hitoro

An Aversion To Other People's Frameworks

Shane McChesney is right - so many developers don't like to use canned frameworks and prefer to write their own. At the end, the result is the same and often, the new framework is underpowered.

I just experienced the same feeling when I was taking a look to a custom content management tool written with PHP and in development since many months. This tool is awful and provides so few features when compared to something like Zope. Some of our intranets as well our newsletter are running with Zope and most of the time, I don't write any line code to make them running. Even the custom management tool used to handle the newsletter was done in half a day with Zope.

What I like in Zope is that it just comes with things for free. Create some ZClasses and you get WebDAV editing, version control and tons of features without any coding! Many times I wanted to write my own tool but I'll never be able to reach the same level of bang for the money.

Get a life, stop coding and try Zope.

Talking about voice notes, I'm dreaming of an iPod-like device which can be used to record anything I want on the go. Go to school, take a record, write the resume later.

Tablet PC, is it the future?

Tablet PC-like projects popup every 2 or 3 years. Fujitsu launched a touch-screen portable 4 years which was never saled anywhere else than Japan. And there was several similar products many years ago.

I doubt it will really take up. The real problem is to try writting on a LCD screen: it's not confortable at all. First the writer is always concerned by scratching or breaking the coat and the visual feedback is made in a very low resolution compared to paper. That last point really matter because you don't recognize the shape you're writting and it's getting worst because no LCD screen is readable when positioned horizontally.

Hey but why the PDA are working so well? Palm PDA are designed to accept input on the move. The user holds the device whith one hand while writting with the other one. That way, the view surface is put in a more confortable angle and most of the text input is made at the same place. It's not tiring.

How does it compare to Apple's inkwell? Inkwell is to be used with a tablet device, like a Wacom tablet, and this input method is more clever: the input area is horizontal while the view area is vertical. The only problem is to write without looking at the hands and many people can't make the shift.

I don't think there's really a market. It's hard to write faster than typing on a keyboard. You can always write very fast, but then you can't read yourself and the computer will never be. As marketed by MS, the Tablet PC is designed to annotate documents but I think that this strategy doesn't match the reality. If I want to annotate a document, shouldn't it be easier to add voice notes, postits and links to other documents?

No proof that Cuba is developing biological weapons

Someone in the US administration heard something about biologic and they send their old president to do a check: 60% biologic... 60% of the Cuba's agriculture is biologic and complies to the strictest norms used worldwide. The secret is the US embargo which prevent the importation of fuel and artificial fertilisers. The Cubans have invented their own new biological fertilisers and don't use any machinery.

The US government has decided to sustain the embargo until Cuba stops to produce biological vegetables.

Monoculture is older than you believe, it's here to last and, by the way, it doesn't exist.

Monoculture is not an artifact of the 20th century but dates back when kings selected their favorites painters and music composers for entertaining their courts and impressing other kings. It was three centuries ago as it could be 3000 years ago. The French Revolution gave access to the culture for everyone and free-speech press became a reality. During the 19th century the bourgeoisie takes back the old habits of kings and hired their favorites artists. Ultimately, the entertainment industry was born. The two previous centuries seen the rise of the so-called monoculture, the culture where the production of new content is centralised. It will not disappear in one blink, mainly because it doesn't really exist.

Monoculture doesn't exist

How monoculture could exist when you can go down street, pick a copy of Courrier International and read news from all around the world written by professional journalists living in their home countries? How monoculture could exist when you can learn any language you want? How monoculture could exist if you have the choice to turn off your TV set? How monoculture could exist if you're totally free?

Still believing?

Monoculture is to believe that the real information is coming out of weblogs. Monoculture is to believe that culture is brain dead not only in the USA but anywhere else. Monoculture is to believe that some obscure forces prevent people to create.

Back to the beginning

"Monoculture, an Artifact of the 20th Century?" story is in fact the beginning of a new monoculture, the monoculture of someone saying that himself and his protegee are moving in the right direction, the story of the king and his favorite weblogger. "Welcome back, i'm here to stay", said the monoculture.

Une des grands erreurs que l'on peut commettre est de croire que les bonnes manières ne sont que l'expression d'une pensée heureuse. Les bonnes manières peuvent être l'expression d'un large éventail d'attitudes. Voici le but de la civilisation: exprimer les choses de façon élégante et non pas aggressive. Une de ces errances est le mouvement naturiste, rousseauïste des années soixante où l'on disait: "Pourquoi ne pas dire tout simplement ce que l'on pense ?" La civilisation ne peut exister sans quelques contraintes. Si nous suivions toutes nos impulsions, nous nous entretuerions.

Miss Manners (Judith Martin)

The Big Lie?

The victim and his killer share one common behaviour: they do what they think. The current quote on the Lijst Pim Fortuyn's website, "Ik zeg wat ik denk en ik doe wat ik zeg" (I say what I think and I do what I say), just reflects the current state of mind driving our modern society.

If you want to enter into politics in a very short time, get a populist programme. The populism is really easy to practice: you just have to say what some people think and the sum of these thoughts will meet all the expectations of the mass. But beware, populism can be dangerous too.

Some people will never recognize themselves in your programme, for example some vegans who don't appreciate your willing to authorize the creation of very large scale pork farms.

The populism is dangerous because it gives the impression that a populist is always right. If a populist loses the elections, people think that nobody care of their opinion and are revolted. If a populist is killed, people think that he was killed because he was right. If a populist is criticised in the media, people think that there's a big lie somewhere.

The populism conducts to an over simplification of the reality and people are attracted by this distortion field which makes them believe that everything can be simplified. Not happy, then act.

Fortuyn's death is a wrong thing but you can't tell there's a Big Lie behind it. The society is not driven by a big headless Thing but by some kind of a big lie, in which every one participates. The lack of participation is in fact one of the underlying themes of the Fortuyn's programme.

One of the other themes of such populist parties is to preserve the identity of their nations while being more and more integrated into the European Union, a fear of being themselves a minority. That fear is understandable: when you're a minority, you can't participate anymore. The big game out there is to put your enemy into a minority to cancel his/her effects. That's the Big Game in which almost everyone is ready to lie for staying in or reaching a majority.

The state of insecurity is not created by the minorities, and even less by the ethnic minorities, but by the willing of the majority to keep society divisions. While Fortuyn's programme is addressing the integration of minorities, the reality is other. The Gay community could be considered as a minority wanting to get attention of the majority. When Fortuyn stated that Islam culture is a "backward culture" because it doesn't accept the homosexuality, he wanted to show that the muslim minority deserves to be a minority.

The more you blame a minority, the more it will become angry against the majority or against a minority struggling to be recognised by the majority, the more likely it will participate by using violence.

The majority itself is in fact made of minorities tied together by sharing some specificities and breaking apart that coherence is very dangerous. A populist party will never try to appeal the majority but the countless minorities forming that majority. The more you divide, the more likely you get reactions, either positive or negative, which in turn create new divisions. At one point, you are elected by an endless number of competiting minorities.

The Fortuyn's death has formed a meme, just like the shooting party of Nanterres, on which minorities get connected and select populist or racist parties to represent them without taking care of the real background of the politic programmes. This meme creates the feeling that there's something rotten, a big lie, a conspiracy. The worst mistake is to give support to such ideas because one day, someone else will take advantage of the terrain prepared by the populists, someone like Le Pen or the Vlaamse Block.

One of our politicians was talking about the death of Pim Fortuyn and in someway, he was right by saying that when you, as a politician, play with the extremes, you have to assume the extremes.

CNN Quick Vote "Will space tourism remain the preserve of the super rich?" Yes but we have to convice them to do some charity by buying one-way tickets and giving the rest of their fortunes to the third world. Try to join the useless to something more useful.

Look we even manage to make a cover with some nice printed color photographs of a guy doing his daily job. The boat full of arms was not enough so we get a bit more clever and made a book with some photocopies here and there proving that everybody is guilty but us. If it doesn't work then we will cut a deal with D----y and create a theme park with some great animatronics showing the daily life of that devilish guy.

Maintenant que la situation est un peu plus calme au Moyen Orient, il faut absolument que les troubles fêtes se ramènent et jettent de l'huile sur un brasier à peine couvert.

Cette fois ce sont les Américains, avec Mme Rice en tête qui déclare que les négociations de paix ne se feront pas avec le gouvernement palestinien, parce que ce n'est pas le gouvernement "dont ils ont besoin" pour négocier (This is not government that we need). Bien sûr les Etats-Unis sont bien mieux placés pour parler de la paix, ils y travaillent tous les jours -- coup d'état par ici, soutient d'une dictature par là. Pas facile d'être la plus grande démocratie du monde.

Tout est bien qui finit bien. A part ce reportage sur les affaires à Chirac, son château, ces voyages aux quatre coins du monde, sa vie de grand nabab.

Mais il y avait surtout cette séquence avec une conférence entre le président et des jeunes de la banlieue parisienne. Chirac parlait de mettre fin à ce système où on se fait agresser dans le bus. Il ne parle visiblement pas du système politique ni policier mais de la vie de banlieue. Pour illustrer, il monte dans un bus RATP, accompagné de tous ses gardes du corps tandis que la foule crie "Chirac, voleur."

Demain le grand jour