Toxic Elephant : Category life, everything about life

Hello new year!

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:36:00 +0000

It’s a new year! Time for more resolutions. I can’t believe that’s actually two years ago.

Yes, my blog has been neglected, but not for want of anything to write about. Oh, there are so many things I have an opinion about. But always, it’s the question, is my opinion interesting, new, well informed, etc? And can I write something sizable about it? Not conductive to writing every monday (recently replaced by sunday, but I bet you hadn’t guessed). Maybe I should try less hard to be reasonable.

Oh yeah, e-mail is getting better, mainly thanks to the Inbox Zero articles.

What I really want to be doing: I still don’t really know, but let’s look at what I might blog about:

Size is the Enemy, leading to the issue of abstractions in programming languages.
80/20, or the problem of getting your average Java/.NET programmer to really learn and use new things (e.g., new methods of abstraction).
Lots of new languages are popping up, all running on some VM or other (e.g., Scala, Nemerle, Boo). Where’s the development in regular compiled languages?

This surely points in some direction, but some weighted average will have to be taken to find out what that direction is.

I did manage to quit the job that was definitely going in the wrong direction, so there’s a plus.

Oh, you wanted new resolutions? Hm, let’s do some:

Uncluttered house
Learn Japanese
Finish more software so it’s releaseable

Zurich

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 21:12:00 +0000

So, I’m reading Steve Yegge’s latest, and he drops some not so suble hints to the reader that they should apply at Google. I talk about that to my wife, how working at Google would definitely be nice, but that it would mean moving from Amsterdam (the Netherlands) to Zurich (Switzerland), because that’s where Google is in Europe. And then she says:

Zurich has the best zoo in Europe.

A song

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 23:38:00 +0000

Today, at seven months and nineteen days of age, Sophia spontaneously performed her first song. It went like this:

Ba ba baa ba baa, ba ba baa ba baa.

(The bas are short, the baas are long). The piece was performed at a constant pitch. I’m still working on the correct rhythmic notation; it’s pretty complex.

Years from now, we will say: We were there at her first performance.

Strike, stones

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:44:00 +0000

For work, I’m in Chennai in India. Up to today, I have seen the apartment where we are staying, the office, restaurants, and the streets in between. That is actually already a lot to see: There’s always a lot going on on the streets.

For tomorrow, a trip was planned to Mahabalipuram, but now there’s a big strike planned, and the trip was canceled. The reason is not that there won’t be transport, but that people will be allowed to throw stones at cars without fear of punishment.

Dream

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 09:43:00 +0000

Last night, I had a dream. There was a gathering of people for dinner. It was probably not my house. I mean, it didn’t look like my actual house, but in my dream it was also not my house. We sat at a table with a thick rough wooden top. The light was soft, coming mostly from the simple lamp hanging over the table. The floor was also wooden, as were the low shelves lining the walls at the other side of the room.

I was sitting at the head of the table. I’m not that tall, so I was looking slightly up at the other people at the table. On the second chair to my left sat a young man who was somehow connected to Microsoft. Probably he worked there. He was very enthousiastic about Vista.

At some point he said something that really upset me. I think it was about how something could not be fixed, and users just had to either live with it, of buy something new. I told him, how can he say that when there are people how have to get by on very little money, and can’t afford to buy the shiney new stuff, and that Bill Gates is really out of touch with reality. I don’t remember the exact words, but I was clearly very angry. The young man decided this animosity was too much for him, and left.

Afterwards, I was standing on the other side of the room, shaking so badly that I dropped two glasses that I was trying to drink from to calm down on the floor.

WNT Online

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 12:40:00 +0000

As of today, the `Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal’ (Dictionary of the Dutch Language) or WNT is online. It is a massive dictionary of Dutch, apparently comparable to the Oxford English Dictionary. I first heard about this dictionary when I was a young boy, and my father made a documentary about it (sorry, those links are in Dutch). At the time, the WNT was not finished and already occupied several bookshelves. People had been working on it for 125 years, and it seemed it would not ever be finished. Since then, they’ve clearly come a long way.

[Unfortunately, their interface is in Flash. Why, why, why? Three of the ten questions in their FAQ have to do with problems caused by choosing Flash. That should have made some bells ring.]

By the way, I was alerted to this historical event by the invaluable Language Log. Be sure to also read the resulting discussions of Babel Fish name mangling.

Hello, World

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 21:30:00 +0000

On November 2nd our daughter Sophia Emiko was born. At birth, she weighed 3050 grams, and was about 48 cm tall.

In the photograph, she is about three and a half hours old.

Finally, B'stilla

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:36:00 +0000

More than ten years after my only trip to Morocco, I have finally had the pleasure of eating B’stilla. Amazing! It’s sweet, hearty, rich, succulant and crunchy.

What I wanted to try but found hard to actually order in Morocco—as I recall, few restaurants served it, and if they did it had to be ordered a day or so in advance—I can now get right here in Amsterdam, at a restaurant just a short bikeride away.

Hurray!

Resolution Evaluation

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 15:13:00 +0000

We’re now more than halfway through the year 2006, so it’s about time to evaluate the status of our new year’s resolutions. Now I realize many people give up on them by the time februari comes around. This is because they think a resolution should be followed all year, instead of being something to strive for all year. That way lies failure, clearly. And it’s also a kind of lazyness: “Oh, it’s now the second of januari, and I’ve already smoked a cigarette/forgot to call my mother/killed a kitten, might as well smoke/not call my mother/kill kittens all year.” If that’s your attitude, resolutions are dead cheap. Lazy bastards.

Anyway, on to my resolutions. Let’s see:

Answer all relevant e-mail within a reasonable time.

Well, that’s going pretty badly. Friend requests from cute orkutians, praise for msgconvert, ex-colleages who want to keep in touch, they all go unanswered. Of course I’ve been busy, but that’s really no excuse. My humblest apologies to you all.

Find out what I really want to be doing, and do that.

More luck here. I quit my job, after it had turned from just an ok way to make money into a constant source of frustration. So, as of June 1st, I am a self-employed software developer, IT consultant and web designer, which gives me the freedom and tranquility to think thoroughly on where I want to go and how to get there. Where I want to go would probably be somewhere where there is a nice PhD position in computational linguistics or computer science.

Post to my blog more regularly. I’m going to try mondays, but don’t hold your breath.

Well, you can all see how that’s going.

I Got Married!

blog@matijs.net (matijs) — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 23:22:00 +0000

On June 16 and 17, Naoko and I got married. On the 16th we had our civil wedding, while our church wedding was on the 17th.

This is a photo from the first day, made by Thomer Gil:

Jim Forest has some pictures of the second day on flickr.