Chinese New Year

I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that I’m a big fan of Chinese culture.  Today, at the office, we had Chinese New Year celebrations will plenty of home-made food (cooked by our Chinese colleagues) and red decorations all around.  That inspired me to read some more about China on Wikipedia and even try my hand at calligraphy.

The above image depicts my third attempt, which was good enough to be readable and was actually recognized by at least one Chinese person as “this is actually pretty good“.  Let’s all call that my best wishes for all of you this year.

P.S.: If you wander what that one means, I used this image as the source of inspiration.  Wikipedia says it means “When wealth is acquired, precious objects follow”.  Having no idea myself, I’m inclined to trust that.

New University of Cyprus library

Cyprus Mail reports that the construction of the new University of Cyprus library has begun.  It will take a while, so the doors are expected to open some time in September, 2014.  While reading through the article, one particular paragraph took me a while to understand.

The library’s collection, which will be housed in an impressive dome-shaped building holding  around 600,000 books, more than 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books all in digital format plus 10,000 audio books and 150 databases. Its contents will be accessible to all Cypriots.

My first thought was that the library will hold 600,000 books in digital format and that the new building is being constructed to accommodate that storage.  I thought that was a bit excessive.  After all, I used to have an e-book library of more than a 1,000 titles and they were living nicely on a single hard disk.  Digital storage is cheap these days and the size of drives keep growing.  How much space does one need to store 600,000 books in digital form? – I thought.

The size of books in my collection are somewhere between 500 kilobytes to a couple of megabytes.  Let’s assume 1 megabyte for an average book.  How much space is there on a modern hard drive?  I’ll assume 2 TB (terabytes).  How many average books can we store on such a disk? 2 TB / 1 MB = 2,000,000,000,000 / 1,000,000 = 2,000,000.  I know, I’m approximating things a lot with terabytes, megabytes, and average book sizes.  But with a single 2 TB disk holding 2,000,000 books, give or take, I don’t think a new building is in order.  3 TB and 4 TB hard disks exist already.  By September 2014 we’ll probably have way more than that.  Even a few of those connected together for backups, “150 databases” and such will provide a lot of storage, while being the size of a device that is easy to hide at home.  New building? Really?

Of course, once I re-read the paragraph a few times, I realized that I’m on a totally wrong foot here.  It read more like:

  • 600,000 books (print)
  • 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books (digital)
  • 10,000 audio books (digital)
  • 150 databases (digital?)

While the digital part of that library will easily fit on one or two hard drives, the 600,000 printed books collection does indeed need some storage space.

I am all for knowledge and education, and I’m glad that this effort is being taken and that all these books will be available to all Cypriots.  But if I was to express a wish, I’d say : please push for digitizing all those books and make them available on-line.  Cyprus is good, but why not share with the rest of the world?  Especially now that we do have the technology.

Office poetry

I’m about to share some office poetry with you.  To better understand it, here’s some context for you:

  • The whole office is non-smoking area.  Those who need to smoke, have to go on floor up (from where I am), to the balcony.
  • Most of the important things are discussed on that balcony and not in the meeting rooms, so even non-smoking people frequent it.
  • On Fridays, it is customary to have a long lunch somewhere out, with a pint or two.  After which people still come back to the office to finish the day’s work.

Now that you know everything you need to know, here is some poetry from the internal instant messenger exchange between me and a colleague of mine.  These are just from today.

Leonid Mamchenkov:
For all week’s troubles to dismay
We should have lunch at TGI Friday.
We’ll eat and drink and have a cheer
Not to forget a glass of beer.
It will be cold such as the ice
And overall it will be nice.
Mihai Milea:
Let’s get ready for a feast
Pull some ribbs out, like a beast
That’s how hungry now I feel
Let’s all eat and then we chill
Leonid Mamchenkov:
We are going out for lunch
With an Easy Forex bunch
We will eat and drink and laugh
Until everyone’s had enough
We’ll come back and work a bit
Until everyone will quit
Cause today is Friday’s rest
And I wish you all the best
Mihai Milea:
Poems, rhymes, that’s all we do
Let’s go out and get some food!!!!!!!!
Leonid Mamchenkov:
If we go up, you’ll have a smoke.
I don’t want to, so I’ll grab a coke.
Breeth some fresh air, rest the eyes.
It’s an hour or so until we say goodbye’s
here is a grim one :
While we are here, trying to pay the bills,
Why don’t we do upstairs something that kills?
There is no question that I’m looking to answer.
You, however, should be careful – smoking causes cancer.
Mihai is busy, Sam’s disappeared.
I’ll go alone – the air has cleared.
No more smell, no more smoke.
It sounds just fine, but something’s broke.
Mihai didn’t like the last one, complaining about the rhymes.   I tried to get away with this one then.
That was a dunk.
Because I am drunk.
But you aren’t too good,
You are breaking my mood.

 

The permanence of temporary

I came across this little story about the Gmail logo.

How many times have you been told not to leave something for the last minute, but when you did, it actually turned out better than expected? Well, Gmail’s logo was the product of this situation — it was designed by Dennis Hwang (who’s responsible for most of Google’s doodles at the time) the night before Gmail launched. Former Google designer Kevin Foxtells the story on Quora: “The logo was designed literally the night before the product launched. We were up very late and Sergey and I went down to his cube to watch him make it.”

The last minute bit reminded me of something else.  A few years ago I was involved in a project with a rather hectic release plan.  There was too much work to do, not enough organization, and the deadline appeared much sooner than expected.  The team was in the office pretty much since Friday afternoon and it was already just after 11pm on Sunday night.  Everyone was stressed and exhausted, and we thought that the painful release of the project was just about done.

It was then that we got a report from the support department that something is wrong with our outgoing emails.  And the problem was that they weren’t going out much.  Clients submitted forms and were told to expect activation / verification email with code.  And those emails weren’t coming for a while already.

It was then that we realized that in all the chaos we actually completely forgot to implement that bit functionality.  There was nothing there that was sending emails.  Oops!

I kicked everyone out of the room, locked the door and wrote a very quick Perl script.  I spent not more than 15-20 minutes.  We just needed something really quick to get the mail queue out of the way.  We would rewrite it properly next day, when the dust settles a bit and everyone is rested and thinking clearly.

Can you guess when we actually rewrote it?  One and a half years later!  That’s  right!  Something as temporary as that lasted and did the job for almost two years.  Turned out that the job I wrote it to do on the first night was pretty much the job it would be doing 24×7, and there was no need to even update it.  It supported templates, multiple languages, and pre-configured attachments based on the template and language.  And it was efficient enough, since when I was writing it we already had a few thousand messages in the queue and I wanted to send them out as quick as possible.

Even later, when the rewrite happened, it wasn’t for any new functionality, but for better integration with the rest of the project.  After all, it doesn’t make much sense to have a single standalone Perl script in the project that is completely written PHP.  It was ported almost verbatim.

Every time I tell this story, especially to my Russian friends, I keep hearing the same response: “Nothing is more permanent than temporary“.  You build something to last for years and it gets destroyed, redesigned, and rebuilt every 6 month.  You throw something together to get you through the day and that lasts a century.

The Gmail logo reminded me of that.  Designed on the night before the release, the logo is still here…

Apple

Apple

Looking at this ugly apple, I remembered a joke someone told me recently about the three famous apples in the history of humanity – the one Eve gave to Adam, the one that fell on Isaac Newton, and the one on the logo of the Apple Computers Inc.  Actually, I don’t even remember the joke. I just remember the apples.

Thinking about them, they all must have been quite ugly.  After all, Eve had to promise to Adam that he will get laid if he bytes the fruit.  The other one that fell on the head of a genius must have been ugly by definition.  It also made Isaac think a lot.  If it was a nice looking apple, he would have just eaten it without much thought.  And the last apple sparked the creativity of Steve Jobs.  He must have seen an ugly apple and thought of it as a creative challenge.   A lot of people can take something ugly and make it better.  But how can you take something ugly and make it even uglier?  Steve Jobs took a byte of it. Simple, easy, yet genius as well.

The apple I have in front of me is ugly.  I’m blogging this for historical reasons.  After all there is a small chance that this apple will become the fourth famous apple in the history of the world…

And if that wasn’t enough, I had one more revelation.  If you look at this image in a certain way – with your side vision, and you’ll cover the top part of it – then this apple looks a lot like watermelon.  So there you go.  My ugly apple story ends here.