Year: 2006

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my future. I was planning this and that. Some of my plans had to be discarded due to their naivity and stupidity. Others – I couldn’t defent against some smart people, so I just threw them away (plans, not people). After this tedious process only a handfull of plans survived. And there was one that I liked particularly. That is, until today. And although I still don’t know what exactly is wrong with it, but I figure that if it is featured in the Dilbert comics strip, it won’t be very successful. Obviously, other people figured it out before me.

Thank you, Scott Adams, for saving me some time and effort.

…think again:

In the late 80s, we actually published a book called !%@: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing and Networks, which covered how to address email across 190 distinct networks. (The title !%@ was homage to some of the many special addressing characters that were used before the @ crowded out all the others.)

A big thank you is due to my parents, who gave birth to me in such when and where, that I didn’t have to learn “190 distinct networks” and ways to send email through all of them.

For those of you who still often forget why we need web standards, here is a nifty reminder.

The point of the standards is not just to ensure that browsers can display the pages. The standards also ensure the pages form a platform that can be built upon; a hacked-together platform leads to brittle and fragile extensions.

Tim O’Reilly has discussesan interesting post that talks about Open Source Software in the Web 2.0 times.

It’s a very interesting time to be in open source. Open source zealots need to realize that open source needs to be reinvented for the new platform architecture, and web 2.0 companies need to remember that open source isn’t just goodwill, but an integral part of keeping the developer ecosystem healthy. And everyone needs to experiment with new models, and not believe that the story has already been written.

Steve Yegge tells “The Truth About Interviewing“.

If you want a job at a company like Microsoft, Yahoo!, Apple, or Amazon.com, they’re going to have high standards. It doesn’t matter if you “know how to program”. They’re going to test you on algorithmic complexity analysis, advanced data structures, algorithm design, searching and sorting, internationalization techniques, network protocols, OS-level memory management, parsing and semantic analysis, recursion and mathematical induction, graph theory, combinatorics, programming language theory, machine architecture, discrete math and logic, graphics and window systems, fonts and typesetting, color spaces and representations, databases and query languages, filesystems and storage, embedded systems, device drivers, mobile and wireless protocols, and internet standards and technologies.

If you’re lucky, that is.

If you’re unlucky, they’ll ask you to derive the outline of their Ph.D. thesis on fault-tolerant massively parallel machine-learning systems. Or to solve a grand-unification style computation problem involving telephone switches, grid networks, and third-degree differential equations. Or, God forbid, they’ll ask you about the darkest corners of C syntax.