Learning how to code. I like the word “coding” more than “programming”; code is poetry
My first efforts were writing some lines of code in PHP. Now I’m learning LISP. Why? Because it is the granddaddy of computer languages. But there is more: I’m not finished yet learning PHP, and I am doing some very small projects – for learning purposes only – in the Mono development framework.

Yesterday I stumbled on Wagn, “Ruby on Rails, Wiki on Wheels”. This “Explore, Organize, Thrive” CMS seems to me the best application for a new project I am planning for my work. (Don’t ask…).
But…I need some knowledge of Ruby on Rails, as well as Git. Hm, that’s all rather arcane to me, but everything can be taught, so I picked up a book from the Public Library “Handboek Programmeren met Ruby en Rails” (in Dutch) by Ivo Balbaert and followed some online lessons at the Ruby Programming Language Website, that led me to another hands-on tutorial, written by why the lucky stiff, whoever that may be, but he describes himself as

…a fledgling freelance professor, one who will die young and make no lasting impression.

Rather modest, IMHO, because besides his beautiful website he also blessed the world with a funny book Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby – completely free!

Okay, I downloaded the One-Click Installer and wrote my first line of Ruby; “Hello World”, or something like that. Let’s see if I’ll get Ruby rolling.

Yesterday I finished this book, that I bought two weeks ago just because of the word “geek” in the title and a little bit tempted by the funny cover. When I started reading, it reminded me of “Freakonomics”, but “Geekspeak” is more diverse in the choice of the topics.
The cover promises to learn you how life + mathematics = happiness. Maybe that’s true, but I was thinking of Rudy Ruckers’ axiom that mathematics is nothing more than an algorithm to transform given facts into new knowledge. That is exactly what Tattersall does in his book, and while doing it he shows how much better it is (and how much more fun it can be) to think about the world around us and use your brain instead of losing it while just watching television.
So, for example, in chapter 21 “Idiot Calculus – What can you work out while sitting in a deck chair” he calculates how many sand grains fit in a children’s sand bucket (16 million) and when the job is done he continues:

Well, that feels better. The sand bucket is now fully understood and presents no threat to your peace of mind. But there are many other things that can be calculated as you laze in your deck chair.

The next project is calculating the speed of an airplane and then, never a moment of dithering, what weight of electrons has been delivered from Britain’s power stations. All calculations done while sitting in your deck chair on the beach (there’s nothing wrong with that!) and without using your computer or WolframAlpha. At the end of the chapter he finishes with

It’s time to leave the beach for home. I do hope there’s nothing incalculable on the way.

That is Geek Speak! Not the would-be “g33ksp34k” but the real down-to-earth “according to my calculations…” approach to satisfy your curiosity, to find the answers, to explain the world, to know just for the satisfaction of knowing.
Of course there is more to explore.

Life is a well of delight; but where the rabble also drink, there all fountains are poisoned.

This quote from Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” applies to the current state of the internet. Internet is great, but the overload of blogs and microblogs pollute the web. The surplus value of the internet as a means to exchange information is undone by the trouble you have to take to wade through the swamp of second hand information to find a single bit of news.
Nascent, Nature’s Blog on web technology and science, has an article about which web 2.0 services scientists use, written by Euan Adie. The conclusion is:

• Almost a third of Friendfeed scientists have delicious bookmarks. Don’t discount non-academic bookmarking services as a source of paper metadata.
• A similar number use the share functionality in Google Reader.
• Despite rumors to the contrary not everybody is on Twitter.
• A surprising (to me) number of people are uploading and favouriting items on Slideshare.

Hmm, I almost never use my Friendfeed account, although it is the easiest way to share online (as you can read on their own website) So, I’ll give it a little more attention from now on. I’ve subscribed to some groups like life-scientists. Of course I hope to learn from others, but I also share information I found on the web. Quid quo pro. Another way of viewing my web 2.0-activities is my Public Plaxo Pulse Stream, but this shows less services than Friendfeed. You can see how much and where I share conveniently arranged in a pie chart at my Geek Chart page, but this covers only a few services: this blog, Digg, Stumble, YouTube, LastFM, Delicious, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.
Yes, I’m on Twitter, but I still haven’t discovered what the hype is all about – except, of course, that it is all about exposing in public what you are up to. Somewhere in the world there must be some very interesting people, but usually those people are too concerned about doing their thing that they are not interested in launching their tweets into cyberspace. Proof me wrong; I still haven’t read one single tweet that changed my life – and I doubt if my own tweets are worth the trouble of writing (let alone: reading) them.
I like Delicious, although last year I transferred a lot of my bookmarks to Evernote. I think Evernote is a great tool for sharing information, but My Notebook at Evernote is not public. Another great service not mentioned in the Nascent article is Twine.
I think I’ll have to delve more into the possibilities of CiteULike, Connotea and Slideshare. I’ve seen some very interesting presentations on the Semantic Web. I wrote about that in an earlier post.

Hm…Too late I noticed that Nerdpride Day coincides with Towel Day. On this day, Geeks carry towels to honor Douglas Adams, the author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who passed away 11 May 2001, at the age of 49. According to the third chapter of the Hitchhikers Guide a towel is the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Hence its symbolic role in this celebration.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Some Geeks celebrate Towel Day with a performance of the Japanese Algorithm March

I enjoyed reading The Hitchhikers Guide, not only for it’s geeky humor, but I didn’t celebrate Towel Day, I use a towel everyday.
At Slashdot was a small thread about Towel Day. There I found the following quote:

We don’t have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it.
– Douglas Adams, Speech at The University of California

Wikiquote has even more quotes: there I found this one from Triumph of the Nerds, that brings us back to Nerdpride Day:

I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.

My Google Geek Holiday Calender told me today is Nerdpride Day, or Geekpride Day. This day is celebrated on May 25 since 2006, celebrating the premiere of the first Star Wars movie in 1977.
The stereotypical nerd is intelligent but socially and physically awkward, according to Wikipedia. Hm, that doesn’t count for me (at least not all features!), but I’m not exactly a nerd. I feel comfortable when talking about the weather as well as about Linux, although talking about the weather makes me feel like playing a role in a sitcom.
In my daily life as a teacher I can observe every day that my pupils’ struggle for life is about wearing the right shoes or clothes, having the newest and most expensive cell phones, I pods and how cool it is to spend as little time as possible for school.
I have no problem with getting older, but now and then I wonder how life would have been for me if I had had access to computers and the internet when I was twelve. I bought and read as much books as I could afford then and didn’t worry about my mother’s complaints that I hadn’t any social life and wasn’t interested in girls – I knew there was nothing to worry about. I’m sure I would have spent all my time on reading RSS-feeds and hanging around on forums like Slashdot; I do that now as much as possilbe, but it is much more difficult to find the time – not nerdy enough to say “no” to family and friends (yes, I have some – I’m actually quite normal). So, I can only agree with the following quote:

My idea is to present an image to children that it is good to be intellectual, and not to care about the peer pressures to be anti-intellectual. I want every child to turn into a nerd – where that means someone who prefers studying and learning to competing for social dominance, which can unfortunately cause the downward spiral into social rejection.
— Gerald Sussman, quoted by Katie Hafner, The New York Times, 29 August 1993

Basic rights and responsibilities of nerds.
A manifesto was created to celebrate the first Nerd Pride Day which included the following list of basic rights and responsibilities of nerds.
Rights:

1. The right to be even nerdier.
2. The right to not leave your house.
3. The right to not have a significant other and to be a virgin.
4. The right to not like football or any other sport.
5. The right to associate with other nerds.
6. The right to have few friends (or none at all).
7. The right to have all the nerdy friends that you want.
8. The right to wear witty t-shirts
9. The right to not be “in-style.”
10. The right to be overweight and have poor eyesight.
11. The right to show off your nerdiness.
12. The right to make an attempt at being as nerdy as Morgana Summers, and the right to fail. (Topher Stumph came quite close, but he too, failed).
13. The right to develop serious crushes on Randall Munroe, Shane Carruth & Bo Burnam, as opposed to say… James Franco. (See 11).
14. The right to carry a Thesaurus with you at all times, as opposed to an iPhone. (See 11)
15. The right to execute shameless self advertisement via the Wikipedia Geek Pride Day page. (See 11).
16. The right to falsely assume the surnames Finkleton, Waldman, Stratzer and Krukemeyer.
17. The right to take over the world.

Responsibilities:

1. Be a nerd, no matter what.
2. Try and be nerdier than anyone else.
3. If there is a discussion about something nerdy, you must give your opinion.
4. Save any and all nerdy things you have.
5. Do everything you can to show off your nerdy stuff as though it were a “museum of nerdiness.”
6. Don’t be a generalized nerd. You must specialize in something.
7. Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every nerdy book before anyone else.
8. Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related t-shirt, all the better.
9. Don’t waste your time on anything not related to nerddom.
10. Befriend any person or persons bearing any physical similarities to comic book or sci-fi figures.
11. Try to take over the world!

Virtualization is the method by which a “guest” operating system can run within another “host” operating system. The good thing is you can have the best of both worlds.
So I have a dual boot machine with Vista and Linux. But, like many other people, most of the time I use Windows, simply because Linux is difficult with music software; of course I installed the RT-kernel, but until now I didn’t succeed to get Jack working and talking with Rosegarden. Only LMMS works with the Linux RT kernel, but this derivation of Fl Studio isn’t half as good as Fl Studio. Besides: I see not much difference between my (OpenSuse 11.1) Linux installation and Windows.
While the musician in me still prefers Windows, the computer geek wants to learn how things work. As a car driver I’m not interested in what’s under the engine cowl; as a computer user I’m getting bored of clicking those stupid icons. In the beginning was the Command Line but I have never used a non-graphical environment. Now is the time to make up my programming skills. This is where virtualization is of great use. Sun’s VirtualBox lets me run Ubuntu, INX and even Minix3 without any risk under Windows Vista. Only TinHat refuses until now to run in the Virtual Box, but, of course, in the end it will have to obey me .

I use Ubuntu for coding (especially the Mono development framework). But for learning good old-fashioned command-lines INX is great. It is console only, without any graphical “X” windows. INX is intended as a tutorial and introduction to the command line, according to the release note. You can run INX as a live-CD, but when running it in your virtual box and you get stuck, you have the possibility of switching back to the host OS (Windows, that is) to look up what you have to do.

Wolfram Alpha is a data-focused, computational search engine that pretends to make the world’s knowledge computable. Wolfram Alpha is a hybrid between Wikipedia and Google, for simple search queries. You can enter any date (e.g. a birth date), any town (e.g. a home town), any two stocks, any calculation, any math formula, any two first names, any food, any measurement, any chemical formula, any musical notes.

So I tried 42, which is, as we all know, the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Here are Alpha’s results. Not bad. Now I tried Enoch Root. Hm, here Google helped me better in the past.

Gina Trapani wrote a comprehensive article about Wolfram Alpha at LifeHacker. She sums up a decent list of trivia calculated by Wolfram Alpha’s computational knowledge engine, but I would be disappointed if this is all Wolfram Alpha has to offer.
If you find yourself using Wolfram Alpha more than Google or Wikipedia, there is a WolframAlpha Search Plugin for Firefox users. There is also a Wolfram Toolbar.

I always read in bed, especially when I can’t sleep in the middle of the night. This happens every other night, and I always reckon with the possiblity of lying awake in my bed. It’s not that I worry about things: I simply have too many thoughts, ideas, plans and sometimes even songs and complete projects that are keeping my mind busy. Because the temperature is usually cool at night and there is silence everywhere I can let my thoughts flow free and enjoy myself thinking about stuff. As a matter of fact I’m having a good time when lying in bed, but the next day I ought to be prepared for my job as a teacher, so I need to calm down my busy brain and get some sleep.
Reading helps to get it back to one stream of thought at a time. (I also tried playing Bach’s fugues on my synthesizer – of course with headphones on – but I enjoyed that so much that I kept playing until sunrise). The last month the pile of books and magazines on the floor next to my bed grew beyond measure, so it was time again to clean out.
According to “Cyborg 101: The Warrior’s Guide to the Blackboard Jungle“, an online book by Angus T.K. Wong there are three steps of cleaning out your room:

1. Throw out the useless junk.
2. Throw out more junk.
3. Throw out the rest of the junk.

I didn’t follow this advice literally, but I transported the whole pile to my study-room, where my books actually belong. The interesting question is: what has been on my mind the last month? Here is the list:

• The latest three issues of “Zenit“, a Dutch astronomy magazine
• The latest two issues of “Computer Music“, perhaps not very suitable as bed reading material, because this magazine is too interesting and usually gives me more inspiration and ideas than I already have.
• The latest issue of Linux Format
• The latest issue of Hakin9
• Some printed articles from Scientific American (I have a digital subscription to that magazine)
• This month’s “Long Life” magazine
• Neal Stephenson’s “Quicksilver”
• Dr. Graham Tattersail: “Geekspeak”.
• Th. Liket: “Differentiaal- en integraalrekening”, a Dutch textbook about differential and integral calculus.
• Dr. K: “Hackers’ Handbook 3.0″
• John Barrow: “The Constants of Nature”
• a photocopy of Patrick J. Hall: “How to solve it in Lisp”
• Christian Braut: “Het complete MIDI boek”, Dutch textbook about MIDI, especially for the chapter on how to count in hexadecimal and binary.
• Arthur Hutchings: “The Baroque Concerto”. Textbook about baroque music. So what?

That’s not all: my notebook, pen, reading glasses, a flashlight for reading without disturbing my wife and another exercise-book to write down dreams (sometimes I have lucid dreams and I try to cultivate them to get the most out of the time I have to spend in bed) are all traces of my nightlife when suffering from insomnia.

My loving and caring wife arranged a small bookcase for me, and after sorting out the books I desperately need and the ones that I can sleep without – and after using the time to let the vacuum cleaner do a great job – I was happy to put some of my pillow books back, but now well organized. I can go to sleep in a clean bedroom without worrying about wasting my time, my books within easy reach.

Geek:

• A person who is interested in technology, especially computing and new media. Geeks are adept with computers, and use the term hacker in a positive way, though not all are hackers themselves.
• A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who passionately pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.

I found this definition, quoted from Wikipedia, on the website of The Society for Geek Advancement, a site where you can watch and embrace being a geek.

Shira Lazar wrote about it, and also about people tweeting about their Geek Pride.
With so much advertising about the coolness of being a Geek, the paradox is that being a geek is obviously the same as being a “normal” person – not to say a petty, bourgeois, middle-class, mediocre person.

Being a geek means being so interested in something that you don’t care whether or not it’s cool.

Yet Another MindMap Application, you might think. But this piece of software has the best of three worlds: the power of Mindjet, the UI of The Brain and, like FreeMind, it doesn’t cost a penny. I’m talking about MindRaider.

MindRaider is personal notebook and outliner. It aims to connect the tradition of outline editors with emerging technologies. MindRaider mission is to help you in organization of your knowledge and associated web, local and realworld resources in a way that enables quick navigation, concise representation and inferencing.

I found it reading this month’s LinuxFormat magazine #119. Open Tube listed it at the 12+ list of Free MindMapping Tools. Freemind is still on top of the list, but I would be surprised if that will change shortly: MindRaider is not only Another MindMap Application, it is also a Semantic Webtool.

What is the Semantic Web? In fact, I find it difficult to explain! Earlier, I wrote about Twine, a service that combines social bookmarking with the semantic web. I subscribed to the semantic web twine. But all this didn’t increase my understanding of the Web3.0. The MindRaider website offers some great presentations about the Semantic Web, like this one by Freek Bijl, who explains the web3.0 with a stamp:

or this one, rather extensive: