Drums of Peace

Quote Of The Day: Perseverance

2009-11-13T22:51:00.001-07:00

The path is indestructible. Sooner or later things turn up again. One of the things that turn up is a plan to destroy the past.

-- Attributed to Borges in Tango

Quote Of The Day: Creativity

2009-11-10T10:11:00.001-07:00

That's what you call an evolution: create a mess and then make it extinct.

-- Y.

Occam's Razor

2009-11-08T11:32:00.002-07:00

Made my day.

(Image credit: http://thereifixedit.com/)

I am writing you to let you know of this exciting opportunity

2009-10-19T11:18:00.000-07:00

Here's a rhetorical question: how do I tell a recruiter that repeatedly sends solicitations to my work account (which is, by the way, unpublished) that he's an idiot, without offending him much?

Something tells me that the person violating the biggest recruiting no-no is too thick to listen to any arguments, so for now he goes to /dev/null. Alternative suggestions welcome.

Quote Of The Day: Express Delivery

2009-10-09T15:41:00.001-07:00

Prayer is the best way to meet the Lord. Trespassing is faster.

-- here

Android Market Updates: I Give Up

2009-10-04T22:51:00.005-07:00

As far as I'm concerned, the main problem with Android Market is drowning in an ocean of shit.

The "default" Android Market is useless - you have to be actively looking for something in order to find it, and it has to be "top". Thus useful, but niche applications go unnoticed. There is no search. There is no feed.

cyrket.com, on the other hand, does provide a feed. Good luck using it, though. Daily volume is over a hundred items, you've missed a weekend - it's over 300, you've had a busy week - it's well over a thousand. Most of it is farts and sexy lady whatever, repeated every few hours (yes, developers have realized that you have to release a new version pretty much every day to ~~stay on top~~ avoid total oblivion).

I've been using the cyrket.com RSS Feed since the day it appeared, but today I'm calling it quits - the signal/noise ration has become loathsome, and I'd rather miss something useful than spend hundreds of non-renewable hours of my life sifting through junk that is flowing at ever increasing speed.

What I would ideally like to see (consider this a free idea) is an Android Market notification service that would allow me to

notify me of totally new applications only;
notify me of new releases of applications I've subscribed to;
allow to blacklist publishers, or, even better,
allow to blacklist anything based on regular expression patterns.

Then it can become more or less usable. Not before.

Quote Of The Day: Life

2009-10-04T14:17:00.004-07:00

Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

-- Joseph Brodsky

Splendours and Miseries of Hotlinking

2009-09-30T12:21:00.003-07:00

"Hotlinking is bad", we are told. "Hotlinking is the bandwidth theft", we are told. Vices and evils of hotlinking are described in gory details at The Source.

But wait a second... What if I want to promote someone's work, and that someone is someone I've never met, have no commercial interest vested into, nor desire to communicate with, it's just I like their work and think they deserve their fifteen minutes of fame?

Should I copy the picture to avoid stealing their bandwidth? Well, but copying is stealing, we are told.

Should I provide a plain hyperlink? But with the information density of today's Internet a link will most probably just go unnoticed.

So I'm just going to settle with the assumption that the bandwidth "stolen" is not actually stolen, but is, in fact, a fair price paid for the exposure the author gets. Provided the link is not disemboweled (as, say, http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2605/3964180788_0627f1c922.jpg) and backlink is readily available - just like the image above.

Now go nudge this photographer and make him give you a chance to order his prints.

(Image Credit: Cullen :P)

Quote Of The Day: OOP

2009-09-28T19:43:00.000-07:00

The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

-- Joe Armstrong

Quote Of The Day: Dancing

2009-09-27T21:06:00.002-07:00

You may be a king or a little street sweeper, but sooner or later you dance with the reaper!

-- Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

Quote Of The Day: History

2009-09-26T13:42:00.002-07:00

History is a constant race between the invention and catastrophe. Education helps but it's never enough. You also must run.

-- Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

Quote Of The Day: Cowardice

2009-09-24T14:31:00.002-07:00

Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

-- Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

Little Big Annoyances

2009-09-18T10:41:00.012-07:00

Everyone's got their idiosyncrasies.

Some people can't touch apricots and and peaches.

Some people don't tolerate a sound of scraping on the glass.

Some people can't drive stick.

My idiosyncrasy is the middle button in the browser. I want it to open a new tab, in the foreground.

And Google Chrome, otherwise a decent browser, can't seem to support this feature as of version 3.

Or is it just an advanced configuration option?

about:config doesn't work. OK.

Some research shows that it does support some others, though verification shows that it's a hit and miss (for some reason, not all keywords display anything other than an empty page - keep trying in new tabs). Other than that, nothing.

Moving on. More searching (details omitted as mundane). Nothing useful, except it seems that there are other people desperately trying to make Google add this option, to no avail.

Damn Google, is it that difficult? Every other browser has this option configurable, who died and gave you the right to decide that you know better how it is supposed to work? Yes, I know you can do it, but it requires two hands, and what if I don't have the other one?

Maybe if the head of usability testing team for Chrome had one arm, we'd get this feature faster?

PS: This is the only reason Chrome is not the default browser on my boxes.

UPDATE: Tried to get the Chrome Beta and what do you think? Lo and behold, time after time, browser, network proxy and fresh/upgrade tricks being used seemingly irrelevant, it downloads the Chrome (stable, v. 3.0.195.21) instead. And, as usual with Google, the hood is welded shut and it'll take significant effort to figure out where the problem is. Screw it, I don't have that much time.

Back to Firefox.

GIYF is not so F anymore

2009-09-15T14:45:00.003-07:00

We old-timers used to think that GIYF stands for "Google is your friend".

Well, this started backfiring lately.

It used to be that a carefully crafted search criteria returned just the right result for the search.

But with advances in personalization this art has already become useless - whereas one person gets a completely relevant result set, the other gets absolute noise. And the more alien (out of pattern) the search is for the person conducting the search, the less useful it becomes.

Quote Of The Day: Expression

2009-09-15T08:25:00.003-07:00

Ideas imbedded in a language require that particular language for expression.

-- Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

PS: Yes, "imbedded" is the word used in the book. Don't ask me why.

Quote Of The Day: Certification

2009-09-09T14:55:00.002-07:00

I'm certifiable, not certified. It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.

-- Internet lore

Afterthought: Nice play of words on the definition of "certifiable".

Quote Of The Day: Obscenity

2009-09-08T09:39:00.003-07:00

What is the opposite of obscenity?

-- Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

Quote Of The Day: Reason

2009-09-06T10:48:00.000-07:00

Never attempt to reason with people who know they are right.

-- Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

Quote Of The Day: Administration

2009-09-06T10:46:00.001-07:00

The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices.

-- Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

Lessons Nobody Wants To Learn: Enterprise Upgrade Path

2009-08-19T10:21:00.005-07:00

Quite often, I hear this argument that is supposed to be very convincing: "But our enterprise has millions of dollars invested in infrastructure X, it is our duty to protect it".

Give me a break.

Let me give you an example: In 1997, I've invested $2000 into a highly modern computer. It had the brand new Pentium MMX 233MHz CPU, whopping 32MB RAM, and incredibly large 2GB hard drive. It even had the SoundBlaster. Forget the fact that 12 years and countless generations of computers passed by since, I still must protect my investment and support and nurture the obsolete monstrosity with less computing power than a phone in my pocket?

What part of the message you still don't understand?

District 9: Extended Review

2009-08-17T10:39:00.001-07:00

District 9: <bleep>ing awesome.

Quote Of The Day: Expert

2009-08-12T00:11:00.001-07:00

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.

-- P. J. Plauger

And Tell Me Stereotyping Doesn't Work

2009-08-09T10:41:00.003-07:00

Couple of weeks ago, third generation Mustang driving dude, tattooed, pierced, no shirt, rear-ends my car, gives me a smug smile, offers "Don't worry, this is what insurance is for, ha-ha-ha", and drives away.

So tell me, why am I not surprised to find out that the bastard is hiding from both my and his own insurance company, which, though puts him into a position of "guilty by default", makes me responsible for paying for the damages that he caused?

And don't you ever tell me stereotypes are wrong.

Quote Of The Day: Bore

2009-08-06T11:23:00.002-07:00

A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

-- Gian Vincenzo Gravina

Google Talk via SMS: Still Dead

2009-08-05T13:41:00.005-07:00

Remember I've been fuming about how easy it to get Google Talk via SMS stuck with no way out?

Well, guess what, it's still stuck, five months later. All the recipients I've tried to communicate with failed to respond via SMS at some point, which rendered Talk to SMS channels dead, and there is nothing you can do about unblocking them. Zip. Nada. No block expiration. No "enable this contact to send SMS to my phone" setting.

A search on "must reply before you can send more messages" confirms that the issue is alive and well, with no resolution in sight.

Two trends are becoming more and more distinct:

Good luck getting prompt customer service from Google if they don't feel like it;
Applications that "almost work" (other prominent examples: late Latitude, less-than-dependable Android) are becoming the public face of Google.