As so many of us I’m currently working from home. My internet at home is most of the time pretty ok, but it can get very flaky, as in, speed drops, it can’t connect to certain hosts etc. However, every time I report this to my ISP, I get the same routine: restart, unplug, hold for 30 seconds, pray to Ubuntu and other ridiculous demands that make no sense because I didn’t change anything in the hardware (I didn’t even move it). ...
So I am currently between jobs and I like to use that time to learn new programming languages as I believe that you should try to think outside your day to day experiences. Especially in this world of microservices, it makes sense to broaden your horizon to see if you’re not always applying your favorite lawnmower to a problem that requires a hammer. Given that I have about 4 weeks, I figure I can do more than one so I started with Erlang and I used Google docs to keep track of the notes. I quickly ran into a huge issue: there is no ‘format as code’ block functionality in standard Google Docs! Being used to Atlassian’s Confluence and even WordPress I was a bit undone. What next? Obviously I looked for plugins but they always want all the rights (like, run while you’re not around, access to your bookmarks and browser history, credit card details, you name it) ...
Because it’s enough to have just one. See, thanks to scope and something called currying, any multi-argument function can be rewritten as a unary chained function. A simple example is this Javascript function to add two arguments: function add(x, y) { return x + y; } it’s easy to see what that function would do, you pass in two arguments and they get added: var sum = add(2, 3); // 5 now, in a functional world, you want to have unary functions that take only one argument. How can you achieve a simple add function if you’re not allowed to take more than one argument? This can be done by currying (and it requires scope) ...
Though what happened in Berlin today is still ‘most likely’ an attack (by a lone wolf, not by an army of asylum seekers) we can’t generalise and blame this on asylum seekers in general. That’s just what our nationalistic leaders want, what the news papers want because it sells more papers. By these rules of generalisation, all men are rapists, all fathers are incestuous, all mothers are whores, all white people trade slaves and basically all human beings are monsters. You cannot blame anything like this on entire groups of people. The fact is that only one person was driving that truck. Not a nation, not a group, not anyone else but that guy. ...
Recently people who use Mac computers have asked me about security. Good question. I’d say they are pretty secure. They didn’t ask me about safety. That is a different question. I will try to explain why: The only safe operating system is the one that is turned off, disconnected and preferably locked in a safe. And even then, it only takes one human to breach that security. As long as it is not turned on, or plugged into a network, it is still secure, but not safe. ...
It’s a wonderful day in the world of telecommunications… First, the 3G service on my phone went dead (it still showed wonderful connection, but as soon as you tried anything it said I didn’t have cellular data). Since I recently moved from Vodafone to Virgin Mobile who uses Optus, I thought, how bad can it be. But hey, after a few tests with luckily another phone at hand, it obviously showed that there is probably one flag not set correctly at their end. We can only hope that the morning crew is able to set the flag. ...
You can talk to us, just like you can to Siri (see http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/#siri), and you can be sure that we’ll listen and act appropriately… really, just start talking, we’re serious, ehh, sirious :-)
One of the first things I noticed when applying for a job Down Under was that where in Europe they recruit specialists, down here, they primarily recruit the ‘jacks of all trade’ Probably because there is a huge lack of really good software engineers (they are here, but there’s not enough of them). Where in Europe, the roles ‘analyst’, ‘developer’ and ’tester’ are strictly different roles. Think of it like the ‘Trias Politica’, where you differ between the power that defines law (politicians), the power that upholds law (police) and the power that checks if the other two are operating within the law (judges). ...
I think I’ve been using Google as a search engine from the day Google emerged as a search engine. Which, of course, was there sole business when they did. It was the fastest, most accurate and the least gruesome of all search engines of it’s time. Just this textbox and two buttons (at least, I can’t remember the day the ‘I feel lucky’ button was introduced, to me, it seems like it’s always been there) ...
I acknowledge the fact that I’ve been born a tv-native (I’ve never wondered about a tv-less world) but my children are what they call ‘digital natives’. Think of it, the communicator we’d love to have from Star-Trek, is what they call an iPhone, blackberry or if you are really hip, an android phone. We got the technology Star Trek dreamt about delivered at our doorstep. To my son, there is no difference between the tv-remote and my iPhone, just because I was that stupid to install some application that allowed me to control my tv through my iPhone. But when he grows up, there really isn’t a difference. ...