Randomness Posts

About ten years ago (summer of 2002), while I was working in Yellowstone National Park, I took a lot of time that summer for personal reflection. The the rocks beside the Snake River and the roof of the cabin where I lived became close companions of mine. I took a lot of time to examine where my life was at that time, and there were a lot of things that I didn’t like. Towards the end of the summer, based on my reflections, I started writing a short series of notes to myself. I titled these “Personal Initiatives” and set out what I wanted to change and how I was going to go about doing it. There were probably 50 or so entries. Some of these were fairly arcane and maybe even silly. Among them: Get rid of my acne by washing my face twice a day. Wear contacts any time I’m not at home. Take better care of my teeth. Get in better shape. Pursue financial independence and keep a budget. Get better grades and get at least a 3.0 from that point out. After I returned to Auburn that fall, I looked over my Personal Initiatives from time to time. And it occurs to me what a good motivation this was for me. As evidenced, my near term goals in many of my initiatives I achieved within the next 3 years. I never earned less than a 3.0 after that fall. I was financially independent in 2004. I’m in better shape now than I was. Not only that, but my plans gave me goals. Even the arcane ones (“wash your face every day”) gave me little things that I could do to feel like I had accomplished something every day. Not every goal had to be in outer space - I could accomplish 5 things just by walking out the door each morning. Of course, some of them I completely blew too. There were a lot of entries about future planning that involved me becoming a pilot. Some other entries concern wanting to have a family (not there just yet…). But overall, I would say my success rate for my personal initiatives in 2002 to today is probably close to 75%. The reason I’m thinking about this is that I kind of feel a bit like did in the summer of 2002. Lost. Listless. Unsure of what I want in my life but unhappy with where I am. And without a plan. Every day I get up and go to the same job and do the same things I’ve done for the last five years. Then I go home and do the same thing each night. The cycle usually never varies. Now, to be sure, my life is much better than it was in 2002. I’m married, a homeowner, active in my community. But that seem creeping, nagging unhappiness is still there. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of taking an entire summer off to work and reflect on my life. But I’m seriously thinking that it might be time to write down some more personal initiatives. Having passed 30 now, I can’t help but feel that I’ve entered a new stage of my life and, if I don’t want to spend this entire decade listless and unhappy, that I have to begin to plan some things out and set some goals for myself. Yes. I think it’s time for some more Personal Initiatives.

Using GoDaddy as my registrar is one of those things I’ve always felt vaguely ashamed of. Something I knew all the “cool kids” didn’t do, but I was already so neck-deep in them that I didn’t want to transfer. Not to mention I had my DNS hosted with them as well so the thought of going through all that trouble to move just seemed like too much of a hassle to deal with without good reason. In my last entry, I talked about setting up your own DNS server. This was the first part of my attack on moving my domains away from GoDaddy. But I didn’t have a real timeline to move away from them. Then came the news of GoDaddy’s support for SOPA - one of the worst attacks on the Internet since 1996’s Communications Decency Act. Now, to be sure, GoDaddy’s position on SOPA was not the first thing they’ve done to anger me. Their overtly misogynistic advertising has always bothered me, and their CEO Bob Parsons’ elephant killing and shameless exploitation of the natives angered me so badly that I almost left in April. But their aggressive support of SOPA was the final straw for me. I’d been a customer since 2003, but I simply could not take it anymore. So over the course of about 4 days, I transferred all my domains to Namecheap. Having never transferred a domain before, the process was surprisingly quick and easy. Once again, it makes me wonder why I haven’t done it sooner.

Revolutions are a dirty business in every country they occur in. Libya is no exception. Moammar Gadhafi was a terrible human being. He was a thorn in the side of 5 US Presidents. He actually did pursue a WMD program, only giving it up in 2006. Under him, Libya was a state sponsor of terrorism and was behind the destruction of Pan Am flight 103. At home, he brutally repressed his population and ruled with an iron fist. In short, he was not a nice person. According to a report on the BBC that I was listening to on the drive home, he was found hiding in a drain pipe in Sirte. He begged for his life, and was shot in the abdomen and again in the leg. Supposedly he “died” en route to a hospital, but at least one report mentioned an execution-style shot to the head. Now, is this what happened? There’s no way to know, and I suspect we never will for sure. And yet, I find myself having some difficulty taking any “joy” in his death, especially a death such as that. No man who begs for his life should be killed, especially without due process. I would much rather have seen him turned over to ICJ authorities and tried for crimes against humanity. And yet, it may have been the best possible outcome. Libya is not a stable country at this time and probably lacks the facilities to hold Gadhafi securely. There would be months of negotiations that would have to happen before he even got to a trial. All that time, his continued defiant existence would continue to empower his dwindling base. With him out of the picture, the rebels / new government should have little problem establishing itself as the new legitimate government of Libya, thus drawing a close to this whole thing even faster. Revolutions are a dirty business.

Unlike Steve Jobs, unless you’re in the tech industry, there’s a pretty fair chance you’ve never heard of Dennis Ritchie.

Normally, I’m not one to be too taken with the death of a “celebrity” … … but this one hurts. We truly lost a titan of our generation. A man who became synonymous with the company he founded, and whose products made life more awesome for millions of people. As I look around my house, pretty much every room has some touch of Apple, and all of that thanks to Steve. Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs. The world was enriched by your presence and is saddened with your loss. Thank you for everything you did.

So with the landing of Atlantis, the end of the Space Shuttle program has finally come. And while it is bittersweet - I remember being able to watch the shuttle go up from my backyard (literally!) when we lived in Florida - you have to excuse me for slaughtering the sacred Huntsville cow. The retirement of the Space Shuttle is long overdue.

The recent announcement by Linus Torvalds that the next release of Linux will be 3.0 has provoked rather furious discussion around the Internets about whether or not the incrementing of the version number is warranted. Linus himself has said that “absolutely nothing” has changed. “It will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just that I can no longer comfortably count as high as 40.” This got me to thinking about the nature of version numbers. Once upon a time (when versions were driven more by engineers and convention, and less by marketing), a version number meant something. Major, minor, revision. A major new release that modified significant portions of the code from the previous release incremented a major version number. Version numbers less than 0 were beta releases. Linux has been at 2.x since 1996, and at 2.6.x since 2003. Mac OS has been at 10.x since 2001 (even though the current version of OS X is significantly different from the original release in 2001). Meanwhile, Google Chrome has blasted through major 11 “versions” in three years. Mozilla is planning to release versions 5, 6, and 7 of Firefox this year. You can’t tell me that they are going to change major parts of Firefox three times this year. In this case, version numbers are purely being driven by marketing. They need to “catch up” to Chrome and Internet Explorer. But we live in a different world now. One where, arguably, version numbers are becoming less and less important. The growth of “app stores,” I think, is desensitizing your average user to a version number. While apps in the app store still have versions, I couldn’t tell you what “version” any of the apps on my iPhone are (other than the OS), and I bet you can’t either. Any of the apps I’ve installed from the Mac App Store I could not tell you the version of them. I just know that, when I see the number on the icon, I know I need to do updates. The updates happen, and I get a new version with whatever new features are there (or, in the case of the Twitter app, whatever features have been removed). Then there are web apps which are versionless. What version of Gmail do you use? You don’t. You use Gmail. Sure, there’s probably a revision number or something in the background, but the user has no clue what version they’re using. And they don’t need to, because there’s no action they need to take. So version are numbered in a wide variety of ways depending on the product and overall seem to be becoming less important as the growth of broadband, “app stores,” web apps, and automatic updates make thinking about version numbers less important. So why does it matter if Linus ups Linux to 3.0? Ultimately, it’s just a number.

I’m looking out my window right now at my neighbors. They have their kitchen lights on. Inside my house we have light - plenty enough light to light the whole room. And yet I still find it difficult to wrap my head around what just happened.

Over the years, I’ve seen a number of blog posts relating to common questions that should be asked of programmers. Obviously, this is going to depend on exactly what position you are hiring for, but there are some good “gateway” questions that can be used to determine whether or not an applicant you are interviewing can … well … even program at all. If they even have the mindset that makes a good developer. A common one I’ve seen tossed around is Fizz Buzz. The challenge goes something like this: Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”. Now, to anyone who even has a basic understanding of programming, this is super simple to solve using a modulus operator. But apparently many people applying for even entry-level development jobs cannot solve this problem. According to the article linked above, even one “senior developer” took 15 minutes to solve this problem. Earlier today, a friend posted something on Facebook that inspired what I think it another good, intermediate to difficult level programming question that also looks for pattern recognition. The relevant part of the post began by stating: “This year July has 5 Fridays 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays.” There is the question! It would go something like this: The month of July 2011 has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. Calculate the next 50 times there will be a month that has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. Woah, so how to go about solving this problem? Well, look at a picture of July 2011. Notice something interesting about this month in relation to the question? This month has 31 days (the most any month can have), begins on a Friday and ends on a Sunday. And that’s the solution! It’s any month with 31 days that begins on a Friday! With this in mind, it’s pretty easy to come up with a PHP solution: <?php $count = 0; $num_found = array(); while(count($num_found) < 50) { $count++; $ts = strtotime("$count months"); if(date("t", $ts) == 31 && date("N", strtotime(date("Y-m-01", $ts))) == 5) { $num_found[] = date("F Y", $ts); } } print_r($num_found); ?> Note that I make use of PHP’s strtotime function, because it is the Swiss Army Knife of date manipulation in PHP. This would need to be adapted for use in another language. So now tell me: what are some other questions you’ve been asked or asked in an interview?

So today, out of nowhere, Xcode 4 finally landed as an official release. After seemingly forever in beta, and me quipping more than once about it’s similarity to Duke Nukem Forever, Apple finally pulled the trigger and released it. But something changed. Xcode now has a price. And that has left me, as both a Mac user and a Mac developer, with a lot of questions. It’s either $4.99 if you’re not a registered, paid Apple developer, or free if you are a registered, paid Apple developer (with all its $99 per year price tag glory). Supposedly there’s some crazy accounting reason that they have to charge for it. This, of course, leaves open the possibility that Xcode will soon be free again once OS X 10.7 arrives. But, it also leaves open the possibility that Xcode will no longer be distributed with OS X and will always have a price tag. It may not even stay $4.99. It may be $49.99 or $499.99. There are additional questions, too. Does this mean that Apple is still distributing Xcode as a bundle with GNU GCC? Because there are things (such as MacPorts) that rely on the underlying foundation provided by the developer bundle that don’t actually use Xcode. Before, those were completely free. Now, they cost $4.99 unless they have split the underlying compiler from the IDE. And if they are still distributing it with GCC, that leads to all kinds of crazy interesting licensing questions. But I think the worst part is that there is now a barrier to entry, however low, to being a developer on a platform that is already a minority in market share. I can’t understand how Apple potentially believes that it is good and right to trade short term profits for long term growth in the number of potential developers. For the future of the Mac platform, I sure hope this isn’t their line of reasoning. So, let me tell you a little story. My first dabbling in programming came courtesy of QuickBASIC back in the MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 days. This was the late 80s or early 90s, so I would have been 10 or 11 at the time. I stumbled across the Qbasic environment included with MS-DOS by accident and found Nibbles. And, after playing it, I discovered that I could change things by making changes to the strange text presented on the screen. I could change colors and speeds. But it would be a couple of years before I really understood what I was doing. When Windows 95 came out (and along with it, Visual Basic 4), I talked my parents into getting me a copy. I don’t remember how much it cost but it was probably a lot because it was one of the few Christmas presents I got that year. But boy did I run with it. I’ve periodically felt guilty over that expense because I didn’t actually make anything really useful with it, but it was instrumental in furthering my education. Now I could do things on my computer far beyond what poor ol’ Qbasic was capable of. So I wrote lots of silly little programs. I put together a “family newsletter” one year that was installed and ran as a piece of software. I was pretty proud of that. I even wrote some software for my high school as part of a software development and AP Computer Science courses. Eventually, I would move on to other things. Other versions of Visual Basic, Java, C, a brief foray into LISP and Forth-based languages for programming MUDs, and eventually web programming. First in Perl, then in PHP. I even landed my first paying programming job while still in high school, writing applications for a local transit contractor. At first, these were Visual Basic applications. But by the time I left (August of 2000) everything was going to the web and so were we. But I can trace everything - my entire career, and my consuming passion for software engineering - back to Qbasic and Nibbles. A silly little game about a block snake, and a free development environment included with the operating system. Had I not stumbled on Qbasic and Nibbles, there’s a chance I would never have been a developer. This is not about $4.99. I spend more on coffee in a week than that. My worry is about that 11 year old kid out there somewhere who may never get the opportunity to stumble across Xcode or the sample applications in /Developer and realize the raw power they possess. This is an area where Apple, a company with billions in cash on hand, should be happy to show a loss. It would be to the benefit of their platform, both now and in the future. One of the great benefits of the Mac platform has been it’s low barriers of entry to developers. Sure, one could argue that the hardware is more expensive (and I could counter-argue that, for the quality of the equipment you are getting a bargain), but the development tools have always been freely available online and included with the machine. You could dabble in programming to your heart’s content. Sure, if you want to put something in the app store(s), you had to pay for admission, but there was nothing stopping you from getting all the way to that point, or even distributing your creations on your own. But this new trend of charging for the development tools - even if it is a paltry sum - sends, to me, a worrying signal about the course Apple intends to tread. They’ve now moved the gate from the last step to the first step. It’s a course that Microsoft, as above, once tread. Microsoft? They now give away a version of Visual Studio for free.