Common Sense 4 Common People

Search is sick, Bing is the cure

Oh dear...

This article at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31084838/ is titled "Microsoft ads say search is sick, Bing is the cure". Cute...

But, didn't anyone tell them that the Chinese word "bìng" (病), which is pronounced with the 4th tone, very similar to the English pronounciation of bing, means "sick" or "to get sick"???

More than 1 billion people, people that seem to believe in things like lucky numbers and "bad" sounds, people that feel that the number 4 is unlucky because it sounds like "death", these people say "wǒ bìng le" (我病了) and they mean "I am SICK". And MS hopes to make bing a new verb for searching and have them type in www.bing.com every now and then to do their searches?

Oh dear... I think I need another drink...

Firewire Expert Blog

Hi everyone,

Some weeks ago I posted a link to some Firewire informational videos. Now there is an insiders' blog about the history and business decisions that affected Firewire's development, written by the man himself, James Snider the Executive Director of the 1394 Trade Association. Jeff Cat is just a nickname that James is using. In an act of shameless promotion I would say that I think it is worth your time to check it out.

Oh, and here's the link: Firewire Expert Blog

Have fun!

Dimitris

the BOOK OF est

This is a superb book that I picked up for a second reading. I own a used copy but with some effort you might find it somewhere:

The Book of est on wikipedia

The Book of est on Amazon

Here is a small excerpt, which as soon as I read some minutes ago, just knew I had to post it. Apologies for the use of offensive language (to those that requiring such apologies):

Let me remind you before I go on that I don't want you to believe a word I say over this weekend, just listen. Because the reason your lives don't work is that you're all living mechanically in your belief systems instead of freshly in the world of actual experience. You don't look at reality and then construct conclusions, no. No, you did that decades ago. You asswholes are roboting through life with your conclusions, and with your conclusions developed decades ago you are constructing reality! No wonder you've lost all aliveness. No wonder your lives don't work.

Have fun!

Dimitris Staikos

Firewire Informational Videos

Hi all,

The 1394 Trade Association (www.1394ta.org) recently started a series of Firewire informational videos on YouTube. These are like "video FAQs", not full fledged tutorials. However, these videos are not made by "self-proclaimed" experts but by the 1394 Trade Association, so you are guaranteed that what you will see and hear is accurate.

Surely the 1394 Trade Association has "promoting 1394 technology" in its mission statement, but it is not a marketing organization. These videos are not marketing material, but answers to common questions about Firewire.

You can check them out at: http://www.youtube.com/user/FireWireExpert

Currently there are only a few, but if there is enough traffic then the 1394TA will decide to invest more time and money on this approach. Surely enough, you can understand that it takes much more time to prepare a video FAQ than typing in 20 lines of text on some web page.

Also don't hesitate to email them your questions, if you happen to have any.

Have fun,

Dimitris Staikos

Digital Misfortunes: Off-the-shelf end-user product mafia

Happy New Year everyone :-)

Although I planned to kick off 2009 with a much more inspiring article, I finally couldn't help it. I bumped onto a Digital Misfortune of such proportions that it was just impossible to resist the temptation.

Either it's me who is totally stupid or indeed software nowadays is designed by a blood-thirsty sadist mafia that plans to rule the world by killing all intelligent beings, or to be more exact, leading them to willfully commit suicide by banging their head on a wall, unable to stand the stupidity that surrounds them any longer. Some rock band had a song called "Mandatory Suicide"; now I think I finally get their message.

Tips on writing C macros

Macros in C/C++ is an extremely powerful feature, basically one I can't live without. The use of macros has been widely debated and mostly they are labeled as 'evil', as a no-no. This is the usual moral dillema that shows up whenever we have something with significant power in our hands: Anything that is powerful enough can be misused one way or the other. Should we then allow the usage of the powerful tool or ban it altogether so as to prevent its misuse (intentional or unintentional)?

The code is THE documentation

Yeah sure... Sleep tight and noone is gonna rock your boat, at least while you are sleeping in it.

This is a very luring statement. The reason it is so luring is that it is so obviously true. Or is it not? Doesn't the program do exactly what the code tells it too? So the code is THE one and only always up-to-date documentation of any program. Right?

It is so convincing that you just can't resist falling for it, especially when faced with an aficionado that passionately claims that she doesn't need to write comments as "extra" documentation, because the code is THE documentation, and since she obviously writes top quality code, comments are simply redundant. A waste of screen estate more or less. Useless clutter around the actual documentation.

Sorry to break the news boys and girls... The reality is somehow different.

The code is the imperfect translation into a programming language of the programmer’s imperfect understanding about what the program should do.

You can figure out the rest. The code is THE documentation of the programmer's imperfect language translation of an imperfect understanding. It documents how the programmer failed to code properly what he failed to understand properly.

Anyone still battling on the issue of whether the code is THE documentation and whether comments (in any form) are needed or not, most likely hasn’t worked on a big project (300+KLOC) long enough (5+ years) to figure things out for him/herself.

Life is so sweet when 90% of the time you fool around your own code. Everything is so simple, because everything is in your head. However once you start spending 50% of your time on pieces of code that other people wrote, pieces of code you have NEVER seen before, or pieces of your own code that you wrote 4 years ago and haven't glanced at since, then life is not as sweet.

When you read code you are not familiar with, then you are doing the reverse translation, from imperfect programming language to imperfect understanding about the program's intentions. This is tough. Some may be better at it than others, but trust me... without good comments it can be much more painful and error prone than it has to.

So please, make others' lives easier. Let them cherish your memory after you are gone and enjoy fixing the bugs in your code. Because you WILL be gone some day and your code WILL still have bugs that need fixing.

Enjoy,
Dimitris Staikos

Psychology is a science, NOT just Common Sense

This is an excerpt from an excellent book that I am currently reading:

It's no surprise that people who are faced with choices about how to influence others will often base their decisions on thinking that's grounded in fields such as economics, political science and public policy. What's puzzling, however, is how frequently decision-makers fail to consider established theories and practices in psychology.

One explanation is that, in contrast to how they regard the fields of economics, political science and public policy, which requires learning from outsiders to achieve even a minimal level of competence, people believe they already possess an intuitive understanding of psychological principles simply by virtue of living life and interacting with others. This overconfidence leads people to miss golden opportunities.

It is really sad to see otherwise smart people feverously deny any chance to improve their soft-skills, to attend seminars about human behaviour, influence, negotiations, etc. Their thinking appears to be something of the sort "Hey dude, can't you see what great a manager I am? How did I get here? Because I am smart and because I am good, really good. I need no silly seminars to tell me how to do my job!".

As the book says, they believe they already have ALL the skills they need, plus they believe (in their hearts) that they do a damned good job, almost perfect. They think that psychology is common sense; if you are smart enough you can figure it out by yourself. But it's not that way. Psychology is a real science and you definitely cannot figure it out. Just read a couple of good texts and after your jaw drops to the floor for a couple dozens of times you will know that you could never have figured it out.

Needless to say, the competition will sooner or later do their part of the studying and inevitably they will outrun these managers and their companies. It's as certain as death and taxes.

Have fun,

Dimitris Staikos

Sloppy sizeof Programming (Variation #2)

This is another variation on my previous sloppy programming post.

When something potentially dangerous is displayed on TV then we hear them say "Do try this at home".

Well for this kind of sloppy programming I say "Don't try this at work!".
Only try it at home, where you can merrily shoot yourself (and just yourself) in the foot as much as your heart desires, leaving the rest of the world in blissful peace.

Digital Misfortunes: Remote desktop messes up keyboard layout of logon screen

It seems that lately I have been having a peak of digital troubles, which I have come to call "Digital Misfortunes". These are situations where programs or computers do not behave in the expected way and I have to utilize the "supernatural" powers that device driver development has given me in order to solve these problems.

So, since these things seem to happen more and more often I have created a new category in my blog, with that name exactly.

It really makes me sad to see that more and more problems keep coming up. What would a normal user do? Format and reinstall the OS? Most likely...