Notes from my terminal

Power to the iPod!

I was never good at DIY stuff, but this self-made iPod battery pack by Drew Perry looks just too tempting:

On occasions I found that the iPod battery wasn't quite large enough to cope with very long journeys. I wanted a way to improve this... So I grabbed a few batteries, clips, soldering stuff, bits of wire and a deck of cards.. This page is about what I managed to come up with...

[via MobileWhack]

A desperate cry for more IM etiquette

Instant messaging can boost your productivity. While e-mail quickly becomes the most-often ignored medium in history (with all the spam, it has almost become a must to call the person you sent an e-mail on the phone in order to check that the recepient actually reads it), instant messaging is simple, fast, direct and simply there. However, I have a pet peeve about it. It's not about the less technical users (IM is so easy, they usually find out everything quickly). It's about the power users, the geeks. Those that install Linux on their own server. In my contact list, I have a growing number of what I would call IM zombies. I blame GNU screen for 24h idlers who proudly display "I really enjoy the default AIM away message of centerICQ" all the time. THIS IS NOT THE WAY IM WAS MEANT TO WORK. If I want to IM someone, I want to see if that person wants to receive my message. If the person is away, fine, I'll try it later or if I'm feeling lucky, I'll send an e-mail. But I don't want to see these lurking zombies who suddenly come back to life again (not changing their away message, of course) and talk to me out of the void, sometimes replying to a comment you sent them days ago. Stop it, please. If you're not available for IM, simply switch it off. It's really as simple as that. Spare me the frustration, Please stop killing IM the way IRC was killed by power idlers. Conversation on IRC has become almost impossible (posts to comp.lang.ruby get faster replies than questions in the #ruby-channel on IRC), even though there are more than 20 people online all the time. It just won't work this way. Flat-rate Internet has become too cheap, if you ask me.

Code Complete

Every once in a while, there are books that change your life. I'm not talking about fiction here (although there are probably more fiction books that changed my life), but books on programming. If I should pick three, the first one would be Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, the book that taught me how to think in an object-oriented way. Next on the list is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a book that is great in so many ways the space here wouldn't suffice. Classic hacker literature that teaches everything about programming. In Scheme, mind you. Be it functional programming, recursion or compiler design, it's all there. But when it comes to practical programming, I choose Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction. Much of what I learned for actual code-writing and documenting comes from this book, probably the best single thing ever to come out of Microsoft. I'm much delighted to learn that the second editon is in the works. Great news. I'm looking forward to June 2004, when it will be published.

Thirteen Ways To Save Orkut

Again, an article on Orkut. This one by Rebecca Blood sums it up perfectly. On reading almost every point I was about to say out loud "yes, that's it!". In a way, many of the points boil down to number 8: Make all aspects of Orkut more configurable. It's much too static at the moment. Make it more flexible and watch a culture emerge.
Anyway, read the article. Good stuff. [via apophenia]

LiveJournal FOAF

LiveJournal, a huge community of bloggers, now takes a step towards the Semantic Web (and decreased privacy :)):

LiveJournal now exports FOAF data, including foaf:interests, foaf:knows, and contact information. It's exported for every user at http://www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/foaf . Discussion of the LiveJournal FOAF files can take place in a community I maintain - http://www.livejournal.com/community/ljfoaf . If you're interested in FOAF, that's the place to come to discuss it.

What if...?

Imagine a world where other media imitated the Web when it comes to content.

• TV and radio would be mainly about building antennas, receivers and transmitters
• Most newspapers would report on the latest developments regarding printing technologies or feature philosphical rants on the nature of publishing

Don't get me wrong. I love technical debates and information on the Web. But I guess the overwhelming bulk of self-referential subjects just shows how much this medium still has to mature.

North Korea in the Dark

This image of East Asia at night shows an amazing picture of the Korean peninsula. Apart from Pyeongyang, North Korea is virtually invisible. The whole story behind the picture is at Global Security, brought to my attention via Don Park's Daily Habit, who added the quip: "I guess there aren't many nightclubs in North Korea."

Strange Ruby language tutorial

Oh, I love surreal tutorials for Japanese OOP scripting languages! Especially if they feature cartoon foxes!

Why the Lucky Stiff has published "Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby". Hooray!

RSS on your iPod

This script will copy the news items of the selected Subscription in NetNewsWire in vCard format to the Contacts folder of iPod for portable reading.

Shiny toys

I like things that look beautiful and fulfill their purpose perfectly. The iPod is a good example. My latest toy: A Casio EW-K500 electronic dictionary. What a productivity-booster when translating from Korean! It's really hard to believe how much time is lost flipping through the pages of a conventional dictionary. Here you just type the word in on the little keyboard (QWERTY / 2-beol-shik) and can go through a list of alternatives, go to related words with the device's hypertext system etc... Perfect.

Spooky: Orkut Jail

Been in Orkut jail? Didn't know such a thing existed? Well, find out about it here.

Oliginal

Found at the Jin Long grocery in my neighbourhood: Ginseng flom Kolea.

Orkut

So, no blogging from the conference I mentioned earlier. Maybe I'll write something about it later, maybe not. But now for something completely different: Orkut hit my social group heavily in the last days. I know, a bit late, but with it being an invite-only system (one of its major strengths) I guess it first had to go around the US a bit before coming to someone in Germany who'd invite me. At least I didn't have to beg for it nor did I have to fork out money. Obviously, not everyone is happy with Orkut. The arguments against it seem to come from two camps: the paranoiacs and those annoyed by popularity games.

I don't get some of the of the paranoid arguments (after all, it's your responsibility which data you give out and I find it highly improbable that any three letter organization would hire a hitman to go after you just because you entered the wrong favourite cuisine in your Orkut profile), but some of the more rational critics point to the actually highly debatable terms of services. I do however believe that the fun and convenience you can get out of Orkut is currently higher than the actual risk of Orkut abusing your personal data.

The popularity game is something that can be annoying on Orkut. On Orkut, you are not a free woman or man, you are a number. Getting measured by your ability to climb into the "top 9" that are displayed can be irritating. If you take the term Orkut uses for your connections or contacts seriously (Orkut only lets you call them "friends"), you can become bitter. After all, you're collecting "friends" like Pokémon cards ("gotta have them all!").

Orkut could fix that easily. Drop the word "friend" with its emotional baggage. Like many others, I have 2 or maybe 3 persons in my life I'd regard as friends, on Orkut I have 56 at the moment. Stop the number games and the sorting of your "friends" list based on the number of "friends" they have. That's a common trend with statistical data: Display numbers and graphs and users will try to drive them up to absurd values. Instead of making everyone your "friend", maybe FOAF with its richer vocabulary for relationships would have been a wiser choice in the first place.

But what can you actually use Orkut for? Is it just ego-boosting and collecting? Is it all maintainance and no value? I think there are at least two serious things you could use it for.

1. You can publish your contact data (address, telephone number etc.) to a fuzzy group of "friends" that will likely not abuse that information, but put it to good use without giving your data out to the whole Internet. Likewise, you can ask a group you don't actually know (friends of friends) for help (I received a message by someone looking for a martial arts dojo in Amsterdam, sent to his friends of friends) and hope they can help you. In the case of the Amsterdam guy I wasn't able to help, but since he's from the Netherlands, he correctly guessed that many of his "friends of friends" would be Dutch as well.
2. Because on Orkut everyone has at least one contact, there's a system of social control. This might make Orkut's (badly implemented) discussion boards less troll-infested. But this is just my guess, the system needs to grow more for us to see this.

In conclusion, Orkut's a neat toy. I might get bored by it pretty soon and I am perfectly aware of its faults and shortcomings, but I find the experiment to play around with actual social networking data exciting. And I can see ways of making it more enjoyable to use Orkut: What we now need is an Orkut client, scraping your friends' contact data and feeding it into your address book. Any takers?