Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

“You’re just making an excuse” is a relative phrase

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

I recently stumbled upon this marvelous piece. I title the quote “making an excuse“:

Saying that you’re forced to do something when you really aren’t is a failure to take responsibility for your actions. I generally don’t think users of proprietary software are primarily to blame for the challenges of software freedom — nearly all the blame lies with those who write, market, and distribute proprietary software. However, I think that software users should be clear about why they are using the software. It’s quite rare for someone to be compelled under threat of economic (or other) harm to use proprietary software. Therefore, only rarely is it justifiable to say you have to use proprietary software. In most cases, saying so is just making an excuse.

Bradley M. Kuhn – 2010, on his blog

I’ll translate this for you to Catholicism. You can definitely adapt this to most religions (for some, add death penalties like stoning here and there):

Saying that you’re forced by your nature to masturbate when you really aren’t is a failure to take responsibility for your actions. The church generally doesn’t think masturbaters are primarily to blame for the challenges of sexuality — nearly all the blame lies with pornography. However, I think that people who masturbate should be clear about why they have sex with themselves: It’s quite rare for someone to be compelled under the desire of sexual pleasure. Therefore, only rarely is it justifiable to say you have to masturbate. In most cases, saying so is just making an excuse.

The translation

There you go.

RDF propaganda, time for change

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

I’m not supposed to but I’m proud. It’s not only me who’s doing it.

Adrien is one of the new guys on the block. He’s working on integration with Tracker’s RDF service and various web services like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, picasaweb and RSS. This is the kind of guy several companies should be afraid of. His work is competing with what they are trying to do do: integrating the social web with mobile.

Oh come on Steve, stop pretending that you aren’t. And you better come up with something good, because we are.

Not only that, Adrien is implementing so-called writeback. It means that when you change a local resource’s properties, that this integration will update Flickr, Facebook, picasaweb and Twitter.

You change a piece of info about a photo on your phone, and it’ll be replicated to Flickr. It’ll also be synchronized onto your phone as soon as somebody else made a change.

This is the future of computing and information technology. Integration with social networking and the phone is what people want. Dear Mark, it’s unstoppable. You better keep your eyes open, because we are going fast. Faster than your business.

I’m not somebody trying to guess how technology will look in a few years. I try to be in the middle of the technical challenge of actually doing it. Talking about it is telling history before your lip’s muscles moved.

At the Tracker project we are building a SPARQL endpoint that uses D-Bus as IPC. This is ideal on Nokia’s Meego. It’ll be a centerpiece for information gathering. On Meego you wont ask the filesystem, instead you’ll ask Tracker using SPARQL and RDF.

To be challenged is likely the most beautiful state of mind.

I invite everybody to watch this demo by Adrien. It’s just the beginning. It’s going to get better.

Tracker writeback & web service integration demo / MeegoTouch UI from Adrien Bustany on Vimeo.

I tagged this as ‘extremely controversial’. That’s fine, Adrien told me that “people are used to me anyway”.