Blog archives for February, 2004

Measuring employee productivity

You keep hearing about those hyper-productive coding sessions, where people are capable of producing thousands of lines of almost perfect code on the daily basis, and thus qualify for “genius” title appended to their name. But the guy who is capable of producing really good DirectX code might have a trouble with generating good sorting algorithms, and even though he can do it, it’d take him longer than the guy across the cubicle farm, who had the sorting routines as his senior project.

Measuring employee productivity is both an efficiency and project management issue. The corporation, theoretically, is interested in saving resources by firing, let’s say, 10% of its least productive people and re-assigning work to 10% of new hires that might or might not bring the required productivity. Is employee productivity an exact science or is it just a myth carefully nurtured by business schools, so that efficiency experts from Office Space could get a job?

I’ve started reading this collection of articles and documents from Intel. Intel, out of all companies? Well, in a nutshell, Intel is somewhat interested in selling you a bunch of PCs, so they tout their technology as a way to improve employee productivity. To improve something you must measure it first, so that you don’t end up like me and my Atkins diet, where I didn’t weigh myself at the beginning to figure out how many pounds I’ve really lost. Lots of research, whitepapers and best practices, should be an interesting read.

Web’s most annoying spelling errors

If you’ve ever been through an English as a Second Language program, you are probably aware of the numerous annoyances in spelling that an avid English learner must know about. So, if you’re like me, and English is not necessarily your first language, you go on the Internet hoping to finally utilize your mad language skillz, only to find native speakers themselves mauling English, their first language. It’s everywhere - in emails, on forums, Slashdot, personal sites, and blogging just contributed to this phenomenon.

I will keep a list of the most annoying ones, that I hope to keep updating in the future.

  1. it’s/its - This one is not hard, really. It’s a beautiful day implies that it really is a gorgeous day to be outside, while Killer bee is a strange creature, its behavior is mostly unknown talks about the subject (in this case killer bee), and then something pertaining to this subject (in this case behavior). The first one is just a short form of it is, the second one is a pronoun. Any time someone has a problem with choosing between it’s/its, substituting it’s with it is should give the definitive answer. Its really annoying to see people make this mistake over and over.
  2. ‘ve/of - This one is interesting, since people who make this mistake have probably better audio skills than visual. They seem to hear that little voice of their own pronouncing “I could’ve run away to join the circus” and since the phonetic appearance of that little apostrophe-ve part is so similar to our favorite of, the brain automatically makes a substitution and stuff like “I could of run away” and “Microsoft could of open-source Windows” comes out. Fewer people make this mistake, than the previous one, which nevertheless doesn’t make it less annoying. Once again, substitute that little ‘ve with have, and if the sentence still makes sense, then of probably has no business being right there. I could of written more on this, but let’s move on.
  3. definately - Google search for definately - 634,000 results. Dictionary.com search on definately - 0 results. Hard to say where this one comes from, perhaps ambiguity of “independent/independant” had something to do with this, or maybe people freak out at “fine”, thinking that they should read it as in “wine”, which they know is incorrect, and thus definitely must be wrong, but there’s really no excuse for this one.
  4. they’re/their - Less common, and less annoying to me, but still lurking out there among those with greater capabilities for spoken word than written one.

Meet **beautiful** w0men, increase your…

The pitch that you would get back in the 50s and 60s would tell you to “learn how easily and quickly any normal voice can be strengthened”. Supposedly Feuchtinger voice method would increase your chances of rising to middle management ranks, after which only unparalleled success could ensue. The company insists on calling itself Prefect Voice, but they are really Perfect Voice and they are still in business.


Improve your voice

Kerry gets endorsement from Internet majors

Even though Republican administration generally provided beneficial breaks for tech industry and was always perceived as more pro-business, Silicon Valley and California in general typically vote Democrat. John Kerry received high-level endorsements from Google CEO and Yahoo COO this week.

Hmm, interesting, it looked to me like Google would endorse another candidate, but I guess that’s out of the question since he kinda dropped out.

Paying for e-mail becomes more realistic

Bill Gates’ idea about charging certain amount for each piece of e-mail you receive (a penny for strangers, zero for people you know and white-list, five bucks for those who forward chain letters) is getting some practical implementation. An Israeli company called Goodmail is currently developing a technology to do just that and even managed to pitch it to folks at Yahoo! Haaretz goes as far as claiming that “the stamp will be identifiable by ISPs worldwide”, without going into too much detail there.

Meanwhile, the story of Google preparing a free e-mail offering that I submitted to Slashdot got posted and there’s some guy, who knows a guy who knows a guy who works at Google, says that Google’s service will pitch you context-based advertising (not too cool), but will offer 1 GB of e-mail space for such inconvenience (fucking unbelievable). Of course, reliability of such sources is questionable, but Google is in good position to do just that, with terabyte of storage not costing too much, and with possibility to scrape each and every Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail user out there just before the IPO.

Exploiting Software: How to Break Code

Exploiting Software: How to break codeI finished reviewing Exploiting Software: How to Break Code by Hoglund and Viega and you should expect to see the review on your favorite news for nerds site. The review still shows up in the submission queue, so if you want to see it sooner, tell Timothy to stop slacking off.

This could be the best security book I’ve read this year. The first one that actually tells you how to break code and take advantage of software applications instead of providing general rules like “validate user input”. I am sure the great amount of controversy will spur from the fact that such book is sold for $50 list, so pretty much anyone can get access to it, including those with some malicious plans. However, a need for such book is quite apparent, as quite often people know what a buffer overrun is, they know that it’s bad, they know that some Microsoft software frequently got slammed for it (happens less frequently now), but they sure cannot describe the exact way of how an attack can be launched.

Learning to love RSS Bandit

Reading thousands of RSS feeds is not easy, as Robert Scoble, the avid reader of sub-1300 feeds, points out in his Weblog. Most of the people are a bit saner and prefer not to deal with hundreds of feeds daily, but some of us are just that crazy. I generally used SharpReader to do most of my reading, but yesterday I have finally re-discovered RSS Bandit.

Issues with SharpReader

What’s wrong with the SharpReader? - you might ask. Well, here are some of the issues, some mysterious, some quite obvious, that I had to fight while trying to read more than 800 feeds in this RSS aggregator.

Errors displayed in SharpReader

  • Sometimes, for no apparent reason SharpReader just stops updating the feeds, of which you’re not informed, but have to sort of figure out on your own by saying “Wait a minute, it tells me everything is updated, but these News.com are two days old”, which means that the feed has not been updated. Okay, down the feed list, choose News.com, right-click, Update this feed. Nothing happens, except the little updating icon appears by the feed name, without the feed getting ever updated. It’s a mysterious crash somewhere inside SharpReader, which behaves like a zombie, having no knowledge that some threads have died.
  • However, if at any point the feed is missing or contains an incompatible character, which invalidates the RSS, SharpReader is sure to inform you about it with big frigging red title in the pane where you expect to read titles, i.e. useful information. Which is not that bad if the breakdowns are occasional and if you have like 5 feeds. However, here’s the case that occurred more than once. I am sitting at work, and my employer’s network connection is down for a minute, or I am at home, and I need to use the phone line, so I disconnect. God forbid that happens while the SharpReader is updating, because instead of 800 useful feed updates you’re getting 800 red messages “Feed could not be retrieved” or something like that, making the window impossible to read and putting you at risk of getting carpal tunnel by pressing the Del button repeatedly.
  • Memory consumption is unbelievable.

Memory consumption with SharpReader

Good things about SharpReader

  • It supports folders, so you can read headlines from the entire folder, instead of browsing feed by feed. I stopped reading individual feeds long time ago, I just read folders now, especially since a bunch of my feeds come from Yahoo! News and Google News requests (there is a cool PHP hack for Google News to RSS conversion that you can download and host on your server).
  • There’s internal search (for feeds you’ve downloaded) as well as external (Feedster).
  • You can specify the global refresh speed (for me it’s 1 hour) as well as per-feed refresh rate (MSDN blogs and ASP.NET blog feeds are updated every 15 minutes on my desktop, since they’re refreshed more often due to multiple authors involved).

RSS Bandit in general - looks just like the SharpReader

Part of the issue that I suspect is specific to my box, is that while the links from SharpReader used to open in my FireBird 0.7, they somehow do not open anymore in FireFox 0.8 (yeah, they changed the browser name in between the versions, in case you didn’t hear the story). I’ve spent some time trying to fix that problem, but then got fed up and decided to search around, keeping in mind a cool project Dare Obasanjo once started that now evolved to this.

Search pane in RSS Bandit

Good things about RSS Bandit

  • Folder browsing is there (although the default sorting is descending alphabetic, what gives?)
  • Local (via View - Find or Search button) and global (via Search pane) search is supported
  • Global as well as local refresh rates are supported.
  • The processes do not die mysteriously.
  • All the errors are saved into a separate Feed Errors folder, which is definitely nicer than SharpReader’s approach.
  • It’s open-source.
  • It stores your feeds remotely, as long as you give it the FTP server username/password.
  • Post Reply button for those supporting the CommentAPI.
  • Blog this using w.bloggar, if you happen to use this Windows GUI client for access to a dozen of blogging back-end engines (like Movable Type and LiveJournal). I am using w.blogger as you could probably learn from my previous posts, haven’t used this feature yet, but it’s rather convenient.

Google is developing free e-mail

Not so much a secret rumor, as it is reported in New York Times (and NYT wouldn’t have reporters just thinking up stories, would they?), but Google is developing free e-mail offering in order to compete with Yahoo (or so NYT notes, since the story is about Yahoo, not Google):

It is expected to be the hottest initial public offering this year. And now Google is preparing to offer a free e-mail service, people close to the company said, in a bid for Yahoo’s most important source of loyal customers.

Ethernet to solve international power adapter problems?

Traveling between Europe, Americas and Asia, everyone probably at some point went to the local Radioshack with the purpose of purchasing the international power adapters that plug into those funny outlets around the world. My first international Ericsson cell phone with tri-band support included like 5 or 6 different plugs to recharge the battery.

Looks like Metcalfe’s invention might save the world in this regard. Power over Ethernet allows you to plug your devices into the ubiquitous 802.3 jacks, with the purpose of getting power supplied to your device (and perhaps some Internet connectivity, if it requires it). Ethernet razor, anyone?

.NET garbage collection - advantages and issues

On Saturdays I tend to wake up at noon and just read leisurely, not being prepared to do much more, except catch up with the outside world. Paul Wilson posted an interesting series of articles on .NET garbage collection, where he describes some issues with the subject, discovers certain memory leaks within .NET Framework and compares the .NET implementation to Java.

While discussing the issues of .NET garbage collection and especially comparing the collector to Java, it’s worth remembering that while Microsoft provides the implementation of its GC, Sun Micro documented the specs for the GC and the actual garbage collection is implemented by whoever published JVM. Theoretically thus the issues described with Java GC do not relate to JVMs from IBM and other vendors. I have not actually looked into the alternative JVMs, just consider it a fair warning to anyone who brings up the subject of JVM GC performance.

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