Tell me if the following sounds familiar:

Oh, hi! It's been such a long time! They told me that you are a researcher now, right? What are you working on?
Me? Oh, well, ...

• ... I am developing a new carbulator theory that can hiperstat a maximum-entrophy logarithmic equation.
• ... it's something complicated. Have you ever heard of carbulators? No? Don't worry, no one ever does.
• ... you don't really want to hear that. It's super boring.

I am guilty of giving all of those answers at some point in my life. And while I am used to people not caring about my work, I'm not happy about it. Of course, I'm a nerd, so "doing boring things that no one cares about" is what I do. And I'm not saying everyone should be pasionate about Dungeons and Dragons^1. But I do think that, when I give a completely useless answer like the ones above, I'm contributing more to the problem than to the solution.

It is a fact that a lot of what we programmers and researchers do is considered boring by lots of people. But think about it, do you think it's boring? If the answer is "no", then I bet you could explain to me what's exciting about your job, why does it matter and/or what are you expecting to achieve. So all we need to do now is to better transmit this excitement to those around us. And yes, by "around us" I mean people who doesn't know what a carbulator is, have never heard the term in their life, and are probably none the worse for it.

I think a good start is my research section, in which I've listed some articles where I give a simple explanation of what I do. Not because I'm expecting my relatives to check my personal homepage, but because writing the articles has made me think really hard about what might be hard to grasp to non-technical readers, and next time I'll have a good script to begin with.

I can't tell you why I feel so strongly about this. Perhaps it's because the last time I was asked this question all I had were links to published papers, and that's unacceptable. Or because the time before that I straight up lied about it. Or maybe because I'm thousands of kilometers away from my family, and yet they don't have a clue about why I think it's worth it. And I have yet to find any downside to making knowledge more accessible.

So, what did you say that you do?

Footnotes

^1 I still can't find a Dungeon Master near me, though. And if you don't know what that is, no, it's not a sex thing. It's an old game...

Hypothesis

People who claim being able to identify brands of cola by taste are usually right

Resources

5 different kinds of cola drinks (Pepsi, Coke, Coke Light, Diet Coke, Freeway), 5 similar cups, sticky paper, pens, even more paper

Description

So this is something that definitely happened, mainly because I think things too much and my girlfriend doesn't know when to stop me. The setup was: we kept all soft drinks at room temperature (to keep the taste unaltered), and then we split up. In step 1, one of us poured a cup of each softdrink into a numbered cup, and then left the room. In step 2, the other one replaced the numbers with different ones (Roman numerals), and mixed the cup order. This is a single blind experiment, which is as scientific as we could get without involving third parties.

Then the tasting began, which we did literally blind to keep any effect from identifying the color of a given softdrink (just in case). The task was to accurately identify which drink is which. Here are our highlights:

• Soft drinks at room temperature taste awful.
• Coke light is terrible even when blindfolded.
• The Coke brands were identified without a hitch, while one of us mixed up Pepsi and Freeway. This points to our hypothesis being right.
• If you don't think that softdrinks pack enough sugar, try tasting them at room temperature and blindfloded. We had to implement water glasses in between, because after the second cup they all tasted just like pure, unadultered sweetness.
• It is curiously difficult to find Pepsi in Berlin. Seriously, give it a try.
• It would be quite easy to fake an experiment to prove that people prefer a certain brand over the other. Just make sure your brand's drink is cold while the other one is not.

Conclusion and Future work

It is quite possible to identify a brand of cola by taste only. In future work we intend to repeat the experiment, but this time rating drinks in order of preference instead, to find out whether we really prefer the soft drink we claim to prefer.
We also found that the claim "people prefer X over Y in blind tastes" ranges from a filthy lie to useless at best. This result might come as a shock to some of our reviewers. We suggest those reviewers to leave their houses more often.

I was warned. I was told this wasn't a good idea. I mean, even the price should have pointed out that something was not what it seemed. But no, I had to go ahead. I had to be cooler than the other guys, and I was certainly going to prove everyone that you can't go wrong with a Nokia phone. So I got myself a Windows Phone 8.1 (again), and today I say to you, that was a stupid choice and I'm stupid for going with it.

I've chronicled in a previous blog^1 how much of a pain it was to try to develop for a Windows Phone (WP). That alone should have kept me away from buying a smartphone with a too-good-to-be-true price. But on I went, tricked by memories of me saying "this is not so bad after all", carefully ignoring that I only said that before I tried to write my own app. And here we are again.

This is, step by step, what my experience trying to develop a very simple app for my (Lumia 530) Windows Phone was like. Yours might vary, of course, but I'm not betting on it.

1. Install Visual Studio Community 2015 (free), following the Official WP develop guidelines
   Problem: all versions that could work in Windows 7 (the one I have) are deprecated for WP development one way or another: they don't have required tools, cannot be activated because the servers are gone, or just won't work. So get Windows 10 and that comes bundled with itwant it or not, and try again.

2. Update your Windows and Install Visual Studio Community 2015 (free), following the official WP develop guidelines
   Problem: the installer doesn't actually install the WP tools. Go back to the installer and modify your requirements.

3. Plug your phone to enable development
   Problem: you need to unlock your phone first.

4. Sign up to Microsoft's Dev Network to register as a developer to get your phone unlocked
   Problem: you need to pay €14, because reasons.

3.1 (Optional) Sign up on Dreamspark as a student to get a free developer account
Problem: the automatic verification process is broken. You need instead to send a copy of your ID, your student ID, and a transcript of your grades to Microsoft over unencrypted email. But don't worry, this data will be destroyed after they use it. "Anna" promised me so over email.

1. Start Visual Studio, create your first project, and add a couple text fields
   Problem: bugs! The auto-complete is buggy, running my app once would force me to restart every time, and adding a control on the GUI while the text cursor is in the wrong place can (and will) erase every other control. But hey, at least we are finally developing something.

2. Add a "select date" field to your project
   Problem: you need the DatePicker control to do this, but it's not included - I guess people don't select dates in phone apps. You have to follow several steps to get it working. However, as there's a library incompatibility somewhere, you'll get stuck anyway.

If you have been following all the steps you'll notice that, after several GiB of downloads and a lot of hours spent on internet forums, I have not yet managed to finish the first screen. I spent three days trying to get things running, which is the time I budgeted for the whole app, I'm out €14, and yet I haven't even managed to add a control that should have been there anyway. I also gave Microsoft quite some money, along with a lot of my personal information.

But the worst part is that I knew this is what development would be like, and yet I insisted on giving it another try. This is why I'm an idiot, and if you think your experience will be any better, it is my opinion that you are deluding yourself too.

Listen to my advice, dear reader: Windows Phone? Not even once.

Footnotes

^1 As of now I haven't restored the backup anywhere, but once I do you should see a link to that post here.

After my last blog post arguing that advertisers should fall on a well and die, I've given the issue some more thought. After all, how would this little blog survive without ads? How would I keep up my product reviews without advertisers sending them to me for free?

Therefore, I came up with a plan to save the advertising industry from the scourge known as "ad-blockers". It's not precisely cheap, but we can still make it work in volume.

First of all, the Central Bureau of Advertising (or similar agency) has to announce publicly that they intend to make a raffle. The prizes have to be pretty good - The main prize should be at least a car, and the minor prizes should be iPhones (or even better, access to a yet-unreleased version), tablets, smartwatches and the like. You'll need a lot of them, so this is the expensive part. Ad agencies have to create quite a buzz, but then again, that's what they do for a living anyway.

Once we've assembled what is essentially the coolest contest on Earth, we announce the rules. In a nutshell, they will be:

1. Everyone is allowed to claim a prize
2. Winners will be selected via ads, served through the usual channels.
3. Other than reading "you've won", there's no requirement about what the ads will look like
4. The campaign will go on as long as there are prizes left. New prizes can be added at any moment

Here's the genius part: the winning ads will look as sketchy as possible. I suggest flashing gifs straight out of the 90s. Think about it: if the buzz for the campaign is high enough, we won't just have thousands (millions?) of users disabling their ad-blockers; we'll have effectively trained them to click on anything, no matter how suspicious it looks! All you need is to drag the contest long enough for little Johnny to think "I wish I could disable the ads, but then I might miss my chance to win". Once smaller companies start running their own contests in the same way, it's game over for ad-blockers.

There are of course some details to sort out, but I think you get the main idea. Some people will argue that this is dishonest, and that will lead to thousands of virus infections from rogue ads. Don't listen to these people: it's not your problem if some schmuck fails to protect his/her computer, and then again, if you cared about "dishonesty" your industry wouldn't be in this problem anyway.

I'm confident you'll find my scheme worth trying, and I hope this will clear any remaining bad blood between us. No need to thank me.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of gaming for me is to try and pretend I'm the protagonist. That includes making choices the way I'd do them in real life. Of course, I understand that games are escapism, and I'm not blaming those that use games as an opportunity to murder pretty much anything that can be murdered. It's just not my style. I'm more the kind of gamer that's constantly being chased around by the guards I didn't kill because they didn't do anything.

Having said that, I'm having trouble with Angry Birds. I know, I shouldn't expect moral lessons from what is essentially a group of suicide birds bombing an enemy. But am I the only one who has trouble with a game that asks you to bomb a playground, including the kids playing there?

Did you enjoy committing a crime against humanity? Do you need more genocide? Then good news! You can bomb the skate park, somebody's house, and even a cemetery. Not only you get to kill your enemies again, but this time you can get their friends and family too!

Maybe it's because I'm having a bad day. Maybe it's because I'm putting too much thought into it. Maybe it's because I'm sick and tired of the phrase "collateral damage", or maybe I'm just missing some black humor. But in any case, I found out I can't bring myself to finish the game.

I hope that says something nice about me.