Speeding up hyperlinks: topics

In a conversation with Jon Husband earlier today, we discussed hyperlinks - and how they've changed this world. In my view, hyperlinks form zero-threshold access to any and all information just a single click away. Whenever I scavenge the Web for info, I open up links in new tabs until there are 20 or so of them, and then scan the results, greatly helped by search, maybe jumping back and forth or drilling down deeper and deeper.
Compare that with the old fashioned way I had to gather information, which at best resulted in a day or so in one or more libraries where some or most books would be out on loan and I'd only have the full result set after a week or two, sometimes more - leaving me with a metre of paper books I had to plow through

Scanning them was simple yet elaborate: read the index, pick the most appetising chapters, and from each of those carefully read the first and last paragraph. Mark in mind or on paper if worthwhile, and continue search - I used to write 10-page papers in a single night doing so

Now, we have hyperlinks - and I still miss something. I call it topics, and here is how I envision them to work

Big Brother? Sits right on your mobile

[The image above has nothing to do with this post, but it seemed to be fitting, given the latest developments. This post is all about trust]

In this age of free(mium), it's common knowledge that you pay with your privacy. Facebook is the best (or should I say worst) example of the dance around your data, yet there are many more tools that you use, which have access to everything that you carry with you: all the data on your phone. Not only can they read that, they can also change it - and even "impersonate" you

Some applications do need this very deep trust level, e.g. virus scanners and applications such as Androidlost. Others absolutely do not do so, like Skype, Google Plus, LinkedIn and Facebook. Interested to see what they can do to the contents of your phone? You'll be in for a surprise, or should I say, shock

How and why common sense will beat REST

In my previous post I described how REST would replace SOAP. If you paid close attention you will have noticed that I actually didn't say anything in favour of REST, but everything at the expense of SOAP.
Because it indeed seems like REST will be the new SOAP - which is in contradiction with the idea that today's Enterprises that have any form of Service Oriented Architecture will replace their current implementations by those fit for the future

Because "REST" just doesn't make any sense in that context. Mind you, I'm talking about the REST that the low-level techies hijack; exactly what I described, i.e. JSON with the four HTTP verbs. Not the REST as Roy Fielding intended, i.e. a verb-independent style. Apart from all the heavy caching on every side of any connection, which really enabled the scale he was looking for. Without cache, there would be no Internet. Period.
And in case you want to know what Roy thinks of the current hijacking of REST, just read this and this

GoDaddy... Go... Gone

Tonight the Godaddy servers have been hit by a simple DDOS - a distributed denial of service involving a few dozen clients or servers that fire off hundreds or even thousands of requests a second at their servers. It's a simple attack, and very effective. It's like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, standing in the middle of the classroom and getting all those toddler questions fired off at him. The inevitable result: he breaks down

Why it pays to keep rats on a starvation diet

Full credit to Dennis Howlett for this title. I tried to locate the very tweet he sent out years ago, but failed. If memory serves me correctly, he compared enterprise employees to rats being kept on a starvation diet.
Why enterprise employees? Maybe because they come by the tens of thousands, I guess. But I vividly saw the image in front of me

I often hear people complain about the way they are rewarded at their job - usually financially. And when I say people, I don't mean the top 1-2% in an enterprise that surf ahead of the wave and automagically keep their feet dry when it drops on everyone else

Do uneducated vote conservative - in the USA?

My last post of the year was about the correlation between conservatism and education. I took the results per state of the US 2008 election, showing the margin percentage for Obama, and related that to total education spend per state

The outcome was astonishing: all but 3 states fit perfectly into the newly found rule. The odd ones out were Sarah Palin's state, Dick Cheney's state, and Louisiana. However, Pat McGuinness slapped me on the wrist 4 times in a row, assuming his ass off, calling me ignorant and prejudiced, and spreading dumb and unsupported rumours. So here's my answer.
The data in the table above is based on data from the National Center of Education Statistics and shows actual education level in 2006-8

On the correlation between conservatism and education

I was in a fairly regular Twitter conversation with Vijay Vijayasankar (meaning: anything goes) and it happened again: right in between the bartalk, something clever was born. See the dialogue above please, top-down, transscribed here:

@vijayasankarv The abundance of ignorance and misinformation among Americans, especially conservative ones, is staggering

@MartijnLinssen not sure if that is a problem with just conservatives..ppl think in extremes on both sides I think

@vijayasankarv I guess so. It's just that conservatism and lack of education is highly correlated - throughout the world

@vijayasankarv Having said that... if there *is* a correlation, that means conservative parties/govs must do their best to cripple education

@MartijnLinssen that is an interesting hypothesis

Twitter needs a radical change of security NOW

I wrote a post a while back titled Your Twitter security is an egg, not an onion, explaining how Twitter only has one front door, like your house, and if you let people in, you let them in - after which they have access to everything, including your Direct Messages.
A few months after that, Twitter finally changed its security model and now it makes a distinction between complete access, or access to the account without Direct Messages

A little bit better, but still a major failure - as just got proven by spammers

Intrinsic motivation - doesn't work well in enterprises 2/2

After my previous post on intrinsic motivation, trashing the single study / research underlying Dan Pink's speech, I had awkward responses. For some reason, people had a very hard time reading and understanding the post, where I clearly stated the scope in the very beginning: focusing entirely on the single so-called research underlying it.
Most dragged in other research (hah! the irony of that) or spoke about their own experiences and some even slapped me around the ears with books.
I told all that I wasn't prepared to listen to that unless they gave me a motivated point of view on my post, its content and my conclusion. Alas, only one came close but managed to get sidetracked within one single tweet. So I rest my case: the 2005 Federal Reserve Bank "Large Stakes, Big Mistakes" Ariely study was fraudulent, and only meant to prove its hypothesis. And no one cares about that

Anyway, now onto the second part: my own opinions on and experiences with extrinsic and intrinsic motivation

What am I going to condone it for?

Yesterday evening, the BBC announced an interview with Darcus Howe,

to discuss if comparisons between these inner city riots and events that took place in the 1980s are useful or misleading

This morning, that interview took place - and bit the BBC in the ass (pardon my French)

Comments make your code alive. Otherwise, it's dead

[Image by W.Rebel]

I had a small discussion about code and comments with Bob MacNeal. Bob thinks that

Commented out code is the same as a comment - Litter. Don't litter.

I strongly disagree, although we had a nice conversation. It turned out that

@MartijnLinssen I'm an average coder at best, but I like clean code. I've made a living copying code from others. I dig good, clean shit.

That is the crux right there

Education - does it still ROI?

I promised Harold Jarche yesterday to follow up on his tweet on education

Will blog on that tomorrow > RT @hjarche "no one dares call higher education a bad investment" http://ur1.ca/44kmc

I studied Cultures and Languages of Latin-America at Leiden University from 1989-1995. Why? Because I didn't know what I wanted to do or become, had the brains to go to University and because it was more or less free. Back then, I got 670 guilders a month from the Dutch government for studying - let me label that scholarship although there are some vast differences with UK and US scholarship - although they share the fact that they're gratuitous. Tuition was somewhere around 1,400 guilders annually averaged out for the 6 years, and one could rent a room for 300-400 guilders