Bruno Unna

A very interesting article about the psychology behind the act of cursing has appeared at the New York Times.

In my opinion, those who at all times refrain from cursing are denying themselves the opportunity to get in touch with [perhaps not so] basic states of the mind, to get relaxation from the expression of own's feelings, to discriminate between the good use of the language and the loose one.

I find interesting the fact that my three years old daughter, my dearest Sophie, can already curse. She does so in increasingly accurate contexts, and she knows what words are appropriate for every place and which ones are only to be spoken with the family. A three years old little girl! What this tells me is the very basic and extremely important role that cursing plays, as a part of the expresiveness supposedly assigned to human languages.

A final reflexion on the matter: what language do we curse on? At a first thought, I would say that mother tongue is the best resource. But what is the reason behind that? And what happens when I find myself using the word "fuck" as it comes as naturally to my mind as it comes any other mexican curse?

Igor Kholodov has a son (at least). Me too.

Igor is a programmer. Me too.

He is interested in teaching his son how to program (see Juan's ideas on the basic, cultural character of the programming skills). Me too.

He created a board game, called c-jump, that helps him in the endeavour.

I want this game!

Dice Sebas que este angelito usa chicheros de 11 millones de dólares.

Si tal cosa es cierta, es impresionante la fenomenología económico-social contemporánea. Si no lo es, la fenomenología impresionante es la psico-social.

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del.icio.us tags:
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Microsoft's greatest comedian, Mr. Steve Ballmer, has entertained us with this words (in Busines Week):

The output of our innovation is great. We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web.

I haven't had such an amusing time since the days in which the other great comedian at Microsoft, Mr. Craig Mundie, spoke about GPL.

Thank you, Microsoft, for sharing with us your humor!

Very kindly, Juan has pointed me to one of the most enlightening web logs I've found on the matters of metadata and metainformation: tagsonomy.com.

Particularly interesting is the critique of tags as a classification system disregarding the total cost of information retrieval:

Last week Ian Davis wrote an interesting post on Why Tagging is Expensive:

On the surface tagging seems to offer a new paradigm of organising information, one that reduces the cost of entry and so enables a long tail of participation to emerge. I’ve come to realise that the cost isn’t removed, instead it’s displaced and possibly increased. Tagging bulldozes the cost of classification and piles it onto the price of discovery.

There’s a saying I’ve heard once or twice (I wish I could attribute it): “The cost of metadata is in its application, but the value of metadata is in its use.”

Not exactly something you’ll be quoting at dinner parties, but it nicely captures the cost/benefit gaps of metadata.

The arguments against professional classification (including Clay’s views on tagging) have almost always worked on the cost side of the equation. Automated indexing, search and now tagging are seen as ways drive down classification costs. But as Davis explains, classification costs are only one part of the system:

In my view the total cost of an information retrieval system is the cost of classification plus the cost of discovery. In the formal classification world you have a very small number of people incurring a high cost in order to reduce the costs incurred by a very large number of people. In contrast the tagging world has the unit costs reversed: it’s cheap to classify, expensive to find. But the numbers of people involved are large in both cases so you end up with a lot of people paying a tiny cost to classify added to a lot of people paying a high price to discover. I think it’s pretty likely that the total cost is going to end up much higher than in the classification scenario.

Here’s an analogy. I visit a lot of thrift stores. The true cost of an item in a thrift store is a function of the time it takes me to find it, not the price (which is always cheap). A very large thrift store is more likely to have what I want, but at a greater discovery cost. Like del.icio.us, a thrift store is great for serendipitous discovery but not so good for known item retrieval. Put another way, del.icio.us wouldn’t be your first choice if you needed articles on Rousseau and the French Revolution, just like the Sally Ann wouldn’t be your first choice if you needed a smoking jacket, size 42T.

Where I think Davis might be wrong is suggesting that the discovery costs are shifted back to the user. In fact, the costs are shifted to search, blogs and other more efficient discovery tools. In large part this is because the domain of tagging systems has been the “big messy” web.

In that case, the “classicial” economics of information retrieval don’t apply because there are often multiple ways of finding things. Or because Google can radically lower your discovery costs by selling keyword advertising to offset their infrastructure. Or because algorithms can do much of the heavy lifting. Or because users’ expectations are for “just good enough” results. Or because users are not interesting in finding so much as tracking. And so on.

But I’d argue that once the domain is constrained–by subject, by context, by user population, by privacy/security, by business goals, or by those things in combination–the economic prinicples of classification and retrieval come back into play. Because other discovery tools are either not available or not optimal, poorly designed retrieval systems do shift the burden back to the user. (Karl Fast’s thoughts on problems in the middle are worth a read here).

In that middle ground–and the “big messy” web contains probably millions of cases where local structure is valuable, not to mention information systems that aren’t part of the “big messy” web–I think there’s a large area where a mixture of emergent, algorithmic, formal and now social classification systems will make for optimal retreival.

Thanks, Juan!

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David Heinemeier Hansson (Ruby on Rails) complains about the slowness with which the web-startups are gaining mass in Europe.

Interesting observation, but I would like to extend the observation of the phenomenon to my own country: Mexico. I would like to say, besides, that the third-world mentality takes the additional toll of having corporate IT minds bought by big corporate offers. Microsoft, Obstacle^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hracle, and the like.

DHH writes:

Why does France just have of 5 people working professionally with Rails, Germany 13, while the US have 130+? Is there really a notion of "old Europe" when it comes to innovation and the web?

As just one Dane with one set of opinions, let me give you my half-baked hypothesis: We have it all too cozy. There's not a lot of incentive to "get out of the ghetto" when the governmental care is so good. It's too easy to remain complacent in a stable job at a stable company that's not your own. Europeans simply lack the motivation to reach higher for themselves.

Well, that perhaps explains why Europeans are not moving at the fast pace one could expect from them, but how about mexicans? Are we too cozy, as well? I honestly don't believe it. I think the case here has to do with a lack of respect for ourselves. Perhaps the 500+ years of external domination?

Sebastian brought into my attention the existence of blogpoll, a tool for bloggers to add polls to their blogs.

In order to test the concept and to have some fun (à la gringa) I've set up a poll in my blog. You'll find it in the right sidebar. It doesn't make much sense, but it doesn't have to, anyway.

Ben Goldacre, writer for Guardian Unlimited, writes very accurately:

...

Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely - since they'll be the ones interested in reading the stuff - people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it's edited by a whole team of people who don't understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given "science communication" chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they've got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.

...

It is indignant the way science is treated by mass media. It is good that someone is trying to do something about. But what can we expect when people believes in the horoscope?

A category system I've shamelessly borrowed from Wikipedia, selecting from that one those that please my taste the most.

This is an opportunity to put to test the usefulness of such a thing, from my extremely personal vantage point. And interesting is to take notice that I'm intending to derive some good knowledge from this experience, in order to exploit it later on, in the truth project.

Sebastian has just put a very interesting link in his blog, related to an extremely well thought course about Linux, in Mexico City.

Good reading!

Technorati: curso linux.

Last Monday I wrote about the adoption by the commonwealth of Massachusetts of the OpenDocument standard, and how good it was from the "free as in free software" perspective.

Now I've read an anecdote I found by means of Jon's blog, which illuminates the issue from a more "pragmatic" point of view.

It says:

An XML spreadsheet parable

Amidst the controversy over XML formats for office documents, it's important not to lose sight of the fundamental benefits that accrue simply from using XML. Michael Tiller has a nice ancedote that drives home the point. Here's the setup: a small engineering firm, Excel expense reports, each must be dispensed on demand to an employee and coded with a unique number. And here's what Michael did:

I took the Excel spreadsheet she gave me (in .xls format) and wrote it out in Microsoft's new Excel XML format. Then I uploaded it to the Zope server and turned that XML into a Page Template. Then, I could apply any TAL transformation I wanted to it.

Very cool.

So, I created a very simple Gadfly database that keeps track of expense report requests so that each one would get a unique ID and then I wrote a tiny Python script to generate the unique ID based on the state information in the database. Once all this was in place, I just added a very simple set of TAL directives to the original template and viola...each request generates a unique Excel document. [Michael Tiller: XML, web services, and business processes]

TAL is the Zope Template Attribute Language. It's used by Zope-based content management systems, like Plone, to enable XML or XHTML documents to function as CMS templates. The output of a transformed template is, of course, normally a web page. Here it's a spreadsheet. Michael notes that downlevel Excel clients can't read it but, when Office 12 makes XML the default format, this downlevel support should appear for pre-Office 2003 versions.

The Plone scenario is, of course, just one of a million different ways to skin this particular cat. And that's a huge win regardless of how the format tussle plays out.

What I like about this tiny example is that it's representative of how spreadsheets are mostly used in the real world -- to do simple things, like add columns in expense reports. Whether or not Microsoft decides to officially support the OpenDocument format, it's hard for me to imagine that transformations between it and Excel's SpreadsheetML -- for all the basic functionality, at least -- won't be trivial and ubiquitous.

Granted, I've internalized the idea of XML transformation to the point where I tend to regard two formats related by a transformation as, effectively, the same thing. But that's precisely the point. It's just data. Exposing it as XML matters more than how exactly we do that.

La ortografía no es un lujo.

Si queremos, como «hackers», ocupar un lugar de alguna relevancia dentro de la sociedad, debemos mostrar a la misma que tenemos la capacidad de interactuar con ella.

¿Acaso los programadores de Perl, con toda la flexibilidad que el lenguaje les otorga, están por encima de su sintaxis? ¡Claro que no! ¿O los de Python? ¿O los de Java? ¿O los de cualquier otro lenguaje? ¿Por qué tener el cuidado de respetar las reglas del lenguaje cuando se habla con máquinas, y no cuando se habla con humanos? ¿Será que los humanos somos menos valiosos?

¿Cuesta trabajo cuidar el idioma? Sí. ¿Toma tiempo? Por supuesto. ¿Vale la pena? Yo opino que es innegable. Pero cada cabeza es un mundo.

Kathy Sierra, acute and accurate as she always is, writes about the importance of well-writing, through the attention to the way one talks.

This reminds me of a guy selling a course to write books in a fast, very fast manner (at least that is his claim): Steve Manning. In his site: Write a Book Now (which admittedly looks like a deception point) he says very interesting things. And one of them, his first and most important advice, is just that: write just the way you talk. Do it fast. Do it with no second thoughts.

I've just read this in zdnet:

The commonwealth of Massachusetts has proposed a plan to phase out office productivity applications from Microsoft and other providers in favor of those based on "open" standards, including the recently approved OpenDocument standard.

The state described the plan in a posting made to its Web site earlier this week as part of a public review process which ends Sept. 9. Massachusetts agencies have until Jan. 1, 2007, to install applications that support the OpenDocument file formats and phase out other products.

By then, agencies must have applications that save documents in that format by default. Massachusetts will also sanction use of Adobe Systems' Portable Document Format (PDF) format, which it says "meet(s) criteria of openness and (is) therefore considered acceptable at this time." Documents need to adhere to a version of PDF that supports XML.

I'm very happy about it. It reminds me of a document Richard Stallman wrote for answering to people who send attachments in closed formats.

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Why should we use our own means to build truth.fruxant.com?

A very funny animation has been sent to me by my good friend Julio: how the vi editor would seem if it has been made by Microsoft: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/marigan?entry=how_the_vi_editor_would

During a long time I had an integration problem between Mozilla Firefox and my email client: KMail.

Firefox insisted that when following mailto: links it would launch evolution, no matter what. But I don't use evolution, I use KMail, I use KMail, I use KMail!

At long last, I found this extension, which allows me to follow mailto: links without launching an external composer. Instead of that, it opens a new window/tab to compose the letter using a web interface. It supports a wide range of services, including those I use: horde, gmail, yahoo mail and -I have to admit it- the very ugly hotmail.

I would gladly recommend it to anyone not willing to use a heavy, cluttered external client program.