Entries for May28th2018

Is anybody going to Twiistup 007? [Is anybody going to Twiistup 007?]

May28th2018 — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:54:04 GMT

I have opted for the super early bird registration. I still have bracelets and dog tags from past Twiistup events.

The last Twiistup was the crappiest one ever. Yes, Robert Scoble was there and for the first time Microsoft was a sponsor. They had a really crappy XBox 360 booth which no one seemed to care about with a 2-3 very bored looking teenage employees standing by.

Paul Graham is supposed to be at this one making it mildly interesting for me. Otherwise I would not have registered.

Another good event coming up is the Scale 8x conference. I will be at that one too as well as I/O. If you are at any of these events and you would like to eat lunch with myself and possibly some coworkers, send me a PM.

in reply to Is anybody going to Twiistup 007?

Has anybody signed up early to I/O 2010 yet? [Has anybody signed up early to I/O 2010 yet?]

May28th2018 — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:47:20 GMT

Google sent out a bunch of invites for a discounted ticket to I/O conference 2010. I am already preregistered.

Last year they gave out a free HTC magic phone. Who knows what we will get this year? At any rate, I look forward to seeing a lot of my programmer friends there this year. Some of my coworkers go to the Adobe conference, the MySQL conference, the RHEL conference, ect...

As far as I can tell I/O is the cheapest ticket price, and the best.

Even if your employer pays for it, instead of just going to one, you can use your budget to attend many conferences that have a high cost->effectiveness ratio if you are smart about it. I am attending 4 conferences this coming year, with the budget of one Sun or Microsoft conference price, and they sessions are far better.

What's the point of attending any MS conference on web technologies, when they themselves are using stuff like JQuery on this very Channel 8,9,10 project???

(click view->source on this page or inspect element in firebug)

http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.min.js

Apparently they use it share across all Microsoft sites, because it's on the primary domain. Whatever happened to Atlas?

in reply to Has anybody signed up early to I/O 2010 yet?

G1 owners, it may finally be time to upgrade [G1 owners, it may finally be time to upgrade]

May28th2018 — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:49:09 GMT

People at work have already pre-ordered this. Very interesting indeed. I think it may be time to toss my G1 and upgrade. Finally.
I also own an iPhone I jailbroke with QuickPWN that I use with 2G and voice. I must say it's pretty useless to me. The OS is not what interests me, it's the hardware. You can GIT Android from the Google code repository. So the OS is no longer the factor, it's the hardware. Just like when Windows 95 was released. This new Moto phone seems pretty freaking awesome. I didn't really dig the G2 Magick from HTC. No keyboard, and it felt cheesier than the G1. This one looks like the Compaq clone of 2010 so far.

in reply to G1 owners, it may finally be time to upgrade

Does anybody else abuse the snack bar at work? [Does anybody else abuse the snack bar at work?]

May28th2018 — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 04:05:51 GMT

I've been pulling some serious shifts lately, and I have thoroughly abused the snack bar. I don't feel guilty either. I've eaten entire meals of free snacks lately and I'm ok with that. It's not that I don't get paid a lot, because I do. It's that I just don't wanna buy food at home.

Anybody else in the same situation?

in reply to Does anybody else abuse the snack bar at work?

App Engine vs. Azure [App Engine vs. Azure]

May28th2018 — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:05:15 GMT

Appspot.com App Engine with the Java and Python GWT API using Appengine API with JDO and datastore and possibly the Wave API vs. Azure using, well, whatever it is that Microsoft runs?

Which do you think is better and why?

Which costs less?

Why would you pay to license Visual Studio when the App Engine GWT Eclipse plugin is free and better documented?

App Engine has tons of hooks into Android and iPhone with Wave and maps. Android also has a free SDK and Eclipse plugin.

Which one has better hooks in Mobile platforms?

As a developer do you ask these questions or go along party lines like a hardened politician?

in reply to App Engine vs. Azure

Officially speaking out against MS products [Officially speaking out against MS products]

May28th2018 — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:05:11 GMT

Bugs in Microsoft's technology caused me a great deal of harm at work recently.

So unfortunately, I can't come out and say which company I work for or even discuss what happened. I kind of wish it were possible to blow the whistle on Microsoft with authority from the stand point of our positions at X company, instead of anonymously. Kind of how Robert Scoble does on his blog. Unfortunately this may pass with a guy that rides the tea cup rides at the VC amusement park until they break(or lose all their money) then jumps ship, but it doesn't sit well with people that have normal senior positions.

Does it improve things to make public criticisms? Of course not. But we don't care about Microsoft, we care about ourselves. They are an unfortunate obstacle of the enterprise.

in reply to Officially speaking out against MS products

Protected Memory? [Protected Memory?]

May28th2018 — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:13:47 GMT

For years, DRM schemes for both games and media have counted on the OS and CPU protecting certain parts of the memory.

http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/code/

Today, thanks to research done at Princeton, we can say goodbye to OS driven memory protection.
The software "USB / PXE Imaging Tools" can be downloaded, installed to a USB stick and that will dump all the memory out of the RAM after a reboot to the USB device via your first boot choice in the BIOS.

The dump is similar to the dd command in bash where it is dumping raw memory to your USB device.

Once you have the memory dump on the key, you can grep through it or use "strings" to grab the string you are looking for.

This also defeats file encryption schemes of any kind.

Once you power down your computer or reboot, your memory does not re-instantiate itself immediately. It takes several seconds or minutes for the memory to clear. It's similar to zero formating your hard drive. The sectors will retain an electromagnetic signature unless written over, even if the partition table has changed.

in reply to Protected Memory?

Are we recovering from the recession? [Are we recovering from the recession?]

May28th2018 — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:20:30 GMT

I recently interviewed some candidates for a project I had been working on for quite some time.

I received calls from former employees of Sun, HP, even Microsoft, pleading for a full time job. I explained that this project is funded by a small VC and that there are no benefits or even fair compensation. That did not disuade them.

When I got to the technical questions such as, what is the difference between abstract methods and an interface? Such as how is it different that you can extend an abstract class or a class with abstract methodds, and have it force you to implement those methods, and implementing and interface class, and that class also forces you to implement methods?

These are very simple questions, but they weed out the good from the bad pretty quickly. You should have heard the desperation on the other end with some of the explainations I got.

At any rate, it's clear that some of the employees of our tech giants will be finding employment in the fast food industry soon. What a dramatic turn. I used to work in fast food when I was in community college so many years ago. Now our fine students with bachelors degrees in CS and a few years of experience at global tech firms are taking over the flipping of dead cows!

Keep those H1Bs coming Bill.

in reply to Are we recovering from the recession?

Qi Lu joins Microsoft [Qi Lu joins Microsoft]

May28th2018 — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 03:08:09 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/technology/internet/31search.html?hpw

Interesting piece.

"Mr. Lu’s colleagues at Yahoo and Microsoft say his intellect is matched only by his work habits. He sleeps three to four hours a night. One most weekdays, he wakes up around 4 a.m., goes through his e-mail and runs four miles on a treadmill while listening to classical music or watching thenews."

LOLZ, it's not worth it. Not unless you own the company.

in reply to Qi Lu joins Microsoft

Best online stock apps? [Best online stock apps?]

May28th2018 — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:18:13 GMT

So besides Yahoo and Google finance, what are some good online stock applications you've seen so far?

What are the best analytical online tools you've used?

in reply to Best online stock apps?

Clone and subset [Clone and subset]

May28th2018 — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 05:30:34 GMT

So many of you have played with Google wave by now.

So it took Microsoft about 6 months before Soapbox came out to answer Youtube. Soapbox just closed due to various reasons.

Wave is different than Yahoo, Twitter, MSNP, and email in that it let's you script the actual messaging medium.

It would be like if the MIME protocol supported stateful applications, instead of just content types and inline data.

Microsoft could have easily added this to MSN messenger or any of it's other products years and years ago. But they didn't because why the heck should they? It would cost money and nobody noticed it missing.

Now they have a reason. They can't look like the poor dog who got kicked and left behind. So how long do you all think it will take them to bake this cake out of the Redmond kitchen? Will it be in MSN messenger or are they going to let go of their tech because it's old and unpopular like they did with flash and soapbox vs embedded media player?

My Google wave application is under way, because I want the Geniune advantage. The advantage that comes from using geniune software.

in reply to Clone and subset

Twiistup 6 was really bad this year [Twiistup 6 was really bad this year]

May28th2018 — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 06:55:56 GMT

I took a few pics, but won't post them unless somebody requests it. The dudes and 1 dudette from Microsoft looked like they were about 15 years old, and their Xbox demo table was lame.

I don't want to rip on a an event too much because you do, you won't have any more events at all, and they have the opportunity to do better next year. This year's Twiistup was not as good as last year's.

There was no shwag bag, and they were giving people really lame dog tags as ids. The Universal City venue was bad too.

I don't know if it's because it got bought out or what, but something bad happened to this conference this year. I did see a few MySpace executives and other well known web 2.0 people, but they were just trying to cut me off in the line up to the bar to get some alcohol.

There are much better events to attend in Nor and SoCal, let's just put it that way. I do hope they do better next year. They really blew it, and it's not just because of the recession. This conference sucked.

in reply to Twiistup 6 was really bad this year

How would you have a robot pick stocks? [How would you have a robot pick stocks?]

May28th2018 — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:03:27 GMT

As most of you know I am working on AI that analyses world markets and places buy and sell orders all by it's lonesome.

Right now the system is not fully operational, so I am still doing manual research.

2 stocks I see rising are NYC, Capital Trust

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=87081&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1307136&highlight=

They have an earnings report coming out on August 5th.

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chdet=1248667114120&chddm=3407&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NYSE:CT&ntsp=0

They've been on a fast rise this past week. The bad part is that the volume is so low, that if you sell off any significant amount, you'll probably end up pushing the price back down to nothingness.

Then there's Elixir Gaming Technologies, a company that sells slot machines to Asian Casinos. LVS and MGM have doubled and the gaming business is looking better globally this summer.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/industries/entertainment/elixir-gaming-technologies-report-second-quarter--results-august--host/

They have a conference call coming up on August 5th.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=egt

DISCLAIMER: do not rely on anything you read here to make any investment decisions. These are merely *VERY BASIC ILLUSTRATIONS* to illustrate what a human, as opposed to a robot, would do to determine a possible rally on a symbol.

So markets are starting to rebound. This type of analysis is nothing some algorythims wouldn't be able to do by themselves. I am training the software to do this right now. You assign points for an upcoming earnings calls, points for gaining volume, points for world markets with similar sectors rising, ect... It's not quite that easy, because you are sifting through terabytes of data, but that's the general idea.

Is anybody else developing this type of technology on this forum?

Trade tips and techniques?

I feel that you can in fact make a fail safe system based on points for various attributes of the company's environment. Like Pagerank ranks pages based on inbound vs outbound links recursively. I don't think this is impossible, and I think it's well within the reach of a small 6 figure project.

in reply to How would you have a robot pick stocks?

MSFT hit hard after close [MSFT hit hard after close]

May28th2018 — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:54:43 GMT

click to enlarge

Summary: MSFT online services are now running at an operating loss.

The only reason people use Bing is for cashback (not for actual searching). So it does not seem to be paying for itself.

Bloggers are starting to question the survival of MSFT's online offerings after a shut down of soap box, popfly, having squandered the 100M investment in Powerset, and much, much more.

May 28, 2018 has downgraded MSFT to a sell.

in reply to MSFT hit hard after close

Programmatic Trading gone wrong [Programmatic Trading gone wrong]

May28th2018 — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:53:32 GMT

Let's create a huge piece of software to trade based on our news aggregation and other data sources!!!

Let's give respository access to some random Russian dude who knows Java! (H1B visas really need to be relaxed. I heard Bill Gates pleading to congress about this). Along with H1B access we need to make sure all foreign workers can bring 16GB USB keys to work with zero security check.

Why is there a disaster?

There are actually some pretty good online stock news aggregators that calculate futures based on real time news, but they're no where near what Sachs has. I have actually been working on software that does this, and a colleage in Australia has been doing the same. It's not related to any product our startup is releasing, it's just something I do on my own to try to get an edge.

Most programmers have at one point tried to make news aggregators to beat market predictions and buy right before an uptick. I mean, why wouldn't you. You're a programmer for god's sake. Use your power. But on the other hand giving your company secrets away to employees that will return to their country and sell them off doesn't make a lot of sense. One or 2 programmers can only make a system that is so good with X amount of time. Sachs had years and the best resources to make theirs. What a shame. What a sham. No wonder nobody wants to invest anymore and the markets have lost thousands of points.

in reply to Programmatic Trading gone wrong

Windows 7 question related to the global economic situation [Windows 7 question related to the global economic situation]

May28th2018 — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:38:33 GMT

Why didn't Microsoft wait for the economy to recover before asking people to upgrade? Why are they releasing Windows 7 in fall? We prolonged launching our new service until next year. Statistically speaking, no enterprise is going to upgrade in this. I hope they're counting on Asia and Europe exclusively for upgrade & OEM sales, because they're not coming from America I don't think.

The economic data is still pointing south.

How bad is it? The "new GM" has a master plan to sell their cars off on ebay. That's the best they could think of to save the US auto industry. Things are actually very bad, and the recovery has not yet started despite what some analysts are saying.

Launching software before a recovery period is a waste of resources. I am just wondering what the strategy is?

demand--

Google does not incur these problems because their software, OS, mobile OS, app engine, APIs, SDKs are all free. They can launch as much stuff as they want and expect large penetration with little to nothing spent on marketing. That is not the case for Microsoft.

in reply to Windows 7 question related to the global economic situation

David finally took down Goliath [David finally took down Goliath]

May28th2018 — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:32:13 GMT

May I say holy crap. When most people experience HTML5 SVG/video/audio DOM, worker threads, and DOM 3D scripting that should finish IE off for good.

IE will look, feel and essentially be depricated for web browsing.

Next up to bat Android is about to hit a home run. I think it's pretty cool how Mozilla and Google tag teamed to wipe out their competition.

And it actually worked. Most of the really good MS employees now work there anyway so it's no surprise.

As a web developer and DBA, I must say good riddance. The only browser that ever ate up $60/hour customer time was IE. IE has wasted billions of dollars in developer hours for what amounts to bad design and programming obscurities and probably contributed to the economic disaster this past year by wasting resources.

GOOD RIDDANCE!

in reply to David finally took down Goliath

competing for your own job [competing for your own job]

May28th2018 — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:12:04 GMT

How many of you have been in the same software job for months or years, and now find yourselves competing with coworkers for your once secure job?

I found that at my work place, people that took breaks to exercise or watch TV, or escape from mental fatigue are now missing from my work environment. By missing I mean they are permanently gone. Budgets have been slashed and now people are getting paranoid.

I'm personally not worried because I am not counting on my software job/401k for life as some are.

So what strange things have you noticed around the workplace?

in reply to competing for your own job

The Microsoft history videos [The Microsoft history videos]

May28th2018 — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:32:26 GMT

I just saw the 1976 one. When Tina mentioned "with revenues of over $22,000" I laughed my ass off. That wasn't even good for 1976.
These shorts pale in comparison to Triumph of the nerds and other videos, but I find them slightly entertaining because the footage is not on other videos that I know of or on youtube.

in reply to The Microsoft history videos

Is the current downturn starting to spiral? [Is the current downturn starting to spiral?]

May28th2018 — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:39:18 GMT

We're now partying like it's 1997 !!!

http://www.google.com/finance/historical?cid=983582&startdate=May+1%2C+1997&enddate=Jun+1%2C+1997

Dow Jones Industrial Average 30-May-97: 7,385.99

http://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX:.DJI

Dow Jones Industrial Average Now: 7,365.67

The toilet is flushing. Interestingly enough most tech shares have stayed their ground until now. How thin is the ice?
Can Tech companies survive the onslaught of bank nationalization?

Has Bill Gates cashed out completely?
LOL

in reply to Is the current downturn starting to spiral?

Google's Channel9 - all Android, zero noise [Google's Channel9 - all Android, zero noise]

May28th2018 — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 19:22:46 GMT

http://www.youtube.com/user/androiddevelopers

Other good resources are Anddev.org and this e-book

I will see some of you at Google I/O in a couple months!!~

in reply to Google's Channel9 - all Android, zero noise

Christopher Blizzard clips from Feb 21st [Christopher Blizzard clips from Feb 21st]

May28th2018 — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 18:25:23 GMT

firefox.exe threads abstracted to Javascript in Firefox 3.1

In addition FF 3.1 presents Ogg Vorbis DOM objects as <audio> and <video> tags which can be scripted similarly to flash, and also advanced SVG support with image filtering.

XSS now allowed with Client/Server mutual security exception

XHR progress notifications

Google Chrome's DNS prefetching has also been cloned in FF 3.1 as well as NEW and improved client side resource bundles as XML.
That's right, you now get client side resource caching without Google Gears.

Blizzard also presented geo location tracking which will also be in FF 3.1. FF 3.1 returns either static or dynamic longitude and latitude information.

FF 3.1 also now has NATIVE JSON parsing. Blizzard expects JQuery to dump their own implementations for FF and to use the new JSON parsers if they are available as they present a 300% performance boost over eval style JSON parsing.

When Blizzard was asked "what about IE compatibility?", he laughed and said something that you could liken to "screw them", "screw them up their stupid @sses".

Blizzard mentioned that more HTML5 features are coming. He also laughed at Microsoft's calls that FF is less secure than IE8.

Blizzard then mentioned Mozilla's domination in Europe where Mozilla corp is now helping the EU bring up more fines for M$ in their antitrust case against the software giant.

in reply to Christopher Blizzard clips from Feb 21st

Microsoft says "our stuff runs Red Hat OOB" [Microsoft says "our stuff runs Red Hat OOB"]

May28th2018 — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:09:43 GMT

http://www.aim168realestate.com/real-estate-news/united-states-of-america/9933/red-hat-and-microsoft-join-han.html

Buy Microsoft server, and run RHEL on it. Microsoft will certify it works.

It looks like Microsoft finally found a marketing plan for IIS.

in reply to Microsoft says "our stuff runs Red Hat OOB"

No thanks [No thanks]

May28th2018 — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:44:13 GMT

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3801961/Mozilla+Helping+EC+Against+Microsoft.htm

in reply to No thanks

How hard is infiltrating MSFT? [How hard is infiltrating MSFT?]

May28th2018 — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:13:45 GMT

http://i.gizmodo.com/5142993/microsoft-says-former-employee-spied-on-them-for-his-startup-company

Apparently it's pretty darn easy.

in reply to How hard is infiltrating MSFT?