Birds of a feather….

I’ve heard the word for quite some time now: TWITTER.

Never really gotten around to it that much– I do use FB once in a while (much less nowadays), and I really like the fact that I can get in touch with people I had lost all contact with since long back.  Which is why I can kind of understand why it is so ‘happening’.

However, twitter was a bit of an enigma to me… I guess it still is.  It seemed to me that if fb could help you get in touch with your friends, mail could be used for more private communications (then phone, then face-to-face talks, in order of privacy), and IM was a much more realtime way of communications, where exactly did twitter fit in?

I am a ‘newbie’ to twitter, though I have been a member for quite some time.  Recently, I installed twitterfox, which seems to be a very handy addon to firefox which lets you tweet without having to open another application or opening the twitter webpage.   I also started ‘following’ people– some friends, some people sites had told me I should follow (think in terms of people/organizations relevant to my fields of interest).

Soon, I noticed that I would be seeing tweets regularly, especially tweets from the ones that I did not know.  The tweets, however, seemed to be trivial enough to ignore when busy, and interesting enough to read when I wanted to.  Two examples are News From Nepal and BBCNepal.  Both seem to give periodic updates on stuff happening in Nepal.  Other tweets come from companies whose technologies I am interested in.

I don’t really pay much attention to these tweets, but when I open the twitter page once in a while (or when I use certain firefox profiles where I have installed twitterfox), I do enjoy looking at the periodic updates once in a while.  It is in fact, kind of like listening to a multitude of voices around you, and choosing when to pay attention, and when to go about your own business.  Further, the tweets you are hearing are those of the ones you have chosen to come within hearing distance of– those that are apparently similar to you in some aspects.

Hence the thought that crossed my mind: “birds of a feather tweet together:)”

In the end, this comes from someone who is not really that much into twitter (yet anyways), so you might want to ask your local twitterguru if you want to know more:).  Or just listen to one of the guys behind twitter here.

The other aspect of computer software evolution

“This is the Unix philosophy. Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.”

—Doug McIlroy

Before I go on with my intended post, I will write in a few lines why I like Linux so much.  The fact that it is Open Source is there, but much more important to me is the Unix philosophy I quoted above.  You have programs such as awk, cut, sed, etc., and concepts such as i/o redirection and piping that let you join these programs together to do so much, and you have environments such as bash that let you do the same thing a hundred times over, with small variations, using scripting (programming).  In short, it is simple, but very powerful!

On to my main post now:

We can think of computer evolution as the evolution of Dos 3.1 to Windows Vista (7?), the evolution from sneakernet to wireless and satellite connectivity, and whatnot.  Frequently, I used to think of computer evolution in terms of how bloated programs could get, while maintaining marketing hype, without really doing much more besides get horribly huge and slow (so that you buy new hardware, and the hardware-software computation requirement makes your computer still feel about the same).  I know that there is more than just bloat– there have actually been many improvements, both in user interface  and in features.  That is one aspect of computer software evolution, and is definitely impressive.

But then, I think there is another aspect of computer software evolution which is much more important to me– the development of “Legoware”– a term I coined on the spur of the moment.

What is Legoware?  Any (generally small) software program that can be easily used in conjunction with other tools to do what the user can imagine (and not a fixed set of components fixed up and packaged by a single vendor in a rigid, non-modifiable structure).

Legoware could be the programming (or more apt perhaps, scripting) environments like bash, python, perl, etc to use those tools extra-intelligently, specialized tools such as awk, gnuplot, sed, veusz, etc to do very specialized stuff, latex, etc for great formatting and text-editing, etc.  You can create arbitrary programs to do as much as you can imagine using these– the concept of a computer as a (hacker’s) playground.

And then again, come the application plugins.  OpenOffice, Firefox– the two I can think of right now.  The applications do just so much, and you can get plugins to extend everything beyond measure!  I use so many firefox plugins that using firefox is an experience in itself not just because of the application, but much more so because of my favorite plugins.  Which is why I hate it when upgrades break some plugins.

I got a long distance call from home a couple of days ago, and my dad told me over the phone that no matter how hard he tried, he could not make firefox look as good as it was before after the tech who had visited had reformatted his computer (virus problem or something).  I think he was missing the adblock plus extension I had installed for him…. though I am not sure yet.

Further, I keep bumping into new add-ons that I google up when I need them, and though I lived my whole life up to that point without using them, they seem indispensable from that day onwards.

I have even considered writing a few when I did not find any plugin that did what I wanted– I might eventually end up writing them… hehe… lets see.

The point of this rambling is…. I am sometimes very impressed with computer software evolution… the other aspect of computer evolution that comes in small, distributed packages, is generally free, and very very helpful!

Cheers to the ongoing development of these packages, and to the inventive souls who manage to keep coming up with and maintaining them!

google and shortest path browsing

Is it a website design flaw, or just plain old laziness?  I suspect the latter.  I was trying to download firefox source code, and couldn’t notice any source download links at first glance (I think <CTRL><F>, my favourite key, didn’t work either), so rather than read through the webpage and try to figure out where to download source, I just googled it up, and voila, I was there in two pages.. first to bring up google search (via my browser search bar), and the second to actually visit the download page.

I guess (even more) simplicity would definitely help web pages (mine should be one that needs that advice I guess!).