alex.moskalyuk

MIT Technology Review interviews Bjarne Stroustrup on C++ and why modern software is so bad. Some memorable quotes on why software is bad: “People reward developers who deliver software that is cheap, buggy, and first. That’s because people want fancy new gadgets now.” On problems developers might have with C++: “Often, when people have trouble with C++, the real problem is that they don’t have appropriate libraries - or that they can’t find the libraries that are available.” On some developers frequently complaining about C++: “There are just two kinds of languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses.”

I finished reading The Art of SQL by Peter Robson. It’s a pretty informative book, and has two pretty good uses:
1) It provides author-derived benchmarks for a bunch of special cases that you might encounter in the future, such as having indexes on a single column, having it on two columns, having it on three columns, and so on. It also has pretty good explanations of how expensive things like an index can be.
2) It provides a pretty good list of common beginner mistakes, such as running a SELECT COUNT(*) on your DB just to see if the number of results is larger than zero. That is a classic example of a wasteful query, since your programming language most likely allows you to run a SELECT query without COUNT, and then perform a foreach() on the set of results, therefore eliminating this step if the number of returned rows is zero.
The book is written with Sun Tzu’s Art of War in mind, and the chapters carry the same titles as Sun Tzu’s work.

Ray Kurzweil is in the news lately, first describing stock-picking to some hedge fund investors, where the most successful investment strategy is determined exactly in the way the best chess move is during any given move:

Because arbitrage opportunities disappear so quickly now, neural networks have emerged that can consider thousands of scenarios at once. It is unlikely, for instance, that Microsoft will begin selling ice cream or IBM declare bankruptcy, but a nonlinear system can consider such possibilities, and thousands of others, without overtaxing computers that must be ready to react in milliseconds.

The at SC06 the inventor described the nanobots that would cruise the human body, cleaning blood passages and doing a lot of useful work, which is required for a body to avoid heart diseases:

By the late 2020s, doctors will be sending intelligent bots, or nanobots, into our bloodstreams to keep us healthy, and into our brains to keep us young;

He even points at the exact year, when computational power will exceed the human intelligence:

Computer, or non-biological, intelligence created in the year 2045 will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.

If you missed out on Xbox 360 for $100, at least this deal is not in limited quantities. Sony PlayStation Portable is on Amazon.com for $169.24 with free shipping and no sales tax, unless you happen to order to a WA state address. No limited quantities or anything - looks like it’s either their day after Thanksgiving special, or regular price from now on.

Bill Gates was on Charlie Rose tonight, and I managed to catch 20 last minutes of the interview. It was pretty packed with interesting information on Microsoft’s chairman views of competition. He derided the European Union and the lobbying competitors a bit for spending so much effort to make Microsoft ship a MediaPlayer-less version of Windows that no consumer wanted. Gates strongly believed shipping parental controls with Vista is worth it, even though a free version inside Windows sort of kills the cottage industry of paid parental control packages - in the end it’s better for consumer, and companies in that industry can always offer more added value on top of Microsoft’s controls.

He disagreed with Charlie Rose regarding any suspicions on Microsoft “tuning” the defaults in Vista to favor MSN Search. First off, there’s an entire branding going on inside the company, as far as switching to Live brand, and Microsoft as well as other search engine players will be fighting for the privilege to be the search engine of choice on user’s PC. Second off, most of the new computers sold today are reconfigured depending on who paid more payola to PC manufacturer, such as Google+Dell and Yahoo!+HP deals. So the competitive field is more or less leveled.

He things of Google as a strong competitor, primarily because
(a) they overlap in several markets
(b) Google is fundamentally a software company
(c) Google’s aggressive hiring of top talent is something Microsoft is seeing for the first time in the industry

With the Zune they don’t have success metrics, at least not the ones that Bill Gates is willing to divulge. He said that the market will hopefully appreciate the innovations such as wireless sharing. Meanwhile, he called iPod a phenomenal success.

Going through 100 notable books of the year from the New York Times was a bit depressing, since out of 100 books that NYT deemed the most notable I have read zero. Even worse, just one looked interesting - Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos. Ok, to be fair, I managed to get through quite a few books lately - The Art of SQL, Condensed Knowledge, Data Structures and Algorithms, In search of Stupidity, 2nd ed., but none of those made the list this year.

That Amazon promotion on XBox 360 for $100 did not go too well this morning. I logged in at roughly 10:45, checked My Account, just to make sure the cookie that’s saved into Amazon system is fresh and new, so I am not presented with the login screen somewhere in the process. At about 11:00 am the site was completely inaccessible with Firefox tab icons spinning away for minutes at a time.

Greg Linden provides some insight as a former Amazonian:

When I was at Amazon, every year we in engineering would try to avoid spikes in traffic, especially around peak holiday loads, and every year marketing folks would want to run some promotion specifically designed to create a mad frenzy on the site. Usually, we convinced them to change the promotion, but apparently engineering lost (or was asleep at the switch) this year.

People who didn’t get the console got kinda upset with the site performance.

In related news, did you know you could build MySQL clusters on Amazon’s E2 service, while utilizing S3 for storage? Due to sudden availability of free time I did some reading on MySQL Cluster this morning.

Brian Aker of MySQL AB released version 0.3 of memcache_engine for MySQL. memcache_engine marries in-memory object caching engine memcache (originally developed by Danga Interactive) with SQL query capabilities, basically enabling you do to SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE against your cache servers. The source is pretty light - take away the make files, and it’s just ha_memcache.cc and ha_memcache.h with round 25k worth of code.

Vote on the deal Amazon.com should introduce on the Thanksgiving day. According to the current state of voting, it looks like Xbox 360 will be sold for $100 on November 23rd at 11:00 am. Only 1,000 consoles will be sold at this price.

There’s a contest to write a PHP GD graphing calculator annojunced on PHPFreaks.com. The deadline is December 16th, 2006. Not sure what the prizes are, but the contest is open to solo coder teams only. The entry should minimally support:
* Basic math: addition/subtraction/division/multiplication
* Logrithmic functions - ln, log, x^y
* Trig functions - sin(), cos(), tan() of basic 2D equations
* Traversal of the axis (x and y)