Enjoy your turkey dinner and count your blessings!

Just don't forget to be thankful for what you have tomorrow as well.

The real revolution is that you get to make waves, not just ride them.

 

The extraordinary revolution of media choice

Nothing I can say will make you feel any better; it's just going to suck for a while and then it will be fine. 

This line sums up the knowledge I also came up with after years of people crying on my shoulder. It's just a simple way to cut through the bullshit, but it makes you sound like a ruthless jerk.

 

The line is from Margin Call.

I think it takes both courage and self control for a developer to simply delete code.

Usually, developers prefer to comment out code rather than delete it. I see this a lot, both while pair programming and while reading other people's code.

I have nothing against comments per se, or against commenting out code when you know you're going to need it a bit later. What ticks me off is when I devs comment out a whole block of code because they're about to rewrite it. And then they just leave it there. Forever.

That's a problem because when someone else comes in and reads the codebase, they see the comments and they have to read those too. Because, hey, if the commented code would be useless, then it would have been deleted, right? Therefore, this code is just as valuable and important as the uncommented code.

Pah!

Another scenario occurs with shotgun coders. You know them and you've worked with them. They don't really know the API so the hack at the examples and you could swear that you can read their thoughs when you watch them try out different API calls: "Maybe this will work." -- "OK, maybe this?" -- "This?"

They comment out each try, leaving a trail of failed trials in their wake. And when -- as if by miracle -- they do get the damn thing working, they quickly close the file. Yes, comments left untouched. Like a trophy of cool code and of their great effort.

Pah!

It takes courage to delete code, it seems. You first need to understand what the code you're deleting is doing. People don't like to invest time in that kind of stuff. They'd much rather have the old code right there in case they screw up.

Deleting code is like making a promise. You give your word that you are going to write better code that will replace and maybe extend the old one. This means the old code will be obsolete. And in the words of the late George Carlin, here's what I like to do with obsolete code: delete the fuck! I do have git to take care of old versions of the codebase so I don't have to, right?

The next time you comment out some code trying to fix a bug, remember that and delete it when you're done.

Take some responsibility. Make a promise. Delete code.

 

 

This is something for the weekend, featuring @mike_ftw

I think the number of sales per day a month or so after launch with give us all a bit of insight about whether we like the ideas at ted.com or the way they're conveyed. I think the ideas and stories TED has brought me are invaluable and some people I've seen give TED Talks are actually genius, but I don't buy just anyone's book. Then again, they are just $2.99.
I know TED are not in the crapper with money, so this thing might actually be new for the sake of novelty science.

The first three TED Book are up for sale and can be downloaded on any Kindle-app-equiepped device, including iPhones -- you know, like mine.

I think I'll start with The Happiness Manifesto, by Nic Marks, because I remember I loved the talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/nic_marks_the_happy_planet_index.html

 

I came across an interesting article this morning. It's about software that analyzes social media updates to isolate statuses that are actually sales leads. Or anything else, for that matter. They call it human intent.

If a relatively unknown company, Viralheat, can do this why can't we expect something similar being done at a higher, conspiracy-prone, level? Read the article and give me you two cents.

 -- Scott Adams

And that's the case with most things. See this video, for instance. It's about the jetpack and its inventor, Justin Capră.

Toward the end of the clip, he mentions that an American told him new cars or new energy cannot be implemented, although technology allows, because that would mean millions of people losing their jobs. Tomorrow.
Obviously, that's not such a great idea, but what that actally translates to is:

Some people invested a lot of money in today's -- or, rather, yesterday's -- technologies and they want to maximize on their investment. So change is hard, if not impossible, in this case. I'm sure you know the whole PCI versus PCIe and PCI Express. Even though PCI Express is better than PCI by leaps and bounds, it could not be implemented right away because big players had invested money in PCI -- the legacy system. This is also the case for electric cars. Well, that and the fact that they're damn expensive and have low autonomy.
Still, we could work on their autonomy and find a way to drive manfacturing costs down -- but nobody's interested in doing that because there's still plenty of money in the oil business. Only when that pot boils dry will we have an urge to improve the alternative energy sources.

The coding-world example would be Python 3 versus Python 2.x. No backwards compatibility! A rewrite. Because things got out of hand. The API became a mess. And with great cost, they brought forth a great change. A New Age. And yes, if other new ideas -- in other idustries, I mean -- would get implemented like this it would cost a lot of people a lot of jobs. Jobs that would be replaced by new ones, yet nobody's talking about that. And yes, the filthy rich that invested in the current technology would be a bit less rich. So why don't they invest in the new one side-by-side? Like a pet project. Or like a common fund investment.

To go back to Justin Capră, his merit for inventing the jetpack is finally being awarded to him. And that's good. What I loved most about his discourse, was how he sees automobiles, as shameful devices. They burn 980ml of fuel to move themselves forward, and only 20ml(!) to move the 1 person they bare. That's not a good ratio, by any means.

Screw the MPG fad. Focus on Gallon Per Ton Per Mile for a while, eh?

 

About a year ago, Romanian Railways decided to do something about the massive delays in their train schedule.
They chose to go about it in a unique way: INCLUDE the current delays in the schedule.

And faster than you could say "damn trains are always late" they were now always on time. Sometimes a little early.

I am traveling right now, by train. And talking to Oana, I realized that, since CFR (Romanian Railways) charge by the kilometer + speed supplement, the price of the tickets should have gone down.

Guess what, the price stayed the same. And actually went up a bit. So CFR not only shagged us in the behind with their creative delay strategy, they got us to pay more for train rides that take longer.

I feel retroactively violated!