Just a little food for thought…

Ever had a “gut feeling”?

Maybe it was your Enteric Nervous System

More here, here, and here.

Just a little food for thought.

On a related note, wrt privacy.

‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy — Professor Daniel Solove, George Washington University Law School

Why, Even If You Have Nothing To Hide, Government Surveillance Threatens Your Freedom: The Case Against Expanding Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Powers — John W. Dean, FindLaw columnist, former counsel to the president.

No more Facebook.

Logged In or Out, Facebook Is Watching You

Facebook A Black Hole For Personal Info

Facebook Sharing Too Much Personal Data With Application Developers

Facebook Widget Installs Zango Spyware

Facebook Caves To Privacy Protests Over Beacon

Facebook Beacon Privacy Issues Worse Than Previously Thought?

Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking

Facebook Users Complain of New Ad-Based Tracking

The New Facebook Ads – Another Privacy Debacle?

From Facebook’s Terms of Service:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

A different take on closure-based object orientation

Provides OO-like access to already existing data abstractions, and its implementation is a pretty neat use of syntax-rules macros. It seems like it could be a pretty useful bit of code in a lot of cases when you wish to write in an OO-style but are using libraries not designed as such. You can find it here.

Text editing, efficiency, and design.

The Craft of Text Editing — by Craig A. Finseth.

It’s a book on how to design[1] an Emacs clone. Comparisons to vi are made where appropriate.

It’s interesting in that despite being written in 1991 most of what it covers regarding editor specific functionality and concerns is still valid. It’s essentially built around a model-view-controller pattern, long before the patterns book was published. There still hasn’t been much improvement on gap buffers or linked lists and such for modeling the data. User interface design is obviously important, if you expect to have any users. I like timeless shit like that.

A few parts such as chapter seven cover implementation and performance details which aren’t of particular concern today, but I think are still worth the read simply because it’s an interesting look into the sorts of tradeoffs one faces when performance matters (chapter seven itself even says as much, pointing out that for screen management you could just use the prevalent curses library). Thankfully we don’t generally use monochrome text-only terminals over a connection who’s speed is measured in baud anymore, but while people typing faster than the networked terminal could respond on slower connections is no longer a real concern, over time people have gotten lazy and despite multi gigahertz machines with megabit/sec connections we still deal with lag. The lag’s just in other areas now, but it’s still there, especially on the web. Especially when someone’s on dialup, or a cell phone, neither of which are exactly uncommon just as 300 baud connections wern’t uncommon in 1991. I’m thinking specifically of XML’s rampant misuse for non-trivially-sized datasets here as one example where something like JSON or SQLite or Google’s newly released Protocol Buffers would be far more appropriate. Using scripting languages to implement entire applications (as in RoR, Django, etc…) would rank pretty high as well, but at least in those cases it’s the server’s CPU cycles they’re chewing away and not your own computer’s. Unless of course it’s also an AJAX site. Sigh[2].

Writing a new editor, of any sort, from scratch today would simply be retarded. You aren’t going to do anything new, editors have been done to death. It would accomplish nothing but a pointless reinvention of the wheel when all you needed to do was pick a well designed customizable editor, and learn to use it. Emacs, vi, LyX[3], Eclipse, TextMate, there’s shit loads of good editors already. But the fact that the book covers writing a text editor for obsolete equipment seems incidental to me. It’s more about properly designing software, using a text editor as a specific case example. In that regard it will remain valid for many years to come, especially in a world where test-driven development and “agile” development run rampant and naive programmers think “if it works, it’s done”. Not to say that TDD/Agile are bad ideas, I think TDD is awesome. But when they’re mis-used by the lazy, they’re fucking horrible.

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[1] Design, not program. The book won’t teach you how to code in general, let alone anything usable, save for an appendix covering the minimum of C necessary to, with effort, understand the code examples. It was written for programmers, ergo it contains mostly concepts, not code.

[2] I know there’s going to be some ass chewing over this. Oh well.

[3] Especially handy when writing papers, articles, and such like. While the web has only recently begun to understand the value of separating content from presentation, it’s been around for document editing for eons. If you’re trying to do both at the same time, you’re wasting time. The trick is these two choice quotes from Bram Moolenaar:

“I want to get the work done, I don’t have time to look through the documentation to find some new command”. If you think like this, you will get stuck in the stone age of computing. Some people use Notepad for everything, and then wonder why other people get their work done in half the time…

Don’t overdo it. If you always try to find the perfect command for every little thing you do, your mind will have no time left to think about the work you were actually doing. Just pick out those actions that take more time than necessary, and train the commands until you don’t need to think about it when using them. Then you can concentrate on the text.