Log

I'm a fairly easily distracted person. My schoolcards always had comments on them along the lines of "Good student but easily distracted", "Sometimes a bit too much of a daydreamer" and "Needs to work on his short attention span". I've always known this, and kind of assumed it was just my personality. But when I read articles like this one, I wonder if I'm the only one.

When I got interested in computers, everything was so amazing to me that nothing could divert my attention from the task I was performing at the moment. Quite frequently, people would talk to me and I would awnser them in a distracted sort of way while I kept looking at the screen and bashing on the keyboard. Later, I would recall nothing of even having talked to the specific person. Friends would visit me and find four rolled, unlighted cigarette's next to my ashtray, two unfinished cigarettes which I was smoking at the same time and three half-rolled somewhere on my desk. I was so emerged in whatever it was that I was doing on the computer that I would forget about the cigarettes. Talk about concentrating on a single task. Naturally, those were very productive times.

Then.. I got an internet connection. Since then I've been much more easily distracted and haven't been nearly as productive as I was before that. Instant messaging, IRC, E-mail, browsing, newssites, they all sucked up my time and attention. When my internet connection dies for more than about a day, my productivity suddenly goes through the roof.

I'm seeying the same thing at my work. Just when I really go up in my work and am coding like crazy somebody swings by to complain about this or that bug. The telephone rings, a high-priority e-mail comes in which needs immediate attention (or so claims the sender), etc. It's killing my productivity.

I am now thinking about ways to stop being interrupted all the time while doing my job. Here are some rules that I'm going to adhere to:

• No e-mail reading/replying after 10:00 in the morning.
• No instant messaging clients running
• No IRC windows open.
• Firewall rules that kick in at 9:30 and which block all access to the Internet except for some specific resources (documentation, online radio stations, etc).
• No more listening to people that stop by my desk for useless stuff. They can send an e-mail (which I'll read the next day) or they can file a bug-report in bugzilla if the want something from me.
• No telephone. I'll simply won't awnser it if I'm busy. (This one might be kind of tricky.. I hope my boss won't get pissed off.. but it's for the best)

I'll be applying the same rules at home from now on. I'm even thinking of going unplugged at home. Since I now have a laptop, this should be do-able without too much crawling under the desk.

I'm normally not much for donating money to charities, because usually those charities are only aiding in the further destruction of the human race by trying to cheat on mother nature. But I'm making an exception for the victims of the earthquake in Azie. All you dutch people, please consider donating to Giro 555.

A lot of sites (PHP.net amongst others) are imitating google's 'Suggest' feature (See this post). No doubt google will receive all the credit for this invention, even though plenty of other people already implemented similar features elsewhere. That, however, is not my gripe with this technology..

The problem is that this 'feature' FUBAR's my browsers ability to autocomplete previously entered information. I hate that. Now when I enter something for the first time in some entrybox somewhere, it'll help me by showing some possibilities.. but each time I return to retrieve the same information, I'll have to find it all over again. Damn.

Oh, and by the way, I retract my oppinion about which example I like better. Google's implementation is completely useless (the chances anybody who types 'a' into the searchbox would be wanting to search for 'Amazon' if fairly slim; seems more like a cheap commercial to me) while the Apple Developer example is a useful real-life example of how this could be used.

Update: PHP.net's News page says the following about the implementation of the function-completing searchbox: "The function list suggestions we started to test a year ago seemed to be working better as some bugs were found and fixed, so it was time to make the result available on all php.net pages.". So PHP isn't really copying google after all. Doesn't make the feature less annoying.

GrokLaw announces, in this article the following:

"In a totally unexpected turn of events, the EU Council took its proposal for a software patent directive off its agenda during today's meeting. [...] Polish undersecretary Wlodzimierz Marcinski asked for additional time in order to be able to write up a "constructive declaration". The meeting chairman accomodated the request since no country raised objections."

Somewhat further down into the article:

"The Dutch parliament had passed a resolution on July 1st, asking its government to abstain, but the Dutch government decided to ignore the will of its parliament. The Polish government reiterated on November 16th that it "cannot support the current proposal" but was pressured by the Dutch EU presidency and other countries to support the decision. At times it looked like Poland would give in to that pressure."

Hooray for Poland. Fuck the (worst ever) Dutch government!

Weg met de huidige Nederlandse regering. Honden zijn het.

Chello has upgraded the speeds for my internet connection.

I'm now on 4096Kbit down/1024Kbit up, which is equivelant to 512kb down/128kb up. Sweet. Here's a little proof:

I just downloaded the OpenOffice.org 2.0 preview release (94 Mb) in 4 minutes.

Here's what I have become to see as the typical republican american: Kubed.org. Especially check out the politics section. Of course posting this here is hypcritical and all that.. but who cares really?

Some highlights:

"I BELIEVE in equal rights, equal justice and equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, creed, sex, age or disability."

Hmm. I thought republicans generally were against homosexuality and equal rights for them. But I guess 'Sexual preference' and 'religion' don't fit in with this row.

"I BELIEVE government must practice fiscal responsibility and allow individuals to keep more of the money they earn."

What ever happened to equal opportunity for all? With this kind of capitalistic view you'll inevitably enlarge the gap between the poor uneducated and the rich who get all the opportunities.

"I BELIEVE Americans value and should preserve our national strength and pride while working to extend peace, freedom and human rights throughout the world."

A noble and lofty goal.. except that history has tought us that the U.S. only believes in spreading their own believes (capitalism, democracy) and does so by supression and force. Furthermore they believe they should be in power everywhere so the can exert control. They try to accomplish this by funding and training terrorists and dictators (Bin Laden and Hussein).

"This demonstrates the faith of the American people in the President, and their trust in his handling of national security matters, as well as basic moral issues." …. "those who did vote for Kerry, did so because they were voting against Bush.".

Why, yes, that shows that the American people have a lot of confidence in Bush.. voting for someone you don't like just because you'd rather not have to put up with the other guy for 4 more years. Only thing this shows is that the U.S. people are either democratic or republican and that this election more people cared about voting than usual.

"Naturally, Carter, the same man who aids and abets dictators by validating their “election” results, would leave out the fact that Arafat is a terrorist who started every intifada in Israel since the 80s. Let’s not forget that Arafat has stated that his goal is to see Israel pushed into the sea to be replaced by a Islamist government."

And also let's not forget who helped Saddam get a hold on Iraq and who was best friends with Bin Laden.

Perhaps I'm wrong.. perhaps this isn't the typical Republican speaking.. but I can't say I've ever been pursuaded otherwise by an republican. Perhaps they're really thinking they're doing the right thing (as commanded by god or something) just like Bin Laden was thinking when he planned the attack on the U.S.

On Folklore.org, you can read all about the people at Apple and the development of the Macintosh. Very entertaining, in-depth and educational stuff.

_{(Sorry flux)}

They just released GTK 2.6. It's got a lot of new features that I've been wanting:

• GtkCellRenderers for dropdowns and progressbars (these can be used in a list.. nice for ListPatron)
• The combo box can now display trees, insensitive rows and separators.
• Path entry in the file chooser widget (no more need for using ctrl-l
• Performance improvements in GtkListStore (not in GtkTreeView though :( )

Hope it'll be packaged for Debian Unstable soon, though I'm not holding my breath for it. I really want to use some of these new features for use in ListPatron, but I'd rather not have my project depened on such new libs.

Sometimes it takes a little while to realise something is actually really stupid.

Take this for example:

"Chalk one up for teachers. What better way to present educational materials than with a template that evokes the classic image of the teaching profession?"

It's an KeyNote theme. KeyNote is a tool for creating presentations for the Mac. The theme can be applied to your presentation to give it a "blackboard & Chalk" look. How nice.

The following high-tech state-of-the-art equipment is used to create a presentation:

• Laptops/Desktop PC's which can proces bilions of instructions per second
• Fancy Operating Systems with swooshy thingies
• Highly user-friendly software tools which took many programmers many hours to create
• Expensive Beamers and screens

And that presentation looks exactelly like something that cavemen drew on the walls of caves some 10.000 years ago? Something that could just as easily be done on a real blackboard and some chalk. Only difference is that instead of having to whipe out the chalk and drawing/writing the next diagram/text, we can now click the button of a mouse. Whooptiedoo.

Really, with all our super-duper high-tech stuff like planes, trains and automobiles.. computers and what not.. we're still just advanced cavemen. Craving for status, power and procrastination. Makes you kind of sad, doesn't it?

I'm still working on ListPatron.

Here's a little in-between screenshot which shows the sorting rules.

What's still left to do before releasing version 0.1?:

• Finish the sorting
  • Sort rule loading/saving (70% done)
  • Dialog polishing (80% done)
  • Code cleanup (80%)
  • Sort list on header click
• Some memory-leak fixing
• Bug fixing
• Testing
• Package building

That's aboutit.