Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Good bye, Netscape

People all over the web are saying good bye to Netscape.  Since Mozilla and Firefox started to get better, Netscape sort of faded away.  Now it faded away so far that AOL decided to end the support for the browser. This is the time when thousands of people all around the world, including yours truly, suddenly felt very old and broke out into uncontrollable nostalgia…

If you want to read more about the sentiment, here are some links for you:

How marketing research works

Here is a quote of an insightful comment from this Slashdot discussion:

IDC just released its predictions for 2008 with regards to data storage trends. Its research shows…

If you’ve ever been involved in an IDC, Gartner or whatever marketing discussion, you know that the “research” mainly consists of going from vendor to vendor (data storage vendors in this case) and asking what, in their wildest dreams, would the ideal demand curve look like. Then they charge for actually coming up with some supporting information to meet the vendors’ preferred conclusion, and release the whole thing to consumers in the hopes of stimulating some demand for the paying vendors. Very scientific.

On copyright, fair use, and free speech

TechCrunch has an excellent cover of the “photograph in the video” story that has been going on all over the web in the last few days.  Basically, somebody wrote a funny song and made a video for it.  In that video a bunch of images were used including one that was downloaded from Flickr without permission of the photographer.  The photographer got really pissed off and such.  The video was re-edited to remove the offending image, but there was plenty of discussion on how is right and who is wrong in this story.  Some really important questions on copyright, fair use, and free speech were asked, and some really smart people tried to answer them.

The rights of the copyright holder have always been balanced against the more fundamental right of free speech. And free speech in the Internet age, more so than ever before, goes way beyond words and text. The way people express themselves on the Web increasingly involves images, video, animations, and other rich media, often in mash-ups of pre-existing works. That is how people communicate today. Both copyright law and industry standards need to evolve to take that into consideration.

While I support the (copy)right of the author to command the usage of his or her work, I think that this particular case wasn’t handled properly by the photographer.

Happy Birthday, Perl!

My favorite (so far) programming language has been born 20 years ago.   It’s been loved and hated.  It’s been praised and damned.  It’s been complimented and criticized.  But all that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that it has been helping people all over the world to solve problems.  Tricky, boring, annoying problems.  It provided enough power to build enterprise grade applications, while still being easy and flexible enough to be the super-glue of many systems.

I’m sure Perl will still be with us in another 20 years.  I wish it to be as useful in that time, as it is now.

Thanks, respect, and best wishes to everyone who created and supported Perl, its community and tools all these years.  Happy birthday!

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.