I swear I must look like a ghost or something – people seem to think they can walk right through me! This one time, I was walking up the Sussex St ramp to the bridge from the city to Pyrmont, carrying a big bag of shopping, keeping to the left, and this guy was running down the ramp. He slammed into my shoulder and bounced off, across into the opposite railing. Then he turns around like he’s surprised and says sorry. Excuse me, but what do you expect to happen? Did you think you’d go straight through? Or were you expecting to knock me down and keep running?
And?
C++ defines a bunch of aliases for operators. These are kind of cool, and they can make code more readable at times – for example you can write things like:
if ((dest bitor netmask) == bcdest and protocol == udp)
But in typical C++ fashion, they chose to specify it in a completely brain-dead way. The names don’t alias the operators they’re named for, but their actual punctuation representations. That means this is valid code:
Address parse(const std::string bitand repr);
The ability to do this doesn’t really help anyone, except lazy compiler vendors who want to implement the aliases as predefined macros. But it gives us all one more WTF, and another tool in our arsenal for writing obfuscated code.
Naked
As of yesterday, my Internet connection has finally started working. It’s been unbelievably frustrating, and I cannot in good conscience recommend naked ADSL Internet – I honestly thing it would be a better experience to get Telstra or Optus cable. There are too many levels of indirection between you and the people who actually get stuff done with ADSL, and it would appear that communication is poor and contractors are incompetent.
I needed a brand-new service, as there was no existing POTS or DSL line – only Telstra cable and CATV. There was a lengthy waiting period, and after the installation date, I called an electrician to wire up a socket. It turned out the MDF hadn’t been tagged. After much arguing, Internode sent someone out to tag it properly. However, I had to call out (and pay) an electrician to jumper it. So if your ISP tells you your MDF or boundary point is tagged, don’t believe them – check for yourself before you call out an electrician.
At this point, I had a socket connected to the correct cable and pair, but still no DSL. Internode insisted that I find an analog telephone to listen to the line. I want naked DSL – why should I need an analog telephone? Anyway, I discovered that I had a POTS service of some kind, and even found out what its number was, and told Internode. They informed me that they needed a technician to come and “perform tests”. It took another week for the guy to come out, and he didn’t arrive on time. He just confirmed what I’d told them: my socket was connected to the correct cable and pair, but had POTS service. Apparently they don’t believe their customers.
After this, it took another day for the exchange to be patched correctly. I now have a working Internet connection, but my high-speed ADSL2+ here is barely faster than my plain ADSL1 in Melbourne, and I now have to fight for a refund for the period when I was being billed for a service that didn’t work. If you’re thinking of getting naked ADSL, save yourself the trouble and get something where a single vendor is responsible for the whole solution. Cable Internet or ADSL with a Telstra DSLAM would be a whole lot less trouble.
Tiger
Technology is definitely very good for making people lazy. I’m now too lazy too cook rice in a pot on a stove, so I need an automatic rice cooker. Now that I’m getting my Sydney pad set up, I need one to use up here. Having experienced how bad a Kambrook rice cooker is, I decided it would have to be one of the two brands I’ve had good experiences with – Panasonic or Tiger. I initially tried finding one at Bing Lee, as they’re supposed to be the cheapest place for appliances, but they didn’t have either of my preferred brands. Fortunately, I found a shop with a Tiger logo on the sign just across the road.
On entering the shop, I asked the lady which Panasonic and Tiger rice cookers she’d recommend, to which she replied, “You don’t want Panasonic – they’re made in China.” She seemed to think that being made in China on its own is reason enough not to want to buy a product. Not that it’s poorer quality, less reliable, or anything concrete – just that it’s made in China. The fact that she was Chinese herself added an element of irony to the situation. (She doesn’t stock any Chinese-made rice cookers anyway, so she doesn’t really give you a choice.) The designers at Tiger seem to think being made in Japan is an important feature, too: it’s written in block letters right above the control panel on the one I ended up buying.
I’m a sucker for gadgets. I really should’ve saved some money and bought the basic model that just cooks white rice, because that’s probably all I’ll ever do. But for just $69 more I could get the new model that does white rice, brown rice, scorched rice, congee, steamed vegetables, stews, oden (おでん), and more. It also has a timer, a clock that keeps and even displays the time when it’s unplugged, and a user-replaceable power cord. How could I turn down all that extra awesomeness? Now I can’t wait to move in, so I can cook something in it! (I know, it’ll probably just be steamed white rice.)
Internal Conflict
(Just some background – at work we use DVCS with a one-branch-per-feature policy.) You know when you’ve got a few source control branches on the go, because you’ve been splitting time between a few features, but you’ve kind of been neglecting one, because it doesn’t feel like the most important thing to do? Don’t you hate it when you pull the latest mainline onto your neglected branch, and there are like a million changes, including adding/deleting/renaming files and major refactoring, and you get a bunch of merge conflicts? You’re thinking, “Why do people have to change so much all the time?” and you just want to blame someone. You know what makes it even worse? When you take a closer look at the list of changes, and realise it’s all the stuff that you’ve been pushing on to the mainline.
Mean
You know those people who say things to the effect of, “One in two people has below average intelligence,” with a really smug look on their face? The satisfaction they seem to get from flaunting their fundamental misunderstanding of statistics makes it pretty clear which side of average their intelligence falls on.
You haven’t made it
I saw a guy driving a Porsche 911 Carrera S with roof racks. Now firstly, it looks pretty silly. Because there isn’t much roof length, the racks were comically close together. The curvature of the roof meant the rear rack needed to be taller than the front one to get them to roughly the same height, so they guy must have bought two pairs of roof racks and used one of each. But that didn’t completely solve the issue: the racks were still at strange angles, so the tops weren’t level, and they wouldn’t have been able to carry very much load.
On top of the visual and practical issues, the guy had another big problem. A Porsche is more of a status symbol than a car. By driving a Porsche you’re trying to tell the world, “Look at me, I’m a success — I’ve bought the car that you can only dream about.” But by putting roof racks on your Porsche, you’re saying, “I only just had enough money for this car.” That, of course, is an admission that you couldn’t really afford the Porsche. If you’d really arrived, you’d have another, more practical car to put the roof racks on.
Not how it works
Goldman Sachs and UBS both seem to have had algorithmic trading code stolen and/or leaked recently. I haven’t seen an official statement from UBS, but a PR person from Goldman said something to the effect of, “Since the algorithms integrate with a large, proprietary system, we aren’t worried about this.” I realise that this person has the job of reassuring jittery investors that everything’s OK, but the statement shows a chronic lack of understanding that anyone should be able to see through. Sure, I probably couldn’t just compile the code, drop the binary into my system and start trading. But that’s not the point — there are two, very significant things I can achieve just by studying the code.
Firstly, I could determine an algorithm’s behaviour and reproduce it. If Goldman’s algorithms are as good as they claim, the actual implementation detail should guarded closely. If anyone could clone them, Goldman would lose their competitive advantage in algorithmic trading.
Secondly, I could possible study an algorithm’s behaviour and find a way to identify it and game it. That way, if I reasonably suspect that a Goldman algorithm is trading a security, I could use my knowledge of its behaviour to my advantage. If enough people with enough capital can game your algorithms, it can have a big impact on performance.
But it doesn’t really matter what I think of the announcement. I just build systems — I’m not the one deciding where to send the money.
Illiteracy
The Age (the popular broadsheet newspaper in Melbourne) has sunk to the level of Slashdot. From Peter Martin’s article entitled “Choice considers Grocery Choice suit” published today:
First, a costumer enters a postcode, then selects the most convenient nearby shops and then enters the quantities, weights and brands of the products they want.
That isn’t a simple transposition typo — there are two letters between the transposed letters. It’s either a chronic misunderstanding of the language or an inability to type combined with an over-reliance on a spell-checker. What happened to proof-reading and copy editing? What happened to knowing how to spell? This is what you would expect from self-obsessed bloggers or tweeters, not professional journalists!
(There is a remote possibility that he chose a random occupation in order to flesh out the hypothetical shopper’s character, and just made a choice that unfortunately looks like a common error. However, this is no excuse — if this was the case, he should have chosen a more interesting profession, like pool cleaner for instance.)
Maybe next year
It still isn’t the year of Desktop Linux. People may be ready to move away from Windows, but Linux still isn’t ready for them. Let me tell you about my recent operating system experiences. It all started when my venerable Pentium III died. (Well it didn’t quite die outright, but the power supply became unreliable.) The primary reason for me keeping it alive was for ATO eTax. It’s kind of sad that I had a computer that I only really used once a year, but there you go. I used its death as an excuse to buy a new Mac Mini. It’s capable of running Windows for eTax, and it can run x64 Linux for SDLMAME, and OS X for random cool stuff. The new Mini has FireWire 800 (as opposed to 400 on the old one) and NVIDIA 9400M integrated graphics (as opposed to Intel on the old one), which addressed my primary complaints about its predecessor.
Of course it came with OS X installed, so the first thing I did was update it, tweak it to my liking and install tablet and printer drivers. That was all painless, and I had a fully functional Mac/X11/BSD system in no time. Buoyed by my success, I decided to install Windows XP. Boot Camp Assistant took a while to do the live repartitioning, but it worked, and I had a FAT32 partition to play with. The machine booted from the XP install CD, and I proceeded to format the partition as NTFS and install Windows. It took a long time, and I had to restart about ten times during the install, update and driver install process, but in the end I had a working Windows installation, too, and I could switch between OS X and XP on boot. That was enough for one night.