( ? , qUeStIoNMaRk )

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.

After being installed for the whopping amount of 42 times (yes, 42) SeekTube gets outdated by YouTube providing the same functionality. You can now postfix a YouTube link with #t=XmYYs (which differs from SeekTube links for an additional “t=”) and get the player start at that precise moment; actually the precision depends on the nearest available key-frame, which the player starts playing from.

As a plus, YouTube also implemented a functionality I was wondering to add to SeekTube: it now automatically detects when someone mentions a specific time and adds a link to that point in the video. If you write 01:18 in a comment, YouTube would enclose it in an anchor tag wth the onclick attribute set to the seekTo function, i.e. <a href=”#” onclick=”seekTo(01*60+18);return false;”>01:18</a>. The detection is performed server-side (although the conversion is completed on the client - is this by or design by accident?); this leaves a little room for (seektube-strikes-back) porting the detection fully on the client side (in a greasemonkey/ubiquity script) and having it available on every page linking or embedding a YouTube video.

Good Bye SeekTube,
So LongShort and Thanks
For All the Few FishLinks

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.

If you can read this, thank your sysadmin

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day. From (the wikipedia entry on sysadmin Dasy) :

System Administrator Appreciation Day, also known as Sysadmin Day, SysAdminDay or SAAD, was created by Ted Kekatos, a system administrator in Chicago. Kekatos was inspired to create the special day by a Hewlett-Packard magazine advertisement in which a system administrator is presented with flowers and fruit-baskets by grateful co-workers as thanks for installing new printers.[1] The holiday exists to show appreciation for the work of sysadmins and other IT workers. It is celebrated on the last Friday in July. The first System Administrator Appreciation Day was celebrated on July 28, 2000.

As a side note I may suggest you take a while to read this beautiful and involving novel by Cory Doctorow “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”.

Happy Sysadmin Day!

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.[…]”.