Unplug To Learn

From Matt Waite : “Turn off Tweetdeck. Shut down IM. Turn off your email notifier. No one has liked your status in the last minute, so don’t check. Unplug. Why? Because you’ll learn nothing in 20-30 second bursts between distractions. Learning to code, like many things in life, requires you to focus for extended periods of time…”

Web Apps Are Not Simple

Yesterday evening after 10 o’clock the family iMac refused to work. A restart resulted in triple beeps. So far nothing out of the ordinary, and a diagnosis was easily established: bad memory. Luckily, my netbook uses the same type of SO-DIMM’s, and I had a spare module at hand. So with a bit of fiddling the iMac and the Netbook were up and running again, albeit with less RAM than before.

I started searching for memory upgrades on eBay and Amazon, but finally ordered two 2GB modules from a German shop. And that is where things really went wrong: the SSL-encrypted order and payment application for this shop was incredibly slow and unreliable! In the end, after an hour and a half, I sat before the screen with two identical orders, one of them paid through PayPal. It took me another 15 minutes to set the quantity of the other order to zero…

Mission accomplished. I do hope no one has to experience such slowness in my apps!

Ugly Name, Nice Product: Trello

Luckily for me, Joel Spolsky isn’t a prolific blogger – so I can read most of what he writes during occasional visits of his blog. And when he writes, it pays to read his words. You may not always agree with his points of view, but he will have you thinking – and that’s a good thing.

Another good thing is his announcement of Trello. Trello is a web-based applications, that essentially allows you to juggle with lists of “cards” on a “board” – you can think of it a tool to play with small, adhesive note slips on a virtual wall. Sounds simple, and it is simple, actually. Trello is smart enough to help you organize the cards and lists and boards in a more sophisticated way, by providing the possibility to add dates and “organisations” of users. That’s why some call it a Kanban tool: one of the possible applications is indeed a Kanban board.

But Trello can do more than that. Use it to manage your personal to-do list, or to organize projects, or to gather ideas around a specific subject. I can see how it can help you structure and write articles or even a book. And that’s where Trello differs from more project-specifc tools like Basecamp. Basecamp has projects, customers, to-do’s, calendars and a dashboard – a practical approach. But if you want to organize your projects other than by calendar, then it gets harder. And that’s where Trello could help you, with its more unstructured concepts of lists and cards. No, Trello isn’t “better” than Basecamp, it’s different.

I could help but think of Wikis, when I found that Trello allows you to use Markdown markup in your cards. Simple markup for texts in combination with a lot of freedom in how you organize your content: two essential features of a Wiki. But Trello isn’t a Wiki: it has more structure than a Wiki (which only has “pages”), and it does not use a Wikilink mechanism to connect bits and pieces of the content. Still…

You can use Trello for free, and if Joel can be trusted that will be the case for a long time – so why not give it a try?

Social Media For The Privacy-Conscious Folk

If, like me, you are interested in Diaspora, then you should know about the site Diasporial. If you don’t know what Diaspora is, just think of it as a decentralized, privacy-conscious, non-commercial, open-sourced version of Facebook. At least, that’s what the creators and developers of Diaspora are aiming for; the current version is still dubbed “alpha”, but quite workable.

There are already multiple “pods” available  to try Diaspora for yourself; visit http://podupti.me (did you notice the “pod uptime”?) and choose a pod to sign up.

I suppose good mobile client software for Diaspora will appear eventually, once the application is more finished – and I hope that will be sooner rather than later.

Waiting For The Real Thing…

Since we still don’t have winter weather here in Belgium I have decided to update the header of this blog with a picture of autumn leaves ;-)

Now can we please have a bit of real winter, with snow at night and sunny weekend days?

Some Thirty Years Ago

Some thirty years ago, somewhere in 1982, I bought my first computer: a Sinclair ZX81. It’s hard to explain to my children, but the thrill I felt when starting up this little black box was fantastic – that probably explains why I’m still playing and experimenting with computer soft- and hardware today.

I don’t know if the Raspberry Pi will be as charming and inviting as the ZX81, but I certainly appreciate the initiative: selling a small but functional Linux board for about 25€. That could generate many good ideas, and that’s exactly what Raspberry aims for. Good luck, gals and guys!

How Far Wil They Take All This?

The Fight for the Future website says it better than I could, so head over there and watch their video if you don’t know what the proposed legislation in the USA (PROTECT-IP and SOPA) could do to the Internet as a whole. Or read CMSWire’s “Why We’re Against SOPA“, or Lifehacker’s “All About SOPA, the Bill That Wants to Cripple Your Internet Very Soon“.

Don’t forget: some European countries want to take the same road. Anyone with a bit of creativity in her/him should oppose such laws, in the USA and elsewhere too – because such laws could even be used to stop you from humming a pop song; because they might have destroyed Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans”; because they might very well have stopped the Arabian Spring before it even started; etc.

So act, and act now, before it’s too late!

Your Web Application In The Cloud

Planet Python pointed me to “Setting up Django 1.3 + NGinx 1.0.5 + Green Unicorn 0.13 in an Ubuntu 11.10 EC2 instance“. This is a detailed tutorial on how to get a nice web application runtime installed on an Amazon EC2 instance. The comments make it clear that the described procedure actually works ;-)

This looks like a good solution to me: it combines the advantages of developing in a structured programming language with a good framework and the flexibility of a website in the cloud. Having no experience with Amazon’s EC2, I do wonder about the costs of this solution. Let’s say that we start with a micro instance for an intended public of 100 users, deploying a lightly-used web site that includes a blog, a calendar, a couple of hundred “documents” (web pages or Office docs) and a simple kind of forum. I would love to read about experiences with similar setups in order to estimate the order of magnitude of the costs – and to learn about the traps that must be avoided with such a setup.

Gadget Of The Year 2011: My Samsung Galaxy S Plus

I was very busy during the last weeks of 2011, with too few spare moments for writing and blogging. But now I can spill the beans: I have replaced the ZTE Blade with a Samsung Galaxy S Plus as my mobile phone. I have explained the reasons for this move earlier…

The Plus isn’t really a gadget, since I am using it as a mobile phone – but it’s a gadget as well as a tool, of course. But no matter how you look at it, it is a great phone. It has a great screen, large and colourful – and it’s remarkable good at not showing greasy fingerprints. The Plus has a fast processor – and that shows when it has to do a lot work, e.g. while displaying web pages. Movies zip along in full-screen mode. The phone feels nice when holding it: not too heavy and easy to handle. Lots of memory are always useful, and the Plus has that. The camera is just so-so, but that’s not what I bought a phone for, so that does not bother me. The GPS is fast and seems accurate, at least accurate enough to document my bike rides.

The Samsung version of Android (here in version 2.3.4) isn’t too bad at all. Coming from CyanogenMod I feared the worst, especially since the Plus cannot (yet) run CyanogenMod, but with the ADW Launcher and a few tweaks here and there I can’t say I have missed CyanogenMod. The Plus hasn’t required a reboot since three weeks now, except one time when I tried switching from WiFi to 3G and Bluetooth while trying to start the TuneIn Radio app… and I guess that had more to do with the app than with Android or the ADW Launcher itself.

Fine hardware coupled with stable software: that means I’m quite happy with this machine. My only problem with the Plus as a mobile online device has nothing to do with the machine: the 3G (or even Edge) coverage of my provider (using the network of mobile operator Base Belgium) could, nay: should, be better! But that’s the price I pay for the low rates I pay, so I can’t complain too hard about that ;-)

So, does the Samsung Galaxy S Plus replace the Blade? Yes it does. But I haven’t thrown the Blade away! It will either be used by my wife as an introduction to Android, or by all of us here at home, serving as a cheap Sonos controller.

PS. If you’re using a Plus, stay way from the Power Control Widget made by “b.virtual”: that thing crashed the Plus time and time again…

The Sun In 2011

I have taken the time to update the numbers on our solar energy production. Our solar panels were installed late in 2009, so I have waited until today to add an overview table per year. My conclusion: the sun didn’t do so well in 2011, at least not in our neighbourhood. Let’s hope 2012 will be sunnier ;-)

Best Wishes!

Happy New Year!

Joris Goes Native

Joris Luyendijk is a dutch anthropologist with a mission (for the UK newspaper The Guardian): he’s “going native in the world of finance“, by listening and talking to people from the City of London about their job in the financial district. My interest in the subject shouldn’t come as a surprise, since I work for a bank in times where the “world of finance” hits the newspaper headlines every day.

The list of interviews Luyendijk has published since September is getting longer and longer, of course. What strikes me most is the cynicism that can be read in the words of many of the interviewees. Caring about your own money, that seems to be the only requirement in order to work in the London finance sector – or perhaps it’s that what you need to survive more than a few months or years in that environment… No wonder the British government is under heavy pressure to not regulate all that goes on in the City!

Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, And Fraud?

The gazeta.ru website uses a statistical anlysis of the recent parliamentary elections in Russia to argue that the results do not reflect the real votes of the Russian people: Elections improbability (thanks for the link, Pascal). The graphics shown in the report, if correct, are quite revealing… Does anyone care to repeat the exercice with the results of the recent presidential elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo?

Frontier Is Not Dead

A few days ago, Dave Winer mentioned an fresh source for all things Frontier: http://scripting.com/stories/2011/12/18/areYouAFrontierUser.html. Still no mention of a Linux version, but at least there’s a better overview of what’s available than what Google can tell us about the subject ;-) I have mentioned Frontier several times on this blog, not in the least because it was my first Web Content Management System and the osted runtime of my blog over at Userland.com… I’m not sure I’ll find the time to dive into the subject again after all these years, but at least I’ll know where to look for a quicker solution to migrating my old blog posts than just doing it by hand, one by one, as I’m trying to do currently!

A Study On Blogs

This will be reading material for a few hours, but the subject should interest any blogger: the State of the Blogosphere 2001. Published on the Technorati website, the series includes the results of a survey and a number of interviews.