Deathy's blog

Pentru ro ca sa nu o stresez din ora in ora si apoi sa adorm chiar inainte de miezul noptii.

La Multi Ani!

PS: Pe cand la un vin/bere?

Și surprinzător și pentru mine, e de bine.

Mi-am amintit că aveam și un domeniu .ro, deathy.ro și am zis să văd dacă pot să-l recuperez și folosesc la ceva.

Nu mai știam nici de unde exact l-am cumparat dar m-am dus direct pe site la rotld. Văd acolo administrare online a domeniului ceea ce nu exista când mi-am cumparat domeniul.

Îmi incerc și eu norocul cu recover password, bag domeniul. Primesc pe adresa de mail parola.

Pană acum placut surprins.

Urmează login și văd că pot schimba nameserverele, nimic prea surprinzător. Dar pot și adauga host-uri directe pe domeniu ( aka ns.deathy.ro când deathy.ro nu avea nameservere puse ).

Update-urile de nameservere și host-uri au fost la fel, surprinzător de rapide.

Dacă mai bagă și înregistrare cu taxă pe an și scapa de domeniile vechi blocate deoarece sunt “pe viață” chiar nu voi mai avea motive să-i înjur.

PS: Mi-am dat seama că urăsc să scriu cu diacritice, dar mai încerc…

As I said to a lot of friends, I don’t expect privacy and I value openness.

In the spirit of sharing all my recently read/bought books you can find on My Shelfari Page. And I also added a shiny widget to the sidebar

Just this evening I started by change to read a story from Clive Barker’s Books of Blood (Son of celluloid) and even thought I didn’t want to, I couldn’t take my eyes off the page for at least half an hour.

I love reading and I love good books. Currently, except for technical things, my favorite authors seem to be Clive Barker and Seth Godin. Odd combination of course, but I like diversity

Got any good book recommendations?

A random idea is just something that pops into your head, maybe while doing something completely different, and for the moment you just think it’s the most awesome thing ever.

What do most of us do with those kind of ideas?

• You either completely forget about them or ignore them for their insanity
• You write them down in a little black book of things you might do if/when you have the time. And of course you don’t ever do them.

I say: post them out there for everyone to see!

I was in the second group for quite a while during high-school. I thought ideas had a big value and wouldn’t tell them to anyone. I even thought my source code was a state secret and wouldn’t show it to anyone.

I’m over that. Ideas don’t have any value, the implementation is where the real fun/work/value is. And even in implementation I’m sad to say the technical part is not the most important.

So share your ideas on twitter, on your blog, anywhere you can. Maybe you’ll find people interested in collaborating with you on it. Maybe someone will have the time to implement it and if they’re successful they’ll buy you a beer later on.

To eat my own dog food I’ll post any random ideas I have on my blog/twitter, starting with the rest of this post.

Random idea: “pidgin plugin to automatically expand any short urls you receive. ( makes me wish I knew c+gtk+pidgin now ).”

Details: I hate the opacity of short URLs. At least for security purposes I’d like to see the real link of something someone sends to me on messenger. There’s already Long URL Please for the browser but usually you get a lot of links on any instant messenger things you use. I didn’t yet find a plugin for pidgin,yahoo messenger or others that does this. (They could even use the Long URL Please API for what I care ).

Random idea: “job posting site that automatically crawls/lists your open-source project contributions ”

Details: I probably saw something similar online but the idea popped into my head while reading about the Hacker Fair. So going on the same idea that developers should show/present their skills a good way would be to show for a person all open-source software contributions they made. This shows their interest, they coding style, what kind of software/issues/bugs they like and so much more. You could get all their commits from GitHub or other repositories of oss software projects, get their mailing list posts from mail-archive.com or something similar. You could even make it as an API for other job posting sites to use. It’s good because it shows actual contributions by the people you’re thinking of hiring, not what they wrote on their CV.

Will be posting other random ideas in the new “random_ideas” tag, but can’t say when because they’re random

If you’re a spammer, please go ahead, spam me for I am listening at bit-bucket@deathy.info

Even added as mailto for your parsing convenience.

Yes, it’s an experiment and the only failure would be to not get any spam. Like that could happen for any publicly displayed email address

The interesting bit is how fast and much it will come

Crikey! I just climbed out from under my rock and realised I have not updated this since they invented sliced bread… You would not believe that I actually have a life. Please don’t abandon me!.

I am absolutely consumed with finding Jesus (after someone told me he was lost), personal projects, just generally being a coach to the local soccer team, my day lasts forever from 4:55am to till I fall into bed at midnight. I am so over it. I need a holiday.

I wish one day I will have time to blog again. One day I will find my magic genie! I keep looking, anyway!.

Filler post brought to you by The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator

Note: nothing I say here is new, it’s just an annoying thing that started to bug me again recently.

Although spam checking and spell checking should be different enough they are much closer for most of spam emails, comments and other types of communication.

The story goes like this:

Spammers want to sell you crap like viagra, replica watches, whatever (just some from my recent spams).

But of course the “Good Guys” know this so words like “viagra”, “replica” are banned or give a very high spam score.

Back come the spammers and change the offending words to other which look similar but aren’t the same so spam rules won’t catch them. As examples: “v1agra”, “repl1ca”, etc. (and here I thought leet speak was dead )

And the game between spammers and spam filters continues on and on. Different words, different misspellings. Nobody actually wins, the game just continues.

Seems to me like the generic solution to filter out some spam has become to run it through a spell checker. Any misspelled word or word which doesn’t exist in any dictionary is usually a good indicator of either spam or just very stupid people writing you mail/comments. Should there be a different treatment? My initial opinion is that it shouldn’t matter.

If someone writes you a mail which you have to waste a lot of time to understand because of misspellings that is no better than generic automated spam.

Also I recommend Paul Graham’s A Plan for Spam as a must-read about handling spam.

Wondering if writing them down will mean better chances of actually getting some of them done.

For now the current list which is a work in progress:

• Move to Git as my SCM for anything personal and also try it for work
• Do lots more Python
• Contribute somehow to an open-source project
• More conferences, more trips
• Get agile
• More small projects
• More blogging

Some time ago I read something that seemed at the moment very funny on the lucene mailing list: There were a few spots open for a conference so the community had to decide on the speakers. To quote the essence of it: “We need to decide on speakers, which means we need to decide on how to decide on speakers.” (Grant Ingersoll)

While seemingly funny, the question is really much deeper than it seems initially. Making decisions for yourself is pretty easy and for the most part is done subconsciously influenced by various factors in your life/work.

But how does a group make decisions? That’s a whole different matter.

Signpost - lots of possibilities

There are two ideal cases, as to the length of the decision making process, within a group that makes decisions:

• They all immediately propose and approve of the same idea. In my opinion this happens very rarely. Each person is different by definition and having a single “hive-mind” in the group would be perfect but rarely happens.
• One authority figure proposes something and all the others follow like sheep and approve of it. Unfortunately this happens too often. It happens often because the authority figure is seen as the “manager”, “senior developer” or some other fancy title when in fact the accurate title is “Dictator” and the rest are sheeple.

So the two quickest ways to make a decision are not the best for the purpose of the project, lunch order, camping trip organization or whatever. One rarely happens and the other means some people are dumb and one is taking advantage of the others.

Marginally better is to set up a committee of trusted members and have them decide. This is better but there may still be people upset that they’re not in the committee.

Voting on the topic (with majority voting rules) is better since everyone gets to have their word. But it’s not perfect since there will always be a minority, there will always be people upset. And there also will be people who let themselves get influenced into giving a certain vote.

The best method seems to be to reach a consensus. If no consensus in reached after the initial discussion you talk. And talk, and give each person in the group the chance to argument his opinion and maybe comment on the opinions of others. The important thing is that after discussions some people will change their opinions, “see the light” or the stupidity in their previous arguments. And thus the votes change and after a time you reach a consensus.

It’s harder and it takes a lot more time than other decision-making methods, but it does seem the only one which listens to everybody’s voice and doesn’t leave anyone dissapointed. In the end I think it also makes the team understand itself better so that in the future you can reach decisions faster and eventually just have a hive-mind of the group.

The important aspects are:

• Everybody must say something, there cannot be any blank votes .
• Nobody’s opinion is more important
• Like all good things, it’s done in iterations that at each step approach the best result.

Only problem is it works best in small teams. As teams grow communication can be a lot of overhead and messes up everything.

As a personal note, I think decision making should be mandatory in schools too. Even in high school there were the occasional problems when deciding where to go out. And they haven’t stopped now.

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/katemonkey/439124069/

Honestly I’m fed up with all the “Going Green”, “Save the Planet” bullshit that’s been piling up since a couple of years already.

Of course I want to save the planet and have a nice and clean place to live on this earth. But it seems to be that everything people say now is too exaggerated.

The planet has been dying for a long time, probably since people started building cities. Trying to exaggerate everything now to get people to realize it and change something faster seems like poorly-done mass advertising.

Coming back to the green that interests me since I work in IT/programming:

• Moving to Virtual Servers to optimize hardware usage on physical servers to drastically reduce the number of servers and completely eliminate old (power-hungry) servers.
• Optimizing application code, up to the point where it doesn’t really pay to optimize more to make applications work faster and use fewer resources and thus servers.
• Letting your computers sleep/hibernate and having components that use less energy when not in full use. Also using efficient power supplies.

I fully support these since I consider them the good kind of green technology. Sure, it helps save the planet but that is a side-effect. The real green feature is the green that goes back into your pocket. All of these mean less computers, less servers, less power consumption. And this means cold green cash. Cash that if you’re a philanthropist you can donate to making the planet a better place.

But even if you’re someone who doesn’t care about the environment, who only cares about his own pocket (especially in these economic times) you will be saving the planet as a side-effect of saving your money.

So in conclusion, please, Go Green. But go green not because of guilt, go green because it’s good business. I imagine this is much for motivating for a lot of people than the guilt of cleaning up the mess of past generations.

Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwheeleroz/2295584401/