Dan Nguyen - The bastard book of Ruby
As both a coder and a musician I can’t but feel sick facing such disarming candor…
Here you can read the whole post (my rants are burps compared to this mastery! :D). It’s interesting, whether you agree or not. But this quote speaks an important truth: PHP is so widespread that a lot of sincerely-eager-to-learn PHP programmers think they can really find and learn everything they need without stepping one single time in others ecosystems.
After all, PHP will soon or later do what others do (from ages): look, Java has blahblah, let’s create a framework that do this in PHP! Hey but what about Ruby’s blehbleh? Yes, add them to next version! And why not introducing wonderful mehmeh from JavaScript?
Maybe this is what drives my nuts with my everyday job… I experienced a lot of different context, languages and tools, before I hit PHP. Now it seems I can’t flee: too much inertia.
I’d just want out, once in a while.
I thought it was just me, but reading this makes me feel less alone! :)
Here is a tool that streamlines and atomizes a critical debate in a way that renders single arguments and their relation clear!
I’m used to be pointed out as an annoying person. I think I deserved this label for my tireless resolution in examining arguments in depth, asking my adverser to give precise meaning to every single word used.
This come from my need to understand values and ideals promote by the person I’m talking to. I often find that most people build arguments on arbitrary premises without even being aware they do. This particular case makes me grow acrimonious and, as a result, I become unable to explain myself without rants or polemics.
A visual representation of an argument allows for synthesis, relations and documentary sources to be analyzed and verified without beating the brain in frustration.
It does not solves arguments, of course. But I hope will help me being more comprehensible, avoiding grudges and frustrating misunderstandings.
Good work! :)
Can’t agree more. It’s a long time I’d like to tear down the Pomodoro by burping a roaring rant, but why bother when someone else did this for me? :) Thanks @arialdomartini.
Today Doodle is wonderful. It speaks an important truth.
If you ever read Erich Fromm’s “To have or to be?” you should be aware of the famous ethics dichotomy. It’s an easy guess that Fromm sees more ethics in “being” than in “having”, despite western cultures are largely based on the concept of “private property”. After reading Fromm I ended up with a slightly different idea, one that comes from my personal experience with my family, friends and co-workers.
As far as “being” is the foundation of self-definition and self-definition is the foundation of ethics, I think today’s society should be based on “doing”. What am I doing? What drives me day after day? What could I do to help others to be and do something of themselves?
Today’s Doodle sings this mantra: I don’t care what you give me, I don’t care who you are. Loving means doing something together, sharing a goal, walking day by day towards it, together. That’s how our lives can be spent and not wasted, this is the root of success, this is the root of a family, the gift of children, the immortality of an opus. We must love each other (broadly speaking) not just to achieve a more comfortable level of “existence” but to roll our sleeves and do something that can last behind us.
They say love lasts forever: how to make it live on when we pass away if not with the changes we left behind?
Thanks Google! You gave Valentine’s day the meaning it had long lost.
PS: for all that find this vision inspiring, give a read to Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
It’s a long time I don’t post on this blog. I regularly go through periods of hypo and hyper working activity, in time-spans of broadly two months. November/December 2011 has been one of those hyper periods.
I took some refreshing days and tomorrow I’ll be back to my everyday life again.
Before even this last vacation day comes to an end, I’d like to sum up something I learned in 2011. It won’t be all, but I’ll try to list what’s more important IMO.
If you want children, don’t wait too long.
They suck a lot of time! They can be as cute and tender as a teddy bear, but odds are good you’ll be drained by their need of attention. Mother Nature rendered women able to easily get pregnant between late teenage and early 40s. There is a reason for this.
I know there are also a lot of reasons not to have children before given checkpoints (I want a home, then I want a work, then I want to travel the world, then I have to relax a bit, then…). Some of them come from fear (Will I have enough money? Will I be responsible enough? etc), but babies just need you. The older you will grow, the less “you” you’ll be able to provide.
So, given for grant you’re sure you love your partner and you really want to spawn offspring, go for it without fear! ;)
Less money == Less troubles
I live in Italy. In 2011 we had to face a truth everybody knew, but nobody was able to speak: our country was running at breakneck pace towards financial default. Our politicians has all been inept and incapable in their mission for so long that we’re now driven by a temporary non-politic government. I’m pretty happy with their results, even if they’re asking people for sacrifices. But Italian national sport is “Complaint” (you would have said “football”, I know, but bear with me! I drive “a rant a week”, I know what I’m talking about! :D), so the most of people isn’t happy with change.
Last year hasn’t been easy for my family on the economical side. I worked a lot, but we still had to face a chronic lack of money. We had enough to pay our bills, eat and pay taxes and our life-insurance, but at the end of the month we remained with a few odd coins in our pockets.
Despite this could sound sad (it has been sometimes), I have to say that we learned to face the situation enough to appreciate it somehow. We always drove a moderate lifestyle, dedicated to our family, our work, music and children. What we have is enough to be happy.
Looking around I see a lot of people complaining. Some complain with good reasons, since they can’t even afford our moderate lifestyle; but most of them aren’t doing that bad: they just shed tears over their lack of privileges.
Claiming personal financial disaster on facebook from your brand new iPad2 is not what I call coherence.
So, at the end of the day, I’m happy with my drained bank account, as long as my family and loved ones are too. I think if I had more money I would have been scared to lose it in the rising crisis. It’s not the case, and, as stupid as it can seem, I’m thankful. :)
Each head is one world.
Not that I didn’t know this before, but in 2011 I understood this even more deeply. There are tons of different visions, reasons and ways to be. None is totally right, and some seems to be definitively wrong.
What I learned is that reasons behind ideas are the real value of ideas themselves. You can’t decide if a vision is good or bad without putting yourself in the mindset of the vision owner.
Sadly this is too much overhead, not to mention you risk to lose your own visions and ideas with frequent transferts (not joking). That’s why I decided to adopt a macro-evaluation process based on some simple rules of thumb:
- Does your vision somehow hinder my freedom?
- Does your vision violates some of my personal, deeper or moral value?
- Will I take (or risk to take) damage or (intentionally or unintentionally) damage someone else following your vision?
If all answers are “Nope!”, then, let’s do it your way and stop arguing. I’ll have more time for myself.If there is one “Yep!”, I prefer to split and go alone on my own way. The reason is that, simply put, it won’t work.
After all, minding one’s own business is the sole, true road to success.
If you need to explain it for the third time, it doesn’t worth the pain.
Stupid people (I mean, really stupid ones) are not that much. The vast majority of stupids around are just fat-heads with different ideas; actually they think the stupid is you! :)
I’m always eager to explain my ideas twice, but the third one is wasted time.
Try with me: I’m more fat-headed than you can tell and you won’t get to change my mind so easily. I want evidences, and I won’t take them nicely if they show I’m wrong.
Sometimes I just don’t understand, so a second explanation will fix things. If not, reality is I don’t want to understand. So let me see you’re in the right without further ado.
Things get done! It’s just a matter of time.
I’m not scared about not getting my (personal) things done on a daily schedule. I’ve got a lot of passions and I’d like to do just everything, but work and kids steal the very most of my daily hours.
Being an 8PM Warrior is hard, and sometime it’s not enough, but step after step, things get done.
So, don’t trash your ideas just because you feel you won’t have enough time. And if this feeling discourages you too much, face the truth and tell yourself that you won’t have enough willpower.
Personal projects take time and devotion. If time is short, you have to invest on devotion, avoiding deadlines and putting brick over brick when you can, slowly but steady, ignoring fast results. This requires patience and will.
There are a lot of things I could put in this list, but I think they’re just corollaries. All in all, 2011 brought me some more wisdom. I hope I’ll be able to put it at work. :P
Happy new year everybody.
Note: this was worth much more than a retweet! Even more while I’m struggling to make Assetic simply write some fucking file to the disk (we do this since 80s without that much of a hassle).
I ranted as hell last week about how new Unity drives my nuts with its UX flaws. Here is a workaround for Skype. This saves 50% of my total hassles with everyday work. Still my opinion is the Precise Pangolin will have to revert to old Launch-Bar.
Enjoy.
After a month using new Oneiric Ocelot, I have to say that Unity made some annoying step backward. Somehow little changes can bring great consequences. This is the case for the second version of Unity desktop. A pity changes are in the bad direction.
1. Less stolen space = More stolen space
Unity refrain is “less clutter when you work”. So keep away all elements that does not concern what you’re doing from the page. This makes Ubuntu very cool on small screens too. YAY!
So, to free the top-left corner to that evil (but easy to reach) Ubuntu logo, we now have a full-size icon stuck at the top of the sidebar:
Now let’s pretend I like the new look (and I don’t, but hey… personal tastes), I could bear with this on my 18” laptop, but what about my 10” netbook?! Gaining eighty more horizontal pixels for application title and action buttons, and losing hundred vertically in the dock means throwing basic assumptions away. Or is it me?!
Anyhow, I can state after some month that what I gain in one direction is not worth what I lose in the other, when it comes to work with my netbook.
2. NO… tifications
Stolen space is not the major flaw in new sidebar design. Let’s talk about notifications. In previous Ubuntu release, when something happened somewhere while you were working (say, you had new mail or Skype chat message), a little shocking-blue triangle used to pop in the angle of top Ubuntu logo to warn you of the event.
Now that it is gone, you are given no clue (and I mean no one) of the event. From Oneiric on, I unfailingly cut a sorry figure, becoming aware of Skype chats after hours. What the hell, am I supposed to focus that much on what I’m doing?
Oh, I know what you’re about to say: there is a little envelope that turns blue near the clock, but hey… It is just for communications. And Skype is not there. And poor me, I can’t do away with Skype so easily.
Yet again when I click on a new message notification (new social network messages, new mail, and such), related application icon jiggle a little on the left of the screen but no application is taken in foreground, so I have to reach the left side (see below for a little more crap), click the icon, that in the meantime did stop jiggling and disappeared, take the application in foreground and… oooh, how many clicks! It’s easier to check mail and twitter on my phone even if I’m at the PC! Then it’s easier to write replies and tweets at the PC when I need.
I’m not joking! Are we serious?I feel such a monotasking feeling using Oneiric… I really think this lack of visual clues is the less acceptable thing, even more when mixed with the next flaw.
3. Keep away from dark left side (even if they got cookies)
Since approaching the left side of the screen opens the evil sidebar, I’ve so many times found myself unable to use the browser back button without swearing out loud that I finished heading to CCSM (that is not there by default FTW: see point 4 below) and configure my reveal mode hostspot as follow:
Why top and bottom left? Simply put, since top-left does not work.
Serious.
Somehow the top left corner doesn’t trigger sidebar revealing… or kinda: I have to swing my mouse to the top-left corner, then quickly head down across the border to make sidebar show.
Or I can simply go to the bottom-left corner and I’m served. I can’t understand why I should undergo this wrist-torture but I guess the top-left corner is not exactly at the top-left for some strange reason.
The result is awful. Yes, I can use keyboard shortcuts but I call this a workaround, not a solution.
So, to sum this up: I can’t keep the whole left side revealing the sidebar or I’ll make Jesus cry AND I can’t use the top-left corner as I was used to because (I guess) I made Jesus cry one too many time.
Add this to the notification problem above and you have a nearly-unusable interface. But let’s move on.
4. Apple told us we’re stupid, aren’t we?
As I mentioned above, CCSM wasn’t there by default. It wasn’t in previous Ubuntu version also, but I can see three good reasons to have it installed on my system by default:
- New Unity is configurable ONLY by CCSM since it’s now a Compiz plugin
- The whole damn system runs on top of Compiz now, if you don’t explicitly use Unity2D, in which case I really don’t know how to configure it at all
- It was before the distro-upgrade (why in the skies above has it been removed?! >:( )
So, no way to configure Unity for a commoner (say, my mom) out of the box. Let’s at least make-up this stuff a little. Here is new “Aspect” options dialog:
Mmmh… ok, oversimplified for dull boys. But there should be a way to change, say, my icon set or so!
Guess what? There’s not. You’re stuck with Canonical choices. If you want to access these options you should install a pretty recent, italian, unofficial package called MyUnity. Tell your mom, she will love it.
Someone moaned “appleish” over there? Because I did.
Conclusions
In the end we can see what I consider a PIMA (pain in MY ass) resides basically in the new sidebar setup. I don’t know if I am missing something obvious but I really think moving the “Ubuntu button” into the thing itself has been a very bad idea, with a broad, terrible and hindering impact on usability.
Not that oversimplification in system configuration matches my tastes that much, but I can live with having to use VI to change my icon set… even if facing the truth I shouldn’t: wasn’t Ubuntu meant to be for human beings? Wasn’t it meant to foster my freedom? Why shall I stick with a single silly icon-set?!
Back to sidebar, I think I’ll give my feedback to design team guys, without further rant and with sincere will to collaborate. After all, Canonical is pioneering a little bit to find its own desktop concept and… yes, I always love my good old Ubuntu. :P
