useless philosophy

we moved

2008-08-07T15:36:00.000-07:00

we moved here:

http://www.uselessphilosophy.com/

Layer 42 review

2008-06-25T04:55:00.000-07:00

Layer42 Networks  3080 Raymond ST Santa Clara, CA 95054

this is a truly evil company. we've been their customers for one year and we found the following facts:

- there is no onsite support. they claim there is, but there is not. for example, not a single emergency ticket was ever responded. we had to drive to facility to restart equipment

- facility has frequent power failures. once they didn't even answer the phones when it happened.

- and the worst: all contracts are auto renewed, and require 60 -day notice prior to expiration. there is *only* a year option for any service. don't phase out contracts: we had cabinets and 50mbit/s bandwidth from august, then we bought much more bandwidth in december. since they do *only*anual contracts, cabinets were expiring in next august and bandwidth four months later. in order to leave, we're now faced either to waste money for 4 months of bandwidth or 8 months of cabinets. no, they explicitly won't let us buy any of these monthly.

yes, it sucks.

Releaselog | RLSLOG.net » Real punishment: Russian Viagra spammer murdered

2007-10-11T05:56:00.000-07:00

Releaselog | RLSLOG.net » Real punishment: Russian Viagra spammer murdered

More free music, this time its Oasis, Jamiroquai, The Charlatans and Madness - Download Squad

2007-10-10T11:08:00.000-07:00

More free music, this time its Oasis, Jamiroquai, The Charlatans and Madness - Download Squad

OhGizmo! » Archive » World’s Largest Outdoor Swimming Pool

2007-10-10T11:07:00.000-07:00

OhGizmo! » Archive » World’s Largest Outdoor Swimming Pool

Amazon EC2 instances have hidden command

2007-08-05T13:35:00.000-07:00

This was my first experience with Amazon EC2. 100 instances doing WWW / 50M http hits per day.

And then we discovered this hidden command:

shitdown -h now!

And it worked.

Now we are at Layer42. It feels right.

The day when geeks will take over The Stick

2007-05-12T20:04:00.001-07:00

Why Hit Forge based models could rule the near future

This is Hit Forge and more is here

Business is easy

It took me 15 years, as a developer, to realize that.

Writing software is about turning machines into your private slaves - that's exciting, empowers you - but is only on-screen.

Much more fun is coding business, which is nothing more but using laws of physics and your coding skills - to make people hand you over their money, in a politically correct fashion.

This, in turn:
- buys you life (money=time).
- makes others respect you.
- buys you a big house.
- porsche.
- gets you hot girlfriend, for many it could have been life-goal (let's not brag about woman who didn't like money).
- or gives your children opportunity to choose the best education (those who experienced paternal instincts know what I'm talking about).

* welcome to ego heaven

Worth mentioning, there is much less competition in the field than in pure coding one. Businessmen have generally worse skills in synchronizing events, thinking out possibilities and noticing details. I think of developers who debug, master action/reaction, synchronize processes in milliseconds, have great sense what it means confronting the physics of the Nature ...and more...

What matters is reaction of the market and quick & flexible turns to take the best advantage of it

Nobody can for sure predict market reaction, but what is left are skills to notice details and up-create a big picture out of it. Generalize where possible. Fill out the missing numbers. Early notice trend to failure.

Guess who can do it better?

But yet most of the geeks never step into this zone.

(with exceptions of Commodore, Apple, Microsoft while uprising, Google, Digg - wherever coders were/have been truly in charge)

There is a mantra, created by businessmen which reads: building companies is hard, leave it to us.

Business people are important

Nothing if black and white. The laws of Nature will tell you this the next morning.

Layer of business people is important, very important. They are connectors. They can talk to people.

As an experienced coder, I know the feeling of "wasting my time" dealing with politicians, dishonest people and anything else that doesn't-react-as-instructed.

Coders know how nature feels. And The Market, as part of it. But not the micro-universe of human behavior.

Capital is unavoidable, as well. I heard people objecting the importance of it because now we have Amazon Web Services, Imageshack, cheap hosting, open source...

They're right, but there is more to it.

An example

Say you are a bare handed builder. Experienced. On a party you overhear an idea which could be hit. You should always steal good ideas. Tech parties are full of them.

As a coder who can build complete product - it's easy, give it few thousands lines, get yourself a server on Rackshack and start flying. Then you spend some more time to get first users, do A/B testing, see how market reacts by analyzing logs, using your debugging skills. Don't know how to get first users? Buy them, it's cheap.

Use this knowledge and your coding skills to figure out which micro actions should be taken to lead users into desired reaction.

Two possible outcomes:

- it simply doesn't work. You can try again, or kill it.

- market bit it: now it's time for rent-a-business people

They will unload the "boring" tasks off you by getting more people into the team, inject money for technical stuff (for example salaries, so you don't need to give up more shares). In other words, help thing expand in the fastest possible way and help you magnify your best: understanding why it worked.

Otherwise, you're subject to fast-following, burnouts, getting hell bored doing things you might not like, like dealing with support.

But if you call professional help in, you could also move along and build more companies.

Without money you can't reach those who need salary. This, alone, can lead you into making bad partnerships which can later destroy the company.

In other words, let business do what it does best: do the talking.

If you still think the Silicon Valley is famous because of coders - you are wrong.

It's because of its risk-tolerant capital holders and business culture.

Put these capital-adventurers in the middle of Atlantic Ocean, you'll get the Silicon Valley there.

Builders are everywhere, we just need access to the business layer and freedom to fail.

The God, revisited

2007-04-04T19:32:00.000-07:00

I, for sure, don't believe in God and think that religion is often dangerous for teaching us that non-understanding is a plus, the Church works in a mafia-model by combusting our fears... - but

After reading The Wisdom of Crowds, I started revisiting the whole idea, from the standpoint of how-brains-interconnect: the God being an imaginary point where you instruct you brain to connect to and believe unconditionally everything the point propagates to you, that being actually a compiled opinion from the child nodes.

Voila.

That makes, or could make, our entire brain acting as one cell, allowing us to create super brain by connecting all child nodes (believers, in God's case) to super-hub, "the God" itself.

Q: Does the God exist?
A: Yes, as long as there are at least two people believing in it!

The Bible is written in a very clever way: If you understand it's a bullshit, you are ready to move onto next level. No need for anybody to evaluate your brain's readiness.

God is just one model suitable to be instructed to our brain. There are various other models: Sport teams, nationalities, labeled groups. Also Digg, Myspace. Basically, anything you can make yourself feeling "connected to".

my thinking process is still evolving but this CNN article may be of interest.

Learning from spammers

2007-03-25T17:55:00.000-07:00

I just visited site from a spam email and... I think there is lots of things we can learn from spammers about design: clean, direct, colorful, pretty

Stupidity causes global warming, too

2007-03-24T11:40:00.000-07:00

Not directly, of course.

But when you do something stupid, you make one or more people proud because they were not you.

That does cause global warming and you should stop making other people proud for not being you..

~

Why did I just post this:

Regarding my article Adobe's Apollo, Google warned me that I violated terms of use by posting a non-useless article on Blogger.

Adobe's Apollo

2007-03-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

WARNING: People seeking for useless philosophy only, may skip this post

FOR OTHERS, IMPORTANT DISCLOSURE:
I'm Flash, Adobe Reader hater!

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/56394.html

From developer's perspective (and this is going to be our call), there are very important reasons why HTTP/HTML/P*/CSS/JS/mysql/Linux combination took major role in web revolution and Flash became a hooker.

I've worked actively with different models/platforms - C, C++, Borland (OWL), Microsoft (MFC) and Java, directX... (exception is .Net),

...for about 17 years.

Let's see why I've learned:

0)
- Online: I want **nothing** to do with local computer. I want nothing to do with local files, file systems, registry, video resolution, local API, installation folders, need-this-library-situations (!). If I want to store something for user, It's going to be on my server in file system on a machine which I specially prepared for this application and for which I know how is organized, what can take, under which load it is expected to collapse.

If there is structured data, I want that to be in my mysql, which I configured with around 40 highly specific commands in my my.cnf, which nobody is allowed to touch, not even system administrator.

I want UI totally separated from the application Engine: these are two completely different things. UI is dirty, quickly made up spaghetti code which only needs to work correctly and to be beautiful from outside.

Back engine needs to be clean, structured, stable - to spare machine and crash never. Most importantly - data needs to be in one pool for every client, not them connecting to each other over and over. That generates routing problem and requires developer's advanced knowledge which we're trying to avoid in order to have more developers on Earth .

When I build UI - I think like a user, I just visualize desired outcome and try to build up to it as fast as possible...

But, when I build back engine - I feel compassionate to the machine which is going to run it, and am very careful for every memory allocation, every open file handle..

UI takes lots of resources (check your browser's memory footprint) and often forces machine (browser) into crashing.

Back engine is simple code, takes little resources but needs to be absolutely reliable.

Being entirely different in almost every aspect, these two should be separated far far away from each other.

Otherwise, imagine this way: every time browser crashes, you lose your data.

Privacy? One of the best manipulated subjects today.
Will probably time out, after majority realizes that attention=money, ranging from $0.04 to $30 per pair of eyes per occasion. Take my word, forget it for a moment.

1)
- Linux: community+simple+stable+familiar. This includes experience in working with file systems, knowing what machine can/cannot do. Even version of OS makes difference to me. I can quite feel what can be done with particular machine, so we don't waste time/money under scaling /overkilling.

2)
- HTTP: switching to url and stateless request was a major milestone in my life!

One request is one life cycle of the micro application. You don't have to keep image of entire system in your mind. An action starts with initialization, does thing, goes away in 500ms. DB carries the burden of managing the state and shared data. In other words, you can focus to serve specific action at a time and you can release everything else from your mind. Beautiful.

Otherwise, you need to think about health of the process, memory allocation and releasing, cleanup threads, occasional saving to disk, dealing with recovery

Is Adobe thinking of taking us back to dark ages of application installation, versions, data loss, incompatibility and when developing was a science? If not so, what is their proposal?

I must be missing something important here...

Application developers are users of platform designers, hence we should be treated as idiots. Appreciated.

This is exactly why HTTP took over everything else. Downside is speed, but developers are more important.

Also with XHTTP/JS you can decide how much you really want to reload, so when developers are ready, they'll use it!

As an ex-desktop developer, it took me some time to get used to it - but now wouldn't change it for anything. It should be treated as a step forward, not backwards.

3)
- Mysql took over because of the community, availability and price. Even postgress seems to be better (heard so), it's not enough. Any mysql's question is answered somewhere, and there is lots of questions when it comes to storing your data.

4)
- P*: in my case PHP, is similar to C, especially function names. That's why I chose PHP, nothing really more to it.. Loads fast (can be used in stateless mode), has well done mysql support, associative arrays - that's why not Java.
- Also, has Zend Studio IDE and I would really rather stay with PHP because of Zend than something else which wouldn't have Zend.
- php has hundreds of libraries built by community, covering almost anything. Done.

4)
- JS/Firebug: I'm actually addicted to it. Firebug is seriously best debugging tool ever built, having MS Visual Studio and Zend studio as competitors. Plus? Available from any(F) browser. No debugging' servers, no client switches, no levers, no howtos... For the first time, ever! Hello?

5)
- Firefox (browser): extensions. Without Firebug, timestamp generator, hashing extension, WebDeveloper toolbar I would kindly try to avoid it.

6)
- HTML+CSS+JS: (I'm coming from OWL, MFC and JavaSwing). This is great combination for building UI. Anything you need, strait on the spot you need. My wife is a lawyer and she is just now building corporate website in HTML in Word. I'm sitting on the other computer and building 2.0 application in Ajax. Using the same paltform.

Ok, actionscript==javascript, but is the whole combination what makes it great.

To be fair, code is dirty but it doesn't matter for UI: if it works - it works. It is far more important to have freedom.

In the other corner we have:

1)
- Coding Flash is just plain nightmare. Even actionscript==javascript, Flash DOM is retarted.

let me document the claim:

// create a layer with a border and write some text inside

// create a layer
_root.createEmptyMovieClip( "myclip", 1 );

// why the hell this way?
var myclip = _root.myclip;

myclip._x = 0;
myclip._y = 0;

// allow me to ask few questions
// why layer is called movie clip?
// why _root has that underscore?
// why I need to specify some number which is level
// and I'm required to do so (think: z-index)
// why the hell this call doesn't return
// pointer to new layer, but instead I need
// to pass string name and retrieve it from soehwere else
// why underscore in x and y ??
// why why why??

// ok, make a rectangle
myclip.moveTo( 10, 10 ); // !!
myclip.lineTo( 100, 0 ); // !!!
myclip.lineTo( 100, 100 ); // !!!!
myclip.lineTo( 0, 0 ); // !!!!

// dont worry, won't even work
// you need to set myclip.setLineStyle before d'oh

// have some text on it

myclip.createTextField( "mytextfield", 1, 0, 0, 100, 50 );

// 100 and 50 are dimensions of text rectangle. Yes! you need to
// specify it and yes, your text will be clipped if you
// anyhow specify smaller than it takes
// "1" was again required z-index and 0 0 are coordinates

// AAH! not to forget. IF YOU SPECIFY TWO OBJECTS IN THE SAME Z-INDEX
// THE SECOND WON'T EVEN SHOW OFF. THEY USED THE SAMEL LEVEL
// RE-FUCKING-TARDED!!

// I won't even comment this again:
var mytextfield = myclip.mytextfield;

mytextfield.text = "Fuck you Adobe";

// and here we go, a layer with rectangle and text inside
// you want some other font, size or something else?
// ooh, you'll need to create TextWhateverStyle object and fill it with values

// leave you there..

what about HTML + CSS?

<div style="position:absolute; top:0px; left:0px; border:1px solid #000000; color:#ff0000;" >Fuck you Adobe!</div>

need to say more?

2)
- The latest Flash IDE is on level of Borland Turbo C 2.0 from 1987.

Odds that Adobe is going to move web revolution to the next stair?

- Why flash then?

Great 2D animation engine underneath. Macromedia/Adobe developed these graphical engines/technologies to support their old products. These seem to me practically ported to Flash and really well done. As is DirectX.

However, this, or most said in Apollo's FAQ page don't have anything to do with Web revolution.

I'd say Adobe doesn't really understand why web is moving in the direction it's moving. Instead, they probably see it going backwards and trying to help us by bringing up '80s.

Humans from cat's perspective

2007-03-11T18:18:00.000-07:00

We, humans, may appear plain stupid in the eyes of cats.

Two reasons:

Reason Number One

At first, we were their food.

Now - we feed them, provide shelter, take care of their health, clean their shit

Reason Number Two

Geek

2007-03-02T00:41:00.000-08:00

I caught myself downloading using command line ctorrent while browsing with text browser elinks on a FreeBSD under VMWare, everything running on a Windows box.

I wonder... when did I become such a geek

The Evolution of a Developer

2006-11-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

I've written nearly 2.5M lines of code in my life.

From BASIC, via 6510 assembly code, lots of C, some C++, lots of Java, PHP.

I never took off with C++ because machines and I were already thinking to much alike.

Java changed that since it was a highly disciplined environment but yet equipped with everything you can possibly need (threading, syncing) . This was absolutely lacking in, at the time, C/C++ platforms

The discipline moment in Java prevented me from making simple mistakes all around, and that was absolutely important for writing big systems. I fully utilized that and wrote some large compact applications with surprisingly small amount of bugs. They were great.

Finally, I adopted scripting (PHP in my case) because computing power got much cheaper (it's actually not an issue anymore). On the other hand development price raised into skies because market forces you to be fast as hell. Unlike java, PHP cannot be used to develop complex integrated software but yet everything is supported through lots of libraries. A scripting language of no hassle, easy to quickly build-up something within a second.

Now, you must be expecting me to conclude this by giving a final mark or rank list of all these languages.

No.

That's absolutely not what I've discovered for these 15 years of writing code.

It was something else which made actual sense:

*Smart people create products, smarter people sell them*

Cheers.

P.S. coding is absolutely important, only before you type the first character, think how it'll make money. That's where the *real fun is.

the worst design ever

2006-09-13T12:25:00.000-07:00

you think for a moment you saw everything, then suddenly get knocked out (again)

http://homepage.mac.com/alberttang/handlebarclub/wbmc.html

and yet on mac.com ??

The Perfect Digg Headline

2006-09-13T03:12:00.000-07:00

If you asked a computer what would be the most promising digg.com headline, I think you could expect something like:

"New, Amazing Ajax Net Neutrality Ubuntu tool Says Microsoft Sucks Appple Ipod, Amazing, Amazing"

The meeting

2006-09-07T16:19:00.000-07:00

today I met God.

he was heavily drugged and I was having fatboy slim.

he smiled.

Global Warming

2006-08-04T06:58:00.000-07:00

it will probably be hot (the World walking in speedos),

but

aren't we going to get a new continent for living - Antartica - with a size of Europe?

Revenge

2006-07-27T18:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Flickr was broken and I couldn't change permissions on entire set so had to go 50 photos one by one, one by one, one by one.

Today, as a revenge, I'm uploading every single photo I can find in my house to use space on their disks.

On Intelligence, implementation

2006-07-21T21:11:00.000-07:00

based on on intelligence model (good framework) , following should be true:

If you want to do something in your life

1. become there / predict yourself there (like you predict yourself being in the kitchen just before heading there)
2. make sure all the skills you might need on the way there are practiced
3. drive your motive (the engine), mostly based on driving your emotions well, best if you can use existing problems derived from childhood, revenge works fine, not important what the cause or object is

you'll eventulally get there

On money

2006-07-16T16:04:00.000-07:00

Amongst other uses, money is a healthy way for successful people to communicate with others

Creativity

2006-07-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

If you want to stay creative - never completely learn how to walk.

The Future

2006-07-13T09:03:00.000-07:00

Have you ever imagined little things from our life in 50,000 years from now?

i.e. Would you have fun watching George W. Bush on some lower stage planet convincing people to build wall to protect North Americania from South Invaders?

On Internet Neutrality

2006-07-13T08:52:00.000-07:00

Don't blame telcoms. They are cable putters who found bag of money while digging the soil.

But where are other Internet transportation solutions?

They are late.

WARNING: ADULT CONTENT!

2006-07-12T16:07:00.000-07:00

"If you are over 18 - ENTER, otherwise LEAVE"

Do we really need to show our children how fake adult life is?

Bureaucracy

2006-07-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I let myself thinking... if there was no bureaucracy, bullshit and (useless) management levels - most of the people would be unemployed.

Then I say - better keep it this way, it's safer on the streets.

Religion, Mafia and Governments

2006-07-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

Have they been growing from the same hole?

- Each one covers one stage of social evolution, cannot run in the same time - one must be in hierarchy with other two
- All three will ask you to pay for the protection. Protection from what? Neither will exactly specify
- Since your interest is not sufficient to 'keep using the product', they will ask for your emotional involvement: respect god, fear the boss, be patriot
- There is no way to know how is your money being spent
- All three will punish you if you stop giving - instead of just stopping the service... (which service?)

The story they sell is, however, different. Each covers different stage of brain and social development:
- religion will grab those who don't know/understand how nature works and have fears drive their lives. Religion, therefore, has science as a natural enemy,
- Mafia gets those who do understand the nature thing, but still have fears run their lives
- governments cover those from Mafia group who don't buy 'the boss' thing. Notice that Mafia is much closer to governments than religion to Mafia

What is the problem with paying a company to protect you?

- you know exactly what you pay for
- if you don't like the service, you switch
- no need to wait for millions of other people to like the same thing
- there must be a customer support
- probably cheaper
- no need to hope for better future (children watch pornography anyways)

Today

2006-07-12T12:37:00.000-07:00

Today I lost my left shoe.

So, I decided to become a blogger:

"Today I lost my left shoe"