Code and Management

The death of the URL | FactoryCity

2009-11-18T11:14:00.001-05:00

Everyday, when you fire up your browser and type in some arbitrary URL in the browser’s address bar, you are taking the red pill.

via factoryjoe.com

I am not as paranoid, but an interesting take on the situation nonetheless.

Posted via web from Mike's Lifestream

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » How Wall Street is making its billions

2009-10-19T16:41:00.001-04:00

Wall Street banks have had profitable quarters. JPMorgan Chase reported $3.6 billion in profit (more than $1 billion per month). Goldman Sachs was only slightly behind, at $3.2 billion. These profits supposedly came from “trading.” I asked a friend who has worked in the money business how this was possible. “For someone to make money trading, there has to be someone on the other side of every trade who is losing money. Where does each bank find someone who can lose $1 billion every month?”

He explained that “carry trade” would be a more accurate description of what they’re doing. Because of the Collapse of 2008 financial reforms, the big investment banks are able to borrow money from the U.S. government at 0 percent interest. Then they can turn around and buy short-term bonds that pay 2 or 3 percent annual interest. Now they’re making 2 percent on whatever they borrowed. They can use leverage to increase this number, by pledging some of the bonds that they’ve already bought as collateral on additional bonds.

I asked if they were taking any risk in order to earn this return. “If interest rates went up to 20 percent, even though the bonds are short-term, the price of the bond could fall enough to make the trade a money-loser.” (Though since the banks are too big to fail, they would simply be bailed out with additional taxpayer funds.)

What kind of bonds are they buying? Are they investing the money in American business? “No, they are mostly buying Treasuries.” So the money is just being shuffled from one Federal bank account to another, with each Wall Street bank skimming off $1 billion per month for itself? “Pretty much.”

[An more old-fashioned way of making supranormal returns is insider trading, which was perfectly legal until the Crash of 1929 (history). The New York Times ran a story yesterday on Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge fund manager who invested heavily in inside information. Rolling Stone published "Wall Street's Naked Swindle" on October 14. The story is much more sensational and entertaining than anything from the Times. It covers a guy who spent $1.7 million on out-of-the-money put options on Bear Stearns on March 11, 2008. The options would become worthless on March 20, just 9 days later, unless Bear Stearns basically went bust. Bear Stearns collapsed the next day and the guy made a $270 million profit. He has never been identified by the SEC.]

via blogs.law.harvard.edu

Dear President Obama and Congress, can I have this deal too? I believe that in borrowing money from the government for 0% interest, I too could help the economy recover. I could become "too big to fail" at some point, and would strive to do so as soon as possible.

Posted via web from Mike's Lifestream

Cartoonists Respond to Obama’s Nobel Prize Win | Cartoon News

2009-10-09T20:51:00.001-04:00

via blog.cagle.com

Nice collection of cartoonist reactions to Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize

Posted via web from Mike's Lifestream

More Technology Groups in Columbus, Ohio

2009-02-20T11:33:00.004-05:00

My original post of technology groups in Columbus, Ohio has been updated a couple of times since initially published. More groups have formed since then too so I wanted to try to highlight these for others with similar interests.

Developer groups:
Columbus Javascript User Group (CBUSJS)
Columbus iPhone Developers User Group (CIDUG)

Security focused groups:
Central Ohio ISSA
ISACA Central Ohio Chapter
Central Ohio InfraGard Chapter

Finally, an important group has formed since my initial post that contains links to many of these groups and the meeting schedules. Columbus Tech Life is a wiki with information on bloggers, technology focused people, companies, groups, events, and more happening in or around Columbus.

Which is more green?

2008-06-10T22:19:00.005-04:00

I find myself more and more over the past couple of months thinking about my lifestyle and how my family is using our resources in terms of "being green". This isn't something I thought about 10 years ago. Sure, I have taken advantage of the awesome recycling options where I live in Dublin, Ohio, but within the past 2 years I have started consciously trying to make better choices. The problem is I don't always know which is better and it is easy to get stuck working through all of the calculations and unknowns trying to come up with a formula for why I should do (a) instead of (b). Some examples:

1. Is it better to run the air conditioner in the car to feel cool, or rather is it better to put the windows down and let the breeze (somewhat) cool you off? At first glance it would seem that AC off would be the greener choice, but consider that windows down would mean more drag, using potentially more fuel. Might depend on speed you are traveling, how long you will be in the car, or many other factors. I wish I knew the answer though, because I would likely chose the one that was better for the environment.

2. Is it better to get read eBooks or buy the real thing? This seems obvious, get an Amazon Kindle. At least that is what I am telling myself as this is now becoming my Father's Day gift this year. By buying, retrieving, and reading books electronically, I am saving the rain forests, printing supplies, transportation costs, and probably loads of other things. Unfortunately I don't know about the harmful costs of producing and distributing these electronic devices. Are we causing an environment catastrophe by creating the lovely electronic displays? What happens when we are done with them? Are we creating a lead problem or does the Kindle have some other kind of harmful chemicals in it? It uses Amazon's Whispernet to deliver books, which is just their name for cellular signals. Harmful signals? Some people claim to be allergic to Wifi now.

Where can I find the answers? Seems like a common problem everyone would have, but I admit I haven't done a lot of online research. As more people buy into "going green", it would be great to have a resource that breaks down the answers to these more complex situations. I don't want to see answers that say blindly "use the AC". I want to see answers that explain why and show the difference of using the AC versus not. I want to know the person answering the question has worked the problem all the way through and is not just flippantly answering without really thinking through the opportunity costs. Suggestions for finding answers? Is searching Google based on each individual questionable situation the only answer? Then I think we run into a trust issue. How do I know the answer I find is not being influenced by some third party?

Warning, warning - stay far away from Peterson Home Improvement

2008-06-23T08:50:00.006-04:00

My wife and I wanted our basement finished to have some extra space for all of our daughter's toys, to have somewhere to get away, to have an extra bedroom since we would be losing one upstairs once Lauren moves to a big-girl room, and to have a "man cave". Okay, the last one was for me, not for my wife. We hired Peterson Home Improvement, of Worthington, OH, to make our dream a reality. Welcome to our nightmare.

The project was estimated to take 4-5 weeks. We are now in the 9th week and if we can get anyone on-site to do some work it would still probably take another 2 weeks to finish. That's right, "if" we can get anyone on-site to come and do work. For the past 3 weeks, the workers have been at our house for a total of 3 hours.

Peterson Home Improvement is out of money. One framing crew has quit working with Scott Peterson. He owed them more than $7000 for past jobs. They stopped working on our project, because that was the only way they could force Scott Peterson to pay them. He bounced 2 checks to them, and finally gave them a check that did not bounce the next week. They came back on-site and worked for awhile, until they needed some supplies. They could not continue working until Scott Peterson could purchase some supplies. Unfortunately, it appears Peterson Home Improvement has bad credit with all home supply stores nowadays and the workers, rightfully so, have stopped purchasing supplies themselves in hopes of being reimbursed.

We ran into similar problems with the drywall crew. They would stop work early on most days. Turns out, they too needed supplies and again, they did not want to purchase supplies themselves, because they too were having a hard time getting payment out of Peterson Home Improvement.

Once again, same problem with the Scott's painter. He needed the primer, but Scott has not bought it. He went out and bought it himself, came on a Sunday, Father's Day specifically, and did all of the priming. The primer was put on very quickly, and only one coat was on. It could definitely use a second coat.

Through all of this work, the owner of Peterson Home Improvement has lied to us multiple times. He claimed during one work stoppage that he could not reach the framing crew and that maybe they had gone out drinking the night before. He was slandering his own crew, when it turns out they were not coming to work because they had not been paid for the past 2 jobs. Nice guy! Not! That was when he bounced 2 checks to them too.

The project manager has left the company. The framing crew has hired an attorney. The owner of the company has had to reschedule the last several meetings I have setup to sit down with him to determine when our project will be finished. It could be that Peterson Home Improvement will file bankruptcy. Regardless, if you are considering a home construction project, you have been advised to stay far, far away from Peterson Home Improvement.

I have written to Angie's List to give them this feedback so hopefully they will update their ratings to reflect how poorly run the project and company is nowadays. I will be writing to the Better Business Bureau in hopes of getting a resolution on our project too.

Stay away from Peterson Home Improvement. Do not wish this company on even your worst enemies.

Technology Groups in Columbus, Ohio

2008-09-02T15:54:00.024-04:00

I have been trying to collect information for all of the technology related groups in Columbus and Central Ohio. The lists below are what I have so far and I will continue to add to this post as I discover others:

Languages and Developers:
Central Ohio .NET Developers Group
Central Ohio Java Users Group
Columbus PHP Developers
Columbus Ruby Brigade
Central Ohio Python mailing list
PyOhio
Rethink Columbus
Central Ohio Chapter of the Extreme Programming Users Group
Columbus MySQL Users
Central Ohio SQL Server Special Interest Group

Operating Systems:
Central Ohio Linux User Group
Buckeye Mac Group
MacForum
Central Ohio VMware Users Group

Applications:
Columbus Digital: Adobe Users Group
Central Ohio Sharepoint Users Group
Columbus Ohio Rational Users Group
Central Ohio Drupal Group

Co-working:
CoSpace Columbus
Corkboard

Social:
Columbus Social Media Cafe
Twitter tracking for Columbus
cSUDs: Columbus Startup Drinks
Columbus Startup Weekend
Columbus IT Martini
Podcamp Ohio

Other:
Columbus Tech Life
Columbus Architecture Group
Central Ohio Application Lifecycle Management Group

Association of IT Professionals - Columbus Chapter
Web Analytics Wednesday (Tuesday)
Columbus Ohio Usability Professionals Association
TechColumbus
Technology for Ohio's Tomorrow
Columbus Robotics Society
Dorkbot Columbus
Columbus Computer Society
BarCampOhio
Convergence Columbus
The Fuse Factory
Freegeek Columbus

What am I missing? Add in comments or mail me and I will add to the post. Thanks.

Bathroom breaks

2008-04-10T13:00:00.001-04:00

Most days I work out of the office in my house. I like to get out and get some good coffee, get a bagel, or just generally get out of the house a couple of days of the week to keep from going stir crazy. I used to go to Panera all the time to take advantage of the free WiFi. My company bought all of the the remote developers the Verizon broadband wireless USB device and the service, so now I go to Starbucks a lot more. Unfortunately, none of the places I work from have a way to secure your laptop when you need to go to the bathroom. Given how many people I see working on laptops in these locations, it is clear these businesses cater to these customers. To provide a better service, I would love for them to install some secure brackets so I could use a laptop lock. As it is, the laptop lock would be pretty useless because it would be trivial for someone to lift up a chair or table to get the laptop unhooked. These are the types of brackets I am talking about:
The silver bracket at the bottom could be securely attached to the wall. It wouldn't even have to be visible, they could put it behind the comfy chairs or underneath the table to keep it out of site for those that don't need it or don't want to see it. I would feel better about leaving my laptop secured by this than asking a stranger to keep an eye on it, or having to shut everything down, closing the lid, and losing my connections.

History meme

2008-04-15T12:03:00.005-04:00

With reference to the History meme: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/04/15/history-meme

Mike-MacBook-Pro:nimitz mike$ uname -a
Darwin Mike-MacBook-Pro.local 9.2.2 Darwin Kernel Version 9.2.2: Tue Mar 4 21:17:34 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.4.31~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Mike-MacBook-Pro:nimitz mike$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
86 ls
78 cd
68 p4
66 pwd
26 gmake
24 s1
24 emacs
13 more
13 man
12 ssh

Notes: s1 is an alias to ssh to my virtual machine server, p4 is perforce

Launching Windows Processes

2008-05-09T21:00:00.005-04:00

The myriad of ways to launch processes on Microsoft Windows is staggering. Getting your application right is very difficult. One challenge I recently came across was a problem launching certain Microsoft command line tools. I had the same problem from both .NET (using C#) and from using the native CreateProcess Win32 API. If you are having problems with System.Diagnostics.Process or CreateProcess while trying to capture standard out and/or standard error, it very likely could be the same issue. Some of the applications that were found to have the problem were: chkntfs.exe, chkdsk.exe, xcopy.exe. As it turns out, for one reason or another for these particular applications, if you are capturing stdout or stderr, you must also give a handle for capturing stdin. Once you do that it will start working correctly.

I searched for awhile on Google and found several people who had the same problem, but never could find a satisfactory answer. Finally came up with this, so hopefully documenting it here will help others in the future.

Columbus Startup Weekend

2008-05-30T11:51:00.004-04:00

I signed up for Columbus Startup Weekend. It
seems like a good chance to connect with the Columbus Ohio startup scene. I have worked at Netscape, AvantGo, and now KACE, so I have experiences with startups in Silicon Valley. I have not had made a lot of connections in Columbus related to technology companies. I am looking forward to this weekend in July to connect with all different types of people interested in started new companies from all of the different angles - from legal, to PR, to design, to development and everything else it takes to start and launch a company. If you are interested, please sign up. If you have already signed up, please introduce yourself.

Observations on BSG

2008-07-06T20:15:00.003-04:00

Some thoughts going through my head on Battlestar Galactica (BSG), with a warning that if you have not watched all of the episodes to-date the observations below may contain spoilers:

1. Single point-of-failure: Are you kidding me? The Cylons have only one Resurrection Hub? The advancement of man (machine)-kind makes this simple mistake? Have they not designed a network or an application with near 100% uptime requirements before? Were the Cylons designed by the folks at twitter? (Sorry, it was too easy.) The end of next season will just be a picture of the fail whale.

2. I have been reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemna. The first part of the book is mostly about corn and how much we have grown to rely on it in the U.S. He talks about the different types of genetically modified (GM) corn and that just a minute amount of the corn grown in the U.S. now is for human food consumption. Very interesting book, but the connection to BSG is that methaphorically the genetically modified corn is like the Cylons. Humans created it, and we think we control it. We mostly can't tell by looking which corn is GM and which is not GM. Many friends have said they are buying all produce from Whole Foods or other organic grocery stores to keep away from pesticides and the dangers of GM crops. In the end, aren't we all genetically modified and isn't all corn genetically modified? Whether by humans or evolution, what we eat today is not what the original inhabitants of North America used to eat. The plants have modified themselves, the strongest or the ones with the best characteristics are the ones that were naturally selected to survive and multiply. It wouldn't surprise me that at the end of BSG we find the humans are in fact Cylons too. Remember, "this has all happened before and it will all happen again".

10 Ways To Be Loved At Startup Weekend

2008-07-21T09:26:00.004-04:00

First in a series of posts about Startup Weekend Columbus.

10 Ways To Be Loved At Startup Weekend:

Bring a video projector - want to do pair programming, want to share some thoughts, want to review your slide deck, you need a projector
Bring a power strip - whenever you are working away from the office or home, you can never find enough power outlets, buy a Monster 4 Outlet Mini Power Strip for all of your travels
Bring an ethernet hub and ethernet cables - the WiFi in public facilities is bound to fail, be dog slow, or be completely unavailable, but with this you can setup your own network to share files with team members anyway
Bring a Mac laptop - not to be religious about operating systems, but it just seems to make Internet Connection Sharing dead simple
Bring a broadband wireless access modem - a Verizon Wireless EV-DO USB modem combined with Mac laptops and ethernet hub allowed our group to keep working while others were stuck without an Internet connection
Be the person on the team willing to run to Starbucks to keep your team caffeinated
Know the area, know the closest cafe, know when they close up shop for the night
Be @TheBeerWench, bring the beer, know your beer, only bring the good stuff
Rent an RV for the weekend, pull it up outside Startup Weekend location, let your team members use it for meeting space, but more importantly for down time, naps, and any out of towners that need a place to crash
Have fun, enjoy yourself, be happy - remember this isn't your day job, you are here to have fun, push yourself, make connections; this weekend will be a lot of work, but it shouldn't feel like work!

Thoughts for Developers going to Startup Weekend

2008-07-24T11:07:00.004-04:00

Second in a series of posts on Startup Weekend Columbus. You can read the first post here.

Having just gone through Startup Weekend Columbus last weekend, these were some thoughts I had that might help developers or architects attending future Startup Weekends:

Bring a laptop, pre-loaded with the development tools you are comfortable using.
Create a source code repository on a public site in advance (github, bitbucket.org, google code). For EventStart, one of our developers already had a github account.
Know your tools, use what you know, don't try to learn over the weekend. If you haven't used git before, don't make this the weekend you try to convince people to use it and then try to learn it on the fly. You have more important things to worry about and learn this weekend - i.e. getting a company launched.
Have a public web server host available. For EventStart, one of our developers already had a slicehost account setup. This was immensely helpful.
Don't be religious about your development methodology. Not everyone does pair programming. Not everyone is a Ruby on Rails developer. Not everyone uses emacs or vi or vim or TextMate or Visual Studio 2008. Allow the other developers in the group to work the way they are used to working.
Divide and conquer. Startup Weekend is very intense. Lots of ideas, lots of tasks. Most people that come to these events are extremely bright. Leverage the strengths of the developers by assigning tasks and responsibilities then let them loose. Go, go, go.
Remember, the assignment for the weekend is to get something done. This code does not need to live forever, does not need to work for every edge case, does not need to do everything you can possibly imagine. You are building a prototype more than a real, working production scalable solution. Keep that in mind, take shortcuts.

Pitching Ideas at a Startup Weekend

2008-07-30T08:21:00.007-04:00

Third in a series of posts on Startup Weekend Columbus. You can read the first post about how to be loved by your peers at Startup Weekend here and the second post for developers here.

Some suggestions for how to pitch ideas at a Startup Weekend event:

Don't pitch the company as if you are the "original founder".
Everyone at Startup Weekend is a founder in the company created at Startup Weekend.
No matter how much work you have already put into the project, by pitching your idea at Startup Weekend, you are opening it up to new people and essentially starting over. That is a good thing.
Don't try to run the show. Be willing to listen to feedback. Something better might come out of it.
Lots of smart people go to Startup Weekend events, listen to them, you might learn something and get a chance to build something even better than you could imagine.

At Startup Weekend Columbus one of the groups that came out of the Friday evening voting process had 2 idea/business people that had already done a large amount of work to verify the business case, talked with Angel investors and VCs, talked with other companies in a somewhat related industry about leveraging their platform, already architected part of the solution, and generally had done everything except legally establish a company and build a proof of concept. One of these idea/business guys went as far as to say THEY were the "founders" of the company to be established. That immediately made me, one of the people that was thinking about working on the idea for the weekend take a step back and reconsider if this was the right project for me for this weekend. What would I be getting out of the weekend if I put in a bunch of hard work to build these guys a nice prototype? It was clear they intended to continue with the idea well past Startup Weekend. It appeared to me they were just looking to leverage developers attending Startup Weekend to build the proof of concept (POC).

I think after the Friday evening voting the group was formed at about 16 people. By Saturday morning I think the group was down to about 6 people. I think this was all because of the way the "original founders" presented the idea to the group. By opening it up to new ideas or features, by starting with some brainstorming and potentially improving the "proven" idea, they may have been able to get some buy-in from the group and create something great.

This is not to say they won't build something great or that they won't be successful. They seemed to have lots of support from TechColumbus before Startup Weekend, so they have the connections to be successful. This is more just an explanation on why I decided not to work with that group and why a couple other people I met decided to drop out of the group and form a splinter group. Our splinter group ended up working on EventStart. The original group can remain unnamed to protect the innocent. This was all just my opinion and I am not interested in burning bridges. Lots of bright people, it is a small world, bound to run into these people again some day, etc. Loved the idea, didn't enjoy the execution.