciel" by Yann Arthus-Bertrand (ISBN 9782732436661). The publisher's site prevents deep-linking, unfortunately.

For images and prints from these and several other photographers see this site.

For me, it is a truly incredible way to start each day...

Allow me to wish everyone a joyful, authentic, and open-minded 2008.
Here is my personal list of favorite films, in case you're interested.

Liesbeth took this picture of our neighbourhood today:



The whole place looks like a beautiful sugar-coated village out of a fairy tale!

This just popped up on my screen:


Is that the modern rendering of the phrase "when hell freezes over"?

From El Reg ...

For some time, I've been using the Akismet filtering service to prevent junk from reaching an area on my website where people can submit issues. It has been working well, as the image shows (scaled and rotated for brevity):



The purple entries were automatically marked as spam and hence ignored. It's both encouraging and depressing - depending on how one looks at this...

Wired has a short article on e-waste. Every time I buy tech stuff, I feel the s(h)ame and conclude that I need to mend my ways. A few years later, for each type of gadget, the story then repeats itself. Tally for 2007: new notebook + camera + scanner + hard disk. Sure, many gadgets tend to get smaller so the molecular count drops, but that's just an excuse to stash the old stuff in a drawer instead of in the garage (which is full of things I simply can't face taking to the dump).

On the plus side, energy consumption of the tech stuff that's always on here is now under 25 watts per hour (adsl/wlan box, nslu2 server with 2.5" hd, mac mini in sleep mode). Plus the fridge, of course.

Do the two balance out? Not by a long shot. Maybe I can do better in 2008.

There are many ways to look at this world. Here are just two. The first link takes 20 seconds to go through, the second 20 minutes. Highly recommended.

Broken leg: invalid → full-leg plaster cast: 1 week → lower-leg light-cast: 2 weeks → back on my own two feet: yeay!

Triggered by an item on lifehack.org, I went through the first few presentations of TED - a yearly get-together of thinkers. Each presentation lasts around 20 minutes, so it takes some serious time to go through a bunch of these. The topics are extremely varied - I found each of the first three absolutely fascinating and can hardly wait to see the rest. The third presentation by Hans Rosling tickled me to no end, there's another presentation at the OECD World Forum from last June.

I can only conclude that this all happening and anyone with broadband access being able to find out about it illustrates how the internet is enabling a new renaissance. What an extraordinary times we live in. And what an opportunities for improving our world!

(Having broken a leg last weekend - silly me - I'm being forced to work at a slower pace the coming weeks. Then again, probably wouldn't have gone through the above presentations otherwise - so there seems to be a silver lining to everything, as they say...)

UPDATE: Dan Gilbert's presentation (#6) is really incredible, IMO.

It's October 1st, 2007. I've been looking forward to this date for quite some time, nearly two months in fact. That's how long I've been involved in a delightful commercial project for the Mac. A colleague / friend and me, doing all the native-Mac aspects of a larger project, i.e. Objective-C, Cocoa, Frameworks, the whole kaboodle. Really impressive technology to build on, and it sure underscores how local GUI apps are still miles ahead of anything web-ish these days, in terms of end-user experience, responsiveness, richness of information presentation, and eye candy.

Anyway, today was the deadline for a very tight schedule, and we made it with a result I'm really proud of. On time, on specs, and on budget. So now I'm celebrating... cheers!

Stumbled across Jacob Nielsen's www.useit.com website. Great articles, well thought-out, well-written, and refreshingly insightful. Found that site when reading his Write Articles, Not Blog Postings article, via a pointer on Christian Neukirchen's Anarchaia weblog.

FYI, from July 14th through August 12th, I'll be away camping in France with the family. We'll have three "computers" with us: Myra's iPod, Liesbeth's cellphone, and our camera. No other bits in sight. It'll be great fun, it always is.

Here's what Google keeps in my public profile:



That's instant access to almost a decade of tracking what and where I posted on Usenet and Google groups. Not to mention every search over the past 18..24 months,and my ISP being required by law to remember every IP address I've contacted in the past 6 months. It's a small step to permanent storage.

Imagine another Joseph McCarthy: have you or your parents or relatives ever...?

This isn't about "big brother" today. This is about creating the preconditions for a big brother scenario any time in the future.

The CVS repository is gone, but a new public SVN repository is now finally ready for use. E.g. to download the latest source code of Metakit, use:

    svn co svn://svn.equi4.com/metakit/trunk metakit

Use "svn list" to get the full list of projects, or any directories / branches in them.

The Failure Feedback Forum is a single point of entry for all problems and suggestions you want to record and report about the various software projects I've been involved with over the years. This new version is still a bit rough and has limited functionality. All known issues have been converted & imported.

Ok, www.equi4.com, www.vlerq.org, and mini.net are back on the newborn server. I'll be keeping a close watch on things. Several quirks remain, but the basic access and download paths should all be back.

All mini.net/tcl/* accesses are redirected to wiki.tcl.tk/* - and revision history access has been switched off, since mini.net is now a fully static site.

Dizzie, the server for www.equi4.com and mini.net is about to undergo major surgery - replacing an ancient SuSE 8.2 setup with a new Debian 4.0 (Etch) configuration. There are no SuSE 8.2 security updates since it's no longer supported and I can't find a cdrom image from which to configure a gcc for it, so I can't set up a subversion repository.

Combined with the fact that I need to repartition the disk with no console access (just a remote reboot / rescue system) and the next few days might be quite, ehm... interesting. Luckily, the people at IPX know their stuff and can bail me out if I mess up.

Starting tomorrow, Thursday morning (Europe time), the www.equi4.com and mini.net domains will be unavailable and return a "503 - Service Not Available" message until the upgrade is over. Emails to jcw @ equi4.com are ok and will reach me, since they do not go through this server.

Preventing spam and helping to digitize books at the same time - brilliant!

There is a treasure trove of original thinking on the CACM site with articles by Peter Denning. Thanks to Mark Roseman for taking me there via his weblog.

A very thought-provoking and powerful article by Bret Victor about why presentation of information matters (and how software hasn't come out of the stone age yet). This is where the coin drops on what computing should be about. It's a long read. But also one of the most refreshing immersions into original thinking I've come across since a long time.

The equi4.com CVS repository has been offline for a few weeks now. There are a couple of different reasons for this - but the main one is that SVN serves me better these days and I've transferred everything to a private local copy.

This is part of a range of changes on the site. The domain "equi4.com" no longer works at all, for example - it has to be "www.equi4.com", i.e. with the www prefix.

The plan is to update the server in a few weeks, at which point I can add svn to it and maintain a r/o replica of my main repository for public access. I'll post here when that step is complete.

The RSS feeds of activities I'm involved in are now as follows:
• This weblog - http://www.equi4.com/jcw/files/rss.xml
• The Metakit mailing list, via Google or Gmane
• The Starkit mailing list, via Google or Gmane
• The Vlerq mailing list, via Google
The Google & Gmane pages also list other access/notifications options.

Welcome, glad you made it back to this weblog again...

There have been some big changes recently, from website updates to complete redesigns, and from migrating files to other servers to taking CVS offline.

The main points to note are:

• The www.equi4.com main website is changing but remains in place.
• I can be reached by email if anything bad happened or got lost.
• This blog will be replaced by a new one, using the same URL.

As a result of switching to a different software package, the RSS feed for this weblog will change in the next few days, from

http://www.equi4.com/jcw/rss.xml

to

http://www.equi4.com/jcw/files/rss.xml

I'll provide more details once the dust settles... in my new blog!

This article caught my attention, especially because of this summary:

If you want to be rich: Don't build what you want, build what they want.
If you want to be a happy geek: Build what you want but don't try to sell it.
If you want to be rich, stop doing research and start schmoozing with the rich.
If you want to be happy, stop caring about the rich and start doing research.

James Bach blogs about people who contact him to get free advice. It seems to be happening more and more.

I can only quote a good friend on this: You get what you pay for.

For me, this does not mean that I won't answer questions or support others - on the contrary - but that it is my choice to do so, not any sort of obligation.

occurred to me that just about everything I've done in terms of software over the past years can be summarized as a simple progression:

A somewhat disturbing trend is that each next step is taking longer to complete... oh, well.

Copyright ownership is a murky issue, as El Reg explains.

It looks like a new trend is to start offering all back issues on some CD-ROM, DVD, or even hard disk at relatively low prices. Publications like Dr. Dobbs, National Geographic, and now the New Yorker are all available in electronic form. Great (I have the first two of these, and a few others).
Wouldn't it be nice is some standard browser emerged, so that we don't end up with a huge mix of supplier-specific reader software? The current situation is a bit like having a different reader application for every web site...

... and their personal preferences. Interesting variety.

The developer perspective. Recommended reading for both sides of the fence.

Hilarious! ... be sure to watch the video.

A quote I couldn't resist copying here:

The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert's Symphony Number 9. --Erwin Dieterich

;)

Great read.

Gulp:

An easy way of checking whether your browser is standards compliant is to check whether the installation files for your browser were smaller than 50MB, or the run-time memory usage is less than 300MB. If this is the case, you should download a more recent browser to get the full Web 2.1 experience.

Pinch me, please (yes, I know it was meant as a joke).

He's right ... and I need to think (not necessarily to change my situation, but perhaps my goals).

It had to happen. I knew from the start that it would be almost inevitable, at some point.

And today it did. I ran the marathon in Rotterdam! All 42 kilometers! In 5:15 - phew! Now I'm tired but very pleased with this moment, and seeing the preparations since July 2005 pay off.

Onwards, back to coding!!

As what is starting to become a tradition, I've been collecting book ideas and recommendations for the past year or so. If the topic and reviews stick long enough, I then order all of them at once to extend my library and have material for all those times when reading seems like the best thing to do. I find it particularly effective to overcome setbacks and productivity dips.

So here's the list that just arrived, in random order:

• Operating Systems (3rd ed: "The MINIX book"), by Tanenbaum & Woodhull
• Ajax in Action, by Crane & Pascarello
• Rapid Development, by Steve McConnell
• Data Crunching, by Greg Wilson
• The Seasoned Schemer, by Friedman & Felleisen
• Micro-ISV, by Bob Walsh
• The Mythical Man-month, by Frederick Brooks
• Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel
• Joel on Software, by Joel Spolsky
• Code Complete, by Steve McConnell

Plenty to catch up on!

From NYT:

"Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration." - Ray Ozzie, CTO, Microsoft

Yup. KISS.

In it's own inimitable way, El Reg has a crazy story about what can happen when the real world meets the world of geeks. Or when people start seeing ghosts/hackers/terrorists on every corner, eh... web page.

The fascinating issue here is how a welcome greeting turns out to have so few hints that non-geeks (that's the other 99.999% on this planet, remember?) may conclude it's some sort of threat...

Having run for over 30 km a few times recently, I think I now understand the term "in the long run" better. It's about setting goals, staying on course, and persevering. It's also about patience - and enjoying both the process and the outcome!

A delightful intro about software product design. Here's part of it:



I'm the schmuck on the bottom left, btw...

I've been updating my website with "rsync -a --delete (from) (to)" for years. Very happily so, I might add. Only this time, the original happened to be on a local NFS mount, and that mount point happened to be inaccessible when I did the update.

So rsync then deleted hundreds of MB's from my webserver before I could hit CTRL/C ...
(Many hours later: all the data has been pushed back out through the ADSL uplink. Phew!)

The bad news: it took exactly 15 days to accumulate 1000 junk emails in my Gmail account (and 55 meaningful ones). And that's after dizzie's basic spamassassin and amavis rules were applied... (stopping another 500 virus emails!).

The good news: Gmail automatically dropped some 98% of the spam. Plus another 75 daily auto-generated emails I always ignore, via a couple of filters.
I now re-route all jcw@... emails to google and then pick them up via POP. It looks like Gmail spam filtering is particularly effective - perhaps because they can detect the same email content arriving for many people and all coming from the same source, and then "undeliver" them as soon as a few people start tagging them as spam, which is very quick to do on their web UI.
Great, just a few emails a day. No distractions!

GTD (Getting Things Done) is a very interesting way of getting organized. FMP (FileMaker Pro) is a powerful end-user database. And ActionTracker looks like an excellent way to brings them together.

The other tool I found was kGTD, which uses AppleScript to make OmniOutliner Pro perform the necessary steps. But this approach is doomed IMO: using a free-style outliner to move copies of information around is bound to stay brittle forever, whereas a database such as FMP can manage data in a perfectly relational structure and present numerous views on the same data using joins, selections, and ordering.

FMP is an incredibly well thought-out and mature system BTW, I'm surprised how little it seems to be appreciated and used.

This is the time of year where I often wonder what I'm about and where I'm headed. Instead of a boring monologue, here's the list of books piled up next to me, waiting to be read, finished, or re-read, as the case may be:

• Machiavelli, a man misunderstood - by Michael White
• Getting Things DONE - by David Allen
• The Mathematical Century - by Piergiorgio Odifreddi
• Database System Implementation - by Garcia-Molina, Ullman, and Widom
• Lisp in Small Pieces - by Christian Queinnec

Ordered as a neat stack, smallest book on top. Somehow, I think this list forms a good overview...

My weekly "long run" has taken me to the 17 km milestone today. Took two hours, roughly half the pace of world-class marathon athletes. So I guess that makes me half an athlete :) - and proudly so!

Gus Mueller's down to earth story of how he made the jump to living off the wonderful software he created. I admit to having bought both VoodooPad and FlySketch and being really happy with both of 'em.

My favorite composer. Ten days non-stop. I've set things up to record it all, and am looking forward to listening to this in my own pace. Thank you, BBC!

How to come up with Breakthrough Ideas. Thinking outside the box, sort of.

Great list. My favorite has got to be #11.



Priceless... (more)

This idea is at least a decade old. A simple tool to jot down brief notes, which I can use from multiple computers. The key feature is incremental search, i.e. entering a couple of characters and seeing the list of hits trim down as I type. No categories, no hierarchies, no keywords. A time-stamp would be nice.

I've got tons of uses for this: storing ideas, remembering URLs, tracking To-do's, and (with proper protection) saving passwords and account info. I'd like to dump my entire chaotic brain in it (for personal use only).

On the Mac, there are several applications which can sort of do this. NoteTaker, MacJournal, OmniOutliner, and VoodooPad come to mind. On the web, there are wiki's and del.icio.us and bookmarks. The Backpack website has a Mac OS X Dashboard widget, a great combo. Will Duquette's Notebook also comes close: incr search and portable. There are lots of ways to do this - it's not rocket science.

But all of the above are single-machine!
On a PDA it would be moot, since those are so easy to carry everywhere, but there's no quick way to enter even limited amounts of text in them.
Is it too much to ask to have a solution which talks to some server, is portable, and can work in disconnected mode as well? All it takes is Tcl/Tk and perhaps Tequila + Metakit. I'm even willing to forego Tk and use the command line, as long as a rendered version in HTML is easy to automatically maintain (for that N770 thing...).
Let's call it SyncPad. Simple idea, simple project, I wish someone would do it.

It's good to see articles like this once in while.

Dick Hardt (first ActiveState, now Sxip) presents his "Identity 2.0" story in a truly delightful way, on video. This was the Keynote Address at OSCON 2005. Not sure how I found this, but it offered great insight into the essence of digital identity. Fasten your seat-belt!

The Shareware Author indeX was a service by yours truly which was started nearly a decade ago to help producers and consumers of shareware find each other... a bit like a marketplace. In a small way, I'd like to think that it made a difference. But given that my interest in shareware is completely gone by now, I've decided to close it down. Stop while you're ahead, or something like that.

Is that Chuck/Charles Moore - the inventor of FORTH - who is being mentioned in an article titled Next-Gen Processor: Supercomputer on a Chip? At AMD? Interesting.

Update: The answer is: no, there are more people with that name.

My lifetime job, of course, is to develop new software and make it run. I've extended that for a while now to also make myself run - an old habit which I neglected for over two decades. So the news is that I'm back into running and enjoying every second of it. Currently at 5 km, five times a week ... it feels really good.

Just back from a refreshing camping trip, it was delightful to read Erik Sink's blog entry about developers and marketing. This one is worth reading and re-reading...

Yours truly is about to enter an extended summer recess. Unlike hibernation, this marks a period of sensory delight and social / travel activity, alternated with brisk work periods in which I will however not be very responsive to email. Anything (or nothing) may happen until September...

Follow your dream. Wil Shipley's student talk at Apple's WWDC 2005 says it all. He's right.

Lawrence Lessig writes a superb article about the World Social Forum. Puts everything I always wanted to know about copyright, DRM, and the GPL into a historical perspective. Ends with a fascinating story about Gilberto Gil.

Ah, so you did read my previous blog entry, eh? And next year we're going to have Mac OS X on Intel hardware? Well, good luck with the switch, get it over with quickly please. C'ya.

The Universal Binary Programming Guidelines covers the technical details.

An insightful story by Scott Berkun about smart, yet not necessarily right. I'd summarize it as: creative ideas need reality checks more than anything else. Or perhaps even more concisely: clever and wise are not the same thing. Reading this, I just can't stop thinking about (design and choice of) programming languages, software practices, database approaches, and development tools.

Let's move away from the clever stuff. Let's focus on wisdom.

Again by Scott Berkun: Why you must lead or follow. Spot on. Life's too short to dwell in any other modus vivendi.

Tedious but progress in the right direction for once... The Register reports that:

Under the terms of [Michel] Rocard's draft, software would only be patentable if it controlled a physical process, or a controllable force of nature. Patents would not be allowed for software that handles "the treatment, the manipulation, the representation and the presentation of information".

Yes, please!

Robert Cringely looks into his crystal ball and describes the future trends he sees looming - the players are Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Apple. Fascinating thinking.

In the category "wow, amazing science"...

Imagine a light source coming from one end and a camera picking up the image reflected by some scene. With a mathematical transformation, it is possible to reconstruct the "dual" image, i.e. the view of the scene as if the roles of the camera and the light source were reversed (note that this requires a scanning light beam, not a floodlight).

Amazingly, this allows you to see things which are not visible from the original camera viewpoint. See the video at the bottom of this page.

Joel Spolsky writes: Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements.. There are an awful number of insightful comments about open source and marketing in his 2002 strategy letter, as usual.

Richard Hamming (yes, the Hamming code guy) describes the difference between world-class scientists and the rest in this talk (of 1986). It's a wonderful glimpse into that world.