Simple is Beautiful

I thought about switching to a text-based environment at work, in order to boost my productivity and avoid distractions. That is, I am using SecureCRT ( I use a Windows XP based workstation at work now, but I couldn't care less what that would be as long as it had an SSH client and a web-browser ) in full screen mode, open a few tabs here and there ( okay, a whole lot of tabs here and there ), one for PIM (text-based PIM) and a dozen or so for vim and compiling sessions. Sometimes I have to switch to Firefox in order to access a web page, but that's more or less inevitable(elinks just doesn't cut it). With a bit of luck, this whole silly experiment will pay off in the end.

I desperately need a challenging, fun and exciting project to work on. That is not to say we don't get to busy our selves with that kind of projects at work, I just need something new, a different kind of problem domains to jump into, which would of course benefit our products development cycle. Alas, I can't think of anything, then again nowadays nothing makes me in any way happy, aside from being close to my loved ones. A side-effect of burnout.

Partitioning vs Federation vs Sharding : More or less covey the same concept, although subtle differences exist.

Ramblings in Realtime : Michael Abrash's classic ranting derived from his work on Quake 1's software renderer with John Carmack. While I am at it, I am reading this book ( Professional Assembly Language Programming) which comes with a nice chapter on the 'basics' of the IA-32 platform ( core parts of the processor, registers etc ). To this day, I am still somewhat surprised most people who are into 'serious' programming seem to lack the motivation to learn how the hardware they are building their stuff on really works ( and this extends to to the lowest levels of the OS chains etc ).

The new 7 wonders : in full 360degrees viewing glory.

Staying true to my plan for regaining my self, so to speak, here is another blog post which doesn't really serve any purpose, but here goes anyway. Apple introduced the new iPod line-up today. The iPod touch is pretty awesome ; though its more or less an iPhone without the phone capabilities. I am not into music, even more so lately, but I may wind up purchasing one for either my brother and/or Dora -- they certainly appreciate noise music way more than I do. Ahem.

'I think you are Fat' : This is a very interesting piece on some movement called 'Radical Honesty'. The said movement is about, well, extreme honesty. I am not sure I buy their dogmas and concepts, but I do love the writing of this article's author. Hilarious. Must read.

I feel totally drained; as if my energy, my inspiration, my will, my ability to think and put together steps for solving problems ( aka algorithms ) has been magically lifted from me. This is not the first time I am going through this sort of problem ( labeling it a problem is an understatement, its way more severe than that ), but this time its too intense, too hard to deal with. A whole lot of sleep, isolation from noise and things that let me down/displease me ( basically, a certain set of people ) , along with lots of reading and rest will eventually undo the effect of this spell and help me get my sanity back. Alas, I have a LONG way to go..

Τσακ Νορις : classics never get old.

All those long past weeks, mostly filled with sorrow and anxiety, have at last come to pass. It was nigh impossible for me to master the will and energy to scribe a new post here but now its time to move on and getting back to blogging is one of the tiny steps I must take to kick-start and eventually accelerate my recovery, so to speak.

I managed to sleep for what certainly seems an eternity ( 7 hours ) last night, given that the norm in those past weeks was zero to 2 hours ( if I was lucky ) of not even 'good quality' rest. What happens when you put your body and mind into that kind of ordeal, is that it fights back. It all too often tires to come up with ways to let you know that you are hurting the system (i.e yourself). You get tired, you are in constant pain, your thoughts get displaced by fear.. a tough scenario to go through.

Anyway, its good to be back. I hope our fortunes will change for the better now.

The Internet is such a wonderful, amazing, awe inspiring, ever increasingly vital to Humans and ultra cool invention. Instant search, yottabytes worth of information, communication, multimedia, this, that and the kitchen sink, all our wishes and dreams - I should stop now before it gets more dramatic - are made possible and accessible because of, you guessed, the Internet. Just like cars brought pollution, TV brought soap operas, Microsoft Windows brought us (DLL)hell, the Internet is not granted to us without side-effects. Action and reaction. Cause and effect. Causality. People sometimes alienate themselves from the peers, kids stay in playing WoW for 76 hours straight, grown ups losing themselves in chat rooms, you name it.

However, much like the aforementioned examples, it matters little for the benefits far out-weight the issues brought upon 'our society'. There is a particular side-effect, though, that I 'd like to spotlight. The Web is effectively rendering books reading hard, mostly because its so easy to simply follow hypertext links to fragments of information ( Wikipedia ) that lead to so many other documents, that lead to videos, that lead to downloads, that lead to more documents, and so on, so forth.

One may argue that acquiring the daily dose of information and entertainment input from the Web is not much different than getting it from a book. One would be wrong. Reading a book, holding it and browsing through it, page by page, actually finishing it, is fundamentally great and fulfilling. Clicking your way through incomplete and short passages of content may be easier and cooler, but is no match for consuming a great book. Unfortunately, its too easy to give up on books and turn to the Net for all your information needs ( education and entertainment, technical books and novels.. ). It certainly has led me to reading a whole few books per month than I used to, in the past. Sometimes though I muster enough will to put my computer to sleep, grab a book and feel great.

Groucho Marx once said he found television very educational. "Every time someone turns it on", he said "I go in the other room to read a book". Grabbing a book once in a while, as opposed to spending that time on the Net, is good for your soul. You may want to try it.

My blog has collected so much dust, one can barely make out the various words here and there, so to speak. Quite often I wind up neglecting updating my blog with posts, mostly due to lack of energy ( sleep deprivation is a bad thing ) and/or insufficient motivation for pouring thoughts on often uninteresting topics. Hopefully I will be able to muster enough energy and find something interesting to write about, by tomorrow.

I need to find a way to isolate myself from people and somehow shield my working space from noise and light. I don't go along with (people|noise|light) and its increasingly harder to stay away from those nowadays. Its simply counter-productive for me to be in a working environment whereas the aforementioned elements co-exist.

Unfortunately, I can't get access to that kind of environment at home, either. Our apartment is situated right next to the street which makes it impossible to cancel out noise. Thanks to the drapes my wonderful soul mate bought for me some time ago, I can keep most of the light from entering the room. Alas, its summer time and its nigh impossible to survive in a room without air-co. So back to square one.

I am going to look for a solution this weekend - perhaps a cubicle ( albeit a modified one ) would help.

I put little time into the engineering this week ; most of the time at the office was dedicated to reading papers, cross-referencing information and ideas, building tiny prototypes for testing concept. Some major projects aside ( Trinity/Arachne included ), things are more or less where they should be. The building blocks, the libraries/framework, just about all components the wonderful folks our dev.team needs to build whatever they put their mind to are in place. Which is perhaps the right time for me to spend some time in conducting 'research' - that and the fact that whenever summer is upon us, I find it harder to focus. This whole feeling/mode lasts for one or two weeks, usually.

If all goes well, I will start working on 3 projects that will allow us to build applications and systems that will (1)provide the kind of functionality and information that is hard to be able to offer unless you (2) can process huge (terabytes) data sets and (3) scale without practical limits. More to follow in posts to come.

Wikipedia and Youtube have been sucking most of time I don't spend at the office. I read about everything I can. I too addicted to it and it doesn't get any better. When I am not on Wikipedia, I watch videos on Youtube, videos about classic, old, games running on DOS and Amiga. Speaking of which, I plan to get back to gaming soon, albeit to retro-gaming only ( old adventure games, rpgs, classics). Time to put my Dell screen to good use again.

My friend George Moschovitis (Ruby demi-god) put together another lovely website (joyerz.com) that draws from the pool of pictures submitted by the users of joy.gr in order to present the users with the 'most beautiful greek folks'. You can drill down by tag, genre etc. A beautiful site.

Frequent posts on this blog related to the Cell Broadband Engine (AKA the Cell Processor) suggest that I am really excited about the architecture and novelties introduced with it. Here is another interesting PDF/slides-based presentation on the Cell processor.

Mental block: One of the folks from Greece attending the Mix 07 event is posting his thoughts on what's happening in Vegas ( in Greek ). You can also find Mix 07 related posts on my brother's and Patrick Malone's blogs.

Late Night Coding : A great post, accompanied with a great video, by one of the few Greek bloggers I keep track of. Make sure you watch the video. ( I love working alone in the dark, till the wee hours of the morning ).

Collecting Imagery for Google Earth : A brief introduction to how the images available via Google Mapping applications ( google maps and google earth ) are collected.

OS X vs. Vista - In Spandex : Yet another OS X vs Vista discussion thread. Always interesting though. ( Jump to OS Combat - Ubuntu Linux Versus Vista discussion thread if you want to see how Vista stacks up against the most popular Linux distribution ).

Blizzard Confirms New Product, May Be Starcraft 2 : Can we get more excited? ( Chandler Bing impersonation )

Sun Surges Into Research, Virtual Worlds : Sun is one of my favorite companies. They keep on coming up with great products and even greater research concepts. They are now branching out to gaming, too.

Yahoo Pig and Google Sawzall : An interesting post that describes the work of Google and Yahoo! in building a high level programming language that allows for relatively easy massively parallel processing across data clusters. I think Yahoo! is trying to fight a war they have lost long ago. A noble effort, but with slim chances of succeeding. While you are it, read the Sawzall paper entitled "nterpreting the Data: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall". Again, too interesting.

What the heck is Web 2.0 anyway? : I never thought one could attach versioning information to a system/concept such as the Web.

Interview with Chris DiBona of Google : Very interesting interview with Chris, regarding Google and Open Source.

New Google Apps Demo : A mighty impressive demo of the Google Apps product suit.

Keeping Google's In-house Database Ticking : Divide et impera.

Talking to my brother over Google Talk / VOIP, while he is in Las Vegas using the fabulous Nokia N800 and me here, using Google Talk on Parallels, on Mac OS X is sort of fundamentally cool.

Google releases patches that enhance the manageability and reliability of mySQL : Great stuff from the wonderful engineers from Google. Looking forward to checking out the contributed code.

Root Nameservers : the 13 name servers that manage all the major TLDs. Speaking of which, it turns out for every .com domain, a domain registrar pays up to USD$6.00 to Verisign and $0.25 to ICANN ( annually ). Verisign is making bucket-loads of money.

Math for Programmers : You have to read this. Link by my brother

To understand the Big Picture give it time and sleep : Sleep and become a better person. Again, you must read this. Link by Steve Dekorte

Wal-Mart Begins Massive Push For HD DVD : We might as well consider this formats war over. Wal Mart, the world's largest retailer is leaning towards the HD-DVD format. What chances does Blue Ray stand?

The Completely Fair Scheduler : Ingo Molnar's much praised O(1) process scheduler is perhaps the most beautiful subsystem ( algorithm and implementation) I ever came across. Ingo has apparently come up with an even better scheduler. Very interesting stuff.

What has Google done in Search laltely? : Some mighty interesting things. The best has yet to come, as always.

Review of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 - final release : My friend John considers Ubuntu Linux distribution the greatest since since sliced bread. I have tried various releases in the past; way more polished and friendlier than most other distributions I messed with, but still a very far cry from Mac OS - X. Beats Windows on oh-so-many fronts though.

New OS X App From Panic Tomorrow? : A new app from the Mac OS X ultra-cool dev-shop, Panic, Inc This new app seems really nice. Not the kind of application I would need, but I am sure there are a great plenty of folks who can't wait to get their hands on it.

CBE(Cell Broadband Engine) tutorial : Very very interesting stuff - at least for some of 'us'. I love the way the Cell is architected ( just as I like the concept of multi-core processors and extensive explicit parallelism ). On somewhat related note, Phil Harisson answers some questions raised by the Slashdot folks. I am still not quite sure as what to make of Sony's PS3 project ( both in terms of conception and execution ), however I really got to give them credit for pushing the technology forward and being the chief player in the STI partnership, which gave birth to the Cell. My hat's off to you Sony.

From time to time ( no pun intended ) I tend to let myself be lured away from my favorite 'processes' (aka habits) by games, mostly, but also by spending too much time watching movies ( rarely, but it happens ) or even chatting away and jumping from one feed to another. I love gaming, I love movies, I love surfing the Net - but really not even half as much as I enjoy programming and learning new things.

As I 've posted before ( more than a dozen times ), I am sucker for books and Wikipedia articles consumption. Whenever I don't try out things with my beloved compilers, I usually read. Alas, I have been spending all my 'free' time surfing the Net, talking to friends on IM and 'researching' various kinda stupid and pointless subjects lately. This ends here. As of tomorrow, I am going back to my books limiting my active online time (at home) to an hour or less. Perhaps even it will help me regulate my sleeping patterns so I will be able to, at last, sleep for +4 hours / night.