8 TED talks that will inspire you.

1. Shilo Shiv Suleman: Using tech to enable dreaming

Technology makes a lot possible. A lot of things that we used to dream of are now possible. It's nice that we have these possibilities now, but the reality removed our dreams. This talk gives just one example, of how technology could re-enable 'dreaming'.

2. Kevin Allocca: Why videos go viral

Many videos have gone viral: Benton, Nyan cat and numa uma, to name just a few. But when you concider that there is 24 hours of video uploaded to youtube, you have to come to the realization that it's a very small percentages of those videos that go viral. What makes a viral video?

3. Jenna McCarthy: What you don't know about marriage

Maybe not as inspiring, but interesting at least.

4. Jeffrey Kluger: The sibling bond

Not a new idea, but an important one, showing the importance of the sibling bond. I find many statements from this video to be true in my own family: My older brother does have a higher IQ than I do, but I, especially as a child, had a bigger inclination to be creative with language and wit, but most importantly, when I have a problem, when I need help, my sibings are the first people I'll go to, because I know that I can trust them, and they can trust me.

5. Paul Conneally: Digital humanitarianism

Advancements in technology can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian actions. This talk shows how technology improved help after the earthquake in Haiti, and many more examples. I hope this talk ispires people to set up more of these tools. It is important that people in as many parts of the world as possible, get more tech savvy, as data that can help humanitarian organizations, can most easily be gathered, shared and visualized, by local people.

6. Paul Lewis: Crowdsourcing the news

This talk shows how anyone can help bring the truth to the daylight, when journalists start crowdsourcing journalism.

7. Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"

The internet is become more and more personalized. Sites attempt to algorithmically determine what we want to see. There's such a big stream of information coming at us, that these sites try to filter it for us, prioritize it for us. But that also means that we don't see the stuff that gets filtered out. And this can get dangerous.

8. Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web

A nice look into the possible future of the web. I only see one flaw in this talk. When Kevin talks about the growth of the eb, he doesn't concier limits. Moore's law will not be applicable for an infinite ammount of time. As soon as we're at the atomic scale for transistors, it might take us longer than 2 years to double the ammount of computing power, unless we don't follow his model of going back to centralized computing, and embrace the model of decentralized computing even more. Instead of everyone's devices being just a portal, the devices could be actively participating cogs in the machine, helping the computation. Idle machine cycles could be used for computations for others. A massive computing grid. But this talk is just mindblowing, and makes you think of the future of the internet and the web in a very broad way.

How Far Can Humor Go?

I'm writing this post after hearing the sensational news about Frankie Boyle's joke, talking about Katie Price and her son Harvey. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, this video will show you what all the fuzz is about.

If you wanna shoot without hurting anyone, don't aim at anyone.

I'm quite tolerant to most kinds of humour. I don't mind people making fun of groups of people, of stereotypes,... I'm visually impaired, but I can still see the fun in jokes about the blind, although I find it even funnier when they strike back.

However, if Stevie Wonder would break his legs by tripping over a cable or something, and Frankie Boyle would make fun of that, I wouldn't be as amused. In other words, when you're talking about a certain group, you're not really attacking anyone imho, whereas by targetting just one person ore family, the joke hits much harder.

Be warned, know what to expect

On the other hand, when watching a Frankie Boyle show, you should know what to expect, and tere are always notices about harsh content. When you think you're going to offend someone, give them a warning, so they can choose wether they can handle it. For example, in a debate on free speech, one of the founders of wikipedia talks about the controversy around images depicting mohammed on wikipedia. In this part of the debate, they're talking about wether and how these images, such as the Danish cartoons should be shown. Although in this case, they're talking about knowledge, and I'm just talking about humour, I still think part of the point still applies. People should be able to make jokes or listen to jokes about religion and other sensible subjects, but nobody should be forced to. Here's a link to the relevant part of the debate.

I know that a joke filter is quite hard to implement in daily life, but some common sense both in the case of the one who tells the joke, and the audience listening to the joke may get you on the right tracks. When you're in the middle of a group of black people, that you've never met before, don't know their history, and how tolerant they are to racist jokes, you probably shouldn't tell any. Whereas when you've been friends with a black guy for years, he'll probably know that when you tell a racist joke, you don't mean what you're saying. On the other hand, if you to a show from a comic who is known for not sparing people with different skin colors, when you can't stand racism, just makes no sense, and complaining about the contents makes you look like an idiot to me.

my revised view on GateKeeper

In Yesterday's post, I mentioned my feeling that gatekeeper was the start of a path to lock mac users into the app store, and limit the developer's freedom. However, this post, I found because of a quote on John Gruber's blog, changed my mind. I'm quoting two parts that I think are important here.

So, for a while, there was a great deal of consternation among Mac developers, including this author, that this might be the route Apple would take. In recent years, Apple has shown a trend of following the most hardline possible stance that will benefit users and Apple, often at the expense of developer freedom, and gradually backing in certain affordances (push notifications, for example) as user-impacting problems became evident. So it seemed feasible that we’d wake up one day and Apple would decree that all Mac apps must be sold through the App Store. But instead, Apple went to considerable effort and expense to find a middle ground.

This part, I was thinking about myself, but I leaned more towards the 'further lockin will come in the future' argument.

I have a personal flaw in the form of a small conspiracy theorist who lives in my head. He worried that this may have been created as just a temporary stepping stone — like Rosetta for the Intel transition, or Carbon for the OS 9 to OS X transition — and that one day, the Mac App Store-only option might still be enforced. But I can’t find it in me to disparage this goodwill effort that Apple has undertaken to not turn every third-party developer upside-down with regard to app distribution. To me it’s a great sign that they’re aware and at some level sympathetic to our concerns, while remaining committed to a high-security experience for users. Further cementing this feeling is the fact that we were invited to a private briefing at Apple about Gatekeeper a week before today’s announcement. Cabel was told point-blank that Apple has great respect for the third-party app community, and wants to see it continue to grow — they do not want to poison the well. I think their actions here speak even louder than their words, though.

this part completely took me over. If I had known about the meeting, I'd have thought differently.

Apple Reveals Mountain Lion

Apple gives us a sneak peak of the next OS in the animal kingdom of Mac OS X operating systems. They're bringing a lot of features from IOS to the mac, which makes sense, now that Apple has iCloud. Sharing files and data between systems becomes much more seamless, when the user experience gets unified.

iMessage on the mac, finally.

When Apple first announced iMessage, the first thing that came to my mind was how cool it would be if this would also integrate with iChat. What they're doing now, is completely replace iChat with iMessage. Although that only applies to the name. What they're actually doing is effectively merging the two applications, as iChat features such as chatting using Jabber and Google Talk will still be available. You can download the beta version of iMessage for Lion here. A minor detail, is that I'm not entirely sure wether they'll call the app 'Messages' or 'iMessage', as Apple uses them both in the sneak peak.

Synching is a hard problem.

Apple is also focusing on better integration of iCloud in the OS, so you can easily synch documents and data between different devices. Synching is a hard problem. Apple has always made it seem as if your computer is the canonical source of your documents. But this model gets harder when 'your computer' could apply to multiple desktops. I therefore hope, that they'll combine 'versions' from lion, with a more dropbox-like model, where changes are pushed to the cloud, and the cloud becomes the canonical source. I hope that the increasing role the cloud plays in Apple's products, will not strain their servers too much, but judging by the size of their data center, that won't be a problem (see video)

Don't forget to install that new OS with Reminders

Reminders, the app that helps IOS 5 users to get around the symptoms of early alzheimer, now comes to the mac as well. You can keep multiple lists of things you need to do, set due dates so that you receive notifications, when the deadline approaches. I hope they also integrate this with iCal, so that the due dates for reminders are shown there as well. You won't forget anything, even when you're on the go, as reminders are also synched using iCloud.

A Note-worthy OS

Mac OS x already had a notes application, but now, they're shaping the experience, to resemble notes on IOS, although the ability to stick notes anywhere on your desktop remains. There are also man more options for formatting, so you can add links, lists, images,... And it's all synched to the cloud.

Growl is not good enough, bring in the notification center.

The system of notifications popping up in the top right corner of your screen, has existed for quite some years now, it's called growl. Now, Apple is using the same, or a similar system to show alerts, but you can get an overview of all notifications that have popped up, in the notification center. Swipe to the right on your desktop to open it. Third party applications will also be able to add notifications to the list, but keeping the Facebook ticker in mind, I hope application developers, especially for social applications, won't overuse or abuse this feature.

Share what you like.

Sharing has been made easier in mountain Lion. The twitter integration in IOS 5 has been extended to the mac, and you'll also be able to easily share potos to flickr and videos to vimeo. I find it strange that Apple doesn't mention YouTube when it come to sharing video. Could this be because of Apple's sometimes rather negative relationship with google, strongly examplified by the discussion of Steve Jobs and Erir Schmidt, mentioned in the Steve Jobs bio? I also noticed that in the screenshot in the section about sharing, safari doesn't have a search box anymore. Dos this mean that safari finally gets an omnibar? I most certainly hope so, it might make me switch back from Chrome.

Who says the mac is not for gamers?

Game Center also comes to the mac, enabling game developers to have a nice high scores, achievements and multiplayer system, even with players on multiple platforms, although I'm afraid that the cross platform multiplayer option will mostly be used by turn-based games, as controlling a character or vehicle works significantly different on a toch screen, than using the arrow keys and mouse. I do hope that the game center will bring both more gamers and more games to the mac App store.

Keep your mac safer, and give Apple more money too.

Mountain Lion has an application called GateKeeper, which controls which apps you can download and run. You can set it to being able to download and install any apps, as you can do with Lion, you can set it to only accept apps associated with a 'trusted' Developer account, or you can set it to only allow only apps from the App Store. Off course, apple describes this as the safest setting. I'm usually not a conspiracy theorist, but to me, this feels very much like apple trying to lock customers into the apple ecosystem. I sincerely hope, that we won't have to jailbreak our laptops in the future, in order to install our favourite torrent client, virtual machine software,... The less safe option, of just checking apps for a developer ID will also bring in enough cash, as the developer program costs $99/year, a price which I'm not willing to pay at this point, although I might do this in the future. This also means that my opinions stated here, are formed based on what's written on the website. I have a free version of the developer account, but that doesn't allow me to download the developer preview :(.

中国苹果

Apple is also changing the user experience for their Chinese users. I quote Apple here, as my knowledge of the Chinese services is too limited to say anything useful about it.

OS X Mountain Lion brings all-new support for many popular Chinese services. And they’re easy to set up. Mail, Contacts, and Calendar work with QQ, 163, and 126. Baidu, the leading Chinese search provider, is a built-in option in Safari. The video-sharing websites Youku and Tudou are included in the new Share Sheets, so users in China can easily post videos to the web. They can also blog with Sina weibo, the popular microblogging service. And with improved text input, typing in Chinese is easier, faster, and more accurate.

I'm looking forward to the summer.

Not only because I like the sun much better than the slippery ice and snow, but also because that's the time this new OS will be released. I'm looking forward to playing around with all the new apps, but I'll be setting my GateKeeper settings to the least secure ones, I want to continue using my open source software.

how to install vinux on virtualbox (ubuntu variant for the visually impa...

Transcript

The following steps will help you install vinux on the free virtualbox virtual machine

1. Download the vinux cd-rom version from the vinux project website.


2. Download virtualbox from the oracle virtualbox website.


3. Install virtualbox, the installation instructions will be self-explanatory.


4. open your virtualbox installation.


5. click the 'new' button at the top of the screen.


6. Click 'continue' in the wizard that shows up.


7. Enter a name for your virtual machine


8. As the operating system, select Linux, for the version, select ubuntu, and click 'continue'.


9. Select the ammount of ram you want to give your virtual machine and click continue.


10. In this window, leave 'create new hard disk, and click 'continue'.


11. In the next window, leave the settings as they are (VDI file), and click 'continue'.


12. The option 'dynamically allocate memory' should already be selected, leave it at that and click continue.


13. If you want to,select a location for the virtual hard drive, but the default is fine. Select a size for it and click continue.


14. Review the settings and click continue.


15. The vinux operating system should now appear in the left column of the virtualbox window, double click it.


16. Click the file browser icon, and select the iso file you've downloaded from the vinux project website, and click continue.


17. Click continue again, and vinux will start.


18. Double click the 'install vinux' icon on the desktop.


19. Select your language and click 'forward'.


20. Select your timezone and click 'forward'.


21. Select your keyboard configuration and click 'forward'.


22. Select 'erase and use the entire disc' and click 'forward'.


23. Enter the information such as username, pasword,... for your user account. and click 'continue'.


24. Review the settings and hit install.


25. When the installation has completed, click 'restart now'.


26. You can now double click the vinux icon in virtualbox to launch vinux at any time you want.

If you have any questions, leave a comment below.

Does buggy software anger you?

A big trend in software in the last decade, is to put out software as soon as possible. The internet, and the world wide web in particular have made it possible for developers and software companies to push updates to their users, on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. Before the ned, software had to be burned onto a disc, which had to be packaged and shipped to a user, making updates to software was expensive.

Because it used to be expensive to get updates to clients, software had to be as close to perfect as possible before it was shipped to the customer. In today's world, as soon as the product is usable, it is put online, for milions of people to use. This is because of the 'fail fast' mentality that exists with developers and technology companies today. Instead of hiring lots of testers, they're crowdsourcing that to their customers. That doesn't mean they just ship any product without testing, but the cost of testing can be reduced by fixing bugs as they are encountered by the users. With a user base of 100.000 users, you're already doing more efficient testing than a team of 100 trained testers could do.

Is this a good approach? For software companies, it certainly is, for the reasons mentioned before, however, as a consumer, you don't want to see screens telling you about unexpected errors, corrupted data, or lost connections. When you use a product, you want it to work perfectly. You don't want to spend 10 minutes filling out a bug report with the details of exactly what you were doing when something broke.

But I agree with Jeff Atwood's post, where he states that shipping imperfect software is better, in order to help developers discover the unknown unknowns, discover where the software that worked in the sterile lab, wil crash in the real world, as long as developers actually listen to the feedback users give them. For companies, there's a tuff choice here. How much trouble can users stand before they loose faith in your software, or even your entire company? Many people stopped using siri, because it became unreliable. And,as a company produces more and more high quality products, the tolerance of users for quirks and bugs becomes lower. This may sound strange, as you'd think that as a company brings out more quality software, it deserves a bit more credit, but this is not how users think. Users want to get what they expect. If they expect a great product from a company, because it has a history of bringing out great products, they'll be much more shocked and angered, than, if they would get another flash version that crashed their browser, that's just business as usual. (sorry, adobe, but it's the truth).

Taking feedback

There are also companies that try to deliver a good user experience within the testing. Users don't like filling out forms, especially after they've just had a bad experience with crashing software. Tracking a user's behaviors, can lead to a lot of the data found in such bug reports or feedback messages. When google tracks what links you click on in a search result page, they can find out how effective their pagerank algorithm is. If you need to scroll down, or even go to later pages in search results, to find what you're looking for, that signals that the algorithm isn't finding the best content for your query.

The problem is that this doesn't help finding the unknown unknowns, you're not tracking something if you don't know you should be tracking it, so you still need some place, where users can enter textual, freeform feedback, which can contain data you otherwise wouldn't know about. The best way, I think, to take feedback is to use both. Track what you can, to spare users from typing in the operating system and version, the browser name and version, the type of connection they're on,...

ZEITGEIST: MOVING FORWARD | OFFICIAL RELEASE | 2011

5 Reasons You Should Join an Improv Theatre Group

Improvisation theatre, is a form of theatre in which you don't know what you'll play in advance. You just go on stage and invent a scene or even an entire play on the spot, often inspired by a suggestion from the audience. Although it might seem nerve wracking to go up on stage, not knowing what you're going to do, it's actually much easier than participating in a traditional play, where you need to know lines and lines of text by heart. Even though you don't need rehearsals, improv groups still have training sessions, in which you learn the skills you need to create scenes and stories that will engage the audience. Many techniques you learn during these trainings will benefit you in the rest of your life. Here are 5 reasons you should join an improv group.

1. Forget your sorrows for one evening

In the lives of most people, there is a lot to worry about: Your boss isn't happy because sales are dropping, and is pushing everyone to work harder, your kids aren't doing well at school, it's 3 days before christmas, and you still haven't bought all the presents,... Many ways exist to free your mind of all these thoughts that prevent you from having peace of mind, and a good night of sleep. For me, and for many other people, playing improv theatre forces you to do just that. It forces you to focus on what you're playing., your only thoughs are about the story, and how you act and react to what other players do. At the start of an improv session, you usually have some warmup games. These games help the players to free their mind from unwanted thoughts, and as esoteric as it sounds, make them focus on the here and now.

2. Get rid of fear of failure

Unless you play long-form improve, where you improvize e an entire play at once, or at least a store that's longer than just one scene, most of the scenes you'll play will be based on a given format. Most of the formats that are played in front of an audience are meant to put the players in a difficult situation, to see how they get out of it. For the audience, nothing is funnier then seeing the player fail at what they try to do, everyone laughs and the show continues. A common example of this, is called the alphabet game. In this game, two players play a scene, in which they take turns to say something. However, the first player's sentence has to start with an 'A', the second player then has to say something that starts with a 'B' and so on. Tension builds up in the audience as the game gets to letters like X or Z, where players are probably going to stumble. If the player says a line that starts with the desired letter, you usually get applause from the audience. If you fail to, the audience has a good laugh, and the scene continues. This game is often played in two teams, standing in two rows. If a player fails, he is sent to the back of the row, or to the side of the stage, to see which team runs out of players first. Quite a lot of time is spent in improv training, to teach players that failure isn't bad, and in most cases even amusing. It gets even more fun when the audience gets to be the judge, for example in a game called 'story, story, die!'.

3. Learn to be a be flexible and adapt quickly.

A scene in improv theatre is never the product of one mind. While you're playing, you might have an idea in your head of where the story is going, but some other player may come in, and change the whole thing around This may be very small things like when you're making the movement of chopping a tree, and someone runs on the stage yelling 'homerun!', because the movement looked like you were swinging a baseball bat. This changes the entire story around, and you'll need to adapt.

4. Learn to be a team player.

As we've seen in the previous section, any player has the power to change the scene completely. However, the goal of the actors is to work together as a team to create a nice scene. That's why, anytime you do something in the scene you'll do it because you want to advance the story, or add something to it. One of the problems you often see in scenes is called blocking, which means saying 'no' to anything other players try to bring to the scene. This may be literally answering 'no' to a question like "let's go to grandma's house', but it may also be far mr more subtle. For example, if you're not paying attention in a scene because you're not focussed, you may not notice, and therefore ignore a lot of opportunities your co-players are trying to bring to the scene. As an example of that, let's say you're playing a scene in a kitcen, and you're angry at your son because he always makes a mess of his room. While you're rambling on about how dirty his room is, an other player may drop a sharp knife on his foot. If you're so concentrated on your ramble, you may not notice it, and the opportunity for the development of the story gets lost. By training your attention to what others are bringing to the table, and your ability tp bring things to the table that bring the team towards the goal, you'll become a much better team player.

5. Get rid of stiffness, become playful

I don't mean stiffness in the physical sense. As you grow older, you loose the ability to play, to experiment. You go with the crowd, just do what everyone else is doing, don't stand out too much. In impro, you'll often be crawling over the floor, playing a talking dog, or hopping around playing a superhero with springs on his shows, and it's absolutely ok. You can release the child within you, break the grey barriers of what we consider 'normal', and just go do something crazy and creative. This really helps break the monotonicity of our lives. I usually leave from an improv training, much happier and energized than I came.

Wrapping up.

I hope that you'll now want to start playing improv theatre, because i'm certain that you'll love it, and become as enthusiastic as I am. Just type 'improv theatre' and the name of your city into your favorite search engine, and find an improv group near you. If you're of the competitive type, you can also look for theatresports. It's a very fun form of improv, which usually leads to a very fun competition.

P.S. Don't say "I can't do this because I'm too ...". I'm visuallly impaired, and I'm still doing this. This is something anyone can participate in!

10 things that irritate me about apple's otherwise perfect products

I'm a huge apple fan(boy). I like most of their products because of their accessibility and ease of use Whenever I'm working on a windows machine or other OS, I miss the 2 finger scrolling, and the drag&drop anything anywhere mentality. However, there are a couple of things that annoy me about apple products. And as people are usually much better at pointing out what's bad than what's good, I'm going to take the easy route here, and go on a nitpicking journey through my experience with Apple products.

1. News stand can not easily be put into a folder.

I like having all my apps neatly organized into folders. This gives me a quick way to find anything, without having to type in the search box to search through all of my apps. There's only one problem. Newsstand won't go into a folder, or at least not in the way that we all got accustomed to for other apps. There is a way to do it, but you need to be very quick, newsstand doesn't work for as long as it is located in a folder, and the trick is impossible to do while using voiceOver :(.

2. the iPhone media player controls

A lot of apps on IOS devices use the standard media playing interface. The problem is that since the introduction of airplay, the buttons are closer together than they used to be. Especially in audiobooks and podcasts, where your current position in a track is saved, accidentally pressing the 'previous track' button is irritating, as it puts you back to the start of the track, making you loose your saved position. Marco Arment has an excellent suggestion on his blog on how this could be solved.

3. There's no setting for when to warn me about a low battery

Less is more, that has always been one of apple's design principles, and they also take this approach when it comes to the customizability of the system. A great deal of the ease of use of apple's products comes from the lack of things you can do wrong.

However, in this case, I believe an extra option would be nice, a way to set at what percentage of battery life, a low battery warning should be shown. By default, it shows the warning when there are 10 minutes of usage left. For me, that's way too long. I'm a huge procrastinator, if I don't need to do something now, I'll do it later. I want that message to be shown to me when there's only 1 minute left, so that I need to plug it in immediately.

It would be even better to have the option of setting multiple warnings, one 10 minutes in advance, and 1 one minute in advance would be perfect for me. This way, I wouldn't start a game of portal, forgetting about the dialog I've just seen, only to see the screen go black in the middle of a battle against GLaDOS.

4. Modal dialogs should darken the background

The battery warning problem brings me to the next problem. This may be too much nitpicking since it only applies to a small audience, but when you're using a mac when a modal dialog such as the low battery dialog pops up, while you're using the screen magnifier, you can't click on anything but the dialog. This can be confusing when the dialog is not in the part of the screen thats currently visible. I therefore think that the background behind modal dialogs should be darkened, to draw the eye towards the dialog, and to notify the user of such a dialog, when the part of the screen containing the dialog box is not currently visible.

5. Arrow key navigation within dialogs

currently within a dialog, you can use the tab key to switch the focus between options, but you can't navigate by simply using the arrow keys. I find using the arrow keys much more intuitive than repeatedly pressing tab to navigate around. I also believe that in order to be able to use the tab navigation in any dialog, you need to select this in the keyboard options section of your system preferences, otherwise, tab navigation is only available in dialogs containing a text input.

6. The edges on the macbook pro used to be way too sharp

I was 'unlucky' enough to buy my macbook pro in 2010, at least in so far you can be unlucky having bought a macbook pro, but mine has edges that are way too sharp, right where my wrist rests. In the winter, that's not a problem, as my sleeves protect me against them, but in the summer it's a pain in the ... umm, wrist. The 2011 model however, does have the edges rounded off. To see the change, and a video on how to fix this edgy problem, look here.

7. The icons in the finder sidebar should regain their color.

I don't fully understand what Apple is trying to do with the new lok in mac os;x lion. They took aay the candyland colored widgets, but put much more color into apps like iCal and Adress book. One of the places where I don't like the monochrome look, is in the finder sidebar. It takes longer now to find a specific icon, as the icons don't stand out as much as they used to. For those who agree with me on this issue, there is a solluiton, as given to me as an answer on the apple stackexchange site.

8. VoiceOver on IOS skips letters when the speech tempo is high.

As a visually impaired, I like using VoiceOver on my iPhone. I've tried using the magnifier, but on a screen that is already so small, seeing only a part of the interface really makes it hard to use. However, I don't want to loose too much speed in navigation. This can usually be solved by putting the sspeed of the speech near the maximum. However, on my iPhone, the speech just skips characters when I do this. It also has other quirks at normal speach, for example saying ww.w.domain.co, when the text actually is www.domain.com. I have no idea what's going on there, but it's very annoying.

9. Making custom ringtones is too hard

I know that apple wants to attract businesses, who can earn money using their platform, but certain things should just be left open for the user. Tethering is one of these (my carrier doesn't allow it), making ringtones is another. If you would like to make you're own ringtones, here's how.

10. Developers should be more encouraged to put VoiceOver hints on buttons

When using voiceover, you canput your finger on a button to hear the text on it. However, many developers use images as their buttons, and then give the image an undescriptive name. The name of the image (or the button element, not exactly sure) is spoken when there is no button text, but in such a case, what you hear just doesn't make sense. Sometimes, you even just hear 'button'. Nice to know that there's a button, but what will it do; blow up my phone? store my entire contact list in a company's database? I understand that for certain apps, especially games, normal vision is required, and therefore voiceover support is not very important. But for many other apps, the audience could be increased, if the developers would make sure that they could use the app with their eyes closed.

What grinnds your gears?

Is there anything apple related, or even just technology related that's really grinding your gears? Leave your frustrations as a comment below.

thanks, Jeff Atwood.

As a programmer, you sometimes encounter problems that you don't find the solution to on your own, and as we all know, the internet is a place full of spam and porn, with some really valuable information hidden in between. Stack Overflow, and later the rest of the stackexchange network, succeeded where many others (yahoo answers, expertsexchange, the millions of forums out there) failed, create a Q&A site with content that actually made the internet better.

This stack of valuable information was founded by Jef Atwood, and Joel Spolsky. These guys did some great work, involving the community in nearly every decision. After reading the Steve Jobs bio, where Steve's children describe how much they missed there father, who was spending all his time at Apple, Jeff decided it was time to step down from his daily work at StackExchange. He wrote a blog post about it, on  codinghorror.

What I think makes Jeff's work so great is his vision that the tools don't matter, it's how you use them. Prammers often get very religous about the tools they're using, focussing on the technology instead of the goal of the product they're building. Jeff and Joel have put a lot of thought in the principles behind stackoverflow, where i find the no-nonsense rule, which makes a much better signal to noise ratio, th e most important one. Everyone who makes a platform where people can interact seems to think that their platform needs some way to send private messages, a way to leave comments on people's profile, and some way to friend/follow people. What they don't realize, and what the people behind Stack Exchange did realize, is that socializing does not have to be part of an application. Stack overflow is not about making friends, networking,... It's about sharing and obtaining knowledge. By making the site slightly less social, they've also prevented the site from getting cluttered.

Another point I've learned from Jeff is how important gamification is in an online platform. Many sites give users credits points, badges, reputation, rankings,... but somehow, whenever I hear someone giving examples of gamification, I hear stackoverflow being mentioned.

For all the times I couldn't find that one bug, or had no idea how to implement that one feature, or had no idea how to structure that routine, and found help on stack overflow, I want to thank Jeff. I wish him the best of luck with his wife and children. And if someone takes the time to write a biography of him, he can be described as a loving and caring dad.

they should have invited jack the ripper

Are your parents bad with technology? It might be your fault.

I came up with the subject for this blog post while watching this video, where Chris Pirillo's says at one point that what makes technology hard for seniors, is that whenever they ask a question, one of these 'youngsters' goes: "oh, ok, do this, click here, type this,..." How the hell can people remember what to do when they aren't even confident in the environment they're working in?

When someone asks us a tech question, we tend to go over it very quickly, just go: "oh, that's easy, just do this, this, this and this", without realizing that it may not be as easy for them as it is for us. Some time ago, my sister taught my aunt how to import photos from her camera into some photo software on her pc. She stood behind my aunt, and told her where to click, where the cable should be plugged in, ... without ever doing anything herself, she just let my aunt do it. Last wednesday, my aunt came over to visit us, and as she came in, she told us very proudly that she had found out how to rotate photos.

Because my sister had only told my aunt what to do, without doing it for her, my aunt had built up much more confidence, working with the pc. Hands-on experience is very important. I'll try to do the same when I'm asked to teach my parents or other family member something, because i generally find it hard to just sit and watch while they try. It may take longer for them to rezach their goal, and it may take you more time, because you have to stay there longer, while they follow your instructions, but it'll be better for them in the long run.

big youtubers are cheating the system.

People want to make their own online content easier to find for their customers, even easier to find than the content of your competitors. People have been trying to make content look better for search engines from the moment these things existed. This practice is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO in short). There's nothing wrong with SEO, as long as it's beneficial to your users. The 'good' SEO practices are usually called 'white hat SEO', whereas practices that try to cheat the system, trying to look different to search engines then to users, or writing content that would look better for a search engine, but is harder to read for users, are called 'black hat SEO'.

The search box on youtube is a search engine too, and so pople that make youtube videos, especially the people who make a living off of them, will try to make their videos as easy to find as possible, striving to make the most viral video. There seems to be a trend in well-known youtubers, putting tags in their description. The description is a place where some informative text should go, not some ugly keywords.

I'm not specifically targeting the youtubers that I'm using as an example here, the fact that I'm subscribed to them shows that I like their videos, I'm only protesting against the practice of keyword-spamming the video description.

examples: (click the image to go to the youtube video

RayWilliamJohnson
tobuscus
and even the vlogbrothers in their scishow, which is strange, concidering that they don't spam the description in their main channel videos.

Ass a fan of the vlogbrothers, and therefore a proud nerdfighter, I value the pleasure of reading quality video descriptions, containing information that is actually useful to humans, not just getting you higher in the search results.

Piracy in China.

Congratulations to my brother, as I can now officially call him Doctor Creemers. Yesterday at 2pm, he successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on copyright infringement in China. He is looking for a way to publish the book he wrote, that complies with the policies of both Maastricht University, where he did the research for his thesis, and Oxford University, where he works now. As soon as there's a way you can get your hands on his work, I'll give him a shoutout here.

For those of you who go tl;dr quickly, his main point comes down to this: The chinese government regulates very strictly what types of media may be distributed. Therefore, the availability of information is low. People see opportunities to obtain, share and sell this information in an illegal way. This reduces profits for organizations that do sell media in a lega fashion, which again leads to a decline in availability, more piracy,... forming a vicious circle. This short explanation doesn't do much justice to the work he has done, but at least it gives an idea of what his thesis is about.

But also outside China, I find the idea of lack of availability of certain media, as a reason for piracy an interesting point to think about. I used to think of the opportunities to save or make money, as the main reason for pirating. I'm looking forward to more interesting works that my brother and others will publish in the future, as internet piracy becomes a very hot topic, with internet usage growing every second. Stopping piracy is a challenge, and the solutions that are currently being suggested such as SOPA are simply not the way to go.

5 Math Videos That Will Make Your Brain Explode

1. Is it possible for a human to generate a random sequence?

2. Plants do maths too!

This is part 1 in a 3 part series. The youtube channel is awesome, and full of things to do while you're bored in math class, but this series just amazed me.

3. Getting a sense for the scale of our universe using powers of 10

4. the beauty of prime numbers

5. This certainly adds another dimension to mathematics

Google's privacy policy: love it or hate it, it's how the web works.

A couple of days ago, google announced a change in their privacy policy. The new privacy policy has, what I call a human-readable version. Which I've red and agreed to. In a world where new technologies seem to arise every day, I understand that people are concerned with where their personal information goes. What irritates my though, is people shouting about abuse of their info, abuse of cookies and other technologies, without knowing what they're talking about. In this blog post, I'll try to explain the privacy policy, and give my opinion about it.

The new policy states what kinds of information google is is collecting. The really obvious part there, is what you type into input fields on google services. It seems logical to me, that if you type something into a form on a site, and hit submit, that you know that the site displaying the form will use that data in some way. If you don't want a site to know something about you, then don't type it into a form.

It gets more complicated when it comes to data gathered in less direct ways. It is logical that google keeps records of queries people typed into the search box. But analyzing those queries to know types of products you're interested in, and even logging the links in the search results, and other usage data, that gets a little scary. I can imagine that you don't want google to know that you're searching for a lawyer, which you'll need for your upcoming divorce. And this is where it becomes a matter of truest. In google's privacy policy, they also state how they will use the data they collect. The data will never be shared with other companies or individuals without your explicit permission. And therefore, I think it is no problem that google knows that I'm getting divorced (for the record, I'm not, I don't even have a girlfriend at the moment.) There's nothing thhat could be harmful to me, that google could do with this data without breaking their policy, nor would it be in google's intrest to do so.

What's new in the policy, is that the data is combined across services. This means that any data you marked as publicly visible data on one service, can also be publicly visible on other services. Anyone who knows your email may be shown this publicly visible information (profile image, name,...) If you don't want this single identity in different services, you can still make different accounts for different services.
This may be inconvenient, but remember that most of google's services are free, you're not paying them for convenience... wel, you are paying them indirectly, by allowing google to show you ads. And now we get to the most controversial part, ad targetting.

Most of google's services are free, because google uses ads to bring revenue. The more people use their services, the more people will see the ads. Free services obviously bring more viewers, and thus more $$$. Many advertisers don't pay just for views, but for actual clicks on the ad. Therefore, it's important for google to show you ads that are relevant to you. They use the data they gather, to select ads that you'll probably like. I'm a nerd, especially interested in the web. So it's not unlikely for me to earch on google for things like web hosting, programming languages or web design techniques. I notice that as my interests shift from one domain of web development, the ads do too. And I personally like that. I'd rather see an ad that's interesting to me, than getting screen estate taken away by an ad for viagra, I certainly don't need that. Best of all would be to have no ads at all, but then I'd have to pay for the service I'm using, they need some income to keep the servers running.

I save lots of money by not buying any magazines. I only read blogs and news sites, and I get all the information I'd get from the magazines, but for free. I like the business model of ads much better, than a paid subscription, and I do not mind ad networks such as google adsens, using data I've provided, to show me ads that are relevant to me. I don't find that abuse of my data, and I'll continue to give google my data, so they can keep their datacenters running. I love gmail, I'm a huge fan of google+, and I couldn't live without youtube. If google wants to use my data to provide me with more interesting ads, so that I can keep using these services, I'll gladly keep giving my information.

however


Google is in a very strong position. Many internet companies rely on google to exist. They need the visitors google brings. Visitors would otherwise have no way to find them. Some have adsense as their only source of income. In my opinion, this isn't smart, you need to diversify, but still, some people don't do that. This brings google in a very strong position, you could call it a monopoly. Companies like that should by watched very closely. At this point, I don't see google doing anything wrong with the power they have, but as soon as i notice them, selling or even giving my info to third parties without my permission, I will delete my account.

Voice your opinion.

This is my first post on my blog. There are many more of these flying through my brain, waiting to come out some day. but what I'm writing here, is just my opinion, and my opinion is, and will never be set in stone. If anyone feels they can lead me to a point of view that is better, whatever that may mean, I encourage them to leave a response here, so we can have a nice discussion/debate.