There is nothing more cringe-inducing than seeing somebody try to program something without actually knowing what's going on. With some exceptions, programming allows you to know precisely what's going on. Not knowing how something works should trigger some alarm bells.
Magic might be an ancient form of "programming" nature where most of knowledge has actually been lost. Without factual information, only rituals were kept and some basic notions.
I wouldn't be surprised if in 1000 years or so we have a high-priest class of programmers that need to take care of computerized systems so old they forgot the logic behind them. They will basically become magicians.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
LTS means ancient?
I was surprised today to see that Ubuntu 10.04 LTS comes with Mercurial 1.4! The latest Mercurial release is 2.1
Mercurial 1.7 also introduced a repository change, the dotencode requirement. This means any repository created after November 2010 with 1.7 and dotencode will not be accessible by the Mercurial from the Ubuntu LTS. This error should be familiar:
One solution is to use the Mercurial PPA to get a newer release.
But, it doesn't make sense to use an LTS if you are going to use software from PPAs, no?
With sun-jdk being pruned from the repositories, I'm starting to get annoyed by Ubuntu. I'm starting more and more to manage dependencies by hand instead of relying on the system. Which, imho, means the system is broken.
Mercurial 1.7 also introduced a repository change, the dotencode requirement. This means any repository created after November 2010 with 1.7 and dotencode will not be accessible by the Mercurial from the Ubuntu LTS. This error should be familiar:
abort: requirement 'dotencode' not supported!
One solution is to use the Mercurial PPA to get a newer release.
But, it doesn't make sense to use an LTS if you are going to use software from PPAs, no?
With sun-jdk being pruned from the repositories, I'm starting to get annoyed by Ubuntu. I'm starting more and more to manage dependencies by hand instead of relying on the system. Which, imho, means the system is broken.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Capitalism, dignity and the health care system
A relative of mine underwent surgery and it allowed me to revisit the horror that is the Romanian medical system and in particular the Romanian medical Man.
The hospital is not as dirty as I remembered it, so things must be getting better, but the kind of person you see employed there is about the same.
To me, Capitalism is an Arena. It's the Great Arena. It's the place where the strong show their strength. It's wonderful!
But wounded or sick people don't fight into an arena. Nor old people, nor children. There are rules and there must be some Esthetic to the fight. We need a safety net for these people because if you are sick and society fixes you up, you might return into the Arena and bring value into the world.
There is a lot of bribing going on in the Romanian National health care system and bribing means a severe lack of Dignity.
It's not just patients that lose their dignity, it's everyone involved.
The patient is an insured person that shouldn't have to pay a thing: the State takes a percentage from every salary for healthcare. It's with great hypocrisy that people are expected to bribe the doctors too as well as buy their own medical supplies. Yes, the patient is sent next door to the pharmacy to buy what's needed for the surgery!
Bribing is by definition a very hush-hush thing even if it happens at such a large scale: patients don't even know how much to give to whom, when and how many times. It is a great demeaning ambiguity.
But doctors don't have it any better. The same ambiguity makes them lose dignity too. I've seen the same doctor visit the patient about 4 times for nothing, just because he hadn't received his bribe yet. When the money entered his pocket, he was finally able to do something else. This is the life of a beggar.
Doctors must not be thinking about financial gains. A good salary combined with the general respect doctors have should provide a nice life for them.
Capitalism seems mostly incompatible with the medical profession. You cannot have a homo homini lupus situation where a weaker person which is not in the best shape will have to just trust somebody that's actually thinking about financial gains. People should be able to stand tall and look in each-other's eyes.
The hospital is not as dirty as I remembered it, so things must be getting better, but the kind of person you see employed there is about the same.
To me, Capitalism is an Arena. It's the Great Arena. It's the place where the strong show their strength. It's wonderful!
But wounded or sick people don't fight into an arena. Nor old people, nor children. There are rules and there must be some Esthetic to the fight. We need a safety net for these people because if you are sick and society fixes you up, you might return into the Arena and bring value into the world.
There is a lot of bribing going on in the Romanian National health care system and bribing means a severe lack of Dignity.
It's not just patients that lose their dignity, it's everyone involved.
The patient is an insured person that shouldn't have to pay a thing: the State takes a percentage from every salary for healthcare. It's with great hypocrisy that people are expected to bribe the doctors too as well as buy their own medical supplies. Yes, the patient is sent next door to the pharmacy to buy what's needed for the surgery!
Bribing is by definition a very hush-hush thing even if it happens at such a large scale: patients don't even know how much to give to whom, when and how many times. It is a great demeaning ambiguity.
But doctors don't have it any better. The same ambiguity makes them lose dignity too. I've seen the same doctor visit the patient about 4 times for nothing, just because he hadn't received his bribe yet. When the money entered his pocket, he was finally able to do something else. This is the life of a beggar.
Doctors must not be thinking about financial gains. A good salary combined with the general respect doctors have should provide a nice life for them.
Capitalism seems mostly incompatible with the medical profession. You cannot have a homo homini lupus situation where a weaker person which is not in the best shape will have to just trust somebody that's actually thinking about financial gains. People should be able to stand tall and look in each-other's eyes.
Thursday, May 05, 2011
I will release an OSX-focused IDE distribution
I plan on releasing a NetBeans-based IDE distribution. Just as there are a whole bunch of Linux distributions, I believe there should be more IDE distributions.
What I intend to focus on is OSX support since, although a lot of people use NetBeans on OSX, it always looked to me like it needs more polish.
Native OSX integration is one of the reasons I wrote the NBnotify.com plugin, which shows IDE notifications via Growl. And there are other areas where NetBeans needs to pay more attention to the way it does things in order to be in tune with OSX.
I have many features in mind, but I'll leave you with just two low-level ones:
Of course, one of the high-level features would be Growl notifications for IDE events.
So much for the first post talking about my IDE distribution. As I get closer to a release I might mention some of the other features.
When is it going to be released? Well, sometime this year, but in order to be certain let's say you should expect it in your Christmas stockings.
Why am I announcing it so early? Because I want to get some initial feedback about what people feel it's missing in their NetBeans IDE, either overall or specifically on OSX.
Also, this is as a way to commit myself to a release. So, feel free to bother me as we approach the release date.
What I intend to focus on is OSX support since, although a lot of people use NetBeans on OSX, it always looked to me like it needs more polish.
Native OSX integration is one of the reasons I wrote the NBnotify.com plugin, which shows IDE notifications via Growl. And there are other areas where NetBeans needs to pay more attention to the way it does things in order to be in tune with OSX.
I have many features in mind, but I'll leave you with just two low-level ones:
- Drag and drop installer
The IDE should be available as a simpledmgwhich users just open and then drag and drop the application wherever they feel like it. You shouldn't need administrator rights just to install the application.
- Using proper OSX folders
The~/.netbeansfolder will go away entirely. There are some standard places to store caches, preferences and everything else on OSX, usually in theLibraryfolder. The IDE should be a proper citizen and store data there so that users and helper tools know what it represents, which is important and which may be discarded if disk space is becoming an issue.
Of course, one of the high-level features would be Growl notifications for IDE events.
So much for the first post talking about my IDE distribution. As I get closer to a release I might mention some of the other features.
When is it going to be released? Well, sometime this year, but in order to be certain let's say you should expect it in your Christmas stockings.
Why am I announcing it so early? Because I want to get some initial feedback about what people feel it's missing in their NetBeans IDE, either overall or specifically on OSX.
Also, this is as a way to commit myself to a release. So, feel free to bother me as we approach the release date.
Monday, March 28, 2011
The startup company hierarchy of needs
I've been focusing on different themes than usual with regard to my company and I've come to realize it might just be a mental shift on the Maslow pyramid.
We are still a tiny company (just 4 people) and our business isn't large in terms of income, but I think it's probably enough for me to trigger a shift into my thoughts.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs describes the stages in human growth and it seems to apply just as well to a company:
Physiological needs
The lowest level in the Maslow pyramid are the physiological needs. These are the basic survival needs: air, water, food, shelter and sex.
There is nothing fancy here. A company at this stage is basically aiming for that ramen profitability. Everything else are mostly nice thoughts, because the immediate future is all about corporate survival.
When I first started my company, this was the most important thing. I didn't care about anything else, except knowing that I had customers and I was profitable. Of course, personally I've been lucky to have some nice and decent customers where I worked on some interesting stuff, but from a corporate standpoint it was all about being profitable and having projects to keep me, and later my team, busy and liquid.
Safety needs
Wikipedia has a nice explanation:
This is where I find myself to be since about last summer...
Ever since the financial crisis came in Romania too, the government has made a lot of unexpected and rash changes: laws changed over night, tax legislation changed, corporate expenses limited by law in weird ways.
Also, corruption was left basically unchecked, while the government still found enough time to waste money.
So, I've started yearning for some predictable legislation (fiscal, labour, etc) as well as a reduced threat of corruption.
I still haven't found a solution to this. Since changing Romania first is impractical, I've been reading a lot about incorporating into other countries.
This is a complicated equation involving corporate specific variables such as taxation, accounting expenses, rent as well as personal variables: I'd probably need to relocate or travel a whole lot more and that's hard.
Love and belonging
Love and belonging has two levels in a company: internal and external.
Internally I don't think we have a particularly strong belonging feeling since we were very focused on just getting the job done. We are distributed in 3 cities quite far away so there is no physical closeness which I think hinders us a bit.
This is something we should work at, but I guess it's not on the list yet. One of my future plans is maybe get an actual corporate office but that's a problem in itself and it would split us: 2 guys would work in an office and 2 guys 500km away.
Externally, the company sends upstream bugfixes for the open-source code we work on, we support the localization effort into Romanian of an open-source product and this year I want to get a junior researcher / student into a part-time position doing open research (it's basically a sponsorship disguised as a job since legally it's way simpler).
But, sadly, the company isn't involved at all in the local community.
Esteem
Esteem means wanting respect, status, fame and attention as well as self-respect, competence, mastery, self-confidence, independence and freedom.
So far the company is very low level and mostly "behind the scenes". We basically do contract work so the end users never know anything about our involvement.
It would be nice to be known by our users and even nicer to be independent and actually sell products to end users directly. But we are not there yet.
Self-actualization
"What a man can be, he must be." Realizing the full potential.
I'm not even sure what to speculate here. I believe we have something interesting and I'm rather proud of my team but I couldn't say exactly what the full potential is. Still searching this one.
Conclusions
Maslaw's pyramid seems to be a quite nice simplification. Of course, the layers intertwine and evolution isn't linear like that but it seems to apply quite nicely for a startup too (which isn't entirely surprising since a company is a social construct.)
It might be an interesting exercise to analyze your own startup through this hierarchy and see where do you stand as well as what you should be focusing on.
We are still a tiny company (just 4 people) and our business isn't large in terms of income, but I think it's probably enough for me to trigger a shift into my thoughts.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs describes the stages in human growth and it seems to apply just as well to a company:
Physiological needs
The lowest level in the Maslow pyramid are the physiological needs. These are the basic survival needs: air, water, food, shelter and sex.
There is nothing fancy here. A company at this stage is basically aiming for that ramen profitability. Everything else are mostly nice thoughts, because the immediate future is all about corporate survival.
When I first started my company, this was the most important thing. I didn't care about anything else, except knowing that I had customers and I was profitable. Of course, personally I've been lucky to have some nice and decent customers where I worked on some interesting stuff, but from a corporate standpoint it was all about being profitable and having projects to keep me, and later my team, busy and liquid.
Safety needs
Wikipedia has a nice explanation:
These needs have to do with people's yearning for a predictable orderly world in which perceived unfairness and inconsistency are under control, the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare.
This is where I find myself to be since about last summer...
Ever since the financial crisis came in Romania too, the government has made a lot of unexpected and rash changes: laws changed over night, tax legislation changed, corporate expenses limited by law in weird ways.
Also, corruption was left basically unchecked, while the government still found enough time to waste money.
So, I've started yearning for some predictable legislation (fiscal, labour, etc) as well as a reduced threat of corruption.
I still haven't found a solution to this. Since changing Romania first is impractical, I've been reading a lot about incorporating into other countries.
This is a complicated equation involving corporate specific variables such as taxation, accounting expenses, rent as well as personal variables: I'd probably need to relocate or travel a whole lot more and that's hard.
Love and belonging
Love and belonging has two levels in a company: internal and external.
Internally I don't think we have a particularly strong belonging feeling since we were very focused on just getting the job done. We are distributed in 3 cities quite far away so there is no physical closeness which I think hinders us a bit.
This is something we should work at, but I guess it's not on the list yet. One of my future plans is maybe get an actual corporate office but that's a problem in itself and it would split us: 2 guys would work in an office and 2 guys 500km away.
Externally, the company sends upstream bugfixes for the open-source code we work on, we support the localization effort into Romanian of an open-source product and this year I want to get a junior researcher / student into a part-time position doing open research (it's basically a sponsorship disguised as a job since legally it's way simpler).
But, sadly, the company isn't involved at all in the local community.
Esteem
Esteem means wanting respect, status, fame and attention as well as self-respect, competence, mastery, self-confidence, independence and freedom.
So far the company is very low level and mostly "behind the scenes". We basically do contract work so the end users never know anything about our involvement.
It would be nice to be known by our users and even nicer to be independent and actually sell products to end users directly. But we are not there yet.
Self-actualization
"What a man can be, he must be." Realizing the full potential.
I'm not even sure what to speculate here. I believe we have something interesting and I'm rather proud of my team but I couldn't say exactly what the full potential is. Still searching this one.
Conclusions
Maslaw's pyramid seems to be a quite nice simplification. Of course, the layers intertwine and evolution isn't linear like that but it seems to apply quite nicely for a startup too (which isn't entirely surprising since a company is a social construct.)
It might be an interesting exercise to analyze your own startup through this hierarchy and see where do you stand as well as what you should be focusing on.
Monday, March 14, 2011
The IDE must move onto the server
Here is a video of my prototype online IDE (watch it in 720p if possible):
It's basically a subset of how I think a browser-based IDE should look like and where we should get, pretty soon.
I've just focused on some essential parts in my prototype:
The most important thing is the editor: I still don't see a good Javascript-based editor and certainly not one for Java, which is what I would need.
The next thing is the proper integration of the various external tools. You could hook the build server test results and findbugs warnings straight into editor hints or error stripe, for example.
I also think nobody is focusing on the kind of automated learning we could apply to projects once everything is in one place. Nothing says progress like a browser Clippy saying Hey, it looks like you're solving almost the same threading problem as John did on this other bug 3 months ago.
All in all, my work is just a prototype. But I do hope that in the near future I wouldn't need a workstation to do my job -- just a humble device with a decent network connection.
It's basically a subset of how I think a browser-based IDE should look like and where we should get, pretty soon.
I've just focused on some essential parts in my prototype:
- The IDE must be accessed via a standard browser and should be installable (ie. your own startup should be able put it on a dedicated server).
- Project/user timeline with commits, bug reports, code reviews, etc.
- Good editor: syntactic and semantic highlighting, project-based code completion, code folding.
- Running tests locally (a signed applet gets disk access if needed) or remote. I guess the local part is just for reassurance and, perhaps, offline fallback.
- Some form of chat for internal communications.
- Integrated metrics and reports from various sources (FindBugs, build server, project planning tools, etc).
The most important thing is the editor: I still don't see a good Javascript-based editor and certainly not one for Java, which is what I would need.
The next thing is the proper integration of the various external tools. You could hook the build server test results and findbugs warnings straight into editor hints or error stripe, for example.
I also think nobody is focusing on the kind of automated learning we could apply to projects once everything is in one place. Nothing says progress like a browser Clippy saying Hey, it looks like you're solving almost the same threading problem as John did on this other bug 3 months ago.
All in all, my work is just a prototype. But I do hope that in the near future I wouldn't need a workstation to do my job -- just a humble device with a decent network connection.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
About the Hudson debacle
There are some big discussions about forking Hudson. Oracle's latest response seems to have triggered this reply from Hudson's main developer Kohsuke, now hired by CloudBees.
Personally, I don't see all that much negativity in the Oracle message. Actually, it seems very well balanced.
One thing I agree entirely: there is no such thing as a project "renaming". We are talking about a fork. Even if the Jenkins fork becomes the one with the biggest market share, it's still a fork.
This reminds me of the EGCS fork of the GCC which became so good it actually became the next 'official' GCC release. There is still a chance this might happen for Hudson/Jenkins so I don't see why Kohsuke seems so eager to burn all the bridges with Oracle.
I am also part of the "community", using Hudson since before it was so fashionable, and I don't see why should I be so enraged about all this? I guess I am too cynical not to notice that there are two companies involved: CloudBees and Oracle and only one of these two makes money almost exclusively from Hudson-based services. I think there's a natural conflict when for-profit companies make money from open-source software -- they'll always want to keep some proprietary "added value".
What I did understand is that Oracle has some fear of using non-Oracle infrastructure (github, etc) which seems to annoy some of the developers. But, other than that, I don't understand the need to fork the project.
Personally, I don't see all that much negativity in the Oracle message. Actually, it seems very well balanced.
One thing I agree entirely: there is no such thing as a project "renaming". We are talking about a fork. Even if the Jenkins fork becomes the one with the biggest market share, it's still a fork.
This reminds me of the EGCS fork of the GCC which became so good it actually became the next 'official' GCC release. There is still a chance this might happen for Hudson/Jenkins so I don't see why Kohsuke seems so eager to burn all the bridges with Oracle.
I am also part of the "community", using Hudson since before it was so fashionable, and I don't see why should I be so enraged about all this? I guess I am too cynical not to notice that there are two companies involved: CloudBees and Oracle and only one of these two makes money almost exclusively from Hudson-based services. I think there's a natural conflict when for-profit companies make money from open-source software -- they'll always want to keep some proprietary "added value".
What I did understand is that Oracle has some fear of using non-Oracle infrastructure (github, etc) which seems to annoy some of the developers. But, other than that, I don't understand the need to fork the project.
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