How programming lets me know I'm getting older

You're hammering away at a particularly hairy bit of code (or any other problem). You know exactly what you want it to do, but are just struggling to translate it into the right language. After hours of wrangling with convoluted logic and endless cycles of edit-build-debug-rinse-repeat, you throw your hands in the air, give up and walk away.

And then suddenly, while cooking dinner, or watching a movie, or in the shower thinking of what manner of pasta to snarf down for lunch, or simply just on the can focussing on your business -- it hits you. A brilliant solution to the hair-puller-outer, so elegant and so bloody simple you wonder how you never thought of it in the first place.

You scribble a quick note in your head (or Evernote, or a notepad, or whatever) and suddenly nothing else will do except firing up vim and set things straight right away. You do it.

The final turn on the safe -- maybe something audibly goes "click" in your head -- and it's done. You step back and marvel in the beauty of it. You can feel the mystery briefcase glow on your face, a la Pulp Fiction. All is right in the world again. You are the master of all you survey - there is no mystery you cannot solve, no stream you cannot ford.

You are also not me.

Maybe I am slowly gathering up enough work experience, or maybe I'm just getting older and my mind is atrophying, but while the initial frustration and subsequent elation are still very firmly in place, the "eureka!" appears to be happening a lot less these days. Instead, what I find works most of the time is just plugging away at the issue, continuously breaking it down into smaller bits, and gradually piecing the solution together from these little digested chunks.

"Solution epiphanies" strike about two or three times out of ten, down from 6-7 out of ten from back in the day [when we wrote our code with styluses on papyrus and prayed to Ra to compile it into machine code via heliography]. The adrenaline and oxytocin rush is still phenomenal, but I find myself needing them less and less, since I can be more objective about the side effects and just more productive overall.

I still end up getting celebratorily hammered over the next weekend though.

You're doing it right

Dear Maciej Ceglowski: You're doing it right.

It is quite a breath of fresh air to see someone who's built a product, marketed it to the right audience, charged money from the outset (and thus not falling into the "users first, money later" trap).

I signed up for Pinboard (just out of curiosity, and wanting to see if my shiny new credit card did USD payments) pretty much the same day it was launched on Hacker News, and it became the first ever online service I paid money for. A mammoth sum of ~$1.

And since then, for this one-time joining fee, Pinboard has continued to add numerous features -- both asked and un-asked for -- while stamping out bugs nearly as quickly as they were discovered. And because it was making money, there wasn't a need to slather it in advertising or the atrocious amounts of social gunk that seem to crawl across pretty much every "Web 2.0" site now.

The Pinboard blog sees some brilliantly detailed posts and insights on technology (both site- related and otherwise), the site itself offers a spartan, uncomplicated and flexible API, and now -- this is what motivated me to pen this screed down -- the database schema behind the site!

This is how quality products are built - the real secret sauce is the execution; the actual idea and technical implementation detail can be at any point in the simplicity-complexity spectrum. It really is quite awesome to see someone basically give you everything you need to clone their product/service. The level of confidence in your own execution and delivery capabilities underpinning such candour and openness is a refreshing departure from the current clusterfudge that is "intellectual property".

Once again Maciej, you're doing it right, and I thank you.

Switching over to Ubuntu 12.04

Ubuntu has certainly come a long way since the days of the Warthog, and Precise Pangolin (commonly known as 12.04, to appease the suits) seems to be the slickest out-of-the-box experience of the lot. Unity seems mature and quite snappy on my 2.5 year old laptop, and the most common bugbears, audio and wifi, got set up in perfect working condition during the install itself!

Personally, what I liked the most was that GParted will happily re-partition your drives without data loss during the installation. This was the biggest sticking point earlier - having to 'source' shitty bloated tools from Acronis or PowerQuest, or struggling with boot disks and FIPS. And of course, the murky middle ground of Ranish and the Windows Disk Management tool. Bleurgh.

Not any more.

Not only do you not need to burn a CD any more (I think my CD/DVD drive has lapsed back into virginity...), you don't even need to hunt up a USB flash drive!

A combination of the Universal USB Installer and EasyBCD means you can install Ubuntu in a dual-boot configuration without needing to use Wubi at all. Simply use the Universal USB Installer to pick up your downloaded ISO and 'install' to an existing (non C: drive) partition on your hard drive. Then create a bootloader entry via EasyBCD that points to the newly set up Ubuntu 'live USB' location. Reboot, et voila. You can boot into the 'live USB' Ubuntu setup that resides on your hard disk.

Some people might want to leave this in place (dual-boot setup without re-partitioning! Hooray!), but I went ahead and installed Precise anyway. For one, I'm not entirely comfortable with having Windows manage my bootloader, given its tendencies to gobble up the MBR occasionally. Also, there was a nagging need to rid oneself of the Microsoft-centred ecosystem. And a desire to use a real terminal and solid command-line tools without resorting to nice-try-but-no-cigar solutions like Cygwin, Gow and Console2.

After a friction-less install process, all that remained was to mount the old D: partition into the current /home directory to retain access to old files and the media libraries.

Unity + Compiz is pretty sweet, and once you paper over some of the lesser annoyances with ClassicMenu Indicator (for a real applications menu) and Ubuntu Tweak (to smooth out some fiddly bits of the Unity interface), Precise Pangolin completely shines through in day-to-day computing. A few hours of sudo apt-get update/upgrade for Flash/Java/MS fonts (ugh), and an Aurora Firefox sync later, it was bye-bye Windows 7. Except for when iTunes is required. Ah well, one can't have it all.

"When Daddy Was A Little Boy", or, why book publishers need to stop being stupid

Once upon a time, there was this publishing house called Raduga Publishers.

A brief blurb on them:

The Progress / Raduga Publishers was a Moscow-based Soviet publishing house founded in 1931. It specialised on output of the books translated into foreign languages. The children's literature was only a part of its production. They also published scientific, arts, political books, books for people studying foreign languages, guidebooks and photographic albums. [...] The Progress Publishers stopped the existence after dissolution of the Soviet Union.

If you go on to that link, you can see some of the covers of the books they put out - they look quite delightful.

A big part of my childhood was reading, and one of my most cherished books of that time was this hardbound collection of stories called "When Daddy Was a Little Boy" by Alexander Raskin (originally in Russian, and translated into English by Fainna Glagoleva).

Here you have a 10-year-old's review, which tells you everything you need to know about the book, really. But sadly, pretty much every book put out by Raduga is out of print. The only copies exist in the hands of a few people lucky enough to come across those books, and amidst library collections.

Until today.

I managed to find a scanned PDF from a library website, and intend to transcribe it into a document with the original images/artwork and put it someplace for download.

This experience has given me a renewed respect for Google's book-scanning efforts, and I'd like to - in my own humble way - tell all the publishers that opposed this: You all are giant, flaming idiots. Let there be a way for the books to live on long after you're dead and buried.

To give you a taste of what the book is like, here are some of the initial images, and the author's foreword.

---

Cover Image & Publishing Info

Table of Contents

Artwork accompanying author's foreword

Author's Foreword

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

Dear Children,

    I want to tell you about how I came to write this book. I have a daughter named Sasha. She's a big girl now and often says, when speaking about herself, "When I was a little girl –" Well, when Sasha was a very little girl, she was often ill. She had the grippe, and a sore throat, and an infected ear. If you've ever had an infected ear, you know how painful it is. And if you haven't, there's no use explaining, for you'll never understand anyway.

    One Sasha's ear hurt so badly that she cried and cried. She couldn't sleep at all. I felt so sorry for her that I nearly cried, too. And so I read aloud to her and told her funny stories. I told her a story about the time I rolled my new ball under a car when I was a little boy. Sasha liked the story. She was surprised to learn that her daddy had once been a little boy, and that he'd gotten into mischief and had also been punished sometimes. She remembered the story, and whenever her ear would begin to ache, she'd shout: "Daddy! Daddy! MY ear aches! Tell me a story about you when you were a little boy." And each time I'd tell her a new story. You'll find them all in this book. I tried to remember all the funny things that had ever happened to me, because I wanted to make a sick girl smile. Besides, I wanted to my girl to understand that being greedy, boastful, or stuck-up wasn't nice at all. That doesn't mean I was always like that when I was a little boy. Sometimes, when I couldn't think of a story, I'd borrow one from other daddies I knew. After all, every daddy was once a little boy. So you see, none of these stories were invented. They all actually happened to little boys. Now that Sasha is a big girl, she's hardly ever ill and can read great big books all by herself.

    But I thought that perhaps other children might like to know about a daddy and the things that happened to him when he was a little boy.

    That's all I wanted to say. But wait! There's something else. There's more to this book. Each one of you can discover the rest for yourself, for your own daddy can tell you about things that happened to him when he was a little boy. And so can your mommy. I'd love to hear their stories, too.

With very best wishes,
Your friend,
A. Raskin

---

Who wouldn't want to read the book after all that?

And since it's only about 160ish pages, it only takes about an hour to read. I can use these reading credits to offset a similar amount of time wasted on frivolity like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

UPDATE: See here.

Not really life with a dumbphone

One of the worst things on the Internet is attempting to outgeek geeks. Only one thing is worse, and that is trying to out-hipster hipsters.

For the uninitiated, I'll try to define "hipster" (in its Internet sense) a little more concisely than Wikipedia and UrbanDictionary.

A hipster is someone who actively rejects the mainstream, and a large part of the reasoning is that the idea of a "mainstream" seems to run counter to their need to stand out from the teeming, unwashed masses who have seemingly been brainwashed into their 'preferences'.

I (try to) pass no value judgement on hipsters, as sometimes I can come across similarly (being a Bieber-hater, for e.g., although I try to convince myself that it's because he's shite.)

And yet, when I try to draw on other people's experiences in a life with a dumbphone, I come across examples that are either not really dumbphone enough (GPS? Music? Podcasts? WTF?), or way too smartphone-hating.

The problem with the first linked post is that the blogger's reaction is a little extreme. He tries out a Moto Cliq tied to T-Mobile, and after a terrible first experience, continues to do the exact same thing! He then moves on to a Huawei Comet (again with T-Mobile), and has an even worse experience, promptly pronounces renunciation of smartphones, and goes for an LG "feature"-phone. Which can still do GPS, music and podcasts.

So it's not really "life with a dumphone", but more like "life with a non-shitty phone and service provider, but let's start small". He's basically gone hipster without knowing it.

My issue with the second linked post (in two parts, One and Two) is that it is phenomenally hipster, in that it denounces the typical smartphone user as being a socially inept person in real life, who dumps all over real-world relationships, based on a survey done by a phone systems company ("81 percent of survey participants said they would prefer being single and keeping their smartphones!", "on average, an adult spent nine hours a day playing with a smartphone and only about 27 minutes per day talking with their significant others!") Except that the study it cites was an April Fool's gag, as confirmed by the company in question on their blog. There's an important lesson in there about getting your data from the right sources, as well.

After having to forcibly live with a "proper" dumbphone, it is a little strange that there is such little chronicling of such experiences. Ah well, if the mountain will not come to Muhammad...

The Metallica "Angry soon-to-be-ex Fan" is stupid

Nearly everything in this "Open Letter To Metallica from an Angry soon-to-be-ex Fan" is either wrong, misguided or plain foolish.

What have Metallica said or done that betrays a lack of concern or knowledge about the fans feelings? Their news update is pretty clear (IMHO), and just about stops short of an apology. What more do you want them to do? You're taking them to task for not wanting to perform in a - by your own admission - "shitty venue"? And you're mad at them for this? To paraphrase the hackneyed t-shirt slogan, "They've upped their standards. Up yours." :-)

Spirit of personal integrity? Laugh and a half, that one. "Put on our headphones and tear shit up"? Well, that's what the Metallica 'fans' did at the concert venue, and look how well that worked out for them.

Saying "we can behave like idiots because you do too" is far too childish for someone in the age-range of the average Metallica fan.

The absolute kickers were these lines:

See…you shouldn’t toy with the affections of people who love your music…they will react like homicidal lovers. They will set u on fire.

..followed shortly by:

Heavy metal is supposed to represent a spirit of rebellion and independent expression but it seems like you expect less from your fans.

Allow me to say: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

There are strangely unsettling parallels between the thinking that drives this blog post, and the apologists for the London rioters.

Gotta get down on Sunday

1. Take a train to tiny speck of a station.
2. Trek through the Sussex country-side on roads without sidewalks.
3. Step back into the late 18th/early 19th century of railways.
4. Hop aboard a choo-choo train.
5. Stare at guy in dirty overalls shovelling coal into the firebox of ancient steam locomotive.
6. Inhale coal gas fumes in moving train.
7. Gawk at adverts for companies, brands and products long since extinct.
8. Take shortcut across a meadow that turns out to be grazing lands.
9. Watch woolly and shorn sheep gambol.
10. Marvel that gambolling doesn't just happen in books.
11. Wade through a slushy path to a delightful little patch of green.
12. Curse at rain for threatening to deprive a day of its cricket.
    
13. Rejoice at the senior citizen players deciding to play anyway.
    
14. Rejoice even more at the clouds relenting and deciding to let the sun through.
    
15. Get picture taken with one of the finest commentators of all time.
    
16. Laze through a cricket match with a pint of bright Sussex ale.
17. Laugh at random commentator who keeps quietly asking spectators and players the names of the batsmen and bowlers.
18. Shoot the breeze about cricket obscuridae with genuine lovers of the game.
19. Run back through aforementioned meadow to catch taxi and train back home.
20. Feel like a character out of a chilled out Enid Blyton novel.
21. Crash.

Best. Sunday. Ever.

Showing the URL protocol in the Firefox address bar

A fair amount of people seem to be using Firefox Aurora.

Unfortunately, the latest Aurora 7.0a2 build (as of tonight - 12th July, 2011) has enabled a 'feature' as part of the Firefox team's efforts to copy Google Chrome's efforts at being different: they have gone and disabled showing the "http://" (the protocol) part of the URL.

I was dreading the day this would come to my beloved Firefox - but fortunately, Firefox retains the ability to make quick, under-the-hood changes using about:config.

Here's how you go about ensuring your URL bar isn't screwed around with:

1. Go to about:config
2. Find the value called browser.urlbar.trimURLs
3. Double-click and toggle it's value to false

And that's that!

Suspicious Gmail IMAP Activity

Quick note for future reference: if your Gmail activity window shows frequent IMAP access from the United States IP 67.220.123.24, don't panic (as I did initially).

It's just your Nokia phone polling Gmail for new mails. That IP resolves to em.outgoing4.messaging.nokia.com.

Just FYI. And FMI.

Kurt Vonnegut is awesome. And very scary.

I finished reading Slaughterhouse-Five on a Sunday night.

Monday morning, the better half informs me of weird bed-side behaviour and ramblings about time travel.

I then flip through my phone, and realise I'd typed this out in the "Notes" section, reproduced verbatim (except for the timestamp bit; that was generated by the phone)

Date: Monday, 20th June, 2011
Time: 00:21

Time is like a fractal tree. The past is always the trunk, the future always the branches, and the present is always the junction of the two.

To the simple mind, time can be visualised as an endless 3-dimensional matrix of amber. And every moment of our lives is captured in it as bugs. Except we are all the bugs, in every direction. But our actual physical manifestation can only be one point in time, because is is not a spatial dimension!

This seems to make sense at some points, but is also disturbingly out of reach to my conscious mind and brain. Hence recorded here.

What. The. FRACK?!

Dear Mr. Vonnegut: what have you made me smoke, and may I please have some more?