Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

Google is celebrating Newton's birthday today. Better late than never, but in the interest of historical accuracy, I feel it should be celebrated on 25 December and not on 4 January.

I am aware of the fact that the calendar was fiddled with around the time of Newton's birth, but I think the key defining element of a "birthday" is the day one is born (or birthed, depending on perspective). I'm sure Sir Isaac's mother thought it was 25 December.

If Newton was born in the 21st century, his mother would have had to fight her way through a forest of "christmas" trees to get to the delivery room.

Frank's iPhone developers are stupid! post on Planet Grep today made me a little grumpy.

Stating that iPhone developers are "stupid" because they target a restrictive environment is a bit blunt. Further suggesting that all their problems would magically go away if only they'd write "web applications" is criminally short-sighted at best.

While I'm happy to accept that some aspects of "web development" are "real programming" (and I have great respect for some of the people who identify themselves as "web developers"), I'm not so happy with the implication being made that "web development" has somehow obsoleted or replaced what has traditionally been considered as "real programming".

Frank seems to feel that all the things people want to implement natively could just as well be expressed as "web applications". I beg to differ. "Web applications" may be a reasonable choice for applications involving the manipulation of data in some way, but they're inherently unsuited to many other things.

The iPhone provides a lot of interesting hardware in a fairly compact battery-powered package. I can easily see people imagining things for it to do which Apple did not intend it for. Asserting that "web applications" could be used to implement all these things suggests a very unrealistic worldview.

I don't see "web applications" being used for interrupt handling or DMA or for that matter anything that involves networking on any level beyond the payload of a TCP stream. While those low-level things can conveivably be driven by "web applications" on the presentation layer, perhaps even down to the session layer, something underneath still needs to "be there".

It must be incredibly frustrating to target an environment which only allows "blessed" code to run, especially if the requirements for blessing are not all technical and the organization responsible for the blessing has commercial interests in not blessing code it deems to be threatening in some way.

I'm not very impressed with the "stupid" label being applied to people who can motivate themselves to target such restrictive environments and by extension to everyone who is (still?) not writing "web applications".

A couple of weeks ago, I cycled past a sign on my way to the station stating that there would be "significant" traffic problems as they closed a crossing for repair. Of course, the sign didn't mention how these works would impact train schedules or the ability of cyclists to cross the tracks.

I sent an email off Infrabel, who supposedly maintains the rail infrastructure, and got no fewer than three emails back to tell me that my query was important to them and that I was assigned a "file number". Very useful.

More useful was the fact that my questions were actually answered the next day by a very thorough Infrabel employee (with a title like "arrondissementschef", you presumably have to be thorough) and all was well: trains would run as usual (note that this does not imply "on time") and cyclists could cross the tracks.

This morning, I received yet another email noting that my "file" was still open. Uh...

• My question was very thoroughly answered
• Why would I still be interested in the impact of roadworks between 30 October and 8 November on 17 November?

I guess the answer email just didn't cite the file number.

Now if only the trains could run on time for a change...

Spending way too much time on airplanes, I can very much relate to this comic:

sigh

I gave in and bought an HTC Hero phone this weekend. Everyone I know seems to be lyrical about it. It seems capable of making phone calls and all the features one would expect from a "smart" phone are there.

I am a bit disturbed by the amount of data the phone seems to want to share with Google though. So far, I have not been able to find a way of importing my contacts without going through GMail (which I don't use), short of typing them in by hand - an error-prone process I'm not willing to try. The phone does not appear to support vcard-over-bluetooth.

None of the people who have given me their phone number have allowed me to share this data with Google and I would prefer not to ask all of them.

So, dear Lazyweb: how do I import approximately 300 phone numbers into this Hero contraption?

It won't surprise anyone that I'm not a great fan of electronic voting. I think most people who know anything about software share my reluctance to trust it for something as important as the democratic process.

For some reason, the government only releases the voting software after the elections. In other words, if the software is flawed in a way that influences the results of the elections, the problem can only be "fixed" by calling new elections. Inevitably, that means the problem won't be fixed. Ever.

Earlier today, I downloaded the "source codes" [sic] of the software used for the 2007 elections. Unfortunately, I've not been able to find a single line of code in the Zip archive yet. The archive contains a large number of binary files and even something that looks like a bootloader.

There also appears to be some documentation in the archive. Some of the documentation is in PDF files, but there are also some Microsoft "Word" files which I can't read.

Why does the government go through all this trouble to hide the source code of this important software? Do they assume citizens don't care? I'm a bit grumpy about this.

I'm running a bit behind on the news again. One advantage of reading a week's worth of newspapers in a day however, is that stories develop much quicker than if you have to wait a whole day for the next episode. A disadvantage is that idiocy becomes much clearer and gets the blood boiling much quicker too.

Next month, like everyone else in Europe, we'll be voting for our representatives in the European parliament. In Belgium, we will also be voting for representatives in the superfluous "regional" parliaments.

Elections are compulsory in Belgium. This is a good thing as it allows politicians to campaign on facts (should they so choose) rather than having to expend a lot of energy on motivating the uninterested to vote. A parliament voted only by fanatics would be a very bad thing of course. A couple of weeks before the elections, every eligible voter gets a summons in the mail from their local council telling them where they need to go to vote.

Some towns in Belgium have very mixed populations. Much to the dismay of certain right-wing linguistic supremacists, there are people speaking Dutch, French, Arabic, English, Turkish and other languages all living together in the same town. How very untidy! One such town near Brussels decided to be practical and send out the elections summons in Dutch and French. This is much more efficient of course than writing it in Dutch and adding a footnote that anyone needing a French translation can request one specially.

"Gosh, it's a letter from the government, three weeks before elections, could this be my summons? I don't know, we should request a translation to be sure!".

Of course, this got the extremists very upset. And the newspapers have exploded again with cries about "wasting money" and such. Only in the fictional region of "Flanders" do we have politicians who seriously believe that forbidding efficiency can save them money.

What can possibly be gained by emphatically deciding not to write to your inhabitants in a language they understand? Do they think it will motivate people to "integrate" (nasty word) better? If anything, I think it would make people feel more left out.

Forbidding efficiency. What a stupid idea.

I think it's obvious that I'm not going to vote for anyone promoting such lunacy.

Grump.

19:12 EDT

I survived another eight hours locked up in a steel tube pointing towards Canada earlier today. first thing I did after I got here (after witnessing the mandatory introductory card crash) was buy money for my Canadian pre-paid phone.

Rogers has also gone the robot way. Has anyone ever got one of those robot systems to actually work? Do we all need to take lessons in robot pronunciation now?

Long live gethuman.com!

Planet Grep this morning seems to be a stream of "meta-micro-blogging".

I wonder, does anyone feel this new "micro-blogging" hype really adds any value?

I've yet to be convinced that "blogging" adds value, so perhaps I'm just naturally disinclined to see any benefits in the continuous stream of consciousness multicast by self-proclaimed new age geeks. Honestly though, how do people get any work done if every other minute they announce on "twitter" that they should be getting work done?

Never mind being interrupted every time someone they are "following" -- as they call it -- is not getting any work done and has the urge to multicast that fact.

What happened to the open source geeks? Whatever happened to idling on IRC?

And now I am off for a cup of coffee. And then I am going to fire up vim. And then I am going to open a buffer. And another buffer. And another one. And another one. And then I am going to write some code. And if I get stuck, I will read some code. And perhaps read some mailing lists.

See, no need for Twitter! In certain cases, polling really does make more sense than interrupts.

Because having an early night proved to be impossible owing to things being set on fire in a noisy way, I decided to watch my shiny new Funkwecker for the leap-second that was introduced just now.

It was unbelievably exciting!

A bit like watching paint dry. You should try it some time! Watch for the memo for the next leap second.

I understand however, that not everyone was interested in the leap-second tonight. Many people celebrated the completion of an imprecisely parametrized solar cycle (I still love that phrase, Elise!) instead. Some of those people got so sucked in to the celebrations that they decided to send me text messages.

Of course, a new year does not officially start until p2's annual Goa-text, so I'm definitely not complaining!

Some of the other texts I received were a bit strange (well, stranger) though. Particularly because they came from people I don't know! I feel a bit weird about getting messages encouraging to make my "naughtiest dreams" come true and such more from possibly random strangers.

I also wonder what I should text them in return? "Enjoy the leap-second" felt a bit too geeky. I decided that the best approach was probably to wish them a generic happy new year and not to ask them to identify themselves. That might have implied that I only feel people I know should be happy. Everyone should be happy of course. And not just on the 1st of January according to a given calendar.

Happy new year if you celebrate this particular calendrical phenomenon!