Over 3 Years of Blogging

by Zef Hemel

I was too occupied with other things to think of my 3-year blogging anniversary which was three weeks ago. February 10th of 2003 was when this ZefHemel.com weblogs first saw the light and lots has happened since then. A summary.

First of all I posted over 1,100 stories in these three years and my readers (you) wrote almost 2,500 comments to those. The kind of posts changed over time. It started out as just links with a small comment, then changed into bigger articles with mostly my own content. The frequency of posts also changed. At first I posted sometimes 6 posts a day, then it became less. And there were about 4 months in which I posted one real story (600-1200 words) each day. Impressive. This year was a quiet year, until the past couple of days, when ideas for posts started to pop up again. I’m still finding a new format and mix of things I post here, but I’ll get there.

Some things I remember well of the past few years were my Why Microsoft Can’t Hire Great Programmers post, which was picked up by Robert Scoble and even Microsoft Recruiting, which was a nice experience.

Then the nomination of The Church of XML for Joel Spolsky’s The Best Software Writing I, sadly it didn’t end up in there. And then there’s my most successful post ever: Howto: Create Your Own Podcast Show On Windows, which still attracts hundreds of visitors each day. I happened to be lucky enough to get into the podcasting thing early enough to have written the first article explaining how to do it on Windows. This article even ended up in a book: Politics to Go, published by the IPDI (of the George Washington University).

Twice I did a week of posts on a certain subject, once on distributed systems and once on interregional collaboration.

ZefHemel.com gets almost 800 pageviews each day according to Google Analytics, and if my little script is correct, roughly 400 people are subscribed to my RSS feeds on top of that. Some study mates did a presentation on Search Engine Optimization a week ago and told me that my website has a Google PageRank of 5 (out of 10), which is quite high. It also means I can bump up other’s PageRanks quite a bit by linking to them. Cool.

But the people to thank for all of this are you, my readers, especially those who have commented. If it weren’t for you, I would never have kept doing this for so long. Thank you for that.

On to the next three.

The Terrors of Fame

by Zef Hemel

As one of Ireland’s celebrities, life is getting harder and harder for me. Fans everywhere, calls from people that don’t say anything, and I won’t even start about the members of fan clubs trying to ask me questions while I walk to Trinity or to the store, leeches I call them.

This morning as I walked to Trinity there were three more leeches on the way. All members of Unizef. I did what I always do, just pretend I don’t see or hear them, even though their jackets are very clear about their obsession.

Yesterday, however, I found something more disturbing. It turns out some musician called “Didier Malherbe” has released an album about me, a few years ago already.

Zeff

Even though it is called “Zeff”, it’s pretty obvious who it is about. The additional ‘f’ just gives him the opportunity to deny everything. This guy is crazy. I know I’m hard to resist, but this… look at the first seven track names:

  1. Zeff dance
  2. Zeff Waves
  3. drole de Zeff
  4. Zeff over the dunes
  5. Zeff up
  6. Zeffing away
  7. Zeff in the box

It’s sick, I’m even a verb! Don’t believe the CD exists? Look at iTunes Music Store, look here, they’re selling it!

It’s getting worse and worse. In Latvia they even have candy named after me (Zefirs):

Zefirs

Believe me, fame is not all they make you believe it is.

Having said that, anyone want my autograph?

Stories From the Front

by Zef Hemel

The headlines are clear: “Protestant march plans trigger rage in Dublin”, “IRA supporters, police clash over parade”, “Orange march sparks Dublin riots”, “Police hurt as parade sparks Dublin riots”, “IRA-Protestant Brawls Spread in Dublin”. Google News Ireland related articles.

Yeah, riots in the Dublin city centre yesterday. And yours sincerely was at the front showing off his true journalistic abilities. Not as an eye witness, but as an eye witness of eye witnesses. When it happened, it turns out, I was about a street away from the action, totally oblivious to what was happening around the corner, patiently waiting for a friend, playing happy music on my iPod. Actually, my friend was late because she ran into a riot with lots of police and a car that was set on fire. This one to be exact:

As I walked through Grafton Street a group of protesters walked by with pig-head masks on and loud music. I later concluded that they had been IRA protesters. When I got to the McDonald’s where I was supposed to meet my friend they had closed the doors and the protective screen that shops usually have down when they’re closed for the night. After a while they opened the doors again and a lot of customers came out. They had closed down everything to prevent rioting groups to enter the restaurant, luckily nothing happened.

Man, I feel like a journalist in Baghdad.

People Like Sleep

by Zef Hemel

After I got up this morning I had a conversation with a friend who I’ll call, let’s say, Justyna. The conversation went somewhat like this:

Justyna: Hey you!
Me: Good morning! Slept well?
Justyna: Yes I did, how about you?
Me: I did too, I like sleeping you see.
Justyna: Who doesn’t?

That was an interesting question that immediately caught my attention. Does everybody like sleep, or do some people hate it? As I had been recently appointed as a professor in the totally new research area of Trivial Matters and Obviousity at Trinity College, Dublin I decided to do some trivial research on the matter.

But before I get into my stunning results, let me first give you some familiarity with the field of TMO. Little over four years ago now I got a big grant to conduct research in the area in eye counts on homo sapiens. My Ph.D. thesis was poetically called “Those Eyes We Have” and without getting into the technical details, its contribution was to give a historical perspective on the number of eyes humans (homo sapiens) have from the seventeenth century until now. My initial grant was for three years, but it took an additional year for me to complete the work. This additional year was caused by the suggestion by some people that one-eyed creatures existed. This turned out to be true, but these creatures were not homo sapiens.

Already before I defended my thesis I managed to publish two papers in Nature magazine, entitled: “Eye Counts in the 17th Century” and “Trivial Matters: An Exciting New Area”. The latter eventually led to my appointment as a head of a new school at Trinity College: Trivial Matters and Obviousity.

But back to the question Justyna posed: doesn’t everybody like sleep? As with many research areas, also in TMO the most interesting questions come from every day life. I remember well that I came up with the idea for my eye count research after noticing that people generally have two of them. Is that really true, I asked myself. For the answer you’ll have to read my thesis. This morning it was the same. Doesn’t everybody like sleep? It seems obvious, which makes it perfect TMO research.

The main TMO research tool is Google. Using well-chosen phrases it’s fascinating to see how much accurate information you can get from a big demographic. The trick with doing TMO research is the assumption that it is true, unless proven otherwise. The key observation here is the second part of that statement: unless proven otherwise. So what we’re really looking for are people who do not like sleep; who hate it.

So we do a search on Google for “I hate sleep”. This returns 16,300 results. Promising!

The first result, which according to Google is most relevant, as most people link to this statement — which implies it is an authoritative one — is one from a guy called “d”. He states “I hate sleeping. What a waste of time. I want an alarm clock that will wake me up when I’ve had just enough sleep to survive.” We can safely assume this “d” person does not like sleep very much.

When we look at the rest of the Google results, we see these people don’t really hate sleeping, they don’t appreciate sleeping under certain conditions, such as sleeping on the floor, sleeping in silence, sleeping in hotel beds and sleeping in the Aviary.

So what we can conclude is that, with only one exception, people like sleeping.

As we say in TMO: QED (Quod Erat Demonstrandum).

What I’ve Been Up To

by Zef Hemel

As you’ve undoubtly noticed there has been little activity on my blog lately. There’s a couple reasons for that.

The first reason is the classic one: I’m pretty busy. As you may know I’m doing a quite intensive one-year master course at Trinity College, Dublin, namely Networks & Distributed Systems, which eats time.

But there’s another much more important reason for this. Long term readers probably know about what I refered to as the change. Zef, the guy that spent most of his free time programming all of the sudden (or actually gradually) stopped liking programming. This “change” happened roughly two years ago now and in hindsight it’s not the thing I’d today still refer to as “the change” unless you considered the whole of the past two years as a changeover phase. Things have changed a whole lot more since then, ultimately leading up to a point that came last Christmas in which I basically decided to “give up” the computer science thing and go do something completely different.

You wha?

During the past years my interests shifted a lot. First I liked programming, then I didn’t anymore and became more interested in software architecture. After a while I realised I didn’t see myself actually developing regular software either. Developing software for banks, administration stuff, web applications, nah. I moved up to another level, the meta level if you will: tools. Given that I don’t want to spend a lot of time developing software, what can I do to get it over with. How do I squeeze as much out of each minute that I spend on it as possible? If you want to do stuff like that the best way to go is to go into research. And I’m at a great place for that, Trinity College’s computer science department is quite big and does quite some research in interesting areas, such as distributed systems and information and knowledge engineering (think Googlish stuff). So I thought, yeah, when I finish with this year, I’ll just go do a Ph.D. and after that I don’t know, just continue doing research or something.

But at this stage I think I’m not going to, not anytime soon at least. I realised I am still interested in it, but mainly in observing what’s happening in that area. That’s basically what I’ve been doing the past years here at zefhemel.com, it was mainly about programming languages, development tools and other cool new technology things. Sometimes I came up with something myself but in most cases I didn’t actually build it, I just philosophised about it. I enjoyed writing about it.

2005 was an eventful year for me, if not the most influential in my life with the exception of my birth year ;) A lot of things happened in my personal life and I’m happy that they did. Also, when I came here to Ireland I started a newish life building on this “new me”, if you will. I got different friends who, generally, don’t do anything related to computers. And it’s great. We don’t often talk about computers and I never steer the conversation into that direction either. One of my good friends here does a language related study, we talk about that a lot and I find it very interesting. More interesting than what I’m studying myself now actually. That’s not a good sign, is it? Then last Christmas somebody asked me what I wanted to do after I finishing the course I’m doing. And I answered I’d probably do a Ph.D. Don’t you want to do something different? Well yeah, I do, but I’ve been investing into this since I was 9, you can’t just… Well I can, I’m still young, I’m 22 and will be 23 when I’m done. I can still do something else. And I most likely will. My current plan is to go back to Holland after I finish here (I’ll finish because it’s a waste to stop now and a M.Sc. degree from a well-known college like Trinity won’t hurt your career either) and study English Language and Culture. Yes that’s linguistics and literature and stuff. Yes that is quite different. But that’s the whole point. I want something different.

Stupid computers.

Anyway, that’s why I haven’t been posting a lot lately, I had to figure things out for myself. And I guess I pretty much did by now. I am still interested in technology, but how active I will be here I don’t know, it’s hard to predict. I might just change things around, but it’s a bit weird to do that. It is my personal homepage technically, but I’m thinking most of the people reading this blog don’t read it because they care about me as a person, they care about what I have to say about technology. So yeah. I haven’t decided on that. But I thought I’d let you know what’s been going on with me anyway, it’s only fair.

Gmail Talk and 30 Boxes

by Zef Hemel

Hey all, I’m sorry for not posting for so long, I’ll tell you why later. But for now let me just post about two things that have a very high coolness potential.

First, Google will be “integrating Google Talk into Gmail”:http://mail.google.com/mail/help/chat.html. That’s right they’re going to offer IM from inside their Gmail web application. If they do it the Google way that may potentially not suck. Once the Google Talk service is opened to other Jabber services it may actually become really useful. Another way to look at it is that they’re making Gmail more than just plain e-mail, it’s getting too fancy. But I myself am looking forward to it, Gmail is getting better every month and I love using it.

The second thing I wanted to point you to is “30 Boxes”:http://www.30boxes.com, an AJAX calendaring application. I’ve been looking for a good one for ages and this one seems really nice. It launched its beta last Sunday. I’ve put all my appointments in it now (it doesn’t allow you to import your other calendars yet, but it allows for export of data, like in iCal format). The way you enter your events is really nice, you can say stuff like “Lunch with Peter Wednesday at 4pm” and it will actually understand it and add a new event at Wednesday, 4pm named “Lunch with Peter”, you can even say “Lunch with Peter Wednesday at 4pm +peterblab@somedomain.com” and it will send an e-mail to that e-mail address (presumably Peter’s) asking to confirm the appointment. You can also tag appointments and repeat them weekly, monthly or yearly (actually when you say “Zef’s Birthday at June 22nd” it will ask “It seems you’re adding a birthday, do you want to repeat it yearly?”). Really cool. There’s more features like sharing (parts of) your calendar with buddies and putting other stuff like flickr photos on there. All really nice. Check it out! And if you want to try the sharing feature (haven’t tried it yet), feel free to add me as a buddy (with the zef at zefhemel dot com e-mail address).

“30 Boxes”:http://www.30boxes.com

Oh and if you haven’t tried Google’s “new” RSS feed reader “Google Reader”:http://www.google.com/reader, I really like it myself, but not everybody finds it great.