tldr: limit your GPUs to about 2/3rd of maximum power draw for the least Joules consumed per token generated without speed penalty. – Why run an LLM yourself in the first place? The llama.cpp software suite is a very impressive piece of work. It is a key element in some of the stuff that I’m playing around with on my home systems, which for good reasons I will never be able to use in conjunction with a paid offering from an online provider.| Jacques Mattheij
CNC Lasers for cutting and engraving Laser cutters can injure or blind you permanently if you do not follow safety procedures! This post is an attempt to collect all of the information that I’ve gathered over the last year or so regarding budget laser cutters. There are no affiliate links on this page, I have no ties to any of the companies mentioned here other than that I’m a reasonably satisfied customer of some of them.| Jacques Mattheij
My children are hopelessly addicted to their gaming devices. This is a problem, but not one that I can directly solve because the school mandates that they have both an Android smartphone and a Windows laptop. Rather than to meet the problem head on I figured the better way to address it is to replace consumption with creation. But creating anything at all on a smartphone or a laptop, where the competition is insane, and the toolchains super complex is going to be an uphill battle.| Jacques Mattheij
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine the price of gas and electric power in the European Union has gone up enormously. Russia, a major supplier of gas to the EU has been sanctioned heavily, buying natural gas from Russia effectively pays for them to wage war on Ukraine and the price of electricity is tied to the price of natural gas, which has been going up and down like a jo-jo, but far more up than down.| Jacques Mattheij
In 1989 I got a call from a friend to come along to visit a studio in Landsmeer, near Amsterdam, where something quite amazing was being constructed, a circus with nothing but eggs, both as the performers and as the audience. I was - and still am - a huge Jim Henson fan and immediately felt an interest to see what was going on. We were received by Jacques Meijer and his wife in their house in Landsmeer, attached to which was a large workshop.| Jacques Mattheij
Dit is een antwoord op de Tweet thread van @Inge_v, die een hele berg redenen aangaf waarom ze vond dat Kernenergie de enige optie is in plaats van zon, wind en andere renewables. Het begon met: Ik ben tegen wind en zonne energie, en voor kernenergie. Dat is duurzamer en ik heb er vertrouwen in dat we een manier vinden om het afval goed te verwerken. De hoofdmotivatie was dat het duurzamer is en dat ze vertrouwen heeft in dat we een manier vinden om het afval goed te verwerken.| Jacques Mattheij
Electric cars are fantastic compared to ICE vehicles, but E-Bikes are even better. Much lower environmental impact and far more suited to medium range travel such as commuting. Here in NL they sell in huge numbers, far faster than electric cars. But they also have their limitations: a regular e-bike tops out at 25 Kph, and will do a very limited distance on a single charge. What powers your average e-bike are Lithium-Ion cells, usually of the 18650 variety, capacities vary but the very best c...| Jacques Mattheij
More than a year ago already I posted a fictional COVID19 retrospective, reading it back today it is pretty eerie to see how many of the predictions made in it have come true or are about to become true. Because I didn’t actually dare to write it down as predictive I figured I should improve on this, after all, what use is it to predict stuff without attaching the label prediction to it?| Jacques Mattheij
First an apology. I started this project because during the first 9 months of the COVID-19 pandemic business was down to a fraction of what it was before then, and I had a lot of time on my hand. But that has changed now and there is a lot of work in my ‘day job’, so I don’t have a whole lot of time to work on the piano software (or to play piano, for that matter).| Jacques Mattheij
I have friends from all walks of life. Most of them are smart and skilled. Some of them believe the most outrageous things. For instance, there is this one couple that I know that refuse to believe in 9⁄11 on odd days and on even days they will go to great lengths to push their theories that it was all make believe, that it never happened and that if it did happen it was all special effects.| Jacques Mattheij
I’m pretty sure that the hardest choice in my life to date has been the one between my two loves: music on the hand and computer programming on the other. The programming won out, I figured it would be a much more lucrative field to pursue a career in, besides it was a much better match for my talents. From the age of 5-8 I did violin lessons and hated every moment of it.| Jacques Mattheij
If you’ve been following the news you probably are aware that the number of people that test positive for COVID-19 is rapidly rising. As most people that know a bit about historical pandemics have warned about. The ‘second wave’ is a fairly typical thing with respiratory diseases because during the summer month these are usually at a disadvantage. People are at the peak of their resistance, more outdoors and the moisture conditions in the air do not favor transmission.| Jacques Mattheij
Letsencrypt is a pretty neat concept: free secure certificates for web servers, in order to increase the adoption of HTTPS across the web. The basic idea is that certificates should be free, that the barrier to install them should be as low as possible and that updating certificates should be automated. It protects this site and many 100’s of millions besides. The advantages are that in-flight data can no longer be easily snooped and that injection of data into pages is made either much har...| Jacques Mattheij
Software distribution has over the years gone through an enormous revolution in efficiency. Originally, software was developed on things called ‘plug boards’, a matrix of sockets that allowed quick (or so they thought) re-configuration of computing hardware to adapt it to different problems. This was soon followed by papertape, then the punched card deck, a stack of paper cards that contained the program code in a series of holes punched into the paper.| Jacques Mattheij
After seeing some of the weirdest stuff ever show up in my Twitter timeline I decided to dig in and see for myself what is going on in the underbelly of the beast. Someone I follow had just re-tweeted a bit of information that at face value seemed too outrageous to even consider and I wondered what made that happen. In short, the original tweet mentioned that COVID-19 is a hoax, that the virus isn’t real and that this whole pandemonium is just an excuse by ‘them’ to get us all under con...| Jacques Mattheij
A couple of months ago I received a present, a small book titled ‘Why we sleep’ by Matthew walker. It is an interesting book that takes you through the physiological and psychological effects of sleeping and the damage done by lack of sleep. I don’t necessarily subscribe to each and every bit in the book, there are certain passages that ring as though the data does not support them but all in all it did open my eyes to how much damage I’ve been doing to my body over the years.| Jacques Mattheij
As much as I love digital instruments, synthesizers and other electronic gear I also really love the look and feel of instruments made from wood, brass, steel and felt. There is objectively no difference between the best digitally sampled pianos but for some reason it doesn’t quite feel as much alive as an actual instrument. Unfortunately, this limits you to what you can actually play and this is where I’m still very much behind where I would like to be.| Jacques Mattheij
It’s been a couple of years now, since the 2020 Coronavirus disaster. Society is still not completely back to normal, and I doubt it ever will be. For instance, you can clearly see which movies were made before and after. People shake hands and hug complete strangers with abandon, something that today, even with the virus mostly under control still feels extremely un-natural and would immediately result in people freaking out or at a minimum speaking up and indicating the fact that they are...| Jacques Mattheij
The Netherlands is one of the wealthiest and most favored countries when it comes to dealing with nature. If it weren’t for our continuous watchful eye on nature this country would - in the most literal sense of the word - simply not exist. A very large part of our land area was won back from the sea over the centuries, and without continous maintenance the sea would reclaim it within a generation.| Jacques Mattheij
There is a lot of material about the not-so-nice VCs who take advantage of young and inexperienced founders. But the reverse also happens, founders that try to get money out of VCs for projects that have zero chance of every coming to fruit. Or worse still, founders that pretend to have something on the go when they really don’t and are just looking for the cash to make a run for it.| Jacques Mattheij
For the last three months I’ve been working on a project that combines my twin passions: music and computer programming. The problem is an interesting one, the formal name for it is ‘automatic music transcription’ and it is much harder than I ever thought it would be. I’m slowly getting a grip on the problem space, after a ton of exploratory programming. It seems so simple, doesn’t it? You just listen to music you hear piano, voice, guitar and a hundred other optional instruments co...| Jacques Mattheij
Have you ever wondered what causes large teams of search and rescue people including all their gear to magically spring into action within hours of a plane crash, no matter where in the world it has happened? Meet UK company Kenyon, a company that is one of the best in the world when it comes to rapid response to disasters. I came across them while talking to a friend who is partner at a large PE firm, we do technical due diligence for them and the subject turned to IT disasters and what can ...| Jacques Mattheij
I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the owners themselves are even aware of what these devices are doing, and the likely truth is that they do not. Like needy little aliens all these devices phoning home are breaching the privacy of their owners, the guests of those owners and anybody else that comes within WiFi or sensor range.| Jacques Mattheij
Long ago, in the mid 80’s I worked for a bank in the IT department on the Western side of Amsterdam. I lived in the east part and moved around town by bicycle, most because it is by far the fastest way of getting around, even if the weather is miserable it is still the nicest form of inner city transportation. Being on a bike you also see a lot more than in some vehicle, including public transport.| Jacques Mattheij
According to Bloomberg Microsoft is said to have agreed to buy GitHub. GitHub which reportedly has been losing money being acquired is a major development because of its central role in the development of many open and closed source projects. For the uninitiated here is what GitHub does in a nutshell: GitHub allows computer programmers from around the world to conveniently collaborate on projects, share bug reports and fix those bugs and allows the administration of some project documentation.| Jacques Mattheij
Apologies for the typo in the url… Some dumb lawyer figured it would be fun to give GDPR trolls a form letter to use to inflict maximum damage on unsuspecting companies. The reason why this is dumb is simple: the GDPR serves a legitimate need but by decreasing the signal:noise ratio handcrafted requests from users with a legitimate concern can get drowned in these ‘just because we can’ letters. It’s the legal equivalent of an exploit toolkit.| Jacques Mattheij
Part I of this is here, if you haven’t read it yet please do so before reading this installment, it will help to establish context. So, after geting the most repeated fallacies about the GDPR out of the way let’s take a long look at the real life impact of the GDPR and why it is worded the way it is, after that we’ll look at some of the more important ‘nuts and bolts’ that will help you to decide what to do.| Jacques Mattheij
In another week the GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation will become enforceable and it appears that unlike any other law to date this particular one has the interesting side effect of causing mass hysteria in the otherwise rational tech sector. This post is an attempt to calm the nerves of those that feel that the(ir) world is about to come to an end, the important first principle when it comes to dealing with any laws, including this one is Don’t Panic.| Jacques Mattheij
I love cycling. Sometimes I think I love it just a little bit too much. Such as the day two years ago that I took my Zephyr Lowracer for a spin and ended up in the hospital with my right leg broken in way too many pieces. It was a pretty harsh experience, one second you’re fine, the next you are flying through the air (speedbumps work on bicycles too…) and before I’d landed I already realized this was going to be a bad one.| Jacques Mattheij
A dark pattern in the design world means something that is purposefully created to mislead users and to get them to perform actions against their own interest. Since we are supposedly required to consent to giving up our privacy there has developed a cottage industry of entities doing everythign they can to obey the letter of the law while at the same time ignoring the spirit of it, or in fact turning the law on its head.| Jacques Mattheij
Computer code that I’m writing usually doens’t keep me up at night. After all, it’s only bits & bites and if something doesn’t work properly you can always fix it, that’s the beauty of software. But it isn’t always like that. Plenty of computer software has the capability of causing material damage, bodily harm or even death. Which is why the software industry has always been very quick to disavow any kind of warranty for the product it creates and - strangely enough - society see...| Jacques Mattheij
If you’re reading this page it means that you are accessing a ‘darknet’ web page. Darknets used to refer to places where illicit drugs and pornography were traded, these days it refers to lonely servers without any inbound links languishing away in dusty server rooms that people have all but forgotten about. Refusing to submit to either one of two remaining overlords these servers sit traffic less and mostly idle (load average: 0.| Jacques Mattheij
For part 1, see here. For part 2, see here Reliability The machine is now capable of running un-attended for hours on end, which is a huge milestone. No more jamming or other nastiness that causes me to interrupt a run. Many little things contributed to this, I’ve looked at all the mechanics and figured out all the little things that went wrong one by one and have come up with solutions for them.| Jacques Mattheij
One of my favorite writers of all time, Douglas Adams has a neat little plot device in that wholly remarkable book ‘The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy’, called the Babel Fish. Let me quote the master himself to explain the concept of the Babel Fish to you if you’re not already aware of it: “The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it.| Jacques Mattheij
If there is one thing that never ceases to amaze me it is that the hacker community tends to place itself outside and by their own perception above politics. This is evidenced in many ways including ‘safe spaces’ and moratoria on discussing anything political because it has no bearing on the more interesting bits of IT. What bugs me about this is that anything you make or do has a political dimension, and that hackers, more than any other profession, create the tools and the means with wh...| Jacques Mattheij
It happens at least once in the lifetime of every programmer, project manager or teamleader. You get handed a steaming pile of manure, if you’re lucky only a few million lines worth, the original programmers have long ago left for sunnier places and the documentation - if there is any to begin with - is hopelessly out of sync with what is presently keeping the company afloat. Your job: get us out of this mess.| Jacques Mattheij
For part 1, see here. Overview of the software components All the software written for this project is in Python. I’m not an expert python programmer, far from it but the huge number of available libraries and the fact that I can make some sense of it all without having spent a lifetime in Python made this a fairly obvious choice. There is a python distribution called Anaconda which takes the sting out of maintaining a working python setup.| Jacques Mattheij
One of my uncles cursed me with the LEGO bug, when I was 6 he gave me his collection because he was going to university. My uncle and I are relatively close in age, my dad was the eldest of 8 children and he is the youngest. So, for many years I did nothing but play with lego, build all kinds of machinery and in general had a great time until I discovered electronics and computers.| Jacques Mattheij
I grew up in Amsterdam, which is a pretty rough town by Dutch Standards. As a kid there are all kinds of temptations and peer-pressure to join in in bad stuff is something that is hard to escape. But somehow that never was a big factor for me, computers and electronics kept me fascinated for long enough that none of that ever mattered. But being good with computers is something that sooner or later also is something that you realize can be used for bad.| Jacques Mattheij
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Facing a sizable fraction of his own party that wanted to secede from the EU David Cameron made the gambit of the century: Let’s have a referendum and get this behind us once and for all. He never for one second thought that the ‘leave’ faction would be able to win that referendum and the end result would be to cement his own position for at least another election cycle to come.| Jacques Mattheij
About a week ago I bought a really nice solid wooden table for a song in a second hand store. Hauling it home was quite the job, the thing weighs a ton. Fortunately the legs came off otherwise I’d still be standing in front of the staircase with it. After two days of working I noticed that the pinky and ring finger on my left hand felt numb and wouldn’t move the way they normally do.| Jacques Mattheij
Ycombinator has decided to move forward on their ‘Basic Income’ experiment. That’s a pretty bold step and I absoltely commend them on doing this, experiments like this are a lot more valuable than hot air. The one thing I really don’t get is why they start off with time-limiting it. If the outcome of a basic income experiment is going to be used then it had better be as realistic as possible.| Jacques Mattheij
Electric Vehicles (EVs) are all the rage these days. They’re wicked fast off the mark, they are nearly silent at low speeds and they are perceived as ‘green’, what better way to make yourself feel good than to get an Electric Vehicle as your next car. Now, as much as I like ‘greentech’ I see a whole pile of issues with EVs that won’t be easily wiped off the table using appeals to emotion (such as acceleration speed of ‘fun’ of driving) or a (somewhat misplaced) sense of improv...| Jacques Mattheij
If there is one story of a persistant nature that seems to pervade the start-up world it is that VCs as a rule are evil, they’re out to get you, will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience. Some people that are very visible in the start-up world are perpetrating this to the point of being irresponsible. In Three Roads To The Top Of The Mountain I’ve already pointed out that dealing with VCs is a choice, and that that choice comes with both advantages and disadvanta...| Jacques Mattheij
For many years in the beginning of my career I’d been more than happy to work for free or even at a loss as long as the work was interesting. I was so totally in love with computer programming and the feeling I got from making something work and then seeing that creation be used by other people that I completely lost sight of the value that I was creating.| Jacques Mattheij
Imagine a contest in which we are going to pit man against machine. But instead of measuring who is best in playing the game of ‘Go’ we are going to measure who is fastest. In the one corner: Human, all of 175 pounds of extremely well trained runner. And in the other corner, a Formula 1 racecar with a remote control running down a straight track. Nonsense, you’d say, that’s not a fair comparison, the car uses much more instantaneous power, and will use a much larger amount of energy d...| Jacques Mattheij
A couple of weeks ago I went to the local shopping centre looking for a thermometer. After entering one store upon leaving without buying anything a tracker was assigned to me. I didn’t think much of it at first, but he followed me dutifully around the shopping centre, took careful note of how I walked. Whenever I visited a store he made a note in his little black book (he kept calling it my profile, and he didn’t want to show me what was in it so I assume it was actually his, rather than...| Jacques Mattheij
So, you’re about to be hired by that hot new startup. Great, congratulations. But wait, congratulations may be a little bit too early. Young companies can - and do - have all kinds of problems and you need to be fully aware of the risks and the potential issues that such a company has before you decide to sign on the dotted line. Below a short list of questions that you should be able to ask of any company that is younger than 2 years or that is still clearly in a mode where the income does...| Jacques Mattheij
In this post I’m going to try to give potential and actual CEO’s (and other C level execs to some extent) some actionable advice when it comes to how they conduct themselves in the hope that this will at some future date save some of you a great deal of misery and in some cases charges of misconduct or worse. My hope is that this will somehow help save a few companies by causing you - the CEO - to change direction before it is too late to do so.| Jacques Mattheij
For a very brief (way too brief) time the world was a much better place. A very large publisher (Springer) probably inadvertently decided to sell all their books online for the low price of $0. Silly me, I actually believed this was some kind of masterstroke of try-before-you-buy marketing, where only after you read the book you would decide whether or not you wanted to own the paper version. I imagined myself reading for the next year or so with complete abandon on all the subjects that inte...| Jacques Mattheij
There lots of products that came to market in the recent past and that will come to market in the near future that use some kind of cloud hosted component. In many cases these products rightly use some kind of off-device service in order to provide you with features that would otherwise not be possible. Sometimes these features are so much part of the core product that the whole idea would be dead in the water without it.| Jacques Mattheij
Volkwagen is a house in deep trouble. The dieselgate scandal just doesn’t seem to go away and even though the company is now under new management it seems that things are getting worse and worse as time goes by. What I really don’t get is this: Does Volkswagen actually believe the nonsense that they put out in order to try to do damage control? A nice sample of The VW reality distortion field at work is here.| Jacques Mattheij
My credentials in the wind industry are just about ‘0’, the only reason I’m writing this is because I’ve been a life-long wind power enthusiast, I’ve built (a prototype 2.5 KW 5 meter wind turbine and have a basic understanding of how wind power works and what the limitations and engineering elements are that go into a typical wind power setup. I also live in a country that has a very long history when it comes to using wind power and have a pretty good understanding of the kind of ...| Jacques Mattheij
A while ago I received an invitation to a high-school reunion. I didn’t go and I probably will never go to a thing like that. I’m trying very hard to forget that period. I love to learn, but it wasn’t always so. As a small kid, up to the age of 12 I definitely did. During the summer holidays that I would spend with my paternal grandmother in Arnhem I’d eat my way through the public library technology section, and when I was done with that I made a deal with a second hand bookstore cal...| Jacques Mattheij
One of the hotter topics of discussion at the moment is ‘The Right To Be Forgotten’. The basic idea is that individuals should have control over their online image. Because ‘Google’ is now the front door to the web, for once the European Union got something right and concentrated not so much on the websites that may post items about a person but on the search services providers that caused the information to be found.| Jacques Mattheij
It seems to be the only thing that web millionaire wanna-be’s care about is growth. It’s true that growth matters but it isn’t always obvious how you can grow a business without either sooner or later imploding it by running out of funds or what to do when growth inevitably plateaus. When a company is just founded growing is easy. After all, from 1 user to 2 users is 100% growth and you should be able to do that in a day or so, maybe even a couple of hours.| Jacques Mattheij
Before ‘HTTP’, whenever a new kind of application was invented (say ‘file sharing’, or ‘address book’ or ‘messaging’) someone would sit down with a bunch of others and would discuss this problem at some length. Then they’d draft up a document describing the problem they intended to solve and the protocol layer they came up with to address this problem. That document would then be sent out to various parties that might have an interest in using this protocol who then would su...| Jacques Mattheij
Update: James Hague, aka Dadgum was inspired by this to do some work on his blog and I’m happy to report that now his blog is the fastest blog in the world, 4K transferred and 1 request per page, load time < 75 ms. If you have a blog that’s even faster than that let me know. – Read on for the original post – I positively hate bloat in all its forms.| Jacques Mattheij
Divide and Conquer is a name given to a group of algorithms that take a problem and then solves it recursively (recursion is a programming concept where a program uses a simpler version of itself, a bit like those Matroshka dolls). For instance, there is a very elegant algorithm that sorts lists of elements like this named Quicksort. But that’s definitely not the only interpretation of those words. Historically they came from ‘divide and rule’, the concept of getting the locals to fight...| Jacques Mattheij
Computer programmers are a weird bunch. They go around telling the rest of the world who can and can’t be a programmer. There are even studies on the subject to prove that there are ‘two kinds of people, those that can program and those that can never learn it no matter how much effort they put into it’. But that’s total nonsense. It’s like saying that there are only two kinds of people when it comes to swimming, those that can learn how to swim and those that can’t.| Jacques Mattheij
There’s a war going on and your head has been designated the battleground. For every battle there are simple objectives: switch your loyalty from one brand to another, make you vote for a certain group or person, join a religion, a certain school or pursue a career etc. Many such battles are waged with simultaneous campaigns. The weapons used are such as images, videos, text, print, music, television programming, product placement and many other strategies.| Jacques Mattheij
Of all the privacy violating tracking methods on the web there are two that are particularly bad, the first one is called ‘evercookies’ for being particularly hard to get rid of, the other is called Browser Fingerprinting and is impossible to detect. Evercookies are to regular browser cookies just as superglue is to cellotape. Evercookies work by storing cookies on your computer using a large number of different techniques and upon refresh re-creating all of the cookies if you have tried ...| Jacques Mattheij
It started a couple of years ago, became fashionable last year and it’s become just about unavoidable now: the plague of the ‘customer satisfaction survey’. I can’t order a ball-point pen online without being mailed a link to a questionnaire to give feedback. Either from the company directly or - worse - from some third party they outsourced the survey process to. These outsourcing companies tend to outsource everything else as well, which is one of the reasons they need the survey in...| Jacques Mattheij
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve run some analysis on the one million most popular sites on the web. External resources, risky business What started off as a simple question (how many sites use externally hosted resources) turned into an ever expanding project to answer questions about websites engaging in risky behavior. The reason this interested me is that I believe that every externally hosted javascript is essentially a huge gaping hole in a website.| Jacques Mattheij
In the how to sell your company article I wrote at length on the process of how to go about selling your company once you’re ready for that. Which makes it seem as if there is no choice, either you sell your company, or you don’t. Simple as that. But every now and then a founder comes up with the exceedingly clever idea that he or she can have their cake and eat it too: Why not hire someone reliable to run the company, either find a qualified person externally or promote one of the employ...| Jacques Mattheij
What you see is what you get was a way to distinguish between word processors and layout software that used ‘markup’ and those that allowed you to interactively manipulate your documents in an on-screen representation of what the final output would look like. HTML editors started out as mark-up aids and rapidly moved to a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach where the visual representation was the final product. Unfortunately, the final product as presented to the user these days has ano...| Jacques Mattheij
The Past Since 1851 Amsterdam had a registry that recorded the following innocent pieces of data about the residents: Name, Date of birth, Address, Marital Status, Parents, Profession, Religion, Previous Addresses and Date of Death if deceased. For many years this system served well and was kept meticulously up to date. Which undoubtedly well meaning civil servant long before World War II came up with the brilliant idea of registering religious affiliation during the census is lost in the mis...| Jacques Mattheij
I’m not a gmail customer in the normal sense. While I do have a gmail address that I use for access to some old spreadsheets in google docs (that I need to migrate away from there to Open Office but still haven’t had the time for) I don’t use it for email. But I am a gmail customer in another sense. I communicate a lot with people using email and a very large fraction of those people now uses gmail either directly or by having google handle their email under some other domain.| Jacques Mattheij
According to this article in ‘Der Spiegel (German)’ Deutsche Telekom (the largest German telecommunications infrastructure operator) aided the BND (the German intelligence service, the ‘Bundes Nachrichten Dienst’) in tapping internet connections to Austria, France and the Netherlands (and most likely others), apparently in collaboration with the NSA which also gained access to the data, which carried traffic from many other countries besides those that the connections led to. Because ...| Jacques Mattheij
Recruiters are not my most favorite people in the tech eco-system. They’re the people that will contact you on behalf of some client (the company that pays them) in order to try to find new employees. They typically get paid a fairly hefty sum per employee found and if ever there was a moment when the ‘you are the product’ meme was even remotely true it is when you are dealing with a recruiter.| Jacques Mattheij
So, it has finally happened. I just turned 50 and I can’t say it was something I was looking forward to. First the good news: today seems to be a day like any other so if you’re younger than I am, from the far side of the great divide, I’m happy to inform you that there is nothing that feels abruptly different. The bad news is that even though nothing feels abruptly different plenty of things feel as if they’ve been changing subtly over time and not all are for the better.| Jacques Mattheij
The lever, the transistor, the vacuum tube and the computer all have something in common. They’re amplifiers, they allow a relatively small change or capability in a domain to have a much larger effect. Let me give you some examples: The crowbar is an instance of the lever concept, using a crowbar a relatively puny human can lift enormous weights simply by trading the distance that one end of the lever moved by how much the other will move.| Jacques Mattheij
Hard to believe, but the most frequently encountered ‘to-fix’ during due-diligence has to do with what you’d think would be a formality: having proper backups. On an annual basis I see quite a few companies from the inside and it is (still!) a total surprise to me how many companies have a pretty good IT operation and still manage to get the basics wrong when it comes to something as as simpel as having backed up the data and software that is critical to running their business.| Jacques Mattheij
Almost every first world country has them: A legion of newly minted companies with just one person active in the company. They’re called 1099’ers, ZZPers, Freie Dienstnehmer and so on depending on the location but other than that the situations are quite comparable. For many of these newly minted independent contractors their decision to go that route was born out of necessity rather than a choice made freely. One day they showed up at work, decided what to have for lunch that day and bef...| Jacques Mattheij
This post has been re-written several times, so please forgive me if it does not come across as coherent as I would like to. The main reason for the re-write was this post by Martin Wedge. Originally I planned to scrap the whole thing but maybe having a different perspective will help, I’ve deleted those parts that he covers and have tried to massage the rest into something resembling a continuous whole but there are still big gaps, apologies for that.| Jacques Mattheij
Programmers tend to loathe writing bookkeeping software. Just thinking about doing something so mundane and un-sexy as writing a double-entry bookkeeping system is probably enough to make a whole raft of programmers contemplate switching careers in earnest. This is interesting because at heart all programming is bookkeeping. If a program works well that means that all the results come out exactly as expected, there is no room at all for even a little bit of uncertainty in the result.| Jacques Mattheij
Paul Simon has a song called ‘One Trick Pony’ with a bit in it that goes like this: He’s a one trick pony One trick is all that horse can do he does one trick only It’s the principal source of his revenue In the world of programming being a one-trick-pony is not an option. What it means is that when that one technology that you’re currently married to becomes obsolete you’ll be instantaneously out of a job or out of customers.| Jacques Mattheij
I often get the question what it is exactly that I do for a living and usually I can’t really talk about it due to non-disclosure agreements and possible fall-out but in this case I got permission to do a write-up of my most recent job. Recently I got called in on a project that had gone off the rails. The system (a relatively low traffic website with a few simple pages) was built using Angular and Symfony2 used postgres and redis for its back-end, centos as the operating system for the uni...| Jacques Mattheij
Bad consultants make money off their customers, good consultants make money for their customers. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. If you make money for your customers you can basically write your own ticket (within reason, but reason translates into ‘more than you can spend reasonably’). Bad consultants typically enter a job at some hourly rate, pull in their buddies (also at hourly rates), start ordering hardware with kick-backs (unknown to the customer) and leave right around deli...| Jacques Mattheij
Disclaimer: the cancer analogy is in no way meant to cause mental grief to anybody, I’ve lost enough family members to it that I realise such an analogy may be a step too far for some, but I feel that in this case its use is justified. If you do feel offended by this in any way then my apologies. One of my favorite VC bloggers wrote an article that I’m pretty sure was meant to be serious but that had me in stitches.| Jacques Mattheij
When telephones were still solidly connected to the wall, either by being bolted on to it or by an umbilical (sometimes consisting of one or more phone extension cords) it was pretty clear who owned them, the phone company did. And bad things (such as disconnection) would happen to you if you connected something to the network that wasn’t authorized. When computers were still unconnected to each other using networks it was pretty clear who owned them too, the company or person that paid for...| Jacques Mattheij
One of the oldest business sayings that stuck into my head was ‘Time is Money.’. It’s deceptive in its simplicity, it generates in the mind of the beholder of this simple 3 word adage that there is a direct equivalent between time and money, and that that equivalence runs both ways. Ways in which you see this at work in every days life are people working (spending their time) in order to get some money.| Jacques Mattheij
After looking over many advertisements for all kinds of super nice looking vehicles I’ve decided to go with this baby: It was custom built for me by my eldest son, he spent a ton of time on it and the result is really quite nice. I had a whole pile of weird requests so buying a bike off-the-rack was out (I did quite a bit of shopping around but I could not find anything with these specs).| Jacques Mattheij
In case you’re tuning in late, the previous installment in this series is here. This is an absolutely ridiculously long blog post, feel free to either totally ignore it or to read only the top portion, it will likely contain all you need or want to know to keep up to date with what’s happening here. The rest is more of a detailed log of what I did to be able to get back into it quickly if I decide that ‘Ruby Is the One’.| Jacques Mattheij
For many years I was a ‘bulkregister’ customer, I landed there after Network Solutions went mad. Then Bulkregister was bought by enom.com and it went from good to bad to worse in a very short time. I called around to my colleagues to see where they were registering their domains and they pointed me to a small but scrappy upstart registrar called Moniker, the brainchild of one Monte Cahn. Monte was awesome, he worked like a demon and rightfully claimed never to have lost a customers domain.| Jacques Mattheij
In case you landed here without any context and have no idea who I am or what this article is about this article should give you some background. For years we were skating on very thin ice. Our only advantage that we had over competitors is that we had figured something out that they had not. Which is that Netscape, Microsoft and pretty much every other browser vendor had made a small but crucial mistake in implementing HTTP.| Jacques Mattheij
A recent comment on Hacker News gives a little bit of insight into how charities and non-profits determine who to target for donations and how they deal with requests for removal from marketing lists. I’m more than a little shocked at the contents. The author, Tom van Antwerp goes into some detail about how his employer, the Ayn Rand Institute operates. (Surprising that such a bastion of capitalism isn’t able to turn a profit because of the useful services it provides for which it command...| Jacques Mattheij
There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding about the Google Search/Web History disable switch that google provides to its more privacy conscious users. It’s not exactly the most advertised feature (you won’t find it in your profile page) to begin with, but once you do find it (it’s on the history page, you have to click the little ‘gear’ on the top right and then click the button to switch it off) there is no guarantee whatsoever that google does anything except for changing wh...| Jacques Mattheij
After creating a short-list of languages and frameworks to be evaluated (see here for the first installment in this series) the next step is going to be a lot harder. It involves getting my hands dirty and at a minimum going through the website of the framework, looking at each in turn to see if they actually match the criteria and then to decide whether or not to build a ‘toy’ application in that framework or not.| Jacques Mattheij
In this HN thread I commented on how the story about the People’s Republic of Donetsk reminded me of my days in communist Poland. User bernardom prompted me to tell this story, so here it goes (I’ve slept on it and I don’t think it will do any harm, even though all the participants are alive (and well)). I got my driving license in 1986. My dad and his wife were looking to buy a new car and were going to trade in their old Citroen 2CV.| Jacques Mattheij
Learning Romanian is rapidly turning into a huge exercise in Yak-Shaving. You often see the question “What stack should I use to develop my application on?” posed but rarely do you get any insight in the actual process once someone decides to answer it specifically, so both as an analogy to rubber-ducking this and showing you what went on while I made my choice I’ve decided to document the whole process.| Jacques Mattheij
Disruption is something that you can usually only establish after the fact. A decade later or so you can look back and say ‘x’ disrupted ‘y’. Microsoft did it to IBM. Disruption usually plays on a larger scale, for instance, the semi-conductor industry all but destroyed the vacuum tube industry (for certain purposes though vacuum tubes had hard-to-beat advantages potentially good enough for a niche revival). On the web disruption takes place at a smaller scale.| Jacques Mattheij
I currently find myself living in Romania for a bit. One thing that bothers me is that if I spend time in a place where I don’t speak the language and make the locals speak English to me all the time (provided they can!) is that it feels like I’m rude and not making an effort to meet them halfway. Why should (many) be the ones to adapt rather than me (one)?| Jacques Mattheij
The employer of one of my coding heroes, John Carmack is currently being sued by ZeniMax over unspecified IP that he may or may not have taken with him to his new spot. He responded to the suit and inquiries by the general public with tweets here: Oculus uses zero lines of code that I wrote while under contract to Zenimax. And a slightly older one: No work I have ever done has been patented.| Jacques Mattheij
One of the most interesting architectures to come out of the 1980’s was the Inmos Transputer. The idea behind it is that you string together a large number of CPU’s each with their own memory and connections to neighbouring transputers (using a series of ‘links’) into a computing fabric. A recent comment on HN suggested using a cpu-per-process as a means of achieving very high degrees of security. This made me wonder if you couldn’t use a Raspberry-Pi Compute Module to achieve this ...| Jacques Mattheij
In January I came up with a weird idea, to go and visit total strangers in return for ‘food and board’ in order to do useful work for them. (see: Will Work For Food And Lodging for how and why this started). They say no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy, and in a slight variation on the theme, in this case the battle plan did not survive first contact with the audience.| Jacques Mattheij
In the past, the various professions were organized as guilds. If you wanted to become a cabinet maker you’d enter into an apprenticeship arrangement with a ‘master’ cabinetmaker and you’d be taught the tricks of the trade over a several year period. As your final examination you would be required to make a masterpiece (that’s where that word comes from) and then, if the master accepted your work you could call yourself a cabinetmaker.| Jacques Mattheij
I’ve read a number of articles recently on ‘nomadic techies’, people that live as sparse as possible while moving from place to place every few days, weeks or months and how this impacted their lives, a backpack, a laptop and an online business or consultancy seem to be the main ingredients. This spate of articles has caused me to look at my own life to date in a new light and I think I too have been bitten by the nomadic bug only with me it seems to last on average five years before I ...| Jacques Mattheij
I started my first business (a computer programming consultancy) when I was pretty young (21), in 1986. At the time I had worked for a little over a year and a half for the application programming department of a dutch bank. The department had 100 employees divided into several teams and about 35 people hired from companies such as BSO and Volmac (loosely termed ‘body shops’, not a very nice term).| jacquesmattheij.com
tldr: A small i386 32-bit protected mode multi-tasking operating system modeled after QNX| jacquesmattheij.com