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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey

When I started college in 1998 this was literally one of the first books I had to buy. It was part of a — cheaply thrown together — five-pack of paperback management book ‘classics’. And my particular copy is printed on recycled paper, with boring frugal typesetting, and even has a Dutch translation error on the back. Not normally a book you would hold on to for 21 years. Management… Read More »The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey

Een Mooie Jonge Vrouw – Tommy Wieringa

I have written about Tommy Wieringa before. And this little book is once again a clear example of the mans’ writing ability. Effortlessly and thoughtfully he creates a small story — a tragic love story between two people. And this story, of course, unfolds dramatically almost to the point of derailing and then just staying in the tracks. And Wieringa brings it down to a human level. While never overdoing… Read More »Een Mooie Jonge Vrouw – Tommy Wieringa

PHP: how did it become so popular?

PHP empowers a gigantic part of the internet. So it is, by definition, a very popular (i.e. prevalent) language. But it also very popular (i.e. well-liked) to dislike PHP as a — serious — language. This could be explained as one of the side effects of that same popularity. With great exposure, comes greater scrutiny. But that would be too easy. Because when discussing PHP as a serious computer programming… Read More »PHP: how did it become so popular?

Glove Pond – Roger Thorpe

Roger Thorpe is just as good a writer as Douglas Coupland is. As a matter of fact, he is also as real as a Douglas Coupland character. Glove Pond is his first novel. I got this book bundled with The Gum Thief, and I was thrown off guard by the high praises on the backcover by Coupland himself. How come I had never heard of this writer? But as soon… Read More »Glove Pond – Roger Thorpe

Gomorrah – Roberto Saviano

When Gomorrah came out in 2007, apart from spawning a popular TV series, it shook the world. The workings of Italy’s lesser known ‘other mafia’ — the Camorra — are laid bare and Saviano subsequently signed his own death certificate. He has been in hiding ever since. It’s a gut-wrenching mosaic of stories, of how this organisation operates from Naples — mind you, a modern West-European city — and their… Read More »Gomorrah – Roberto Saviano

Sex, Blogs and Rock-‘n-Roll – Ernst Jan Pfauth

The rather sensationalist title would normally be a reason to not want to read this book. But since this book came out in 2010, the author E.J. Pfauth has become known for more than just this book. He is the co-founder of the Correspondent (a journalism platform), has written other books and he hosts a rather entertaining podcast. So I thought it would be fun to see where his head… Read More »Sex, Blogs and Rock-‘n-Roll – Ernst Jan Pfauth

Popular post postmortem

Yesterday I wrote a story about how Git is eating the world. And in less than 24 hours more than 10.000 people visited this article! This is not the normal kind of traffic for this site. So that calls for its own article. Not only did the above WordPress plugin tell me I hit 10.000, but my server logs said the same. grep git-is-eating-the-world j11g-access.log|awk ‘{print $1}’|sort -u|wc -l I… Read More »Popular post postmortem

Git is eating the world

The inception of Git (2005) is more or less the halfway point between the inception of Linux (1991) and today (2019). A lot has happened since. One thing is clear however: software is eating the world and Git is the fork with which it is being eaten. (Yes, pun intended). Linux and Git In 2005, as far as Linus Torvalds’ legacy was concerned, he didn’t need to worry. His pet… Read More »Git is eating the world

Giacomo Joyce – James Joyce

A couple of years ago I stranded about half-way into Ulysses. It did not click. One of the greatest novels ever written, but I had little use for it. So I put it aside for another time. Recently I came across a rather insightful video (highly recommended) about Joyce and his work, and all of a sudden a lot of things clicked! But not to rush into it too fast,… Read More »Giacomo Joyce – James Joyce

The Death of Murat Idrissi – Tommy Wieringa

Tommy Wieringa is of course famous for his novel Joe Speedboot. A tremendous novel, where Wieringa demonstrates heaps of writers’ finesse. This book — the Death of Murat Idrissi — is no different. Even though this is a short and easy read, it touches on a lot of subjects and themes and has the Tommy Wieringa flair all over it. He is a master is describing brooding situations, internal struggles… Read More »The Death of Murat Idrissi – Tommy Wieringa

Gid – Get it done!

Last weekend I built a personal ToDo app. Partly as an excuse to mess around a bit with all this ‘new and hip’ Web 2.0 technology (jQuery and Bootstrap) 🙈 But mostly because I needed one, and I couldn’t find a decent one. Decent? Decent in my opinion would be: Self hosted Self contained Use a plain text file Mobile friendly Able to track / see DONE items And Gid… Read More »Gid – Get it done!

Create a Chrome bookmark html file to import list of URLs

I recently switched RSS providers and I could only extract my saved posts as a list of URLs. So I thought I’d add these to a bookmark folder in Chrome. However, Chrome bookmark import only accepts a specifically formatted .html file. So if you have a file with all your urls, name this file ‘url.txt’ and run this script to create a .html file that you can import in Chrome… Read More »Create a Chrome bookmark html file to import list of URLs