I added two confluences to my list. Victor and I spent three days in the beginning of September in Northern Ontario and we logged two successful visits. You may read the full trip reports 50 N 85 W and 49 N 83 W. We are planning more confluence visits, some of them may involve quite a bit of snowshoeing.
On unrelated note, I'm starting to worry about future of some filesystems. Companies behind two brilliant filesystems - XFS and ReiserFS are going through hard times now. Hans Reiser - founder of Namesys and creator of namesake filesystem is arrested on suspicion of murder. SGI - sponsor of XFS - filed for bankruptcy.
Unfortunately, there is not much going in filesystem world lately. Subject area is actually extremely complex and very conservative (it is your data at stake after all). Microsoft took WinFS out of Vista and the only notable advancement I can think of is ZFS by Sun - not exactly new but it is getting a lot of traction lately.
One of the most interesting reads lately were answers of several famous programmers to a Polish student's questions, published on student's blog. Torvalds, Stroustrup, Norvig, Bray, Gosling and others share their thoughts on next big things, best books, most useful skills forprogrammers, and many other topics.
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Submitted by frolov on Sun, 2006-10-15 22:03.
I put some of my photos to two photo hosting sites: Zooomr and Flickr. Zooomr is nice but until recently its main advantage was geotagging, but the other day Flickr announced geotagging capability too and full-blown Yahoo maps beat API-exposed Google Maps hands down. So I will probably settle on Flickr.
If you know Russian language you may also read my blog on LiveJournal.
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Submitted by frolov on Wed, 2006-09-13 11:24.
GNU linker on Fedora Core 5 is horribly slow on moderately large C++ projects with debug information. Apparently, this is a known problem. This is frustrating to wait more than one minute for a linkage of a project that normally links n a matter of seconds. Tried to run yum update but that did not solve the problem - and package download was very slow. I watch this PR and wait for the patch.
New glibc 2.4 now has a detection of mulitply freed memory. While this is not a full-blown Purify or my favourite Valgrind but this introduces almost no overhead in runtime and is constantly on. Nice work!
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Submitted by frolov on Wed, 2006-09-13 11:16.
Fedora Core Linux's official UI theme is called Bluecurve and distro maintainers try to keep it consistent across different desktop frameworks (KDE and Gnome that is).
I stumbled upon a Bluecurve page on FC Wiki. New isometric icons look nice... but only where isometric look is appropriate.
It's kind of stupid to have isometric icons for "back", "forward", "fast forward" and so on. Consistency is good, but if you have to tilt your head or rotate an icon mentally even a little bit, this is not good for usability at all. And usability is really what is important at the end of the day.
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Submitted by frolov on Mon, 2006-08-07 18:53.
Business community in Ottawa-Gatineau region likes to refer to their region as Silicon Valley North (or Canadian Silicon Valley). At the same it is recognized that National Capital Region has an awful lot to achieve to be at least comparable to venerable Silicon Valley near San Francisco. If I could get a buck or two every time local business press like Ottawa Business Journal has an article on the topic, that would be a nice chunk of a pocket change. The truth is: nobody here really has any sustainable ideas on how to make dreams come true. The latest idea I read about was to lure some big chip manufacturer with tax breaks and incentives to build a fab here.
Paul Graham recently wrote a great essay How to be a Silicon Valley. I encourage you to read it in full - it is worth it (as almost any Paul's essay), but basically it boils down to following: there should be a university (or a number of them) that produces nerds. The environment should be nerd-friendly. There should be rich people that are willing to invest into startups. A discussion on slashdot highlights few other factors that I think are relevant but omitted by Paul.
Let's see how Ottawa fares.
First of all, I believe that weather/climate is a very important (and probably most basic) ingredient of the brew. Neither rich people, nor nerds like to live in swampy, foggy, cold or chilly or otherwise uncomfortable climate. Ok, this is not entirely true, as there are historical places that may not have a great weather but are financial centers by tradition (Moscow, London) or large academic centers forcefully created by government (Novosibirsk in Russia). Now, remember that joke about Great White North? "In Canada there are ten months of great weather in a year, and for remaining two months you cannot play a hockey". In Ottawa, at least, this is not that bad. One problem is that we do have winter. If you are into skiing, skating, snowboarding, there are plenty of rinks, ice fields, ski trails in region itself and rather good hills within couple of hours driving distance. If you are not into that, you do not get outside too often - maybe only to fuel your car and quickly cross a parking lot. However spring, summer and autumn in Ottawa region are lovely. Though weather is a little bit too unstable sometimes, when it is bad - it is tolerable, but when it is good, it is really, really good.
And there are tons of things to do in non-winter seasons: cycling, jogging, canoing, kayaking, kite surfing, volleyball, hiking, camping. Lots of ball parks, bike trails, hiking trails, provincial parks around Ottawa-Gatineau region, uncountable lakes and rivers with rapids is just a Heaven on Earth for an active type. And nerds, contrary to popular belief, do belong to that active type.
Another, and probably most important factor is a presence of world-class academic institutions. Do not get me wrong, University of Ottawa and Carleton University are both good, but they are just not good enough to re-create Silicon Valley or anything similar. This is the first gap that has to be fixed to make Canadian Silicon Whatever a reality. How? Frankly, I do not know. But the first step would be to lure world-class professors to these university, by money, or by immigration incentives. Proponents of Ottawa technology cluster boast a that Ottawa is a home of many research institutions and laboratories. But most of these are financed by government. And government workers in Canada (actually everywhere, but especially in Canada) are extremely risk-averse. Students without families and responsibility burden are able to create startups. Government workers - umm, no.
It's not that there are little nerds here. I see a lot of smart and hard-working tech people, but probably concentration is not enough. Besides, being smart and hard-working does not mean that you are able to do a scientific research. The role of academia cannot be overestimated.
Now let's talk about availability of money. It is not a big secret that canadian venture capitalists are relatively cash-strapped. So canadian start-ups usually raid Boston VCs for money. As Paul Graham noted, VCs like hold tabs on things and invest into companies within 1 hour driving distance or so. While Boston is certainly closer to Ottawa than Sand Hill road, this is definitely not even as close as desired. Given a choice of a rather good Startup in Boston Area and somewhat better startup in Ottawa, Boston VC inevitably ends up funding bostonian startup. Besides, Boston is everything that Silicon Valley is not and vice versa. Boston's priorities in business are: process, serivce, stable sales figures, contracts. Silicon Valley, on the other hand emphasizes innovation, coolness, explosive growth, and risk taking.
Canadian tax law is horrendous and pretty unfriendly to venture capital. And government course here seems to be very chaotic (just search the net for "Labour Sponsored Venture Funds" to get an idea). Plus, United States have Nevada and Delaware, what does Canada have?
There are many little things that may look unimportant at first glance but it all adds up. For example, it is a common practice to include employment contract clauses, claiming everything employee creates an employer property, even if it is done outside of work hours and company premises. California law explicitly forbids that.
So here is a verdict. So you want to have a Silicon Valley in Ottawa, eh. Ok, G-d gave us a great weather and nature, and municipality done a good job, developing infrastructure. Now roll up the sleeves and get to work on everything else that is needed: academia, legislation and money!
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Submitted by frolov on Sun, 2006-05-28 00:57.
I wonder why virtually every article about telecommuting or virtual office mentions Starbucks or just some generic "coffee shop" or "cafe"?
This is ridiculous. I wonder if I ever can work remotely. You see, I hate coffee.
Even if I loved coffee, I probably could not work for more than thirty minutes in any coffee shop.
And I guess coffee shop owners do not like people hanging out for hours with laptop, occupying valuable tables. If I was a coffee shop owner I'd kick a client 30 minutes after last order. And do not tell me about "alienating customers", I'd rather loose one patron, but serve other three, who otherwise would not find a free table.
Well, maybe kicking them out is too harsh. I guess cutting their Wi-Fi access after 30 minutes will do just as good.
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Submitted by frolov on Fri, 2006-05-05 17:06.
Usage of static analysis tools in the software development is new black.
Tools were around for years but recent advancement in both algorithms and raw processing horsepower made them practical.
There are a lot of tools available on the market, of varying quality and price. There is quite a number of so called open software 'source code scanners' that will go over your source looking for suspicious places. Hit rate is usually too low to justify their application to large code bases.
However there is one thing you can do to get a boost in bug discovery rate, sometimes even for free.
Upgrade your compiler.
New versions of compilers are usually more picky and more sophisticated, do more analysis.
Recently I was compiling open source project that builds ok, with gcc 3.2, but miserably fails with gcc 4.0.2. Newer gcc issued legitimate errors, many of which are apparent logical defects.
If you are a manager or just a developer who wants to make code cleaner, remember this. Before you spend money on expensive static analysis tool, make sure you clean up warnings issued by your compiler first. Upgrade your compiler. Rinse and repeat. Now when you have your code that is squeaky clean for your compiler go and buy static analysis tool.
Because there are only so many things compiler may find. Commercial tools have frameworks built specifically for defect detection whereas any non-trivial compiler warnings are mostly byproducts of their optimization passes. And by their nature compilers must be very, very conservative in their optimization, so they will never be as aggressive.
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Submitted by frolov on Tue, 2006-03-21 12:00.
Brad Feld announced that Boulder Software Club is planning an event to discuss usage of RSS, first of all in enterprise.
For a long time, I actually wanted to write my thoughts about RSS and its place in technology landscape, so Brad's post gave me a reason to finally overcome my laziness (heh). I'll start by my take on some topics that will be discussed there.
Why RSS instead of e-mail – isn’t it just the same thing? Isn’t this just for bloggers?
No, RSS is not the same as e-mail, though similar. RSS is better suited for some use cases, not only for technical but for psychological reasons too. If I wear reader's hat, I strongly prefer RSS over a a mailing list, because if I loose or cancel my mail account for some reason, I need to reroute all my subscriptions which is tedious and error-prone, whereas with RSS, I just need to carry my OPML around. Subscribing to and unsubscribing from mailing lists is more evolved than same actions with RSS feeds and usually requires two-step process. Second big advantage is that I get precisely what I subscribed to in my blogroll, and mailboxes tend to become spam targets. As an author I may prefer RSS to mailing list because my (potential) readers prefer RSS to e-mail (see above).
RSS is not just for bloggers, it may be used in all areas that needs some kind of periodic update protocol. Software packages may use RSS to get information about available updates. Microsoft is going to use RSS for synchronization.
What are typical use-cases of RSS applied to the enterprise ...
Take for example a typical situation in corporate environment: you need to propagate some kind of a knowledge but you are just not sure about target audience. For example, you are a software developer and finished some important feature. Now you may need to send a notice to your immediate manager, that's a no-brainer, but then things start to get complicated. Documentation needs to be updated but you just do not know who in documentation team is now responsible for that area, so you send e-mail to Documentation Team leader or to the whole documentation team. Now, QA manager needs to know about feature too to test it, check. But oops, you forgot sales engineers, some of them will be caught with 'deer in the lights' look when curious customers ask them about that new feature. Your immediate manager and QA manager consider this feature (and good tests' results) as an important milestone so your e-mail gets forwarded to VP of engineering. Twice. VP of engineering wonders if VP of marketing may need to know about that feature, and whether it will help in lead generation, so she forwards it just in case...
As an employee of medium or large corporation you often faced with a dilemma: you do no want to send e-mails to too many people - some of them may not be that interested and you appreciate their attention span, so you do not send your e-mail to too many addresses. On the other hand, you may not know that some of your colleagues need exactly that information, right now, so you do not want to miss some important addressees. RSS transfers this burden to the shoulder of your readers and they are usually in better position to know what kind of information they need.
If you are a manager you may choose a subscription style that fits your management style. Control freaks may subscribe to every single feed and keep tabs on everything, and fans of delegation may read only blogs of their key subordinates and higher management, hoping that if anything interesting pops up, it will be reblogged by one of the bloggers they read (analog of e-mail forwarding in the RSS world).
RSS is also beneficial if you want employees to roll out ideas more freely and often. The thing is, people generally do not want to send non-critical e-mails to others, because they believe they may be annoying, but will happily blog them. It's like instead of approaching you bosses with your idea one-by-one you speak about it at company lunch and all who listen to you, know about it (What's that sound? It's an analogy police knocking on my door).
Posted in Personal Technology | Software frolov's blog | 2 comments
Submitted by frolov on Wed, 2006-02-15 23:37.
I use Drupal to run this site. While Drupal looks like a bit of an overkill for running just a personal blog, I don't want to switch to any other blogging engine now (No, not even to trendy WordPress, thank you).
And of course Drupal has its long-standing annoying quirks. One of them is a deletion of a comment spam - you have to hit a delete button for each comment individually - which results in a horrible user experience when you have Web-based interface. Fortunately there is a workaround.
One piece of advice though - change URL from the article to something which cannot be guessed or, better yet, add authentication. I hope Drupal maintainers will get the message and turn this workaround into feature.
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Submitted by frolov on Sat, 2006-02-11 22:01.
Probably the most interesting part of web log statistics for my site is a page with keywords that people use in search engines to come to my pages. The most popular search is for information about C++ string streams. Ironically, this blog does not provide much help here, though I put some useful links on my front page.
Over the course of my career I bumped into many different technical problems. Often these problems required a lot of time or mental effort to investigate. Needless to say, web search engine made that task way easier, but sill there were problems I had to spend considerable time on. Once I had this blog I have started to put some results of my troubleshooting sessions, primarily as a sign of gratitude to all the people who do the same.
So, when I look at search term statistics, I am always glad to find that people came to the solution at my site, using search keywords describing their problems, like the problem of putting spaces to LD_PRELOAD environment variable or Coloured bash prompt screwing multiline input in a terminal.
Maybe separate articles or pages instead of blog entries is more appropriate for that kind of texts, but I am pretty happy with the present format now.
In near future I am going to post a couple of entries explaining problems related to GNU C library application binary interface (ABI) revisions and incompatibilities and problems with C++ language ABI.
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Submitted by frolov on Wed, 2006-02-08 23:30.
