Branko's Weblog

The decay of Wikipedia can be measured by expressing the chance that it will fork.

That’s all I’ve got.

A fork is a term from the community of open source programmers. It means a split of a project into two distinct projects working from the exact same code base. These splits often happen for philosophical reasons, with opinions divided over the course a project should take.

See also: Oh goody, I’ll dance to that (about the fork of Mambo into Mambo and Joomla).

I eat a lot of TV dinners, simply because when I arrive at home, it’s been a long day and I really don’t feel like cooking. Unfortunately the supermarket monopolist of this town only sells high calorie TV dinners. What is a guy to do?

Well, you know, there ought to be a supermarket for fat people, one that sells filling but low calorie dinners. I imagine a tower, five stories high, no parking lots, no elevators, the store at the top floor. Every step tells you how many calories you’ve just burned. At the top they will only sell you food for a day. They won’t deliver. And their customer loyalty scheme will let you save for free use of the gym.

(I could of course stop buying crap, and start exercising more. Sure, and pigs could fly!)

See also:

• Invention #4: registered e-mail
• Invention #3: the battery charging coat-rack
• Invention #2: the multi-alarm alarm clock
• Invention #1: the pay-me-to-talk-to-me phone

A couple of months ago Jeff Atwood pointed out a 60 minutes long PBS documentary about Netscape during the dot com boom called Code Rush. He seems to like it, so I downloaded it off Youtube where its makers put it up under a Creative Commons license. To quote Atwood:

Remember when people charged money for a web browser? That was Netscape.

Code Rush is a PBS documentary recorded at Netscape from 1998 – 1999, focusing on the open sourcing of the Netscape code. As the documentary makes painfully clear, this wasn’t an act of strategy so much as an act of desperation. That’s what happens when the company behind the world’s most ubiquitous operating system decides a web browser should be a standard part of the operating system.

Everyone in the documentary knows they’re doomed; in fact, the phrase “we’re doomed” is a common refrain throughout the film. But despite the gallows humor and the dark tone, parts of it are oddly inspiring. These are engineers who are working heroic, impossible schedules for a goal they’re not sure they can achieve — or that they’ll even survive as an organization long enough to even finish.

What Atwood is perhaps too polite to mention is that the behemoth Microsoft wasn’t just competing with Netscape at the time, but it was doing so with a superior product and with the deck stacked for them—Microsoft owned the platform upon which Netscapes products had to run. These were the days of the Microsoft monopoly trials.

(Downloading off Youtube? I use the Download Helper plug-in for Firefox. I don’t entirely trust them—their website looks way too slick—, but am too lazy to investigate further. In other words, I am mentioning the plug-in, not recommending it.)

I have started looking for a new place recently. Although many sellers create excellent on-line presentations of their apartments, there are a few interesting properties that I nevertheless never look at simply because it would take too much of my time. Maybe that’s just a luxury that results from living in Amsterdam, where so many apartments are screaming for my attention that I can afford to be choosy.

So here are a few tips from a buyer’s perspective:

• If you are not on Funda, you don’t exist.
• If you are with some weird ass real estate agent like iBlue or Makelaarsland, you might as well not exist.

These two are basically the same point. Although there are truckloads of things that can be improved about Funda, the site is still miles ahead of any other of the on-line housing marketplaces (at least as far as non-rental properties in Amsterdam are concerned). Forcing me to use another site means imposing on my time: I need to learn how to work with a myriad of substandard home grown interfaces.

I will, however, look at jaap.nl and huizenzoeker.nl from time to time. Both are sites that obviously took long and hard looks at how Funda does things, then decided to copy them as closely as possible.

The “weird ass real estate agent” rule is simply because these agents with their special approaches to selling houses tend to make the process of enquiries more difficult.

Continuing:

• There is no such thing as too many photos (unless we are talking dozens, but I have yet to come across those).
• Also publish photos of connections between rooms, not just of the rooms themselves.
• I adore floor plans. (A real estate agent told me they have a gizmo that makes it really easy to produce these.) See also: www.floorplanner.com.
• Please do mention everything that does not belong to the ‘woonoppervlak’ (lit. living area) but does belong to the apartment like sheds, attics, balconies and so on, and make sure they are listed on Funda’s Kenmerken (Features) page.

Also, a tip gleaned from Freakonomics: the more concrete your description the better. So “wooden countertop” beats “beautiful countertop”. (As it happens I do like the look of wooden countertops, it is just that I do not like the way they age. Which means that in my specific case, “wooden countertop” probably means “buying a new kitchen”. Forcing me to find out about these sort of details after I took a paid day off from work to look at your apartment is not going to earn you points.)

Obviously I need exact measurements to go with the floorplans: I want to see if my stuff will fit.

All of the above is just IMHO, of course.

First, read this deranged metaphor by Sue Cameron, columnist for the Financial Times. The crazy, it burns.

So I decided her fairytale needed retelling. I am not saying mine is more realistic, I just want to show how easy it is for a metaphor to lose its magical powers.

The rain beats down on a small Irish town. The streets are deserted. Times are tough. Everyone is in debt and everyone’s credit is cut off. A rich German arrives at the local hotel, asks to view its rooms, and puts on the desk a €50 note for reasons only crazy Germans know. The owner gives him a bunch of keys and he goes off for an inspection.

As soon as he has gone upstairs, the hotelier grabs the note and runs next door to pay half of his debt to the butcher. The butcher supplies the hotel owner with €100 worth of meat on credit, then hurries down the street to pay half of what he owes to his feed merchant. The merchant supplies the butcher with €100 worth of feed on credit, then heads for the pub and uses the note to pay half of his bar bill–the bar owner is so happy that he extends the merchant’s credit with €100. The publican slips the €50 note to the local hooker who’s been offering her services on credit. She gratefully gives him the full service, all €100 worth, and all on credit. Then she rushes to the hotel to pay half of what she owes for room hire. As she puts the €50 note on the counter, the German appears, says the rooms are unsuitable, picks up his €50 note and leaves town.

People did lots of work. Everybody except the wealthy German is 50 euro further in debt. Everyone is feeling better, for a very short while. And that is how a bail-out works?

Blah-blah-blah-blog. I’ve got nothing to say. My mind is empty. May I entertain you with a joke you’ve probably already heard?

An uggly man walks into a bar. He has got a parrot on his shoulder. “I will sleep with anybody who can guess what I’ve got on my shoulder. For free!”

Silence descends on the room. People carefully back away from the man.

A pretty woman feels sorry for the man and figures she’ll guess wrong just to humour him: “An elephant!”

“No,” says the man, “but it’s close enough.”

(Where’s my rim-shot? I am sure I left it here somewhere?)

Here’s the Happy 2011 e-card I sent to people whose snail mail address I do not possess. If I forgot to send one to you, call me names in the comments. And a happy 2011 to you, too.

* It started in September of this year. Labour party member Geke van Velzen, city councillor for Amsterdam, had just nicknamed the upcoming national government “Brown I”. Maurice Limmen of the Christian Democrats, the party that was about to collaborate with Geert Wilders in said national government, got indignant. He asked for and got the mike: “Can you tell me what you associate with those words? For me ‘brown’ is indelibly connected to the Second World War.”

The best defence is a good offence. Geert Wilders party PVV are the philosophical heirs to the NSB, the Dutch Nazi party that collaborated with the German Nazis during the occupation. Calling a group that collaborates with the PVV ‘brown’ is just not that far fetched. But Limmen got what he presumably wanted, as the right wing press started its hate campaign against Van Velzen.

* Next stop was parliament itself. As you might imagine, Geert Wilders pretends to be the law and order type. And as you can imagine, that probably means rather a lot of his party members have broken the law themselves once or twice, because that is how these things work. When RTL News decided to test the hypothesis in November, they found out that about 25 % of the party consist of criminals. Or rather, 25 % as far as they could tell, because former policeman Hero Brinkman, already well-known for starting bar brawls, refused to co-operate with them.

(It later turned out that once, while a cop, Brinkman ignored a alcohol check when driving. His fellow police offers went in pursuit, and caught up with their colleague just as he got home. The head start gave him the seconds he needed to start drinking from a brandy bottle as soon as he got out of his car. It is left as an exercise for the reader why that was the first thing he did.)

Wilders response to allegations of bad behaviour by his MPs? An indignant “My group is not a bunch of criminals. You are damaging people [...]. You must stop.”

I am sure not everyone associated with the Mafia has actually committed crimes. Yet the Mafia are rightly considered “a bunch of criminals”. But Wilders managed to convince his fan base that this was yet another example of the so-called smear tactics of the Left. If elections were to be held today, his party would even gain a seat. Not a chink in their armour.

* So now we get to this week.

In the following I am going to use the name Indymedia. Don’t beat yourself up if you have never heard of them (it’s a them). Indymedia are an organisation for publishing alternative, often left-wing or anarchist news. Their lack of fame and success are the embodiment of the falsification of every conspiracy fantasy about the press that Noam Chomsky has ever held.

(It would not matter one iota if every news venue on the planet were controlled until the last damned exclamation mark by champagne swilling illuminati, because the people would still get the news they prefer either way.)

Despite managing to sideline themselves pretty effectively, Indymedia managed to become a household name when they portrayed Amsterdam mayor and labour party member Eberhart van der Laan as a fascist in a photo collage. Not that anyone would have noticed if the story had stayed at Indymedia and Van der Laan had treated it with derision or even a “no comment”. But Van der Laan just had to get indignant, condemning the cartoon in the harshest of terms.

That to me suggests two things:

1. Indymedia do indeed have a reader.
2. Van der Laan thinks of himself as a fascist.

I cannot remember the last time we had snow in November … a last time. It is so quiet outside, not a creature is stirring, not even a climate change camp guard.