Aggravations

The insanity of “shareholder value”

December 29, 2011
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I’ve been saying this for years. Many times those with “MBAs” have told me I’m wrong. Yet, deep down, I knew something was remiss. Something was just absolutely, 100% wrong. Why? Because it made no sense to have a company focus on guessing what their balance sheet was going to look like a year from now when every person I know would not be able to hit a personal target within 1% if they tried. Life just has too many variables. And the total focus on guessing is detrimental, as I’ve personally experienced in certain large firms where senior executives run around “managing expectations” as opposed to pleasing the customer. The irony is that there’s this insane hire/fire mentality that goes with it, removing talent and thus impacting long-term viability. It’s simply maddening. One of the things I liked about Steve Jobs was his total disregard for Wall Street. He focused on pleasing his customers and proved that an insane focus on the consumer was all that really mattered. The pity is that so few have comprehended this fact even while they try to “replicate” Jobs’ success. I’m hoping well abandon the “dumbest idea in the world”, as Welch puts

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Stupid found between chair and keyboard

December 21, 2011
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It seems there’s a lot of “stupid” going about nowadays. No idea if it’s the internet that’s just giving people more voice or if stupid is just becoming more common. Like many people I get a lot of my news online. Thus, I get to read it at my computer and, if something is interesting, save it. I read from various sources, conservative, liberal and neutral alike. It’s best to stay as best informed as possible so as to minimize the likelihood of exacerbating any given bias. But it seems some people are just incapable of doing that. They cling to sites that expound their personal biases. Some of the beliefs are mistaken but harmless, but others are harmful. And the problem is that people with a similar attitude then read the associated articles, sometimes purported to be “news”, thus reinforcing their prejudices or non-scientific beliefs. And because of some of these misguided beliefs people have died — such as those unwilling to take common vaccines, for example. Again, I don’t know the cause — poor education, the long-standing glorification of the idiot, the hate for anyone intelligent, … who knows. But what I do see is that these idiots

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Stupidity Truly Knows No Bounds

December 5, 2011
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I’ve been reading about the Chevrolet Volt fire risk the last few days. It seems to me to be the perfect arbiter of intelligence. If you figure the Volt’s risk is high and you’re utterly panicked by the potential of the battery catching fire, you’re an utter moron. The rest of you can continue on with your day. Why do I claim those worrying about the battery are morons? Simple, really. Each test done wherein a fire, sparking or smoke emerged from the battery pack happened many hours, days or even weeks after the crash. The most recent tests performed by the NHTSA and GM have been done on the battery packs by themselves, wherein they have done some very serious damage to them and then waited to see if something amiss happens. It took months of testing before they could replicate a scenario wherein hours, days or weeks later the pack would ignite. To appreciate the type of damage that is being applied to the packs you must read the original NHTSA report wherein they say the car must suffer a serious side impact followed by an impact into a low diameter object, like a rigid pole, followed by

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Lasagna Code: Redux

November 25, 2011
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I write here as sort of a pressure release valve. It seems that my little rant on Lasagna Code got some attention. I read through the comments. It seems most get what I’m on about. But I figure I might as well be a bit clearer, in case any of those posters revisit. Yes, I’m against object oriented programming. I’ve been against it for years. I find it an obtuse and bloated way to code. And beyond Smalltalk, I’ve really not found another decent object-oriented language within which to code. This obsession language designers have of wedging an object system into a language “just because” is rather stupid. After all, all objects are is formalized data structures. It’s really that simple. For those that are about to jump up and down and scream they aren’t, I won’t argue because it’s pointless. I’ve used OO since the early 80s, initially in Smalltalk. Later, much to my horror, C++, and then for a brief period with Java — but I refuse to ever touch Java again. Too horrible and, happily, I’m sufficiently old enough to not have to do what I don’t want to do. Python, as I said, is a very

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Lasagna Code

November 1, 2011
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Anyone who claims to be even remotely versed in computer science knows what “spaghetti code” is. That type of code still sadly exists. But today we also have, for lack of a better term — and sticking to the pasta metaphor — “lasagna code”. Lasagna Code is layer upon layer of abstractions, objects and other meaningless misdirections that result in bloated, hard to maintain code all in the name of “clarity”. It drives me nuts to see how badly some code today is. And then you come across how small Turbo Pascal v3 was, and after comprehending it was a full-blown Pascal compiler, one wonders why applications and compilers today are all so massive. Turbo Pascal v3 was less than 40k. That’s right, 40 thousand bytes. Try to get anything useful today in that small a footprint. Most people can’t even compile “Hello World” in less than a few megabytes courtesy of our object-oriented obsessed programming styles which seem to demand “lines of code” over clarity and “abstractions and objects” over simplicity and elegance. Back when I was starting out in computer science I thought by today we’d be writing a few lines of code to accomplish much. Instead, we

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Praying Instead of Doing

August 7, 2011
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I’ve no problem with prayer. I have no problem with those of faith — so long as they leave those who don’t believe as they do alone. What I do have a problem with is when people fall back on prayer as the means to an end instead of getting off their sorry asses and doing something about the predicament they’re in. With the financial/economic fiasco in the US I had hoped to hear concrete solutions to solving their problems, along the lines of what Chretien and Martin did in the mid-90s here in Canada. Namely, raise taxes and cut spending while also shoring up various social programs that are necessary. That pain we went through in the 90s has done us well. Sadly, we should have sucked up the pain a bit more and dropped the entire set of surpluses onto the debt. From 199x to 2009 we were in surplus. Had we dumped those surpluses onto the debt we’d be so much better off. I just wish people would realize that paying off the debt is equivalent to a huge future tax cut. The sooner we get rid of the debt the sooner we get all that money

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Ambient Overload

March 10, 2011
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Nicholas Carr talks about Ambient Overload. A fascinating take on “information overload”. Instead of it being a “failure of filters” it’s instead the success of filters that we’re seeing, allowing information of interest to flood our screens and inboxes. I’d not thought of it that way, but I think he’s right. We can find just about anything. And the Internet provides it to us immediately. When pulling “interesting bits of information” from an infinite supply should it be any surprise that we end up with a near infinite quantity of interesting tidbits? His closing paragraph sums it up nicely, so I include it here: “When the amount of information available to be filtered is effectively unlimited, as is the case on the Net, then every improvement in the quality of filters will make information overload worse.”

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High beams, dim bulbs

November 22, 2010
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What is it with some people who drive around in the city with their high beams on? Even when you try to tell them politely that they have their high beams they look at you like you’re either daft or trying to kill them. Well, maybe at least one dim bulb out there will read this and ensure their high beams aren’t on when they drive around at night. And, if someone flashes their highs at you, that means YOU HAVE YOUR HIGH BEAMS ON!!! The only ones worse than these idiots are the ones who replace their own headlights when the bulb burns out and then aim them up at the sky or, worse, right into the next car. And since so many cars have little levels on their lights I can only assume these geniuses are doing this on an inclined drive way, with the nose facing downhill. Why are these clowns worse? Well, there’s no way they can adjust their lights until they stop and flashing at them does no good. Plus, because they’re “handy” they doubt they’ve done anything wrong. Honestly, the calibre of driver is going down and down. No wonder there are so many

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Lots of Irritatingly Silly Parentheses

November 7, 2010
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That’s what many people I know think of when they hear my favourite languages are all Lisp derivatives such as Scheme or Clojure. They usually follow that up with a statement indicating that there are just too many brackets in Lisp. For a while I’ve wondered about this and after a little bit of study I think most people are wrong. They’re fixated on the position of the brackets not on the number. Most languages use a lot of brackets, be they , ( … ), { … } or < … >. Anyone who codes up XML knows all too well how many of those < … > brackets they’ll be dealing with. So I looked around for some simple samples of accumulator code fragments and found this on Paul Graham’s site. Sure, Graham is a Lisp geek, but a quick look at the following C++ code quickly shows something: struct Acc { Acc(T n) : n(n) {} template <typename U> Acc(const Acc<U>& u) : n(u.n) {} template <typename U> T operator()(U i) { return n += 1; } T n; }; template <typename T> Acc<T> foo(T n) { return Acc<T>(n); } vs. Scheme which is as

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Creationists drive me nuts

November 1, 2010
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As I sit here in excruciating pain courtesy of yet another kidney stone I can’t help but think how genetics and evolution provided me with this “joyful” condition. Which makes me think of idiotic creationists who think God went about the planet a few thousand years ago going “Horse. Pig. Donkey. …” Insanity. Why creationists believe in such an animist god is beyond me. A god who is stupider than I am is irreconcilable with either my faith or intelligence. And that’s one of those things I simply cannot figure out. Why do so many people believe in a god who is dumber than many people are? Is it the comfort that comes from believing someone created everything as it is as opposed to someone who was intelligent enough to create the fundamental algorithms of the universe that would result in the beauty we see everywhere, from the smallest of the small to the immensity of the universe itself. Is it so hard to comprehend that it is much more wonderful to believe that God created a universe based on mathematics, that behaves in comprehensible ways that we, as humans, could comprehend given time? Is it not more wonderful to

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Musings

A blog of my musings. Some folks find it interesting and so I continue. Hopefully it will remain fairly interesting. At worst, it'll keep me writing orthogonally to my day job.

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