( ? , qUeStIoNMaRk )

The future of television is digital terrestrial.

On digital terrestrial you see a whole lot of nothing.

The future of television is (seeing) a whole lot of nothing.

(with apologies to the original “Trains whistle/Socrates whistles/Socrate is a train” thing).

As consolidated tradition Happy Π Day.

By the way, it looks like for the non-americans 22th July (22/7 = 3.1428571428571428) would be a more appropriate date to celebrate, as we don’t turn around day and month in formatting dates (e.g. 3/14/2009).

Improving on last year’s version…

…and for the coding-inclined here comes the source

#!/bin/bash

#lights_off
#
#          *==<
#           /\
#          /  \
#         / @  \
#        /      \
#       / @    @ \
#           ||
#
#       NERDY CHRISTMAS
#       AND
#       GEEKY NEW YEAR!
#

#lights_on
#
#          *==<
#           /\
#          / *\
#         / @  \
#        / *  * \
#       / @  * @ \
#           ||
#
#       NERDY CHRISTMAS
#       AND
#       GEEKY NEW YEAR!
#

	
frows=14;
stime=1;
which tput >/dev/null || alias tput=“clear”;
	
display(){
    tput cup 0 0;
    grep -A$frows \#”$1″ “$0″ | tail -n$frows | sed ’s/#/\ /’;
}
	
animation(){
     display lights_off && sleep $stime;
     display lights_on && sleep $stime
}
	
clear;
yes | while read i;
do animation;
done;

Just read it on Slashdot: US Army Sees Twitter As Possible Terrorist “Operation Tool”

A chapter titled ‘Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter’ notes that Twitter members reported the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements. ‘Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,’ the report said. The report goes on to say, ‘Terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the US as an operation tool.’

Then, the Fail Whale will save us

PS: We just need to get Jack Bauer in touch with the Fail Whale.

CDD (Comic Driven Development) seems the last trend in software development techniques, first experimental evidences show it as particularly successful in getting the fun back to programming.
Ingredients for the recipe are a talented and sharp comic writer (say your favorite geek comic author) and a smart and receptive development team (say the one behind your favorite video-powered online time waster): the comic writer portraits a tremendously useful feature which could clearly improve the life of the many,

the development team makes it real,

and it actually works!

Now the whole CDD thing just needs a wikipedia entry.

It seems that a pragmatic approach to ending procrastination is focusing on “small things”, and getting them done. As part of this today I focused on a long-standing “issue” of mine… getting YouTube videos link-addressable. You know, it happens you want to link to a precise (topical) moment in a video - e.g “when the kitten can’t finally keep up with the ever speeding treadmill” - and what you are left with is a “at X minutes and Y seconds in the “.

That said, having previously spotted the YouTube JavaScript Player API providing a seekTo function, I managed to leverage it (through Greasemonkey) to come to a solution: SeekTube.

SeekTube is a Greasemonkey user script to enable the same “link within a video” feature provided by Google Video also on YouTube videos.
[…]
Well, SeekTube enables the same functionality: i.e. you can specify a permalink to a precise time in the video by appending an “#” followed by the time formatted as HhMmSs to the video url, where H, M, S are sequence of digits indicating hours, minutes and seconds respectively (none of them is mandatory); e.g. you can take a look at the BeOS nice long degradation curve under heavy load(multiple multimedia streams and 3D graphics, half computing power down), happening at 7 minutes and 50 seconds (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VDYdaXApNk#7m50s) from the beginning of the video.

Note: it’s rather alpha stage, as I haven’t yet figured out a way to cope more gracefully with the security/sandboxing model of Greasemonkey/Firefox (see SeekTube page for details on the implementation).

As a note for the JavaScript-inclined, an interesting failing approach to get a working reference to the “player” object inside the Greasemonkey execution environment (without overloading the window.onYouTubePlayerReady function) is to wait for the player.seekTo function to be ready, i.e. defined, i.e no more undefined, which goes down to setting a recurring timeout until the player.seekTo is defined. This approach failed beacuse of Greasemonkey sandboxing; player.seekTo will be undefined forever. Here comes the code… (the GM_log() is GreaseMoney logger to JavaScript Console)

function seekOnPlayerReady(){
  player = document.getElementById(‘movie_player’);
  if(player.seekTo) {
    /* seek time retrieval from url */
    player.seekTo(seekTime,true);
  } else {
    GM_log(‘player not yet ready’);
    setTimeout(’seekOnPlayerReady()’, 500);
  }
}
setTimeout(‘’, 500);

PS: DiveIntoGreasemonkey, being not fully up to date, is yet a very nice introduction, js2mode (by Steve Yegge) for Emacs is great.

Clifford Stool’s talk at TED is an absolutely awesome and brilliant learning experience. This talk reveals all the energy, the passion, the hope that lie in scientific inquiry and in an agile mind. As a side effect this should also make you wonder at the propulsive push to the development of a society/country this sort of attitude brings…

“The first time you do something it’s science, the second time it’s engineering, the third time it’s technology, it’s just being a technician. I’m a scientist: Once I do something, I want do something more.”

“I think if you want to really know what the future is gonna be… If you really want to know what society is gonna be in twenty years, ask a kindergarten teacher. In fact don’t just ask any kindergarten teacher, ask an experienced one.
[…]
“I think locally and I act locally, I feel the best way I can help out anything is to help out very very locally… I teach eight-grade science four days a week… I said to my science students: we are going to do seriuos experiments, none of this “open the chapter seven and do all the problems sets”, we are going to be doing genuine physics.

Joel wrote, as usual, a thoughtful and witty article on the web, standards, interoperability and the upcoming mother of all flame wars; this is a must-read for everyone concerned with web-related software development (web designers, web programmers, information architects, marketeers…) .

As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice. The flames will continue for years.

Joel goes into a lengthy explanation, driven by an extra-terrestrial catchy case study, of what are the possible “cardinalities” of “market standards” (One-to-One - all is fine and simple, One-to-Many - yet fine, Sequence-to-Many - a story of pain and backward compatibility, Many-to-Many - you know, PurePain ™), why a standard without a reference implementation it’s not that standard, and why in the long run being conservative in what you do, and being liberal in what you accept from the others potentially ends in deployment issues kicking your conservative yet liberal butt. In the meanwhile you get also acquainted with some real-world compatibility issues between rabbis from different ultra-orthodox communities:

If you’ve ever visited the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem, all of whom agree in complete and utter adherence to every iota of Jewish law, you will discover that despite general agreement on what constitutes kosher food, that you will not find a rabbi from one ultra-orthodox community who is willing to eat at the home of a rabbi from a different ultra-orthodox community. And the web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn’t ensure compatibility[…]

As a very brief personal memorandum: Real Standards must have Real Reference Implementations (because “reality siphons off excess complexity“¹) and although Postel’s Robustness Principle is (imho) still much valuable for the wide spread of the internet/web it has been able to sustain so far, it should be carefully balanced - “in medium stat virtus” - with having very, very strict standards and “components” positively obnoxious about pointing them all out to you; maybe we (as developers/engineers) should resort to some sort of “carrot and stick” principle.

NOTE ¹: The full citation from David H. Gelernter’s Mirror Worlds (a wonderful and fascinating book narrating a vision of computing and information of extraordinary elegance - that is by other words a good combination of simplicity and power) is:

“Information structures are, potentially, the most complicated structures known to man. Precisely because software is so easy to build, complexity is a deadly software killer.
The same problem exists for hardware machines, but it lacks comparable significance. Physical reality is the overflow valve that siphons off excess complexity before the whole system blows.[…]”.