Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Endless loop

I’ve been using Gmail for bookmarking for quite some time now.  It works, but not as good as specialized bookmarking applications, such as del.icio.us .  So, I’m moving many of my bookmarks from Gmail to del.icio.us .  A few minutes later, I see them coming up in my Google Reader subscriptions (I’m subscribed to my own feeds as well for easier searching).  I look through them and think “these are some cool links!  I should add them to my del.icio.us bookmarks.”.  Puzzled…

See the face behind the comment

I’m glad to say that this blog gets more comments these days than it ever had. This is probably due to several reasons – frequent posting on my side, improved web design of the site, recent comments list on the sidebar, email notifications for replies to your comments, etc. Most of these improvements were introduced via different WordPress plugins.

Today I am adding yet another one, which will, hopefully, bring in even more comments by making the web site a little bit more personal. I’ve installed the Easy Gravatars WordPress plugin, which shows the author’s picture near the comment. Pictures are taken from the Gravatar.com web service, which was recently acquired by Automattic – the company making excellent WordPress software and running WordPress.com web service.

If you don’t have an account at Gravatar, no image will be shown near your comments. But if you do, your comments on this site, as well as on any other web site that uses Gravatar.com will become more recognizable. So, I suggest you go register and upload the image of yours – it’s really simple, straightforward, and free.

So, let’s see faces now behind all those comments…

P.S. : I mentioned avatars before on this post.

Social network through the email

Slashdot runs the “Turning E-Mail into a Social Network” post, which links to this article about Google and Yahoo approach:

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.
Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

This feels very natural. Both Google and Yahoo indeed aggregate a lot of personal data and a lot of personal relationships (who knows who, who emails who and how often, etc). It’s logical to assume that they want to expand what they have, and social networks is one of the ways to go.

So, why email?  Email has a number of advantages over other media:

  • Everybody has an email account.  And everybody knows how to use one.  It’s almost as widely used as mobile telephony.
  • Email is very flexible – texts, HTML, attachments, links, etc.
  • Email is an open standard – there are many clients, servers, web services, plugins, etc.
  • Email is easy to convert to other media – IM chats, blogs, SMS, etc.
  • Email is often integrated with other tools, such as addressbooks, calendars, todo lists, reminders, etc.
  • Email supports both one-on-one and group communications (mailing lists).
  • Email is easy to remember (not like a phone number or ICQ UIN), lookup and share.
  • Social networks are often about messaging.

I wish email was better integrated with half of the social networks that I use.  Most of them use some sort of their own messaging system.  Some don’t even provide any messaging at all.  And all of them would have to do much less work if they relied more on email.   I’m glad to see that Google and Yahoo realize this.

How to handle web rudeness?

Web Worker Daily asks an interesting question – “How do you handle web rudeness?”

This is probably a nobrainer for people who have been on the web for some time, but newcomers, especially those to the blogosphere and the world of forums, are often puzzled.  It’s very easy to insult someone on the web.  Pick a forum or a blog.  Write a comment.  You’re done.  And sad fact of life is that many people do just that.

Having a blog (albeit not the most popular) for a few years now, I’ve seen some of that rudeness and some of those insults.  Both private and public.  And here is how I go about them.

First of all, I treat both private and public insults equally. I don’t differentiate.  If I can think of the way to make fun of it, I respond publicly. If I can’t, I just delete and ignore the comment.  If I get two or more insults in a row  from the same person, I ban, blacklist, and filter the originating username, IP address, and email.  And then I don’t care.

My thinking is that there is enough crap going on already, to take some more from the Web.  I consider the Internet to be the best thing since… since… since… since the beginning of times.  If something bad is coming out  of it, I either convert it into good (humor, smile, good mood), or I totally get rid of it.  It’s as simple as that.

P.S.: Just to make something crystal clear – with non-insulting comments I respond in the same scope.  If the message was private, I reply in private. If it was public, I reply in public.  Sometimes, if I feel like the public can benefit from a private discussion, I’d ask the permission of the other party to publish the conversation.  To be on the safe side, I’d often forward the preview of the post too, to clarify what exactly will be published.  Insulting comments never get a private reply – it’s either nothing, or a public joke.

The Nerd Handbook – quick guide to the unknown

Via Mark Fletcher’s post came across The Nerd Handbook.  This is a really nice post explaining a few things about nerds.  While details may vary from person to person, the overall picture is pretty accurate of so many people I’ve seen in the IT industry and in some science related areas (mathematics, physics).  Here are a few quotes:

A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.

Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.
The reason for this typeface selection is, of course, practicality. Monospace typefaces have a knowable width. Ten letters on one line are same width as ten other letters, which puts the world into a pleasant grid construction where X and Y mean something.

Your nerd loves toys and puzzles. The joy your nerd finds in his project is one of problem solving and discovery. As each part of the project is completed, your nerd receives an adrenaline rush that we’re going to call The High. Every profession has this — the moment when you’ve moved significantly closer to done. In many jobs, it’s easy to discern when progress is being made: “Look, now we have a door”. But in nerds’ bit-based work, progress is measured mentally and invisibly in code, algorithms, efficiency, and small mental victories that don’t exist in a world of atoms.

This post is a better written piece, which is also more accurate than most of those endless lists “You are a nerd if …“.  If you know somebody really weird, working in IT or scientific research, I strongly recommend to read the article.