BSDnexus blogging

I don't get the social networking thing - why do so many people love it and waste their time on it? They're engineered to self-promote under an illusion that the user is getting all the benefits. I admit, it was fun for the first week or two, but now I can't even be bothered to log in.

Facebook is a great example. It's a site that works on the premise of finding people you know by looking at images of faces with the same name - so you sit there looking at hundreds of images until you find the "Jon Doe" you once new at school. Coupled to this is the irony that some users use a photo of themselves infront of some beautiful scenery resulting in their face being 2 pixels big when you're trying to first find them. Worse still are those people who don't upload a picture - what's the point of that?

After you request to be their friend (and they decide to accept) you can then see their profile; a list of details that you don't really need to know anyway - like their age (which you'll roughly know, especially if they were in your class) and which part of the country/world they now live in. You can also look at any photos they may have uploaded of themselves - this is pretty cool - and perhaps you'll even find yourself "tagged" in one or two. The real peak is the ability to send them a message, replies to which continue scrolling down the screen in a conversational style model. The first few weeks of this seem exciting, but that's it - the excitement is over and I'm now left feeling "is that it?" The only content that seems to change are people's status updates - essentially telling you what they're up to.

Ok, so there are other apps that you can install; you select and install it, perhaps one based upon your favourite TV show or film for example, and in it's bid to self-promote, it offers you insentives to get all your un-subscribed friends installing it. The insentives are weak, ranging from extra points to more functionality. I mean, why would I want to "poke" a friend if I can message them?

SPAM has clearly made its entrance too. Install the SuperWall app and you're in for the typical scam of "forward this to all your friends and your wish will come true"; or the occasional "If Jane Doe sends you a friend request, decline as it's a hacker!" Ugh. How can people spend hours at a time on this thing? I don't even get the slogan:

Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.

If the people are already around me - what do I need facebook for? Surely I can walk up to them and simply say "hi"? Has the Internet really reached the stage of making us all house-bound secluded individuals?

Let me also say it's not bug free. When searching for faces I have often seen the same images go round several times - seems to me that the database back end has some horrid duplication issues.

As if all of this isn't bad enough, you should also question the security and privacy of your data - you cannot delete your account, all you can do is disable it. It's not the same thing. An account is associated to an email address, so you can't create another account with the same email address if there's one already there. Why do they feel the need to keep my info? Why can I never leave? I don't remember signing up for eternity. I'm certain a simple SQL command would fix that, something along the lines of...

DELETE FROM accounts WHERE email LIKE 'jondoe@hotmail.com';

MySpace is another site I don't get (and I've never had a myspace for my space, I have my own website. Websites in this day and age are easy and cheap to purchase and create.) The big difference here is that each user can customise the look and feel of their page; be warned, some of the wallpapers that people select are so wild you're liable to need eye surgery if you look at it too long - not to mention clashing font colors and lack of contrast. Clearly not everyone is able to contemplate basic design concepts like "less is more" or green on pink just don't go together.

I've seen couples post messages to eachother on their myspace pages (yep, I have) which completly confused me. Why would you do that? In a bid to make your myspace page look more visited? Or simply 'cos you can't be bothered to physically chat with them?

Why, oh, why, do people have to have auto-playing music on their myspace? I have to immediately mute the sound to protect my ears from the deafening chalkboard-scraping sounds that are broadcast under the title of "music".

It seems even well known bands have a myspace page - why? They usually already have a general website, so what does myspace offer them that their website doesn't? Seriously though, thinking about it, it's their website that they have full control of, including media content - so how do they feel myspace benefits them?

hi5 seems to be a mix of the two. I'm sure there are more out there.

FriendsReunited was one of the first sites to get the concept going, but being financially based you couldn't send messages to anyone without first swiping your credit card (they even employed some very clever filtering on attempts to write email addresses in user profiles in the form of "jondoe at hotmail dot com" or "janedoe at gmail"). Facebook saw the end of FriendsReunited by offering messaging as a free service from the start - as a result FriendsReunited had to make messaging free to hold on to their userbase.

All in all, what am I missing? What are others enjoying that I just don't see? Facebook hasn't enhanced my life or given me something I thought I was missing - so why is it doing so well? Ultimately, when you sign up, you have to ask yourself one thing: "do I want people from my past catching up with me?"

Most recently I have been learning Python. It's one of the only languages I have come across that layout is important (I'm sure there are more, I just haven't been introduced to them). Everything has it's place. And the fact that a semi-colon does not end a command is scary to me - it's like execution falls off the end of the screen into /dev/null.

Saying that, my immediate learning has shown me just how beautiful it is, just look at how simple the infamous "Hello World" is:

print "Hello world"

What more could you want? Why should it be any more complicated? It's simple. precise and exact - and it does what you expect it to (including adding the newline)!

Ok, so it's not exactly the best example of a computer language's beauty. One of the pet hates that I have with C coding is that everyone writes their C code slightly differently - arguments about the right placement for curly-braces and the like. For example, I know one excellent C coder who says that curly-braces in an if() statement should be as follows:

if (1)
    {
    /* do something */
    /* do something more */
    }
else
    /* do something else */

He makes a fair point as to why too, a statement on the following line of an if() is indented; the curly-braces merely represent a compund statement and are therefore indented as part of the statement. And I haven't even touched the notion of whether the curly-braces should be next to, or above and below, the "else" statement. Is it any wonder that projects like the BSDs have a style page somewhere?

Python does away with this whimsical issue by not using curly-braces, instead stating that any statements that form part of the if() block are to be indented, stop the indentation and you end the block. Something like:

if 1:
    # do something
    # do something more
else:
    # do something else

The advantage here is that everyone writes their code the same, no need to reformat code you are given simply because your personal beliefs say it's wrong - in the long run it's easier for the next developer to read the code and know what it does; this is also a good thing commercially, making developers evermore cheaper to replace. It also ensures people like me - with my poor memory - are able to read and understand my own code several months down the line when I read it.

Indeed, as someone who has written Perl, much has been said in the past about how messy Perl can look and how obfuscated it is. To be honest, even I've looked at my Perl code at one point or another to try to understand the mess and the assumptions it makes (like $_ being the default variable that contains data). The real irony to poor style in a language is a competition where entrants aim to write "devious, inhuman, disgusting, amusing, amazing, and bizarre Perl code".

Style is far more important than typing code quickly - for the sanity of longevity at least. Yes, you want the coder to be coding as quickly as possible, but you don't want to see a messy source file that's a pain to go through each time an alteration is made. If style wasn't so important to the coder we wouldn't hear the endless ramblings we do about why doing it "this way" is better.

Put simply, having a standard that all language users follow (without choice) ensures consistency, readability, maintainability and beauty. And this is where I see Python.

[edit]
I've just heard about a Python 'Easter Egg', simply run the following command on a python-enabled UNIX system:

python -c 'import this'