Archive for the 'Philosophy' Category

I've watched some great videos on Google Video in the last few days:

• "All Marketers are Liars" - Seth Godin speaks at Google
• Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series: Lessons From Advogato - Some very interesting insights on Trust Networks and specifically on Advogato, of course.
• The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less - An extremely counter-intuitive lecture on why more choices may make us more frustrated and depressed than ever and why 28% of Americans are willing to donate their organs when they die, versus to 90% of the Europeans.
• Sergey Brin Speaks with UC Berkeley Class
• Performance Tuning Best Practices for MySQL - I'm not sure that a pro DBA can learn much from this lecture, but I've certainly learned a lot and will probably revisit it sometimes.
• Change your Mind Change your Brain: The Inner Conditions for Authentic Happiness - It's a unique lesson from a Buddhist teacher on happines and it paints a stark contrast between our society's bullshit that's ought to make us happy versus real inner peace and joy.
• Aspect Oriented Programming: Radical Research in Modularity - AOP is an interesting concept and I think it may have its benefits in case of larger systems, but I'm not convinced that it's viable due to the increased complexity that it adds to the system.
• Best Practices in Javascript Library Design - A lecture from John Resig himself.

Mozilla's Asa Dotzler on Firefox, Fighting Bloat and the Problem with Democracy is a very interesting article both from a management and a social standpoint.

I think meritocracy is the best possible system of government because proven excellence gains power, although empathy and righteousness are also necessary traits to lead a society in a long and happy way.

Once in a while I find a site with full of life wisdom which makes me think in new, better ways. I officially welcome Pick the Brain among my feeds!

I've just redone the Jung Typology Test yesterday and it turned out that my preferences regarding my Myers-Briggs type are considerably stronger than one and half years ago. I think I've matured since than and I know myself better so my answers reflect my personality better this time. I think the MBTI is a very good way of modelling people's personalities.

Based on my results, I chose the right profession. Good to know that. ;)

• We should be more aware of our cognitive biases.
• What about speeding up opening documents using D-Bus?
• The Cathedral of Santa Eulalia is a beautiful building.

It's fascinating how differently audio and video feels compared to plain text. It's another spectrum of information. Tonality, movement and gestures code a tremendous amount meaning which I really like to percieve.

I'm saying all this because it seems that podcasts, screencasts and videos are getting more and more popular as broadband is getting more widespread day by day.

OSNews has a recent podcast with the theme: "Are We Happier When We're Fighting?". It's about flamewars. I like the closing though: what could be accomplished if we could work together instead of wasting our energy on arguing. Personally I've argued a lot over the typical controversial geek topics in the past. If I see such a thread emerging nowadays, I immediately ignore it and I try to focus to things that I can actually make difference on instead of burning my energy pointlessly.

Channel 9 also seems to be a great resource of videos, podcasts, screencasts and photos related to Microsoft and the people working there. Despite I don't sympathize with the company, I do believe many of these people has a lot to offer and some of them are genuine talents.

I've just seen the interview with Jenny Lam on Channel 9. She's an artistic type designing the UI of Vista. This interview makes me thing about design. Really like it.

I'm always impressed by the power of visual representations. They seem to be much more natural and intuitive than formal representations. The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license is probably one of the best examples out there how one can harness this kind of power the most efficiently:

Of couse everything that is powerful in our universe can be well-used and abused also. Marketing exemplifies the best how one can selfishly abuse visual power by notoriously emphasizing the benefits of his/her products or services while neglecting their disadvantages or putting them in the footnote written with the smallest font size that nobody can really read without a microscope.

From now on I will consciously strive to make my blog more visual by including related images in my posts.