Posts tagged with internet

The Beauty of Typing More

Well, that’s all gone to shit.

After reading Atwood’s tweet: “even Hungarians are not using hungarian notation any more.”[sic] — I got to thinking.
People have stopped writing properly.

I know what Hungarian Notation is, sillies. And I know it’s has nothing to do with grammar or spelling things right. But then, few things today have to do with proper spelling. And I’m not talking about English, either. I’m talking about mother tongues. The beautiful ones, with funny letters and groovy sounds.

Languages will tildes,breves, carons, cedillas, circles and other diacritics. Those are the ones I’m talking about. They’re not dying. Their writing is.
The process itself is called Romanization. It basically means that you can only use the letters found on standard qwerty keyboards plus a few French-ish letters.

The Romanians have long adopted this trend. Now, most of our online writing would sound funny if read out loud and with no interpretation. The Hungarians too have fallen to this group. It’s understandable, since their letters are damn funny and tough to type. The Dutch, too. Their cosmopolitanism is what caused that stroked out o to vanish from the online. And the French? Well, they’ve been eager to leave all those damn accents behind since the day they were forced to start using them.

The Ruskies, zhe Germans, the Norse and the Asians have yet to be Romanized. And that’s good!
It makes inter-cultural communication a bitch, but it’s well worth it. People will have to study, translators will be hired, eyes will be pleased. That’s what the Japanese say when they’re asked why they don’t switch to the Latin charset: ‘Ours is so damn prettier!’

Granted, adding the special letters is cumbersome, at best. And sometimes, the wrong letters are added. Sometimes we’re just too lazy to switch between keyboard layouts. Sometimes, money gets printed with the wrong diacritics because of bad character support on Macs. Some bastards will write in English because they just feel like it.

Whatever our excuse is, it stands. But we’re still on a very slippery slope.

And yeah, Jeff Atwood’s twitter account is @codinghorror. A must-follow for any developer.

Posted on the 30th of September, 2009 | 6 Sexy Comments

Football Blogmeet

Boy did we ever play football.

There were three types of players on the field:
The girls, with unbeatable tactics, and desirable decorations.
The boys, who played football when they were little, had fancy footwork and could score with their head.
And then there were the pussies, who spent their childhood pastime doing something else, apparently.

Naturally, I was the only one who fell into the latter category. That, and my disputed red/pink t-shirt accounted for my being on the girls’ team.
I was quickly joined by Moroi as goalkeeper and Cata, to even things our against te lads’ team.

I managed to score the first goal for the lasses, when it was three-null, after a very inspired pass from Dora. That was awesome, considering I had not scored since I was twelve or thirteen.

We had our fair share of injuries. Moroi was the first to fall, because of his bad knee. Then I had a massive collision with Dani. I was ok, but his nose was broken after that. I’m still sorry about that one, Dani. Rob, the blogless bit a chunk out of Cata’s shoulder when they collided, but they were both ok five minutes later.

The final score was ~~14 or 15 all~~… 10 all apparently, but that didn’t really matter. The funnies, the ‘marking’, the joy and the continuous running, or walking, we had outweighed the official result.

All stinky and sweaty, we then moved to Porto Arte. I got there and left right away, since my parents had just returned from their trip. So, while the footballers were all getting tipsy, celebrating their sore muscles, I was home, getting drunk with my folks.

I had a great time, all sores included. So I’d like to thank everyone. In no particular order, the players: Andrea, ily, Anda, Dora, Dani, Cata, Tomata, Paul, Ovi, Richie, Nuzzu, Luci, Rob, Moroi and yours truly.

I’m now waiting for the official ‘Zelist‘ from the blogmeet, the cheering fans list, and for pics from the game.

Posted on the 28th of September, 2009 | 10 Brilliant Comments

Twitter versus Yahoo!

When I switched from IRC to Yahoo!, the one thing that was most annoying was how intrusive IM windows became.
You’d be minding your own business and then, suddenly, the center of your screen was covered by a chat window saying ‘Hi’. Well, I eventually got used to that.

Then came the Age of Mass. Skillfully tailored mass messages, made out to look like they’ve been meant only for you. And then, people just got lazy and started blurbing out all the inanities they could come up with. All ending in ‘sorry for the mass’. It was a dark age for communication.

Then twitter came along.
All the messages were mass messages, they were meant to be mass messages. You knew that upfront. The one monumental advantage? you could check your mass messages whenever you felt like it. I don’t know about you, but I like most things to be unobtrusive.

Also, twitter has reduced the number of chain-mail messages I receive. It’s way easier to drop a bit.ly link into a tweet.
So, even though twitter still annoys a lot of people, it has brought some good into this world. Whether you realize it or not.

Now, when I get a mass message, I don’t mind anymore because a warm feeling of nostalgia sets in.

Posted on the 26th of September, 2009 | 4 Intelligent Comments

Tagged: No More Internet?

This question has been on many people’s lips recently. What would happen if the Internet would suddenly cease to exist?

The first and obvious answer would be: you would not be reading this. For the rest of this post, let’s pretend we’re penpals and you got this in the mail. Since this is about my take on this modern day apocalypse, I’ll go on by saying I’ll also be out of a job. Also, the browser wars.. would be over!!

With the extra amount of time, I’d get back in shape, guitar-wise. Less or no time spent in front of the computer means having all the time in the world to me. I’d also get to having those wet dreams I was talking about earlier this year. I might even get laid! Oh, and I’d start calling snail mail, mail and mail, email again.

I would probably earn my living working as a farmer, which would become the equivalent of today’s coder. Can you picture me with overalls and a checkered shirt on? Straw hat and all? Sexy, I know. I could even look into the possibility of becoming a professional smoker, but I still think the world is not ready for that one yet. I’d start reading in public again, since everyone would be doing it, I suppose.

I’d also remember what it’s like being alone again — and I mean that in a good way — seeing how I can’t keep in touch with people without using the Internet. I’d also start noticing small offline details again. Like people talking to me or girls smiling at me. Or that I have fourteen cats living in my house. I’d definitely play with my dogs more often. I’d spent way more time in the garden, eating fruit right out the tree.

Best part yet? I’d get to finally fix my unhealthy sleeping habits.

Now, this is a tag. Anda was curious to see what a geek would do if the Internet went 404. The fun part about this tag was that I actually got to thinking how much time I actually do spend either online or on my lappy. My findings call for immediate action. So maybe this tag will do Ovi, John Resig and Jon Hicks some good as well.

Posted on the 10th of September, 2009 | 2 Mouth-watering Comments

Your Privacy is Null

I just loved it when everyone freaked out that Facebook will be sharing information with third parties. For a while, the panic about your online privacy had something to do with Facebook. Now things are changing.

People are getting all wired up because Google is starting to play nice with the authorities, revealing identities and IP`s. It happened to some poor gunrunner schmuck from Belgium, some blog writer from New York, and now to some journalists that published some crap on Wikileaks.

This is funny. People try to hold on to their privacy so tightly on the internet. I think they’re missing the point.
Google and Facebook already know everything about you! Why? Because you told them. Every context-aware ad, link you click, every message you send to a buddy, your spelling habits, your math skills, whether you had sex last night, your full name, your ailments, what you ate this morning. These guys store it all.

Point A: so what? What does that say about you? Who cares about all that info? It’s all worthless. Nobody gives a damn.

Point B: if the authorities are after you, you probably did some shit. If it’s bad shit, fuck you! You deserve it. If it’s some vigilante or hardcore journalism stuff, that’s appreciated. The problem is you knew what kind of shit-storm you were getting yourself into.

I have my full address and my mobile phone listed on Facebook and Google. Not one person has bothered me.

Posted on the 6th of September, 2009 | 6 Extraordinary Comments

Get Gravatar

So what is this gravatar thingie?

Gravatar is a Globally Recognized Avatar.
From the gravatar site:

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

I would really appreciate it if you decided to sign up for gravatar! You can even associate one image to as many email addresses as you please. The only thing is: you need to own those email addresses. It will really make a huge difference.

Please, get gravatar. Now.

Posted on the 3rd of September, 2009 | 2 Coarse Comments

To The Guy That Used My Credit Card Online

FUCK YOU!

Posted on the 17th of August, 2009 | 5 Smart Comments

The Value of a Kilobyte

As I’m writing this, it’s Friday evening, quarter to seven.

You do know the number one excuse for a web developer to slack off; don’t you?

It’s uploading!

My last task for today is to upload 1.1GB worth of video files on a 64KB stream. Now that equates to, oh, five hours. Should this go into my overtime? I think it should. That means we, as a company can charge double for the time spent.

This means that today, one kilobyte costs $0.002
Obviously, I did not include the ISP cost, as that would be demeaning.

Next time I come up with a quote for a project, I’ll take this into account.

Posted on the 31st of July, 2009 | Comments Off