infojunkie's blog

Time has been often compared to a river, because it flows. But in which direction? Consider this: things that were once in the future will soon be past. So from our reference point, time flows in the reverse direction! And that makes us creatures that swim upstream :-)

Or, as U2 puts it in Zoo Station (from Achtung Baby):

Time is a train
Makes the future the past
Leaves you standing in the station
Your face pressed up against the glass

Antoine de Saint Exupéry:

La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever. Perfection is achieved not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing left to remove.

Found in the very good programming book, Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley.

As an information junkie, one of my favourite pastimes is to think about words that carry more than one meaning. The first word that lit that particular lamp in my brain was "reflection", with meanings related to thought and to physical light. Very soon I formed the following theory/conjecture: those loaded words don't in fact carry more than one meaning! Instead, they refer to processes that occur on different levels of abstraction, but that are similar from an algorithmic point of view.

For the past 2 years I've been fantasizing about buying a tablet PC or a portrait monitor, that would enable me to use the full screen to read e-books or similarly laid-out documents.

A couple of months ago I found the poor man's portrait monitor. Here it is.

To read PDFs in portrait mode, I just rotate the document inside Acrobat Reader and switch to fullscreen mode. To read other formats (like Web pages) I flip the Windows orientation, with the help of my video driver. I also a wireless mouse that helps with flipping pages remotely. I think a wireless keyboard would also help.

The problem is this: on one hand you've got a PHP application that does one thing only, but does it great, and on the other hand you've got Drupal, the Lego of computing which lets you do anything, but from scratch. And the applications that you are required to build are never fulfilled by just one existing PHP system, so using Drupal is tempting as a universal container.

For example: phpBB is a mature, full-featured bulletin-board system that's been around since 2000 and has a huge community. In constrast, the Drupal forum module is rather immature, clunky, and buggy. But it's integrated with all other nifty features of Drupal. What to do?

The burning question on everyone's mind should be: is there something we can smoke that's actually good for us?

I know, I'm guilty, I've been watching TV every night, looking for decent movies on MBC2 and One TV. ("Sucker!" I can hear you laugh). One thing I've noticed lately, before my mind goes dim, is that we're being fed American war movies every day!! What can it possibly mean?

There's a perverse relationship going on between Western media and the Arab world, and I wonder what it's causing to the Arab psyche. One of my firm beliefs is that mass media, predominantly TV, causes a feedback loop from a society onto itself directly, much like a lecture delivered to an audience, except that the media feed directly affects the whole of society, by imprinting ideas onto the individual bypassing his critical judgement. The result is society moving in the direction of the media, in a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of way.

Graphviz is an open source graph diagramming system. From an input description of a graph, the system generates an automatically laid-out diagram to one of several output formats including PNG, SVG, and HTML image maps.

The open source domain has created an explosion of source code to be examined and used. The potential savings in terms of development effort are huge, but they don't come for free: it is essential to build an understanding of the downloaded source code before attempting to use it or modify it. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that typical open source projects produce very little technical documentation, so the interested developer must go through the source code unassisted to build understanding.

I remembered this from my youth, and kudos to IG for finding it! Taken from MAD Magazine, issue unknown, volume unknown, year unknown. Drawing by Sergio Aragonés.

In the same vein:
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

Some sites try to serve me targeted ads based on my geographical location. Because I live in the Middle East, most ads I get on American sites are the two reproduced below. For non-Arabic speakers, the campaign encourages people to apply for a working visa to the US.

and

Click the attachment to see the full thing.

Globalization from the point of view of the globalizee.