Marko Anastasov

Homeless of the web

2011-10-06T00:00:00-07:00

While reading Ryan Dahl’s recent rant I’ve noticed how he often jumps publishing sites. He used to be (and still is, sometimes) on LiveJournal back in the day. Obviously I’ve been into having your domain and owning your data and all that, but there’s something compelling about being homeless on the web.

When you own your domain and managing your stuff, you’re stuck with it for a long time—rarely you get the time and inspiration to change something. You usually need to make a little more effort in “promoting” it. Statistically it’s more likely that you will not renew your domain than that the free blogging platform will disappear. If they’re worth it, your creations will live their own life. These are all just words in the end.

Educators who are not engineers

2011-10-04T00:00:00-07:00

I think there are various degrees of disconnectedness from practice in people who educate and equip programmers. It seems to in descending order for academics, language inventors, framework authors and book writers. That’s a blatant generalization of course, but I think it applies in many cases.

I’ll go on, in fact: academics “assume time is free and infinite” (via DF), language inventors are nebulous, framework developers have not shipped a commercial application in years and book writers decide to write books when they’re through their second tutorial of a marketable new programming language.

The best things in software development happen when a maker finds himself in one of those roles. Books are a different case though, as they require a gift for teaching, and it’s not a coincidence that some of the best books are co-written by “serial book writers”.

I thought of this while I was searching about a new programming language, and I found one person’s praising blog post. It was full of logic which was on a purely philosophical level. Advanced features were treated with a single sentence. I browsed the archives a bit and found out that this guy had started to study the language about two months before that post. Fast forward a few months to present, he’s writing a book about it. Meanwhile he wrote one app in another language during the whole past year. I find that suspicious. Can you really trust your learning time with someone like that?

Kay's future

2011-09-12T00:00:00-07:00

Here’s an interesting talk by Alan Kay (via) about some exciting history in computing that he was part of but didn’t spread, how new is much harder than news, how the web was done by amateurs etc. Many, many ideas float.

Is Apple, with more cash than the US state, forever going to cater only to people’s primal computing needs? Why not try to make something new (in software) and educate people about it? I like my iPad-the-reading-device but sometimes it feels shallow.

Kay says that the desktop GUI that we have today was just a subset that he intended for children. He also brings up an “old” idea about making software objects communicate not by agreemeent, but by negotiation. That’s what we do between ourselves all the time. We’re a kind that has agreed on so little.

Anything that takes a big deal of agreement is likely to fail. A lot of things on the web are like that. The foundations are very primitive, and we cannot evolve particularly brilliant things on top of them. Latest reminder is the unfolding drama of Google Dash.

Knuth on multicore

2011-01-22T00:00:00-08:00

In this short video interview that we found, Donald Knuth throws an interesting opinion that I didn’t hear anyone expressing publicly:

I don’t know anybody who likes multicore except the people that are manufacturing the chips, and they’re saying “Well, now we’re giving you all this great hardware” … [the chip designers] are just passing the buck, they ran out of ideas and so they said “OK now it’s your problem”.

These multicores actually do a lot of important things well and so if you’re good in video games or you’re doing some calculations like physicists like to have… then multicore is a super thing. The trouble is, when I look at the last 2000 programs I’ve written, maybe 2 of them are helped by multicore.

While I like the idea of learning a new programming language that will change and expand my thinking, the idea of learning one “to tackle multi-core complexity” never felt right — as if we wanted that complexity in the first place. Once again, it’s worth remembering to practice the skill of taking a step back and seeing beyond what is served and marketed to us.

On the other hand, a professor from my university, who taught an OS course where we were writing concurrent programs in C++, said at the end of the semester that concurrency is a way of thinking, and if you really mastered it, you will approach and solve many problems that way. So it’s probably not an option to avoid entirely, and new languages and frameworks(?) should help us explore those grounds.

Active hammer

2010-08-01T00:00:00-07:00

Frank Chimero has yet another interesting post on the value of making new things through collaboration with people from other fields. In the introduction, he makes this good observation:

[Dino and He-Man] were my two favorite toys. Looking back at them, I played more with that shabby dinosaur toy than I did with He-Man. Because He-Man, well, had to be He-Man. That’s all he could be, and he could only do the things I saw on the television show. He couldn’t shoot lasers out of his eyes, he couldn’t bend time, he couldn’t eat bombs. But dinosaur could. Dino could do anything […] because I wasn’t playing in someone else’s story, letting someone else do my pretending for me.

To maintain a healthy state of mind, I believe that the same applies to anyone doing some kind of creative work. If you’re in it, you must get at least some pleasure in making things. From nothing. Most likely, it is why you’ve always wanted to do that.

If you’re a programmer, I think it’s essential to have something going on aside. Either a part-time startup, or an open source pet project, or reading a CS book on a topic you’re not familiar with. Otherwise, depending on your job but still, you might start wondering whatever happened to programming.

OpenID and OAuth

2010-07-23T00:00:00-07:00

About three years have passed since OpenID initiative was widely launched and from what I see, only hardcore tech geeks, a tiny fraction of Internet users, have acquired or figured out what their OpenID URL is. (My OpenID URL is this site’s URL, which redirects to myid.net via some meta tags.)

The password problem does remain. However, it is a problem that only we have, the fraction that has dozens of active accounts. In a way, it was expected that because of this everyone else would eventually understand and type in an OpenID. Ambitious.

Meanwhile, a data-sharing idea that started much more modest, OAuth, is being applied on a large scale. Its implementations, two-click sign ins with Twitter, Facebook, Google Account etc, in the context where these accounts provide value and integration with the corresponding service makes sense, are awesome. It’s becoming a standard for secure third-party application development through API access, latest example being Tumblr. But to use it just to solve the “login problem” is not appropriate.

This has proved that the data and, perhaps even more, friend portability problem is more important. There can’t be one true universal solution on the web. Rather, we should continue to standardize how to connect the nodes.

Surprise reminders

2010-07-18T00:00:00-07:00

Consider setting email reminders (via Google Calendar, for instance) for something in distant future. Eg “have you done x with this person”, “chase this client unless he finally paid”, “go to _” etc. It’s an interesting way to, not just remember, but check whether months later you’re still feeling the same way, and the conditions you’ve predicted still hold true.

Analog

2010-04-06T00:00:00-07:00

Recently I acquired an old SLR and a brand new turntable. Zenit 12aa from my parents’ wardrobe and a cheap and simple Roadstar TTR-8633.

The turntable happenned more by accident. I was walking through a local home store with a friend and spotted it for just 50 euros. I only have three records at the moment, the pictured rare compilation Nothing Short Of Total War, and old Jugoton Ace Of Spades and a Мелодия issued Rachmaninov’s piano Concerto No. 2, which can be found on the street here for 1 euro.

I’ve always been finding new music, but I’m slowing down recently. I’m still checking out new stuff, but when something grabs me, I need to give it some time and my full attention, otherwise it feels like a waste.

One assignment in high school was to write freely about what we’d do alone in the house. Two of us, who were talking about music most of the time, complained that we can’t imagine silly things that teacher thought we would want when the best thing to do is just lay down and listen to the music.

These days it seems that digital music works best as a preview and my walking soundtrack. In room settings, I never had or saw a non-distracting bridge between a hard drive and speakers. I’m still for CDs there. And now big vinyl records feel better than them. There’s something about taking the vinyl out of the card box, putting the needle down, changing sides. Anticipation, sense of time, the pleasure of process. I want that instead of instant availability.

The Zenit camera is pure joy. I’ve uploaded my first roll of film on Flickr. Most of them are overexposed (noob), but still the tone and DoF are beautiful. It’s just silly to have to pay like 500 euros for a DSLR to get decent lens and manual focus capabilities. And I’m not sure about the tone. By now you’re probably assuming that I have metaphysical appreciation for film and mechanical controls. Yes, I’m having fun and megapixels bore the shit out of me.

Again(st) patents

2010-03-06T00:00:00-08:00

I wasn’t completely honest in my previous post. As I was searching for the exact link to Amazon’s cookie patent on USPTO’s site, I did a search for ‘cookies’. Turns out there’s lots of other silly software patents about doing something with browser cookies, which is logically not far from patenting an arbitrary sequence of operation in RAM. But there are also patents about how to actually make cookies. Now in predefined shapes.

Recent explosion of patent lawsuits in mobile computing has provoked a lot of people to blog about software patents. But seriously, how are software patents different from any other? They’re all about how to make something. Is it because software is not a physical thing?

In fact I think that patents should not exist in general.

Some say that companies need to protect their inventions. There’s plenty of evidence that a company can be a leader in some field even if all the ingredients and methods are available to everybody else. A frequent example are pharmaceutical companies, who are thought to spend huge amounts of money in research, thus should be given a monopoly on a certain medication for some time. They deserve a monopoly? Perhaps a better question would be how did the society end up in a situation that such research should not be done through a joint effort at universities. It just doesn’t work trying to maximize profit at every step you make.

Perhaps patents made sense in late 19th century, but I don’t think that a legal ground that creates companies that make money from lawsuites is the way to go. Neither should individuals get passivizing royalties. It doesn’t matter if they go to the hair dresser every day or start a company; a false sense of reality can have bad consequences — mostly on the people who are around.

Good ideas should spread freely.

Ten minutes with software patents

2010-03-03T00:00:00-08:00

One of the news of last week was that Facebook was granted a U.S. patent on news feed. I share the opinion that software patents should not exist:

Here are some other insanities that I found quickly: