Use Tables!

Oh no! I was tagged by Axel Hecht. And I don’t even understand his reason for tagging me (id est, he gave a reason and I don’t understand it). By the laws of the internet (and to make myself and my relationships to others “less one-dimensional“) I had better comply, however.

So, the rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven facts:

1. I am a Dutch national, currently doing my MSc Advanced Computer Science in Britain, and taking intermediate-level French lessons on the side. The accent of (some of) my classmates drives me insane.
2. I got into Mozilla (and eventually its development) by writing scripts in VBScript for a fansite of an MMORPG (to calculate experience gained from using certain skills), and having the website owner tell me that the result “didn’t work in Mozilla”. Very badly written JavaScript versions were published later, and I vividly remember cursing the various differences I ran into when converting my code. Everything seemed much harder in JS. I’m afraid the damning evidence of all this is now lost, as the website was taken down some time ago.
3. I once taught first-year students in highschool (when I was a fourth-year, out of 6 years) how to make websites with Frontpage. I am hopeful none ever got published somewhere remotely important. I repented before the end of highschool.
4. I had the dubious honour of working for McDonalds once, for 6 months on a temporary contract. I declined staying afterward.
5. The pronunciation of my first name (and the difficulties people have with it) is a subject of hilarity among some of my international friends that I have by now resigned to. For those who don’t know how to deal with it still, I wrote about it some time ago. For something that even people who read that post might not know, it is short for “Gijsbert” which is equivalent to the name “Gilbert” in German, English, and French. Except nobody there actually calls their kids Gilbert.
6. I have 5th cousins who live in Alberta, Canada, who randomly found me through Facebook.
7. I was robbed in my own home (student flat) at knifepoint about 2.5 years ago. Fortunately, nobody got hurt. I still have the IRC log from that day and at the time its timestamps helped me, bizarrely enough, to identify precisely how long the robbery took to the police.

Seven people who shall also have to go through this harrowing experience:

1. Nadya Peek, because she always has something to say but never blogs.
2. Aaron Leventhal, who tends to have interesting stories about his history, and certainly has more of that than me.
3. Ben Millard, who doesn’t seem to have been tagged yet.
4. Okke Formsma, who is in the states at the moment and would presumably love to share childhood memories while far away.
5. “Schrati”, because she keeps blogging in different languages and I really wonder in which she would write this.
6. Daniel Glazman, because so much of his life is public knowledge by now that I wonder what we do not yet know.
7. Shawn Wilsher, because if I remember correctly he got into the Mozilla Project after me, is now definitely in much deeper than me, and still did not respond to the previous person who tagged him.

And finally, if you were wondering, the title of this post means “Seven freaky things”, not “Seven without linge cases” as Google would like you to believe.

While I was in Brussels for the European Meeting of Taizé, I was co-responsible for the rubbish collection during meals (with 25,000 people eating in big exposition halls, you need people to take care of the trash they create, obviously).

We would separate bottles from all other rubbish, so we could recycle the empty bottles separately. So, we needed some way to label rubbish containers which were for bottles, and containers which were for other rubbish. While worrying about this, I was told that the company providing the containers had already “taken care” of labelling the containers so that some would be used for bottles and some for other rubbish. Curious as to what they had done, I went to look.

Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures, but basically what they had done was taking 2 A4 papers for each container, printed “PET” on them as big as possible, and stuck them on either side of the container with one piece of doublesided tape.

There are several things wrong with this. First, and most importantly, the target audience (young people from all over Europe and in some cases the rest of the world) will largely have no idea what “PET” even means. In fact, I would guess that some part of the people reading this blog don’t. In the Netherlands and Belgium, it is a fairly common abbreviation used to indicate plastic (even if it’s not strictly speaking PET). 9,000 of the 25,000 people were Polish young people. Some of them don’t speak English very well. Even those who did would most likely have been baffled by the signs.

The other mistakes are smaller: the papers had been attached in such a way that some would be upside down on the other side if the container was opened, and in other cases they were only attached on one side, meaning people approaching from the other would have no idea they couldn’t put their rubbish there.

Finally, using one bit of double-sided tape to attach a bit of A4 paper when there are 25,000 young people coming is naive at best. The papers that we did not take off the containers ourselves had, by the end of the meeting, been taken by the young people, or fallen off.

Instead, our team improvised a different solution. We stuck signs with a big image of a bottle, and the phrase “Bottles only” in several languages on the containers, using large quantities of duct tape. We taped shut the bigger openings of the containers which had two, so only the small opening remained, through which people would have more trouble putting their normal rubbish. And finally, we taped actual empty bottles to the top and sides of the containers.

I guess the lesson I learned from all this is that it is surprisingly easy to make stupid mistakes when you don’t realize who will be using your “product”. For the Belgian rubbish collection company, “PET” was probably clear enough in the case of big expositions with reasonably well-educated Belgian people manning stands from where the rubbish would come… For large crowds of young people from diverse backgrounds, clearly it was not.

Update: Patricia Clausnitzer translated this article to Belorussian.

Thanks to Silver‘s hard work, current ChatZilla trunk now features draggable tabs! Due to a slightly older patch the userlist is now much faster, and there’s some other API backend work going on to make things (even) more stable, fast and usable. Don’t hesitate to grab a nightly build and try things out!  As always, bugzilla is there for your bugfiling needs.

In other news, I will be away until January 2nd, I’m off to Taizé’s European Meeting in Geneva.

After 7 weeks of absence, I’m back. Being away was great, for all those who were/are wondering.

Catching up on bugmail and other boring things will happen this week. If there’s anything urgent you need me to look at, poke me using Mail/Google Talk/Skype.

(English Version)

Zondag 1 Juli a.s. neem ik om even voor 9 de Thalys naar Parijs, en vandaar om 14.38 de TGV naar Macon. Vandaar ga ik met een bus verder naar Taizé. Daar blijf ik hopelijk ongeveer zeven weken. Ik verwacht om 6 over 7 ‘s avonds op zondag 19 Augustus weer in Amsterdam terug te komen, maar weet niet of dat daadwerkelijk gebeurt. Dat hangt af van wat er in Taizé gebeurt. Wees gerust, ik ben niet van plan daar de rest van mijn leven te blijven, maar het zou kunnen dat ik een (paar) weken korter of langer blijf, al naar gelang ik en/of de broeders dat nodig vinden.

Ik hoop veel van jullie daar te zien – de groep van de 3 ranken komt de 15e (Juli) aan, mijn ouders en een aantal oude vrienden uit Polen die ik al lang niet meer gezien heb komen een week later. Verder zal ik ongetwijfeld veel nieuwe mensen ontmoeten, en wie weet nog wat oude bekenden onverwachts terugzien.

Opschrijven wat me beweegt daar zo lang te blijven is moeilijk, vind ik. Daarnaar eerder gevraagd schreef ik een paar maanden terug:

Ik wil graag een keer langer blijven om rust te vinden, denk ik. Om een langere periode niet iedere dag met studie of werk geconfronteerd te worden, en meer tijd te hebben om na te denken over belangrijke(re?) dingen, zoals wat ik nu eigenlijk wil (of kan) met mijn/het geloof, en wat ik (daarmee) voor anderen kan betekenen. Om tijd door te brengen met andere jongeren die dat ook belangrijk vinden, en van hen hun mening over zulke onderwerpen te horen.

Wat betreft praktische zaken: hoewel er een kleine internetkiosk is op het terrein ben ik niet van plan daar naar binnen te gaan. Dit betekent dat ik ongeveer 7 weken mijn e-mail niet zal lezen. Ik neem geen mobiel mee. De gemeenschap heeft openbare telefoonnummers, maar bel deze alsjeblieft NIET tenzij het ontzettend dringend is. Als je gewoon wilt weten hoe het met me is, stuur dan een ouderwets postkaartje, ik zal proberen terug te schrijven

Als je me nu gedurende die periode dat ik weg ben mailt, en je hebt nog niks teruggehoord nadat ik al een maand of zo terug ben, laat het me dan alsjeblieft even weten – het kan zijn dat ik je mail gemist heb of dat deze in de spam terecht is gekomen. Die kijk ik normaal gesproken door, maar nu ik er zo lang niet ben zullen er dingen ongezien in de prullenbak verdwijnen. Ditzelfde geldt voor commentaar op dit weblog.

Ik wens jullie allemaal een fijne vakantie.

(Nederlandse versie)

Sab – bat – i – cal
noun
any extended period of leave from one’s customary work, esp. for rest, to acquire new skills or training, etc.

Just before 9 am on the morning of Sunday July 1st, I’m taking the Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris. At 14.38, I will take the TGV to Macon, and from there I will take a bus to Taizé (Wikipedia Article). I will stay there for seven weeks. I hope to be back in Amsterdam at 7pm or so on Sunday August 19th, but I’m not completely sure this will happen. I may ask or be asked to stay for a longer or shorter period of time, which may delay or hasten my return.

I will meet up with some good friends of mine, notably a group from my church (site in Dutch), my parents, some Polish friends of mine who I know will be there – but probably also a whole bunch of others who I’ve met there the other times I’ve gone.

Putting the purpose of my “sabbatical” in writing is hard for me, but I suppose it involves learning more about (my) faith, the Bible, life in general. It also (especially, perhaps) means sharing and living with other young people who struggle with the same or similar issues.

On the practical side, there are several consequences. While there is a small internet kiosk on the community grounds, I have no intention whatsoever of using it. I will not check my email for 7 weeks. I’m not taking a mobile phone. If you very, very, very urgently need to contact me, the community has a landline phone which you could call. If you just want to know how I am doing, send me an old-fashioned postcard (there’s an address on that page) and I’ll try to write back.

If you happen to e-mail me during these 7 weeks, and even a month after I come back you haven’t heard back from me, chances are your e-mail ended in GMail’s spam filter – please bug me about it and we’ll see what happened. The same issue applies to comments to this weblog – AKismet is wonderful, but might just hurt your comments.

I hope everyone has a great holiday, and see you all on the other side.

I meant to write this post a long, long time ago. I was prompted to actually do it right now when reading an article on the BBC News website about euthanasia. (more…)

Dear Cambridge. You are supposedly the 6th university in the field of technology in the world (link requires subscription). However, as graduate degrees you only offer a PhD, an MPhil or a “Diploma”. The latter being mostly courses from the second year of a BSc Computer Science. What on earth convinced you not to have a regular MSc degree? It’s baffling me, whatever the case.

In other news, I went to see Anna Ternheim in Lantaren-Venster yesterday. This was fun, though the dual concert approach wasn’t all that successful in my eyes – Vinicio Capossela simply makes a very different kind of music, so to me this didn’t better the experience much. I’m not sure if, in hindsight, I should have preferred missing his bit of the concert. Regardless, I liked the somewhat more intimate approach (about 200-300 people attended) than what you generally see on tv (this was the first ‘pop’ concert I ever attended – I’ve been to classical concerts before). I had a good time, though I unfortunately didn’t manage to get an autograph on the cd I bought, which is sort of a shame. Oh well.

Edit: You can listen to some of her music on MySpace. I wouldn’t normally link there, but this is the only place I can find where you can listen to “No Subtle Men”, which she sang last night and is absolutely great, if you ask me.

List of things on my mind, because I can’t be bothered (and don’t think you guys can) with separate posts for each of them.

• Trying to find time to co-write a paper and to get it accepted for a student conference on AI in Utrecht.
• Trying to find time to modify a paper on Ethics (specifically, Moral Relativism) that I wrote some time ago and submit that to ‘something’ Dutch / UvA.
• Doing regular coursework, which involves
  • reading about 200-300 pages every week
  • writing summaries and questions for speakers on the subjects for all of them
  • working on a project with students from Stanford University and a Fortune 500 company in the tech industry. Can’t say much more than that, though for once it doesn’t involve engineering.
  • writing language processing tools in Python.
  • trying to catch up with lost classes from last block about Statistics and Stochastics.
  • writing knowledge processing tools and representations using Prolog and OWL.
• Working on my Mozilla project. I meant to write about this earlier, but the Mozilla Foundation has sponsored me to work on making the ChatZilla IRC client accessible (as is clear from that link, it also needs a better website, we’re working on that on the sidelines). In fact, I have a conference call concerning that starting in 10 minutes, so I’d better finish this up.
• Working on other Mozilla-related issues
• Trying to get some work done on some other Firefox extensions of mine.
• Figuring out what university I’d like to attend for my MSc.
• Visiting junks drug and alcohol addicts. We need to stop calling people garbage – things are garbage (see also the post title) but people never should be. Also, Amsterdam is strange in the sense that I just went to a church service done by the Drug section of the pastoral care (not sure if that’s the right way of putting it in English) and atop of us (ie, in the room above us) some snobby people were having champagne, for the opening of some exhibition or whatever. Stark contrast…

That will do for now. Off to that conference call!

Because bulleted lists rock:

• The Hilton is not for me. I’m struggling with the luxury nature of most things. For instance, this morning I wanted to have breakfast. Which of the four eating places inside the hotel should I use? Breakfast is not included in the night’s stay, so how does paying for that work? Is it a buffet or do I just get stuff from the waiters? It’s all solvable, and fortunately everyone there is paid to help even though I’m ignorant, but it’s annoying at times.
• “Public transport” is not part of the standard Southern California vocabulary. Getting around without a car and without spending a ridiculous amount of money on cabs is hard.
• “How are you, sir?” is the standard substitute for “How may I help you?”. This is confusing.
• Obesity is a real problem. After having breakfast, the ‘why’ for that is readily apparent as the continental breakfast I took was considered “a base” by the waiter, who told me at least 2 or 3 times I could get more stuff if I wanted to. I did not finish this “base” alone, though that admittedly might have something to do with my jet-lagginess and generally confused stomach.
• Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands should start being real Chinese restaurants, instead of serving all this stuff we call “Chinese” which is actually Indonesian/Malay (Babi Pangang, Nasi Goreng, Bami, etc.)
• Some stereotypes are not stereotypes, they’re simply true.

That will do for now. I’m off to see the Queen Mary.

One more thing – it amazes me, as it has for some time now, that as one travels to different places across the globe, every place has its own “colour scheme”. The easiest examples close to my home are the fact that brick houses make up most of the (nothern/middle) Netherlands, and once you cross the border to Belgium and France, the omnipresent red brickwork is replaced with grey/white plasterwork, the colours and fonts used on roadsigns change, the wildlife/trees are different… For some reason this and the different plants/nature/cars around mean the atmosphere changes. Perhaps this is what other people think “feeling on holiday” is all about, I’m not sure. I just find myself thinking, at times “gosh, this place is ugly” and then remembering I should really be thinking “gosh, this place is different“.