Igor Delovski Board

[XNote]

The NYT - Who Needs Hackers?

“We don’t need hackers to break the systems because they’re falling
apart by themselves,” said Peter G. Neumann, an expert in computing
risks and principal scientist at SRI International, a research institute in
Menlo Park, Calif.
...
When the electrical grid went out in the summer of 2003 throughout the
Eastern United States and Canada, “it wasn’t any one thing, it was a
cascading set of things,” Mr. Bellovin noted.
...
That is why Andreas M. Antonopoulos, a founding partner at Nemertes
Research, a technology research company in Mokena, Ill., says, “The
threat is complexity itself.”
...
“We have gone from fairly simple computing architectures to massively
distributed, massively interconnected and interdependent networks,” he
said, adding that as a result, flaws have become increasingly hard to
predict or spot. Simpler systems could be understood and their behavior
characterized, he said, but greater complexity brings unintended
consequences.

“On the scale we do it, it’s more like forecasting weather,” he said.

[delovski]

gamearchitect.net - Software Is Hard, by Kyle Wilson

"It is impossible, by examining any significant piece of completed code,
to determine within a factor of two how many man-hours it took to produce
that code.

If you can't tell how long a piece of code would take when you have the
finished product available, what chance do you think you have before the
first line of code is written?

Talking about a software development schedule more than a year out is
like talking about where we go after we die. Everyone has some idea
where we'll end up, but those ideas differ wildly, and there's a lack of solid
evidence to support any of them."

[delovski]

Jeff Atwood: Software Branching and Parallel Universes

"The concept of versioning is deeply embedded in every source control
system. You can't avoid it.

But there's another concept, equally fundamental to source control, which
is much less frequently used in practice. That concept is branching."

[delovski]

The Future of Software Development

"Non-technical people tend to think that software is soft or easily changeable.
Since there are no visible nuts and bolts and no hood to open people think
that software can be tweaked and re-wired on a whim. Of course, this is not
the case. Software, like any mechanical system, has a design and the structure"

[Ike]

Mark Guzdial's Amazon Blog - What makes programming so hard?

"One of most persistent questions in computing education is the reason for
the 20% Rule. In every introduction to programming course, 20% of the
students just get it effortlessly -- you could lock them in a dimly lit closet
with a reference manual, and they'd still figure out how to program. 20%
of the class never seems to get it. Why is that?"

[Ike]

Yahoo: Apostrophes in names stir lot o' trouble

"More than 50 years into the Information Age, computers are still getting
confused by the apostrophe. It's a problem familiar to O'Connors, D'Angelos,
N'Dours and D'Artagnans across America."

[XNote]

Gojko: How many points are there in a five-point star?

"I’m currently reading Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design by
Donald Gause and Gerald Weinberg. The book was written twenty years ago
but it is still spot-on, which is really incredible for a software-development
related book. Gause and Weinberg described an experiment from one of
their workshops that was supposed to show how even the simplest things
can cause a lot of misunderstanding. I honestly could not believe the results,
so I decided to repeat it yesterday. The outcome absolutely amazed me."

[delovski]

TechReview - Why Incompetence Spreads through Big Organizations

"In 1969, a Canadian psychologist named Laurence Peter encapsulated this
behavior in a rule that has since become known as Peter's Principle. Here it
is: - All new members in a hierarchical organization climb the hierarchy until
they reach their level of maximum incompetence. -"

[XNote]

Joel: The Duct Tape Programmer

"One principle duct tape programmers understand well is that any kind of
coding technique that’s even slightly complicated is going to doom your pro-
ject. Duct tape programmers tend to avoid C++, templates, multiple inheri-
tance, multithreading, COM, CORBA, and a host of other technologies that
are all totally reasonable, when you think long and hard about them, but
are, honestly, just a little bit too hard for the human brain."

[delovski]

xent.com - Programming languages, operating systems, despair
and anger

"Language designers in general: You are IN THE WAY."

[delovski]

Fraser Speirs - Future Shock

"With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do some-
thing about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just tal-
king about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.

Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken
under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately under-
stand what's happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, ex-
plain to a child or colleague that the reason there's no Print item in the File
menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder
is actually the frontmost application and it doesn't have any windows open,
understand what's happening here."

[XNote]

reddit - Comment on slashdot detailing the so called Android
'fragmentation' from an application programmer

"So Googlers aren't even eating their own dog food on this issue. They just
make app developers put up with it on their own, never experience it them-
selves, and then ridicule the issue as a bogeyman. I think I was happier be-
fore I read the blog post. At least then I could imagine they were working
hard on the issue and just doing terrible at it. Now I know they don't even
consider it an issue."

Distribution of Android Platform Versions

[Ike]

Slashdot: Nokia and Open Source — a Trial By Fire

"The H has a damning piece on Nokia's open source smart phone projects,
Maemo and MeeGo, and why they failed. 'They did dumb stuff like re-wri-
ting the whole networking stack, duplicating as they went. So instead of
re-using NetworkManager and improving it, and getting to market fast –
they re-wrote, got something that still doesn't work well, failed to push
Linux forward, and failed. Repeat that for every technology pick and you
get the idea,' said Andrew Wafaa. 'The N900 was a great product.

Immediately [after] it was launched it was announced that it was a dead
product, ISV-wise. They announced a Qt re-write/project re-set. Then they
merged Maemo into MeeGo, giving another project re-set. Then, when
they were coming up to release in September 2010, there was another
project reset to switch to a different Qt technology (even the Qt groups in-
fight in Nokia).

In consequence they have no shipping product.' At the same time, 'both
Nokia and Intel were working on separate handset UIs using Qt, the
former proprietary, the latter open-source. A better worked example of
squandering your leadership role and wrestling yourself to the ground is
hard to see. Nokia deserve their trial by fire – and I hope the people who
truly screwed up the amazing Linux opportunity that was the N900 get shut
down in the process.'"

[delovski]

Choice of Games Blog: Five Tactics for Designing Games While Depressed

"Working on a large creative project all by yourself is a huge emotional
challenge. Indie game developers work notoriously long hours, often in
isolation. You’re constantly facing the outer limits of your artistic ability;
doubting that you can even finish the project; wondering whether anyone
else will see what’s cool about the game, even if you do finish it."

[Ike]

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/159637/what-is-the-mars-curiosity-rovers-software-built-in/159638#159638?

[Ike]

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/10/05/233254/the-computer-science-behind-facebooks-1-billion-users

Actually, Facebook's problem isn't trivial in any sense of the word. The complexity and joins of various database tables must be insane. With YouTube it's all about raw bandwidth, which actually is a fairly easy problem to solve especially since 99% of that data is static. You just physically distribute it and throw money / resources at the problem. As far as database structure, any CS student should be able to reproduce the bulk of it in a single day. You have videos associated with users, and comments associated with videos, etc. The gist of it is straightforward.

[Ike]

james.hague - Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry

"When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is
how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its
own complexity."

[delovski]

highscalability.com - Reddit: Lessons Learned From Mistakes Made
Scaling To 1 Billion Pageviews A Month

"Jeremy Edberg, the first paid employee at reddit, teaches us a lot about
how to create a successful social site in a really good talk he gave at the
RAMP conference. Watch it here at Scaling Reddit from 1 Million to 1 Bil-
lion–Pitfalls and Lessons."

[Ike]

http://youtu.be/VpZmIiIXuZ0

[delovski]

http://stilldrinking.org - Programming Sucks

"Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old
MacBook actually works. Why do we tell you to turn it off and on again?
Because we don't have the slightest clue what's wrong with it, and it's
really easy to induce coma in computers and have their built-in team of
automatic doctors try to figure it out for us. The only reason coders'
computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know
computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases
and we don't beat them when they're bad."

[Ike]

http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/10/a-military-leaders-approach-to-dealing-with-complexity/

A Military Leader’s Approach to Dealing with Complexity
by John Michel

[Ike]

Jean-Louis Gassee - The Internet of Poorly Working Things

"Then there's the truly ugly side of Consumer IoT: security, or the lack of
it. The lackadaisical, to be polite, approach to software leaves many con-
nections open to hackers who can see passwords exchanged in clear text
on home WiFi while they sit in a car parked outside the house. Or we see
that 100M Volkswagen cars are open to wireless hacking. Using the One
Cockroach Theory, how many more other makes of cars will be found to
be insecure?"

[delovski]

jakubdziworski - Github Code Search - Programmers' Goldmine

"Github search provides a way to query repos in a various ways. One
of them is searching code. This is extremly powerful feature. Every line
ever written by anybody can be found with simple queries. The 'good'
thing about github is that the private repos are not free, so there are
many projects implicitly shared to public by people who just want to
backup their code. This is a goldmine of information!

Below are some of the examples which I find github search code is handy for."

[delovski]

Ben Brooks - Evolving iPad Desktop Usage

"Ulysses: I write everything in it.
Slack: it's my office.
Instapaper: still the best after all these years.
OmniOutliner: I would love to find something with more modern features, but this is a rare dead spot for app activity.Reeder: I don't need much for my RSS anymore, and Reeder is a delight to use.
1Password: I am pretty sure I would have been hacked by now without this app.
Pythonista: This tool cuts the time in half that it would take me to post a photo for these articles.
Workflow: I rarely use this app, but for the things I do use it for, it's amazing.
Documents: This is a must have app if you work on an iPad at all. So versatile and so handy.
Screens: Invaluable for managing my Mac mini server.
Transmit: I mostly use this for uploading files to the Mac mini - nothing regular, but damned handy.
Prompt: If there is a problem with my Mac mini, this is the tool I use. There's a lot of times where I can't VNC in, but I can SSH in and fix everything.
Coda: It's my do everything with my websites tool.
Web Tools: one of those amazing little apps. I wouldn't be able to troubleshoot website errors without this.
Soulver: makes calculations simple and clear.
Associate/Blink: These make associate links dead simple."

[Ike]

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bcg58u/windows_10_source_code_over_05_tb_source_code/

Windows 10 source code: over 0.5 TB source code, over 4 million files, more than a half million folders (quora.com)

Here's a post about Microsoft's effort to store it in Git:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-on-the-planet/
TL;DR: They invented a "Git Virtual File System" to do the job.

[Ike]

r - How to read complicated declarations?

I've been trying to understand how to read this, but at the end I just seem to broke my brain.