Tag: thoughts

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.

Google Profile coming up

In my recent post about Google Reader and Google Talk integration I mentioned that it would be nice to have a possibility to control friends’ names and pictures.  Similar to the way I can do so in Gmail.  Having things a bit more centralized would be nice.

Obviously, Google realizes that.  They are some of the smartest people put together after all. Well, it looks like we’ll have something centralized in the near future.  Web Worker Daily runs a post about Google Profile.  Good news.

And while I was going through that stuff, I had a thought (yes, again).  Google must have some really nice tools for its developers. Usually, companies try to maximize the utilization of available resources, boost code reuse, and minimize time spent on re-implementing things.  Google shown a few decentralized bits over time.  Like this contact management issue, for example.  That probably means that creating something like Google Profile (simple, but very scalable application) has been made extremely easy.  It’s like it is easy to make one rather than to decide if one is really needed and what are the alternatives and how to use those alternatives. That, or they have some a weak approach to code reuse – something that I find hard to believe.  Either way, it’s interesting…

On movie reviews and movies …

While reading dooce‘s reasons for why she stopped reading music reviews, I had a thought along the same lines, but for the movies.

A music reviewer runs into a problem that plagues most writers: coming up with new ways to say the same thing.

Why is that most of my movie review reading consists of checking the first half of the IMDB page for the movie?  (The part with title, genre, user rating, producer, and top of the cast).  Well, because that’s all I need to know about most of the movies that I get a chance to see (TV, rentals, and cinema).

Yes, most of these movies are either total crap or half crap.  They don’t amaze. They don’t make me think.  They don’t bring back the memories, and neither do they stimulate my imagination.  Most of these movies have a pretty straightforward story, shallow characters with long time coined phrases. You know the ones I’m talking about.

It’s a tough job being a critique for such movies.  You’ll indeed run out of words to describe them, and that will happen pretty fast.  I know, because I tried a movie blog ones.  It’s dead for a long time now, and I don’t have much will to revive it.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time now.  One thing that scares me a little bit is this move towards shorter time frames.  I’m guilty in participating, of course, but that makes it even scarier.

What I am talking about is this general move towards smaller pieces of information and entertainment.  We used to have printed books.  Those took a few days to read each.  Gradually, the majority of the population moved from books to movies.  Movies are much easier to consume, and then only take a couple of hours.  With the raise of the Web, the time frames got even shorter.  YouTube is one of the most popular entertainment resources on the Web, and it has a limitation of a 10 minute clip.  You just can’t upload anything which is significantly bigger than that (give or take a few seconds).   Now with mobile devices coming up strong, and popularity of short message services, such as Twitter and Jaiku, something tells me that we’ll go much under those 10 minutes of YouTube.  Of course it won’t happen in a day or two – I’m talking a general trend here.

Now imagine the reviewers going in step with the progress.  Writing a book review was simpler ( I guess).  Movies got tougher, because there are so many of them and because they are so much alike.  YouTube clip reviews turned into tiny user comments and star ratings.  You just can’t talk about a few minutes of video for hours I guess (again).  What will happen with a reviews of Twitter messages and tiny mobile video clips?  They’ll disappear.  It’ll be easier and faster to watch the original rather than spend time on the review.

Of course, it won’t all turn out that bad.  It’s just I’m having one of those pessimistic days…

On the nature of old things …

Here are some assorted points that will hopefully come together once I am finished writing them.

  • My mobile – Sony Ericsson P910 – looks very old and much used.
  • I got it second hand as a temporary solution.  I have feeling like it was three month ago or so.
  • Via “On this day” section of the sidebar, I am reminded of this post.
  • The biggest problem with this mobile was the broken keyboard.  A few month ago, I took it off. Now I use virtual keyboard via touch screen.
  • The second biggest problem with this phone that I had, was stylus.  I had only one and I lost it.  For a few month now I’m using just my finger.
  • I’ve heard about “temporary being the most permanent”.
  • A Polish colleague of mine once noted  that most people in Poland drive  very old cars. “A car of 25 years old is like brand new“, – he said.  He was only half joking.
  • I am looking for a new mobile phone to buy. I am not in a hurry.
  • Google Android stuff sounds very cool, and it will have a lot of future, and I will have one of those.  But they aren’t available yet.
  • iPhone is available.
  • So is BlackBerry.
  • I am not in a hurry.  By the time I will make my mind and decide to do something about my phone, probably Androids will be all over the place.

Yes, I am very slow sometimes.  But even if I am taken out of equation, like with those cars in Poland, there is one argument, which is very very simple, but is very very hard to overcome – “It works“.