A blog by Emmanuel Goossaert
I am always on the lookout for unusual and interesting books, from which I hope to learn new ideas. But time becomes an issue, as I have to prioritize which books and articles to read first. About a year ago, I wrote an article about the industry standards for nonfiction…
TL;DR The non-fiction book publishers are imposing a standard that is toxic for the readers: books that are 200-300 pages long, sell for $10-20, and get 4-5 star ratings on Amazon. Trying to read everything is overwhelming and unnecessary, as most non-fiction books do not deserve your time anyway. They…
Of all the currently available media, the written format is the only one for which we do not know the exact durations ahead of time. Indeed, we know exactly how long it will take to watch a film or listen to a podcast, but we have no idea how long…
When doing system administration to fix a crash on some Unix-based server, I have run several times into the issue of trying to remember how to perform a certain task, but not remembering the exact sequence of commands. After that, I am always doing the same thing, and I have to resort to do a search on Google to find the commands I need. Those tasks are generally not frequent enough to be worth it to memorize the commands or create a script, but frequent enough for the process of searching to become really annoying. It’s also a productivity issue since it requires me to stop the current workflow, open a web browser and perform a search. For me, those things include tasks such as “how to find the number of processors on a machine” or “how to dump a Postgresql table in CSV format.”
I thought that it would be great to have some piece of code to just be able to query Google from the command-line. But that would be a mess, as for each query I would need a simple sequence of commands that I need to type, and not a blog article with fluffy text all around which is what Google is likely to return. Also, I thought about using the API of commandlinefu.com to get results directly from there. So I did a small Python script that performs text search that way, but the results were never exactly what I was looking for, since the commands presented there have been formatted by people who do not have the exact same needs I have. This is what brought me to implement Kir, a tiny utility to allow for text-search directly from the command-line and give the exact list of commands needed.
I am not into social network websites, and when it comes to keeping in touch with people, I like to use good old emails. However, as my contact list and the diversity of these contacts expand, I am having problems following up with everybody. When networking with people met on…
Fritz the Cat is an independent animated feature from 1972, directed by Ralph Bakshi and based on the eponymous comic strip by Robert Crumb. With a budget of $850,000 and a gross revenue of $100M, Fritz the Cat is the most successful independent animated feature as of today. This is…
So I have been working at a startup company for about two months now, and I already learned many great things. I am not talking about new frameworks or programming tricks, but about peer-interaction and productivity. Coming with an academic background to a fully-pragmatic startup is not easy, and I…
I have seen many blog posts about Twitter bots, but they all seem pretty useless to me. People have this tendency to overuse things like Markov chains or other conversational agent library, just to make their bot look cool. But what’s the point of all that, and what problem are…
The rate at which gaming is penetrating the different layers of our societies has been rapidly increasing during the last decade. Sure, part of this is due to the fact that kids playing in the 80’s are now 30 to 40-year old, but another good part of it is a direct consequence of the vulgarization of video games in general. With the Wii and now Kinect, no need for fancy game pads and killer finger skills to play video games. A vector of this acceleration is also the recent urge in the social media world. With Facebook, social games have emerged, taking advantage of social and psychological constraints. Games are no longer confined to the virtual world, and are crushing into the real world.
