Silv Thinks IT

A mashup of loose thoughts on IT, maths, science, tech, language, writing, the web and similar things

[silvthinks]

Are you familiar with regular expressions?

If no: they are sequences of characters, usually short, that greatly simplify searching a text within a text. For example, a sequence \d\.\d is a regular expression that facilitates finding two digits with a dot between them, like 1.2 or 0.0. It is used by many applications, e.g., by LibreOffice Writer. (Of course, regular expressions used in the wild are far more complex.)

Now, you're familiar, so – some background. Sometimes I try to multitask on my computer (like a processor, but I succeed far less often; by the way: concurrency is not parallelism). Some time before starting to write this article, I had launched a script to search some text within some file, and then write this text to a new file. It's running so slowly… second after second… the size of the new file is increasing 1MB after 1MB… (The input file's size is over 600MB.)

(I surely will have to stop it when I will be shutting down my computer, and find a better way for that searching.)

I can observe a similar behavior when I want to write a blog post. I've had several attempts in the past (how it sounds ;) ) – I've failed more often than not. When I try to write, I feel that the content advances so slowly that now I just reject the idea of an article even before starting to write.

Of course, that needs not to be true – it may only seem to me. In a commonsensical way, I would have to verify this feeling to be sure. But I don't see any way of doing that, so I must take for granted that things are as they are. What's the root cause then? (In this paragraph, there would be described the chain of causes that lead to the root cause, but I'm omitting it for the brevity of the flow of my thoughts.)

First and foremost, simply or not, I usually want to do it too well. I imagine an article always being too good. All the information must be verified; all difficult terms needs an inline explanation – or at least a link to Wikipedia; and, the article must include a list of all the sources I used to write it (well, even for one-liners…).

Just have a look at an article on my previous-but-still-not-abandoned blog: https://silvuss.github.io/2019/03/23/the-structure-of-the-linux-filesystem.html. Now – looks nice, but the process of writing it was just too long.

Secondly, I expect my articles to have a well-defined main topic. This means that starting from one topic, moving through another one to a third one – no good. A topic is a topic, not multiple ones.

Thirdly, I expect my articles to flow logically, similarly to expectations for a paper in a college:

(…) in college, it’s harder to get an A if you wait until the last minute. Professors aren’t as lenient about poor writing, and they expect papers to flow logically.

The introduction, the middle part, the end. I admit, that's how things should go in a good paper – and in a good article… But I have a problem, and it needs some solution!

The above is not a complete list of my expectations, but I don't want to list them all, in order not to be trapped in the too-detailed-article case.

I see a couple of solutions. In this article, however, I will mention two of the most useful… again, in order not to be trapped in the too-detailed-article case.

The first solution is general and related to a writer's block. One advice from PaperRater seems to fit:

The first step to deal with this issue [a writer's block] is to do some research!

Translating into the language of blogging, I need to read, read, and – probably – read one article (or book) more. I do it already, and it's one of the reasons I've created this blog for: too much information.

The second one is more specific and related to the flow of my writing. It should always be logical, as I mentioned. That's out of the question. But, does it need to have one, well-defined topic?

(By the way, is the flow of this article easy to understand? That's how my thoughts go.)

I want to implement both of the above advices. But it's hard. But I've started it establishing this blog, and I continue it writing this article.

Will I succeed? Time will tell (in Polish, we say czas pokaże, literally 'time will show').

[silvthinks]

So… this blog is meant to be primarily about IT (see the logo!). But, apparently, now I'm not able to think about any ways of writing about IT. All the more about fields related to it, like software development.

Maybe I'm trying to be too perfectionistic?

Anyway, not exploring for possible reasons of this inability, I still do want to write something. After all, I've created this Tumblr blog to do just this – writing my thoughts, doesn't matter of what field.

Luckily, I've left a fallback for myself. (If this seems to be a little boasting, that's not my intent.) In the blog's description, I have pointed out that this blog is not only about IT, but also about "math, science, tech, language, the web and similar" (the last one is just a perfect fallback ;) ).

In this article, let's concentrate on language.

Firstly, a fact: my native language is not English, it's Polish. I still learn English, hence it sounds reasonable to talk about an English word or phrase that I've learned recen… maybe not so much recently, but not so long ago, either. Just "adequately long ago".

(Well, if my native language was English, it would also work; but, most probably, I would have to describe it in a way more sophisticated manner. I like this idea, but, probably, it would not work out. Articles intended to be sophisticated are vulnerable to reveal my perfectionistic style. It certainly wouldn't work out.)

I'll start with an English word/phrase and its translation. In order to make the content more interesting, I will then try to use my imagination. We'll see how it will look like.

Let start with the word "curriculum". Of course, I already know the phrase "curriculum vitae" – it is widely used in Poland for, well, a curriculum vitae (usually abbreviated CV, pronounced the same as in English). But, new to me, it is also an umbrella term for what an educational institution has to offer.

In Polish, "curriculum" in this second meaning is translated as program nauczania. Among others, program means 'a program' (e.g., program komputerowy 'a computer program'), and nauczania is a genitive case of the word nauczanie 'education'. Program is pronounced the same way as in English except that both "r" sounds are pronounced as rolled r (listen to it here).

Program has another meaning: 'station', in the sense "TV station". The acronym TV is also used in Polish (pronounced the same way as in English), but personally, I prefer to use its longer form telewizja 'television'. I use it usually in the phrase w telewizji, meaning 'on the television'.

The word w is quite interesting (pronounced [v] – without any additional sound at the end). Firstly, as you might see, it doesn't contain any vowel (is there an English word without a vowel?). Secondly, it's one of the two words that consists of only one consonant – the second one being z ('with, of, from'). (There are also words that consists of one vowel, as English "a" – but those are for another article, maybe.) Thirdly, as noted by the dictionary Diki.pl, it has 10 possible translations on its own (i.e., excluding being used within phrases) – for me, it is a notable number.

W, when followed with a dot (w.), is a shortcut for wiek 'century'; for example, as in na początku XVIII w. 'at the beginning of the 18th century'. And sometimes you can encounter a specific form of it – we (pronounced [veh]); it doesn't mean 'we' ;), it means the same as w, but is used exclusively before words starting with specific sequences of letters, like "wn". For example, we almost always say and write we wszystkich ('in all [of them]').

Chciałem znaleźć w internecie aktualny program nauczania mojej uczelni. Niestety, na jej stronie znalazłem jedynie reklamę programu telewizyjnego we wszystkich językach świata. — I wanted to find the current curriculum of my university on the internet. Unfortunately, on its website I found only an advertisement of a television program in all the languages of the world.

That's about it when it comes to this article… Maybe I will publish more such thoughts in the future (especially if you like it).

Sources

Below you can find sources that I was using when writing this article.

https://enpl.dict.cc/

https://www.diki.pl/

[wanderlusteurope]

Isn't it weird to think we have to pick a career and stick with it for the rest of our working lives? Like. I'm a multi faceted human with so many different interests and what I may have enjoyed doing at 25 might not hold my interest at 35 let alone till I'm 50. There's SO MUCH TO DO. SO MUCH MORE TO LEARN. Why pigeonhole yourself into just one "career"?

[silvthinks]

Too much information

I started this blog in order to sort out all of the information that I gain every day. To organize them – and even better, if possible, to structure them. Nonetheless, as I’ve been thinking of it earlier and as I think about it now, there is still a specter of a side-effect hovering nearby: a blog demands to read more, and to read more carefully.

If you have an e-mail newsletter, either it will flood your inbox, or you will deal with every single message. If there come too many messages to deal with, what do you do? What did I do? Read them all.

flooded with information

An exemplification of a part of my daily activity in the internet; the top, open book is the current tab in my web browser. — A photo by courtesy of Pixabay from Pexels.

But, as it can sometimes be seen, there is another issue apart from the mentioned specter (quite hidden): the audience.

Who do I write to? Who will read me? I find the answer for this question not only helpful in shaping my posts to better fit the users’ needs, but also in writing more efficiently and with less fatigue (does the word “fatigue” fit here?).

How can you make it more efficient? By filtering information only for the particular group of people that read you.

For now, the answer is easy: nobody is reading me (I don’t know Tumblr that well, but it seems that less than 24 hours is not enough for becoming recognizable. This is good, I have some time to make progress). As a software developer with 5S-working aspirations, the next question that I will ask myself shall probably be: how to write to nobody?

This time, no easy answer. Let’s take it to pieces. What does it mean “nobody”? Everybody. As I tend to think about it: even though a “statistical individual” does not exist, it is sometimes very useful to assume that they do.

To a “statistical reader” of my blog, of what use would be to write about the IA-32 architecture? Maybe more significant number of people would need to know what a white paper is in i. What is very interesting to me, the reason for the space being 3-dimensional, would probably not interest anyone of them.

What this shows… They are also going to be flooded with information. By me. I am redirecting the flow of information onto them. (Well, that is – you, of course. Interestingly, that constitutes a really philosophical problem! Writing statements for future readers who will expect different conditions than those allowing the statements to be true, so they must look in the past.)

Epilogue

Whilst I personally have problems dealing with the, let us call it, “too-much-information” case, I’m not alone. There are multiple flavors of it here and there; for example, Miriam Suzanne deals with the “too-much-selectors” case that might occur in writing CSS code; she provides tips for doing it using Firefox DevTools, in an 8-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp9ZfSvpf7A

[silvthinks]

Ideas here and there

They say, we get more creative ideas in the shower. But what’s the benefit if we cannot write them down? (By the way, the linked article taught me a couple of new English words, including “slacker” – someone who often seems not wanting to work.)

(I must some day read “À la recherche du temps perdu” – or: “In Search of Lost Time” – by Marcel Proust.)

On the other hand, having the results of a research of it (why not “a research «on it»”, like in “insights on it”?) or at least beliving it, why do we not shower from time to time at work? (Maybe some do?)

I’m having a couple of new or partially new insights in the shower sometimes (also had some about this blog). That’s good, that’s very good (who do not want to be creative), but as long as I would like to write all my ideas down – or at least make a web bookmark on it – it isn’t very helpful.

But, who knows? Some of them (may) stay in my head.

(Did you know, in the English language there is a word “serendipity”? Extraordinary. Schade that I will probably not remember it. It derives from an old name of Sri Lanka, as this page states).

The research mentioned in the article linked in the first paragraph generally says about taking a rest from hard, sustained mental work (does the word “sustained” fits here? I don’t know). A rest may be a good choice for our health, both physical and mental, but what if we don’t know how to rest?

I’ve noticed this is happening sometimes. Intensively think how to rest from thinking? Hm…

Learning how to rest. That should be an activity for me, sometimes I also forget how can I do it.

Sometimes, utilizing one idea that I came up with, I have to throw the other out (forget). Not very pleasant, but I can find there a bright side – as I see it, more space means more new, exciting ideas in the future. :)

(And here we are – “swivel chair”, a new term for me. A chair that “swivels”, a chair that has a “swivel”. A “swivel”, something that makes only a part of something rotate, without rotating other parts. swivels on a swivel chair in his mind)

A jaw swivel. — A photo by courtesy of crossenterprises1 from Pixabay.

For me, ideas taste best served minimalistic; with pure excitement; just the idea, without all the baggage of restrictions existing here and there, like this idea by John Ankarström about writing HTML in HTML. This is one of the reasons I tend to write in the web in (some kind of) Markdown language instead of “rich text” or similar. Or even HTML (but sometimes "rich text" and HTML are useful. Markdown does not have all their features.) (By the way, Tumblr, what I like, allows me to edit my posts in Markdown.)

Also, there is the idea of wireless electricity. What might be even more interesting, Nikola Tesla has been thinking about wireless power transfer over 120 years ago (sic!).

Another neat idea that has come up before 1900 is light painting. Actually, it is a post on Tumblr that invited me today to discover it, but now I could not find it. The linked article even shows a photo of an electromagnetic radio wave.

I had not planned this post to be about ideas – but, here it is, grown by itself; fresh and juicy, help yourself.

[silvthinks]

Hello (world)!

I wonder whether someone is going to read it, but anyway, my first post ever on Tumblr deserves more than silently moving to appropriate content.

So: hello, everyone! (Just a human "Hello, world!". By the way, did you know? The Wikipedia article about "Hello, world!" states that the origins of a program displaying "Hello, world!" most probably are in this tutorial by S. C. Johnson and B. W. Kernighan (notice the sentence at the end).)

(I don’t like writing openings and intros, and posts about nothing, like this one. But, I think, to be good in marketing, I probably have to learn.)

So (hm, warning: twice “so”, too many), to begin, I was kind of surprised that I couldn’t see a link to my “About” page on my blog’s main page on Tumblr.

How did it look like? Just like that:

That is right, you see nothing below the blog's description, because nothing is appearing. The links are there; the proof is (if nothing can be proven): after hovering them, the cursor changes to a hand, they are displayed in my web browser in a bubble, and I can click them.

Well, I like dealing with content, and usually it is fun for me to handle preparing metadata for a web page (like title, description, keywords and similar). But, it is not the case now – now I would like to focus on meaning, not structure.

And, moreover, I like styling a webpage – CSS and so on – but it is not the case now, because this would be, again, dealing with the structure of content, not with its meaning (or with the form, not with the content, speaking differently).

But I had to fix it, because I really do not feel comfortable when I expect something to appear on a webpage – and it does not. A nice thing, Tumblr allows to edit the HTML code* of the default template for a blog (other templates – I don’t know). So (third time “so”), most probably breaking a couple of web development and CSS style principles, I’ve made a simple hotfix, just a simple patch, that is –

background-color: #304358; padding: 10px; border-radius: 7px; font-size: 1em;

– and I’ve put it in a place that I considered the best one.

Think of it: a refined, many-line HTML template, and a random user CSS code being added to it. I can already hear (read?) someone commenting: “you must have missed something”. Agreed. But – now it just works; and, probably, I will not touch it until I must. Well, welcome, technical debt.

* Well, if you’re not familiar with programming, don't worry. I plan to write about different things, as I’ve stated in the blog’s description; maybe, in the future, you will find something more suitable for your needs.

Postscript

Having written the post, a couple of insights:

If you want to write or already write, and want to do it better, learn with me: I write too long sentences (already fixed them; must learn). — By the way, may you get a glimpse on a post on my second blog about better writing? –> https://silvuss.github.io/2018/07/10/tips-for-blogging-developers.html

I've found the reason of the navigation bar (as it is called) not being displayed: I've set both the accent color and the background color of my blog the same... Now, I've fixed it, and I removed the patch.