Google knows everything
2012-02-23 21:24:17
This is a tired thought that just crossed my mind.
I've realized that Google doesn't really know that much. Somehow it gives the illusion that it is this vast library of endless information that is constantly growing and growing. It does accumulate a lot of information, but I'm wondering what kind of information this is and what the general quality is. My experience so far in my study is that for specialized knowledge Google rarely knows what I need to learn. In most cases my books turned out to have much higher quality and, even more importantly, it was much better at challenging me instead of giving me exactly what I want which PageRank does so excellently.
Well, anyway, I'm feeling that I'm getting off topic, so I should stop writing now. This hasn't been thought through very well either, so you are welcome to argue it to pieces.
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Now with comments!
2012-01-15 00:28:25
I've finally made it possible to make comments on the posts. With my spaghetti code it took a bit longer than I expected. Perhaps I should refactor the code, but then again, I suppose I'm too lazy right now :)
I'm looking forward to hear your opinion!
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My brother on Logos Hope
2012-01-02 15:35:40
My brother and his wife and their child are going aboard the Logos Hope for two years. Here is a link to their blog. http://www.logos-hope.blogspot.com/
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Color Palette Generator
2011-12-23 00:20:36
I just changed the style of the site. I found a relatively nice photo that I had taken a few years ago, put it through a Color Palette Generator and I got these colors. I admit they look kind of dull and lifeless, but at least they are consistent with the picture. This can be a pretty powerful tool and I'm definitely going to use it in the future.
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What makes software great
2011-07-07 00:10:57
I once read on a blog somewhere that it isn't the program that makes an artist great; it is the artist that makes the program great.
An example: The reason for why Adobe Photoshop is so good and so well developed is because all the good artists happened to be using it. Why do the pictures photo-touched with Photoshop usually look better than others? Because a professional edited the picture. The same professional could do the same result with e.g. the open source application Gimp (with some workarounds, but he would figure it out).
Of course a bad program will hinder the professional in making a good job, but I still think this is a good point.
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Religion in computers
2011-05-28 22:29:31
Sometimes the loyalty to either Apple's products or the PC software goes to such lengths that one is tempted to call it fanaticism or religion. I found this interest in a product kind of extreme, but as I learn more about this fascinating culture I see that the religious feuds between Mac and PC users are just the tip of the iceberg.
Ever heard about Vim against Xemacs?, CISC against RISC?, KDE against GNOME? or OpenBSD against everyone else? I guess it makes sense considering the time it takes to learn a product. As you get better and better at it you eventually get more or less emotionally attached to it.
As for myself I try to stay as agnostic as I can when it comes to what products I choose, but I have to admit that I feel affection for some pieces of software. Like for example Blender. In reality, it's probably not as good as 3DS MAX, and it's much easier to make fancy effects with After Effects, but I still feel just a little bit of indignation if someone calls Blender something bad.
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Grace Hopper, one of my heroes
2011-05-28 19:25:36
One person whose qualities I admire a lot is the late Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. I heard about her the first time when I was taking the introductory course to computer science in the first semester. Later I bought a book about her, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age by Kurt W. Beyer.
She used to be a university professor in mathematics. When WWII broke out she left everything she had to serve the army. She was put to work on the so called Harvard Mark I, one of the first electronic computers. It was used to make calculations for the army. After the war she continued to work on computers and her work ultimately helped making computers into the thing we know today, that is, available to pretty much everyone and not just mathematicians with PhDs.
What I admire about her is that she was always a learner. She always tried to push into a new area to learn. When she was a professor she not only taught - she also was a student herself. She studied biology, history, architecture, literature and then she brought all those subjects into mathematics to make it more exciting for her students.
She didn't want to come to a point where she felt that she knew enough but she always tried to learn new things all the time and make that complement what she already knew. In reality this is what gives birth to original ideas. When people have an unusual combination of skills and knowledge they can see unusual and original connections and then truly innovate.
I don't want to come to a point where I think that I have learned what I am supposed to learn. I constantly want to move on and get into totally new subjects and areas.
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Humble beginnings
2011-05-28 19:25:07
This is the first post in my experimental site. I'm doing this to learn to program websites from scratch. I'm writing in PHP and I'm hopefully going to use some JavaScript, and I'm building this on a MySQL database. Things are going to be pretty messy and things are probably going to change a lot some periods and be totally dead and forgotten some other periods. I might use the site for a blog and I might not. If I do I'm going to write about geeky and nerdy stuff about computers, software and general reflections on stuff that I like. If you should happen to like what I'm writing than I'm very happy.
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