Binary Balance

The information equivalent of a nuclear bomb detonating over the Shima Hospital that is SOPA / PIPA last week would seem to have put a rather large question mark over the future of the these proposals (thanks to Wikipedia et al).

Of course, copyright reliant industry’s troubled relationship with technology isn’t new. Historically, it’s been something of a slow-motion rear guard action over the years as technology steadily makes it easier and easier to distribute information. But previous attempts to combat the inevitable seem very quaint now that the stakes have been well and truly raised.

They say there’s only two things that are certain: death and taxes. Well, taxes is a given I suppose, unless you happen to be in a position to mostly lobby your way out of them. Death on the other hand is a little harder to lobby against at present. The Death card in the traditional Tarot deck (as watchers of The Simpsons or readers of Promethea may recollect) is often interpreted as representing change or transformation. In truth, perhaps the one universally inevitable condition is change. Following on from this, I thought I might try an analogy that incumbents such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) could find some affinity with: At present, the movie/TV industry is like the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Once more or less invincible, now they find they are smack in the middle of the molten ore of advancing technology, transforming themselves into all the past shapes stored in their memory in a desperate attempt to avoid their own destruction. Read more...

I was recently reading a blog post entitled ‘How to work from home without going insane (purple monkey dishwasher)’ by David Tate.

The post has a lot of good advice and observations in it, relevant to my interests because working from home is something I aspire to be doing more of.

In the section on interruptions, where – referring to adjusting from the more typical office environment to working from home – David writes:

What you will realize is that outside of your normal distractions your body has learned to not focus for very long on anything.

I stopped at that sentence for a moment, because whenever I come across someone talking/writing about how they have trouble focussing – and I come across this reasonably often – it makes me wonder why I usually don’t have this problem. Read more...

There’s not a huge amount of Debian specific Ruby/Rails tutorials on the web. I’ve written a few in the past and with the release of Debian Squeeze and the recent official release of Ruby 1.9.3 I thought it might be time to do another one. Read more...

In my previous post I wrote about how I have now made the switch – full time – to Chrome as my default web browser. I’d just about managed to sort out all the extra functionality I needed from existing Chrome extensions, but there was one little Firefox Add-on that I found myself missing, it’s called Backpack Pages written by Ben Mills. Read more...

Late last year, I wrote a post entitled ‘Is it time to chrome my web browsing?’ wherein I took a look at how Chrome stacked up in comparison to Firefox, specifically in relation to the Firefox Add-ons that I used and could not do without. At that time, I decided that – for me – the day was not yet ripe for a move.

Fast forward to ten months later and the situation has changed. For the last four months or so, I’ve been trialling Chrome as my default web browser for both day-to-day browsing and development. Enough time has passed now that I can say with some certainty that I won’t be going back. And it seems that I am not alone as Chrome is set to overtake Firefox as the second most popular browser before the end of this year. Read more...

For what amounts to a long time in the short history of the Internet, Google has been a synonym for large scale. I vaguely remember a quote from a Google employee who – when talking about their work and just how early they need to start thinking about scaling a system up – said something like ‘One day you get something kind of working and the next day you have 5000 users’¹. There’s not many places where a developer is forced to deal with scaling issues basically from the very beginning of a project. Google developers must scoff at warnings about premature optimisation.

The amount of data that Google stores for people and about people is impressive, mindboggling, constantly growing and more than a little scary. The launch of Google+ adds a new dimension that depending on your perspective, could exponentially add to the scariness factor of the information Google is keeping on us.

Every now and again a horror story will come along which deftly highlights the fact that ‘customer service’ and ‘Google’ appear to be mutually exclusive concepts, at least as far as the general public is concerned. Accounts disabled, important data or one’s entire online identity lost, with no recourse. Certainly #FirstWorldProblems if ever I’ve heard one, but none the less I don’t think calling them horror stories is an exaggeration. Read more...

A couple of weeks ago, I read a post by Brandon Hays called ‘Why I still don’t contribute to open source’ wherein Brandon lays out his reasons for not yet having contributed to any OSS projects. To reiterate Brandon’s points:

1. There’s no certification, ceremony, or merit badge that says, “you’re ready to contribute to OSS”.
2. It’s not obvious where to start.
3. Guidelines often make a maintainer’s life easier, and mine harder.
4. Open source is for people who are better at this than me.
5. Trying to contribute and failing makes me feel stupid.
6. There’s no time.
7. It’s pretty lonely.

I found Brandon’s article interesting because I can definitely relate to a lot of what he says.

How do I know I’m ready to hack on an open source project? And if I’m not ready but jump in anyway, won’t I potentially just be broadcasting my stupidity across the Interwebs for all to see? How do I know where to start? The code base seems so intimidating and I know nothing about it. Are any hazing rituals involved? Those guys are so much better at hacking code than I’d be after ten lifetimes, how the fuck did they get so smart? Or am I just really retarded? I’ve got my own stuff I want to work on. All these sentiments I’ve felt at one time or another.

But recently, I’ve started contributing to open source projects anyway. Read more...

Read an interesting book recommended by a friend the other day: Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff. The main thrust of Rushkoff’s book is that all media, all forms of communication, starting at speech, moving on to the first examples of an alphabet, to the printing press and now to online communication have a bias and one needs to be aware of a medium’s bias when communicating through it. Bias in this context meaning that each medium tends to elicit particular attitudes and behaviours from it’s users.

If I can attempt to paraphrase, Rushkoff infers that this last communication revolution based upon the computer is a very important one, because now we’re actually getting to the point where the tools we are creating are taking on the characteristics of living things. They’re not quite living things yet though and at least until the hypothetical singularity manifests, the people who program these almost living tools will continue to take on an increasingly important role. Conversely, in the years to come those who do not at least have a basic idea of how programming is done will be at an acute disadvantage (politically, socially, financially, culturally) much like the illiterate following society’s adoption of the written word. Read more...

It seems that social media is everywhere today. Live tweet our show using the hash tag ‘#WhyJustWatchWhenYouCanCriticise’! There’s other websites as well as Facebook? But how do do your friends know about your inane comments on those ones?! One could be forgiven for thinking the read/write web is getting old hat these days. Web 2.0, how unfashionable an epithet for use by today’s modern web hipster. Read more...

Following on from my ‘Getting to sleep’ post, now part two of what apparently will be at least a two part series on sleep related topics.

My introduction to lucid dreaming came at an early age. When I was four or five, I used to have this recurring nightmare. I was in my childhood home, quite a large house built down the side of a slope, it had two stories, plus a lower basement/flat level that was probably about half the floor space of each of the two floors above. So I used to have this dream where I was being chased around the house by a Wampa from The Empire Strikes Back¹. There was a central wooden staircase that connected all three floors of the house and it was constructed in such a way that there was a fairly large space between each step (or so it seemed to my child sized sense of scale), the kind that can make one slightly wary of climbing if you’re unfamiliar with it, something to do with the perspective of seeing through the steps as one climbs them. To this day, I still have a distinct memory of crouching silently on the staircase, a few steps from the top, looking down through the gaps and seeing this giant monster walking past on the level below, looking for me. Read more...

Sometimes I can’t get to sleep, or perhaps more accurately I can’t get to sleep as quickly as I’d like. I’ll be thinking about some project I’m working on or what I need to do the next day. It doesn’t help that I’m pretty sure I’m more nocturnal by nature. I suspect that if the schedule of the world didn’t impose on me, I’d likely keep the circadian rhythm of a vampire.

I’ve heard of many possible approaches to victory over insomnia: nightcaps, reading, TV, exercise, etc. All of these options have – at different times – had some positive effect for me. Particularly helpful is simply making sure that I’ve consciously relaxed my body from head to toe, I find that I often retain tension in my neck or shoulders without really realising it. But in this post, I want to talk about a more specific technique, perhaps a form of meditation, that’s floated around in my head for a while now. Read more...

On more than one occasion, I’ve heard people say that happiness is a choice. It’s easy to dismiss this phrase as a platitude, to lose it amongst other phrases with a similar resonance like ‘Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right’, ‘Life is what you make it’ etc. But in this post, I’m going to talk a little about what the phrase means to me.

So what is happiness anyway? Better philosophers than I have spent more words than I plan to use in this post trying to figure out a generally applicable answer to this ostensibly simple question. I don’t think I could do the question justice here were I to seriously try and give a comprehensive answer. But I will try and define what I think it is for me. I might start with what I think it’s not. Read more...

Traditionally in the website building and maintenance sector of the IT industry, there have been two sub-specialisations: the web designer and the web developer¹.

To define my terminology more clearly, I’ll risk stating the obvious: web designers tended to have more of a graphic design background. These people might end up doing the ‘front end’ work on websites. They’d do the colour scheme, set the font, maybe do the logo and icons if they were good enough. As websites started to share the space with or become web applications, designers started to take responsibility for the user interface (UI) aspects, although UI design almost seems to have become yet another sub-sub-specialisation of it’s own. Web developers typically had more of a programming background and worked on the ‘back end’ of the website or web application. Server side and client side scripting, maybe some server and/or database administration.

but as the web has matured, the line between these two archetypes has continued to blur and it is this middle ground that I personally find myself standing on. Read more...

I watched the video of David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote address from RubyCon 2010 the other day. It was unapologetically pro-Ruby, and delivered with the flair and showmanship that has made DHH and 37Signals the polarising force that they are. Being quite fond of Ruby, I found myself nodding along to most of what David had to say. But I don’t wish to add even a small amount of new fuel to the programming language wars that seem to go on endlessly around the place. The purpose of this post is not to join in on any Ruby circle-jerking.

One of the things that particularly stood out to me in DHH’s keynote was a quote from Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language:

The very fact that it’s possible to write messy programs in Perl is also what makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner in Perl than they could ever be in a language that attempts to enforce cleanliness. The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil.

The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil. This is a great quote and it rings very true for me. Along with some other parts of David’s address, it got me to thinking about how the uniformity that we enforce in other aspects of life in order to minimise the potential for evil may also be minimising the potential for good. Read more...

I remember when I first heard of Google’s new browser, dubbed Chrome. I was sitting at my desk at work, reading the news and for a moment I thought I could almost hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth emanating from clear across the other side of the world at Redmond.

There were some obvious wins for Chrome right out of the gate. Independent processes for tabs meant that if a page crashed it wouldn’t take down the whole browser with it. Security was also enhanced with this model of tab isolation, if I remember correctly. There was the V8 JavaScript engine, tests by Google in September 2008 showed that JavaScript execution in Chrome was about three times faster than Firefox 3.0 and about ten times faster than Internet Explorer 7. There was some debate over the real world applicability of these results, but little doubt that Chrome was kicking ass at JavaScript. A modern browser made to support the quickly burgeoning age of JavaScript heavy web applications. Read more...