jugglin' information, making ideas clear
There's no denying anymore: open it is
After years of spending way too much time on very actively advocating all sorts of open it's now enough:- SVG, that i've always seen as a key ingredient of the greater spectrum of open standards that more and more allows people creativity in whatever they do in the way they like it, aka freedom, is everywhere (and i like to believe i helped). Not a standard component of Internet Explorer yet, but that is slowly becoming irrelevant in many, many ways, just as other pain points.
- Most people still think all that open stuff is something small and cute (While it was always big in the inner working of software systems, it's now spreading to the user side of things and at the same time people learn about vendor lock-in and the '"we control you" suicide note' called Windows Vista.). To those people , and the university that annoyed me by giving a very high grade to the person that in her final presentation said no money was made with open source software, i cough whatever. Google/Look/phone me up if you want more explanation.
- If you like what you read on freedomdrive.org or homecomputerhelp.org and want to use the domain for realizing the ideas there, just contact me
Cheers, I'm off to creating things.
Good shit and bad shit: “waste equals food”
- The good shit: VPRO documentary (english&dutch) about McDonough en Braungart who figured waste equals food can also be applied to production products. Essential in their designstrategy is replacing the old adagium 'Cradle to Grave' with the 'Cradle to Cradle' (C2C) principle: A principle of natural systems and Design Chemistry that eliminates the concept of waste: all materials are viewed as continuously valuable, circulating in closed loops of production, use, and recycling.
- The bad shit: Last week some youngster was persuaded to eat dogpoo; the video
“You can't make cow out of hamburgers”
Surfing from the amazing video i blogged about i also found an interesting entry on his blog "A Scientist and the Web" with this great comparison.Another smart remark i found via Sean McGrath's blog:
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian W. Kernighan
Old Stuff
My website was taken over by spiders. Hmm, that might not be a good expression on the web. It had not been updated since IE6 came out. Okay, not that long, but long. Not that i promise much writing from now on, but at least it looks better now. I still have to give web/crap,how2nerd,art_fart and techy a place, but maybe that's with the fishes.<People will switch
Apple's big presentation makes everybody want an Apple. The Mac Mini even makes it very affordable now, and it's small enought to bring it to your friends and show it off. And though the hardware all looks very slick, it's the software that is really interesting. It looks like everything just works, cooperates with the rest of the world. Compare this with a lot of Microsoft frustration, say for example WindowsMore writing
Most of my on-line writing consists of tiny remarks on SVG (Google on SVG and me), some months ago accompanied by some just a bit more substantial writing for SVG Open 2005 and svg.org. Yesterday i finished a 2-page article about SVG soon to be published on openmagazine.nl (dutch). And don't forget my SVG songs :-) (see earlier entry).Next to SVG i do write a bit more. I've written the EP-book and the Open Source for entrepreneurs article (see earlier entries) and have some nitwit to nerd stuff on this site. Every few months i write some funny/serious mix for the basketballclub magazine. And once in a while i react on something political.
About politics and society in general: lately i got quite fed up with some things and people not understanding them. Just one sentence in an e-mail i got triggered me into a little outburst of frustration (i wasn't even that conscious of the buildup) writing most of it down and hitting Send before i knew it (hope i didn't scare her with the reply, which was not much on topic). I wasn't too happy with it, though the activity of writing and how it relaxed were good. When reading in an article by Joel Spolsky about practicing writing, maybe in a blog, i knew what to do. And some remarks by Kurt Cagle, who can turn high-tech into understandable sometimes even philosophical stories, motivated me more. So, i'll be writing more (here)
My name in the press
After coming back from SVG Open 2004 in Tokyo, Japan and telling my friends "Tokyo is quite a nice village" :-) i was interviewed, resulting in this university newspaper article on SVG Open and meopen source for entrepreneurs
For an innovating university course (video-conferencing, internet-forum, etc.), that was meant to stimulate into become more entrepreneurial, i wrote “open source for entrepreneurs”. I liked the course a lot. Roel Pieper, Wim Dik and Sicco Santema can really tell some insightful stories.Singing Vector Graphics
I want my, I want my, I want my SVG.With a little help of Metallica and Dire Straits i wrote 2 songs about SVG: “Nothing else renders” and “Redmond gets suffrin'”. I'd like to record them too.
organizing SVGopen 2005
Most people want SVG, but just don't know it yet.I'm letting them know.
visited FOSDEM, Brussels
There and back took over 13 hours of traveling, but it was worth it.I was attending Mozilla things only. I liked the presentations, especially Application development in Mozilla by Alex Fritze.
Had some interesting conversations with developers and Mozilla Europe people. I wrote a messy report on eu.mozdev.org
‘My EP-book’ was presented to the rector
As an experienced member of the EnschedePloeg-UT i am at least quite familiar with how this team works and how it is organized. For the first time working at a production (concert/show/etc) is a big step and to be well prepared for it, the idea was to write a book about all the aspects involved.I did the content: some i wrote myself, for the parts i knew experts i invited them as guest-writers. I like information management: figuring out what the book should be, in order to maximize the wished effect (a bit ofreader psychology :-) ). Retrieving the information and combining it into one congruous piece of work. It was really interesting to get so many very different people to help on the project.
During a day of workshops i could finally show my parents what this work is about and in the evening the first EP-book (cover) was presented to the rector of the University of Twente.
PS: after this project i swore of Microsoft Word. I use OpenOffice now (handles PDF, MS documents, etc.).
“Programming is gardening...
..., not engineering ”An interesting article about misconceptions regarding programmers
(A good learner when you have to talk to programmers, a recognition of nice wording for programmers).
Another article from Bill Venners, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas that might bring programmers and non-programmers in more understanding: Programming close to the domain
“The internet is stupid”
And isn't it great, just because of that? (I know i love to KISS).“World of Ends” is a good explanation of the internet and with that of why some attempts of using it keep coming and failing (no technobabble)
SVG dead-end ?!?
“Whatever happened to SVG?” was the title of an article that ended with “SVG - wave of the future, or dead-end format?” which was a strong enough inivitation for me to react.OV-fiets
OV-fiets: Makkelijk, niet duur.Hoeft natuurlijk niet in combinatie met ander openbaar vervoer.
Voor als je effe zonder werkende fiets zit....
power to the people
The hydrogen revolution, TV documentaries on-line (dutch subtitles)part 1: The energy source of the future
part 2: The clean freedom
(source: http://tegenlicht.vpro.nl)
started steltenpower.com
should reflect liking to share the power of openness and (software) technology, especially smart combinations that make it easy to grasp and apply powerfully.1st SVG experiment: film credits scroll
Presentation of the names of students that finished their first year at university. It's started from a page containing the names it uses.Super short code.
About
“steltenpower” is what a spectator shouted when i smashed someone's lay-up high to the backboard years ago, and is used as my basketball-nick since. As a wonderful combination of speed, gentle touch, power, tactics, agression and teamplay, and still lots of room for personal improvement, basketball is a great fanatic hobby. Another hobby is information juggling, often webdevelopment. Though web-experimenting is my favorite, i also create complete solutions for personal use, the greater good, or people hiring me and my open standards advocacy. Yes, I try to combine work and hobby and as i like variation: I sometimes also work at stadium concerts and festivals, where my colleagues and i assist in light, sound, power, rigging and general production. Variation keeps you sharp and creative on how things and people work. The web is all about cooperation, isn't it great? I like having a good overview (abstracting where possible), and with “stelten” (dutch for stilts or long legs) that is wel possible.
