2019-03-17

Have you ever apples seen, and counted them for fun? Never ever could there've been a total sum of minus one. Turned away and icy blue: number minus one portrayed; favors that which isn't true, wearing a destructive shade. Demands their space to play and fly:

2019-05-30

Nothing, that which isn't there, could that be someone's hero? Prince of castles in the air is empty, hollow number zero. Roam the palace at calm pace while hidden like a long-gone flame: quiet zero knows all space, requiring legroom all the same.

2019-03-31

I generally believe that getting rid of daylight saving time (DST) is a good thing, which the EU just decided that European countries should do, starting in 2021. There are several annoying aspects of societies that switch to and from DST, and this is the start of a series where I list a few annoyances that affect me, as well as some of the upsides.

2019-02-24

As a disclaimer, I'd like to mention that I'm not a doctor, have no medical training and am not a researcher. My knowledge is that of a layperson interested in science and health research. Some topics seem to be highly personal, and therefore difficult to discuss with people who don't share the same set of opinions.

2019-04-01

Daylight saving time (DST) further complicates the already convoluted timezone handling in applications. This has both good and bad consequences, but as a programmer, I frequently worry that the systems I work with will handle DST incorrectly. In the last year, I have been working extensively on a system, where we transmit and store dates and times in the local timezone, but never explicitly stating what that timezone is.

2019-02-28

Disclaimer: My knowledge on the subject is that of a layperson interested in science and health research. "Significance" is a word that you'll come across while reading articles on medical research and studies, and it's easy to misinterpret what the word actually means.

2019-04-03

I've long prided myself as someone barely affected by jet lag, likely because of my never sticking to any regular sleep schedule. For this reason, I've generally not been affected by daylight saving time (DST), but this spring, I believe I've been negatively affected by the DST switch.

2019-04-09

There's something jarring about daylight saving time (DST). It messes up my sense of beauty and consistency. Below you'll find a quite beautiful map of timezones around the world. You'll notice that, for the most part, countries' timezones roughly correspond to their longitudes; the colors showing timezones are in fairly straight lines from south to north.

2020-01-18

In part 1, I'd begun transferring some domains from one registrar to another, as well as their ownership. After emailing the registrar, they kindly responded with a simple seven-step guide. It seemed easy enough, but I'm currently stuck on step 3.

2020-01-17

Yesterday, I wrote about the risk of thinking in public. More generally, about being a public figure. Today, I read Steve Klabnik's post on harassment in the Rust community, a community otherwise known for being welcoming. We humans have a tendency to take things for granted, and toward groupthink.

2020-01-16

I recently watched a video on canceling by Contrapoints (Natalie Wynn). It's a feature-length movie, where she walks her audience through the toxicity of criticizing individual word choices, blaming by association, and mob mentality. The movie also works as an elaborate apology for (rare) poor phrasing, as well as defense against those who seem to be out to get her.

2020-01-15

I'm trying to transfer a few domains from one registrar to another. Also transferring ownership from someone else to myself. As the great procrastinator I am, I'd waited for as long as possible, or as it turns out, longer. Transferring a .

2019-08-14

Wikimania 2019 started today! I'm attending the hackathon, which was organized in a very welcoming way. People who wanted contributors for their projects got to explain what they were about twice, both verbally and creating a poster. This way, I connected with Cyberpower678 to work on his InternetArchiveBot, a bot that adds links to the Internet Archive on Wikipedia pages, when needed.

2019-08-13

This year's Wikimania starts tomorrow! It's a huge conference for anything related to Wikipedia, Wiktionary and any of the other Wikimedia projects. I'll be attending the hackathon tomorrow and on Thursday, but I don't really know what that entails. Will I be able to work on the Wiktionary https://gitlab.

2019-08-03

I categorize most of the post on this blog as "rambling". Those posts are for the most part not the best use of your time. If you're lucky, they'll contain a sliver of an interesting idea, but it won't be original nor fleshed out, and the text could use some additional editing.

2019-08-02

Some people get angry if you protest the state of the world too aggressively. I would, for instance, almost never accept violence as a valid way to protest. Except in self-defence. But... how do you define self-defence? And what about major non-violent disruptions, say, causing an airport to temporarily shut down?

2019-07-24

In a classroom, the boys will often be louder and take more space than the girls. Well, adults can be just as bad, at least if kids are around. The other day, I organized a game for a group of 20 people, about half adults and half kids of various ages.

2019-07-22

I've written about how you might want to experiment in order to find something better. When it comes to your career, for instance, you might want to try different projects and companies in order to find something even better, even if what you've got now is the best you've ever had.

2019-07-20

Many of us are lazy by default. And nobody wants to lose what they have, unless they know that they can get something better. That means that a person might change things around only when forced to, when there's a clear outside and internal expectation, or when the situation gets too bad.

2019-07-18

You'd think Google tests their websites extensively. Especially one of their flagship products, such as google.com. Especially the main page. I'm sure they do, but testing GUI across all browsers and screen sizes is difficult. A screenshot of google.com from June 21, 2019, in Tor Browser.

2019-07-17

I'm thoroughly convinced by the scientific, philosophical, and my observational evidence that there is not such thing as free will. Here's a quick recap. Scientific evidence. Several studies show that it's possible to predict someone's choices a few seconds before they themselves know that they've made the choice.

2019-07-16

When I started blogging, I hoped, but didn't expect, to manage to continue the habit for more than a month. Well, that succeeded. Even after a few single-day breaks, I picked up speed, writing and publishing something the next day.

2019-06-10

Are short sentences good? They're easier to read. They let the reader pause. A lot. And sometimes they even connect with each other. When writing, however, it is much easier to let the sentence go on for as long as your thought continues, since it's easier to connect your thoughts to each other within a single sentence, only stopping when you don't have anything more to say.

2019-06-10

I regularly run the text of this blog through grammar and spell check1, generally a couple of months after publication. It's a great help. It finds both simple mistakes and cases where I was genuinly unaware of the correct spelling, grammar, or punctuation.

2019-06-04

Since starting this blog, I've become a quicker writer. Instead of waiting for the perfect sentence and structure, I just write something that more or less works. In that way, it has fulfilled one of the goals that I set for it.

2019-06-01

The freedom not to plan What I'm doing in five years? Honestly, I haven't thought that far ahead. I don't think it matters very much, as long as I enjoy whatever I'm doing. If I'm heading what seems like a good enough direction, I'll probably be fine.

2019-05-26

A couple of months back, I added site search to this blog, created as a static website. Such a website consists of just HTML, CSS, Javascript and media, with no backend code or database for fetching data that the browser requests.

2019-05-23

The public opinion in many democracies is more polarized than ever, causing societies to become divided into factions. Many writers have analyzed why from different perspectives already, blaming social media, domestic agitators, foreign powers and technology. I won't repeat that.

2019-05-21

C3.js is a nice charting library, easy to include on a webpage. At work, we created an Angular wrapper, for easy use. Its API is fairly intuitive and minimal, and the standard settings and styling are quite good. Being based on D3.

2019-05-18

I intend to explore how to host videos on a virtual private server (VPS), but I'm not there yet. In this post, I'll just give a motivation for why this would be worth-while. Let's say you wish to publish a video to the world.

2019-05-16

Don't. Can you expect people you talk to, to have the same vocabulary, knowledge, and worldview as you? Probably not. Should you explain everything like they're a child? Probably not. Should you act incredulous when they don't understand what you're saying, even if it's super obvious?

2019-05-14

In my own life, I value truth, clarity and understanding over friendship, feeling good and bliss. Of course, usually they can be combined, but I don't mind understanding the horrors of the world much. That's the first step toward changing it for the better.

2019-05-12

It seems like two politicians can do the same thing, but the resulting scandals are very different. I have a pet theory of why that is, consisting of three separate parts. Expected moral high ground. If a politician avoids paying taxes or is otherwise tricking some authority, it will rightly and likely result in a scandal.

2019-05-10

Sarcasm. The type of humor that I just don't understand. When people use sarcasm, (I think) I can tell that something is a little off. But I'm never sure what to make of it - is it really just humor? Sometimes I get the feeling that people say it sarcastically, just for the plausible deniability.

2019-05-08

When reading code that's hard to understand, I like to gradually remove annoyances. First, I'll reformat the code, so that it follows the style guide of the rest of the project. Second, I'll rename functions and variables to better explain their purpose.

2019-04-25

About three months ago, I was talking to my grandfather and his wife, both authors of a great many books. They encouraged me to spend a few minutes writing every day, for instance, every morning. This is why I created this blog, where I publish something every day.

2019-04-23

To err is human, but it still doesn't seem like most of us would like to admit our humanity. I hypothesize that a few different aspects that affect how readily you'll admit to having made a mistake: Whether you believe that you're the type of person who's honest and admits when they've made a mistake The subject area of the false statement - if it's one where you're fairly confident and competent, or not How confidently you claimed the false fact The severity of the error, how the mistake affects others Whether you discreetly can correct the problem A few classmates and I were making a film for a high school project, where we needed to calculate something, perhaps 59 × 59.

2019-04-02

I've just added a search bar to this blog. It allows for quickly searching for any topic that I've written about. It's not a full-text search engine, so don't expect matches on whole phrases. The search index contains the complete site map, listing the title, tags, and topics of each page.

2019-03-16

Recently, I've played board games in settings where someone decided to cooperate with someone else, even when the games didn't dictate any kind of cooperation or negotiation. This feels very unnatural to me and can change the dynamics of the game completely.

2019-03-07

Everyone experiences stress differently, and everyone is sensitive to different stressors. In this post, I'll recount what I hope will be this year's only extreme stress situation for me. Preconditions for stress You're prone to end up in a much too stressful situation if some of these are true:

2019-02-17

In many settings, you can feel powerless, without that actually being the case. This post is not about those situations, but about those where you really are powerless and have to accept whatever the current powers do and decide. Where you've come to the conclusion that you can't really affect the situation, and where you have to take shit.

2019-02-14

One of the things that give life meaning, is to make the world a better place. I'm just an individual person, you might be thinking, I'm just a drop in the ocean. Whatever I do will barely move the needle.

2019-02-10

Being as large as they are, Microsoft can get away with surprisingly generic names for specific products. Microsoft's naming scheme assumes that their product will be the default, and it seems to be working. Officially, they'll often have a qualifier, such as "Microsoft SQL Server", but in most marketing, documentation, and articles, the qualifier is excluded.

2019-02-09

My whole life I've taken on more roles in front of an audience than most Swedes, even though it's never been part of my profession. I've taken theater classes, been on radio, been a teaching assistant, led games at summer camps, led a Swedish speaking group for immigrants, and in the last year I've started holding lunch lectures - brown bags - at work, and a couple of weeks ago I started a university course in rhetoric.

2019-02-04

I like constructive criticism and poignant points of view! Have you found false facts, avoidable ambiguities or all too partisan publications? Or perhaps I've made a grammatical gaffe or strayed from standard spelling?

2019-02-03

Computers do what we programmers tell them to, and nothing more. And the fact is that most programmers (or "software engineers") are quite bad at telling computers to stay secure, myself included. We get the work done, but you shouldn't trust us with anything important.

2019-01-28

I work at a large company with some 45,000 employees. Last Thursday morning all internal systems shut down, globally. This includes email, the internet connection at the office, the intranet, our Git server, our login portal, and many more crucial systems.

2019-01-25

In my previous post, Consensus over Compromise, I was probably overly enthusiastic about consensus as a way to reach agreement. I'll expand on the drawbacks in this post, as well as mention some ways to combat the problems. Patience and Persistence Consensus is frequently a slow process and gives undue power to those who have a lot of patience.

2019-01-24

In today's political landscape - and society in general - it seems like our divisions are somehow more important than what brings us together. We split into factions who egg each other on, and those who are tired of this way of being, usually wish for compromise, rather than consensus.

2019-01-22

At the time, it just felt awkward, but now it's easy to laugh at a situation, which could've easily been a sketch if you could hear our thoughts. I've reproduced what happened at the office the other day, as truthfully as I can.

2019-01-19

I'd like to start by lowering any expectations you might have for this blog. All of my previous attempts at free-form writing have been miserable disappointments, either for myself or my friends. I've written a fast-paced novel where the plot ran in circles and the characters were as shallow as my imagination.