Reverberations

Quiz: Are You An Online Jackass?

Bret Taylor on his present at Friendfeed and his past at Google [video]:

I had a number of accomplishments that I’m really proud of at Google. But I think for me I really wanted to sort of, you kow, forge my own path, if we can do it on our own. When we make decisions, I get to just look up from my computer and say, “Hey, you think we should do this?” And then people say, yes, we should do it. I haven’t made a single PowerPoint presentation. We don’t even use Microsoft Word documents; we just talk to each other.

It’s a really, really interesting dynamic environment. I think no matter how innovative a culture is at a large company, you can’t really reproduce it. And I think that’s what’s so infectious and wonderful about a startup environment, that I think draws a lot of people to it (…)

With 70 people the odds that two people are working on the same thing are probably pretty low. With 17,000, it’s almost a 100% that two or three people will be working on the same idea, or at least very similar ideas, at different parts of the organization. I think there is a certain amount of cost to just coordinating that activity. I’ve been really impressed with how Google has been able to scale, but inherently it has to change – just because there’s that coordination cost.

I think some bloggers call it “strategy tax.” You know, when you grow, your strategy becomes more and more important, and it taxes sort of everything you do a little bit… because everything you do, it strays from that strategy. You know, there’s a huge cost to that. Whereas I think for smaller companies, the strategy is less well-defined, or certainly the impact of straying from it is much lower.

Blogged with Flock

Internet Explorer is notorious for breaking on trailing commas in JavaScript array declaration. e.g.

var obj = {
     a: 1,
      b: 2,
};

fails on IE, while all other browsers just ignore the innocuous trailing comma after second element.

Weeding out these commas from JavaScript code is absolute PITA. However, here is a regular expression search string I wrote to search such instances in the code.

,\s*\n+\s*[\}\)\]]

Even better,
,\s*\n+(\s*\/\/.*\n)*\s*[\}\)\]]
matches multiple new lines and comments.

I’m not much of a fan of Apple softwares on Windows. I like iTunes though, even if it’s a bit bulky. I’ve tried using Safari on Windows for its super pleasing font rendering, aesthetics and, of late, some testing on WebKit/KHTML. However, it crashes just too often to be of any serious use and, of course, doesn’t have any DOM inspector. It has a barely usable JavaScript console though.
On a side-note, I’ve read that Safari can work on Linux under Wine. I’ll give it a try sometime. Now, if only I could run iTunes under Wine .

Sun could’ve just downloaded MySQL from the site and run without paying .

Anyway, Sun buying MySQL is a big deal and a big surprise. Another slightly related acquisition news today is - Oracle buying BEA, the app server company. Incidentally, Oracle owns both InnoDB and BerkeleyDB - two of the better engine options of MySQL.

Full vs partial RSS feed is an old debate. I understand that a site needs to accumulate page views and ad impressions to pay for bandwidth. Now, Digg’s RSS feed and Slashdot’s RSS feed - both these sites don’t have much original content apart from the story comments. (Reading Slashdot comments is fun, even a few trolls. Digg comments OTOH are invariably retarded). These sites are not obliged to put all “their” content in RSS feeds, and may be that’s just me, but throwing an external link or two won’t hurt the click-through much and they can always put ads in feed.

You learn something new everyday. Apparently, there is a theoretical limit to

the maximum number of individuals with whom a set of people can maintain a social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person

and that number is called Dunbar’s Number. The number is a significant value in sociology and anthropology.

There is a very interesting analysis on the Dunbar number in massively multiplayer games in this article - “The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes“.

It’s a small not-very-useful exercise, but, as the result is unexpected for me - here it is.

I’ve created a web page where two images are served as static files, and two images are served by a Java Servlet. The images served as static files (top two images) are cached by the browser for future runs.

The results are as following:
Jetty:

[Server]

[Cache]

Tomcat:

[Server]

[Cache]

The actual numbers are irrelevant, but the relative ratios consistently demonstrate that the web server “can” serve images much quicker (disregarding network latency) than the browser can retrieve them from cache. As expected, web servers serve static files quicker than they can serve Java Servlets.

Sidenote: damn, browser image resize is ugly.

Microsoft, the object of hatred for a large geek pop (and wannabes), is actually far from over. They are as fierce competitor as one can be. Latest evidence - Microsoft creating a YouTube channel for promotion of Vista and Live brands. Significance of YouTube here is that YouTube belongs to its “enemy” Google. That’s atypical for an “an underdog beats the incumbent” story, so it very well might not be one.

http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/msg/52f04d4ab1121c9b

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 00:58:03 GMT
Subject: Re: Coding style - a non-issue

Newsgroups: fa.linux.kernel

On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:

> I’m very interested too, though I’ll have to agree with Larry
> that Linux really isn’t going anywhere in particular and seems
> to be making progress through sheer luck.

Hey, that’s not a bug, that’s a FEATURE!

You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is?

Guess what - it’s not Linux, it’s not Solaris, and it’s not your car.

It’s you. And me.

And think about how you and me actually came about - not through any complex design.

Right. “sheer luck”.

Well, sheer luck, AND:
- free availability and _crosspollination_ through sharing of “source code”, although biologists call it DNA.
- a rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this “survival of the fittest”)
- massive undirected parallel development (”trial and error”)

I’m deadly serious: we humans have _never_ been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking.

Don’t underestimate the power of survival of the fittest.

And don’t EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That’s giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.

Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their engineering practices or their coding style.

Linus