Mob Programming

 

Mob Programming

Better Ops Patterns and Practices

Dev-Ops, anyone?

ice bucket

Talia challenged Yofi and her mom; her mom challenged me.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=671430366283410

https://www.facebook.com/mitchwyle/posts/10152638658479269

Night Watch keeps getting better

James Mickens’ column in usenix magazine keeps getting better.  This month’s riff on systems programmers is spot-on.  Here is a representative excerpt:

I need mission-critical people; I need a person who can wear night-vision goggles
and descend from a helicopter on ropes and do classified things to protect my freedom while country music plays in the background. A systems person can do that.

Or, this one:

When it’s 3 A.M., and you’ve been debugging for 12 hours,  and you encounter a virtual static friend protected volatile  templated function pointer, you want to go into hibernation and  awake as a werewolf and then find the people who wrote the  C++ standard and bring ruin to the things that they love. The  C++ STL, with its dyslexia-inducing syntax blizzard of colons and angle brackets, guarantees that if you try to declare any reasonable data structure, your first seven attempts will result  in compiler errors of Wagnerian fierceness:
Syntax error: unmatched thing in thing from std::nonstd::__
map<_Cyrillic, _$$$dollars>const basic_string< epic_
mystery,mongoose_traits &lt; char>, __default_alloc_<casual_
Fridays = maybe>>
One time I tried to create a list<map<int>>, and my syntax  errors caused the dead to walk among the living.

It just keeps getting better.  Read the whole thing.

Day Trip to San Jose

I was in business meetings at eBay’s North (PayPal) campus today.  Many people who saw me in the hall ways scheduled phone meetings since I was booked up and had not extra time.  There is huge pent up demand for face meetings after my long absence.

When I arrived on campus, eBay’s Acme Labs was conducting octo-copter experiments in the parking lot.  I hope we get FAA clearance to deliver items to our customers before the evil everything store does.

Cubical decorations in building 15

Great meetings; lots more work to do.

Give up

http://www.theonion.com/articles/fasttalking-computer-hacker-just-has-to-break-thro,32000/

Best news all week!

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/report-google-to-end-forced-g-integration-drastically-cut-division-resources

The evil search giant ESG stops its own slow suicide.

Brilliant New-Age Humbug Generator

Back in the 1990’s we had a fantastic ecommerce web site generator someone coded up in perl.  It took random National Geographic pictures of bizarre primitive individuals for the executive team and random first-Internet bubble buzz word sentences for the mission, purpose, products, and services sub-pages.  It randomly generated some fantastic content-free web sites that were often better than real ones.  It was very inspirational.  It was called athenanow.com but alas, it was short-lived and cannot be found in archive.org.
Now we have a Deepak Chopra new-age web site generator:

It is wonderful.  And the author found another one for generating and tweeting smaller random New-Age BS here.

If anyone reading this knows where I can find the code or resurrected athenanow.com site, please contact me.

Spring Break in San Diego

Apartment on the beach (more photos here; video)

 

 

Sea World (more photos here)

 

 

UCSD Tour (more here)

 

 

San Diego Zoo (more photos here)

 

 

 

 

Berkeley Hall of Science & visiting friends in Fremont (more photos here)

 

Videos:

• splashing orcas
• play with dolphins 1
• play with dolphins 2
• Dolphins play with Frisbee

Tolerance and Coexistence

As a big fan of Ayan Hirsi Ali I was, of course, disappointed by the dogmatic intolerance of Brandeis University when they withdrew their invitation for her to speak on the topic of women’s rights.  It was therefore a pleasant surprise for me to discover that the Wall St Journal has published excerpts of her talk.

Read and learn!

Abridged Version of Remarks:  “Here is what I would have said.”

What aligns the timelines?

During this wonderful explosive “bubble time” of free social networking services we are actively giving away any semblance of privacy, propriety, and intellectual property to any and all who offer convenient services.  Each new social application produces a must-have, niche paradigm of connecting and communicating that leads us to sign up for their “free” service into which we cheerfully pour the most-intimate details of our lives.

But how can we go back and search for that great SMS, post, comment, picture, email message, thread, URL, or tweet we made two years ago?  Where is the unified history of activity?  When email dominated our interactions we could use desktop search or email search to find the thread.  Now, however, there is no unifying index that aligns our communications by timeline.

Will a slick, new “octopus” cloud-based service come into existence that tries to unify the services we use?   One hint at where we are going is this new cloud storage unifying system.

It abstracts the underlying services into one big disk in the sky.  You can peak under the hood to tweak and see what it is storing on which service, but it unifies them for you conveniently and allows you to use them all as one big disk.

Will the evil search giant’s “dashboard” evolve into such a unified timeline view?  Will their chrome browser crawl your history at other services (facebook, twitter) to mine out your posts, tweets, threads?

Which application or service aligns these disparate timelines?

Empower your Minions

 

device.modeOfTransport.on('changed', function(signal) { if (signal.previous === 'driving' && signal.current !== 'driving') { device.notifications.createNotification(car is parked here: ('
                + signal.location.latitude + ', ' + signal.location.longitude + ')' ).show(); } });

 

JavaScript may not be the best way to talk to your minions.  Wolfram Alpha’s natural  language seems more appropriate.  But now I shall never need to look for my car again.  It is likely someone has already written the JavaSript code for you to tell your minion what you need.

Putin, Snowden, Ukraine, incompetent NSA

Instant speed reading -- It works!

After years in “stealth mode” as a start-up, Spritz finally launched its application and within a few days dozens of clones popped up all over the interwebs.  Late to the game (as always) I stumbled upon the “squirt” bookmarklet, which is a nominal (but un-polished “quirky”) JavaScript re-implementation of the simple Spritz algorithm.  There are already many browser plug-ins and we can expect a calibre plug-in very soon.

The “spritz” algorithm is very easy to implement and shockingly effective.  I anticipate getting past 500 words per minute after a few hours of reading.

The first time I ran squirt I was shocked to discover that my most-comfortable “spritz" style reading speed is 440 – 460 words per minute.  My normal reading speed is about 100.

Like most of us, I have a large and growing collection of unread ebooks waiting for me to read.  Calibre can convert them to HTML or text and I shall now be able to read them 5x faster.   Awesome!

Supervising Smartphone Sensor Sucking Software?

Sensors

The amazing sensors in our phones track where we are, what we’re doing, what we see and hear, even our stress levels and pulse rate.

  

And the cool software we run in our phones helps us navigate, avoid traffic, communicate with our family, friends, and business associates, stay informed, and be entertained.  Sound, video, vibration, interaction, immersion, augmented reality….  It’s awesome.

Privacy is Dead

But the price we pay for this connected life is a complete loss of any modicum of privacy to institutions, companies, individuals, and artificial intelligences to whom we would not choose to surrender such intimate and private information.

 

Take Control with XPrivacy!

 

When it entered the phone wars, the evil search giant (ESG) used the idealistic and altruistic Open Source movement to mobilize the “crowd” of idealistic, motivated individuals who want to collaborate on developing systems together, where the information and intellectual property is shared freely.  The ESG created AOSP the Android Open Source Project, which they later treacherously abandoned to earn more money in the Phone Wars.

 

But the AOSP lives on!  And noble, rebel coders still produce cool software.  Here is a great example.  This application enables you (the phone owner) to decide which information the applications installed in your phone are allowed to see and use.  It feeds the applications fake or no data from sensors if you don’t want them to know where you are, who is in your contact list, with whom you speak on the phone, etc.  You decide which sensor and private data of yours the application is allowed to have.  Of course it’s free.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bokhorst.xprivacy.installer

“Double war crime:” attacks on children from behind civilian human shields

Soon after the final bell rang, sending children home from public schools across Southern Israel on Wednesday 3/12/14, a rain of about 60 rockets, fired from Gaza, began falling on civilian centers.

Hiding behind a dense civilian population (war crime number 1) the bad guys launched rockets at civilian kids walking home from school (war crime number 2).

War Crime #1: hiding behind civilians to launch rockets

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another rocket attack from an olive grove in Gaza Wednesday 3/12/14:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The civilian targets for these rockets were the kids walking home from school (war crime).  Below is a photo of the blast from a rocket that landed in Sderot.

I cannot imagine having kids walk home while under rocket fire.  I cannot imagine why we reward double-war-crimes by paying cash to the kleptocrats who order these crimes.

200 million identities compromised via Experian

 

Experian gives ID Theft Service 200 Million Consumer Records

…each page containing at least ten different records full of personal data on multiple individuals — including my correct records. Revealing the more sensitive data for each record — including the date of birth and Social Security number…

Boston Business Trip

I flew a red-eye coach non-stop from Seattle to Boston.  The timing is very convenient because I was able to work all day Monday, have dinner with the family, then head to the airport.  However coach seating, pressed up against strangers is not the most amenable place to sleep.

The 737-300 had a “Russell Wilson, chief football officer” paint scheme 

 

 

 

I snapped some shots of the sunrise over Boston during landing

Boston Logan Airport is a big, inconvenient, slow-moving, inefficient airport with bad signage and poor facilities.

The polar vortex was in full-swing.  Outside temperatures where 19 degrees F (-7 C).

After dinner I attended a fun talk at MIT by eBay’s Hunch CTO Matt Gattis.  It was relatively well-attended and I met some great summer intern prospects.

Matt spoke about the Hunch taste graph and the team’s journey from Python to C, to assembler and then on to mobile applications as they coded their real-time machine-learning system.

The next day I interviewed a bunch of candidates at PayPal’s new Boston office at 1 International Center.  It is a gorgeous facility with a beautiful indoor fountain that drops water down from the ceiling of a big atrium in the central lobby.

 

View from inside the office out over the Charles river.  There is another view of the harbor on the other side.

 

There is a “Tom Brady” conference room.

 

The summer intern candidates were young, inexperienced, bright, motivated, facile at code, very deep in python idioms and libraries, and fun to interview.  I am hoping we can grab a bunch of them this summer.

 

Instead of staying at an expensive hotel, I saved my company some money and crashed at my sister’s house near-by, where we celebrated her birthday.