People Don't Like Me

I got a link from Mr. XML himself, Tim Bray, on his blog, adding "you couldn't make this stuff up". Well Tim, I'm very honored and very impressed by that thoughtful comment.

Other people chip in too, for all responses check the comments here. Very few say nice things, probably because it's too much against the XML wave. The wave that people haven't dared to go against for 10 years now.

There's even a supposedly Japanese guy called Matz that talks about this in Japanese. Is this the matz guy that invented Ruby?

"$100" Laptop Porn Browsing

The project that used to be called the $100 laptop, which costs about $250 now I think, has launched and children in third-world countries are really enjoying these things.

From Reuters:

ABUJA, July 19 (Reuters Life!) - Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organisation have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported on Thursday.

NAN said its reporter had seen pornographic images stored on several of the children's laptops.

"Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials," NAN said.

Great project. Now I start to understand how they can make those laptops so cheap.

10 Years of XML: Global Warming

XML is almost 10 years old. 10 years, that is a long time. When it just came out, I thought it would be gone within a few months, but it wasn't. XML became popular because companies had to interact. Who has been making companies interact since the 70s, 80s, 90s? Programmers. And programmers are what? Lazy.

XML is the lazy person solution. It's easy, takes little time, but it's inefficient. I grew up with the idea that it is better to put a bit more effort into something at the beginning so that you would safe a lot of cost later. XML is the perfect example of something that does exactly the opposite. XML is simple. It's simple to write, it's simple to program with, but it is very verbose. Simple things take kilobytes of space. Why is that bad? Because it takes memory, processing power and bandwidth. You only have to program something once, but the memory usage, waste of CPU cycles and waste of bandwidth just keeps going on and on and on forever.

If people would just have invested into some protocols a tiny bit more, like XHTML, like SOAP, like RSS, like this hip new REST thing, they would have come up with more efficient protocols. Sure, the parsing would have been more difficult, but come on, we're IT people right? We're not sissies. Think about all the wasted resources, all the wasted energy.

People talk about global warming and energy waste. They should calculate how much of that can be blamed on XML. I think people would be surprised. Hundreds of thousands of servers are at this very moment wasting their CPU cycles and bandwidth, and with that their energy, on parsing and generating XML documents. Haven't we ruined enough with this already. Isn't it time to come up with more efficient data representation format?

Maybe Al Gore should make a documentary about that.

Reddit Laptop Auction

Two of the guys that started Reddit are now auctioning off the laptops that they used to build Reddit and are giving the money to charity, to the American Brain Tumor Association no less. Now the American Brain Tumor Association is a great organization, I'm not going to mean about that. I think it's great that they sell their old junk and give the money to charity.

One word to potential buyers, however: you're crazy if you buy this stuff. It's from the Reddit founders! Reddit is the whore house of the free software movement. Powerbooks are cool things (although filled up with GPL software), but these thing have been contaminated by nerdiness. If you put a bid on these things the only reason I can think of is the charity, well here's an idea: you can also give that money directly so you don't get to keep this junk in your house, plus the charity gets about $60 more because you save on shipping costs. Here's their website.

Just an idea.

Kaboom!

Some cool things you just don't do enough, because you simply don't get the opportunity. One example of this are blowing up stone mines (wish there were such a thing as a free software mine):



Source.

Go Steve!

I'm a long time reader of Fake Steve Jobs' blog and often agree with him. Of course he's still a tree hugger and uses GPL software in his operating system. But you know what, I can forgive him that. Nobody's perfect (with a few exceptions). He often takes shots at people and companies that other people only cheer at. Plus he uses great pictures when shooting:



Today it's Google's turn to be shot at. Admitted, I do use their blogging platform (as does Steve, don't get why, can't he use .Mac or something?), but for the rest they pretty much suck (too much investment in open source for one). So, go Steve!

Finally Real Innovation: 3D Mail

Some things are just awesome:



Be sure to get the paid version though.