Julio Santos

Rather than sit outside, I am going to spend an hour or so, inside the coffee place. This is what I see:

It’s dark, that’s good.

Also, my mom wants one of those stress balls to squeeze. Amazingly, I couldn’t find any around here, maybe people aren’t that stressed (hardly). So I made my own..it’s not that hard anyway.

I bought some balloons (difficult to get too) which I filled with sand, of which there is plenty.

The four-layer balloons seem to work just fine. We’ll see what she says this afternoon when I see her.

This is it:

I’m still in Europe waiting for bad news. For the few people who care (subset of the group of people reading this :) things are “stable”, which is worse than it sounds.

Anyway, I finally found a free hotspot and this is what I see:

Emergency trip to Portugal. Not pleasure, not business.

Now I’m in NYC waiting for my connection to Munich, where I’ll connect to Lisbon, where I’ll drive to Algarve, where I’ll collapse.

Here we go again, another article on how to build a Silicon Valley. Well, this one is not so much about how to build one from scratch, but speculation on where the next one will be. While the other three articles, here, here and here were pretty good, this one not so much.

Several flaws:

- It assumes that all it takes to start a new Silicon Valley is to have a couple of high tech companies nearby (and in some cases, not even high tech companies, just companies with recognizable names). The author thinks that in order to achieve SV-ness status, all you need to have is potential for jobs.

- The article is limited to the US. That alone should make you suspicious of the author’s list.

- The author clearly did not read or understand the articles above. I’ll go with “read” because they’re really not hard to understand.

“Not everyone wants to live the California lifestyle” — Brandon Courtney, vice-president of Spherion professional services, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based staffing and recruitment firm.

Uh okay, I’ll bite. What’s the California lifestyle and how does it differ from the Florida lifestyle? I do have some ideas, was just wondering what this person thought it was.

Hung Gar, philosophy, agile…just ways of life, according to Doug Bromley here..

Agile Development = 5 Animal Form Kung Fu = Buddhism
An attempt to break from rigidity but instead merely adds a number of extra tools to its box and attempts to become more agile yet still sticks to its general tennets religiously preaching such ideas as TDD, prototyping, etc.

I won’t claim that I know enough about Buddhism to say this is true, but if I had to pick a religion to compare to Agile, I guess that would be it. But what do I know?

Hung Gar I did practice a few years ago, and my forearms still hurt when I think about it.

I guess Hung Gar is agile like drum stick spinology is agile. Which btw, is another thing I wish I were good at.

I don’t know if it’s because of the World Cup, but flying to Europe is freaking expensive right now. More than $2k from SFO. In March 2003 I flew to Brussels for $300. Sure, the US was about to invade Iraq and no one wanted to fly then, but still.

Prices drop dramatically after July 10th. They should have discounts for people who promise not to watch any games or even to talk about soccer.

On a related note, I came across kayak.com. In theory it seems pretty neat, but I find the exact same stuff there, that I find with expedia, so maybe there’s no point to kayaking.

At something awful

Google doesn’t hire many managers, and so the ones we have don’t get a chance to do much more than manage. (I’ve seen their schedules. They’re frightening. I have perhaps one meeting per month - they have perhaps one spot per month that isn’t a meeting.)

One meeting per month seems about right…I remember those days.

Can you hear this? If you can, you must be a teenager. As we grow older, we are supposed to lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t that old, and as it turns out I am. I had a few below 15 kids listen to this sound, and they all could hear it. I tried a few over 25 old farts, and only one could hear it. I’m jealous, though apparently it’s a very annoying sound, so maybe evolution is working just fine.

This sound is now being used as ring tone by kids who want to use their cell phone in class. What’s cute is that the sound was being used by shopkeepers to keep teenagers at bay, since it annoys the hell out those who can hear it. While grown-ups don’t even know there’s a sound being played.

Good for the kids, they get their revenge.

The New York Times reported this here and there’s an older pre-ring tone story here.

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Edit: Someone lazy less than me has blogged about this here. You can listen to sounds (or try to listen) between 10 KHz and 25 KHz. I can only hear up to 15 KHz. I guess too much loud heavy metal isn’t good for you after all. That and age.

Free wasn’t good enough.

I will not. I cancelled two years ago because the game was boring, and not much has changed since then. If nothing else, those “little” annoyances that you take as part of life, or part of online life, haven’t changed at all. This is exacerbated by more modern games, such as Guild Wars or even to some extent, World of Warcraft.

The servers go down, no never like GW, not once a week like with WoW, but every freaking morning. That’s hardcore sloppiness.

I still like the fact that you can play with people from all levels, and their level gets boosted to yours, while they’re close. I like that, that’s an idea that should be adopted by other games, but that’s not good enough to make a game.

It’s still extremely repetitive, with the same 2-3 dungeon layouts over and over and over. The monsters (mostly npcs) are the same everywhere, except they have different names. That’s lazy.

I had to reinstall the game from the CD (okay I guess) and then patch it. The patch alone is twice as big as the original game. wtf!? It took 12 hours to download on my 5 Mb connection. Compare that to Guild Wars, where you’re up and running within 15 minutes, if you had to reinstall the game.

The game crashed a couple of times, and a third time I got a message saying that the server was going to be brought down in 30 minutes. I guess once a day is not good enough to get those servers tight. At least they’re polite and give you some warning. I was in the middle of a long mission, and obviously had to start over.

The fact that they now have PvP is nice. I went to one of those zones where you’re supposed to be able to PvP and never saw any people to mess with (for me that would be the Villains). I’m sure they exist though…or do they?

It was also cool to check on my old characters. There they were, waiting to be revived for the weekend. That was sweet.

Bottom lline is that I understand it doesn’t cost PlayNC much to give everyone a free ride. Someone might get distracted and actually sign up. When the ride is so bumpy though, what’s the point?

My big fat toon can still fly!!

Westmalle, Rochefort and Maredsous. Got to love those monks.

The reason seems to be a chicken and egg kind of thing.

In many other countries, football is the only sport available. And why is that so? Because it’s cheap to get started and you don’t need anyone else if you don’t want to. See here for something you can do with a ball if you’re poor, alone, bored…and skilled. It’s so easy to get started, it’s such an obvious sport, in many places it has become the only sport.

Though I didn’t grow up poor, I did grow up in poor countries, with not much infrastruture for anything. If anyone would want to play anything but soccer, they would be pretty much out of luck. There were no hoops, no voleyball, no squash or racquetball courts. No nothing. But plenty of empty fields and large beaches. My parents could afford paying for some “strange” sport I would want to play, but where would I?

When everyone plays soccer, if you’re lucky, your country will invest in soccer fields, not squash courts. Gradually the population will be into soccer or into nothing at all.

Easy access explains why soccer is big everywhere, but it doesn’t explain why it isn’t in the US. The reason is competition with other sports. There are no poor kids in favelas here (at least not enough to start a movement). If you’re 5 or 6 years old, you can pick the sport that appeals the most to you, and your parents will pay for it, whatever it takes.

Baseball? Sure, here’s the gear son. (American) Football? No problem, there’s going to be practice 3 times a week, after school, and of course, here’s the gear son. Tennis, Volleyball, Rowing, Lacrosse? Anything you want, just say the word. And because kids can play whatever sport they like, there are fields and courts for whatever sport they like. If they ask for Polo then there’s a problem, but nothing cheaper than that is fair game.

Add to that that Americans like to be different and have their own sports, and there you go. They prefer alternative sports *and* they can afford it. Good combo.

Me? Sports? No thanks. Not my thing, and certainly not to watch. It’s fun to watch the watchers though.

It must mean something, since everyone is writing about how to start a Silicon Valley. Now it’s Guy Kawasaki, here.

Other places are basically screwed.

Aim higher than merely trying to re-create Silicon Valley. You should try to kick our butt instead. That’s true entrepreneurship.

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Now!? Oh boy.

It’s 6/6/6 muhahaha…

And here’s your playlist for today:

1: The number of the beast - Iron Maiden
2: Bad Religion - Godsmack
3: Am I Evil - Metallica
4: Hells Bells - AC/DC
5: Sabbath Bloody Sabbath - Black Sabbath
6: Countdown to Extinction - Megadeth
7: Bomber - Motorhead
8: Cowboys from Hell - Pantera
9: Hell Awaits - Slayer
10: Soul Crusher - White Zombie

Interesting book this one is.

I’m not sure if I should recommend it, though at the same time it has lots of good information. I know this is unfair, because after reading dozens of books on the subject, the tendency is to learn less and less with each book, and maybe that’s why I’m not thrilled.

The book doesn’t introduce any new ideas. Instead, it captures what has been said elsewhere, and packages it in a single book. That makes it quite interesting actually.

After going over the motivation for Iterative Development it has a whole chapter on evidence for why you should choose Iterative over Waterfall/Predictive/Sequential processes (yes, in 2006 it’s still necessary to “sell” Iterative).

This chapter had huge potential for being boring (I didn’t need to see evidence once again) but it turned out quite interesting. I knew that Incremental and Iterative Development (IID) had been around for a while, but I didn’t know you could trace it all the way back to the 1930’s. Then a few mega-projects were built in the 70’s using IID because, and I’m paraphrasing:

“these projects are so complex, waterfall won’t work here…sorry”

What’s funny is that IBM was behind some of this IID movement. Practicing, showing evidence, and just leading the industry towards a waterfall-less world. What happened?

The next chapters are a summary of some of the existing IID processes: Scrum, XP, RUP and Evo. One chapter for each. If you already know these processes, you can just skip it, you won’t learn anything new. If you didn’t know about these processes, these are some decent summaries.

Finally the author closes with some practical advice for project managers on how to implement these strategies.

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I started by saying that I wasn’t sure if this book was absolutely necessary, given that I haven’t learned that much. Then I remembered that today alone I had to argue this:

It is a misunderstanding to let the iteration length expand when it appears the goals can’t be met within the original timeframe. Rather, the usual expert strategy is to remove or simplify goals for the iteration.

I argued this not on one occasion, not on two occasions, but on three different occasions! This alone makes me want to recommend this book to project managers new to Iterative Development or anyone who wants to understand what IID is, how to implement it, why it works, and what not to do.

Yes, I can change my mind based on nothing…oh well.

Now that the Silicon Valley Patterns Group is done reviewing two upcoming books (one on agile, the other on marketing research techniques), we can go back and discuss languages again.

There was some debate around what the next language should be; ML, Haskell, Smalltalk, and others I forgot. We settled for Javascript and its Object Model, which is prototype-based instead or the more typical Class-based.

The recommended command-line interpreters are Rhino and SpiderMonkey. I’m going with Rhino, and here’s how to set it up in your environment:

- Download Rhino
- Unzip it some place convenient
- Navigate to that directory and create a “my-examples” directory (or something like that)
- Add a hello.js file, containing print("Hello world");
- From the rhino directory, run this:
java -cp js.jar org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.Main my-examples/hello.js

- To run the interactive interpreter, just use
java -cp js.jar org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.Main
- Then use quit() to exit

Dasit.

It was a hot day yesterday. Great day to go the local Art & Wine Festival. We went there with some friends, some for the wine part (or beer) and others for the art. Lots of fun.

I took pictures of everything that moved (I figure that if I take lots and lots of pictures, I’ll have 5-10 that are actually pretty decent). Pictures of people, objects (okay, these aren’t as mobile, oh well), trees, yada yada yada.

At some point I notice a nice reflection on a picture exposed there, and decide to shoot it. That’s when I notice the “No Pictures Please” sign. This is outside! I’m walking down the street and I can’t shoot stuff right in front of me!? I don’t think so. “Stupid Rules That Don’t Make Any Sense” is at the top of my list of things to challenge, so I decide to shoot anyway.

Sure enough, there comes the sign-enforcer telling me not to shoot other people’s art. Uh, whatever. I *know* I’m not going to start a bootleg business of pictures of other people’s work, so I still took some shots, while the dude there was all agitated.

Why the sign is stupid:

- If I want to start my own bootleg business, I buy a couple of the exposed photographs, and do the copies at home, with better material and lighting. No need to do it from a weird angle, with all sorts of interesting reflections on the cover glass.

- The rule cannot be enforced (interesting article on camera laws here)

- When there’s only one, out of 500 vendors to have a “no pictures” sign, they come across as arrogant bastards. My guess is unless they’re the soup nazi and their stuff is simply amazing, people don’t like to buy things from arrogant bastards.

- I took pictures of the Mona Lisa, for chrissakes.

- I can step back 5 yards, point my camera in the direction of their booth, and they
1) won’t notice me
2) if they do notice me, won’t know what I’m shooting

- In 2-5 years, people will wear glasses with an embedded digital camera that goes off when I triple-blink. Then what?

The Merc is reporting that HP is scaling back telecommuting work.

the less-experienced employees who aren’t performing well — which there are “a lot of” — can learn how to work more effectively.

A few things here:

1) Wouldn’t it be better to fire these less-experienced employees who aren’t performing well?

2) They claim to have “a lot of” of people not performing well. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing to admit it (honesty, openness) or a bad thing (lots of bozos)

3) Are the execs who say “I want everyone in the office because teamwork is important!” the same execs who say “let’s hire a bunch of people from other (cheaper) countries, because this type of work can be done from anywhere, so why not from a cheaper place” ?

And this is the kind of thing that makes me mad:

a few employees abused the flexible work arrangements and could be heard washing dishes or admitted to driving a tractor during conference calls about project updates.

So what!? Are they reporting good progress though? Are they being productive? Have we checked if they were working late at night or during the weekend?

I’m curious to find out what happens when all the good ones leave, because they think reporting progress should be more important than appearing to be working during those reporting meetings? Then who’s going to teach the bozos?

I think what’s happening though, is that they think they have a lot of bozos, they just don’t know which ones are which. Either that, or bosses don’t feel like real bosses if they’re not surrounded by the worker bees. Sigh.