General

Subtitled "A little book that teaches you when to quit and when to stick" by Seth Godin. So what is the dip ? It is the strange valley after you start with something, causing that after initial quick success you will get worse before you can get better. Obstacles that you either overcome - or you quit. Seth explains that these obstacles are there for a reason - they separate those who want something badly enough from those who do not. We know them in various forms. Back at the university, the first 2 years packed with math were the dip. Very little of the math we have had to learn was actually really necessary - other that learn you how to think, how to study and in addition to that, separate those who really wants to have that Computer Science degree strong enough.

I've spent lot of time today reading. I am catching up with my reading stack. Between stuff I've finished was: Breaking Windows : How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft The impression ? Mixed feelings. Maybe I've expected something different. Lot's of details on internal politics and inner fights, not too flattering portrait of Bill G as control obsessed person with very questionable interpersonal skills. From technology perspective, very little what was both interesting and new. I can hardly tell how close to reality are the facts presented, but I often disagreed with the conclusion and analytics. Overall, it was probably worth the time spent on the book - the more you are into politics and relations, the more you may like it. If you are (as I was) expecting a view from more technology side and other stuff that matters, get another book.

Thanks to sudden memory jump in my iPod (from 4GB Nano 2gen to 8 GB iPod touch) I have enough space to load some books in addition to podcasts. I normally do not like abridged versions, but the weather is getting worse so I do not get enough walking time for full versions. These two were both 3-4 disc long audio books. The Google Story is interesting if you are into history of computing - because it describes the probably the largest transition in computing history - the evolution of World Wide Web to a platform and the evolution of the company that made the Web actually useful. I still remember how much time did it take in 1997/1998 to find anything relevant when the best way how to do this were directories (in early Yahoo! style) or AltaVista and hours and hours of paging through the irrelevant results. Then in early 1998 my friend Rajeeva (I was working in New Jersey at Merrill Lynch) made me aware of that company with funny empty looking page and strange name Google :). And now, 9 years later the shareprice of GOOG is well over $600 - just unbelievable.

Gerd Leonhard, co-author of the Future of Music book is making an experiment with his new book - The End of Control. He is publishing the chapters of the book as they appear in PDF format as well as MP3's on his website. First two chapters - "Attention is the new currency" and "Copyright in the Age of Uncontrolled distribution" are currently available for download / reading / listening. The books tries to address very important questions on how will the new media business function in environment with little control over the distribution channel. Attempts to enforce control with technical tools were not very successful - just recall the Sony rootkit fiasco's, hacking the HD-DVD and others. Currently, there is strong movement away from DRM and towards non-crippledrestricted content.

Look how creatively did French government - more specifically Ministère de la culture et de la communication - approach even such mundane subject as the 404 page :-).

It is all about deep questions and problems computer science. Including the question whether such thing as computer science actually exists. I thing it does, but have occasional moments of doubts - mostly when I read something related to real science :-). What does Andreas Zwinkau (it is read as ts-win-cow, my anglophone friends ;-)) think about it, can be found http://focs.wordpress.com/ His comments are amazingly deep for such a young guy. I wish when I was getting my comp-sci degree (1981-1986) we have had the same wonderful things these young fellas have now: ubiquitous internet and really world wide web with Google that actually makes it useful, Linux and many other wonderful open source projects (Apache, Jakarta, Firefox, Eclipse - you name it). Can you imagine studying computer science in a world where the Web does not exist (yet) ?

My current client is multi-national company, headquartered in Ottawa with offices in USA and Europe. With teams all over the globe, the conference calls and network meetings are part of the game. This usually means Microsoft Netmeeting to share the screen and teleconference bridge for voice. Netmeeting usually works quite OK - except when it does not - for no obvious reason :-). Thanks to Yugma, there is now better alternative. Yugma is Sanskrit word meaning "the state of being in unified collaboration" and also a name of a startup, offering teleconferencing product that aspires to unify colaboration between platforms. And they mean it, because their product runs on Windows, Linux and Mac and integrates with Skype to take care of the voice portion.

From Scott Guthrie's interview on .NET futures SG: We’ve seen demand for an MVC framework on two fronts. One is for even more testability, having the ability to completely mock-up a request. We’ve also always seen with ASP.NET that some people like having the server control, postback model; some people say, “I just want absolute control.” The MVC framework we’re coming up with is a fairly simple MVC model, it’s very clean, it’s a front controller model, and it integrates very well into ASP.NET so you can use ASP.NET forms authentication, session state, security, personalisation, caching, all the standard features, but with an alternative to the postback model where you have a more traditional controller-view separation and have complete control over your HTML.

Experience is what you get when you did not get what you wanted. Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things. They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough They are there to stop "the other people" Randy Pausch If you want to watch and listen to a lecture by professor of CMU Computer Science that will teach you things way beyond realms of software engineering, check this video.

This is blog entry I wrote over a two years ago - before this blog has even started. Now I found it on the disk during cleanups and found out it is still valid. The iPod mentioned was my first, now long dead first generation Shuffle. Here it comes: Spent most of Friday night and part of Saturday reading this book. I did not really expect to finish it, considering the size (~ 500 pages) and the fact that I am not such a great fan of Oracle products - especially not the Oracle Apps. But it turned up to be way better that expected. I mean the book, albeit I partially improved my opinion about the 11i. Technologywise, it is still kind a dinosaur, but now I can more appreciate the sheer size of the problem these guys were trying to address. But back to the book.