Ev's YAPB

The Uberdiagram of Everything

2009-09-30T19:31:00.004-05:00

Ever wondered how business types who sell enterprise software come up with impressive looking bullshit diagrams? You know the kind where a good old SQL Server instance magically becomes a "data cloud"?

This one certainly beats them all: it includes every single buzzword known to humanity and is shaped to resemble a flying saucer emitting religious looking beams from the middle. Look closer, it features Web 3.0 too - just to make sure you are dealing with a pro who's on top of his game:

I can only imagine how much brainpower was wasted on this thing.

Lenovo Thinkpad T400 Review

2009-09-27T16:35:00.013-05:00

I gave up on this blog long ago due to severe deficit of free time, even closing it down properly seemed like an unachievable goal. I am only doing this in hopes of Google indexing the hell out of this text and hopefully making a small dent in Lenovo sales.

The story here is the LCD screen on the latest Thinkpad T400 from Lenovo. This may come across rather silly, after all it is just a laptop and not even the most expensive out there yet I find it fascinating that in our age and time something like this even exists. The mere presence of Lenovo T400 on the market is puzzling to me. The LCD on this computer defeats the basic premises of the capitalism like survival of the fittest and the competition. This LCD is bad. This LCD is terrible. It is not even usable.

The laptop itself is awesome though. The basic formula was designed a long ago when IBM was still in charge: the build and finish are superb. Thinkpad keyboard combined with their touchpad and the pointing stick is by far the best in class. This machine is a typists dream: everything is literally at your fingertips. After using it for a week I shiver in horror of memories of my old Macbook Pro, and don’t even get me started on the newer Macbooks equipped with what basically is a calculator keyboard. When it comes to typing Thinkpads still rule..

But Lenovo, as compared to IBM 15 years ago, is a modern company, therefore it feels it must follow “cheapest crap always wins” formula. To save cash and save big they decided to go with a $2.99 part for an LCD screen. Actually I have no idea how much this junk costs but I can’t imagine it’s more expensive than a quarterpounder at McDonald’s.

I have tried two different versions: 15” WXGA LED and 14” WXGA+ LED. Both are essentially the same screen albeit different sizes and resolutions.

It delivers the following impressive features:

Zero degree viewing angle, i.e. some portions of the screen are always distorted.
Extremely low contrast
A few hundred metallic-tinted colors
Tremendous light bleed, i.e. you don’t just get black but you don’t even get dark grey: the darkest it can do is metallic-looking grey.

It is beyond me how can this be considered usable. The killing combination of terrible viewing angle, light bleed and low contrast pretty much guarantees that web pages on white background are hard to read. If a page uses #666 for text or lighter you're done, only black-on-white is comprehensible without constantly re-adjusting your head. Without NoSquint FireFox extension this laptop cannot be considered for web surfing.

Colors aren’t accurate. Yes, this is an el-cheapo 6-bit TN economy panel, but even those 6 poor bits get lost in the galore of metallic tint, poor factory calibration and light bleed. I am guessing this laptop can reproduce fewer than a 200 colors visibly distinguishable by a human eye. That is actually worse than my very first no-name PC in 1994. That one was also made in China, so this can’t stand for an excuse.

Do not buy Thinkpad T400. Do not buy Thinkpad T500 either. The CCFL-based panels on the 15” models are slightly better in regard to contrast but they’re much darker and colors are just as bad. Essentially the entire line of modern Thinkpads is shipped with DOA screens. Just for fun I am taking mine for repairs since I have an authorized Lenovo/Apple service center on my block. What if I get lucky and they’ll put an Apple panel into this sucker.

What is funny is that it runs Windows by default. Windows is known for a terrible font rendering: text looks even skinnier there, I wonder how would Windows users see anything at all? Do Lenovo service centers get phone calls from confused Windows users complaining that can’t see any text at the bottom of the screen?

Do not buy this junk. Your vision will deteriorate and you won’t be able to tell your children apart from one another. Buy Apple instead and install a proper operating system on it.

Dear Google, this was my review of Lenovo Thinkpad T400.

P.S. Actually this Thinkpad runs Linux very well. Every imaginable feature works out of the box. I am keeping the sucker. It will serve as my dedicated coding machine. This screen, while useless for surfing web or typing documents, is still OK for working the terminal and vim. To preserve my vision and sanity I cautiously avoid looking directly at this screen for more than 15 seconds per minute, using only dark backgrounds and utilizing only 15 colors for text. This laptop makes an excellent Linux-powered typewriter.

New photographer in New York City

2009-07-10T13:11:00.002-05:00

A little announcement here, or you shall I honestly just say - a shameless plug.

We’re adding a second small business to our family, helping Americans to look like a million dollars on their family photo albums, wedding pictures and business presentations. Galiya is launching Pink Splash! a blog of a photographer living in New York City.

After years of pursuing photography as a hobby I’ve talked to many folks, but I’ve never met a professional photographer with an MBA degree and absolute lack of interest of working for someone like Dell or Wells Fargo. So it will be interesting to watch her develop and grow this little business. Being surrounded by photo models all day long won’t hurt either.

:-)

Baldies and Foreclosures

2009-05-17T18:55:00.001-05:00

Even the nation's leading newspaper just couldn't resist to assign a non-white population percentage to every single block of the city on a freaking foreclosure map.

Ever since I moved to US I could never comprehend how the never ending war on racism, taken to absurd proportions sometimes, manages to conveniently co-exist with this consistent and all-reaching division of people by their skin color.

Seriously, non-whites on the foreclosure map? Why not percentage of baldies, or priests, or Harward graduates or one-legged piano thieves? But noooo, the public just has to know the percentage of non-whites in relation to everything.

Why Haskell?

2009-05-05T00:28:00.005-05:00

Trying to sell a house while working from home at the same time isn’t easy. But lately I’ve managed to scrap some free time here and there and learn something new and interesting.

Actually I’m not done yet and, as with most programming languages, I will never be. This time I’ve got myself a copy of “Real World Haskell” and instituted a new reading approach. Keeping in mind famous quote from Dijkstra about telescopes and computer science, I decided to remove the computer from the process and stick to just paper plus a tiny bit of some tasty alcoholic beverage.

I am happy to report that I’m enjoying the process like never before! I’m not tempted to abandon the book in the middle of chapter No 5, jump right into writing something trivial in a new language and never coming back. I’ve done this so many times in the past. I am not sure I’ve ever completed a single programming language book - about half way I’d always decide I knew enough. Of course I never did and had to pay for my impatience later. Python is my biggest regret - in my head it never graduated beyond “crippled Ruby” label although I’m certain it deserves much more respectable impression and a second look.

So... why Haskell? If you google the title of this post you’ll get no less but one full page of bloggers happily sharing their excitement over its most esoteric yet powerful features. The separation of imperative and purely functional code, super powerful type system, interesting monad abstraction, rich standard library, flexible syntax, software transactional memory and simplified parallelism - the list goes on.

That’s all groovy, but what people aren’t talking about, but what impressed me quite a bit, was that Haskell allows me to build shared libraries.

I am surprised I haven’t heard of this wonderful ability before. You see, I don’t use “fuck you” language implementations. At work - sure, but for personal projects I would never use a language that buries my code in some 2nd tier platform-dependent format like JAR. Why? Because a JAR gets as good as a swap file when I leave the wonderland of JVM.

I want my code in a shared, freely linkable form which I can use for anything from anything: C#, C++, Python, Ruby, Java, Windows or Mac, PC or router or a cell phone.

Moreover, a shared library is present in the memory just once, which allows it to be used by as many apps as you want at no additional memory or I/O cost. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of it even for server applications. If Ruby could compile into shared libs that would have saved me about 200MB per Mongrel cluster.

Needless to say I am anxious to try it out and see if it works as advertised. But I am going to stick to my new routine, start a new chapter and get myself a glass of bourbon.

Utah - National Champions of 2008!

2009-01-04T16:06:00.003-06:00

Congratulations to Utah, National Champions of 2008!

What a game! After seeing Alabama being able to hang with Utah for only about a quarter I have no doubt this team would have absolutely no problems dealing with Florida not to mention OU.

Texas Longhorns fans should drop their bitterness about OU playing for the title - the title game has been played already and Utah won it hands down. Even the most hardcore college football fan wouldn’t be able to disagree without making a fool out of himself: Alabama spent more time at #1 spot than any other team in the country, Alabama actually had weaker schedule than Utah and “non-BCS schedule” argument doesn’t apply. Should I state the obvious and say that Florida didn’t beat Bama as convincingly as Utah did? I mean did anyone question Utah’s superiority at any point in the game? Was it ever close? And here comes the kicker - Utah is the only undefeated team in the nation.

There is really not point for Florida and Oklahoma playing as far as National Championship question is concerned. I can only imagine the awkwardness of someone NOT from the state of Utah holding the trophy. I wonder if talking media heads will ignore this awkward and pathetic moment and won’t say a word about fucked up state of the BCS at the end of Florida vs OU game.

Congrats to Utah. At least I and my fellow longhorn friends will remember you as the 2008 National Champion. I almost wish this sort of thing happens every year just to trigger as much outrage as possible. Perhaps fans will have to resort to some street violence to alter the current BCS system fed by nothing but sheer greed.

Windows: No, netbooks are not the platform of the future.

2008-12-24T00:52:00.009-06:00

According to Computer World, Microsoft is real proud of fitting Windows 7 into "just" 512MB of RAM on a netbook, allowing it to catch up a bit closer to Linux, OSX and XP.

I think they got it all wrong. Netbooks is not the hardware platform of the future for Microsoft Windows. They should be optimizing their OS for VMWare. That's right: Windows future is to sit quietly in the background, occupying no more than 128MB of RAM inside of the invisible VMWare window, assisting Linux and OSX users at launching Microsoft Word to prepare a TPS report every friday.

In fact, why not make it a 100% user-space library, become an "official WINE".

Computer Security is Bullshit

2008-12-18T14:58:00.008-06:00

Computer security, just like privacy, is one of these things that generate a lot of noise and heated debates, yet it is only people with vested personal interests are the ones who really worry about it.

Users don't give a shit. My humble evidence is built on hundreds of support emails and personal observation of how humans use their computers. They will continue to download and launch viruses as long as their friends keep sending them infectious links. And no amount of warning dialogs or passwords will stop them. Why? Because their friend thought that sheep jumping from under their windows were funny. And folks will take their time to disable any jailing software that stands between them and jumping sheep. Sheep always wins.

Security-minded consumer software is useless. But makers of anti-viruses want us to believe we need that stuff. We don’t. Their creations only make everything else work worse: anti-viruses and firewalls slow our computers down and cause crashes in other programs we use, those that actually do something useful.

It saddens me enormously that everything but port #80 on the Internet is blocked, everything except HTTP is banned and most users of my software will be threatened and screamed at by their own computers.

This security hysteria chokes the innovation. It restricts software developers to sit jailed forever in this little crippled world of browser runtimes with 90% of modern PC capabilities unavailable to them. Installing software became a major no-no these days, thus we have resorted to running web pages, an equivalent of MS DOS technology: with primitive animation, slow graphics and proliferation of crappy and non-standardized user interfaces. Major advances is consumer computing (like Apple’s “Core Animation”) go largely unnoticed because they’re not available to developers.

This brings me to Googe’s native client. (what triggered me to post this rant). Will it succeed? I mean will anyone ever care about it? Lets see...

JVM has been around for nearly 15 years being many times more powerful than Mozilla and WebKit's wildest dreams, yet it has failed outside of data centers because it never allowed OSX programmers to write true OSX programs or Windows programmers to write true Windows programs, and I see no reason why browser-based "jail boxes" will be different.

And if you want to go after the consumer market, you need true OSX or Windows programs. For the enterprise - yes, you can get away with Java or AIR or any of these jailed boxes: Enterprise will eat anything you throw at it because users of enterprise software get paid to use it. And you can make anyone use just about anything if you pay them for the inconvenience.

But if you want people to open up their wallets in privacy of their homes, you'd have to do a lot better than that. Otherwise be like others and go with a “web platform” to be locked forever in this eyeball-heavy market of free online crap supported by canadian pharmacy advertising.

Booo-ga-ga!

Oh November...

2008-12-01T14:20:00.006-06:00

The end of November is a wonderful time to be a college football fan. It’s that time of the year when top head coaches across the country have to take off their coaching hats and turn into shameless PR queens. November is when rookie players learn the importance of “style points” and realize how overrated and unnecessary the sportsmanship is in CF. It’s like gymnastics and figure skating. Except you don’t need a lipstick and you get to hit other people.

November reminds everyone that destiny of a team is decided by voting, not by performing, and feeding “every regular season game is a playoff” bullshit seems to work year after year.

BCS is a circus. A money-making circus at that. And money makes a great excuse for everything - greed drives capitalism, leave “world is unfair” for losers. Lets wake up and realize that BCS hasn’t been created to reliably determine the top team in the nation. BCS is just a machine of generating and distributing TV money across as many schools as possible. Think of it as a stock exchange for football fan eyeballs. BCS builds up an artificial drama in the media with their moronic “polls”, therefore boosting TV ratings, and in turn provides an insane number of pointless “bowls” to monetize that generated interest. Of course there is no room for playoffs: nobody is going to let playoff-reaching schools to collect all the cash.

Come to think of it, BCS works just like Wall Street, with media acting as a bunch of financial analysts: they are supposed to sound sane and sober, yet not allowed to be completely honest, keeping the stock value artificially inflated. Teams that are more likely to produce decent TV ratings are constantly advertised on ESPN regardless of their performance. No surprise that these media darlings routinely get voted higher than their less fortunate opponents. WTF is Notre Dame is doing on espn.com? Why not Navy or Fresno State? I have been watching CF for only 5 years and as long as I can remember, ND has been an average-to-mediocre team with a funky name. Why am I seeing the face of their coach on TV every goddamn weekend? This year it took a small army of record-breaking Big 12 quarterbacks to make ESPN finally shut up about USC and notice that the premiere passing game exists outside of California.

This year has been particularly bad: Big 12 is sending the wrong team to play for the national title. I guess the Sooners, just like Ohio State fans, find sadomasochistic pleasure at being ridiculed in big games. A team that allows 40+ points in multiple regular season games is guaranteed to look like a doormat when facing the best of SEC. The national championship game turning in a blowout should be a sure indication of an utter failure of the entire season and all CF fans should be crying outraged.

Go Gators.

Death of the Premium

2008-11-29T16:34:00.001-06:00

What a great article on Gizmodo! After numerous failed attempts to buy a decent laptop recently, I’ve been ranting about the depressing effects of Sturgeon’s law on computer industry. My wife tells me I’m getting old. Perhaps... But there is one thing I am sure about: this isn’t just about computers.

It has been universally accepted that 90% of everything available to buy, watch, eat or listen to is crap, but the mere existence of those “normal” 10% made me feel OK about it. Want something that works? Want to see a movie that wasn’t made for a dumbass? Want to eat an actual grown vegetable instead of a toxic manufactured biomass sprayed with “taste” yet approved by FDA because it hasn’t been proven to kill instantly on contact? Well, you could always pay extra and get the “other 10%” - the stuff that works, movies that make sense, food that’s been grown as opposed to manufactured, software that doesn’t crash, an alive customer service rep. instead of a robot-over-email, etc. Yes, premium goods and services usually cost a lot more, but hey! - this food will give your dog a chance to actually live as long as the wikipedia article says he’s supposed to.

The problem is that we’re seeing a slow death of the premium. Many companies are deciding that the other 10% just aren’t worth the trouble. Market doesn’t want it as much. The consumer prefers free and slow crashing software over paying $59.99 for something that works. Pre-broken computers are popular because they would have been $50 more expensive if sold in a proper working condition without damaging crapware on them. Weird crunchy red objects at my local grocery store are called “strawberries” and there is a growing generation of kids that actually believe that strawberries are supposed to be that. You cannot buy a laptop with a usable LCD: today your only available option will be TN-based, 6-bit, low-contrast, glossy wide-screens with pathetic color reproduction often spiced up by horrendous light bleed. Yeah, those 12-megapixel noisy photos from your latest Canon camera will look fantastic! Never mind that 4 year old cameras available for $20 on eBay actually take better looking photos. And even Apple won’t build you 16.7 million colors laptop despite their pricing: dithered 262,000 is “good enough”. And who’s complaining? $499 for a freakin computer can do no wrong, you can buy one for every Christmas (and why shouldn’t you? Next year they’ll drop another megapixel into an integrated webcam and a keyboard will be glossy too!)

Our bottom-line oriented, cost-driven consumer culture is dragging us into the world of affordable mediocrity, where everything is commoditized, standardized, made in China and very affordable. There are grown ups now who call shopping their hobby. I guess nobody wants stuff that works simply because most of what people buy never gets any real world use, the mere fact of buying the goddamn thing, not using it, is the point.

There are two practical and unfortunate effects from all this. First, we can’t dodge the crap anymore by buying less and paying more. That stinks but well... You can always picture poor kids in Africa or go 200 years back in time to realize how silly you look bitching about those LCDs... But there is another, more troubling aspect of it though: the death of premium means that innovation, engineering and science don’t matter as much as marketing, advertising and packaging. As much as I hate the military, they remain the only customer capable of demanding more. And paying for it. And since Cold War is long time over, I guess we’ll continue living off the tech we had built to fight it. Until the aliens, of course, threaten to conquer us all.

Are Social Networks Underhyped?

2008-11-02T12:07:00.005-06:00

Apparently someone thinks so.

Pretty bold statement, in spite years of Facebook's repeated failure of making any money. If you don't have the time to read the article, the argument goes like this: we haven't seen the full potential of them yet. In the future the entire Internet will be revolving around social graphs because, presumably, our social connections are what guides us in real life: doctor recommendations, business introductions etc. And these real life nets are going to be transitioning online dragging the rest of the Internet along.

Don't think so. All that stuff's online already, there isn't a greater degree of "onlineniness" possible. This is not an early adopter game anymore. How's someone is going to "get more connected"?

In fact I am observing the opposite: the mainstream public (looking at my non-techie friends) have been fully exposured to it, had enough of it, and is slowly getting tired of it. We're not talking about early adopters anymore: everybody has an online identity and has learned its limitations and implications.

If anything, social networks are getting boring: outside of your real circle of friends you see the same strangers posing to be smarter, better looking and happier than they really are: people aren't that different after all, and your real social network stays where it has always been: in your cell phone's address book.

And that's where I'll be turning to for an advice about finding a doctor or a car mechanic. I don't give a rat's ass about what "people on the internet" have to say. At least half of them voted for Bush. Twice.

Thank you OSX, but Linux UI is fine.

2008-11-01T21:46:00.007-05:00

Ubuntu 8.10 is out along with new Gnome.

I think Canonical understands the PR and knows how to keep the buzz going. By releasing a new version of their distro every six month they manage to keep us all warm and moderately excited. No matter how subtle and insignificant the actual changes are, you must be assured that at least twice a year all major computer-related media outlets will have a lot of real estate dedicated to the latest Ubuntu.

I have read a few reviews but haven't tried it myself: I am awaiting for a new laptop from Lenovo to put it on. The reviews I looked at, albeit being positive overall, sparkled some online discussions about Linux UI and overall usability. And lots of people, I suspect OSX fans, suggested that open source developers should take a few UI lessons from Apple.

I disagree. There are many “bad Apples” in OSX UI I don't ever want to see in Linux. In fact I am about to kick Leopard here a little bit.

I think a lot of people are confusing "good UIs" with "pretty windows". When it comes to usability and general quality of the UI, Gnome has surpassed dumbed-down OSX UI long time ago, they just don't have pretty windows to win the masses.

I own a Mac and use it daily. Apple knows how to make users happy but there are plenty of issues I absolutely don't want to see "ported" onto Linux desktop. I can't stand how poorly some UI aspects are designed and how limited I feel on a Mac compared to Ubuntu/Gnome. A few obvious examples:

Non-resizeable windows (only one corner)
Non-maximizale windows (the first lesson I learned on OSX - never click on a green "+" button: generally you never know what's going to happen)
Spaces are dysfunctional: applications aren't isolated in their virtual desktops, all mixed up together in a giant Command+Tab list. Switching to the wrong app may land you in another desktop, i.e. you must carefully keep in mind who's running where.
Finder and file management is a joke: nearly impossible to use without a mouse and its list of limitations is well known. Simple actions like "select this one, that one and these three, move all of them over there, etc" isn't something OSX creators had in mind. OSX is the only OS I know of where command line beats the default GUI when it comes to moving/copying multiple files around.
Font rendering on OSX, while blows Windows out of the water, can't hold a candle to what's possible on Linux. Truth be told, some distros, like Fedora, come with crippled font rendering because of silly patent issues, but Ubuntu comes fully armed with the best font rendering currently available, albeit their default configuration isn't exactly my cup of tea: enable "slight hinting" + "sub-pixel anti-aliasing" in font settings. After a month going back to Windows will be very hard for you. I promise.
Poor keyboard support (users are unable to assign hot keys they want, generally limited to a pre-defined list), many functions aren't available for keyboard users (cut/paste files, resize/move windows and many more). Hey, I can't even get to a specific top-level menu item from a keyboard. That's something even Windows 3.0 could easily do. Fuck, even most confirmation dialogs on OSX have keyboard disabled: you're forced to use the mouse to pick Yes/No/Cancel. Jesus...
Keyboard is so crippled that I want to make this point twice. Inconsistency in how Ctrl, Option and Command buttons are used is still driving me nuts after nearly a year of daily Mac use. Moreover, there are plenty of shortcuts where any two of these buttons are involved, often combined with Shift or Fn. Fascinating... How many fingers do they think I have? And will OSX ever adopt a single hot key that closes a window in all cases? And why do I find myself in a situation when none of the visible windows appears to have focus?
Poor window/application management. The concept of "every app can be switched to and everybody shares a menu" doesn't work, and stop pretending that it does. Windows is what people want to switch to, not apps. On my Mac I have only Safari running yet my Command+Tab list is HUGE: it includes background-running Audim, Skype, Pukka, Performance Monitor and Finder - 6 apps total with only one (!) visible window. But if I had two Safari windows open, Command+Tab wouldn't switch between them - I need to use Command+~, i.e. I am forced to remember which application owns this or that window if I want to get there reliably.
Decades-old and really convenient for many (of those who've seen them) mouse behaviors like "focus-follows-mouse" or "auto-raise", found on nearly all UNIXes, is probably considered too "complex" for an average Joe.

I have discussed these limitations with a few OSX fans. Those who aren't engineers always had the same “perfect response” to such criticism: “you just don't need it”. According to them I don't need to resize windows, I don't need ot move files, I better off using mouse instead of a keyboard and I should be happy I am living in the same time as Steve and should donate my house to his dog in case he owns one. Programmers mostly tolerate OSX idiocies because they're smart enough to find workarounds or build their own, just like they do on Windows.

The main reason why I use my Mac (and why I like it) is simple: Safari+multi-touch. When you have a super-fast browser coupled with finger gestures for zoom, scroll and page flipping you get a dramatically different Internet surfing experience. And we spend a lot of time online, so this awesome combo is worth bearing with general dumbness and poor usability of Leopard and apps that come bundled with it.

Other than Safari, my top most used OSX applications came ported straight from Linux/BSD: gvim, irssi, git and Open Office (never mind that I own a copy of iWork).

For prolonged coding sessions I fire up Ubuntu: everything is a keystroke away there. The only drawbacks are slow&buggy Firefox and the pathetic LCD on my Thinkpad. Linux has its share of problems but the UI isn't one of them.

Yes. Windows is a ghetto.

2008-11-01T21:20:00.003-05:00

This guy complains that developing for Windows is tough. No kidding. Ironic as it is, but his writing is mostly about an easy kind of Windows development. Web apps behind IIS? Not that hard, really.

Try building an installable desktop software for Windows. That's where real fun begins. It is quite common for teams doing Windows work to dedicate as much as 20% of available manpower to the installer alone (!). I've been coding Windows desktop in C++ since graduation in 98 and has always looked down on web programmers since they had it so easy. But once I got older I realized that all my Windows-fighting instincts and in-memory database of gotchas are nothing to be proud of: most of my career I was boxing against the platform I was working on, while some were having fun building an actual software.

Some may ask why on earth would someone spend 20% of time writing an installer, copying files shouldn't be hard, right?

Wrong. The problem isn't getting files in the right place, the problem lies in how inter-connected and "integrated" everything is on Windows. "Internet Settings" in the control panel, while they seem to be IE's settings, actually affect how some Windows Internet-family API functions behave. Then there is a big hairy mess called COM/ActiveX: you can't parse XML without it, yet there will be computers, be it one out of 100, with broken XML parser COM registration. Same applies to various shell-related COM servers which are essential to desktop integration. And yes, IE is the part of the OS despite of the illusion that you can uninstall it.

Then there are cases when other applications break your code: Symantec used to install their own version of MFC DLL right into System32. Then there are super-aggressive anti-spyare/anti-virus/anti-whatever packages that are basically hacks breaking all kinds of legit software. Windows encourages this style of development: when an application essentially becomes a collection of COM servers scattered across your hard drive, hooked into your system via complex mesh of registry settings. And there is no way around it: this is what MSDN tells you to do.

Then you'll have users complaining that when they launch your RSS reading software (or whatever you do), they get a popup that says "Windows Installer: configuring Microsoft Office" that disappears after about a minute of "collecting system information". And users will tell you that everything worked great for 2 months but then "computer did something" and this popup started appearing.

And they keep adding more shit on top of existing shit. Now, in addition to COM and MSI and registry you get this "side-by-side execution" bullshit, when you can't even tell which version of a DLL is being loaded and Windows Explorer essentially hides your own fucking files from you, so even locating a misbehaving DLL becomes a debugging session on its own, where you'll need to decode cryptic hidden directory names and extract a manifest from some executable's resources to see which DLL it actually wants. Having a DLL side by side with an executable isn't guaranteed to work anymore. When they rolled that out I felt sick for a while.

And finally, there is no such thing as "Windows API" anymore. XP machine connected to a domain controller/AD is a very different beast than XP home or Win2K. I'm not even mentioning Vista here.

For my last Windows project I went for "xcopy deployment" with one single fat executable statically linked to everything it needed to run with some help from open source libraries, essentially very similarly to how Firefox does it. But this style of development isn't really for "Windows Platform", this way you're targeting a "sane subset" of Windows platform.

There may be a few minor technical mistakes in what I've written. After all I haven't seen Visual Studio in a long time, but I know that largely I am correct. And I don't hold any excitement about upcoming Windows 7. Why would I? None of their initiatives is targeted towards developers. They're tweaking minor and irrelevant UI pieces, massaging services installed by default, but in the end it's exact same old lame turd. If Microsoft wants to impress me, release a version of Windows without system registry, without MSI and make c:\windows completely sealed: make it so after 3 years of installing Windows, there isn't a single new file sitting under that folder. Make everything, every little piece of next version of Windows fully scriptable and include JavaScript, Python, Perl and Ruby by default. Make the server edition completely free. Integrate with Xen and others, instead of competing with them. Implement every imaginable suggestion for future HTML/CSS in IE9 strictly according to the spec. Break backwards compatibility whenever you want and keep selling XP for those who need it. Finally, try to reinvent the desktop: the damn thing hasn't changed in decades and people still lose their own files without any help from a faulty hardware: they just forget where they are and how they're called.

Linux, and especially OSX, aren't prefect either – there are tons of areas for improvement. Innovate Microsoft, instead of competing with Google in a lame contest of being the most technologically inclined media company. It's very easy to compete with a media company: just make sure you focus on software and where do you think the best CS grads will want to work at?

The irony of it is that once upon a time Microsoft was kinda cool. I was a teenager but I still remember those "good&old" days of snobby IBM/Sun/Oracle salespeople with their super-expensive software, hardware, development tools and even documentation (I was told you could sell your car for a full copy of OS/2 SDK). And then there was Microsoft and Borland, with great, inexpensive and innovative products, driving PC revolution and attracting folks like me and my friends to CS.

Opera is THE browser for Linux

2008-06-17T00:19:00.004-05:00

Ever since my “big switch” away from Windows a few years ago, I couldn't help but notice how much worse, quality wise, Firefox worked on Linux as compared to its Windows version. Don't get me wrong, Firefox on Ubuntu is not a bad piece of software – I use it heavily and usually I have multiple windows open in several desktops each with multiple tabs. Sure it crashes once or twice day, not a big deal. I even like occasional crashes. Crashes are exciting, they add a little bit of spice to every day's perfectness of my computing environment. :-)

What's been killing me though, wasn't that – it was what I call a “800Mz scrolling” problem. When I am on a battery, the laptop naturally is trying to preserve some power and switches to a conservative CPU scaling governor which likes to stick to 800Mz unless applications absolutely need more. Which is fine, most laptops do that. Except that Firefox on Linux really needs a lot of CPU power to scroll pages. This is kind of ridiculous, since scrolling has been done (mostly) by graphics hardware on Windows for the last 15 years, but FireFox on Linux demands 2Gz of CPU horsepower to scroll a freaking page, unless it's something as trivial as http://google.com.

Find a moderately heavy web page, quickly scroll up and down using the strip on a touchpad's left side and watch for 10 seconds – FF will be scrolling, turning your 800Mz Core Duo2 into 386SX 32Mz relic. I run Windows on VirtualBox, and “virtual WinFirefox” is many times more responsive than it's native Linux version, it scrolls web pages quickly dammit...

So one day and installed the latest Opera. Again. This wasn't my first time though, I've done it before and every time I get turned off by how foreign and ugly Opera always feels: the hotkeys were always wrong, UI didn't resemble any other applications on Windows or Linux, the whole package felt like it just landed from Mars.

The latest version is different. Alt+D finally took me to the address bar by default. Backspace took me to a previous page. UI was still butt-ugly, but it took me only a few seconds to find a theme that looked great, right there in “Tools/Appearance”, no googling required. The mandatory ad blocker is built-in and filters are easily discoverable. Most hot keys were already in place and a few missing ones were easy to add.

But how about that incredible rendering speed! Plus nearly instant start-up times, and the damn thing can actually SCROLL TEXT quickly! What a miracle... It also seamlessly imported my Firefox bookmarks. And after three days of casual surfing I am yet to find a single site, a single page rendered incorrectly. Those sweet mouse gestures are as close to heaven (Safari's multi-touch) as you can get without switching to OSX. Check them out!

Here is the list of changes I've done compared to default settings:

Preferences/Advanced/Shortcuts: remove actions for mouse buttons #5 and #6. This will disable back/forward actions on horizontal touchpad scrolling (in case it annoys you like it does me).

Preferences/Advanced/Shortcuts: add ctrl+K for moving focus to Google search bar and add Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2 for cycling through tabs.

Appearance/Skin – change the disgusting default skin to “d_t_a__opera_9_only__-trial2” (available via “find more skins”). Or find something you like – almost everything there is better than the default nightmare Opera comes dressed up in.

Download filters for ad-blocking: http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/urlfilter.ini

Done! You've got yourself the most powerful browser the world of Linux has ever seen.

My First Mac

2008-06-15T20:32:00.006-05:00

A little confession: I have been jealous of Mac users for a while. Most of them don't deserve it though, just visit a random message board where Mac fans hang out. I liked Macs despite their fans. I liked them because OSX is a real UNIX plus you get native versions of most popular softwares. Bash + Terminal + Photoshop = Jealous Me.

So I've been mostly an observer, albeit from a very microscopic distance since my wife has dumped the worst laptop ever made for a Mac almost a year ago. Her Macbook amazed be at being a much better citizen on a Windows network than Windows XP itself. It could share folders, and folders remained shared until I change my mind. I could transfer files over home network every time I wanted. Fascinating stuff... I could never truly master such bulletproof-solid home networking with my ever-varying garbage-farm of beige Windows boxes.

But lucky me, we started trying some collaborative design sessions in Fireworks at work and I got a 4th generation (latest of May 08) Macbook Pro, an ultimate notebook as some people call it. Upon its arrival I burned a full weekend exploring the beast, and it wasn't an easy task: OSX is not Linux nor Windows, and googling for any kind of a solution inevitably lands you on one of those message boards full of useless and loud Mac fans (some tried to convince me that “you don't need to move files”). Where all Mac hackers are? They must be hiding somewhere, but they exist - just look what people go to programming conferences with.

So... it's been a month since then, perhaps not too early for "My First Macintos" post. :-) I won't try to write a “review” of anything, I'll just share a few biggest surprises, something I didn't know or heard about Macs until I ran into it first-hand.

1. Safari is awesome. It blows Firefox out of the water. From developer's perspective I never had an issue with it misunderstanding my CSS, and as a user I now find it hard to live without multi-touch browsing and sweet highlighting of search results as I type. The way Safari renders pages makes me feel like Internet suddenly got 20% faster. I did install Firefox 3 almost immediately, old habits die hard, but I hardly ever use it anymore: it just feels so out of place, so outdated and very slow. The final nail in the coffin arrived when I found the ad blocker for Safari that seems to use same filters as AdBlock Plus.

2. Apple sucks at consumer software. I honestly didn't expect to encounter this. OSX is an engineering marvel and Cocoa is a wonderful piece of work. I also love what they've been doing to Objective C. But now I am starting to suspect that there are two completely separate organizations within Apple: systems and tools vs consumer software. The latter hasn't figured out how to code yet. Every single piece of bundled software I tried pretty much sucked. I could fill a page with rants about each of iPhoto, iCal, Aperture, Finder and iTunes. They all suck and are much worse than analogous software I used on Windows and Linux. It's seems puzzling how come Safari is so great while everything else barely functions. I had to write bash scripts and set up cron jobs to combat iPhoto – that's right, we have a little war going on between us: each claims to know better what concept of “photograph” is supposed to mean and how a computer should aid humans in dealing with it. I am literally counting days for Google's release of Picasa for OSX.

3. OSX is a true UNIX. No compromises. I expected to find a heavily modified Linux-like environment with proprietary Apple specifics everywhere, and in some cases that was exactly what I found, but most of the time I didn't feel Apple, in fact my Terminal experience was very pleasant, and Mac version of gVim shocked me by its visual polish. I installed everything I wanted from the Linux world and it just worked. Not as seamlessly as apt-get on Debian, but pretty close.

4. Keyboard is nearly disabled. This may be related to #2, and can be mostly fixed by installing a better software. Still, what a huge surprise! I was sure I had heard many times how one could “fly” in OSX once he learns all the hotkeys. Not sure about flying, I'm still learning to crawl... This is area where Gnome beats OSX hands down: not only there are fewer keyboard-friendly actions, but flexibility of configuration is lacking too. Apple wants me to use the mice more than I would like, and drag-n-drop is ridiculously overused throughout the entire system. This could be less of an issue on a bigger desktop Macs with full-sized keyboards and dedicated mouse, but for notebooks it's a pain – keyboard/mouse switch keeps interrupting. Simple tasks like selecting multiple non-adjacent items in lists are impossible to do any other way. The keyboard itself is somewhat crippled as well: no dedicated backspace, page up/down, etc. And the way how applications use ctrl, option and command buttons isn't very consistent.

5. You must switch your monitor to Gamma 2.2. Otherwise you won't not see any web content properly, especially photos. Safari tries to correct this by reading embedded ICC profiles for JPEG images, but it rarely works: Flickr, PicasaWeb and others will always display distorted colors: washed out, too bright, with yellowish tint. Go to System Preferences, Monitors, Colors. Click “Calibrate” and select Gamma 2.2 – now your Mac is Internet-ready.

In the end, I just couldn't move all of my development form Linux to the Mac. Perhaps it's better this way – someone needs to file tickets about slow FireFox scrolling and workarounds for bugs in Intel X3100 drivers. Besides that, Linux is just a better programmer's environment, at least for what I do.

For everything else MBP+OSX is years ahead of Vista and somewhat better than Linux, especially at being a “home computer”. Web surfing on a Mac will truly be a revelation to many, once they try scrolling with two fingers and flipping pages with three. And simple IT tasks like installing popular printers and setting up home networking are grandma-proof. This is what I'll be recommending to all my non-programming friends from now on, sounding exactly like those annoying Mac fans from Internet message boards. :-)

On PDFs

2008-05-10T13:34:00.006-05:00

Is it just me, or perhaps all of us get this stepped-in-a-pile-of-dog-poop feeling every once in a while whenever we click on a link and it turns out to be a PDF file?

I mean, isn't it nice whenever web site creators think about us, users, and instead of expected and nicely formatted web pages we get awarded by this wonderful clunky, sluggish Adobe PDF plugin that hijacks our browsers, not giving a rat's ass about our preferences for hotkeys, font sizes, having its own idea how to scroll, zoom and search? At least Linux users don't have to suffer from Adobe's bad-ass PDF software: Gnome/KDE come with much nicer, lightning-fast PDF readers that don't feel like they came from Mars. I am using Evince and it's nice: I actually don't mind PDFs anymore.

What's interesting is that I can't even think of a single case whenever the choice of PDF was justified: nope, same shit every time: text with pictures. Yep, something HTML isn't capable of.

Moreover, here is a new kid on the block, now we all need to stare at a flash plugin to get the same text-with-pictures experience. Welcome to Web 2.0 fellas.

Scribd is nice as a tool for being able not to care about document format, and I wish they'd allow me to simply view every uploaded document as a proper HTML (as every user would expect), but it is barely usable trapped in Flash: the browser's search doesn't work and even scrolling is painful, while you've got to scroll a lot because you're looking at a document through tiny little hole. Someone joked that using scribd is like a watching a live video of a printed document, except you can tell an operator to move the camera to the next page. But they do allow you to download a document as PDF, which is nice - I can read it in Evince, so Scribd gets my vote: check it out!

Why do content publishers believe that we somehow are dying to print their documents? Come on, what else PDF is good for? Dudes, please stick to HTML. It's gotten a lot nicer since 96. And no, I won't be printing or keeping a copy of your booklet/article/whitepaper, but for those five people who will, just have small but gorgeous links on a side: "print" and "PDF", ok? Thank you.

Startup Camp in San Francisco

2008-04-29T23:42:00.003-05:00

At Pikluk we originally planned to attend this conference but it's just not working out for us this time.

However, the list of their speakers looks a bit light on technology, although it isn't really supposed to be programmer's conference. I, however, was looking forward to meet Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent: regardless of all the hype surrounding EC2 and Google Engine, check them out, these guys are great.

How many events like these do they have in Silicon Valley? Startup School took place just under two weeks ago. So much networking and promoting, so little time left to code... :-)

Gnome or KDE?

2008-04-29T22:41:00.001-05:00

I am a Gnome user. Gnome is fine, despite what Linus says. Yes, there isn't much customization allowed and often it tries a bit too hard to act like an bastardized twin of OSX, but who doesn't?

My wish list is short: just replace Nautilus with something usable, there is no point in “fixing” it, just give me something in 2009 at least half as powerful as Norton Commander was in 1991.

But Nautilus is just a minor annoyance - I don't find myself using file manager type of applications on Linux as much as I did on Windows, perhaps due to the fact that I don't wonder around the entire file system anymore: on Linux you quickly learn to live in your home directory and quickly access data directly from applications.

Nevertheless, off to KDE lands I went...

After playing with it for half a day I quickly went back despite the amazing feature in KDE that gives the focus to a control that currently is under the mouse. And oh yes, the beast is customizable in every way imaginable, and the default set of applications blows Gnome's counterparts away. But in the end, it doesn't matter.

I want back because I appreciated Gnome's directness and simplicity and its tendency to stay out of my way. I don't use those basic default programs, I use my own set of tools. I mostly don't even see or “feel” Gnome, even the main menu bar is a lot smaller than KDE's giant log with plethora of little icons and clunky and bold date/time widget. KDE's approach to user interface can be described as “visualizer of data structures”, it simply maps various configuration data to UI elements on screen. “Added a boolean? We better find a spot for a checkbox somewhere for it”. I can understand why programmers appreciate it.

Perhaps I only got lucky and I happened to have pedestrian, simple needs. I can launch my usual 4-5 applications with a single click or keypress, I can see what time it is and how much battery juice I have left, I can switch between windows and desktops. I can logout or fall into a standby mode. If they take away the ability to minimize or maximize windows, I won't even notice.

Gnome doesn't do a lot. Gnome is simple and weak on features. It knows only a handful of tricks but plays them very well.

Sometimes less is more, and with computer interfaces it almost always is.

Get yourself Ubuntu 8.04

2008-04-26T01:23:00.005-05:00

Ubuntu 8.04 is out!

Canonical rules and Shuttleworth rocks! These guys made me feel like I am back to high school again, I believe the last time I was this excited was whenever Windows NT 4 and the latest OS/2 were about to come out. I urge my Russian comrades to reimburse Mark the millions they had him pay for his Souiz spaceflight: come on, how can you take money from the guy who's been so relentless at pulling all our computing experiences out of the current medieval cave we stuck in?

Is Ubuntu Ready?

You cannot possibly be serious if you ask this question. I mean come on – most of the world's population is using five year old XP, which cannot even be installed on a typical laptop without myriad of drivers and custom patches directly from Dell or Lenovo. I can't even think of anything of this size with such a painless installation process: network, video with 3D accelerated desktop, audio, wireless, printers and surrounding Windows servers – everything got detected and works like a charm with default settings. The thing only asked me about my name and which time zone I was in. Most Windows applications are harder to install than this. And hey, I am dealing with an operating system here. Even the most historically problematic area of power management works great: my ThinkPad suspends and resumes like a champ without any configuration tweaking and consumes fewer watts than before. When was the last time you heard someone say “I upgraded my operating system and got a longer battery life?” Yes Ubuntu 8.04 is that good.

Got some Windows-only software that you absolutely must keep? Check out VirtualBox - the first easy to use Linux-based virtualization software built for users, not just geeks: you'll be running both OSes at the same time. Virtualization is the only sane way to run Windows anyway, so you can take snapshots and roll back if it starts acting crazy and blasting you with popups and ads. VirtualBox even automatically maps your Linux home folder to a Windows share: you see, someone thought about this.

And did I mention that Ubuntu handles Windows networking better than Windows itself? Just imagine your life without waiting forever for a list of shares to appear (if you're lucky to find your Windows server in your "Network Neighborhood", it's not always there, isn't it? ;-)

What's New in 8.04?

Most of online media reports the exact same list of new features with Gnome 2.22 being the most important thing. Yea it's cool and all, but I don't think it's that interesting: you don't make money using Gnome so why should you care if they introduced a new “virtual file system layer”? You see, that is one of the problems with Linux: it always gets crappy press coverage, i.e. press does not target you when they talk about Linux. I bet Apple added a bunch of “virtual layers” all over Leopard too, but you hardly ever heard of them. That's right: leave that to programmers. Instead, they should be reporting about applications that we actually use. For one, you'd be happy to hear that new Ubuntu finally, after years of waiting... are you ready for this? ... comes with usable Open Office! That's right – you can actually use it now for reading and typing text because they finally managed not to screw the font rendering. Open Office now uses default system settings for fonts, like every other application in the world. And those fonts are the reason big enough to ditch Windows: even my Mac-loving wife is envious of my “beefy and tasty” fonts that make everything so much more readable, especially on a high-DPI display.

Besides, forget about the new: the “old” Ubuntu had plenty of treats to eat for millions of starved windows users, such as painless application installation and removal, nice UI and 3D-accelerated desktop, total absence of junkware, no-nonsense security and speed. Then there are thousands of high-quality programs and many more less polished ones than you can play with and uninstall in seconds without headaches.

What's wrong with Macs?

Nothing, really. I have one. It's very nice and works well. But I urge you to give Ubuntu a try anyway: you may like its font rendering better, just remember to switch it to slight hinting and sub-pixel smoothing in “Appearance” menu in Gnome. You may also discover how flexible everything is and you'll keep discovering little gems of adjustment here and there, ultimately ending up with something that fits your work flow much better than the default Steve-knows-it-all world of Apple. And if you're a programmer, you'll just find a bit more power available to you. Heck, you may even enjoy having decent screen savers that you don't have to pay for. Finally, Ubuntu runs on a hardware where OSX can't: there are some finest pieces of computing machinery out there such as Thinkpads: the Laptops from God.

What's wrong with Windows?

Nothing, really. But there was nothing really wrong with candles and horses too - lots of folks used to think that way - but that didn't stop nerds of old from switching to electric bulbs and automobiles anyway. Besides, if enough people ditch Windows, Microsoft may be forced to lay off thousands of wasted programmers and some of them will inevitably decide to build meaningful things, maybe creating a true AI, affordable personal jetpack or something. By using Windows you are personally slowing the pace of innovation in the world. Evolve already – get Ubuntu. Help us all get closer to Singularity :-)

Startup School 2008 Impressions.

2008-04-20T01:34:00.003-05:00

Startup School 2008 is over. The videos of the event I am sure will be posted all over the Internet tomorrow, thus there is no point for me to simply describe what happened, you can go and see for yourself: the early, albeit a bit rough, footage is already available on Justin TV.

Instead I'll just share my impressions of what I've seen and heard. I got to see famous Anybots robots in action and I met their famous creator Trevor Blackwell and many, many other people I've known forever but always wondered how they were like in real life, including Paul Graham himself. Trevor turned out to be a lot younger and easier to talk to than I previously imagined, I had no idea where I got that previous "crazy professor" picture from.

The speakers were all excellent, but Paul Buchheit's performance easily wins my heart. It was just that: a freaking masterpiece of a speech on a seemingly lightweight topic. If anyone wants to know how to work the audience so seamlessly, without any visible effort - watch Paul do it. Don't get me wrong, the crazy in-your-face punchy style of DHH and sleek and polished talk by Greg McAdoo were both fine examples of public speaking, but Paul is simply in another league: he can easily switch careers and get into entertainment industry or something. Go and watch him and laugh your ass off in the process.

By the way, I simply could not believe my eyes when I saw on average about 20% of the attendees spent a fair share of their time there surfing freaking reddit, slashdot and checking their emails. There was one dude right next to me who had Visual Studio open (yes, a fucking Visual Studio) and kept resizing an empty form non-stop without paying any attention to Jack Sheridan talking. WTF have you been smoking yesterday? Here you have a well respected lawyer from Silicon Valley teaching you basics of freaking incorporation for free! Yet you prefer to ignore him perhaps not realizing that most of all (those who will get there) will pay $400/hour to guys like him, explaining these details in a more private and expensive setting.

And what the deal with all those Vista laptops everywhere? I thought it was supposed to be a hacker's event, not a retirement home.

Paul Graham's talk was the most unusual, out of place almost. I am sure what we heard was his next essay and you can expect it to appear on his site now. This time Paul turned a bit too much philosophical - and I'm just "not there yet" and need to think a bit about his observations.

With all that said, however, I predict that DHH's talk will be the most quoted on the Internet tomorrow. Of course it had a few f-words and a ton of funny bursts of clever analogies, but I believe most people in the room didn't take what he said seriously. Nearly everyone I talked to, seemed to be stuck in this "I gotta get a million eyeballs" trap and I couldn't imagine a more perfect audience for David's talk - it was the most relevant to this gathering.

Of course I don't want to crush anyone's feelings, but statistically speaking there were not any "next googles" in the room today. Or should I say "such event was highly unlikely", yet every hacker with an idea I talked to, seemed to be going after those "billions of advertisement dollars" and I came away with a strong suspicion that very few of them actually knew how many uniques a month they should be generating to pay for their own salary and rent. Just charge the freaking money for what you made, how hard can it be?

It was kind of ironic to observe the never-ending series of technical hickups, from dropped Internet connections to barking microphones and blacking-out projectors at a conference of young hackers in the heart of Silicon Valley. If we can't get our own shit straight how do we expect our customers to use what we make and pay us for it? Even PG himself, after proclaiming (a few years ago) that everything belongs to the browser now, had to ask the audience to "stop using the Internet" for his presentation pictures to get downloaded. In 2008! If Steve Ballmer was in the room, he'd be flattered: "your cloud is not always with you".

And, by the way, how do Stanford students manage to get any hard studying done in those surroundings? That's just too damn nice to be practical :-)

Freezing Mongrels and Rails Monitor

2008-04-15T13:06:00.002-05:00

At Pikluk we've been having issues with Mongrel instances freezing randomly, approximately once a week. The log files are empty and the list of potential suspects is pretty long. Googling didn't really help much, but some good people from IRC suggested this presentation, which I highly recommend.

But before the cure is found, however, we needed a solution to minimize the impact of these rare, yet annoying hangs. I has been a major pain in the butt to keep an eye on the server, so I wrote this nice monitoring script that can also restart problematic instances automatically: run it as a cron job once a minute. We figured it may be helpful for others. There are probably existing solutions for monitoring Mongrels out there, but we decided to roll our own: it's simple and does exactly what we need.

The script stops/starts/restarts and health-checks a running cluster of Mongrels. The most helpful feature is health-check, when it basically pings a given URL and nukes the instance if it didn't respond within the specified time.

I called it simply a Rails Monitor. Get it here if you're experiencing similar issues.

Why do Programmers Make Free Software?

2008-02-26T22:45:00.004-06:00

When procrastinating on slashdot earlier today I stumbled upon an interesting comment regarding programmers behind Free Software movement left by another reader. The guy posted a question that I found interesting precisely because until recently I'd been asking the exact same thing myself. Quoting:

... But how could you think that [Free Software] this is better for programmers? I always ask this of my fellow IT professionals and they *always* respond with some vague argument about how participating in Open Source projects will get you "recognized"... Well, in the sarcastic words of Homer Simpson "Look at me: I'm making people happy". Someone please enlighten me. Explain to me how we, as programmers, are better off when the fruits of our labor are surrendered for free...

I haven't done any significant contributions to free software myself: I've helped some dudes to fix bugs in one of the first .NET drivers for MySQL once but that's about it. I've been curious about thousands of free software authors and their motives just like the slashdot guy.

Until one day I lost one of my backup CDs with some code I've been accumulating since high school, through college and the first couple of years of commercial work. Suddenly I realized how much software I've written for free. It never occurred to me that I could have made it available for anyone to use.

What kid of code was it? Turns out, the kind I couldn't get anyone to pay me for at that time. I coded whatever I was interested in using languages I liked the most. I also realized that most of my college programming friends did the same: one guy was designing his own programming language, another was playing with neural networks, I even knew two folks who started working on their own mini-OS, we just didn't know it was called Free Software. Mind you, this is not about 70s and PDP-11, I'm not that old. I am talking about middle to late 90s.

I am surprised I haven't figured this out earlier. Where else will you go to work on a PC operating system if Microsoft is not hiring? Have an idea for a new optimization for a compiler? Love hacking Lisp? Fascinated by AI and have an idea for new planning algorithm? Good luck finding job that will offer such luxuries.

Thing is, most of programming jobs suck. Even some ex-googlers called their duties there stupid, now imagine lives of poor souls at Home Depot or Wall-Mart. Lots of companies will hire you to pump their precious data from one DB table into another, but very few will hire you to design the next Perl or build a new distributed file system. This is why you'd want to code something yourself. This is why I hack Pikluk in my free time, it will be free when it's ready.

Programming is an art. Many famous composers and painters had boring "day jobs" painting kings and their fat kids. This is not what we know them for. We know them for what they did at night for free.

Programmers make free software because most software they can get paid for isn't interesting to work on.

Got it, the curious slashdot guy?

Microsoft: You can now disconnect from the Internet!

2008-02-12T15:00:00.001-06:00

I was installing .NET 3.5 this morning, and once the launcher finished downloading the rest of the installer, it showed the following quite amusing message:

"Download complete. You can now disconnect form the Internet"

Not particularly funny, but it suggests something about the prevailing culture, a mindset if you will, within Microsoft's corporate world. Whoever came up with that message must have assumed that *at least some* people connect to the Internet only to download a big fat chunk of software, then disconnect and get back to the real work.

How exactly the Yahoo purchase will save this company?

[EDIT] Someone suggested that perhaps the aforementioned message was in place for mobile users or/and people using expensive connections (some hotels, maybe?), especially considering that Internet is not as widely available in other countries as in US.

Smooth Fonts for Emacs

2008-02-11T00:09:00.000-06:00

This just begs to be shared.

For all emacs lovers who've been struggling with pathetic font rendering in X: the cure is here! Alexandre Vassalotti, who is a bad-ass, discovered that GNU Emacs team has already moved onto XFont back-end giving us these precious and marvelously rendered modern Linux fonts!

Kudos to Emacs team for implementing this and to Alexandre for compiling it for us and packaging into DEB format.

Pretty Emacs is just a few keystrokes away!

Get it here:
http://peadrop.com/blog/2007/01/06/pretty-emacs

Web vs Desktop Nonsense

2008-02-10T20:00:00.006-06:00

Technologists and investors are predicting that desktop is over and online applications are the future, while slashdot posters, at least once a week, argue over this silly Desktop vs WebApps issue. But what is a web application?

Paul Graham, who is well known not only for his writings on Lisp, but also for creating the first app of this kind, once characterized a web program by its ability of executing counterparts of "New/Edit/Save File" on a server, preserving a visitor's state in between.

But what do users think when they hear "Web Application"? Why would they want it? Most would agree that expected web-specific features are:

Web applications are accessible from anywhere, along with the data you create and manipulate with them.
Web applications do not require you to install anything.

Cool: access from anywhere without annoying installers.

But what if I took the code of Emacs and modified it to save and load your documents using the same site via HTTP. Will that make my new Emacs a web application? You can access your documents from anywhere this way, can't you? But hold on, there is still that archaic download&install Emacs nonsense. Well...

How about YouTube then? YouTube requires you to download and install a hefty Flash runtime, would you say it makes YouTube more "desktop" now? How about web version of QuickBooks? This popular web app needs (and asks you to install) an ActiveX control from Intuit site and works only in IE.

To think of it, any software can be logically broken into three large components:

The Code.
A run-time system this code runs on.
Your data that the code operates on.

But you can have any combination of those three to be downloaded. And slicing this pie into local and remote pieces does not really mean anything. More often than not, when people say "web app" they simply mean that run-time is the browser (i.e. local) and it runs JavaScript code (downloaded) that cooperates with some remote code and uses a combination of local and remote data.

Some sites are 100% flash, i.e. they really don't need HTML and JavaScript with DOM; in other words they actually don't even need the browser, only the Flash runtime. Which needs to be downloaded, by the way.

Alternatively, some applications (like Pikluk Browser) are obviously desktop-based but they're using locally stored HTML pages with JavaScript to compose the entire user interface. We could also have served a user-customized XUL code for our browser directly from our servers every time you start it, turning it essentially into a FireFox with dynamic user interface downloadable on the fly.

You see how artificial this classification of desktop vs web really is? A developer can pick and slice his or hers program into online and local components any way he or she chooses.

Thus I see no reason for my imaginary HTTP-based Emacs not to be called a web app. Therefore, why don't we agree that Web Application simply means dynamically downloadable code. It just happens that browsers are the most common and widespread runtime system that supports this in a relatively secure fashion.

And a runtime can always be replaced. Flash is already gradually reducing the importance of it.

This brings me to my second question: if a web application does not really need to run inside the browser, why does everybody expect Microsoft to ship an online version of their popular Office suite in a manner similar to Google Docs? Why don't they simply make Word&Excel slimmer and dynamically downloadable via some URL and add an HTTP storage support with basic collaboration features to them. This way they'll be delivering exact same "documents everywhere" capability without being so badly handicapped by a weak runtime provided by a typical browser.

Can we see past the browser? Can we accept that browser is just a runtime library and stop making a fetish out of "running inside a browser!" nonsense?

I want a standardized, powerful and open web platform. Something which is designed for delivering dynamic online apps, as opposed to an ancient legacy system built for serving static pages of text with pictures.

Google docs and Zoho Apps are a joke - their "word processors" are weaker than WordPad, which appeared in Windows 95 and had always been nothing more than a "toy editor" ever since. Now you stick THAT into a browser and declare it an Office killer just because I can access my primitively formatted documents from anywhere? Come on, the "anywhere" part should not come at expense of losing 90% of other features.

Make no mistake: I am not a Microsoft proponent, I'm just kind of sick of this "software inside of a browser is the future" nonsense. Yes, future belongs to web applications, but I am not so sure that browser, with it's weak runtime and close to non-existent programmable graphics, should remain a necessary vehicle for it. Who is going to step up and give us a true web platform?

When will I simply type this in my terminal to instantly start playing hardware-accelerated Quake 7:
$>http://idsoftware.com/quakeseven

Adobe AIR appears to be close to what I am asking for, but I have expressed my concerns with its proprietary nature. When surfing through AIR documentation I noticed how they always supply the word "free" with mandatory "as in beer" disclaimer.

Tango with D

2007-12-05T13:34:00.000-06:00

I have been playing around with D for a while, nothing serious but I am pretty excited about this language. D is better explained as “C++ done right” or perhaps as “Java done right”, but I will just quote Walter Bright, D’s author from here:

Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. … The D language is statically typed and compiles directly to machine code. It is multiparadigm, supporting many programming styles: imperative, object oriented, and metaprogramming. It's a member of the C syntax family.

This post, however, is not about D. Check out Digital Mars site to learn more about it. Here I just want to let you know that APress just published a book about D and its "Tango" library. As far as I know "Tango with D" is the first book about this wonderful language.

If you have not heard about D, you owe it to yourself to look at it. Most C++ programmers will fall in love with it, and I personally hope it will replace C as a dominant language on Linux, especially after seeing it perform well on programming language shootout. Good thing about D is that there are already two implementations of it and one of them is a front end to GCC.

Well... first book is always great, let's hope it will increase the visibility for D. Congratulations to D community!

P.S. My only concern is the name. While "D" sounds awesomly geeky and sufficiently attractive while implying the underlying superiority over C++, this is the absolutely terrible name as far as search engines are concerned. Try googling for "arrays in D" to see what I mean.

Pikluk! Browser and Email for Kids

2007-11-29T16:44:00.000-06:00

I get asked a lot about Pikluk, our new startup venture. Questions like how we are doing and why are we better than NetNanny always come up, especially among my tech-savvy friends. We tried our best to build the web site as simple and informative as possible, but it wouldn't hurt to explain it again, using less marketing-speak.

Pikluk is by far the most simple way to allow your kid to use the Internet. Sure, there are multiple content filtering packages out there, and big companies sell some scary software that literally is indistinguishable from a rootkit that spies on your own children and sends you reports by email. Yes, there are plenty of people doing similar things, but not quite the same.

Pikluk is simple. Just define two lists:

List for the web sites
Another list for email addresses

... and those are the only resources your child will have access to. The entire process takes seconds. Once you're done, you'll have a fully functioning children's browser and secure email.

We have kept it simple, just two main features: secure email for kids, and a safe web browser. Check out the screen shot.

Parents can also explore around and select from the most popular sites that other parents have already added for their kids. Everything is, of course, anonymous.

Pikluk Tech

Our browser is built upon Internet Explorer, and everything about the content and the look and feel is controlled remotely. The content is completely customizable by the parents through the Parent Dashboard on www.pikluk.com. The browser can optionally "lock" your kids in, not allowing them to switch to other programs and wander about.

Pikluk is built on the Linux platform using a couple of dynamic languages, and from my posts it is fairly easy to guess which ones. Starting it up was a lot of fun, especially once first emails from real customers started to pour in. Things got even more exciting once very happy emails started to appear. And of course, we were giddy with excitement when the first paying customers started to trickle in.

Check it out, spread the word! Pikluk - the web browser and email for kids!

P.S. This is my last shameless self-promoting post, I promise :)

Adobe Flash/Flex. Plague of the Web.

2007-11-19T17:20:00.001-06:00

Someone posted a question recently on hacker news asking what kind of new software technologies readers are into. Few years ago I would be quite eager to jump on such discussion, raving about something really cool I had just discovered and picked apart in my free time.

I do not follow every announcement from Microsoft, Sun or even Google anymore. After riding this crazy technology train ever since I graduated in 99, I forced myself to slow down and re-evaluate everything I have ever picked up. Turns out it wasn't that much. More than half of what came around had gotten obsolete or irrelevant or proven to be dead wrong.

On the other hand, I see the same old (sometimes scary-old) and good ideas coming back into fashion over and over again being re-packaged into newer and trendier buzzwords.

Did you notice how web programmers pissed all over themselves when they happily discovered MVC? Do you have any idea how old the concept is? Didn’t you find it ironic how JavaScript suddenly became trendy, and not just for the Web, and how its zealots love to name-drop first-class functions and closures it borrowed from 2nd oldest computer programming language in the world?

This is why I started moving back in time about 2 years ago, my latest books are all about “good old stuff”. I met the beauty of Smalltalk and liberating flexibility of Lisp. Bam-m-m! And Boost with its binding facility did not look so sexy anymore… These languages, or should I say cultures, did not land me any gigs and I haven’t done any projects with them, but they helped me to notice and pick up Python and Ruby, discover bash and vim, and enjoy the freshness and simplicity of a plain ASCII text file, free of XML garbage.

Old tech can feel very refreshing after years of Win32, GDI, COM, XML/XSLT/XPath and .NET. Most of that is nearly useless now and the stuff hasn’t even been around that long... I guess I got lucky for not ever touching Java after college - that would be another pile of wasted neurons in my head.

Some "New" Tech is Scary.

In fact (or maybe it comes with age) I started to dislike "new technologies". They are scary, like Flash/Flex/Air from Adobe. I see a great danger of "web runtime" being controlled by a single company, even if they are playing nice and flirting with open source community. If not stopped, Adobe will soon become "Microsoft of the Web" and they will be in control of "Web OS", turning browsers into dumb and irrelevant hosts for Flash Runtime. That is precisely why I want AIR to fail and I hope that more web applications will stick to standards-based HTML/CSS/JavaScript as opposed to moving to Adobe world.

It is sad that Miguel de Icaza, who I have great respect for, is not seeing this when he enthusiastically speaks out on Silverlight issue.

Adobe already controls video on the Internet (YouTube, Google Video) and soon, by looking at the trend established by startups like Anywhere.fm, Songza and Scribd, Adobe will have the sound and “universal document” formats under their API umbrella. Do not overestimate the power that comes with a monopoly on APIs.

People go nuts these days if they discover a useful web application that's got "Designed for Internet Explorer" stamp on it, but nobody has ever complained about "Designed for Flash" sites that often have zero HTML content on them. Why is that? If anything, Flash is more proprietary in nature than IE. Not only Flash has closed-source implementation, everything about it is proprietary and not standardized: the runtime, development tools, data formats, etc.

What amazing is that nobody seems to notice... Flash is slowly taking over the Web absolutely unnoticed. What happened? Where are you, open-standards proponents? Where are you, folks who used to whine about IE's monopoly? At least Internet Explorer supports a significant portion of HTML/CSS/JS standards. Sure IE has always had Microsoft-specific extensions, but they were only extensions - the basic foundation has always been open. Flash is none of that - Flash represents Adobe's own and complete redesign of the Web.

The only thing stopping them from completely taking over is somewhat higher cost of entry for content producers, i.e. developers and designers. A simple Flash/Flex web form with back-end server scripts is not nearly as trivial to implement as a typical PHP/Rails one-page tutorial.

I like the addition of VIDEO and AUDIO tags to HTML5, I like SVG, but I am afraid by the time all mainstream browsers adopt these features it will be too late. More specifically, I am afraid that IE8 won't be out for the next 3-5 years. Without new IE Flash/Silverlight will win.

Some would disagree arguing that developing for Flash/Flex frees you from browser incompatibilities. They would say that Adobe has not been hostile the way Microsoft has been. To those, I say that any Monarch, albeit wise, loving and open to his peoples, dies sooner or later. And nobody can tell who is coming next.

Therefore let's stick to democracy and avoid rulers altogether.

Respect C Programmers

2007-10-22T20:48:00.000-05:00

During last few weeks I noticed quite a few blog articles and online discussions dedicated to something awful: bashing C as a language and C programmers who still use it and especially those who LIKE to use it. The bashing seems to be coming primarily from adepts of higher-level languages, filled with self-proclaimed superiority mixed with camouflaged attempts to proclaim the other side stupid. Even well recognized C hackers like Torvalds got their share of criticism in a rather rude manner.

And I have a big problem with that.

But before I explain myself, lets look closer what high-level language geniuses have to say. Summarizing, it predictably sounds like C is too low level and using it in 2007 is like programming in assembly language which is Forrest Gump stupid. More specific drawbacks of being so bare metal include but not limited to the following statements:

Programming in C is too slow and unproductive.
C programmers by default are performing premature optimization.
C-style of memory management is inferior to automatic garbage collectors found in modern VM implementations.
C programs have more bugs in them.
C programs are prone to security vulnerabilities.
C programmers write too many for loops and look stupid doing it.
C is not that fast. Actually Java is almost as fast now!
C programmers are not cost effective and picking C as a language of choice is bad business decision.

You can have a full blown argument for each of those bullet points but I won't. Instead, I want to point your attention to something else.

Dear Haskell People...

You see, most of you Haskell/Lisp/Erlang gurus are true intellectuals and are very capable. You write very well: many great “functional-style programmers” like you have nicely written blogs filled with sacks of good thoughts and ideas.

However, when I look around I rarely see any results of your work. I browse APT repository on Debian, sometimes I check out various shareware for Windows, I follow promising software reviews. I see interesting new projects pop up here and there, and almost everything is done in C. Maybe it is just me, but most of the software I'd personally use on my computers is written in that retarded and unproductive language you dislike so much.

I am counting real software, not software jobs. Because, as many of you already know, most software jobs exist out there solely to produce boring crap around SQL server of some sort for the enterprise with very few exceptions. That's the enterprise software forya. People still use it, but only if you pay them salaries. Here I want to concentrate on software people actually want to use themselves. Even pay for it. Real dollars, you know? And I don't see much of that written in higher level languages, let alone functional ones.

Moreover, looking around I can't help but notice that somehow those "stupid and ignorant" C programmers managed to build everything that powers the Internet and computers in general: GCC, Apache, Operating systems they run under, numerous tools, Gnome+friends, Doom, system utilities and personal money managers - the list is huge. Nearly everything is written in C. And it's not just legacy: if you focus on projects started within last 5 years the picture will not change much.

Meanwhile, higher-level language intellectuals produced very little. On my Ubuntu desktop I do not believe I have a single piece of software written in Haskell or Lisp. I tried Eclipse but continued looking for something usable until I discovered Vim. Even mighty Python has mostly been kept as a tool to write helper scripts as more powerful replacement for bash. I am not saying there aren't any programs written in higher level languages, I am just saying that ratio of C-to-everything-else is profound.

Why is that? Haskel/Lisp hackers, I enjoy reading books you write, blogs you maintain and I find your comments on most programming topics on slashdot very insightful. However, if your language is so superior and it makes you guys so much more productive, why don't you flood us with actual software written in it? Besides your own server-side web applications? I see so many articles and tutorials that end with "WOOW in 5 lines of code!" or "WOOW re-written in less than a week!" that it seems that all that increased productivity and your superior intelligence should compensate somewhat for your smaller number of heads.

Meanwhile, C programmers just get things done. This is why survival of any new high-level super language will always depend on having a reliable and easy interface to C. Why? Because the entire world is written in C by guys who are too busy coding and do not have time to bash cocky Haskell people in their blogs.

Peace. Respect. Love.

Life before Google

2007-10-15T20:49:00.000-05:00

While driving to work the other day I caught myself thinking: what did I use for online search before google came out?

There was yahoo search, there was definitely altavista, I loved the way it sounded... But did I use them on a regular basis? How often? I can't recall.

I could remember my “google day” very clearly: I was looking to buy a car and one of my friends stopped by my office right before lunch and suggested to run some google searches to see what comes up. I do not remember being particularly impressed by the search results, but the simplicity of the front page was what caught my initial attention.

Then, almost the next day, someone suggested searching for “dumb m@$%ker” online and the bio of one of presidential candidates showed up. Jokes like that were much easier to do back then.

And I was happily googling ever since. However, I honestly cannot answer this question: what did I search with before?

The more I think about it, the more I am starting to realize that I didn't. I did not search back then. Well, not that much. Wasn't part of my daily ritual, you know. “Internet without Search” sounds almost idiotic in 2007 but in 1999 it was OK.

It just occurred to me that I didn't do a lot of things back then. And only now I realize how different the Internet has become. It appears that google all by itself dramatically changed the way I use the Internet. I am talking about my personal experience here and not trying to generalize, but I strongly suspect it is not just me.

What has changed since Google?

I stopped bookmarking things. Why? I can always search for the damn thing and find it again. In fact, it will take fewer keystrokes to get there and in case something better comes along I'll get on it right away.
I stopped using specialized sites like edmunds.com. If I want to read up on some vehicle, or anything, for that matter - google will show me the specs and reviews much, much faster than stupid edmunds with their multi-level menu drill down, killed by a naïve question “what is your ZIP code?” at the end. Are you out of your minds, edmunds?
Actually, edmunds was not a particularly good example. I stopped using sites way better than edmunds, like weather.com, yahoo movies, financial sites, etrade, fool, even calculator, dictionary and Microsoft Excel for many cases! Everything could be done by a simple text box and “Search” button. Faster.
In fact I stopped using the address bar all together, just like many others – Firefox has an alternative “address bar” that is powered by Google and is proper: no need to add “.com” or retarded “www” to everything and accidental misspellings will get fixed. Isn't that sweet? Just go Ctrl+K instead of Alt+D.
I do not have POP3 email client software anywhere. Gmail, even though it does not have folders and uses “collapsed” conversations without an option for normal people, was by leaps and bounds the best web-based email program. My primary address is 10 years old and does not end with '@gmail' but I tunnel all my messages through gMail anyway simply because they eliminate spam. 99.999% of it, like nobody else.
I stopped using my personal site. I still have an account and paying for hosting for nostalgic reasons, but I don't need it. I used to store family photos and useful files up there on FTP, just in case I'll need them when away from home. With ad-free Picasa and the giant gmail mailbox I don't need those either.
Finally, all sorts of Yellow Pages became history: online, offline – does not matter. Google finds that stuff too. Phone companies finally (!) realized that as well and stopped bombarding me with those useless yellow bricks.

Who can compete with Google? Compete for my “Internet time”? Only Wikipedia comes to mind, in fact I often throw in a short and effective 'wiki' at the end of my searches just to make sure I am getting wikipedia's perspective as my first search result.

And I never paid a dime for all this informational nirvana... Incredible.

Is Privacy Overrated?

2007-10-02T15:58:00.000-05:00

Recently I noticed an interesting trend among people I know. I am not sure how to express it in full other than by giving you a few examples.

I few people I know have WEP/WPA encryption turned off on their wireless routers. They claim they do not really care if someone is using their Internet connection. Warning them about potential security issues with strangers breaking through Windows networking, lurking around inside of their computers looking for credit card numbers did not raise as much of a concern as I expected. Not as much as it used to anyway. How did they explain it? Apparently they cannot stand the hassle of dealing with passwords for every WiFi device that makes its way into their house, especially for those that do not have keyboards.

I also knew quite a few people, especially older relatives, who never managed to put their family photos online because they felt it was silly to have your private life exposed for everyone to see on the Internet. The issue was not technical: they have always known how to upload photos. But more and more of them are getting Picasa and Flickr accounts and upload their pictures now. They changed their mind.

Meanwhile I was approached by more than one person asking me to "build something" that will liberate them from logging into tens of web sites every day. Apparently all mainstream browsers are still not helpful it with all those "remember-your-password" features.

Don't you find it strange? While tech media cannot get enough of identity theft stories and companies like Micorsoft get hammered by online press almost weekly for yet another exposed security hole in IE, real customers, real people (around me at least), seem to care about those things less and less. A while ago people used to call GPS feature on their cell phones spooky because "anyone would be able to track me wherever I am" but look what really happened: even without GPS you see thousands of happy Twitter users announcing their every step to anyone who'll listen.

Do we Really Care about Privacy?

Privacy is a broad term and I prefer to think more of online anonymity. Back in early Internet years there was a lot more excitement about coolness of being anonymous. Expressing yourself, letting your voice be heard by thousands without fear of reprisals from an employer or your government was how the whole idea of the Internet was perceived by many who never heard of it before.

Fast forward to 2007 and let me ask you: Do you really want to listen to what Mr. Anonymous has to say? Have you noticed how meaningless and short, if not offensive, anonymous comments usually are? Well, enough about others, think of your own experience. Do you like to be anonymous? Really? Think of every time when a web application wants you to log in again and again, whenever you receive spam, whenever you type your name and credit card number the millionth time in your life or whenever your browser pops up a message with something about cookies or submitting insecure data to "scary Internet". And I haven't even asked the web developers. How fun is it for them to deal with anonymous visitors. Don't you find online anonymity simply annoying at times?

Does online anonymity really buy us anything?

I wonder how it would be like if DHCP did not exist?

Nobody is ever Anonymous. Try to imagine an absolutely unique "IP address" assigned to every person on earth immediately after birth. You add that ID to their connection IP address along with ID of the device they are accessing the net. No need to log in, if you are online, "the Internet" already knows who you are. This gives us an incredible accuracy at identifying who and when gets access to what. Sounds like a nightmare doesn't it? That is some scary future that Hollywood warned us about in "Minority Report" huh?

But how different it really is from what we already have? After all, we're not really anonymous. Interested parties (think RIAA) will get you even though they still need to get a court order to squeeze your real address out of your ISP. Imagine the state of affairs in North Korea, how anonymous their Internet users really are?

It seems to me that we are getting all the headaches of the anonymous Internet without any real anonymity. And judging by what people around me are saying, I would suggest that annoyances of online anonymity are eclipsing the fake sense of security it provides.

Don't you think that "scary future" is not that scary but rather convenient? Or am I being naïve?

If only I had a billion dollars...

2007-09-13T15:31:00.000-05:00

... I would... no, it's easier to talk about you :-)

Assuming You want to start your own company, you will want to hire some programmers. You will absolutely have to, and the problem you will face is a problem of avoiding hiring dumb engineers because dumb engineers will ruin your business.

And oh my... Businesses in US are plagued by dumb engineers. There are many different factors that allow these unqualified individuals to get engineering jobs, lack of decent interviewers is certainly a big one. Few years back I got into a habit of going to interviews just for kicks, probably because I have worked for the same company for nearly five years and forgot how it was like. What I discovered was shocking: literally everyone can get a programming job if he or she simply goes to enough interviews and tells the same made up story in response to "so... what exactly did you do at company X? Your resume said you wrote reporting system using Java and DB2..."

I am talking 2002-2003 and since then job market has only gotten hotter.

Do Good Programmers Cost More?

What was even more shocking, however, that many of those jobs paid a lot more than my previous employer did. And that company was ridiculously over-equipped with brilliant engineers. Heck, even now, after 4 years, I keep thinking that an average programmer at "Company N" was magnitudes smarter than most "enterprise level senior software architects" with fat salaries I've met. I also hear that Google does not pay as much as most competitors but they somehow managed to hunt down and hire nearly every well known open source developer all around the globe.

You know what it means? As shocking as it may appear, money is not everything. Smart people like to hang out with other smart people. Similarly, mediocrity comes in volumes too.

The Church Method

Building a great R&D is almost like starting a church: the trick is to keep your "business types" in the basement and, most importantly, - pick the right God. Lisp or Haskell will probably work. Put it up on a banner real high! And here they come: your high quality parishioners... They will build you a highest quality Java-powered unbreakable billing system (or any stupidest data pumping software you may want) in no time. As long as you let them show up to work at 11am and worship their God as much and as often as they wish. And no meetings, of course. Just don't put "Java" in the job description and you'll be fine.

Those who are terrified by total absence of meetings are worried for a very good reason. If you do not have much to do in such meetingless environment, maybe your position should... (it is always hard to call someone else's baby ugly) ... not exist to begin with?

The Internet Approach

In fact I can propose even more radical way of building something great. Suppose you have money and you are looking for something "hi-tech" to invest in. You know what you can do? (Listen to this nearly anonymous advice from Internet, right?)

You can, using the church strategy described above, attract as many smart hackers as you can possibly find, put them all in one comfortable place and leave alone. No projects, no business people, certainly no marketing and "team building" bullshit. Just give them an opportunity to meet, co-exist and collaborate together. Give them computers and free beer. Give them Barnes&Nobles for life memberships. Give them cigarettes if you have to.

And I guarantee that a number of fascinating events will occur. First, this ecosystem of smart hackers will reject "false positives". Naturally, without any HR department or "project managers". They will be expelled by their superior peers and chased away. Then you will start seeing signs of self-organization and, finally - some bright sparks. Those will be semi-interesting projects here and there, probably one per engineer or two. Eventually the most interesting ones will gather followers and evolve further. Not-so-good ones will die off. And I bet, that given sufficient time, you may create something truly spectacular. Something that will revolutionize some markets or possibly create new ones.

Laugh all you want, but look at what Internet did. Well... it surely is responsible for many things, but think for a second about Linux phenomena. An operating system, especially as well featured and modern as Linux, is probably the most complex piece of software a mankind has ever attempted to create. The scary monster of corporate world, Microsoft, has miserably failed at it - they built just Vista and it took them 6 years! Yet an army of smart souls managed to self-organize and pull it off so seamlessly. The Internet only served as one "big comfortable room" that allowed all those processes I describe to take place.

On Commercial Innovation

But what if true innovation in a commercial software space is dead? That may very well be the truth. You know why? Because the coolest software projects, most of their code base, were written between 10pm and 4am. And those, folks, are not your normal business hours. Surely some code gets written and checked in before lunch. Remember the last time your browser crashed? That was probably it.

On Programmers and Business

2007-09-13T13:10:00.000-05:00

Software development, just as science fiction writers predicted some fifty years ago, is becoming more and more common activity people are engaged in. Software drives not just traditional computers, it now propels literally everything plugged in; phones, cameras, TVs, cars, even washing machines. The knowledge of at least one simple programming language soon will be as essential as basic writing skills. Why? Because as the complexity of average software increases, professional programmers become less affordable and less accessible for basic programming tasks.

Let me explain.

Just recently a friend of mine was asking for some help with Excel. He needed a fairly intelligent macro for some intense spreadsheet transformations. I had to explain that it would probably cost him about six hours of programmer's time and no programmer will do it for less than at least $60/hour. Actually... no programmer will do it. Period. Because it is boring. Because they have "better things to do" for $60 an hour. Outsourcing ultimately is not going to help because the population of laptops, cell phones, TVs, microwaves and other programmable devices is growing much faster than world-wide population of professional programmers. Therefore nobody will help you with your basic programming tasks.

And you will always have some basic programming tasks, simply because more and more of what we do includes programmable devices. And off-the-shelf components created by professional programmers will not keep up. Charging your customers money, for instance, used to be a purely mechanical operation; you'd put a smile on your face, stick your hand out and a customer lands a $10 bill on your palm. Now you would want to set up a merchant account hooked to a payment gateway all integrated into your accounting and possibly other software. And you inevitably will want something more, something custom from your (without a doubt) highly customizable software. Why? Because it is customizable. But mostly because you already know: what you want is possible. Because it, whatever you have on hands, is programmable.

And programmers willing to help you are getting scarce. The alternative? Learn to do it yourself. Visual Basic (or bash scripting - depends on who's reading this) should be next to English in an average school's curriculum.

Programmers are expensive. Geez... they are getting more expensive every year. And the software they build is getting more complex. And more essential to whatever you do. Starting almost any kind of company these days involves hiring programmers. Your business does not need to be in information technology, but you have to hire programmers anyway.

Bad Programmers

Now lets think about starting companies. Some of them get born, grow, transform, evolve and eventually succeed. But others miserably crash and burn. Books get written about those failures, articles get published and MBA students are getting fresh real world cases to study and learn from. They blame CEOs for their mistakes. They blame ineffective marketing strategies, strong competition and only god knows what else those MBAs are trained to blame failures on.

But you know what? I have grown to suspect that a lot of companies are failing simply because they hired dumb engineers. There are several factors that lead me to believe this.

First, as I said above, programmers are becoming more important as software becomes more vital to what most companies do. Therefore, the impact the quality of engineers has on business has grown substantially. Second, it is very hard to find good programmers because there are fewer and fewer of them measured in "PPD" (per programmable device). And finally, it is damn near impossible to tell good programmer apart from a bad one unless you happened to be an engineer yourself. And most companies are not started by engineers.

Do they teach this in business schools these days? Do they teach that dumb engineers will have an immense impact on your business? A sufficiently dumb engineer may hurt you more than most competitors will. When organized in loose formations, even in modest numbers, they can even kill an otherwise healthy business. I'll write some more about those blood sucking yet fascinating creatures a bit later.

You may label this post as "self important crap" and you are welcome to, but isn't it everyone's belief that his or her profession is the most important one? Similar to university professors who almost without exceptions believe their course is the most valuable.

Best Notebook for Linux

2007-08-21T14:48:00.000-05:00

Ever since I rediscovered Linux I wanted to have a dedicated computer to run it on. VMWare and dual boot, even though I use both of them for work, were not good enough for personal matters: I wanted 3D-accelerated desktop, fast boot times and "true" Linux experience (whatever that means). Besides, it felt sick to realize how much time I had been spending in my office while I could have done a lot of work outside of it. I definitely needed a laptop.

Apple Macbook Pro
At first my mind was set on MacBook Pro. I adore Apple OS X and to me it is as much UNIX as Linux claims to be. But there were two major issues with this machine: cost and build. With 7200rpm drive and some mandatory software this setup is pricey: dangerously close to $3K territory but I did not see a $3K build quality in Apple hardware. Just by holding the MacBook in my hands and knowing my usage habits - no cell phone ever survives longer than a year, I simply could not see a happy ending there.

What about Linux notebook?
This brought me back to my original idea of running Linux on a notebook PC. Guess what I did first? I googled "Best Laptop for Linux" and was amazed. Apparently Linux still has a lot of issues with portable hardware, especially with el-cheapo sub-1K mainstream machines from Dell, HP and alike. To keep costs in check while manufacturing those throw-away notebooks, Dell and friends have to jump from one cheapest component to another, chasing the best deal I suppose. The brave souls who write open-source drivers simply cannot keep up with all possible "integrated solutions" found on a typical wallmartized laptop. Power management seems to be a big issue as well.

Apparently, to get Linux running smoothly on a notebook, the trick is not to buy cheap crap and try be be very picky about your hardware. In some cases installer will not even recognize your freakin hard drive.

IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T60p

I looked at several machines and tried out more than one. At some point I was prepared for a compromise, it seemed obvious that every notebook I looked at had some inherent built-in incompatibilities with Linux, and all I I was doing was to pick which component or functionality I could live without: be it a hibernation feature, poor battery life, sub-par graphics card or not working function keys including those that control the brightness of the LCD screen.

Well, I'm glad to report I was wrong - in the end no compromise was needed. The search for a perfect Linux notebook now is over. There have been an elephant in the room, my friends: a big one. From what I learned, the best Linux laptops ever made have actually been made by IBM, and still are. I know, I know - they are Lenovo now but they still are the same dudes in the same offices doing what they do best: they design great looking notebooks that are great performers and last forever.

The Keyboard
To begin, just pick ThinkPad up, open the lid and type "Hello world" or "I hate you all", depending on your mood. You will feel the difference immediately. The keyboard is simply gorgeous. I have owned full-size PC keyboards that were worse than this! As far as notebooks go ThinkPad keyboard cannot be beaten: it has all the important keys of the right size in the right places: nicely aligned arrows, "Ins", "Del", Home/End cluster - everything is proper. This is a full size PC keyboard without any compromises in form of misplaced buttons. Up until recently they did not even have the retarded "Windows" button but finally gave in...

Linux-compatible Hardware
Secondly, they use fairly common, Linux compatible hardware. I installed Ubuntu 7.04 on ThinkPad T60 without a single glitch. As far as I can tell everything works: even all function keys. It sleeps and hibernates, I can control MP3 playback and screen brightness. In case you are curious, click to see my exact configuration. I was even able to install drivers for a built-in fingerprint reader and integrate it into GNOME login and screensaver. Although I ended up not using this gizmo simply because typing a password takes less time than scanning. Bottom line, however, is that ThinkPad T60 is 100% Linux compatible.

Why not ThinkPad T61?
Notice that I did not buy the latest T61 and for a good reason: this one is simply too new and people report that it will not work as flawlessly as T60 would. For instance one needs to be careful which Wi-Fi card to order (go with older one, Intel 3945). Some function keys reportedly are not working yet and standby/wakeup is not reliable. But not for long though: IBM is very serious about Linux support, they even sell ThinkPads with pre-installed Suse Linux with a full suite of "ThinkAdvantage" applications very similar to their windows counterparts. You cannot order one of those off their web site but you can, if you want, do that over the phone.

There is another good reason to go with a T60 if you can still find one. Those gems are available with gorgeous LCDs that utilize more professional and useful aspect ratio (i.e. not wide). For instance you can get a T60 with a 15" LCD with native 1600x1200. Unfortunately I ended up with a wide screen display (1680x1050) but at least I got 1050 vertical pixels. Not only that, but some of those screens (check out 15" @1400x1050 model) produce spectacular colors and are great for someone who's into photography. The screens I've seen on T61 are not like that: the colors have "metallic" tint, they're somewhat dimmer and angle of view is much narrower.

Regardless of that, if you are reading this in the 4th quarter of 2007 or later, all those issues with T61 and Linux are probably resolved already. Go with T61 then.

UltraNav and why it rocks.

I may sound silly but this little thing makes all the difference in the world. Unlike others, who supply their laptops with regular touchpads with a couple of buttons, IBM's approach is very much UNIX-like: they want your fingers on a keyboard doing what they do best: typing. To assist you with that IBM added a second row of mouse buttons above the touchpad. Use your thumbs for mouse clicks and use a little red pin to move the cursor around, while keeping your hands in close combat position: always ready for sudden bursts of keystrokes.

I can honestly say that UltraNav coupled with ThinkPad's perfect keyboard nearly eliminates the productivity difference between a notebook and a desktop workstation. I watched enough of colleagues "working" on their Dell Lattitudes - a profoundly disgusting experience, very much like stop-and-go traffic.

What about Performance?
Are you kidding? The software has stagnated behind hardware for nearly ten years (!) - of course the notebook is fast for everything I do. It's a Linux machine, remember? It does not need to run Windows with a typical 182 pre-installed do-nothing junk-processes that you may need 3Gz quad-core CPU for.

Honestly I did not care for CPU speed at all: anything better than PIII 800Hz would do just fine. I was unable to find T60 with 1.6 or 1.8Gz CPU and I view my 2Gz clock speed as a waste: both cores are running at 1Gz 99% of the time, governed by power-saving CPU frequency scaling feature (just like in any other OS). The things I cared for was more RAM and to have a dedicated video card, because "shared memory" solutions put too much strain on the main bus and affect (in my experience) even tasks unrelated to graphics.

The bottom line - the laptop is fast. With 2GB of RAM I am constantly running two VMWare sessions and a bunch of apps as well. After a while everything gets cached up to memory and I don't even see HDD LED blinking anymore. Somehow Linux manages to get the most out of surplus of RAM: Windows caching schemes are way more conservative, but I suspect it has changed in Vista. When running Linux with plenty of RAM, getting a slower, larger and more power-efficient 5200rpm drive seems like a good idea now.

Want a problem-free Linux notebook?
Here you have it. If you wonder which notebook to buy to run Linux on, the answer is simple: get a ThinkPad. The reasons are:

Great build quality.
Excellent Linux hardwre support.
Best keyboard in the industry.
UltraNav.
Awesome LCD screens with crazy viewing angles.
Subtle and purposeful business look.
Runs Linux.

Wide Screens and Best Buy

2007-08-05T16:50:00.000-05:00

Let me tell you a little something. To begin with, I must confess that I am not claiming this is a true story, I heard it from someone a good while back, but it serves me nicely with my point down the road, so here it goes:

The Tale of Blue Crystals
Once upon a time there was a company in the market to make a laundry detergent. Their name is unknown. What matters, however, is that their R&D department really had no idea how to make a laundry detergent. The kind that works i.e. cleans shirts, jeans and the like. Their detergent sucked. It did not work. Consumers kept buying "Tide" and largely ignored the inferior product despite its smaller price tag.

Being unable to afford good engineering, I can only guess, the company goes ahead and hires a marketing guy soon to become known as "Blue Crystals Dude". The blue crystals idea was simple: he proposed the company cuts production costs by stopping using expensive ingredients in their product, effectively making matters even worse. And to improve sales he suggested adding blue crystals to the "formula": a dirt-cheap and harmless substance that looked kind of blue indeed. The crystals did not do anything. They were just blue. However, magic crystals allowed the company to package a crappy product into a shinier box, slap "Improved! Now with blue crystals!" on it, and sell at a hefty price.

What do you think happened? Customers loved it!

Cost Cutting in LCD Market.
Similar thing just happened in the market for LCD panels for notebooks, and the disease of blue crystals is steadily spreading onto desktop monitors as well. The disease is called "Wide Screen" and this is how it was born:

Apparently some marketing genius picked up his high school math book and found out that the area of a square is significantly larger than area of a rectangle given an identical diagonal width of the two. In practice is means that the area of 14" LCD panel with an aspect ratio of 4:3 is larger than the area of 14" LCD with a ratio of 9:6.

That translates into this: a 9:6 display is cheaper to make than a 4:3 display of the same diagonal width.

Wide Screens - the Blue Crystals of LCDs
Blue crystals ruthlessly strike again, while it is unknown which company hit first, but the decision was made to take a full size SXGA screen (1280 x 1024) and simply chop off some pixels at the top, reducing overall display area to save on manufacturing costs. That means making a display smaller: only 1280x800.

To make sure consumers won't revolt, the marketing term of "Wide Screen" was born, to make suckers feel like they are gaining something from this cost-cutting exercise. Never mind that horizontal resolution did not get any "wider", only vertical pixels disappeared, forcing consumers scroll down on pretty much any web site, any document, any photo or anything not tiny. The world largely went back in time to pathetic 800 vertical pixels.

Usability Issues and WebSites running Wide
Eight hundred is your new total display height. Now, if you subtract the pixels needed for your browser’s mandatory menu, title bar and status bar, you will end up with roughly 650 pixels available for a web site you happened to open. However all web sites must have their own top level menu, a logo and such. CNN.com takes 130 pixels for those, so even after you maximize your browser window, you end up with only 520 pixels left for the actual content. Welcome to 2007.

How about TVs?
Every time I bitch about this to my friends I hear nonsense that goes like "wide screens are the future: look at the TVs for god's sake!". Come on, dudes: you cannot compare TV screens to computer monitors. You watch moving picture on a TV, and you read text on a computer. Well... most of us and most of the time. Video and text are very much different in how people perceive and consume them. Books are not wide, folks. Your eyes cannot follow lines that are longer than just a couple of inches: that is why newspapers, the only paper media in "wide" format, use freakin columns. And not only that: newspapers have plenty of "vertical pixels" as well.

Therefore do not kid yourself: N diagonal inches in 4:3 gives you much more usable real eastate than 9:6 of the same width.

It is interesting to note, that most web designers keep producing vertically oriented designs one after another. It became almost a norm to only see a site's top-level navigation in default browser window: to get a glimpse of what's on there you're forced to maximize, enjoy empty "ears" on both sides of your wide screen and, of course, scroll down.

Marketing at Work
Did customers fight back? Nope. They loved blue crystals again. Today it is virtually impossible to buy a notebook with a full-sized LCD display. Believe it or not, I even saw software people write in their blogs "... First thing I want for my new laptop is to have a wide screen, cuz I like to watch movies on a plane..." Whoever you are, the blue crystals dude, you are Genius - I must give it to you. Making college educated folks to blog "I want my next laptop to miss roughly 200 pixels" is something you can proudly report back to your marketing professor.

I looked for a notebook with a full-sized 1280x1024 LCD. It does not exist. Or maybe I did not look long enough. I played with newegg and pricegrabber, I googled, I even propelled myself to a nearest friendly "Best Buy", to no avail.

Which brings me to my second, smaller rant for today.

What the Hell is BestBuy selling?
My experience with Best Buy has always been limited to rare and isolated events whenever I needed to buy some blank CDs urgently enough to pass on newegg.com and other internet shops. Basically it means I opened my wallet at Best Buy... well... maybe once in my life.

Jesus motherloving GOD!!! Have you been to Best Buy lately? Five or maybe seven years ago it used to be a place where cool geeky teens would go to find out what new and exciting is out there. Best Buy was a perfect place to waste you lunch drooling over some newest gadget they happened to put up on display that day. Not anymore.

Best Buy sells... How do I put it nicely? Well... they sell obsolete shit. I am serious, I am not joking. Check this out: they sell portable CD players! "How would a CD by itself be portable?" you ask, but that is beyond me. Best Buy sells them. Yes, these antiques from the 80s and they call them portable. Sure. Anyone can easily load one of those into a sizeable male purse. (I have semi-European roots). In case you're still not convinced that Best Buy turned into a history museum, I have another one for you: they have a dedicated isle for telephones. The kinds you plug into wall-mounted outlets. Remember those? Just like the ones grandmother used to curse at before she passed away in 1988...

I honestly do not know anybody who still uses land lines to talk or rides a horse to work.

By the way, 1GB of decent DDR2 RAM is about $140 at Best Buy. Which is roughly 250% more than newegg.com is selling it for. Maintaining an isle dedicated to land line phones would cost you, I reckon...

Linux in 2007

2007-08-01T22:24:00.000-05:00

Every now and then I like to take a break from my typical PC routine and install Linux, as any self-respecting geek should.

History
I started playing with Linux back in 98, without any particular goal in mind, and kept doing that just for kicks about once every two years. Frankly, Windows has always felt good enough to me and I never really dreamed of switching to something better. After all it is not the OS I use, it's all about the applications.

So every couple of years I install Linux, I look at its somewhat rough desktop, my eyes immediately get fried by its awful, unreadable fonts and usually I quickly retreat to the black and mysterious world of the text console. I may spend a day or two playing with some command line toys and call it a nice try. Unreadable text by itself served me as a powerful motivation to get back to Windows, every time. However, crappy fonts and primitive font rendering were not all.

Linux GUI and X
Linux X-system has always looked like a giant architectural mistake to me: you don't want to build your GUI subsystem as a "server" that "serves requests" from the clients. UNIX guys made matters even worse by implementing other GUI components in this manner, like the font server, for instance. Frankly I can only theorize on why Linux UI has been so painfully unresponsive. Even the mouse has always felt awkward on Linux, so too has choppy window resizing. Maybe those "servers" are not it. Well, let's get back (or move forward) to 2007.
I am happy to report that in 2007, Ubuntu, one of the many Debian-based distributions, looks fine. No, don't get me wrong: the fonts are still screwed by default, but at least there is Google and great support from the community of Ubuntu fans. Apparently, in 2007 Linux knows how to render fonts properly, with anti-aliasing and font hinting, but due to patent issues with Microsoft, Adobe and Apple, those features are disabled by default. Lucky me, I know how to edit an ASCII file, copy those gorgeous Windows True Type fonts into Linux fonts folder and restart my X server. Nice! Not quite Vista/XP quality, but very much usable, especially on modern XZ-something-VGA resolutions we all are accustomed to.

Oh! The fonts!
I wish I could close the issue of fonts, but I can't. As it turns out, many applications simply ignore system-wide font settings and render their own. How the heck is that possible - would be my question, coming from years of Win32 GDI programming, but apparently you can do that in X. OpenOffice happily makes itself totally useless by rendering its own crappy fonts that are as hard to read as they were back in 98, worse than Windows was in 1991. I guess OpenOffice in 2007 compares favorably to something "graphical" from the 70s that I am not familiar with. Heck, I'm only 30. FireFox seems to have its own ideas about fonts, but at least they look much better.

Hardware support and Gnome
But guess what - I don't need OpenOffice, GVim works fine in GNOME, thank you. Oh, speaking of GNOME. I have not tried modern KDE yet, but GNOME has definitely evolved. Overall look and feel are very polished and professional. Everything that I expected to work just worked. Ubuntu even allowed me to use a proprietary, binary nVidia driver for my video card, and everything was responsive. Not quite XP-level responsive, where windows and other graphical objects have almost physical, real-world feel when you move them around, but certainly more responsive than Vista. When I plugged my fairly basic Motorola phone into USB, a little iPod icon appeared on the desktop and all MP3 files from the phone showed up in GNOME's music player. Sweet. XP doesn't do that! Well, of couse it does, but I never noticed it before...

Installing Software
Ahhrr, it turns out that MP3 is a proprietary protocol therefore Ubuntu cannot legally install an MP3 codec for you, but it conveniently offers you an option of installing it yourself with 3 mouse clicks. Same applies to video codecs as well. Downloading and installing the missing codecs worked a lot smoother than it did in XP, which due to its age also comes without DivX.
Most of curious souls who try to compare Linux to Windows usually start by picking Windows features one by one and comparing them to how Linux does that. That's just wrong. Because there are things (at least in Ubuntu/Debian) that Windows simply doesn't do. Take their package management system for instance. Finding free software and installing/removing it from a central repository is awesome. Windows, with its always broken registry and freakish MSI, makes it scary and generally "not safe" to install new software. In fact, Windows gradually gets more and more broken as you install something. Hey, computer geeks, how often do you get a call from a friend, complaining that "My Windows computer got a lot slower"? And what can be said about an OS that discourages you from installing software on it?

And that is the most beautiful part of the Linux experience: there is lots of free software. One can spend days browsing Ubuntu/Debian repositories, installing, playing, removing and comparing all kinds of programs. Let's start with software Ubuntu comes pre-installed with. It was carefully pre-selected and it shows: standard programs are very well-made. Almost every component is better than its Windows counterpart; Instant Messenger is better, it supports all IM protocols I care to remember, default Image Editor is a lot better, default "Notepad" is also nicer, the list goes on. My favorite one is Rhythmbox, GNOME's music player. It has a very clean and intuitive UI that easly eats Windows Media Player for lunch. Somehow, even though I've been using Media Player for years, I am guilty to admit that I STILL have very little idea how to DO anything in it. Rhythmbox is intuitive, simple and powerful. Rhythmbox is usable right away.

Is Ubuntu Good Enough for You?
So... is Ubuntu ready for a typical average user? I don't know, I am not average, moreover - I am nearly a computer genius, right? :) But I seriously do not know. As it appears, most people spend their time in their browsers lately listening to MP3s playing in the background. They may download their digital photos from their camera, organize them into albums and possibly email them to their friends. What else? Rip music CSs into MP3s? - check! Burn MP3s onto CDs? - check! Backup files to external USB drive? - check! Write simple basic documents - check! Hmmm... it appears that Ubuntu will work just fine for them, once they figure out the font madness.

But hey, I am not an average user. I am a software developer. And you know what? For software people Linux is a dream OS these days. It wasn't the case in 98 though. I do not believe it was the case in 2002 either. But in 2007 it is definitely an OS for software people. Why? I don't know where to begin! But haven't you noticed that most of the newest and coolest stuff that people rave about in their blogs is Linux-native? Seriously, look around. It is much easier to try and play with Ruby, Python, Haskell, LISP, Squeak, OCaml, D Language, Rails and Django, PHP and friends - all are first-class Linux citizens that do not "feel good" on Windows. Even Java does not feel as native on Windows. Do you read tech books or you are 9-to-5 kind of programmer? In case you do read and care to recall, what OS is most commonly used to produce screen shots for tech books these days? Or whenever you find an interesting piece of open source code, I bet it's tgz file, isn't it?

Who is it For?
What I think is happening, is that many bright minds in computer field are moving away from Windows. And for "computer people" who like to keep up, UNIX *is* the system of choice. I said UNIX, not necessarily Linux, because Mac OS X is a nice programmer's OS too. In fact OS X is probably the *only* OS for guys who like to build really nice GUIs and get paid for it.

Ahrr... the mandatory conclusion... Here we go: Linux has become a gorgeous OS for "computer people", and a very good alternative to Vista for average+ users who don't have very specific Windows-only needs, like Photoshop or DSLR RAW converters. All they have to do is to enable readable fonts. But truth be told, if my mom asks me which computer/OS to buy I will have to send her to http://apple.com

Notebook Support
Meanwhile I am returning my sweet DELL Vostro 1400 because Ubuntu would not run on it well and getting somewhat obsolete ThinkPad T60 with linux-friendly hardware. But, on a side note, in case you absolutely need to log into Vista prison every day, Vostro 1400 is one sweet&cheap piece of hardware - easily the most pleasing item Dell has ever sold to me. I will keep looking for a perfect Linux notebook and I'll be back with my findings.

Desktop Applications are Dead

2007-08-01T21:55:00.000-05:00

You think I am speaking old news here? After all, everybody and his sister have been screaming on the street lately about the death of desktop programming.

The majority, if not all, of those screamers have always been "web app" developers. Who listens to those? They aren't even real developers, right? They don't know any better. They don't even know how to use malloc() and free() properly! Poor souls... writing foreach loops in their toy languages, acting like little girls trying mom's makeup while she's at work. Surely they have been naturally pissed at us, real engineers, creating real applications, allocating and releasing our own memory, passing pointer-to-pointer parameters.

Sure we've been looking down at web-app "developers", rumor has it that some of them are known to be ex-taxi drivers. Do you trust those folks proclaiming that the desktop was dead? Besides, tell me this, what has been MORE glamorous in IT, more than web apps, since the rise of Yahoo? However, get this: the desktop is dead.

Who is Ev?
You are hearing this from a seasoned desktop developer. Yes, from one of those cynical dudes who always puts "online applications" in quotes, because, you know, they are not "real" apps. Oh! Another classic: I am someone who never considered JavaScript to be a "real language". How about that?

Even more! I've been in love with Microsoft as long as I care to remember! (still reading?) I used to jump on every new technology coming out of Redmond. Heck, I even seriously believed that every programmer should have a good understanding of his hardware and have some assembly language credentials. Moreover, I believed that C++ was a godfather of all programming languages and Java was just a simplistic subset of it, meant to be used by the average Joe with an average degree in something remotely technical, a language created by a corporation for other corporations to have their pathetic RDBMS-wrapping software development done cheaply by armies of disposable chimps. Well, while the former still holds true, the desktop is dead anyway.

Who Killed the Desktop?
Do you know who killed it? Microsoft did. Yes, I am pointing my finger at Redmond, and I am neglecting the advances in HTTP-based approaches to problem solving. The desktop is dead not because the Web is great. Nope. The Web still sucks. After all, the majority of it was created by non-real developers, remember?

The desktop used to be very much alive, but it has been getting worse and worse. It took a long time, but finally the desktop has gotten so bad, that *even Web-based* UI now looks decent and usable!

Forget for a second about collaboration, information sharing and all those other goodies that the Web gives you. They are not important in this context. I am talking about overall user experience; User Interface, primarily. Besides, you can collaborate, share and do whatever you please by using your favorite desktop application - there isn't a technical obstacle in doing that. Take any 1st person shooter and its multiplayer capabilities, people have been killing each other online for years. Need another example? One word: iTunes.

Standard Runtime Support.
Why has the desktop gotten so much worse? What's broken? Well, try installing something on it. Actually, you should dig a bit deeper: try to develop something for it and then have people to download, install and use it. Do you know what kind of runtime support you get *standard*? Old school circa 1991! Yep, that is what you get. Do not point your finger at .NET, it is still a subset of Win32. It is built mostly on top of Win32, and it is still not available for us to use! Yes, .NET runtime is not part of the most popular Desktop out there - Windows XP.

Microsoft made a strategic mistake by NOT bundling .NET 1.0 into the initial XP release. Moreover, even jumbo-sized Service Pack 2 did not include the newest .NET.

Here we go folks: The only standard runtime available to a desktop application is still old and rusty Win32 API. Otherwise...

Otherwise your poor users, those who still prefer desktop apps, they will have to download and install that fat .NET runtime just to try out your little piece of software. Easy to do, you say? We'll get to downloading and installing in a second.

Downloading Software
The downloading! My favorite area where Desktops suck. Have you noticed how scary the downloading process got lately? In some cases your users will face 3 (three!) scary dialog boxes, warning them that they are about to (potentially) screw themselves in the butt by installing your "potentially dangerous" software. Well... let's hope our users are brave and they will make their way through.

Let them run the installer. But where is it? I mean, where did it go?

- "I just downloaded it and it went somewhere. Where?".

Sounds familiar? No? If not, you just haven't developed any desktop software yet. A lot, and I mean it, tons of users are not capable of figuring out where your little precious installer goes. This is why big desktop software companies have step-by-step instructions up on their sites, on how to well... check this out, on how to download an installer and find out where it goes.

Desktop Security.
If Microsoft really wanted us all to develop more desktop applications for Windows, why wouldn't Internet Explorer let you drag&drop our awesome desktop applications from a page to... well... to the desktop? After all, people have managed to learn how not to put everything they see in their mouth, learned how to stop on red and go on green, how to find a restroom in an unknown restaraunt and wipe off their little popas when they're done. They'll learn not to drop viruses on their desktops.

Ok, a user finds your installer, clicks or double clicks... Waits...

-"Did you download this binary off the Internet?! Are you crazy!? It's me, Vista, talking to you, stupid person! Do you trust this software you just downloaded? How about I make your screen go dark and you type your administrative password? I would also like to play a gunshot in your speakers at maximum volume, but some people here in Redmond figured it was a bit too much."

Buying desktop software versus using online apps these days looks like if you were going to a supermarket to buy "Exedrin" (desktop) and to accept the trouble of staying in line to a register, only to have a cashier bitch-slap you, hysterically screaming in your face:

- "Are you sure you want these pills!?!? Are you sure?! What if they cause testicular cancer?!"

... Meanwhile, less effective "Advil" (online apps) is free and you don't need to go anywhere... Do you want to be in business making Exedrin? Me - not anymore. Exedrin is dead.

- User: "Here! Here! Shut up, you crazy OS that came preloaded on my laptop! Take my password! I still want to install that scary desktop app!"

- Vista: "The password is correct, so if you insist... Oh, in order to protect you better, may I ask you to wear a condom, while using that desktop app? It came from the Internet, by the way..."

Windows Installer and New Computers in US
Pretty easy, huh? Well... easy that is, assuming your user does not happen to be one of those victimized PC owners, who purchased their PCs somewhere on US soil, where most computers come pre-damaged with sacks of crapware, such as 3rd party software firewalls, "internet security" suites, anti-spyware and adware programs and other internet-disabling, I/O consuming, eating-your-dual-Gz-for-lunch junk. Those programs intercept and twist the calls of your application into the same old and rusty Win32 API, throwing more and more scary and confusing dialog boxes at your user.

And the poor bastard (assuming you still haven't lost the sucker at this point) has to deal and calm down this zoo of monsters that infected his PC to look after the "safety" of his Desktop.

Do you still want to be on the market to make Exedrin? Seriously. Would you? In case you still not convinced, let me remind you what's ahead.

For starters, you'll hear about some strange application, called "Windows Installer" (MSI), that mysteriously would try to pop up and "repair" your application later on for no apparent reason? That, perhaps, is a side effect of your poor user trying to install more than one (!) application on his desktop, causing MSI to keep things running properly. Secondly, the state of most Windows machines, especially those that have been running for a while, say 2 years, without professional "assistance" is absurdly bad: registry is a mess, reboot times are ridiculously long and (real life example) Windows Installer tries to repair Microsoft Office every time a user touches your application.

And you know what? A User is getting tired of this crap. He finds that clunky and slow Ajax-spiced UI of most web sites is by leaps and bounds far less annoying. He likes to maximize the browser window and never having to face all this ugly and slow shit that Microsoft, Dell and friends have put for him in there. My point is that Windows is a very fragile platform that people are learning to avoid messing with. Windows makes it hard for users to explore various software options. Can you honestly say that you would be comfortable installing and uninstalling 50 random desktop apps in one day? Personally I use VMWare for that.

The Finale
Stupid user... Using those inferior clunky web apps... Ignoring the superior "user experience" provided by "rich" desktop applications.

And you know what, I can't blame him. Although I could not resist the urge to use desktop-based notepad.exe to rant about this crappy deal. Blogstop's HTML "editor" (yet more quotes) is kind of... not quite ready to have a text typed in.