The One with the Thoughts of Frans

I wrote this summary for a university course, but I never finished it.

The History of Philosophy

• The history of Western philosophy starts in Greece—Miletus, more precisely, situated in modern-day western Turkey—, around the beginning of the sixth century BCE. According to Aristotle, Thales of Miletos was the first to develop a way of thinking that deserves the name philosophy, around 585 BCE.
• The first philosophers were possibly aware of the novelty of their enterprise; at any rate, they made up a new term for it, historia, which means as much as “research.”
• The verb philosophein is not found until the second half of the fifth century BCE. This verb and the substantive philosophia do not become commonplace until the first half of the fourth century BCE. Literally, it means “love/desire to/strive to” (phileô) “knowledge” (sophia).
• Philosophia did originally not only specify a specific way thinking: originally philosophizing as an intellectual activity was intrinsically connected to a certain way of life. Something of this ancient concept is still present in our modern language: someone who sees things “philosophically” might possess the spiritual calmness the philosophers of Antiquity had in mind.

This intrinsic connection no longer exists, but some particular terms have maintained this connotation to the present day. Kantian, Heideggerian, phenomenologist or structuralist, on the other hand, only refer to certain points of view. The only qualities the philosopher needs to have are the same that every other scientist should have. Consequently, practicing philosophy does not mean that someone is or tries to be a better human being. It should be noted that this isn’t a modern development. During the Middle Ages, philosophy was little but a tool to support theology, and that is where the modern meaning of philosophy as academic and purely theoretical originated.

The Four Philosophical Questions According To Kant

1. What can I know?
2. What should I do?
3. What may I hope?
4. => What is a human being?

To know what philosophy is, it does not suffice to know the history. You need to know which questions philosophy wants to answer. According to Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) philosophy tries to answer three main questions, which come together in one big question.

The following post on the MyOpera forum spurred me to complain about something I call the prettiness disease. By this I mean adding features that either don’t help usability or actually impair it just because it looks good (according to some). A prime example is most of the features added to Mac OS X as compared to preceding incarnations, but Microsoft and the open-source community have also bought into it.

[…] the thing that most annoys me about [combine always, hide labels] is the fact that it removes the ability to simply click the taskbar icon to minimize/maximize. […] This is the case only, when taskbar buttons are not set to the default ‘combine always, hide labels’. Then it needs CTRL-click to directly switch to the last visible window of a ‘grouped’ application. This is standard Win7 behaviour also with IE8. So, if you disklike the current behaviour disable grouping of taskbar buttons for now. Perhaps there might be an option within Opera later on…

I don’t care for the “combine always, hide labels” setting in Windows 7. I think it’s a failed copy of Apple’s crappy dock, where looking pretty is the only thing that counts while losing out on usability.

Oh wow, look how clean this looks, with all the pretty icons. No text. Whoopie. Now try to identify your windows when there’s 10 different ones. What’s that, thumbnails? Oh how useful, now I can really spot the difference between my 10 directories filled with files, my 10 web pages on the same forum, my 10 text documents in my word processing application, and so on and so forth. There’s a reason I give my directories names, you know. The same applies to just about any other application. The icon only identifies the application, the text-based title identifies what the heck it actually is. Thumbnails would only work the way Microsoft seems to think they should work in Windows 7 if all I ever opened was pictures.

It’s easy enough to combine a text-based title with thumbnails (for those who like thumbnails) and flashy effects (OK, I admit that as long as they’re shorter than a second I don’t completely dislike effects like burning or fading windows, things that light up, etc), but writing your own Compiz plugin is near-impossible without completely reverse-engineering the code (documentation? comments? what’s that?), and for Windows that situation isn’t very different, at least for me.

I do agree with Joe Clark’s recent blog entry protesting shared streets without sidewalks, but I feel that the Netherlands was mistreated by the Toronto Star and to a lesser extent Joe Clark himself. For starters, the sidewalk-free erf as apparently exists in Cologne (assuming that’s what Koln is supposed to mean — if you don’t know how to type Köln, type Koeln or just use the English name) is something that, in the Netherlands, usually only exists where there is no place for sidewalks, and all erven are culs-de-sac. Erf is a Dutch word that means something like yard or court, but in the context of roads it rather refers to an area that is supposed to be more or less as safe as a yard for those cycling, walking, or playing in it. A place where the road-function (transport) is secondary to the area-function. By the way, woonerf is a now an outdated word that means something like living yard. Erven originally only existed in residential areas.

I’d say a typical erf does have sidewalks. Its distinguishing features are that cars have to drive really slowly (no precise speed is specified, but in practice it definitely doesn’t mean anything over about 10 kmph) because everybody except cars can utilize the street however they like, and that traffic can’t pass through: it’s a cul-de-sac after all. Most important it means a place where it’s safe for kids to play on the entire street and where everybody can utilize the street however they like. By no means does it mean that there aren’t supposed to be any sidewalks, and to claim that it does is a misunderstanding at best. Sadly some misguided people have managed to introduce erven without sidewalks in some places where there is enough space for them, but I’m glad to say that this is far from the norm.

Another typical situation is the 30 km zone, though you might see lower speeds like 20 km at times. This kind of zone will typically have a number of speed bumps in place to keep people at this speed and it is usually a through-going road, though seldom the preferred one. This zone will always have sidewalks and may or may not have separate cycling lanes, the latter being almost universally present on roads where the speed limit is 50 or above.

In conclusion, the Toronto Star must have projected its own vision of “better” street conditions on what is actually going on in countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium. An erf does not mean a lack of sidewalks, its application is only in carefully selected areas, and it is always meant to be a cul-de-sac. If you want to copy erven, at least do it right. Don’t claim they’re things they’re not.

I don’t care much for Twitter. The maximum message length of 140 characters is extremely limiting and, unless you resort to chatspeak, it’s hard to say anything meaningful in such a limited space. If you do resort to chatspeak, it won’t look meaningful even if it is. Catch 22! I imagine the best way to say something meaningful is to link to a blog post offering more explanation, or maybe I’m just prejudiced against chatspeak. Regardless, since most people comment on blog posts using Twitter, and everybody and their grandparents is using it, I figured I should look into a way to utilize it in a more meaningful way than logging in about once a year.

microblog-purple offers convenient integration into Pidgin, which I already use for chatting. It’s easy to install on Ubuntu using sudo apt-get install pidgin-mbpurple, but you may want to consider using PPA for both Pidgin and microblog-purple. Note that the microblog-purple from PPA is named pidgin-microblog, so if you already installed pidgin-mbpurple you’ll have to remove that first. That’s what it is, after all: a chat service with a 140-character limit — most chat services offer at least 500 characters or so. At least it has better offline and history support than most. You also need to enable the plugin named Twitgin so you get a character count on the window where you communicate with Twitter.

Since, like I said, almost everybody uses it, I figured it might also be a good idea to announce new blog posts on Twitter automatically. I searched around a bit in the forest of Twitter plugins and WP to Twitter sounds like it best meets my needs. This post is a test of the plugin, and it announces my partial submission to the crowd — not submission in the sense of Islam, but submission in the sense of realism.

I decided to join the crowd over half a decade after this kind of post started showing up across the Internet — and I bet it wasn’t new when I first saw it either. Here is my 2009 in places, alphabetically. I spent the night at most of these places, but some were “merely” the subject of day trips.

• America
  • Chicago
  • West Bloomfield (+Detroit)
  • Holland: where they tried to explain the flags of the Dutch provinces and Wilhelmina peppermint to me.
  • Palatine
  • Saugatuck
• Belgium
  • Antwerpen
  • Brugge
  • Brussel
  • Gent
• France
  • Lille: on the way back the conductor told us we’d better be glad he’s Flemish, ’cause the French would give us a huge fine for not validating our dated return ticket prior to boarding the train (had already been checked on the way there, as well…), and that this was apparently written “clearly in 4 languages at the station.” Maybe on the validating machines themselves, but certainly nowhere else. Other than that it was quite nice.
• Germany
  • Nürnberg: old looking city, but actually quite new due to WW2. Nice museums and metro system. Each church was apparently built by killing all the Jews who lived where the church is now located. A Nazi past, so to speak. The hotel had rooms based around local fairy tales, and was a total dream: both for the price we paid, and compared to our accommodations in Italy.
• Italy
  • Atrani, Amalfi, Amalfi Coast: wonderful scenery, a horrible road that makes a 20–30 minute drive into one that’s more like two hours, lots of touristy shops, and the most laid back people anywhere, ever.
  • Capri: didn’t spend quite as much time here as we’d liked; blue grotto is nice but overpriced.
  • Florence: northern Italy is so refreshing after the south, recommended.
  • Torre Annunziata: Naples suburb that is near the Pompeii and Oplonti archeological excavations; also has a convenient train connection to Naples. Very impressive Roman ruins, and nice landscape, but the modern-day suburbs, city, and nearby villages are not very inviting. The atmosphere is a lot better in the villages than around the city, but the natives peer at you like you were some creature from outer space, which is rather uncomfortable.
  • Rome: definitely need to go back sometime; we barely scratched the surface despite being there for a while. Scariest and oldest elevator I’ve ever used. Who says elevators aren’t supposed to go down like 10cm when you step into them?
  • Sorrento: lots of stairs, just like anywhere else along that coast.
  • Venice: involved quite a bit of dragging with suitcases. Very special place.
• The Netherlands
  • Amsterdam
  • Den Haag: they didn’t have a sand sculpture. Lame.
  • Den Helder
  • Middelburg
  • Rotterdam
  • Scheveningen
  • Texel
  • Utrecht: I lived here, after all.
• Sweden
  • Stockholm
  • Tippen, Saltsjöbaden: where we spent the night and enjoyed the hospitality and company of a good friend.

A couple of days ago, I wanted to print some photos on my Epson printer. I don’t do this often because I usually merely print text, but it is capable of it. I had always thought that the discrepancy between what was on my screen and what came out on paper was a matter of RGB to CYMK (or whatever my printer uses internally) conversion, but today I found out that it is merely a stupid driver. I am embarrassed that I only discovered this after utilizing the printer for several years, but in my defense, I have barely used it for printing pictures.

I’ll start off by showing the culprit. If you select some combination of a type of photo paper with one of the photo quality settings, PhotoEnhance is automatically checked. Despite being somewhat of a control freak in regard to my software and hardware, I wrongfully assumed that this meant some other kind of optimization in ink usage for photo paper as compared to normal paper. Hovering it quickly revealed my mistake: Enhances photos by optimizing color levels. Useful for low resolution images. EXCUSE ME!? I am not printing any low resolution images, and if I were, I would most certainly fix any potential color level issues myself prior to printing, if only because I could try various algorithms for blowing the picture up to a resolution more suitable for printing. Now it’s fine that this switch is there to save me such trouble if I happen to be printing low resolution imagery, but I am not doing any such thing. Tampering with it unasked could potentially have somewhat favorable results, somewhat detrimental results, or results that are so bad that they cause me to write this post.

Let’s start with exhibit one. A picture of us on the beach. Perhaps it could be made a little better by playing a bit with some color or brightness levels prior to printing, but I deemed it sufficiently decent.

Here is the first print-out I made of this picture. As you can see, the colors were made a little brighter, and the results of the PhotoEnhance feature were actually not too bad. It’s not the picture I wanted to be printed, but it’s close enough that I wasn’t suspecting anything to be fundamentally wrong. In this sense it’s comparable to the few pictures I printed previously.

This is the picture I printed later, without PhotoEnhance. Scanning it introduced some color distortions compared to the original picture, but it should nevertheless be clear that it’s closer to the original, i.e. what I wanted to be printed.

Here is the picture that sparked all of this. It’s a perfectly innocent picture of us standing at some random bridge in Amsterdam.

The monstrosity my printer made of this actually seems a touch less bad in the scanned version, but it should still be clear how horrible it is.

And finally, the same picture without PhotoEnhance. As before with the beach, most of the color differences with the original were actually introduced by scanning, and not by printing.

In conclusion, my printer is perfectly capable of producing very nice, approaching color perfect reproductions of photographs, but by default it creates something that made me think its photo printing capabilities were highly exaggerated for years. Since I didn’t buy it to print photos this was not an issue, but it’s certainly yet another example of a hardware manufacturer messing up their otherwise perfectly fine products with bad software.

This post is recycled, and was originally published on WatchZine on Wednesday 2004-03-03 at 14:00:00 UTC. I tweaked some grammar and spelling here and there, but I resisted the urge to rewrite this entry almost entirelyand rewrote fairly large portions of the text to make it flow somewhat better. To exemplify the relationship with the original text, I made extensive use of DEL and INS elements. I did not, however, refrain from commenting on myself. Sensitive souls beware: I added some brand new explicit content.

“Halt” clearly the voice of a German soldier sounds.Halt! shouts the voice of a German soldier. After a well aimed shot in the head of the soldier’s head, the player starts going tosearching for his next victim. A zombie appears. The player getstakes out a flamethrower, and some seconds after thatlater the zombie is somediminished to a pile of burning meat. Then, a group of German soldiers came togetherassembles [or gathers] and is (coordinated) attackingattacks the player in a coordinated fashion. Two of them are killed by the rocket launcher, the; pieces of bodies are flying aroundbody pieces go flying about. This is a scene from Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Some people say this is bad for the minds of growing children,: that it will make them criminals, or even terrorists. Nonsense? [It's a reasonable introduction, but the end is rather weak. This is at least somewhat intentional, however, since in Dutch (high school?) argumentative essay writing the thesis statement is to be avoided until the conclusion. I always thought this was quite silly, and my present-day familiarity with American-style writing only reinforces this opinion.]

These days, games becomeare becoming more and more realistic. That makes them more violent. [Now that's nonsense. It makes them appear more violent. Besides, I thought you were arguing against this point of view?] Ten years ago, in Wolfenstein 3D (the mother of all shooters, and still a game which is forbidden in a lot of countries [Like where? I don't know of any countries other than Germany, and that was for Nazi symbolism, not for violence.]), the German soldiers died in big red pixels. [See? It was much more violent in those days. You don't see those bad-ass blood splatters anymore these days.] No matter where you shot it, the body turned with you. Now, that doesn’t exist anymore. Every character is build fromconsists of at least three to four thousand polygons. Shoot something from behind: it falls realistically; you can do bad things to the body and walks around it. Would this be bad? No, you just need to keep in mind that it’s a game. At young age, parents should tell their children what’s fake and what’s real. Children are able to ‘goimmerse themselves into a game‘ very good,well; that doesn’t matter, as long as their parents/ or friends keep them in the real world. Besides, every game has a ‘parental lock‘ option, which allows parents to reduce the amount of gore. [While I agree with the general gist of this paragraph, the point isn't made as well as it could have been, and some poorly phrased examples detract from the strength of the argument. Kids are aware of the differences between fiction and reality as well as adults, but parental locks aren't exactly a convincing argument in support of this, and are almost a red herring to the real issue. No matter how realistic games look and sound, they really aren't any different from watching a movie or reading a book. Governments are messing up the world and are trying to get history books rewritten so that they only point out the positive aspects in history—or have already succeeded, like in America—. Games are a non-issue and if there are people who cannot distinguish between games and reality, we should be glad that they're doing their vicious deeds in games.]

Then it’s possible to putSome people point a finger toat the shootings in the U.S. Why? Some people sayIt is alleged that theythe shooters did it because they played so-called ‘bloody‘ games like Duke Nukem and Quake (I think they aren’t bloody at all [I think you're fucking wrong.]). The way they went through the school looked like they were finishing level after level in a game. Also, here in the Netherlands something like that happened,: a boy killed a girl, because he ‘got stressed by a game’. Okay, you can get stressed if you die again, but to kill your neighbor girl… That has nothing to do with the game, h. He would also have done that without the game; someone like that would also have done that if his lock refused to work. Indeed, those people we should protect, but not against games, just against themselves! [A good point is certainly made, but I'd have to check the Dutch original to see if the point was so poorly made, or if I lost something in the translation. Probably a bit of both.]

Of course you have the eleventh of september9/11 [Of course, who wouldn't think of 9/11 when discussing violent games.]: some reporters said that the idea came from a game. Their action even was successful: some games, like Red Alert 2 (which has a scene with the destruction of NY – one of the coolest levels in the game [If it had been Chicago, I would have been up in arms. Go Wolves!]) and Flight Simulator 2002 were taken from the stores (or not released yet in the case of FS – hey, in a simulation you should be able to chrash!), o. Of course you take it from stores out of respect for the victims, but the terrorists surely haven’t gotdidn’t get their idea to chrus thecrash into the WTC from a game. [That may or may not be true—if they got inspiration from anything it would have been a movie—, but it's really a red herring to the real issue.]

It becomes time that people will see that gaming is pure fun. Making sure games don’t contain violence and aggression takes a lot of time, which can much bettercould be used to do something about the real causes of violence and terror instead, and to help psychicologically violateddisturbed kids. [Like these guys?]

Frenzie (15 Februariy 2002) [This is positively ancient!]

This post is recycled, and was originally published on my former weblog on Wednesday 2005-03-16 at 10:13:36. I tweaked some grammar and spelling here and there, but I resisted the urge to rewrite this entry almost entirely. I did not, however, refrain from commenting on myself. Sensitive souls beware: I added some brand new explicit content.

Oh yeah, throw open those doors and windows and let the fresh air dwirl through your house. [Oh yeah! By the way, dwirl is not a word. Twirl is, although I'm not sure if fresh air can twirl. For poetic consistency, I'm going to suggest Allow the spring breeze to enter your house and twirl your papers.] Plants growing leaves, flowers coming up; all those scents and colors, it’s just wonderful. [I wish I was two puppies, so I could play together.] The same applies to autumn, but summer? That’s boring and often too hot. [Word on the hot. Boring depends mostly on what you do with it.] It’s not bad at all, but boring in a way, that’s all. [Bravo! Excellent repetition.] But it’s about the summer nights after all… [Ew! Gross. Don't tell me that, keep it to yourself. Dirtbag. Also, just so we're clear on this: you're saying that summer days are boring because they are too hot, but summer nights aren't because they are…hot?]

This reminds me that I want a digital camera someday. [I've got two, sucker. One compact and one DSLR. No, you can't play with them.] I hate (too) limited budgets like mine. [Boo–fucking–hoo. You've got bloody 100 Mbit Internet while I'm stuck with a theoretical 8 Mbit which amounts to 6 Mbit in practice. Keep on saving, spend your money responsibly, and perhaps you will own a nice camera or two in 4 years.]

It’s time to finally get in touch with the local library and read some fucking cool books outside! [Fuck that shit. We're living in the future.]

Lately, I’ve been sorting out some old digital junk. Not because I’m short on space—I’ve got plenty—, but because some of it simply isn’t worth keeping. Most of the posts on my former weblog fall in this category, but about half a dozen of them I just couldn’t delete. I decided to integrate them with my current weblog.

Initially, I was thinking of just slipping them in at the temporal beginning of the weblog, so they would silently appear in the year 2005. However, while I was investigating how I could make the Wordpress 1.5 database compatible with the current Wordpress 2.8 database, I changed my mind.

It would be much easier to repost the entries on my current weblog, but that wouldn’t be right if I didn’t do it with a twist. While I was rereading some of the entries, I was thinking things like Were you on fucking crack!? Wouldn’t it be amusing to make fun of the things I wrote back then by actually adding these thoughts to the entries themselves? Additionally, this would justify reposting them as entirely new entries. If nothing else, at least it will be amusing to me. You can expect the first three recycled entries this week, and a few more may follow, but I’m not promising anything.

I never really got into the whole podcast fad years ago. The available aggregators annoyed me, the available podcasts seemed generally uninteresting, and I didn’t have an MP3 player. Things change: I’ve had an MP3 player for a couple of years now. However, I only reevaluated my dislike for podcasts quite recently, when I discovered Wil Wheaton’s Memories of the Futurecast. I wanted a way to automate the process of getting it onto my MP3 player, and I found it: gPodder seems to do everything I want without getting in my way. Now I can do a quick sync with my MP3 player in the morning and I’ll have stuff to listen to while, among other things, going to and from the university.

All of that was about a month ago. I’ve only got a small selection of feeds in there so far, but since I’m still catching up on literally months of old material, that’s not an issue as of now. Aside from Wil Wheaton’s, my favorite podcast right now is Stuff You Should Know. But enough about that.

When I was younger, I usually listened to the radio news at 7 or 8 AM while eating breakfast. I have long since switched to doing some quick reading of my e-mails and feeds, but that’s not the ideal way to get a quick update on what’s currently going on. The radio news does a better job of that, but it just feels too much like a waste of time. Cue the podcast. I’ve known that Dutch public radio has had its broadcasts available as podcasts since 2005 or so. Selecting the podcast most relevant to me was easy: Radio Netherlands Worldwide, specifically the Nieuwslijn (news line) program. Of course there are competitors, such as BBC’s Global News and the German ARD Tagesschau, and I may have missed some other potentially interesting sources—which would presumably mostly mean American or Flemish—, but for now I’m sticking with this. Alas, there’s one small problem: there’s a news broadcast just about each two hours. This makes the new episodes available dialog look rather cluttered. I only want to listen to the news once a day.

New episodes available in gPodder

That’s where Yahoo Pipes comes in. When I start it, it complains about Opera, but I haven’t been able to discern any difference in functionality between Opera and Firefox on the site. In only a couple of minutes, I have something that only gives me the 8 o’clock news.

If I wanted, I could easily add the BBC and ARD feeds and also strip them to just one item a day. What I can’t do, however, is output the de facto standard <itunes:image href="http://some-picture" /> with the feed. Nevertheless, I can manually link up a picture in gPodder so it doesn’t look strange in the feed display list.

For things more complicated than such simplistic mash-ups, Yahoo Pipe’s graphical programming interface quickly becomes lacking, which is strange considering that it seems to aspire to be more than just a simple mash-up tool. Nevertheless, it certainly makes life a little easier.