… praise Apple! Uh, no, bashing time?0
rzwitserloot posted in apple on April 2nd, 2006

I am generally considered an apple evangelist. Especially by those around me who find my continuous put-downs of their archaic dinky windows-based notebooks rather annoying.

However, I also believe that, if apple did ‘win’ and gained the kind of market share that microsoft currently enjoys, we (the IT world) would be in a heap of trouble. I feel Apple will out-microsoft microsoft by miles, applying DRM, TPM, and a host of other three-letter acronyms to lock out everyone, from everything.

I’m still an Apple evangelist because I’ll be old and grey before it’ll ever happen.

Steve Jobs and co. had a real shiny chance of proving my reservations about the Apple Hegemony wrong in the France vs. Apple lawsuit regarding lack of interoperability of the iTunes Music Store.

Basically, France has ordered Apple to allow music bought with iTunes to work in all portable music players, not just iPods. Needless to say, that’s a good idea.

Apple has fought the decision tooth and nail, bringing in loads of dubious arguments - in the sense that they are basically complete lies.

Tip of the iceberg, people. This IS the company spouting this crap, and this IS the company sticking TPM chips into their hardware, then locking their software to it. And the worst thing? Not one of the people I know who use Apples appear to care about this stuff one iota, with an exception for Alper, who also reports on the French situation.

I refer you to Alper’s blog article about why, exactly, DRM, TPM, and all that jazz is Bad.

Here’s hoping Steve never gets that market share.

meebo but better?1
rzwitserloot posted in tech on April 2nd, 2006

theswitchboard is a site serving up a whole switchboard solution using java applets. Like meebo, a web-based chat system, but with VoIP. Appears to be specifically designed to be a sort of ‘fire and forget’ solution for small companies needing a switchboard.

Pretty neat idea! I have been looking at asterisk but that’s still plenty confusing and takes a lot of work to set up still.

Newsflash: Evangelisers are useless (programming)4
rzwitserloot posted in programming on April 5th, 2006

These days I have the distinct feeling that programming is on the brink of another major breakthrough. My still-favourite language, java, has seen its development accelerated greatly (i.e: java 1.6 is released about 15 months after a very major 1.5 release, that’s unheard of), lots of waves in the web development area, mostly courtesy of Ruby on Rails..

but the problem is, I’m not an independent observer. I read a lot more blogs and such about programming languages, so my feeling that there’s a lot more happening in the programming world is perhaps simply a side-effect of me reading more about them.

And that last bit seems to be, remarkably, what’s happening.

Check this out! (Please look at least at the top table first or the rest won’t make any sense)

its listings are derived from google. All this supposed hype, all the recent stories about how programming languages need raving lunatic evangelisers - even talks of the impending doom of java because some of the java mainstays (like Bruce Eckel) are turning away from the language, etc, etc seem to be highly overrated. With all this hype about python and ruby, python HASNT GROWN ONE IOTA over the last year. Amazed the heck out of me.

Then again, Objective C is somewhere waaaay down the line which seems odd, because apple.com’s documentation about this language is excellent. (ObjC is the main development language for NeXTSTEP/Mac OS X, kind of like C++ is the ‘homebase’ of Windows, and C the basis of the linux kernel and most associated tools).

While I am thus forced to put certain question marks beside this research, it certainly puts evangelism in perspective. It really isn’t that important. I’m still not sure, then, what exactly makes a language accepted. I’d suggest that, if merit is the decisive factor, foxpro should not be the most rapidly rising star, that makes no sense. Python should certainly be higher than perl, basic, and maybe even PHP. Maybe it’s just dumb luck and accidental happenstance. That sounds just as likely, really.

Wahoooooooo!0
rzwitserloot posted in me on April 6th, 2006

I received word today from the TU Delft that I’ll receive my bachelors diploma this april 13th.

Given that I had pretty much no clue whether or not the slap-dash collection of old-system and new-system courses actually qualified, I was pretty much expecting some form or other of drudgery requirement before getting this far. As most of you probably already know, I’m pretty much all done with my masters, so this practically boils down to:

I’m graduating this july.

bomberman update2
rzwitserloot posted in programming on April 6th, 2006

update: Oliver patched a bunch of sprites for me. I also rewrote a large part of the code (specifically, all elements that are unique to a single bomberman character, including upgrade status, position, etcetera) to be a bit more object oriented.

All this in preparation for the goals I’ve set for myself: I want to have 2 modes of play, ’single’ player and ‘multi’ player.

In the single player mode, you battle through 8 levels, each with rapidly increasing enemies, both in number and in abilities. (Walk through walls, gobble up your bombs, etcetera). At the end you meet a boss character.

In multiplayer mode, you fight with other bombermen. 1 or 2 humans, and 0-3 computer controlled players. The AI that feeds these computer controlled players is similar to the ‘boss’ at the end of the single player mode.

None of it, at this time, will employ comet or some other form of remote multiplayer tech - just 2 people behind a keyboard for now.

I’ve been looking a little bit into the sound issue, mostly looking for game sounds to use. I’ve found the perfect background midi. It sounds good on macs, probably sounds ridiculously horrible on PCs, but, for what it’s worth, I’ve attached it to this post: Bomberman Theme Music.

4 out of 5 dentists agree: RCP/Eclipse/Java rocks!0
rzwitserloot posted in programming on April 7th, 2006

Just read that azureus, the bittorrent client, has won the sourceforge overall community award. Azureus is built upon RCP, a very powerful desktop application framework. I’ve experimented with it once or twice, and the amount of help, in the form of wizards and tutorials, available for building RCP apps is simply amazing.

(NB: RCP is java-based. Eclipse is itself built in RCP. Almost anything you see in eclipse you can get with RCP, including the ‘docking’ window style, views, editors, perspectives, automated preferences, OSGi package structure, automatic updates, etcetera)

In many ways RCP highlights something I feel is an underrated future for programming in general: Extreme IDE help. I can only imagine the web application server that works as well as RCP does!

Interesting angle on static vs. dynamic.0
rzwitserloot posted in programming on April 7th, 2006

Interesting angle on programming: Tool-based vs. language-based approaches to improving programming.

Certainly helps to explain why so many developers believe so strongly in ‘their’ way. Also goes deeper into the discussion regarding static versus dynamic language design. That discussion is almost entirely analogous to the tool vs. language discussion, for a simple reason.

Static-based language design makes it easy to make the tool support go a very long way. Of course, dynamic-based design does allow you to pull off neater tricks in the programming space itself much more quickly.

Also, in many ways, all those aforementioned ‘neat’ tricks are solvable quite easily given a sufficiently powerful IDE. For example, eclipse is already working on implementing compile-time checks for ensuring that @NonNull-annotated items are for certain never null. Something that Tim Sweeney has been asking for, not to mention my own preference for such a mechanic.

So far I’ve been looking for a sort of ‘holy grail’, where the language is very powerful but still capable of being analysed to bits by the IDE. This article suggests that it’s very very difficult to get there, and may even overload the programmer’s capabilities of comprehension. I’m not entirely sold on that notion just yet, but it’s an interesting angle I hadn’t considered until now.

Universities are obsolete!1
rzwitserloot posted in education on April 15th, 2006

Perhaps the title of this observation is ever so slightly exaggerated, but I’ve been thinking along those lines for quite a while.

Here are 3 anecdotes that support the notion that universities are no longer useful - or at least very very strange and bureaucratically inefficient places:

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Last week I took the exam for Cryptography, a course about, well, cryptography - a hobby of mine for quite a while.

Aside from being a course mostly involving the nuts and bolts underlying crypto, namely, cryptographic algorithms such as RSA and AES instead of much more widely applicable stuff like the engineering of protocols and the basic concepts, the entire course sucked, from a didactic point of view.

The book, written by the teaching professor, was ridiculously technical and very hard to follow mostly where it wasn’t important. In fact, on the exam, you had to perform, by hand, the first cycle or two of a couple of crypto algorithms, with nothing to assist you except a calculator and some tables of numbers. When will that EVER be a useful skill, ever? I’ll always have internet to look up the specific gory details in the extremely unlikely event that ever pops up.

More importantly, I never even touched the book - wikipedia serves a whole bunch of articles on the subject which are better adjusted to today’s state of crypto and far more extensive, easy to read, didactically nicely written, and in general, just better. (Some examples: how AES works, LFSRs, or even a general overview of the entire field.

The fact that this professor is still trying to improve his book is a fairly fundamental indication that he really just doesn’t get it. Forget the bloody books covering the basics, you’re free to do cutting edge research! The notion that so many profs have pipe-dreams about being the publisher of the de-facto standard book is a real shame. Books no longer serve AS a de-facto standard in many situations, and, if you really want to be the author of that book, it better be of impeccable quality, didactically speaking. Most profs aren’t trained or naturally skilled at teaching, yet they all want to write books.

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One of the many papers I wrote for publishing, together with Maja Pantic, my thesis coordinator, leads me to another anecdote about university ‘cutting edge’ life which boggles my mind:

The paper in question was targetted at a publisher making an ‘encyclopedia’ about the state of artificial intelligence. Any academic could write a paper, submit it to the editors, and provided the paper is good enough, get it included as ‘article’ in the encyclopedia. Nevermind that you then get a list of papers and not an encyclopedia in the sense of i.e. wikipedia.

After sending in my submission, I promptly got 2 papers back with the request of editing them. That is, reading them, and commenting on the quality in general, along with stating particular improvements. I handed those in as well, wondering what the hell the publisher was doing except sending out a bunch of emails, and then received 2 direct copies of the same form I just handed in, evidently filled in by submitters of other articles who had been randomly chosen to edit my submission.

I paid mostly lip service to one, which made fairly ridiculous claims of improvement, and did a better job integrating the suggestions of the other one which was far more useful, and submitted the final version.

That version made it into the book. I got an offer from the publisher to buy the book at half price, being only 250 or so euros instead of the full 500 euros.

How in the name of all that’s fair in the world do university professors fall into this utter load of crap? For doing what amounts to zip squat, these guys are peddling an incoherent bunch of papers bound into book form for 500 euros a pop. That’s so ridiculous I’m speechless.

Yet, when I confronted Maja about the rather odd arrangement, Maja herself was confused about my apparent state of disbelief. Turns out this kind of thing is entirely normal and a side-effect of the notion that universities hand out ‘points’ for successfull submissions, which in turn confer status and paycheck increases. …and these educational publishers laugh all the way to the bank.

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here’s one about possibly the most ridiculous course I’ve taken - Sustainable Development. The entire course is a combination about Treehugger propaganda, doomsaying how ‘we’ are ruining the world at large both by destroying the environment and not giving enough money away to third world countries. I’m all for discussions about such topics, but preferably with some intelligence behind the arguments made. Needless to say, a full blown mandatory university course on the subject should definitely be using some sound scientific methods to derive some form of answer.

The stated purpose of this course was to teach the importance of sustainable development, and also, HOW to build stuff in a sustainable way - nevermind a large chunk of the field of informatics has built-in perfect sustainability: The copying of data costs nothing and is endlessly sustainable.

I was a bit late in starting studying for the course. I noticed on the lecture information site that the lecture materials, normally available in book form at the university press, was available online because the university press had run out. The note accompanying the online PDF version also stated that the PDF would be taken down shortly after the exam.

The book turned out to be the usual didactic disaster, in that it was immensely boring, whereas the subject matter can actually be told well by using lots of interesting real-life cases. However, it was also loaded with argumentative fallacies, chief of which was the faking of scientific rigor: All brain-dead conclusions were backed up with reams and reams of facts, whereas such statements as ‘over half the children in asia have AIDS’ were accompanied by exactly zero references - they were to be believed on sight.

As my own little act of rebellion against this silly course, I mailed the chief educator of this course suggesting that he kept the book online. After all, letting people read the book on computers which with all likelyhood are going to be on anyway saves another tree or 5. Also, in a much larger sense of the word sustainable - (internet) search engines are pretty much the most ’sustainable’ development I know of, in the history of man. Anyone, anywhere on planet earth, can find, see, learn, and interact exactly the same way I can provided he finds an internet uplink someplace.

In that sense, I strongly urged him to make an example and place his book online, so that at some point the TU heads can wake up, smell the technology, and offer a TU wide booksearch function that lets me find the course relevant to a line of research simply by searching through the related book materials.

A pretty sound argument for someone teaching the importance of Sustainable Development, I’d say. A week or two later (what’s up with that delay?) I get a reply: He was thinking about getting it published and was afraid that putting it online too long would hamper his chances.

Nevermind the fact that this yet again highlights the notion that professors by and large are still so outdated that they still believe getting published is the holy grail - this guy was actively harming a perfectly fine sustainable idea just for the sake of his own wallet. As so many left-leaning figures of some importance are wont to do, he was being rather extremely hypocritical. A real shame, because obviously it would be a better state of affairs if the gaps between rich and poor weren’t so large.

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A bit unfortunate that Alper told me this only last week, but I should really have CCed these mails at least to the delta, the university newspaper. At least that might have engendered some form of discussion.

Still, as much as the TU is moving faster these days, the world is changing even faster still.

My blog vs. the soundbyte culture2
rzwitserloot posted in me on April 15th, 2006

As you may have noticed I’ve decided to go with mostly longer, more in-depth posts, with longer frequencies between postings, instead of many small posts.

However, I’m a bit concerned. Is my average post too long? Should I take more trouble explaining what it’s about to help you decide if you should bother to read it? (ironically that would make em longer!)

Should I just make them (much) shorter?

Please let me know in the comments!

High oil prices - rich oil companies3
rzwitserloot posted in politics on April 16th, 2006

Lots of people are wondering why oil companies round the world seem to make boatloads of cash when the oil price is high. It’s a simple story of risk versus reward. Read on for the details.
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