Simple is Beautiful

Like all most of the people I know, I too find myself struggling to keep up with the increasing information flow and the need to come up with means to filter that information stream as to spend as little time as possible evaluating and putting it into good use, and focus on the kind of information that matters to me the most.

Naturally, it would have been best to store/collect/accumulate every bit of information that comes your way. However, unless you be able to identify the usefulness of that information in timely fashion since the acquisition, you are merely storing what you coul/should most probably be able to acquire/lookup later on anyway ( Google, usenet, etc ).

There are various tools and services that make it possible to throw everything at them ( textual content, multimedia, URLs, .. ) which they will happily store away, optionally encrypt them, make them searchable, place them in 'smart lists', you name it. Examples of such applications on Mac OS X are Together, Soho Notes, Yojimbo. I have tried over a dozen of those applications but nothing really worked for me ( pun intended ). They are mostly fine applications, mind you, and may very well turn out to be the perfect tool for your needs so you should try them. ( Sugar is apparently a happy 'Together' user ).

I am relying on NetNewsWire for acquiring information. My subscription list is rather short. I keep track of my friends, some 'interesting folks', various dedicated technical sites and a couple sources providing me with gaming and other entertainment news/meterial. It turns out that having a like minded (sub)network of friends is more valuable than having access to a highly comprehensive list of sources.
Your friends will filter the information for you. They know what you are interested in. They will happily forward you stuff they consider cool/interesting/useful. Thus, its not really that useful to subscribe to popular information sources, for your friends and other sources even, are monitoring them anyway.
I usually check for subscription updates once day, when I get back home from work. I quickly go through the list of items and the ones that seem interesting/worthy I open in a NNW tab for later. Sometime that list of tabs grows to over 100. I go through the opened tabs list whenever I have available time to do so; ones deemed really interesting/useful end up in my Safari bookmarks ( more on that later ) list. Eventually all tabs/pages are consulted and closed. This two-phase process helps me make the most out of the information that reaches me via NNW.

Safari is my web browser of choice for various reasons. I maintain a hierarchical list of bookmarks folders which help me keep references to URLs, obtained mostly via NNW, organized. Most of the bookmarks are tagged by means of adding a list of keywords describing the content within [] in the title. For example, I bookmarked http://www.pragprog.com/ as 'The Pragmatic Bookshelf [store, books, technology]'.

I also maintain text files that hold content specific to a given information domain. For instance, there is a file entitled 'Syntax compilation hints' which I use to store useful, interesting phrases and writing techniques I can refer to in the future. There is another file named 'Quotations', a folder 'Studying Src' which contains files such as 'Algorithms', 'x86 Assembly', 'Cocoa', 'Interesting Findings' etc. In fact, whenever I am studying the implementation details of an application ( say, Lua or Quake III ) I create a text file where I document my findings and thoughts on those. There are over a dozen of folders holding over 100 or so 'notes files', ranging from 'personal rules to follow', to 'ways to deal with stress' to 'ideas about work projects' and 'My Books'.

It all comes down to the fact that thanks to Spotlight ( one of my favorite features of Mac OS X ) I can locate the information stored away as text files ( of course, you can locate anything on your system using Spotlight anyway ) and bookmarks instantly, consult them and update them with little effort. In addition to that, you can easily synchronize and backup that information to locally attached media ( external disks, CDS, etc ) or over the Net (.Mac, online storage services, rsync to a server you have access to you, .. ).

The rules of evolution, thankfully, apply to most systems and processes. What that basically means in this context is that I will eventually figure out a better way to approach the problem. Until that time comes though, I am sufficiently pleased by the benefits the existing solution is providing me with.

I have been meaning to outline the benefits of keeping your body's health in sync with your mind's for a while. Ancient Greeks knew all about that. Put it simply, they practiced their own 'healthy mind in a healthy body' doctrine religiously. But I digress. If you are having trouble dealing with stress, anger management, fighting off productivity loss, severe burnout related problems, do your self a favor. Put aside a tiny portion of your time, on a daily basis, dedicated to body exercises ( it doesn't have to be weight lifting ). Keep it going for a week and the aforementioned problems will slowly fade away. It worked for me. As a side benefit you stand to lose some weight and feel good most of the times - even if it would seem impossible prior to to getting yourself to exercise. It is literally making me a better person. Good luck!

Favorite RPGs videos : Wonderful 'forgotten' RPGs. I have some very fond memories playing and reading about them.

I am browsing some code I wrote a couple of months ago, and, for the life of me, I can't really understand how I built it, how I thought of the algorithms and data-structures I used. Often enough I get to this point, whereas I just can't get my mind to recall things, process input and produce output efficiently ( i.e think straight ), help me focus and, indirectly, provide me with confidence and motivation.

That otherwise malfunctioning mind is leading me to believe this is all due to me overworking the crap out of it, coupled with a good dose of depression and insufficient stimulation of my pleasure center. I remain hopeful that I will restore its efficiency someday soon and along with it, stabilize my sanity and feel good, maybe even happy if I am lucky enough. What a clusterfuck.

My brother provided me with a theme for my blog. Its pretty clean and simple - yet not a simple or clean as I would have wanted it to be, but that's entirely my fault. Its a matter of modifying the structure of the various elements and using font families and colors that make sense.

I purchased two iPhones from Las Vegas ( Thank you for the invitation Patrick ). I used to dislike cell phones with a passion. Especially those engineered by Nokia. Complicated for no reason, cumbersome to use, fancy for the sake of being fancy and loaded with a gazillion crappy applications and 'services'. The only cell phone I actually liked was the original Nokia phone ( short-lived moment of glory for them ) used in the Matrix 1 movie. So, naturally, my expectations were rather low when it came to putting the iPhone to the test.

"The iPhone is a revolutionary mobile phone". It actually is. Everything just works, supported by an ultra sleek UI, robust facilities and solid design decisions. It is by far the best mobile device I ever used, far surpassing any expectations I may have had.

Amazon kick-started the cloud computing era by introducing an ever expanding array of facilities and services, from S3 to EC2, to SimpleDB. Microsoft is entering the game with SSDS. Google made available a dozen APIs and WebService as a means to interfacing with their core services but everyone knew Google would come after Amazon and co, big time. It did. What is perhaps the most important benefit and side-effect of the availability of such a platform is that the everyone can build any web application without having to shelling out for the kind of resources that would have made this application possible. The AppEngine service is going to provide everyone with free access to resources and documentation - all one would need to do is signup with them, build the application on his computer using the provided SDK and then push it back to the cloud. Once the application gets successful (say, 4-5 million page views / month ) that said developer would pay Google for access to more resources. Everyone wins.

I am looking forward to similar offerings from IBM and Sun. For those who are into buzzwords, Web3.0 is here.

I am attending this session called "The Open Question" whereas Sam Ramji of Microsoft is moderating a question on all things ope (source|data, whatnot..). Mike Shcroepher of Mozilla, Andi Gutmans of Zend, Miguel de Icaza of Novell and Rob Conery of Microsoft are on stage. Very interesting stuff. The folks seem to be very knowledgeable and smart; much like the guys participated in other sessions I was lucky enough to attend to. Pictures and more commentary from this session, but also on all things Mix08, Vegas etc in a while.

The wwworld is about to change sooner than later. Microsoft's take over attempt buyout offer is bound to succeed, one way or another. I doubt there is a way for Yahoo! to deflect that one. This new offer by Microsoft would make the Y! shareholders very happy; should Yahoo! decline MSFT's offer, the shareholders would probably sue Yahoo! for doing so thereby not acting on their interest, or at the very least could give Y!'s management some very tough time. Indeed, according to the mail sent by Steven Ballmer to Yahoo! board of directors:

"Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal."

In other words, Microsoft will let the shareholders know that shooting the offer down would harm them financially and the shareholders will of course demand the sale anyway.

We live in interesting times.

MIMD, MISD and the Future

I have been studying Erlang for a few days. I dislike functional languages for various reasons, but I like Erlangs defining characteristics, especially the share-nothing, actor model based concurrency, which makes a whole lot of sense, compared to shared resources that require locking, synchronized and serialized access to them and that leads to problems - sooner or later. Some day I hope I will have the chance to revise our home-grown SGL (Switch Glue Language) based on my findings while groking lua, erlang and other languages. It should make for a really nifty little language.

We have been invited by the, otherwise, lovely folks at Microsoft Hellas to Bill Gates keynote speech, entitled something like 'The World of Tomorrow: Microsoft's Vision for the Future of Technology'. My brother, Dionysis (a beloved phaistonian) and yours truly took advantage of the precious invites and attended that said event.

Once we managed to enter the conference hall ('Music Hall', whatever its called), we found ourselves among a million strangers, looking sharp and always hungry, devouring anything those catering folks would dare place on the buffets in zero time -- that's a typical Greek trait; love for food and free stuff.

Bill Gates seemed tired and somewhat not that excited to be there, talking to mere mortals. He was nice though, he expressed his condolences on the passing of Archbishop Christodoulos and even took the time to demo something for us. He demoed Microsoft Surface, which didn't impress me at all. His hands driven actions suffered from latency and the whole thing seemed not much alike to what all Microsoft products, save the Xbox 360, to me. Ugly and almost deliberately engineered as to be hard to use by every day Joes. Bill Gates's vision of tomorrow is not different than just about everyone's vision. Break down software to services and components, move everything on the Net, come up with new ways to interface with software ( hand-writing, gestures, speech recognition,..), take advantage of the Cloud. Again, everything looked ugly. The slides ( stupid color themes and font text colors ), the screenshots and applications demoed by some Sr.Tech.Evangelist, .. Microsoft products are so freaking ugly. Perhaps I spent too much time drinking the kool aid, using Mac OS-X and apple products that I can't "tolerate" that kind of ugly UIs. I dare-say I like Microsoft, they may luck the cutting-edge tech of Google, the amazing usability and looks of Apple products, but that doesn't make any less important in the grand scheme of things.

I got the new( not so new, but damn Greek Apple products resellers, you burn in hell!) ) Apple keyboard ( the wired one, I am not much into wireless peripherals ) and its just amazing. Its a whole lot like the Macbook Pro keyboard ( best keyboard I ever used ) only, perhaps, a bit better because it provides a tactile feel ). Its just perfect.

Cocoa, coupled with Objective-C, is the best combination of an application environment + programming language I ever dived into. Everything makes sense, everything is beautiful, everything ( not initially, but still ) is simple and it all makes sense. I am looking for ideas for my first Mac OS-X app. Any ideas?

Being flooded with information can easily negate the benefits of staying informed, up to date. Nowadays its increasingly harder to close to the right amount of information; the Internet's billion sources and the ease of connecting to them can get you addicted to adding just one more source to your watch/monitoring list, following one more link, checking out yet another PDF file.

I am using NetNewWire to keep track of a selected number of Feeds (30 or so, most of them feeds to blogs of my friends, people I am interested what they have to say and the rest being about sources I very interested in ), Google Groups ( some 5 or so Usenet groups ), iTunes ( various podcasts related to MacOS-X development, Photoshop(a new found 'love') and other education oriented ones. On top of that, Mail.app connects me to the world, which I check once a day mostly -- which is also true for NNW - and that's about it. In total, I spend around 30 minutes a day on all that which leaves a whole lot of time ( never enough, of course ) to attend to more meaningful activities ( reading, programming ).

Keeping your life simpler, which is also about limiting distractions, is always a good thing.

2007 came and went and what a phenomenal year it has been, at least for Apple and gaming. Apple brought us the best operating system ( or rather, updated what was already an amazing OS release, Tiger ), the iPhone ( I doubt any single other device affected the world as much in recent history ) and a host of other goodies. The gaming world hasn't seen so amazing, gorgeous, wonderful, [your adjective here] games since, since probably never. Game reviewers and critics had a really hard time hand-picking those 'game of the year' gems, for its nigh impossible to tell which is 'better' given the above-great quality of most games that came out. Good luck Apple and Game Developers beating 2007.

On a personal level, it has been the worse year of my life, mostly because my beloved father passed away. A really close to us cousin, one we grew up together, also left this world - and another friend who was also our age departed along-side. It has been really tough. In addition to that, I had ( still am, but I am working on it ) been 'blessed' with major productivity woes and severe mood swings. Most likely a byproduct of the aforementioned events. If it wasn't for the support of the ones that I love and my friends, I am not sure my sanity would have stayed with me in the end.

Here is hoping 2008 will undo what can, and should, be undone, improve what can be improved, keep us healthy and happy and make each day count.

My little pet-project is complete. There are a few features that would perhaps be nice to have, a whole lot of more testing to get it through, but its done, and, even-though I am very displeased with the fact it took months to get it out, it sure beat my expectations. Its a component for our Switch library that offers transactional ( read ACID ), safe ( backed up by journaling ), fast ( optimized read-ahead, write operations reordering and coalescing etc ), page-locking based I/O operations on groups of files. In addition to that, it makes use of a nice memory management system ( layers of caches, check ARC ) that makes it possible to operate in any environment ( from 32K to whatever ) you confine it to - the more memory dedicated to it the better, of course. Hopefully we are going to start integrating to various existing projects, including new Trinity, and some new ones.

Other than that, I spent some quality time going through the various Apple tutorials on iLife and iWork and I can't stretch enough how wonderful, powerful and simple to use they are. Apple products ooze greatness. I also got to learn the basics of Photoshop ( thanks, Jim!) and understand the basics of 3D graphics and trigonometry ( thanks, Stelios! ). In addition to that, I think I am ready to start working on my first Mac OS-X, Cocoa based app.

Happy 2008, everyone.

My favorite games reviewer, Jeff Gerstmann, along with Greg Kasavin, was let go from Gamespot for various corporate reasons. Farewell Jeff.

I setup bootcamp and installed Windows XP and Visual Studio 2008. Thanks to the wonderful functionality provided by VMWare Fusion and Leopard 'Spaces', I have a single desktop dedicated to a fullscreen Windosws XP environment where I can code away on VS and use PIM ( an instant messaging application ) and another one for all things Mac OS-X. Switching from one to another is a matter of ctrl-(left|right)cursor. I can even get to play some DirectX8 games on it just fine and reboot to that said Bootcamp setup for DX9 games and full-speed windows applications performance. Super sweet.

My brother got this sexy-looking Dell M1330 laptop. Its nice, not Macbook nice, but by far the nicest non Apple laptop I ever laid my eyes on. Its pretty powerful too, yet it runs Windows Vista. Enough said.

I am done with console (Xbox 360 mostly) gaming for now. All that time will go to reading(wikipedia+books) and practice(programming) and spending time with my loved ones (mon, bro, my other half). I am going to go back to Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights though, thanks to Bootcamp. Enough with FPS. Speaking of console gaming, Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect are pretty nice looking, both having a great set of impressive features. In the end of the day though, they are both too repetitive for my liking and I eventually gave up on them in a matter of 2-3 days. Perhaps I will revisit them when I get back to console gaming.

Lately I have been feeling extremely depressed, stressed out, tired and ever-sleepy. I hope I can somehow undo this state soon for it sucks being stuck into that sort of loop.

It is safe to assume that most organizations that deal with scale, large amounts of data, jobs parallelization, all things distributed computing in general, are replicating what was made available by Google ( by means of papers and tidbits published on various site ). Which is a good thing. Google's research has combined common sense, pragmatic insight and novel ideas into beautiful systems. Yahoo! is effectively replicating the whole 'Google Distributed Computing Stack', by investing heavily on Hadoop ( consisting of a distributed FS not unlike GoogleFS and a MapReduce implementation ). In addition to that, they are building a system similar to Google Chubby (distributing lock service based on the Paxos algorithm ), a centralized jobs manager and so on. Its a great thing they are not trying to conceal the fact they are following Google's lead for the sake of me-first and rivalry.

As part of my research for this small project I have been working on, I got into studying Oracle Database's internals. I used to dislike Oracle with a passion. Bloated, over-complicated and over-priced. It turns out Oracle is really beautiful architected. From the way data-blocks are handled, up to transactions locking and consistent read (CR) facilities, its all so well thought out and so nicely put together as whole. There is also a ton of information available on the way everything works, that one could "easily" build a similar product just by implementing what is clearly documented.

I forgot my MBP's magsafe power adapter at the office which effectively forced me to rely on my old Fujitsu Siemens laptop ( my brother is using it, though I suspect he too can't wait to get an MBP ; resistance is futile ) and Windows Vista. I am fairly OS agnostic, all I need is usually 3 applications, but the truth of the matter is when you are exposed to the niceties and ease of use of Mac OS-X, the genuine beauty of the the environment.. it feels weird.

It has been a while since I read a book, but that reading hiatus will come to pass tomorrow. So much to do, so little time.

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

John Burroughs

I have been reading into LLVM lately, which is pretty interesting. In fact, one could even say its one of the most important projects currently under active development in the software world. Apple went ahead and did the 'right thing'. They hired the chief developer of the project, got a few other wiz-folks under their protective wing and let them advance the state of the project along with an army of contributors ( LLVM is an open source project ). Speaking of Apple and LLVM ( Leopard is beyond amazing; still using Windows? ), you may want to check out John Siracusa's 30,000 words+ review of Leopard. But I digress. Check the LLVM section on that said review for a taste of things to come in the LLVM world. Very exciting stuff. If you take the time to watch the LLVM video above, you will get a whole lot more hints as to what the future holds for Apple development. The best has yet to come.

The Chieftains is one of my favorite musical groups. I love celtic/irish music and dancing. Their Celtic Wedding : Music of Brittany in particular is a collection of melodies that drive all sorts of sentiments and feelings home, for me. The 6th track ("Heuliadenn Toniou Breizh-Izel") is my favorite "programming time tune" nowadays. Highly recommended.

I have been working on a storage management system for Switch ( our library of frameworks that forms the core of just about every project at work ) which is going to be an evolution to our current JFG (Journalized File Groups) component. What it will basically do, is allow for transactional, safe and optimized filesystem operations. I am using a modified MVCC system for transactions and the wonderful ARC algorithm for caching now, and a dynamic (call me heuristics based) system for self-optimization for either reads or writes depending on the pattern of the operations scheduled. It still has a long way to, partly because I am trying various schemes as I go on assessing which works best. I feel I have wasted a whole lot time on this small project but I hope it will pay off in the end. There are at least 2 major projects that will be benefited from it and I can't wait to integrate it into them.

I have a new favorite TV series. CBS's The Big Bang Theory. Speaking of TV series, I have to admit Lost is great. I more or less forced myself to watch it through the first season, just because everyone was talking about it and I wanted to see what was there and I couldn't see it. Once I got into season 2, it got really interesting, whereas on season #1 it was somewhat boring for me. Watching season 3's episodes were a class above season 2's and that says a lot. If you were like me and thought Lost was not worth it, perhaps also judging from the first few episodes, give it another try. It is way worth it.

PickTheBrain : There are far too many blogs ( information sources in general ) devoted to boosting your morale, getting you all worked up to build the next big thing, etc. However, this is perhaps the best ( that I can think of ) of every one I accessed. Make it a habit to visit it on a daily basis, it will pay off big time.

technovelty : A blog full of insightful posts, especially interesting to programmers.

Thanks to August ( one of my 'favorite' phaistonians, who also happens to be celebrating his birthday today ) I am playing Halo 3 tonight. I haven't had the chance to play any previous Halo game and I wasn't sure what to expect, other than having solid proof that this one special game. After playing for a couple of hours, I am a believer. The game is wonderful. The balance, the action, the weapons, the graphics and the awesome physics speak in volumes. However, I also came up to another sad conclusion. I suck as a player. Perhaps I should ask someone to join me in a co-op session so that I can get past this jungle mission and move on to greater things.

We receive a couple resumes (read : CVs ) once in a while ( that is : from once up to once+while...uhm, disregard that, sanity stabilization issues ) and most of the ones that get forwarded to me suffer from the same set of problems. I came across a very interesting blog post which describes the majority of those problems and provides a good set of reasons as to why such practices should be avoided. Highly recommended for job-seekers.

Slaying Mighty Dragons: Competitive Ranking and Matching Systems : Another great post by Jeff Atwood, this one dealing with attaching scores to the gaming skills of users ( ranking ), matching players of similar skills together and so on. I was reading about Microsoft's Xbox Live TrueSkill system the other day as a means to setup a system that pairs gamers of similar skill caliber together in the forthcoming update of Pathfinder Games service. Its interesting that the ELO rating system, although fundamentally simple, remains the dominant underlying gaming ranking system - given the fact its a relatively old 'invention'. Simple solutions usually last.

Why programmers don't like RDBMs : A good set of reason enumerated on this blog post. I don't have any arguments against the concept of relation databases, other that it leads to lazy programmers, the kind of developers who think an RDBMS is a system powered by magic that will store any kind of data, retrieve it in a matter of seconds and requires nothing more than executing a few SQL statements to get the job done. Then again, the same is true for all those high-level languages and systems that over-abstract operations. Win some, lose some.