Yesterday, on january 19th, Swiss OpenData enthusiasts and activists have founded the OpenData.ch Association in Bern. It’s goal is to bring together citizens, journalists, designers and developers to realize ideas based on publicly available OpenData and OpenGovernmentData.

More about the goals and mindset of OpenData.ch can be found in the German-Only - Open Government Data for Switzerland Manifesto.

If you’re up to create something with OD, whether your a developer or not, reserve march 30th and 31st when the next Make.opendata.ch-Hackathon will be held. Need, some inspiration of what the first one was like? Checkout the great summary by datavisualization.ch or read my hackathon review.

Thrilled to start this new chapter with an amazingly diversified group of people.

James Hague:

Be widely read. There are endless books about architecture, books by naturalists, both classic and popular modern novels, and most of them have absolutely nothing to do with computers or programming or science fiction.

Seems funny now, but had the most difficult time to let go of all those other things when started studying. No more philosophy or politics just algorithm runtimes and graph theory.

via the codeproject newsletter

Richard Minerich:

We work in an environment where hearsay and taste drive change instead of studies and models.

While VCs and influencers encourage us to jump on the emotional UX and viral social-network train to make our ideas succeed, we tend to not consult our logs first. After all, tapping in the dark is not science, but that’s sort of another topic.

Richard Minerich writes about the shift in programming languages away from proven ones to scripting languages. I tend to agree that dynamic languages should mainly be used as glue. Building a house out of porous cardboard could work if you’re an experienced professional, but it’ll probably fail for most of us. That said most of my code to date is dynamically typed because it’s just way to comfortable.

However there’s no test that’ll cover every single error case on the other side there always will be static and correct formulas.

Last december Maciej Ceglowski, founder of pinboard has written a post about the fact that all great services which don’t charge are very likely going to disappear in the long run.

Maciej Ceglowski:

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software.

The reason I’m writing this is that while premium services are making money they’re not necessarily attracting enough users to actually accomplish something while at the same time, free, VC-backed startups are doing exactly that. The middle way is to design a so called freemium service where premium users have to pay for free ones, but they’re obviously not going to tell them that.

Now after having migrated this blog over to a static version I needed a replacement to enable visitors to send me e-mail while at the same time not opening the doors for spammers. PHP scripts can easily fulfill that job but I want something else.

While having used the free version of Wufoo in the past I thought it’s a no brainer to go back and leverage it again. Obviously paying for it this time. Then it hit me while checking the pricing page. The cheapest subscription is 15 dollars per month, while free plans are displaying ads to your visitor. What are they thinking! Paying 15 dollars, which is more than I pay for hosting, while only receiving about two messages during that time period.

That said, please startups and SaaS companies, remove the free model and make premium reasonably priced.

As for Wufoo, i’d guess replacing the free plan with one where you’d pay 2 dollars a month would make them more profit than showing ads on those confirmation pages.

When talking about showing ads to free users checkout the tweet by @romeroabelleira and give it some thought (translated):

Dear Advertisers on Spotify, I don’t even pay for Spotify, I’m therefore worth nothing to you too. Sorry, Juan

And don’t waste your time looking for the contact form, I’d just put the e-mail address into the footer for now.

Ten days back Nikon announced their new flagship model, the Nikon D4. It’s clearly got a higher Megapixel value - as needed for marketing purposes. On the side it has gotten some long awaited features such as proper HD video recording with all the bells and whistles you’d expect. For more details listen to James Banfield below.

Dslrnewsshooter video: Nikon D4 - video feature run through from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

The most innovative feature in my perspective however is the Ethernet connection and what comes with it, a camera management console completely built in HTML and JS so one’s finally able to leave all the proprietary, heavily bloated, vendor specific crap software behind and focus on realizing ideas.

Checkout the video WHY by Corey Rich below if you want to see what’s possible with a D4 presumed you know what you’re doing.

WHY - Nikon D4 Release Video from Corey Rich on Vimeo.