Being Geek

I finished reading “Being Geek” by Michael Lopp. I am sure that Panagiotis (one of my “Your People“) will appreciate it more than me. For the first 20 chapters or so I got increasingly bored (to the point that I switched to reading another book). Then in the middle the book changes pace and provides valueable advice on how to prepare yourself before delivering a presentation. The author argues that there exists no good advice on how to write a presentation, I urge people to read Tufte‘s work, or at least “The cognitive style of PowerPoint“. Then the book becomes boring again.

While the book tries to be a personal growth / career book, it deals so much with interdepartmental politics and intrigue that it is no wonder people work overtime. Their regular worktime is spent not on what they are supposed to work on, but on forecasting fault and making sure it is delegated to others. I’ve got two more issues with the book. First, either it is full of grammatical and syntactic errors, or it makes use of so many American idioms that it is difficult to be read by someone for whom English is not a native language.

Second, I am highly irritated by the liberal use of the word engineer and its interchangeable use for computer scientist and programmer. There are people who are none, one, two or even three out of three, but the terms are not interchangeable. My absolute worst was when the author implied that engineers are not good project managers. Oh really? An Engineer knows his science, understands deadlines, knows that has to deliver a withing the budget solution and can manage people. Sorry Rands, I have an army Engineers to prove this. For example, Civil Engineers do this for a living in Greece and in the process manage people (and teams of people) of multicultural, multilingual and varying educational backgrounds. The fact that one can engineer solutions, does not make one an engineer.

I should have listened to Ozan. So why did I buy the book? Kudos to O’Reilly for providing cool bargaining deals on their eBook offers! I bought it in a buy one, get one free offer. Then why did I recommend the book to @stsimb? The book is not without value. I simply found it hard and tiring to decipher it. On the other hand I know @stsimb for ~15 years and can understand that there exist books that he might like while in fact I definitely did not. Given that I read most of the book while in the bus, this was not a total waste of time.

The (n-th) return of the Database Machine

Once there were Database Machines. Talk to your favorite database person and they will tell you that this is an outdated idea. It is so old, that it can be served again as new and innovative. @mperedim remembers that I predicted that right after Oracle bought Sun. I am neither a market analyst nor I have predictive powers. It is just that Oracle has tried this before: Unbreakable Linux just a few years ago and with Sun hardware and Solaris in the 90s (It also happens that they had tried a lot of things with Sun before, like trying to move all their development desktops to Solaris x86. Or working with Sun on the NC which is no different than today’s netbook paradigm, or the X terminal of the early 90s or even the dumb terminal). So with a 20-year amnesia cycle in CS why not reintroduce the idea? Enter the Sun Oracle Database machines.

Oracle wants to sell such machines. It eliminates support (contract) complexity. Oracle needs a base Operating System that it can control its development and a hardware platform that can be optimized for what Oracle does best. Now clients can buy turn key solutions from Oracle just like they do when they buy IBM. Picture this: Two Linux machines, with Oracle 10g installed exchanging every kind of traffic except sqlplus. Whose fault is this? Oracle’s? The Linux vendor’s? It turned out to be a weird combination of the hardware. And this was discovered because the DBA and the System Administrator under the same employer decided to solve the problem (I was the System Administrator involved). Imagine two different vendors and the client trying to solve the problem: I would expect a lot of finger pointing instead of actually finding the solution and/or workaround.

Oracle now has the opportunity to market the product as a cost saver (“You only need an army of DBAs, not an army of DBAs and an army of systems administrators for different operating systems. Oh, and by the way our patching process just got simpler, you need to call only us”). While in fact a solution’s complexity is unaffected, support contract and communication complexity for the client is simplified. This looks better than buying IBM (or Microsoft) to the person that signs the checks.

Now if someone can make WebKit work with Emacs and we will have Lisp Machines resurrect…

PS: You do not believe in CS amnesia? In “Getting started as a PhD student” Matt Welsh writes: “you should never read anything from the 1960’s or 70’s or you will realize that it all has been done before”.

“Why did you choose DragonFly?”

In this thread Samuel J. Greear asks:

What has drawn you to use the DragonFly BSD operating system and/or participate in its development by following this list? Technical features, methodologies, something about the community? I suspect the HAMMER filesystem to be the popular choice, but what other features affect or do you see affecting your day to day life as an administrator, developer, or [insert use case here], now or in the future?

Since I do not follow the mailing list I will answer here: Well it is of BSD origin! The real reason I used DragonFlyBSD years ago, was that we needed to run pf on the machine and DragonFly was the only BSD that installed on it (with some tweaks though). So simple. It also felt a lot like FreeBSD-4 (for some inexplicable reason, I was never really happy with FreeBSD-5, never installed version 6, returning to using it on production systems in versions 7 and 8). Plus, I got to submit a (minor) bug report :)

I really miss not running DragonFly these days.

[via]

Autism’s False Prophets

I love “Cantor’s Dilemma“. In its final chapter (#22) a letter exchange between two powerful characters describes politics in Research in the most clear way. The book has one problem though. It is fiction.

“Autism’s False Prophets” by Paul Offit is not. It covers the various vaccines-cause-autism theories and provides scientific data that prove them wrong. Do you want to read about bad science? It is there. Do you want to read about non-repeatable experiments? It is there. Do you want to read about how people mistake correlation for causation? There too! Do you want to find out how charlatans of any background take advantage of desperate people? Read the book. People want to be heard and want (instant) relief. With science not having the answers (or answers they can accept and deal with) charlatans step in loudly and fill the void. As is written in the book, hope is the best fix, better than any drug on the street.

“An easy-to-read medical thriller about the consequences of greed, hubris and intellectual sloppiness” reads the back of the book. This is a a chronicle and a science thriller, not a science fiction or science-in-fiction work. It contains the best explanation of the scientific method and the Null Hypothesis for the general public. Thanks to the book I now understand why the most illiterate and unscientific show ever presented on Greek TV exists:

“Unfortunately, the motivations of scientists who perform studies differ from those in the media who describe them: one wants to inform, the other to entertain.”

People want quick answers and are easy to jump to conspiracy theories that can provide them. It is no wonder that the opinion of journalists, ministers, politicians and celebrities that “attended the University of Google” gets accepted as expert opinion by the general public while the scientists are hiding “The Truth” by being on the payroll of big corporations. After reading the book I still do not understand why some people (the very same people that subscribe to such theories) do not visit their personal-injury lawyer every time they have a headache.

While if one is not directly involved with autism the book can have a few boring corners, it is a guide on how to present the facts. It is no wonder that the author gets so much hate mail and is the recipient of death threats.

PS: Two very interesting web sites that the book recommends are neurodiversity.com and
JunkScience.com.

30 χρόνια επιτυχίες

Kat was a Greek computer that dual-booted MS-DOS and Apple II

Ψάχνοντας για την ιστορία της Gigatronics και του Kat, έπεσα πάνω σε αυτό το PDF. Χρήσιμο ανάγνωσμα για όσους ενδιαφέρονται για την ανάπτυξη της Πληροφορικής στην Ελλάδα, τότε που ήμασταν παιδιά.

Μπενάλτι

* Ακολουθεί άσκηση επιστημονικής φαντασίας:

Οι διαιτητές κάνουν λάθη. Έχει όμως ενδιαφέρον να δει κανείς πως αντιδρούν προσπαθώντας να το διορθώσουν. Ο καλός ο διαιτητής θα το καταπιεί (μαζί με το βρισίδι της εξέδρας) και θα συνεχίσει τον αγώνα σα να μην έγινε το λάθος προσπαθώντας να είναι όσο πιο καλός μπορεί. Ο κακός ο διαιτητής, θα προσπαθήσει να βρει την ευκαιρία εκείνη που θα “ισοφαρίσει” το λάθος του. Θα προσπαθήσει να τη δημιουργήσει κιόλας. Δύο λάθη όμως δεν κάνουν ένα σωστό.

Για τους παραπάνω λόγους, ο καλός ο διαιτητής, επειδή ξέρει και μπάλα και τη δουλειά του, ξέρει πότε να διαμορφώσει ένα αποτέλεσμα χωρίς να γίνει αντιληπτός. Ο κακός ο διαιτητής, ακριβώς επειδή δεν ξέρει ούτε μπάλα, ούτε τη δουλειά του, δε μπορεί να κρύψει τις προθέσεις του. Το πιο καλό όμως με τον κακό το διαιτητή είναι πως δε χρειάζεται να τον ενημερώσει κανείς για το επιθυμητό αποτέλεσμα. Το εγγυάται αυτό η ικανότητά του.

decreasoner on OpenBSD

decreasoner is a Discrete Event Calculus reasoner written by Erik T. Mueller (author of “Commonsense Reasoning“). This is how I build it on OpenBSD 4.7:

  • tar zxf ply-3.3.tar.gz
  • tar zxf decreasoner.tar.gz
  • cd decreasoner/software/relsat-dist/
  • tar zxf ../../../relsat_2.02.tar
  • gmake -f Makefile.linux
  • cp ./relsat ../../solvers/
  • cd ../..
  • cp ../ply-3.3/ply/lex.py .
  • cp ../ply-3.3/ply/yacc.py .
  • decreasoner.py executes sort -g. Unfortunatelly, OpenBSD’s sort does not support a -g switch and you have to change it to -n. See also a discussion of sort -g vs sort -n.
  • ./make.sh

Someday I think I may contribute a script that may (semi)automate the above…