wtf?

I really like this philisophy page at gun.io. It's about how our sedentary life (as coders) is a little bit off, considering the technology and opportunities that we now have to move.

I'm settling for a while in Mexico which means I'm trying to apply these guidelines to the letter. I'm not sure how it will work in the end, good I hope. What is certain is that the world is not that big. For example Mexico is just twelve hours from french-land: add airport friction to the equation, it's just a one day trip. Instead of taking your car/train to commute to the same place for the rest of your life, grab a plane and start exploring ; while you have time. I guess it is that simple.

I'm finally back to a more civilized timezone! ... and enjoying the fine weather here in Oaxaca. Not sure how long I'll stay, a few months, or years. The place is fine, I can work in a calm environment, and "get things done" faster, or so it seems. This morning I had to route the whole internet through a VPN though since my usual morning coffee shop's wifi seems borked. I blame their cable operator which only let me through google or slashdot... meh. I guess these are the road-warrior's little troubles.

Friends are already booking their holidays to Mexico, which is a surprise to me. I didn't think I'd see them again before I got back to France: how pessimist can I be, huh? :)

Anyway, expect more updates once I get my own internet access at home.

The pointy-haired boss is a manager who doesn't program. So the surest way to avoid becoming him is to stay a programmer. What tempts programmers to become managers are companies with old-fashioned corporate structure, where the only way to advance in salary and prestige is to go into management. So if you want to avoid becoming a PHB, avoid such companies, and work for (or start) startups.

I never had to manage anyone in our startup, even though I was the president. The other hackers were my peers, and would have given me the raspberry if I'd tried to "manage" them. We operated by consensus. And the rest of the company reported to our experienced COO, who was also more of a peer.

Why be a manager when you could be a founder or early employee at a startup?

From Paul Graham's Rarely-asked questions. I really like his answer here since it does underline a few facts about not making things yourself. Use your own hands to build things, even small ones, or just for yourself. Don't try to stand on other people but rely on them. :)

“All our pets are microchipped,” Squires said. “If I could microchip my kids, I would.”

Hey listen! Let's put ships in people so we can return them to their rightful owners too! (source: npr.org)

A few weeks ago, we got an Arduino board connected to the front door of the office. The thing itself is hooked to a Seagate Dockstar stripped from every of its plastic attributes. There's a decent looking box that we should wrap around all the mess in a few days. But that's not the important thing really. Let Apple care about apparences.

Once you have a system to open the door, you need an IRC bot lurking on your #social-channel to control it. Check, thanks to Cinch.

Once you have got an IRC bot that everybody can interact with, many geeky (more or less useful) modules start popping here and there: like having weather reports, room-reservation notifications, food suggestions, etc.

A few weeks ago I also left my old Eee-PC at the office, installed a pulseaudio service to be able to stream music to it, and hooked the thing to speakers. No need to look for speakers' jacks in the evenings to play music from a random laptop. Yay!

Wait... No! It sucks! What's better was giving the root password to the other AF83 geeks, and see another plugin pop on the IRC bot to control the LastFM player daemon now running on the little Eee. :)

This afternoon, I needed to take a break from the meticulous slacking packing I was absorbed into. One way to not pack your stuff, is taking it to the office, and let it rot here. So I grabbed my Wii. While commuting, I started thinking about how boring it was to have to get to a keyboard to issue specific commands to a bot to love/hate Last-fm tracks: not good enough.

After a bit of coding, here it is: the wiird! The name's so stupid I should check if it's not already used it is already used, so I ended up naming the thing wiisl instead. A few lines of Python that reacts to a Wiimote's events to launch programs. IMHO That's a hell lotta better than talking to an IRC bot (and we got the choice anyway).

So yeah, basically we have built a radio, with a bluetooth remote control. But it's geekier this way. Next step, putting the kinect that's rotting in a corner of the office to good use!

Yesterday evening I was attending a workshop at Le loop with special guest Benjamin Bayart. The Loop is a moving target, occupying various places at different times. Its current location is a three story high office-building in the middle of Paris with network, electricity, water, etc: quite the perfect spot for a hacker space. Of course (if I understood correctly) they're currently in court for illegally occupying the place, nothing surprising if you know a little about french laws and occupying empty places. However, I'm always surprised at the way theses places gather brilliant minds, and good will. :)

Thriving on the small buzz around mister Bayart's presence, the place was a little bit crowded. a journalist from France Inter was here interviewing a few of the core people of The Loop. I hope we get to hear their voices in Daniel Mermet's Là bas si j'y suis one day or another.

Mister Bayart's was nice enough to talk about typography, privacy, and network architecture: for those who did not know how BGP work in theory, they now do. However, as always, I'm more interested in the "state of the Internet" in France: how ISP are pushing for a more restrictive model that would inevitably cripple the people (not only geeks mind you), why is that bad for you, etc. Pushing it would be imagining Internet packages that allows you to access either Facebook or Google services, a "special premium" access to Youtube, etc. All things considered, this is just a slide from an "open" connectivity model to something as bad as the mobile providers: if you thought you were accessing Internet from your smartphone, think again, you've been trapped in layers of cache every minute ; of course that does not prevent every operator from limiting your connection in bandwidth and volume. Greedy bastards. Next in line: your home connection.

In the end, there are a few things that make me glad I'm leaving for a while to Mexico. I just hope I won't return to a country with less freedom.

Lovely.