English

I read Rasmus’s 30 second AJAX tutorial [via] and though it is nice enough in its own respect, it is missing two things: Dojo and Python.

Joel can be a bit obnoxious from time to time, but he is also right more often than not. The two tend to go hand in hand.

Blake Ross’s predictions for the new year are pretty hilarious and are closer to the truth than comfortable.

Adium is the best ever Instant Messaging client I have ever used. It looks nice and works well all over the board. And you have to love the Link Duck Dock Icon.

Recently there has been a barrage of negative news about Wikipedia with class action law suits, various individuals editing their own biographies, false fact injections offset by the news fact that Wikipedia is pretty good compared to Encyclopedia Britannica (and that Dutch Wikipedia compares similarly to the Winkler Prince).

I had a batch of final presentations for a course today, and the age old adage by Tufte still holds:

Some guys are planning to hold a Macworld event in Amsterdam which sounds a like pretty neat idea.

Django now too has its own screencast of making an extremely simple application in it [via].

Europe is indeed a relative backwater in the wireless revolution. Quote Cory: “locked down, overpriced and metered”.

I am running on a new Eclipse 3.2.0 in the shop right now. It’s pretty nice with some cosmetic tweaks and it feels a bit faster.

Meetro looks rather nifty (watch the movie). Shame they don’t have a Mac version available.

The presentations from the previous SuperHappyDevHouse are really cool. I had already seen the Using Python to get money and chicks but the following two are also very worth watching:

What!? First Flickr and now Yahoo! buys del.icio.us as well? It pretty much comes down to all my favorite sites being bought by them.

It seems to be slightly impossible for me to select items from a HTML control using the keyboard.

I was reading this article on the future of web technology. It gives a good overview of the current state of technology, future directions and a two way consolidation which I hope is going to take place.

Reinier implemented what I always thought was a pretty fun game: Closeline.

Being at a different location and not having WiFi internet available (like at my parents’ place) is seriously disturbing. There was a wireless network within range but it was password protected.

Stumbling on a thread in Python-Dev yields this quite funny quote by Python luminary Tim Peters:

I am currently reading the book “The Internet and Society” by James Slevin which went off to a rough start but which I am getting into more and more.

You probably would not have noticed, but I installed Explorer Destroyer on the front page. Most regular visitors of these pages do not use IE, most people stumbling by via Google or another search do use it.

I am in awe.

I have seen the first place where annotations are useful on this blog by Reinier.

On my work there exists a slight tendency to use Ajax just for Ajax’s sake. So drag and drop controls, the most outrageous refreshes and hyper-dynamic webpages. Little thought is spent on the eventual user experience. I do not mind really, playing with Javascript is fun if you get paid for it.

A good part of my reading consists of books which I would like to buy but I am slightly pressed for money. In cases such as this the archaic institution of the library comes to the rescue.

Read two more papers on the subject.

I am currently following a course on internet technology aptly named “Internet Technology”. The contents of the course are unfortunately horribly outdated and detached from reality.

Is anybody busy writing a simple MPEG decoder in Javascript? Would it be difficult to port the standard routines from mplayer?

A jaw dropping display of current web technology at Goowy. It features a quite usable desktop replacement and runs completely in your browser.

Today I finally finished my notes on the paper “Group, Community or Social Network” by Lois Ann Scheidt.

I am thinking of doing something with the Web 2.0 angle and how it connects to the ‘new’ communities that are emerging online.

There is a very cool event called Ultrasound in Huddersfield going on right now and just seeing this installation could make me hop over there if it was at all realistic.

The graphic on this blogpost pretty much captures the spirit of current web trends.

Paul Graham gives a great talk about evolution, open source, entrepeneurship, and inadequate management. Funny and insightful.

Due to a slight mishap at the mail server of my university I have not been able to receive any e-mail in the past 48 hours. All of it seems to have disappeared into a gaping black hole.

The decision by the UN to hold the WSIS in Tunis almost seems like a deliberate attempt not to be taken seriously by the free world. Holding a summit on internet freedom and participation in a country where Boing Boing reports journalists are being attacked by the authorities, is pretty paradoxical.

I have a problem with our radio broadcasting organization. I have detailed it below in the mail I sent them:

I am completely into the literature. Made some major additions to the literature list today (see the changelog) and printed out about a kilo’s worth.

I am this close to throwing the steaming piece of shit browser Safari out of the window. I would have long ago, but it is so damn sexy.

Nice presentation on how to get money and chicks by programming Python by Andy Smith

Just finished reading “Persuasive Technology” by Fogg. I dumped my notes on the wiki page.

My flatmate is having troubles with his kUbuntu installation. It would be too easy right now to laugh at him from behind the iBook.

While we are talking about language upgrades, here are Graham Hamilton’s best dead boilerplate from Java Tiger.

I have been meaning to try out Django (=Python on Rails) for a while now and yesterday I finally managed to do and complete the tutorial. I totally love it!

Managing a home network on a shoe string budget is not easy. I am simply glad if most of the time our crappy old computer here keeps routing the internet. The hardware borking up the Debian install tends to happen from time to time. Then it is usually a frantic search for the last Sarge installer which was lying somewhere last week but now is hopelessly lost and reinstalling everything.

High profile security vulnerabilities led to the Greasemonkey’s disappearance some time ago. It appears that it is now back from the dead.

The amount of new features in C# 3.0 is vast. This score card is not completely positive about all of them. Additions to a programming language should be extremely well thought out and absolutely necessary.

I wanted to install the Explorer Destroyer to Kill Bill’s Browser and to make an extra buck on the side, but it seems that as of yet international AdSense customers cannot participate in the referral program.

I just had a meeting with two Australian researchers who were visiting my teacher Jeroen van den Hoven.

As mentioned before there was a social drink after the Adaptive Path workshop in Amsterdam yesterday. It was great.

Interesting article on Wired about if video games can provoke emotions in players beyond simple victory and frustration. To see if people get carried away so totally into a game that they make personal connections with a character.