erroneous thoughts

Enjoy

… I suggest this as a late night reading. It won’t stop you from using hi5 (it didn’t stop me at least), but it’ll put some (much needed) perspective on its (mis)use.

It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

EDIT: I’ve been wanting to complete this post for some days, but it’s just now I got the chance. And perhaps the first thing to do is to complete the above with the paragraph that follows it, which states the same conclusion, if somewhat more firmly:

That’s why I don’t worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go — and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.

Now in the Portuguese scenario, Facebook isn’t that popular, but hi5 is. And Doctorow’s (the author of the referred article) conclusion also stands for hi5, as the email from which this was excerpted (in Portuguese) shows:

Olá gauthma,

Você tem 3 amigos esperando por você no MeetYourMessenger.pt

It is basically an invite to yet another social network, and some of the inviters are from (surprise!) hi5! And another one joins the “scrapheap of net.history.”

[This is directed to those with the need to deal with Portuguese banks; hence the post is written in Portuguese]

A banca portuguesa decidiu que vai passar a cobrar 1.5 euros por cada transacção efectuada com cartões multibanco. Pelo que li, a razão mais forte é que «isso também é feito noutros países». É uma justificação da treta, mas eles têm direito a usar justificações da treta… Aquilo a que não têm direito é a usar o monopólio para impor a sua vontade: e aí compete ao governo mandar a banca para o seu devido sítio. Enquanto isso não acontece, deixo aqui o link para uma petição que encorajo a que todos assinem (e divulguem!): Contra as comissões sobre levantamentos de ATM.

Ok, this just happened to me one time too many. As I was attempting to watch a DVD in a machine that usually is for other stuff, I just realised that I couldn’t because I lacked the package mentioned in the title. After a fruitless attempt to install it, I remembered that it was in a special repository… Any way long story short, if you use whatever-buntu, instructions to get you on your way are here. I usually do this the following way (from a root shell, packages for i386):

# wget -c http://packages.medibuntu.org/pool/free/libd/libdvdcss/libdvdcss2_1.2.9-2medibuntu4_i386.deb
# sudo dpkg -i libdvdcss2_1.2.9-2medibuntu4_i386.deb

One of the nasty side-effects of spending 5 years learning Java is that in the end you feel the urge to shout things like this until you’ve spilled your lungs out:

Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. It’s a perfectly legitimate goal to design a language for average programmers. (Or for that matter for small children, like Logo.) But it is also a legitimate, and very different, goal to design a language for good programmers.

–Paul Graham

Me being a civilized guy (and a rather modest one at that), I just post it here and leave it be. But I can’t stop wandering how my former teachers looked (and look) upon their students, brain-size-wise…

Thinking in the lines of what the fuck? Well then it’s you and me! I’ll just leave the links:

Slashdot: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotatom/~3/186773385/article.pl

original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-medium-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

It’s this kind of crap that makes me very wary of MPAA rating systems and similar stuff…

… and so should be the software used in theorem proving and similar stuff! At least according to some mathematicians (and some of them Field medalists).

I can’t resist to make the following extrapolation: should it not be the same (even if to a lesser extent) in teaching?  After all, students could on occasions learn quite a lot from looking at source code. Now all we need is someone to go tell that to Portuguese politicians…

I found out about this geekness test (click image below) when browsing through a friend’s blog, who scored 86 out of a 100

Although I scored one more point than her, I can’t avoid thinking the result is somewhat biased by the fact that I know two things: the periodic table and who was James Clerk Maxwell (and anyone who graduated from high school should know too…)

Another thing I find curious is that the comment attached to my score is this:

High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!.

Now I’m not exactly fond of being called nerd, but being described as MIT material is nothing short of a complement! So I’m drawn to the sad conclusion that the way of not being a nerd is … well, being a dumbass… Probably not the best of ideas to spread in junior high…

Anyone who also conducts that test is encouraged to share the results of course

EDIT: I just ran a second test, that confirms what I thought: my original test was left unchanged, except for the chemistry questions, the ones about knowing who is Newton, etc.. (all were given wrong answers) and about what operating system I used (previously I said Linux and Firefox, which what I actually use, now I said Windows and Internet Explorer), and in the calculator’s question answer was did not care as long as it adds… Here’s the new result (my previous one was 87):

The comment was “Not nerdy, but definitely not hip.” The inescapable conclusion is once more yielded:

To be hip, skip chem and math classes, and you should be on your way…

Talk about American influence…

I got kinda tired of the old one… and starting looking at the blog title… green, byte… well you get the idea (unless you’ve been living on a cave for the last decade (?), in which case, I kindly advise you to go get some education )

… some 1000+ plus words images

This image came from this blog post, which by the way has some rather “insightful” comments too!

Thanks to Miguel for pointing this out! (the productivity index of our conversations keeps going up )