Month: December 2007

Wagamama open for Cyprus noodle fans

Wagamama franchise opened the doors of its first food spot in Cyprus.  Located in Nicosia, close to other famous food brands like Starbucks, Pizza Hut, Costa, and Burger King, it’s the first of the planned three restaurants.  Financial Mirror provides some details, such as:

Noodles are also the ideal fast food offering a nutritionally complete meal in a bowl, in addition to the rice dishes and a range of fresh juices, while for the hungry, the restaurant offers a variety of side dishes including meat and vegetable dumplings, skewered chicken, deep-fried prawns and raw salads.

Bloat is bad for you and your code

Steve Yegge has posted yet another of his excellent (and long) rants.  This time he talks about the size of code and why one should jump out of its skin to keep it minimal.

 Most programmers have successfully compartmentalized their beliefs about code base size. Java programmers are unusually severe offenders but are by no means the only ones. In one compartment, they know big code bases are bad. It only takes grade-school arithmetic to appreciate just how bad they can be. If you have a million lines of code, at 50 lines per “page”, that’s 20,000 pages of code. How long would it take you to read a 20,000-page instruction manual? The effort to simply browse the code base and try to discern its overall structure could take weeks or even months, depending on its density. Significant architectural changes could take months or even years.

As I said, it’s a long piece. But it’s worth every paragraph. Even though some Java programmers might be slightly offended by the article, I’m sure it’s not intentional.

Simpler Google Talk translations?

Google has recently added Gtalk bots that can do translations to various languages, mostly available with Google Translate.  While I’m all for helping people understand each other better (even though there are certain complains regarding the quality of translation), I think this functionality could have implemented simpler.

Disclaimer: I haven’t tried it out myself, I’ve only read about it and saw the screenshots.

The problem that I see with the implementation is it being one way.  The bots are named fr2en and fr2en.  Which means that in order to keep up with conversation in the language foreign to you, you’ll need to have two bots nearby, not one.  Why?  Because if you will ask a person in his language a question, he will likely reply in the same language.  So you will need to translate both to and from the language.  I think this should have been done with one bot, not two.

On the battles of the software industry

Here is a quote from Scott Rosenberg’s insightful post, titled “Clash of titanic business-press cliches”  (emphasis is mine):

Are Microsoft and Google in conflict? Of course. They have fundamentally different visions of where computing’s headed — visions that the Times article, by Steve Lohr and Miguel Helft, ably lays out. But it’s not as if they are feudal fiefdoms fighting over some fixed patch of ground. Their conflict will play out as each company builds its next generation of software and services, and the next one after that, and people make choices about what to buy and what to use.

Those choices are the key to the outcome. In a battle, civilians are mostly bystanders or casualties. In the software business, civilians — users — determine who wins.

2008 will be the year of the web worker because …

Web Worker Daily has published the results and some of the submissions for their “2008 will be the year of the web worker because …” contest.  It’s an interesting read.

To some, those postings could sound like a bunch of nonsense from a few lunatics.  And to be honest with you, that’s not far from the truth right now.  But this is not the first time we’ve been there.  Today’s web workers include  many technical people, who already saw the “this is nonsense” and “it will never happen” attitudes before, when Open Source Software was as much of a dream as free wireless access to the Internet, when Microsoft was an unshaken monopoly, when nobody could put “Linux” and “desktop” in the same sentence, when “web standards” were supported only by their unknown authors, when Altavista was thought to be the best search engine, when … You get the idea.

2008 will be the year of the web worker because web workers believe it will be so.