tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-366223862009-05-20T13:38:23.411-07:00A look at software engineering and other techie stuff. (Of course this is all my opinion, and not an official statement of my employer or anyone else)Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-21905764985273658612009-05-02T16:52:00.001-07:002009-05-02T18:23:13.135-07:00

There's been a lot of talk lately about how Newspapers are failing, and they in turn have enjoyed blaming the internet in general, and Google in particular for "stealing" their headlines. It's a funny argument seeing as Google sends them free traffic, but it remains popular amongst the old newspaper companies.To see how ludicrous it is, let's journey back 15 years to the days before the internet

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-11461474694460859772009-02-05T22:43:00.000-08:002009-02-05T23:06:39.266-08:00

Imagine if you will that you are the most powerful investor in the world. Imagine you're credit worthy for trillions of dollars. Imagine you could write laws that let you create any type of investment you dreamed. Imagine if you not only made money off your investments, but also made money off of any positive side effects of your investments.In other words, imagine you are the US

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-56037133177814076802008-05-29T22:06:00.000-07:002008-05-29T22:47:36.780-07:00

Today of course, over abundance of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere is the biggest concern facing the world. But will it still be in the future?Carbon is an extremely useful element. It's in our food, our oil, and is the exclusive ingredient in diamonds. It's in wood furniture and houses, and it's in plastic. Even steel and stone contain lots of carbon.So in 100 years, when we're building

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-79248230844707527572008-01-28T21:49:00.000-08:002008-01-28T22:55:38.375-08:00

What if people were as ignorant about cars as they used to be about computers...- Hello, this is XYZ car repair shop and my name is Carl. How can I help you today?> Hi, my car's light won't stop flashing.- Ok, can you tell me which light?> I don't know which one! I'm not "a car person" so I don't know that much about it. I just know there's a light flashing.- Hmm... Are you talking about a

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-11898030696790315522007-12-13T23:29:00.000-08:002007-12-14T00:10:15.994-08:00

So life at Google is great. The past week Deadra has been out of town so I've been spending a lot of time there. Three great meals a day (I've had lamb 3 times this week) and a midnight snack. Not that I'm working until midnight; I'm just playing board games with some of the other Googlers. On the days I'm not there so late I bring Chachi. Today the big discussions were the winter trip and

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-89247623715692117422007-09-29T16:12:00.000-07:002007-09-29T16:22:44.035-07:00

It's been a busy week. Google has a ton of training stuff for Nooglers. A lot of it consists of learning secret stuff that may never be spoken of with the outside world. Fun stuff. But I've been more impressed by the real difference in attitude developers have here.Every company says "you should write unit tests for all your code". This is the first time I've actually had training on how to

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-45308930748612366832007-09-17T21:52:00.000-07:002007-09-17T22:01:09.226-07:00

To be more precise, I'm a Noogler, an endearing term that sticks with new Google employees for their first month. I even get a funny Noogler hat to wear to the beer bash this Friday.So far I must say I'm very impressed. I'm writing this from my new laptop, which is far more capable than the development machine I had before. My linux box at work has one of the biggest screens I've ever seen (So

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-29426434979002984992007-08-29T21:22:00.000-07:002007-08-29T21:53:43.322-07:00

So I realize that I've been really bad at keeping the content rate of this blog anywhere close to reasonable. Still, there seem to be a couple dozen hardy souls who took my advise and subscribed to my feed. As a reward for your patience I have some big news that will break here first!!!In two weeks I start my new job, at Google!!!Cool, eh?I just got my offer last week, and I officially accepted

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-26907354629737592052007-07-22T22:41:00.000-07:002007-07-22T22:53:54.988-07:00

Hi all,I was rooting around my old files today and I found my undergraduate thesis. A quick search on Google found very little mention of it and no copies of it at all. In an effort to share my research with the world, here it is:Generation of Data Paths in Synthetic CircuitsThe idea, for those who care, is to generate electronic circuits that have desirable characteristics. In addition the

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-66438440399003978272007-04-27T17:04:00.000-07:002007-05-29T16:56:58.678-07:00

Once upon a time, a few thousand years ago (or less if you don't believe the world is that old) there were 4 cavemen sitting around discussing the world around them.One man pointed to a rock which had a hole in the top. Filling this hole was water. He said to the other men, "I wonder why the water stays in the rock instead of leaving."The oldest man, Bob, suggested "Well I think the water is

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-80910368803620884332007-03-23T17:18:00.000-07:002007-03-23T18:20:11.590-07:00

As a software engineer, I sometimes find myself envying my computer. It is so perfectly capable of making decisions based solely on data. It doesn't ever have a gut feeling or a prejudice that it uses to make decisions. Just the facts. Even when a piece of software uses heuristic algorithms to model instincts, it's still all numbers at the deepest level.Now I don't wish to be a computer. I

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-16786388093777466112007-03-06T15:37:00.000-08:002007-03-06T16:31:26.886-08:00

Let me tell you a story about a man named Jim and his piano shop. It was called Jim's Fine Pianos and it sold only the most luxurious pianos. Many people would come to visit the store just to see the beautiful grand pianos. It was known as the best place to shop for the best pianos.Now Jim liked having such a prestigious shop, but one day his brother Bill suggested they should take a closer

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-9497452277531923432007-01-11T11:52:00.000-08:002007-01-11T12:03:49.469-08:00

A lot of computer security folk spend their time trying to generate truly random numbers. Most random numbers in a computer are just a really complex math equation run multiple times. The results look random, but if you know the equation you can guess the next number by doing nothing more than running the equation again.Random numbers are used all the time to generate keys to keep things secret

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-38638207032729498422007-01-04T10:43:00.000-08:002007-01-04T11:29:20.039-08:00

Sorry for the delay between posts... You all know how December can be, which combined with a ton of work to do before the holidays resulted in a less than any contribution level to the blog...So I've been thinking about how programming teams should be selected. As I've whined about before they are far to often selected according to the management structure that evolved out of the previous

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-1164855319726488192006-11-29T18:07:00.000-08:002006-11-29T19:02:21.506-08:00

So yesterday I got to spend most of the day in a "Teamwork and Collaboration" class. Woo Hoo. It was 7 hours, and contained about 2 hours worth of information, but it came with free breakfast/lunch/snacks and I suppose that spending some time interacting with teammates is a good thing.The main idea of the course was to identify everyone's "Myers-Briggs" personality type. Basically you

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-1163818345234797652006-11-17T17:05:00.000-08:002006-11-17T18:52:25.246-08:00

(Yes labour has a 'u'. I'm Canadian dammit! Without 'u', there can be no honour!)Companies go to amazing ends when it comes to finding the right person for a job. They'll spend hours creating a job description, they'll post it in hundreds of spots. They'll take it to universities and trade conferences. They'll parse through thousands of resumes. Then there's the dozens of phone interviews.

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-1163638927550274192006-11-15T16:22:00.000-08:002006-11-15T17:02:07.673-08:00

I've had the opportunity to live in two of the worlds greatest geek-meccas: Redmond Washington, and Silicon Valley California. Both of them are dominated by their high-tech employers and geeky inhabitants, and they are far more similar to each other than to most cities. But they also have some significant differences.I first lived in Silicon Valley as an intern during the height of the

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-1163006060301782092006-11-08T09:10:00.000-08:002006-11-08T09:33:31.766-08:00

Have you ever wondered where most technology companies are? I did. I've seen maps of the biggest 10, or the biggest 10 in silicon valley, but I wanted a bigger overview. I also was looking for something fun to do with the Google maps API so I put something together:Map of largest 100 technology companies by market capitalizationI got the market cap and address information from Google finance

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-1162857845708963562006-11-06T15:07:00.000-08:002006-11-06T16:09:25.996-08:00

Software Engineers are known as a rather slack group of individuals when it comes to traditional "professionalism". We aren't a 9 to 5 type of people, and we don't appreciate suits. Many of us would rather have an interesting job than an powerful title, and we idolize the start-up of 3 guys over the CEO of 10,000.So why aren't we as professional as others, or perhaps the better question is why

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-1162331508434958762006-10-31T12:46:00.000-08:002006-10-31T13:51:48.480-08:00

Programming is a truly creative art. Sure there's rare times when you could hire a monkey to pound on a keyboard for the same effect, but software is written on computers by engineers who can make computers do simple tasks for them. This means that any repetitive, dull, and automatable task is usually relegated to the computer. All that's left is the creative tasks.A lot of software

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-1162253025676061222006-10-30T15:38:00.000-08:002006-10-30T16:03:45.686-08:00

Since the idea of computers and robots was conceived by some geek in a cave people have been talking about the day that computers would be smarter than us. Some have written books about the utopia that will exist when the robots meet our every desire without us ever having to work again. Others talk of the day when the computers fight back and try to destroy the inefficient humans. But in all

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-1161840938469965892006-10-25T22:23:00.000-07:002006-10-25T22:36:47.290-07:00

Ok, so with that intro out of the way, I figure I should post a real entry that is both technical, and won't scare away anyone who came over from The Tweedles. Let's talk about the new browsers that came out this week. There's a brand new Internet Explorer 7.0, and also a new Firefox 2.0. Now a lot of you are still IE folks, and if you haven't tried Firefox you should. It's easy enough to

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36622386.post-1161838507533665932006-10-25T21:52:00.000-07:002006-10-25T22:23:07.770-07:00

So what am I doing starting another blog? Don't me and my wife already have such a thing? Sure, but the people who read that thing aren't often the type of people who want to hear me rant about the state of modern programming languages, or the ways in which software engineers break the traditional labour model. These are the types of things that are often on my mind, so I figured rather than

Ze Acehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05583795364433054412noreply@blogger.com0