There is one thing I really don’t like: Percentages, because it’s so easy to mess with the information in a single message. If one product suddenly jumped from 10 users to 20, you can clearly say that it “had a 100% grow!” and call it “the fastest growing” product in its niche. Sure, the other brand with 100.000 users will have a hard way to debunk that, as the message is, for all cases, right.

The other is graphs. Because they show, in a nice way, number without reveling what they mean.

Like the ones John Siracusa used to veiled show that Chrome is better than any other browser.

But let’s break this to show how much bullshit there is in that so you can tell this guy to join Atwood and Jeremy Khan and move to farm and stop spreading misinformation as fact.

The first thing wrong, right out of the bat, is how he portraits Open Source communities^[1]. You can pick any other open source project, Python, GNOME, KDE — you know, the ones that basically wrote the story on how to open source projects — and see that, way above every project, there is a leadership (Python have Guide, GNOME have the GNOME foundation and KDE have the KDE foundation). Dunno about Guido, but the people in the GNOME foundation, which drives the force behind GNOME, organize, divide resources, help developers with timelines and give some ideas on how to proceed in the next version but they barely do any changes (those are left to the developers themselves). And they still manage and “own” the project.

(I know, for a fact, that Guido reviews a lot of PEPs and give opinions about those, but I’m not quite sure how much “changes” he does in the Python interpreter these days, so I’ll keep that out of the discussion for awhile. And feel free to correct me here.)

The second wrong thing are the graphs, with wild claims about what they mean. I’ll prove this by reading the graphs in a complete opposite way: If you look at the second graph, you can see that Google have a huge turn-around of developers, while the number of people working on WebKit at Apple is almost steadily. This means that the Apple team probably knows the code a lot better than the Google team.

Stopping here for a second just to say that I, too, can be completely wrong: Apple could have a constant turn-around of developers, keeping the number of those almost the same during all the time while Google may have a core of developers who drive the most of the “Android Green”^[2] team. Just saying that to point that, absolutely, this guy needs to learn how to read graphs, ’cause those just tell about numbers and not what those mean.

Now, back to the first graph (which blends with the paragraph just above it): Google had more commits. This means they contributed a lot more, right? Well, if that’s the fact and Google really “contributed” to the project, why the WebKit devs claiming they can finally get rid of code that is specific to Chrome? This may actually mean another thing: Google was already fucking with WebKit to do what they want instead of play ball with all the other developers. In that case, the WebKit developers are more into “open source” philosophy than Google, ’cause they accepted things they wouldn’t need just to keep the ball rolling.

And stopping again to prove the point that that’s what I’m reading and distorting to prove my point that Google is the bad guy in this instead of going after the facts. It could really be that Google, while adding new features, had to open space for its own extensions. But I could also point that, just a few paragraphs later, John points that Google didn’t play ball with the open source community when they decided to not to contribute the multi-process architecture back to WebKit. So I can, once again, point that Google never really did embraced the open source nature of WebKit and was, all the time, just fucking it up.

“But I look at those graphs and wonder.”, he says. Well, yes, I look at those graphs and wonder: Do you have any idea of what you’re talking about?

And then there is the anecdote of Safari crashing more than Chrome. Well, fun fact: I thought ArenaNet botched a patch and was constantly sending reports and was almost furious that they never fixed. Then the NVidia settings panel crashed and I realized it was my system that was botched, not the game. I can also add that, along with Safari, in this year Pwn2Own, Chrome was the first browser to fell (with a bug that they don’t to tell anyone and sell to be exploited around); Firefox fell only on the third day. So yeah, I can claim that while John keeps pointing that Chrome is super-duper secure, Firefox is light years ahead ’cause it took longer to crack and, then, this whole debacle is pointless and Firefox clearly won.

But, then again, I’d be doing slight distortion of facts just to prove my point. Exactly how John did with his whole post[3].

But why do I mention the story of my botched system? Because your Safari crashing more than your Chrome means absolutely nothing. It could be a gazillion different things that prove absolutely nothing. The guy could be running Safari with extensions (yes, they exist) and Chrome with absolutely nothing and the extension is preventing Safari from running flawlessly and the pages stop responding to protect the browser itself. It’s like people that claimed Firefox was slow and bloated compared to Chrome, when they had a pristine copy of Chrome while their Firefox had more than a dozen extensions.

And I can cite again, using John words, that if Google was really into open source, they wouldn’t refuse to contribute to the multi-process architecture and Safari could have better protection. But hey, they didn’t and you have to ask what was the point of the claiming that “Google chose to participate in the existing WebKit community” when they clearly didn’t.

You know, for a guy with a blog titled “Hypercritical”, this guy is pretty full of bullshit instead of being critical to his own writing. Maybe it’s a sarcastic title, meaning people that read that are not really critical…

Edit: Forgot to mention this: If the Google developers have “already proven” they are capable, why does Chrome is second in number of hacks inside jQuery, just after IE? This just helps my point that, since the start, Google was just fucking with WebKit code.

Still edit: And just breaking this paragraph to point that this doesn’t mean your choice of browser is wrong. The fact that Google seems incapable of being a real open source contributor (which is more than just “post commits with code”) doesn’t mean the feature you really like in Chrome is bad and you should feel bad (in Zoidberg voice). It just mean that you don’t need to pick a graph, read it completely wrong just to have some affirmation on your choice.

[1] And I’ll give him credit for at least telling the correct story behind WebKit.

[2] Yes, I saw what you did there. It was not clever, by the way.

[3] And did that with a bunch of links, nonetheless, just to look like a Wikipedia page and give some street cred to the post (including an “already proven” link that actually just goes to the Chrome page without proving a damn thing!)

First you have a guy telling that he would support a monopoly in the browser market (which I fully raged against). And then, out of nowhere, one of the jQuery guys come out and tell everyone that they are tired of doing hacks to avoid WebKit bugs — which finally sparked the Chrome/WebKit team to fix said bugs, which was even celebrated by John Resig himself.

But the thing is: Ok, the WebKit team fixes the bugs. Does that mean that they can simply remove said hacks?

The answer is a loud “no”. Because WebKit is not a single browser; it’s four, with a fifth coming around. Chrome, Chromium, Safari for OS X, Safari for iOS and, soon enough, Opera (and we still need to see how many versions of it will appear — although I believe that there will be at least a desktop version and a mobile version).

If tomorrow the Chromium team releases a WebKit version with all the fixes, will my Safaris (iOS and OS X) finally be updated? I don’t think I need to answer this, right? This just proves how “not smart” (to play nicely) the “WebKit monoculture guy” is: The fact that it’s being support by two different companies, with two different release timelines, is actually creating a fragmentation of the WebKit market (something that you should be used to if you use any Google tool, apparently).

I’m not a full time hater of everything WebKit. Firefox got a lot better since Chrome showed up, but the fact that some many people are brown-nosing it is simply sad. Chrome had some good ideas, but it’s far from being the “awesome browser to rule them all” like everybody is claiming.

Let me explain why this is stupid:

Strong Corporate Leadership

This is cited twice in the post and, honestly, it may actually be a bad thing instead of good. Say, one of the things that annoy me is the number of people who claims they wrote a “pure CSS counter in HTML5″ but the thing only works on Chrome ’cause the moron added a bunch of non-standard “-webkit-” tags. Now, testing tags before they are fully approved and documented by W3C isn’t a bad thing per se, but the browser shouldn’t expose these things to the user unless they are actually developers trying new things. So I go and write a patch to force non-standard tags to be enabled only when the user selects so, and the default is Off (in other words, this would break every single site that wrongly relies on “-webkit-” tags). I’m pretty sure Apple and Google won’t approve it because, well, they are really interested in showing their sites in most snazziest way possible (Apple more than Google, but you get the idea).

Second, he cites “strong corporate support” for the rapid release cycles. Well, Java have a strong support from Oracle and it doesn’t have a rapid release cycle, even when it strongly needs due the amount of security holes being found every day.

So we can scratch the idea that “strong corporate support” does anything good.

The Chrome Updater

I find it absolutely retarded that he cites Chrome updater as a good thing. It’s one of the most atrocious, retarded things I ever had to deal with as a user, because it simply runs. You’re in the middle of your WoW raid, WoW is the only thing running and BLAM! download goes without you asking for it (and there goes you latency too, depending on were you leave).

Personal anecdote, one time my ISP crapped itself and I had to quickly check my emails to write down the address were I had an interview. So I did some tethering and off I went to Gmail. And it took way too long to answer. WAY too long. To the point that I was getting in the “fuck, I’ll be late” zone. That’s when I realize Chrome Updater was running and downloading a new version of Chrome. Did I ask for it? No. Was I informed about it? No. Now, the real kicker is this: Was I using Chrome? NO! Why was that thing updating something I wasn’t even using at the time? It’s ok to download in the background while it’s running, like Firefox does, but when it’s not even in memory is completely retarded and the guy who came with that idea should be taken outside and shot, to serve as an example for the others.

It IS IE6 All Over Again

This argument is going around for a while and, again, it’s true: Chrome/WebKit is the IE6 of this generation. Why? Because it exposes a bunch of non-standard (or, better yet, non-standardized) tags without telling anyone about it.

Don’t you remember the number of “Chrome Only” sites that appeared a few years ago? Why do you think there were “Chrome Only”?

That’s the whole fight we had when IE6 was king, not about “ActiveX” or anything (we can compare the ActiveX problems with what the Java holes are today, if you want). It was the fact that IE6 had some ideas about rendering stuff that were not defined as standard that broke everything and made life as a web designer a hell.

(And, for the record, so should Firefox and their “-gecko-” tags — or whatever they are these days.)

Chrome Does Not Have the Best Tools

He cites that Chrome have an awesome developer tools. I disagree. Firebug have a cleaner interface and more direct access to things, compared to Chrome. Firefox is slowly backporting those things directly into the browser itself, with a better looking tools.

Also, if Chrome had such amazing tools, Google wouldn’t feel the need to hire the guy who was writing Firebug.

Let’s Kill One and Keep One

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where we need to get this guy and put a ban on his use of anything electronic: Kill Gecko and put them in the WebKit dev team because Gecko is “old”.

Kids these days, I tell you: If something is old, it means it found a lot more problems that your new, shiny thingy. It has covered all the corner cases your project doesn’t. So I tell you: Let’s actually kill WebKit and move everyone to Gecko! Since it’s older, it has a lot less corner cases to fix! </sarcasm>

On a serious note, I won’t even get into the “mystical man month” argument ’cause that would probably be a too strong point for this fellow.

Are posts like this that make me feel bad that web has such strong presence everywhere. ‘Cause this guy works for YouTube and should know better how those things work. Except he doesn’t.

PS: Yes, it’s all personal opinion. Yes, it’s my personal opinion against his personal opinion. Yes, I still think he’s a moron.

A documentary on Brazilian Formula One racing driver Ayrton Senna, who won the F1 world championship three times before his death at age 34.

The usual spoiler alert… Wait a freaking second, this is documentary! It’s like asking to not spoil the result of the World War II.

So I finally watched the documentary that, at some point, was said to be the “highest rated documentary on IMDB” (although today it doesn’t even appear in the first page). I reckon it didn’t catch much attention around, as most people are not Formula 1 fans and most people are not Brazilians in their mid twenties or older.

So, let me put this (and specially that last phrase) in context: It was the late 80s, early 90s and Brazil was still recovering from a military dictatorship. Inflation was growing like crazy and the feeling from the general population wasn’t so happy. So there was a great need for a circus (the bread part was a bit harder) and, at this time, this guy, who raced in one of the most expensive racing sports, was considered brilliant by experts and would say he was Brazilian any time he had the chance and displayed the Brazilian flag proudly on every victory and that gave the Brazilian people some hope.

(And people forgot the fact that he came from a very wealthy family — he was the 1%, or even the 0.1% at the time — but remember fondly his Foundation, created to help poor kids, which only existed after he became famous.)

The problem with this documentary is mostly the way it was edited, to give a more “drama!” vision of the events: You have the hero, the rival and the evil.

The hero is, obviously, Ayrton Senna. They show how the people loved him, how impressive his driving was, how he was a bon vivant…You know, the guy you want to be (or have a close friend). In no point, the documentary shows anything negative about him — and, honestly, I think the Brazilian press shielded things like that pretty nicely, as I can’t remember anything bad about him.

The rival is Alain Prost, who Senna had problems since the very beginning of his career. I remember that, recently, someone asked Prost his opinion about the movie and he said that it painted him as the bad guy and I totally agree with his commentary. There is this bad light put over his shoulders in the movie, his driving skills are mentioned hastily and without depth and there is absolutely no word about his personal life. But, again, a good drama needs an antagonist and Prost was used for this. Oh, not only that, but in the very end, when they talk about Senna’s death, Prost is shown helping carry the casket and with distraught face; the bad guy turned to be a good guy in the end. As I said, just so it feels like a real drama movie.

The evil is Jean-Marie Balestre, president of the FIA at the time Senna was racing. The movie goes great lengths to show that Balestre did everything in his power to grant Prost victories over Senna and would take any chance to block the Brazilian progress in the sport. The movie also cleverly does this 2 years after Balestre’s death, so he had to way, as Prost did, to give some words about it. I’ll give the chance of doubt to the filmmakers, as (maybe) Balestre was a total dick (as the movie portraits him) after all, but one has to ask if such thing was really necessary for a documentary.

In the end, it’s a good documentary to remember Senna (if you actually remember seeing him driving) or to get some insight from one of the most known personas in Formula 1. Otherwise, it’s just an average documentary with too much drama and little documentary.

As usual in movie reviews, here comes… THE IMDB PLOT!

Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. brings together a team of super humans to form The Avengers to help save the Earth from Loki and his army.

Spoilers? Spoilers. I mean, for sure this time, I need to spoil this. Also, beware if you’re a Whedon or Marvel fanboy.

Anyway, the easiest way to describe The Avengers is “it is an incredible good sequel, but a very lousy movie by itself.”

What do I mean by that? That the movie is only good because it is based on everything that Marvel did before. If it wasn’t for Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain American and the numerous remakes of Hulk, this movie would suck donkey balls.

Just to show this: If you saw the movie already, answer me this: Who is Hawkeye? No, “the guy who can shoot arrows without even looking at the target” is not the valid answer. Who is Hawkeye? We know that Iron Man/Tony Stark is super genius, incredible egocentric guy from the previous movies (and that he is dating Potts only due his guilt/she’s the only one that cares); we know that Captain America/Steve Rogers is the supreme-good-guy-Greg who is in all about do what’s right form the previous movie; we know Thor is the demigod that cares about Earth due his experience when he was stripped of his powers in the previous movie; we know Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff is the supreme spy and very good at hand-to-hand combat from the previous movies; we know Hulk/Bruce Banner is the super smart guy that can get angry or he turns into an incrontrollable beast from the previous movie. And what do we know about Hawkeye? That he was sitting in a crane on Thor in a very small scene and that’s it. There is absolutely no character development and those were traded with very small “in the previous episode” type of recons.

If someone who never saw Thor (the movie), for example, would that person understand why Thor (the character) cares about Earth? Probably not.

So yeah, it’s a sequel. No matter what anyone says, this is a movie for anyone that saw all the previous Marvel movies.

And for the science, I’m happy that Joss Whedon didn’t ruin this movie too much. Now hold your freaking Firefly^[1] fanboyism and listen for a second: The problem with Whedon is that he’s a nerd. The same way I could bore you to dead discussing some intrinsic property of some programming language, he could probably do the same about comic books. It’s too much for anyone that only wants to learn a programming language or read a comic book. But, again, we both hold ourselves and the movie is saved, which a few exceptions in the screenplay — which is also partially credited to Whedon.

I won’t discuss acting of everyone ’cause, as I said, the characters are pretty much the same you saw before. We don’t need to talk how Scarlett Johansson makes a mysterious but well trained assassin/spy ’cause she’s just redoing the same thing she did in Iron Man 2; or how Robert Downey Jr does a good job being the playboy, narcissistic, super-smart guy ’cause he’s just replaying the same guy he did in two movies.

But we have Mark Ruffalo doing Hulk, a job that was done before by Andrew Norton and Eric Bana. I think he does a good job being the “I… must… control… myself… must… not… get… angry…” type of guy but his physique is a bit… off. The Banner/Hulk relationship is similar to Steve Rogers/Captain America, with the “return to previous state” clause: The thin, weak guy vs the bulging, strong guy. But Ruffalo is already a good-sized guy, which feels… out of place. Nothing that ruins the story, though.

Heck, compare the way Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno in the very old “The Incredible Hulk” series. Sure, both actors have different sizes and there was some camera tricks to enforce this difference, but it worked: The Hulk was huge and Bruce was tiny.

Even if he’s doing the same job he did in Thor, one must point the incredible work of Tom Hiddleston being Loki. I mean, really. What this guy did with the character is the same thing Brent Spinner did for Lieutenant Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation: There is no actor, only the character. The movie could pretty much put “Loki as himself” in the credits and it would still be accurate. A few maniacal laughs missing, but still pretty good character portrait.

I can’t really say anything about Jeremy Renner. I really like the guy, I usually enjoy the way he acts and the type of character he portraits but, again, we are stuck in the question: Who is Hawkeye?

Story wise, there are so many plot holes as created by the number of explosions in the movie. First and foremost, Who the fuck is Hawkeye? Maria Hill also don’t have any character development, but she’s always in the sidelines and never in the center of the screen. But Hawkeye? Oh, come on! And, most glaring, is the fact that Loki is captured because he did want access to the Hulk. Only that he never ever gets near him (Hulk gets near Loki, though, and that’s completely different). It’s never said why Loki wants to get the Hulk as the Hulk never contributes to his plan or against it — Loki doesn’t need Hulk gamma-saturated body parts and the Hulk doesn’t have the power to simply stop Loki, and one sees clearly that Loki doesn’t fear the Hulk later on. Wanna a plot this? Loki wants to use the power of the Stark Tower, but change that to the generator in Tony Stark chest and BLAM! Tony Stark is the monster! OH SHIT! Except that don’t. And if Bruce Banner is always angry and can sort-of control the Hulk, why he goes apeshit on Black Widow if one can clearly see that he’s pissed with S.H.I.E.L.D. — Nick Fury specially — in the discussion? Tony Stark gets annoyed with the idea of losing Coulson (told you, spoilers), walks away when Fury talks about it, gets angry with Cap when they talk about it and, still, nothing really changes. He doesn’t break. He doesn’t bulk up. He shows to be the most affected by Coulson dead and, still, he doesn’t give a fuck? The fuck! And goddammit Whedon, if you want to show semi naked, long legs girl, why the fuck Gwyneth Paltrow? Geebuz!

And then we have the combos. I mean, for anyone who played Marvel Ultimate Alliance — both games — know that this is a big thing: Heroes combine their powers for even stronger attacks! And you keep expecting those to happen, which twice in the movie, in one symmetrical distance between start and end and never used again. Cap, Thor and Iron Man find out an incredible powerful combination that can really destroy lots around them but, when cornered, they go by themselves instead of using this knowledge. Earth Mightiest Heroes, but not smartest, for sure.

The movie is good but only because it stands on the shoulders of its predecessors. Story-wise it’s full of cracks and, if it wasn’t for the previous titles, this would be on par with any Michael Bay movie — or even below them.

[1] And Andromeda was way superior than Firefly, ’cause they had Kevin Sorbo and the series was still kick ass.

Edit: Ok, two things I realized after I posted this:

1. The implied relationship between Black Widow and Hawkeye is only there exactly because they gave zero fucks about his character development. It was added ’cause you already know Black Widow, you care about Black Widow and, thus, with said relationship, you now care about Hawkeye by proxy.
2. Let’s take a step back and look at “Loki needs Hulk” thingy: Let’s say that the plan was really to blow up the Helicarrier. You can kinda make this by seeing that Banner picks the scepter and that the whole discussion was actually Loki manipulating everyone in the most perfect timing in history. And then nobody realizes it was actually some mind manipulation going on, including the two most brilliant minds in the Marvel universe?

At first I got this post about adding your own images. One thing I did a bit different was the way I was generating thumbnails with the same name of the image, but in a different directory. Because of that, all I really needed was the image name. Thus, my wptis_new_default_header_images() turned into:

function wptips_new_default_header_images() {
    $dir = get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory');
    $headers = array(
        'image1',
        'image2',
        'image3',
        'image4'
    );

    $images = array()
    foreach($headers as $filename) {
        $images[] = array(
            'url' => "$dir/images/$filename.jpg",
            'thumbnail_url' => "$dir/images/thumbs/$filename.jpg",
            'description' => __($filename, 'twentyelevenheaders')
        );
    }
    register_default_headers($images);
}

This way, when I needed to add a new header, all I had to do was upload it to the theme package (with the thumbnail) and edit the $headers array to add the new filename.

But that was a bit annoying ’cause, well, I had to create the thumbnail, upload both the image and the thumbnail and then edit the function again. That’s when it occurred to me that I could make a page, add a gallery to it and then make the theme load the images from that gallery. That way, I could use WordPress itself to upload the images and let it create the thumbnails. The result was this:

function wptips_new_default_header_images() {
	$child2011_dir = get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory');
	$images = array();

	$page = get_page_by_title('The Headers');
	$attachments = get_children(
		array(
			'post_parent' => $page->ID,
			'post_type' => 'attachment',
			'orderby' => 'menu_order ASC, ID',
			'order' => 'DESC'
		) 
	);
	foreach($attachments as $id => $info) {
		$image_id = $info->ID;
		$url = wp_get_attachment_image_src($image_id, 'full');
		$thumb = wp_get_attachment_image_src($image_id, 'medium');
		$images[] = array(
			'url' => $url[0],
			'thumbnail_url' =>  $thumb[0],
			'description' => __($info->post_title, 'twentyelevenheaders')
		);
	}

    register_default_headers($images);
}

After that, I created a page named “The Headers” and uploaded all images I wanted (following the guildelines of 1000×288) and let WordPress take care of the rest, including saving them on the server and creating the thumbnail. The thumbnail is a bit larger than the normal size, but that’s not a big issue IMHO.

Anyway, if you’re interested, here is the theme. Install like any other WordPress theme, but you’ll need a page named “The Headers” for it to work (or create a page and change the name in the code).

But let’s close those points:

First, we have Steve Jobs. Yeah, he was a capitalist who commanded one huge company who did care about creating devices where under their total control.

But, at the same time, he was the helmsman of a company that disrupted everything other companies were doing. In IT, we have the expression of “disruptive technology”, which are things created the shake the market completely. Linux is such thing. And Apple products are other. Tablets changed and got accepted when Apple launched the iPad, even if the idea of such devices predates the device by a long time. Smartphones weren’t really smart till Apple launched the iPhone; MP3 players only became a mass market thing after the iPod; and suddenly we have a whole new wave of ultra-thin notebooks coming around after the MacBook Air.

Apple did hold control of everything they did, yes. But you can’t deny how disruptive the company was for the IT market.

But there is one thing that tops it all: HTML5. When HTML5 was just a thing coming out of draft, Jobs was the voice saying “Kill Flash, ’cause HTML5 is the future”. Sure, he had his motives (the fact that his company hold part of the video standard was one of those), but HTML5 became a big thing when Apple started pushing it. Or would you prefer Adobe position of, for example, saying that “Linux is hard, so no acceleration there” instead of Mozilla position of “We recognize there is a problem with accelerated WebGL/Canvas on Linux, but we are willing to work with developers to improve this situation”?

And then Richard Stallman, also known as “rms” (yes, lower case), came with some… erm… “rude” words about Steve Jobs. And then people came with “And what have this Stallman done? Nothing.”

Well, dear sirs, Stallman is the helmsman of the Free Software Foundation and the creator of the GNU project. The very first thing rms created was the Emacs editor, which influenced the readline library, which influenced, for example, the OS X shortcuts. Oh, and his second project was a compiler called “gcc”, which was the only compiler on XCode till version 3 (version 4 also uses LLVM, but that’s a completely different beast). And what’s XCode? It’s the official application for creating iOS applications. Oh yeah, ladies and gentlemen, part of the success of Apple can be be attributed to the guy that dissed Jobs days after his death.

Not only that, but gcc was the official compiler for NeXTSTEP, the operating system that Jobs started after being fired from Apple. And hey, guess what? NeXTSTEP is the reason Apple bought NeXT and, as Jobs said himself, “was the base of the renaissance of Apple”. Would NeXTSTEP be such interesting operating system for Apple if they had to take the time to design their own compiler?

And, after you brush off the politics of rms message… Can you point anything wrong with it? Isn’t Apple the company that pushed a completely controlled environment? Isn’t that the completely opposite vision of what rms have for software?

And then, on October 12th, Dennis Ritchie died. Ritchie was the co-creator of Unix operating system and the C language.

“Whateves” is what those attacking rms and saying “meh” to Jobs are probably thinking now. Unix is the power behind OS X today (with the Mach kernel) and its main developing language is Objective C, which is C with some added features (Wikipedia page lists it as “adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language).

Not only that, but rms idea with the GNU project was to create a completely open source Unix — which later was achieved with the help of the Linux kernel — including a C compiler (the gcc I mentioned before).

If Apple went long, it’s because it stood in the shoulders of giants like rms. If rms managed to fulfill his dream of an open source operating system, it’s because he stood in the shoulders of giants like Dennis Ritchie.

Now you must be asking yourself “What video is this?” and that’s the core of the point I’m trying to make: Every single “Got Talent” video that hits the web is about some kid, man or woman who had some hard time in their lives and then got a chance at the show. Sure, there is the eventual “person who sings/dances/talks incredible bad it’s too funny to pass away”, but the great majority is the underdog who finally got their chance.

So this kid from a middle class family, who managed to get some guitar/singing lessons from time to time, managed to have his time to practice and such, learnt the tricks of trade, created a band with some friends, practices every weekend… well, sorry for you, you don’t “Got Talent” ’cause you’re not an underdog.

Kinda reminds me of those “Reality TV” shows where people are invited and they have to do some crazy shit. I mean, what’s the reality when you have to stay standing for 12+ hours non-stop? Do you stay 12+ standing non-stop at your house, by any chance?

The only thing I’m using the “auto close brackets” feature is to make sure all the mess with opening square brackets inside functions inside functions would have the proper closing element. It’s somewhat easy to get lost in a str_replace(' ', '', trim($param['string'])) line.

But that’s only one thing editors do that are only there to work as a “walking stick” for the language you’re working on.

• Auto close brackets: As I mentioned, that’s because accessing most array elements requires at least two characters ("[" and "]") or 4 if you use associative arrays/dictionaries/objects. JavaScript does this right by not having associative arrays and making objects. You can kinda do the same with Python objects, but it feels somewhat wrong when you do have dictionaries. You can somewhat fix that with __getitem__ or just monkeypatching the dict object. But in some languages, there is no such option. Also, as you can imagine, the problem is “lessened” with languages where all the basic types are objects: instead of making function return the parameter of another function (like I did above), you simply call function and then the next function. The same example above in Python would be something like param['string'].trim().replace(' ', ''). This obviously reduces the changes of forgetting to close one of the parenthesis.
• Snippets: Snippets are small pieces of code that you repeat most, but not to the point you can simply write a function to do such thing. C/C++ allow you to somewhat skip that by using macros but one must reckon that macro syntax is a bit cumbersome.
• Templates: Templates are large snippets that encompass whole files. It seems templates are there not to just solve a language design problem, but a general “language design principle” problem. The most obvious example I can think of is using Eclipse to write a Java application to connect to a database. To do it so, it requires so much boilerplate that Eclipse itself offers a way to create the whole file to you based on a simple database definition.

I’m probably forgetting a lot more programming editors do these days just to cover languages’ asses here. But I guess you start viewing programming languages a lot different when you think any feature in the editor is just to solve a problem with the languages we use today.

Before I go, I think it’s better to tell you what are my expectations in the Star Trek universe. When Gene Ronddenberry created Star Trek, his plan was to make a series showing that, in the future, humanity would always solve things going the higher ground. The captain of the most important human ship, thus, most embody those qualities.

So, in order from worst to best:

Benjamin Sisko (Deep Space 9)

Deep Spacers forgive me, but Sisko was the worst captain the Federation could get, even if you compare him to Jellico. Maybe Sisko wasn’t a bad captain before he took the helm of Deep Space 9, but after the very first episode, he turned into the reluctant captain: He didn’t want to be the captain of Deep Space 9 and couldn’t get into terms with the loss of his wife — and he didn’t for the whole series.

Not only that, but he did slip every single thing for what the Federation stands for: He accepted, with no regret, about people doing wrong things under his nose (won’t spoil, but it involves Garak and the 19th episode of the 6th season) and used his position of “Emissary” to manipulate a whole system. His actions may had saved the station and brought peace to the region, but it was still wrong. For a series that tried to show the best of the human race, Sisko shown the worse.

Kathryn Janeway (Voyager)

Janeway wasn’t bad per se, she was in a very thought and dark situation — honestly, the darkest of all series: In the other side of the universe, with no hope of getting home in a lifetime… If that wasn’t dark enough, their ship was slowly falling apart, replicators falling and the biological memory slowly going out. Everyone mentions “Janeway slow decent into madness”, but I never noticed that. She does start lacking control of her ship due a fall into depression (in one episode, she isolates herself completely from the rest of the crew), which should probably be diagnosed before she was given the big chair.

Jonathan Archer (Enterprise)

Archer had a hard time in front of him: The Federation and all the prime directives didn’t exist yet and his Enterprise (the one without the NCC-1701 prefix) was the first big human warp ship. No rules, no role-model… Archer was fated to fail. But thing is, he didn’t.

In all the crazinest that happened, he had to deal with the fact that he was, at the same, responsible for exploring the universe, trying to make new alliances and the captain of the biggest space weapon Earth had. In one episode, knowing Earth would be under attack, he tried to reach Earth, but the dilithium crystal was completely drained. On the way, only with impulse engines, they find a merchant ship and ask if they are willing to trade their dilithium crystal for supplies, which the merchant says no. After exploring all the possible options, Archer decides, showing a complete regret on his decision, to steal the other ship dilithium crystal (leaving behind enough supplies for the merchant ship to complete its route, promising his crew that he’ll come back and help that ship once Earth is saved). That puts Archer way above the others, simply ’cause he sees and regrets doing what’s wrong.

James T. Kirk (The Original Series)

Kirk didn’t had a soul of a captain: deep down, Kirk was an adventurer. Being a captain only gave him the perfect tool to go into the greatest adventures a man could be part of. He also knew that he would have to play by the rules, so he does. The fact that he doesn’t like to lose is also the reason he follows such rules (’cause he knows he would lose his ship and had to give up his adventures). Also, following the rules made things hard, which only made the things more exciting.

Surely, he had the greatest crew ever: Bones and Spock played two sides of a conscience (the emotional side and the logical side) and Kirk played the judge of those two. But, deep down, Kirk knew the rules and had a conscience (even if it was only strong enough to hear Bones).

Jean-Luc Picard (The Next Generation)

For the Federation standards and rules, Picard was the perfect captain. He followed rules, he had conscience to do the greater good (even against the rules), he had absolute control of his ship and crew (without a strong hand, like Jellico) and, most importantly, he took the job of being a captain seriously. He did not take vacations ’cause he knew there was a job to be done and he was in the position to do so.

Contrary to Kirk, Picard didn’t need the “conscience personifications” walking around him to remind him of logic and morals: He had that in himself.

And, for being the “better human” Roddenberry expected in his series, and having a soul of a captain, Picard is the better captain.