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 consult…

I started my first business (a computer programming consultancy) when I was pretty young (21), in 1986.

Today marks the 22nd birthday of the world wide web.

The NSA apparently has the capabilities to eavesdrop on just about anything you do on the web or on the internet in general.

A while ago I received an invitation to a high-school reunion.

Search engine spam was invented the moment search engines started to be good enough to send significant volumes of traffic to websites based on keyword searches.

Since about 6 days now, I’ve been almost completely deaf in my right ear.

This is most likely the most disturbing video I have ever seen, and just to make sure that you can’t just click through I’ll make you work for it.

It’s fairly rare that I can write about the jobs I take on, this one is an exception to that rule and there are some lessons here that can help any entrepreneur, even the ones that are doing well.

My lucky break was not finishing my education.

APIs are great, they allow companies to expose parts of their engine for inclusion into the products of others to increase adoption and to facilitate the development of features and products around a common set of data.

In a heartfelt appeal to Apple from AppGratis founder Simon Dawlat we gain insight into the ridiculous situation around Apple’s appstore review proces.

A couple of years ago I got wind of the fact that geocities was about to die and along with many others I did my bit to save geocities, the site now lives on (or as much as I could save of it) as reocities.com.

I hope this post will save some lives.

I believe that a lack of domain knowledge is the root cause of a lot of very bad software that gets developed and I think that it is up to computer programmers and their managers to deal with this.

In 1992 I had bought a license to a little known real time micro kernel based operating system called QnX.

Looking at the site earlier today I suddenly noticed a couple of links to sites that I would never ever think of endorsing through my blog.

Over the years I’ve owned quite a few computers.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been working off-and-on on a little side project.

This article is in response to an earlier one comparing Haskell and C, which made the claim that Haskell beats out C when it comes to speed.

The 14th of August, 2003 was an interesting day in many ways.

For a while now there have been tantalizing hints that Elon Musk is at it again.

Hello again, Hackernews.

After moving to ‘the Island’, a place I won’t make too obvious here to protect the innocent and the guilty alike we settled down and built a house.

There are lots of bad things that you can insert into your system through various ways that all seem to be represented in physical form as white powder.

Yesterday I wrote up a post that I had on my list of the last couple of years but never got around to.

Windmills have always fascinated me and for a long time I was dreaming of one day building my own.

I’m not actually a citizen of this country, I’m a subscriber.

In the early days of computing, computers were physical monsters, occupying large rooms or even whole buildings.

Back when the web was only a limited affair and the most exciting thing on it in the realm of imagery was the ‘coffee pot webcam’ I came up with a way to make a real live video stream that worked in a browser.

There are lots of different things that you use each and every day.

A while ago I was in Germany on a business trip, to strike a deal over licensing a bunch of software that I wrote with a German company that was operating in a related field and that wanted to branch out.

When one business sues another to protect their income stream for the most part this is an admission of failure.

With some regularity the question of whether or not anyone can program comes up.

Being acquired is one if the positive outcomes of starting a company, it means that some other - presumably larger - company agrees with the vision and the product created by the smaller entity and has decided to express this agreement with an offer that…

There is an old proverb that says that “Those that can do, those that can’t teach.”.

There are approximately 7 billion people in the world.

Apple just won in their case against Samsung and Tim Cook has posted a memo to Apple employees.

One of the most tiring memes that float around free services is that if you are not paying for them you must be the product, as in you are ‘sold’ to advertisers.

Every now and then I get really weird ideas.

If you’re good at what you’re doing and you have friends in the start-up scene then there is a chance that at some point you will be offered the chance to join a newly minted company.

When you’re in ticket-closing mode it is all too easy to find the cause of some issue, fix it, close the ticket and move on.

Some ideas are so tempting, would be so unbelievably great if they were true that they will never die out.

Apple is suing Samsung and has successfully obtained an injunction because of a novel interpretation of the term ‘irrepairable harm’.

Every now and then someone hits the jackpot.

Best practice has it that when you move content around for whatever good reasons you have that you should do it using a 301 redirect.

In the early days, even if the fruits of the labour of programmers could be used for destruction (for instance, to compute the trajectory of a missile) the work itself was as far as I can see always creative.

An industry is dying.

Most of sales is concentrated on getting to ‘yes’, in fact there is a book with that exact title and many more that aim to achieve the same goal.

And I used to think that was all there was to it.