Kedar's Log, Stardate 2010

Christopher Columbus once said, “You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore“….

AOL has been like a shore for me for the last 8.5 years! I am not sure if I am really crossing any ocean or not, but it is certainly a start of a new life. When you come to think of it, I guess you have very few absolute endings in life.. probably just one! Everything else is a new start.. so, I consider this not as the end of my AOL life but a beginning of my life @VeriSign.

And it feels surprising how fast I reached this decision to leave AOL.. especially since I always used to say that I can be here forever! There was still truth in that, except that it was a bit tainted at that time. I really loved the folks @AOL, the environment, the flexibility in everything.. I built a life for myself while working there – considering I had at least 6 important life events during that time.

During my stay, I must have survived at least 8 layoffs.. and I knew there was no way that I could’ve continued to be lucky forever! Now the question was whether to stay and continue to hope that someone else gets laid off instead of me – if it comes to that – or just leave and find a new hope.. The question was whether I can feel motivated again.. And the question was whether I was ready to start all over again (I had even lost my manager in the layoffs)… And finally, the question was also whether I could live with a survivor’s guilt which I had never felt so closely before…

Within two days, I had the answer in my mind – the answer was to get out. There was no way anyone could’ve advised me to stick it out.. I had already done that for 8.5 years! Also, I was almost getting numb and complacent about being in AOL.. yes, I was getting older and older!

In my farewell email, I accepted the possibility that life might not necessarily be better after this decision, that life might actually be more difficult outside of AOL.. but decisions are always like that.. you have to be open minded about the outcome. So I walked out of AOL on March 27th 2009.. with no plan to be back on the following Monday..

I still see so many AOL branded goodies around me – an AOL cup, an AOL frisbee, AOL pens, AOL jackets.. and it feels quite strange to be alienated from these 3 letters now…!

For those of you who do not remember or did not read my earlier post that had the context for this post, here it is : http://blog.somik.net/lifetime-change.

Then the war began to unfold.. (you can skip this if you are not in a technical mood) http://blog.somik.net/things-i-appreciate-now

Cracks had begun to appear here and there within 2 months of starting this new relationship, and it eventually died last week without even reaching its first anniversary! Last week, standing in front of a mirror, I looked straight in my eyes and asked – is this what you really wanted? That you can’t do things you want to do, that everything takes 5 steps when it used to take one or two, that productivity is suffering at the hands of beauty…?

I thought about it real hard, “can I go back to Ms Windows.. and what kind of a welcome will I get?”, “will it be life as usual again or have things changed irreversibly?” I had to try though.. so I knocked on the door of the “Redmond mansion” again..

..there she was.. same attire, same attitude, just the way I had left her. She welcomed me with a “crash”, as if to tell me that she hasn’t changed just because I dumped her once. I expected this, and remained nonchalant.. unperturbed. I just wanted in, and accept my fate with all its fallacies. I had learned my lessons – that all the beauty in the world is in the bias of the infactuated! That nothing is stable or reliable, that beauty does not necessarily mean practicality, that hype seldom matches reality, that awe should sometimes just stay that way and not try to be part of your day-to-day life, and that everything that gets trashed by elites is not always useless.

So I am back.. some people tease me about my choice, some say I didn’t have the guts to handle a glamorous girlfriend… all I can say is at the end of the day, I tried, I dated the hot and happening Mac for a year, but things did not really work out between us. People may laugh at Ms Windows, think it’s stupid and unreliable, but I did go over the fence and played the field… and tell you what, they are all the same!! Don’t get lured by one or the other, stick with the one you like and get going with your life!

Bill Gates stepped down last week from day to day operations at Microsoft. During the last 10 years or so, several people in the world have developed a love-hate relationship with him – for various reasons, maybe the strong monopoly he has enjoyed for so many years, maybe the riches he has earned, maybe they really see some real unbiased problems with whatever comes out of Redmond – who knows? I was never a Microsoft employee nor do I idolize Bill Gates (although there is nothing wrong in that if I would), so what I say here is my *fair* assessment of the whole “I-hate-Microsoft-and-Bill-Gates” syndrome I have observed in the tech community.

I have gone from being a 100% Windows user on the personal front, with Unix (System V + Solaris) and Windows personality at work, to, still being a, Windows and now Mac OS X person with shades of Linux on the personal front and a Linux+Mac OS X personality at work. I have completely switched over to Mac at work mostly because I wanted a change and I had heard Mac users boasting about Mac all the time and Linux isn’t so much of a day-to-day OS IMHO. I did like Mac for its style, quicker startup/shutdown times and its closeness to Unix. And I do understand, that many of the ideas everyone got used to, in Windows, came from Mac.

Having clearly stated my background, now let me say what I think about Bill Gates..

A person like Bill Gates, who works really hard when the other boys were partying, who thinks about his vision of the world ahead of everyone else, takes up challenges, tackles all kinds of problems, believes in his ideas and opinions, creates something and manages to be successful like no other in the world.. In the process, he brings about an explosive growth in the personal computing world – which I might dare say, is largely responsible for people being able to take interest in the work done by others to compete with Microsoft – such as Linux. It is sad that the world of competition, business and law, taints your success in this manner. And suddenly you become that person who everybody loves to hate. Sure, one would argue that it’s a price you pay when you become the world’s richest man.

I know people have used and liked OS’s such as Unix even before Microsoft. But needless to say, those OS’s never got mainstream. It may be hard to admit, but one has to acknowledge that computing is not and cannot afford to be a privileged activity of a handful of techies. If Microsoft dumbed your ‘oh-so-intriguing’ OS, then so be it. One has to appreciate the fact that it really brought computers to everyone’s doorstep in a way that they could use them without needing to be computer geeks.

I am a big fan of Unix and I have worked with Unix since 1990. Having been a computer programmer for at least 18 years and running, and having done my Bachelors and Masters studies in the same field, I can still see the value that Windows brought to the consumer. Yes, Unix is stable like a rock, has better command line interface, bla bla bla.. but give it to a non-geek, and I have seen it makes no sense to him. And it is not as simple as just having a GUI for it – because most Unix flavors have that interface now. It is simply not as intuitive nor it is easy to understand nor is it usable to that extent.

My point is, I have found faults and stupidities in EVERY OS I have worked with – be it Unix, Linux or Mac OS X. I have seen people ignoring or justifying idiosyncrasies of their favorite OS while being nit-picky with Windows.. What with people arguing about how it is stupid to be able to resize a window using any edge like Windows does, and how it makes *total sense* to be able to resize a window ONLY using ONE CORNER of the window like Mac OS!! I have actually found forums where people say this confidently! I find it completely insane, a bias of highest degree!

One of the main reasons I believe you find more faults in Windows, is because it is more widely used and (hence) abused. You know too much familiarity brings disrespect? Compare that with how many people really understand Mac or Unix or Linux. Put those OS’s in front of those many people, and they will get hacked into and finally ridiculed just like Windows.

I don’t dispute the monopolistic business practices of Microsoft – from Internet Explorer to Windows Media Player – all because they controlled the OS market like no other. And if I was the owner of these competing products, it would make me really mad. But think of it this way, I create an OS and start thinking that it’s my platform, my world and I can do whatever I want in it. This is a typical techie attitude. I will throw in an Internet Explorer in there, throw in a firewall, a media player… and I think I am providing everything that my users can get outside right here in MY environment. Now suddenly the world cries foul! Because my environment, over time, just became this open-to-all platform where I am not allowed to promote my own products. Sure, I can not be naive when I am running a multi-billion dollar business and I should understand these dynamics. I can just see how a techie would work in such a scenario.

Also, my objection is only with the whole bias thing. I think Bill Gates should get the respect he deserves and so does Microsoft. I have cursed Windows many times, when it crashes or if it gets slow, or when it does something really stupid. But I know I have had just as many reasons to do the same with other OS’s I have worked with. In the computer land, I don’t think anybody is a clear winner.

I think Bill Gates left a great legacy at Microsoft – one they should be proud of. A great success story does not happen because the man is one of a kind, it happens because the efforts are one of a kind. Leaving aside the legalities and technicalities, I just think the man wasn’t a gambler, he was a techie and even the possibility of any monopoly was created out of his efforts and not out of luck. He is surely not “Good riddance” as some of the internet pundits have proclaimed.. to say the least.

Having said what I said about my breakup with Ms Windows and a new relationship with Ms Mac, let me just say now, in all fairness, that I do appreciate some things about Ms Windows now that were more right than wrong.. that doesn’t mean I am not going steady with my new soulmate, no, on the contrary I have totally committed myself to ‘her’ now. This is same as my iPhone rant.. you gotta love it but sure, it is not perfect – kinda’ thing. So don’t think I am trying to get out of this!.. not yet There are more things here that I like or am interested in than I hate..

1. Windows Explorer rocks (the views especially). The Finder views in Mac are plain useless. No hierarchical view, not sure whose idea was the column view ‘coz it sucks so bad. The thumbnail view is stupid and unusable. Here is the thing, you can’t go into thumbnail view and select a few files to copy!

2. Windows Alt+Tab is much better than Mac (sure they have Spaces and all that fancy stuff but the basic Command+Tab is really not done right). The Mac Command+Tab does not show all ‘instances’ of an application, say you have 10 Firefox windows open, you will see only one icon for Firefox. So if you want to switch, you either have to search in the task bar or use Spaces.

3. Mac OSX releases a JDK version with its own release so you can’t just pick a JRE/JDK from java.com and use it on your Mac. How stupid is that.. apparently Mac mucks around with the JDK before it let’s it live on its OS.

4. No central program registry: While the Windows DLL hell is horrible, it still makes sense to me to have a central Program registry like Windows has, after having spent quite a few wild night-outs in the Linux and lately the Mac land. So I do like the convenience of getting rid of everything by just deleting the app instead of going through an Uninstaller that does not install everything (!) as on Windows. However, not having everything in one place is kinda’ not that great. Sure Mac has the Applications folder. But sometimes, you download something, install, and the app is sitting right there in your Downloads folder. Then you gotta move it to Applications… that’s a bit lame.

5. Resizing Windows:

This is really a bad usability thing. Again, I thought Mac OS X is known for setting standards in Usability and UI design. This is honestly a mistake to have the resize hotspot in the lower right corner. I use an external monitor sometimes and if I resize a window there, and return back to the laptop monitor, this corner is out of screen and there is no way to resize sometimes because you can’t move a window above the menu on top and off screen.

Let me state here categorically, whatever Mac loyalists might say, but using any window edge (like MS Windows) to resize is absolutely awesome. Even if a window is off screen in windows, you can switch to it, press <Alt>, <Dn Arrow> (this opens the main window menu), press ‘M’ which selects the ‘Move’ option in the menu and then just use the arrow keys to bring it back to the viewable screen.

6. Application Support: Some of the simple things in Windows life are fairly difficult.. now look, I have dealt with Unixes before, so I am not completely that “stupid-windows-user”! But if you don’t use Mac for a real hardcore *developery* stuff then you won’t realize these hardships. But then, you couldn’t get too adventurous with Windows on the other hand – you had to follow the stupid way or hit the highway which I finally did

1. VMWare Fusion : Had to use Windows VMWare Workstation for creating a VM with 2 network interfaces. There was no easy way (even the difficult is just hearsay) to create 2 interfaces for a VM in Fusion..
2. Apache – mod_security : The amount of time I have spent so far without success just to get mod_security installed on my Mac is crazy! I found out about MacPort (package management system for Mac OS X) that potentially has a port for mod_security – http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/browser/trunk/dports/www/mod_security – which allegedly has a variant for apache2 but everytime you do a “port install mod_security +apache2″ looks for and installs apache 1.3.7 and then the checksum for mod_security tar fails…. now how frustrating is that??
3. Enabling php5 for apache2, with mysql and pear support was just a port command such as – “port install php5 @5.2.5_3+apache2+macosx+mysql5+pear”

…there will be more as I get acquainted more…

When you talk about lifetime changes, you tend to think about getting married, having a kid, buying a house, getting divorced.. well, you know what I mean I went for a change in my life recently with the same bit of seriousness, as I would for any of the above, and it makes sense that I call it a “Lifetime change” too… Please read on, it is not a technical discussion.

The change was simply that I finally dumped my Windows machine, for a Mac, after about 16 years! For the non-savvy and non-technical, this may sound trivial. But having spent almost every day of my life, for the last 16 years, in front of different types of computers, I think they too, deserve to claim a piece of my life.

You know, I have ‘dated’ a lot of ‘damsels err, I mean computers.. a weird one called ZX Spectrum back in 1988 that ‘claimed to be a computer’ with a Cassette tape (!), the oldies – PC XTs, the ATs, Honeywell Unix terminals and many other Unix terminals whose names I have forgotten, the IBM mainframe terminals, PC 286s, 386s, 486s, Pentiums xxx, Dual cores… bla bla bla.

And I have seen the Operating Systems that control their behaviors, mood swings, tantrums – there was Unix System V, MS DOS 4, 5, 6, AT&T Unix, SCO Unix, IBM Mainframe OSs, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, XP Pro, XP Home, 2000 flavors of Linux’s (!), Windows -2000, -2003, Mac OS-X, Mac Leopard..

So many of them, but I managed to stay loyal to one family throughout this 16 yr journey – the Microsoft family! I have dated many from that family, keeping the family loyalty intact for all these years! I have enjoyed the closeness, their popularity, their riches, and at the same time, have suffered at their hands, defended them out in the world, got embarrassed because of them, but still, at the end of the day, I came back to them – in their palace, to their kingdom, back to my in-laws…. And now this.. call it disloyalty or my mid-life crisis, but I finally realized that it needed to end.. I wanted out!

On that fateful day in the last week of February of 2008, I finally embraced a bright, slim MacBook Pro and flew away on my vacation to India. That’s when my love affair with the Mac started after so many stale years living with the Microsoft family. I had a few flings with the Mac family before but it was always too clumsy, since there was no commitment from my side. And I used to always complain as to why someone did not ‘click right’ or ‘close their windows right’… I guess I never looked at their heart, which is made of pure gold – the Unix heart – one that holds steady..

And all those complaints, I realize now, were just because I was so brainwashed by the Microsoft family members! I didn’t have a voice of my own, nor was I allowed to think outside the Window! I was comfortable, because it was all too familiar to me – someone blowing their fuse whenever they want, not having anybody to depend on, always living in fear of losing everything you have.. I thought that’s how it is in a love affair – you know, being ready to sacrifice, giving, forgiving, undemanding.. And I didn’t realize when those love affairs morphed into hate affairs.. I continued on as if I was married to the family and there were no divorce courts! It was as if, I had to go from one cousin to another…!

And then this day in February, I said to myself – hey! you are not so old yet.. don’t give up. You will find a soulmate if you are committed to making this change. Linux was too complicated and couldn’t have been someone to go steady with. The only other option I had been eying all these days was the stylish Mac, the one I had complained about in the past like a fool. I poured my heart out in front of her and she was magnanimous in accepting me.

From that day, I began living my new life, accepting things that were minor inconveniences, adapting to the new way of life, new moods, new responses, all the while admiring the beauty of my new girlfriend. And I told myself, nobody is perfect.

I still live my life, there is still programming, surfing, storing, retrieving, shutting down, starting up, but it is just done in a different way.

After all, life is a way of living rather than the living itself! Everybody has one..

Read the 2nd part of this post here

Read Guy Kawasaki‘s comment – “Don’t worry, be crappy” (more on that here) – on the “Art of Innovation”. That inspired me to rewrite the whole song Allow me -

ohhh ooh ooh ohh
oooh oohh oohh
ohhh oohh oohh ohh oohh ooh
ohh oohh oohh

Here is a little app I wrote
You might want to copy it code by code
Don’t worry be crappy

In every code we have some trouble
When you try to fix, you make it double
Don’t worry, be crappy……

Some stupid hacker, hacked your site
stole your cookies but that’s alright
Don’t worry, be crappy

The QA says your build is late
they got nothing to investigate
Don’t worry, be crappy

Look at me I am happy
Don’t worry, be crappy

Here, I give you my buglist
when you worry look at it
that will make you happy
Don’t worry, be crappy

Ain’t got no QA, ain’t got no Ops
Ain’t got no Product folks to put a stop
But don’t worry be crappy

’cause when you worry
Your server will bounce
And that will bring everything down
So don’t worry, be crappy (now)…..

This war between Java and Ruby On Rails is really funny. Java is finally getting the same deal (but in a different role) that they enjoyed against C++ in the past. Ruby is in the same shoes Java was back then. I am sure in a few months, Ruby will have developers all over the world writing stuff for it to put any doubts about its performance to rest… just like everybody joined the Java bandwagon back then and till now.

So Java loyalists, take heart in the fact that it has been a good decade for Java. I am sure Java will have its place.. just like C++ still does.

Here is something really funny that I just read somewhere:

“Typically, a high-level Java figure will encounter Rails, speak out against the claims of improvement over Java, learn more about Rails, spend some time developing with Rails, and then retract past opposition, and begin using Rails for new project development. ”

I think I will do the same after some time.. at some point, you will want to ask yourself whether you enjoy writing complex code with hundreds of classes, XML files and complications of building & deploying and feel good about how you managed to survive in all this or you prefer a simple programming model and get the same thing done in a faster way.

I think my thinking is slowly maturing enough to sense that what matters is not how much torture your brain can sustain and create something, but what matters is getting your ideas faster to their targeted users. If your colleague sitting next to you can deliver something that works quicker than you do with just a little bit of performance hit, then he is a winner and you loose the opportunity to present your ideas to the world. I remember my days as a die-hard C/C++ programmer when I would have never hesitated to start typing “#include ” for everything that came in front of me!

But then I learned over the years.. “If the only tool you know is a hammer, then every problem starts looking like a nail” – so I learned Visual Basic, Oracle, C++, Perl, Expect, Tcl, C#, Shell scripting, PHP, Javascript, even something called PI/Open… all the while, keeping that love for C/C++ burning in my mind! It’s still there, only thing is I understand now is that it doesn’t matter.

The world doesn’t need evangelists, the world needs someone who can have an open mind. Because, evangelists eventually get proven wrong or outdated by something else that shows up on the block. It is funny that people feel so passionately about Java and I used to be the same way for C/C++.

In fact, I still remember how I got angry when my Ruby instructor said “Ruby is more object oriented than Java” or that “Java is for stupid programmers so that they won’t make mistakes”. I thought that’s where we came from. Back then, I, along with other C/C++ programmers, had said Java is for stupid programmers who don’t understand pointers or memory allocations. Now look where we are. The whole world became stupid and embraced Java during the last decade. And now when Ruby says Java is for stupid programmers and we are going to trust programmers and let them modify a private member of a class even though it has been declared private, Ruby is pulling a C/C++ on Java again!

But think about it, does it matter to a myspace user or an online Amazon shopper whether what they used to develop this application is more object oriented or not. What matters is that they get these cool applications fast and working. If the people who develop these applications understand what security concerns they need to address, how the application should or should not behave and what are the safeguards they need to keep in mind, it’s just a matter of time before the tools can potentially be modified to work accordingly if they don’t do so already.

The Java-RoR wars are not new. Java has merits in being widely known, used, tested and workable in a variety of applications and Ruby doesn’t have that – not yet. That is not to say that it won’t in the future. The choice has to be made based on the application you are trying to develop.. instead of being religiously fanatic about one or the other!

These days, companies, technologies start overloading alphabets once they are successful.

Take the case of ‘J’ – everything in Java world starts with a ‘J’ – JBoss, JTA, JMX, JUnit, JNDI, JNI, JDBC, J2EE, AspectJ, JSTL, JMS, JAXP, JAXRPC, JMeter, JProbe, JSP, JSR, JAXB, JAX-WS, JAXR, JAAS,JSF,JRockit..

Now consider ‘X’ – the world of XML – XML, XSLT, XSL, XERCES, XALAN, XPath, XQuery, XLink, XPointer, XForms, XSL-FO, XHTML, AjaX, XDoclet, …

Now ‘i’ – the world of Apple – iPod, iMac, iShuffle, iPhone, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iDisk, .. even iDog!!