Category Archives: Philosophisches

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All the little things & This year of my life

(This is kindof a double post, as I’ve not posted real stuff for some time)

Its very impressive how our life shapes with all the little things we learn. And its all those little things we change in our lives that makes everything a whole new experience. You think I’m on drugs? Nope, I ain’t!

The most time of my life, I’ve been a logical person who had difficulties in understanding human nature and human behaviour. As a logical person, I advocated that no man should ever lie in no situation, and the world would be a better place. Teachers laughted, schoolmates laughted, some tried to persuade me that this just isn’t true. I only trusted upon my logical view of things and nobody could change my perception. Guess what? The human race would be long eradicated by a nuclear war if no man could lie.

Poldi at the window

These were the times when I trusted my own beliefs most, even when people told me something else. It was a very long stage of my life, but I finally made the next level: trying to understand, why people have another opinion, “try out” for some time if this opinion works for me and then accepting or rejecting that opinion/position/view.

For example: I have always had long hair and split ends. Guess that I didn’t understand that I need to use conditioner to make that go away. My opinion was: chemical stuff can’t help my health or the health of my hair. And I was wrong. When I began using conditioner, the split ends were getting better.

So many things just seem like utter nonsense when you see how people behave sometimes. Like watching casting shows in TV. Like smoking. Like going drinking and dancing in a discotheque. Like making music. I even thought listening to music was a strange behaviour when I was about 14 years old. But after some time, you try things out, and some work for you while others don’t. I began liking music and going out to parties for example, but I never liked smoking even if I tried. Well and then after some time, you even try to understand women – a hopeless attempt, some men might think – but even there you can make progress if you really try to understand their point of view.

What I changed this year

Its just that I have a little bit of free time for the first time in about one year – therefore I’m writing this post. And I’m reflecting on what I changed this very year. Change is usually something people don’t like, because their instincts tell them that change is dangerous and that they should just keep everything as it is, because it won’t get worse that way – that is good for survival, the instinct implies. This instinct is called fear. A small interlude from Dune:

I must not fear.
 Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

If you understand that you can choose what you want to change, if you conquer this instinct, you’ll recognize that every change that you do is a positive change in the end. Otherwise you wouldn’t have accepted it … or you just undo it and change back.

And I changed a lot of little things this year. My dear. I hope you my dear reader can reflect the changes you went through this year too. If you want, you should also make a small blog post about what happend this year in your life, because I’d really like to read that. I came to the point where I can say that I love changes – and hearing about them. So this year:

  • I began my diploma thesis on 01.01.2009 and over the course of the year, I needed to unclutter my life to be able to get it done. Some would call this lifehacking. I just stopped playing computer games. Boom. 30% more time. I stopped organizing my week and began organizing my day. Boom. 100% more things got done. I began struturing my online information-digestion through feeds and twitter. Boom. Learning stuff while keeping yourself informed in the shortest time possible. All impressive changes, and needed ones, if you want to use time more effectively.
  • I found a job at the local software company Abelssoft. My salary is fine and didn’t need a car to get to work – again a lot of money saved. My colleagues are very nice and I like working with them – and I also like the work itself, which is a very important matter in being happy, I believe. I also just learned a new programming language (C# .NET) and Abelssoft paid a certificate that measures this skill. Thanks again! You can follow @Abelssoft on Twitter, and this is the website (german verison here).
  • I bought a flat with my girlfriend. A big one. In the times of economic crisis and a drop in (bank) interests, it seemed the smartest thing from a economic perspective. But if you think about the non-economic perspective, its a way more binding statement towards my girlfriend, than a marriage would be. And I’m very happy about my decision. Believe me, the flat is completely new, big and I feel superb when I’m there.
  • I left the church. That means approximately +400€ per year. Nice. I never really believes in god anyways, and if I did, I don’t think Jesus would love me more if I paid the church’s fees.
  • Now for some more little things which changed in my information-digestion: Feedly. After learning what feeds are and how to use them via the Firefox-addon Brief, I just switched to Google Reader to be able to synchronize my feeds (and mainly let those that I have already read not show up anymore) with my iPhone feed-reader. Now that I use Google Reader which in my opinion has a cluttered and unintuitive interface, I found the Feedly-firefox plugin, that lets my feeds look like a newspaper. Hooray, the times of dead paper are gone – and with this kind of interface, maybe I can teach my girlfriend to use feeds someday too.
  • I began listening to podcasts on the bike. Used music before, but riding bike is pretty boring, and I more like listening to music while I’m cleaning up or doing the dishes or something. Fould the following podcasts (both german) to be very interesting: Z and Bitsundso.
  • Another small thing that impact my personal life more than I would have ever imagined: the iPhone. I learned how to use this device as personal organizer (respectively main calendar), ToDo-list, shopping list, feedreader, client for all social networks I use (Twitter, Facebook, Xing, StudiVZ), TV-guide, online-banking-client (damn, I can do bank transfers everywhere with this thing!), (video) camera, instant messenger, radio, podcast-player, music player, navigation-device, pdf-document-reader, voice recorder, gaming device (did you know we have Command and Conquer, Duke Nukem, Need for Speed and many more really good things?), weather information service, eBay-client (which works better and more intuitive than the actual ebay-website), wireless USB-stick, translator, YouTube-client and even TV-reciever (okay, I don’t get too many channels with it). And I can use it as telephone too. You wouldn’t believe it! In one tiny device. All very usable. Thats definitely an upgrade for my personal management.

So I hope your lives got some upgrades too, I’m very pleased with mine this year. For the next year, I’ll have a small list of goals that I want to get done (and that I just entered in my ToDo’s goals section):

  • Try getting more professional at my job.
  • Buy some stuff, so the new flat isn’t all that empty.
  • Write some more blog posts.
  • Main point: I’ll try meeting more friends – I kinda lost sight of them this year and definitely have to change that. But from now on, I’ll have at least my weekends free to tackle that.
  • Play more pen and paper role-playing-games. I miss that, was always fun.
  • Go on vacation with my girl.
  • Get a private server-machine running 24/7. Needs to be low-energy-comsuming and not too expensive. And needs to be silent.
  • Set up a new blog. This wordpress thingy here is too slow, the design isn’t what I want now, and I plain hate PHP. Whats your pick for another blogging platform?
  • Buy a playstation 3 – the Wii has too many bad games, I want more good stuff. And a blueray player too.
  • Pay back the money my parents borrowed me.
  • Upgrade iPhone when there’s time. If you’ll jailbreak, its more time investment, so you gotta plan wisely.

Feel free to answer with your own changes from this year or your plans for next year. Expect to hear more from me more regularly, like every week. Or something like that. Over and out for this week.

Tell me the Truth

“Tell me the truth motherf**ker” Clawfinger sing on my harddisk from time to time. Well, the Clawfinger guys are pretty grown up, but most people are not. Sadly, people can’t – and won’t – cope with the truth. Everyday, they build their reality and when something doesn’t fit in, they just find their explanation to make it fit in. “That other way of seeing this is weird.” – “My way is correct” – “I’m not the one with problems here”

But when you see someone is plain wrong, what do you tell him? Do you provoke a conflict, hoping that the person thinks about the ways things really are? Do you risk to give the person a reason to hate you, because to effectively tell him “There’s something wrong with your perception, so change who you are” – also adding that you don’t like the persons view on things?

Does this all sound cryptic to you? Well, of course there’s something behind it, that I won’t put out here, but in the end its just the question: Do you know when to lie? And to which extent? Talking the truth is easy, but not without punching everyone in the face while you do it.

Writing and Reading Blogs

I just got inspired for this article here, where Aditya Mukherjee talks about how and why he blogs.I want to talk about that and about why I read blogs – as this is something many people here in germany don’t understand or just don’t want to do.

Aditya Mukherjee tries to get better, develop his way of writing and wants to present his ideas to the world. He tries to keep track of his personal progress. These also motivate me to blog. I’d also give people I know the possibility to read my ideas even when we don’t have real-life contact, as this makes people keep connected. And keeping connected is important to everyone of us. Its not the meaningless facebook-friendship, but the possibility to read, what the other person’s up to. Thats also why I’d love to see more people I know blogging or at least using Twitter. They might think I don’t care about them, but the point is that nobody likes to ask everyday “Hey, whats up in your life?” – and given that you have more than one or two persons you know, its better to have a push- instead of a pull-mechanism to get their updates. When something is important to a friend, I’d like to know it. If he put it on twitter, I get that update. If he even writes a longer blogpost, I still can decide if I’d like to read that thought of if its not important to me.

And writing blogposts isn’t a big deal wither. Okay, it takes some time, and at the moment I can’t find much time to do that either, as I just finished studying and will begin working in a software company tomorrow – and just bought a flat with my girlfriend (well and you have no idea how much time it takes to pick the tiles, the lamination, every bit of the kitchen and get all the bureaucracy done). But writing helps me to order my thoughts and to improve my english. And perhaps someone I happy to hear from me again. You never know.

Same with reading blogposts. I began subscribing to a small number of XML-feeds (from blogs of people I know), but learned some other great blog, that I like to read. Some of them are technical, some are philosophical, some are both. Lately, I posted a blog-link to someone who might have been interested in it, about a management technique that is used in his work and what often goes wrong with it. The response I got was “I don’t have time to read blogs – and this stuff in blogs is all pure theory and has nothing to do with the real world work. And by the way, everyone can read blogs.”

This somehow stroke me. Someone who doesn’t read blogs tells me that everyone can do it. Well, I agree that everyone can read, but reading blogs with content that is about your profession or about stuff you care about is important information for your life. And of course you can’t do that if you don’t take time for it. Some people read the newspaper to know what happens in the world – and they take their time to do that. Some read professional magazines – and also take their time to do that. So whats wrong about reading blogs?

Well, I guess the problem is, that its not really commonplace in Germany to do that. People here are always 4 years behind compared to the trends in the USA – and blogs in Germany are often thought of as homepages where people show off the newest funny stuff they found on youtube. If you’re really picking the good quality stuff, you get much more personalized information than you’d find in any newspaper or professional magazine. The writers are not professional all the time, but who cares? Iknow my posts are not too well thought-out too, but hell where’s the problem? You can skip every blog entry as you could flip a page in the newspaper.

Now back to “everyone can read blogs”: indeed. But not everyone can be patient enough to read blogs, to find blogs that delivers good content and to digest that information in a ways that helps you in your everyday life – or work. Its the same with books. Everyone can read them – but that doesn’t mean everyone takes time to do so. Hell, perhaps it would be better to read books, but if you’re into computers you’ll soon realize that the world changes too fast for books to be cutting-edge.

Well, nevermind. Just a lifesign from someone who doesn’t find much time to blog at this time.

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Learning to Code – You Really Want to be a Programmer?

There is a lot that you can do wrong. A lot that I did wrong and that took its time. But after all I think I made it. So here are some simple rules that you should follow if you’re trying to become someone who touches keyboards a lot:

Have a goal. If you just want to be a programmer but don’t know anything that you’d like to program, you’ll have problems keeping yourself motivated. Going into a certain direction of technology is a good idea too, so you know what you can concentrate on.

Just do it. (In fact, this statement is the best you can do in any situation of life.) Every time that you’ll write code, you’ll learn something new that will get you closer to your target.

Never miss an opportunity to code. If you have a project where you’re working / studying, try to take responsibility for some functional piece of software. Documentation or user-testing won’t get you further.

Use an IDE. I began with writing java code in a text editor, compiled it by hand and did so for some time, because I thought “Eclipse looks … complex”. It was an error that cost me soo much time. Embrace all help that you can get, if its an IDE, a build tool or whatever tools you’re friends and colleagues use. They all save time, and thats the stuff life is made of.

Don’t forget to use a console too. There are a lot of graphical things out there that want to make you move the mouse more and the keyboard, but often there are no better solutions than just using the command line. Don’t be afraid of it, you’ll have to learn all the commands sooner or later anyways.

Make a list of skills & experiences that you’d like to have. Making your first objects, Unit-testing, working with threads, building a gui, parsing some HTML or XML, getting data into a database or out of it, using the twitter API, building a website, writing a firefox-plugin; HTTP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, (a lot more Web-Technologies), Frameworks of all kinds … write down what you think would be useful whenever you meet something new you want to learn … and then make it some kind of long-term-To-Do-List.

Don’t think too much about inheritance, interfaces, reflection, … you can first live without that or just use it by-the-book and will understand what they do soon.

There’s no magic involved. Just code. Like in JUnit, I somehow thought it would verify that my code has no errors if I just configure it correctly – plain wrong, no magic inside! You have to write code that checks everything in your other code. I also thought Struts2 would make websites by magic – again, just code. There’s nothing visible that you don’t code, its just makes just need very few code to get those websites running.

Framework is a signal word. Its means “Software that makes something easier for you”, but you should be aware that you’ll need to invest some time to learn how to use it. Framework should give you a positive feeling, when you hear it, like “I’m here to help you!”. Again, no magic involved. Usually ;-)

Ask. Use online forums, ask friends or people you work with. Google can’t always help (but don’t ask question that Google can answer easily). There is so much that could be known about technology, that noone knows everything (especially when you don’t have your master in computer sciences and 10 years of field-experience). Just accept that and also accept if others don’t have all your knowledge.

Teach. If someone asks you and you know a solution, then help him. Assume he didn’t understand something basic that you know and be sure that you teach it so he can solve the same task again later on. Never just give someone the code, they won’t gain anything from that.

Find someone to learn with. Someone who is the same stupid guy like you and also doesn’t know how to do that complicated stuff. Where one brain gets stuck, two often find a solution and both learn. Working together on a project is a great way to learn. Just make sure the other person keeps up with you, or vice versa.

Never stop learning. Technology evolves with lightspeed, new languages appear, new technology is invented. If you’re involved with computers, you’ll probably be one of the most-learning-and-training persons of the world. Never assume you’re ready to “just do work”. Where would be the fun then?

Get tech feeds. Or follow twitter-users who have the smae interests that you have. From time to time, there will be interesting articles that will teach you good new stuff.

Don’t be afraid to buy books or magazines. Its not always cheap , but if it saves you time learning you should just spend that little money. You’ll get that money back with your skills later.

Get your head around this object-orientation-thingy. Don’t use GOTO. Don’t put the whole code in the main-method. Classes are just there to produce objects and objects are nothing more than some fields and methods in one instance. If you write a main-method, produce an object that does that work from there. Objects can be tested nicely and are more useful.

Its not just coding. Software design, team management, data structures, design patterns, team-collaboration, algorithms, time management are all with you at that party. And much more. And don’t you ever forget your social skills. They might be the most important after all. Even programmers need friends ;-)

Be careful with your coffeine comsumption. A programmer is a person who converts coffee to code, after all. If you still want to code, connect with me on Twitter. What do you think I missed? Do you have more hints for the newbies? What was not ever told YOU, that you should have known from the start? Just add a comment …

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The perfect twitter-client

TwitScoop and Twitter search filters in TweetdeckImage by Kevglobal via Flickr

How would my perfect twitter-client look? Well. Lets begin with: it should load quickly! Everything should be organized into streams like in Tweetdeck. All streams should be closable and reopenable with one button per stream (button should be invisible when stream is open). Stream width and textsize should be controllable.

One stream of direct messages, one stream of @replys. One main stream. Custom streams should be easily configurable. I want groups (as such a stream), where I can see the tweets of Tweeple configured for that stream, so I can actually read the tweets from the people I know personally or those that interest me most. Filtering a stream should be possible, I’d love regular expressions here but I don’t think that this will be done. Twitter searches should be configurable as a stream.

The UI should make viewing linked videos possible or listening to linked postcasts without going to the web. Shortened links should be fully shown if you hover them and be opened in a browser if you click them. As the client needed to decrypt a lot of links, it should also be able to show me all the links it can decrypt in another stream, this time ranked by the most tweeted link. #topics should be highlighted – clicking on it would generate a search-stream. It should be easy to see if the Tweeters you see tweets from follow you or not. A click on their pic should send you to their twitterhomepage in a browser. Twitterusers should be numbable – making their tweets and links not appear in any streams, if its not an @reply or a DM. I’d also love if tweets containing links that I already visited get filtered out automatically – this would seriously cut down the noise.

I want multiple accounts to work. I in fact would love to have an iPhone-App that onyl shows me tweets I didn’t already visit in my workingstation-application – and vice versa. And I want it to be a feedreader too. It should be possible to view feeds till a certain (configurable) length of characters, and a link to their online version if they’re too long. I’d also like some automatation, so you can make a Tweet from a feed.

Well … as you can see I want a lot of stuff. Perhaps this can be an inspiration for someone who has the time to make a superb Twitterclient. Oh … you should also be able to tweet after all.

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