Log

Talks Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice:

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

Here's a good example of how democracy works:

NASA Christens Space Station Treadmill 'COLBERT'.

I use terminals a lot. Some years ago, there was a terminal emulator called Gnome-multi-terminal, which could be split horizontally and vertically, and thus giving optimum workspace usage when using many terminals. Gnome-multi-terminal wasn't being maintained anymore (or at least not regularly) and started displaying some buggy behaviour in newer versions of Debian and Ubuntu.

I've searched for a replacement for a long time, but was never able to find one. Now I finally have: Terminator.

Here's a screenshot:

.

Amazon has a Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging initiative:

The Frustration-Free Package (on the left) is recyclable and comes without excess packaging materials such as hard plastic clamshell casings, plastic bindings, and wire ties. It's designed to be opened without the use of a box cutter or knife and will protect your product just as well as traditional packaging (on the right).

I hate the plastic clamshell casings. They're a terribly waste of natural resources for no good reason at all. And, like Amazon already says, they're frustrating. More companies should start doing Frustration-Free packaging. Sometimes I feel like I'm paying twiice as much money for the packaging than I am for the product itself. An USB key and headphones do not need 500 grams of plastic.

Want laten we eerlijk zijn, rokers hebben humor. Rokers hebben stijl. Rokers zijn sexy motherfuckers. Na het neuken rook je samen bezweet een sigaret in bed. Niet-rokers aaien samen een kat.

Beste.. column.. ooit: Rokers zijn sexy

George Carlin, an American Stand-up comedian (though I would rather classify him as a political speaker) died. Here's an excerpt from one of his acts on American politics:

Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here – like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope'.

Because if it really is just the fault of these politicians, then where are all the other bright people of conscience? Where are all the bright, intelligent americans ready to step in and save the nation and lead the way? We don't have people like that in this country. Everybody's at the mall, scratching his ass and picking his nose and getting his creditcard out of his fanny-pack to buy a pair of sneakers with lights in them! So I have solved this little political dilemma for myself in a very simple way. On election day, I stay home! I don't vote! Fuck 'm!

Fuck 'm! I don't vote. Two reasons: First of all, it's meaningless. This country was bought and sold and payed for a long time ago. The shit they shovel around every four years? (mimics masturbation) Doesn't mean a fucking thing. And secondly I don't vote because I believe if you vote, you have no right to complain. People like to twist that around, I know. "If you don't vote you have no right to complain", but where's the logic in that? If you vote and you elect dishonest, incompetent people, they get into office and screw everything up, well, you are responsible for what they have done. You caused the problem, you voted them in. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote? Who, in fact, did not even leave the house on election day, am in no way responsible for what these people have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you people created and that I have nothing to do with. I know that later on this year you're gonna have another one of those really swell elections that you like so much. You enjoy yourselves, it'll be a lot of fun, and I'm sure as soon as the election is over your country will improve immediately.

Now go and watch all his video's on YouTube The man knew what he was talking about.

Here are some random links to interesting stuff:

FirePHP
FirePHP is a PHP debugging library and a Firefox plugin which allow you to output debugging information to the Firebug debugging panel. Since it doesn't intermingle debugging information with your page output, but writes in a special HTTP header instead, it's especially useful for AJAX debugging. It can also come in handy when you're trying to debug a server-side script which generates something else than a HTML page. A PDF or PNG file, for example.

OpenProj
OpenProj is a project management application written in Java and therefor platform independent. It has a lot of the features Microsoft Project has (according to the webpage; I have never used MS Project before, so I wouldn't know) such as Resources, Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, etc. There are also various different representations of tasks for resources. It doesn't really outshine Gnome Planner, but at least it's platform independent.

Typechecking Python module
Typecheck provides powerful run-time typechecking facilities for Python functions, methods and generators. Without requiring a custom preprocessor or alterations to the language, the typecheck package allows programmers and quality assurance engineers to make precise assertions about the input to, and output from, their code.

Here's a little code example:

@accepts(String, [Number], {str: Number})
def my_func(a, *vargs, **kwargs):
    pass
 
@accepts(String, Number, Number)
def my_func(a, *vargs, **kwargs):
    pass

VirtualBox has been getting more and more attention as of late. It is vastly superior to other virtualization programs due to the simple fact that it actually runs on my system. All the others either don't install (VMWare), crash (QEMU), or are a real bitch to set up properly (Xen). VirtualBox is Open Source, easy to install, fast, runs on Linux and Windows and it has both a very nice GUI and a very decent commandline interface. VirtualBox is what VMWare (for Linux) could have been, but better.

Now, WMWare has pre-built images online at their Appliances site. Qemu has the Free OS Zoo. Now there's one for VirtualBox too:

veeDee-Eyes.com:

The VirtualBox "Virtual Disk Image" Index

VDI images of pre-installed "Open Source" Operating System distros.
It's a computer inside your computer.

-Instantly run another operation system on your desktop in a window, on almost any computer.
-Implement full Linux functionality on an existing Windows Desktop or server.

I've been looking for this for a while. All it's currently missing are OpenSolaris and various BSD images. I'm sure these will be added rather quickly.

PS: It appears Innotek, the creators of VirtualBox, have been acquired by Sun. I'm not sure yet whether Sun's acquiring of Open Source companies is a good or bad thing. Guess we'll have to see where it goes. Perhaps they should get the benefit of the doubt since they did free the source of StarOffice (Open Office), Java (in part) and Solaris (in part). I'm just not sure whether Sun understands the Open Source philosophy and community.

Something every PHP developer should be reading:

The Unexpected SQL Injection – When Escaping Is Not Enough

The conclusions:

• Write properly quoted SQL:
1. Single quotes around values (string literals and numbers)
2. Backtick quotes around identifiers (databases, tables, columns, aliases)
• Properly escape the strings and numbers:
1. mysql_real_escape_string() for all values (string literals and numbers)
2. intval() for all number values and the numeric parameters of LIMIT
3. Escape wildcard/regexp metacharacters (addcslashes('%_') for LIKE, and you better avoid REGEXP/RLIKE)
4. If identifiers (columns, tables or databases) or keywords (such as ASC and DESC) are referenced in the script parameters, make sure (and force) their values are chosen only as one of an explicit set of options
5. No matter what validation steps you take when processing the user input in your scripts, always do the escaping steps before issuing the query. Validation is not a substitute for escaping!

Like my rule #1 of what I like to call Defensive Coding: Don't be implicit, be explicit. In other words, don't try to escape things you don't want in your strings, simply only leave everything you do want in your strings. A column name in a ORDER BY clause should only consist of A-Z, a-z and 0-9. Anything else in the string invalidates that string.

The war on Vista continues:

Say NO to Vista.

I'm even recommending Apple Mac's above Vista!