Posted by matijs
25/03/2007 at 13h05
Daring Fireball talks about about an interesting post by Tantek Cilek about Human Interface Design. It’s true that there is some cognitive load in posting a blog entry as opposed to just answering What are you doing?
Partially, that resistance is good. Like forums, or blog comments, the Twitter entries are mostly like noise. A soothing background hum that lets you know other people are alive and going about their business. Unfortunately, that business is often uninteresting in the long run. So how long are we willing to store it, even for ourselves?
On the other hand, it is annoying that I have to come up with a title that covers this little post that wanders all over the place. Or that so many thoughts end up as half-finished posts in my drafts pile.
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Posted by matijs
20/03/2007 at 18h27
I don’t use the crontab command on my own machines (I just put files in /etc/cron*), but recent experience on another machine made me wonder why crontab has the following options (this is from crontab --help):
-e (edit user's crontab)
-l (list user's crontab)
-r (delete user's crontab)
Right. E is for edit, L is for list, R is for delete. Makes sense. And as a bonus, it is easier to accidentally delete your crontab when you want to edit it.
Brilliant.
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Posted by matijs
13/02/2007 at 09h43
Last night, I had a dream. There was a gathering of people for dinner. It
was probably not my house. I mean, it didn’t look like my actual house, but
in my dream it was also not my house. We sat at a table with a thick rough
wooden top. The light was soft, coming mostly from the simple lamp hanging
over the table. The floor was also wooden, as were the low shelves lining
the walls at the other side of the room.
I was sitting at the head of the table. I’m not that tall, so I was looking
slightly up at the other people at the table. On the second chair to my
left sat a young man who was somehow connected to Microsoft. Probably he
worked there. He was very enthousiastic about Vista.
At some point he said something that really upset me. I think it was about
how something could not be fixed, and users just had to either live with
it, or buy something new. I told him, how can he say that when there are
people how have to get by on very little money, and can’t afford to buy the
shiney new stuff, and that Bill Gates is really out of touch with reality.
I don’t remember the exact words, but I was clearly very angry. The young man decided this animosity was too much for him, and left.
Afterwards, I was standing on the other side of the room, shaking so badly
that I dropped two glasses that I was trying to drink from to calm down on
the floor.
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Posted by matijs
27/01/2007 at 12h40
As of today, the ‘Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal’ (Dictionary of the
Dutch Language) or WNT is online. It is a massive
dictionary of Dutch,
apparently
comparable to the Oxford English Dictionary. I first heard about this
dictionary when I was a young boy, and
my father made
a documentary
about it (sorry, those links are in Dutch). At the time, the WNT was not
finished and already occupied several bookshelves. People had been working
on it for 125 years, and it seemed it would not ever be finished. Since
then, they’ve clearly come a long way.
[Unfortunately, their interface is in Flash. Why, why, why? Three of the
ten questions in their FAQ have to do with problems caused by choosing
Flash. That should have made some bells ring.]
By the way, I was alerted to this historical event by the invaluable
Language Log. Be
sure to also read the resulting discussions of Babel Fish
name
mangling.
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Posted by matijs
22/01/2007 at 13h21
For some applications, a spreadsheet is the perfect development
environment. The UI is a no-brainer, while the relations between the
different values is clearly visible, and changes are automatically
propagated from what could be called properties to derived values.
The problem is, of course, that you’re missing out on the features a
programming language could offer. Macros are basically a dead end, unless
you like to solve user issues like ‘It doesn’t work because I disabled all
macros.’
What I want is something that gives me this easy linking within a model and
between model and UI, but from withing Ruby. It is my prefered solution to
the Gnome on Rails problem.
Cells for Common Lisp promises to
take care of the automatic propagation and dependencies between cells:
Cells is a mature, stable extension to CLOS that allows you to create
classes, the instances of which have slots whose values are determined by a
formula. Think of the slots as cells in a spreadsheet (get it?), and you’ve
got the right idea. You can use any arbitrary Common Lisp expression to
specify the value of a cell. The Cells system takes care of tracking
dependencies among cells, and propagating values.
That seems to take care of the automatic updating of derived values. The
second part is the no-brain-UI. What’s needed for that is a dead-simple way
to link settable values to input widgets (text boxes, spin buttons, etc.),
and to link derived cell values to labels. By dead-simple I mean that it
should be done in at most one line per widget/value pair.
It seems for that part, the solution would be to use
cells-gtk:
Cells transparently link GUI elements with each other and the
application model to greatly simplify development of rich interfaces. Cells
also automate how Lisp GUI instances drive their GTK+ counterparts.
Sounds great!
The problem (for me at least) is that this is all in Lisp, and I don’t know
Lisp yet. So, I want this, but in Ruby (since that’s the language I like to
use most right now). Some basic ingredients are already there: We can use
blocks as formulas for the derived values, and there’s the Observable
module. Also, Ruby has bindings for Gtk+.
I have some more wishes, but they’re mostly about Gtk+, so I leave those
till later.
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Posted by matijs
20/01/2007 at 10h28
Wow, compare the eye-friendly layout and colors of a Twelve Stone forum thread, to a completely random example of pbpBB.
There’s also a refreshing lack of the unwelcoming five *cannot*’s that grace nearly every forum I anonymously surf to.
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Posted by matijs
18/01/2007 at 18h59
Without an e writes
Well, ruby just isn’t that much better than python. If I’m going to
relearn everything, why would I bother with ruby? Why not just jump
straight to lisp?
I can really appreciate this argument, since it resonates with my reasons
for not learning Python: I knew Perl, and was doing most of my programming
in it, making nicely structured, readable, object-oriented programs. To me,
Python didn’t seem like such a big step forward: It’s like a Perl with
enforced readability.
And then came Ruby.
My introduction to Ruby was not through Rails, but through reading the
online version of the Pickaxe Book. After reading the first chapter, I was
sold. Here was a language that truly embraced object-orientation, and gave
access to all kinds of interesting abstractions that I had only vaguely
heard of (such as coroutines). There also was a pleasant lack of
boilerplate.
So to me, Ruby is that much better than Perl, whereas Python is not. I
wouldn’t know if I agree that Ruby is not that much better than Python, but
at least I can understand the argument. Ruby is certainly no Lisp, although
it comes close.
So what’s next? Lisp’s features certainly look appealing, giving basically
the pinnacle of power of abstraction, in exchange for slightly unappealing
syntax. I believe the syntax can be overcome, so my next language to learn
may well be a Lisp. Which Lisp is still an open question. On the other
hand, there are interesting languages like Erlang, ML and the like.
[Incidentally, Without an e is the creator of
Scarlet Lambda, which
is roughly a web framework written in, or at least used with, a functional
style of programming in Python, with a Lisp-like syntax. Wow.]
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Posted by matijs
26/11/2006 at 21h30
On November 2nd our daughter Sophia Emiko was born. At birth, she weighed 3050 grams, and was about 48 cm tall.
In the photograph, she is about three and a half hours old.
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Posted by matijs
30/10/2006 at 21h36
More than ten years after my only trip to Morocco, I have finally had the
pleasure of eating B'stilla. Amazing! It's sweet, hearty, rich,
succulant and crunchy.
What I wanted to try but found hard to actually order in Morocco -- as I
recall, few restaurants served it, and if they did it had to be ordered a
day or so in advance -- I can now get right here in Amsterdam, at a
restaurant just a short bikeride away.
Hurray!
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Posted by matijs
22/10/2006 at 11h23
The less said about it the better. I just blocked three IP ranges completely. I don't really like to take these kinds of measures, for two reasons:
- I don't want to block legitimate access to my web site.
- I don't want to spend my days adjusting my firewall, adding rules whenever new spam seeps through the cracks.
Since I was spending my days cleaning up trackback spam, reason #2 stopped applying. There also didn't seem to be any legitimate access from the blocks in question.
Damn Spam has more details on these particular spammers. You can see they've been at it for a while now.
Before, I only blocked one IP address. It was from a company called Webrescuer with a very impolite bot. Aparrently, being impolite wasn't a very good business model, as they seem to be gone now. I removed the block.
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