If You Can't Beat Them, Sue Them

Yesterday Nokia filed yet another patent complaint against Apple, proving (yet again) that patent infringement suits are the last refuge of the incompetent tech companies.  Thank you, Nokia, for your homage to Isaac Asimov.

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Glub Glub Glub

When a ship sinks the people who remain on board are the ones who are afraid of the water.  Ironically the fate they face is drowning.

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A Sense Of Direction

Headwind is a wind that blows against you regardless of the direction in which you're heading. It is an atmospheric phenomenon which forms when you try to run outdoors.

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The Closer We Get The Further Apart I Become

Up until a few dozen years ago traveling globally involved a lengthy and often dangerous journey. Communication schemes were not too advanced either. Consequently people's lives (family, friends, work) tended to be localized to a confined geographical area.

This is far from being the case today. You hop onto an airplane and after a couple of movies and a few peanuts you find yourself on another continent; you lift the phone and speak to your family, wherever you are; you email jokes to your friends who receive them instantly. People can relocate easily, visit each other relatively often, and stay in touch on a daily basis. My close family is roughly 8,500 miles away. My girlfriend is closer, "only" ~3,000 miles away.

Technology may work towards consolidating humanity, but has the side effect of fragmenting our individual lives.

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Efficiency

We can safely shrink the beta phase of any software release down to a single day. All the problems get discovered during the last day anyway.

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The Upper Class

Is it just me or are member fields of objects just glorified global variables?

It is said that George Bernard Shaw once offered an attractive woman 1,000,000 pounds for sleeping with him. "My goodness, Well, I'd certainly think about it", said that lady. "Would you sleep with me for a pound?" he then asked, to which the lady responded by "Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!". "Madam, we've already established that", said Shaw, "Now we are haggling about the price."

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Copernicus, Where Art Thou?

Being a national parks fan I tuned to PBS this evening to watch the first episode of Ken Burns' The National Parks: America's Best Idea. The preamble featured beautiful images from various national parks accompanied by a narrator explaining that the parks contain the "highest peak in the continent", the "oldest living thing", "the tallest tree", "the highest free waterfall in the continent", etc.

Interestingly enough the marshlands around the bay area have not been designated as a national park. Nor did that meadow in Massachusetts where I was eaten alive by mosquitoes, that thorny field nearby, or that boring hill by which we drove in Montana.

Indeed, even the national parks are not about preserving the environment. They are about preserving some environments --- those which awe mankind.

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It Takes Two To Tango

This morning JJ, one of the developers in my group, walked into my office weary eyed: he had been woken up by his toddler son Jonathan in the wee hours of the morning. It turned out that the binkie had fallen out of the crib. When JJ entered Jonathan's room he saw the toddler pretending to stretch in an attempt to reach the pacifier. "I decided to teach him how to fish," said JJ, "Quite literally; I held the binkie in the palm of my hand way down until he extended his arm and grabbed it. Next time he'll pick it up on his own."

This reminds me of one of Ephraim Kishon's stories, the one about his puppy. Despite all of Kishon's efforts the puppy kept wetting the carpet. Desperate, Kishon turned to the vet for advice. "Easy," said the vet, "dogs can be trained. Each time this happens you need to grab the puppy, shove its nose into the puddle and then kick it out through the window." And sure enough, this did the trick: within just a couple of days the puppy was trained. It would pee on the carpet, shove its own nose into the puddle and then proceed to jump out of the window.

We all teach what we want to teach and learn what we choose to learn.

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Necessary Condition Or Symptom?

Last week I started diving into some code at work and felt rather confused. It is a non-trivial piece of code, in a language I don't know well, written in a coding style that is new to me, etc.

This reminds me of a story from my grad school days. I needed to learn a new area for my thesis, and was in the process of reading several papers. Some of them were hard, and at the time they did not connect to a cohesive picture in my brain. I was confused, and must have looked accordingly.

"You look confused", declared my advisor while storming into the department one of those days.

"I am indeed", I said. "These papers don't make sense to me."

"Excellent! Excellent!", he said excitedly, without slowing even a tiny bit, "When you are confused, that's when you learn the most", and disappeared out of sight.

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At Least They Are Consistent

Guess what email landed in my inbox just a few hours ago. Yes, that's right, yet another message from Live Nation, the fine folks who brought us Dave Gahan the ventriloquist just a week ago.

Thanks for attending Depeche Mode at Shoreline Amphitheatre!
At Live Nation, we want to create great concert experiences. That’s where you come in - we want your feedback on Depeche Mode at Shoreline Amphitheatre. If you thought Depeche Mode was great, tell us. If you thought it was just okay, let us know.

I can't take the suspense: what will come next?

I'm finally beginning to get the sense that Live Nation is indeed in the entertainment business.

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P.S. Any creative suggestions for feedback in response to their survey?

Do PR People Care About Customers At All?

The following is an excerpt from an email that landed in my inbox some 3 hours ago (the emphases are mine):

Depeche Mode has been forced to cancel their scheduled appearance on Wednesday, August 12th at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California due to doctor's orders that lead singer Dave Gahan be on complete vocal rest for 48 hours.
...
"San Francisco is one of the most important cities to the band and we are devastated that we have been forced to cancel this date," said Dave Gahan.

Perhaps I'm overly picky when I'm bummed, but I find this to be an insensitive choice of words. Is there anybody out there?

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Brilliant Marketing

Heinz takes special pride in the thickness of its ketchup. So much, in fact, that their web site sports a trivia page which includes the following nugget:

At what speed does ketchup exit the iconic glass bottle?
Ketchup exits the iconic glass bottle at .028 miles per hour. If the viscosity of the ketchup is greater than this speed, the ketchup is rejected for sale.

What they forgot to mention is that achieving the .028 mph speed requires an equally iconic attack by a coordinated team, with one person holding the bottle upside-down and hammering its base while another is prying the ketchup out using a knife.

How they managed to take the most annoying feature about their product and turn it into a selling point is beyond me.

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P.S. Food cools down much faster, at an average speed of 0.57 mph.

Digitized Concepts

Earlier this week, on July 20, 2009, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. To commemorate this event the Google code blog published transcriptions of the original Command Module and Lunar Module source codes.

Thus 40 years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon I found myself browsing the Apollo 11 source code and downloading the open source emulator of its computer. I was in awe; it was a truly humbling experience. Those lines of carefully crafted assembly instructions felt like precious artifacts, and I was grateful to the people who made my experience possible.

And then it hit me: the web sites hosting the Virtual AGC project and the Apollo 11 source code were museums. Wikipedia confirmed this observation:

A museum is a "permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment, for the purposes of education, study, and enjoyment", as defined by the International Council of Museums.

Indeed, it was all there: conservation, communication, heritage... And the sites are open to the public like no museum has been before.

Yup, these were museums alright, of the digital age kind. But museums of what? Of Apollo 11? Of moon exploration? Perhaps. More than anything, however, these sites felt like museums of the human spirit.

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Democracy

On June 25, 2009 Michael Jackson passed away.

Following his death people rushed to the internet by the millions to follow up on the news. It was such a sudden frenzy, in fact, that Google News' protection scheme kicked in and blocked related queries for fear of attack on its servers.

Last night Coldplay, one of the hottest bands of this generation, performed in front of a sold-out crowd in Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA. Half way through the concert the band abandoned the stage and shifted to a tiny stage located in the middle of the surprised crowd. After explaining that they were "going to go into a song that is far better than any song we could ever write" the band played Michael Jackson's Billie Jean, unplugged. I had never seen such an earthy homage before.


Michael Jackson may have been the King of Pop, the queen of pop, both, or neither. His music may or may not last. For now none of this matters; the people have spoken.

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Bottom Up

Earlier this evening Bob, one of the developers in my group, was taking a picture of a fish in the aquarium in his office.

"Look how big he has grown!" Bob was all excited.

"How small was he when you got him?", I asked.

"The same size as the other fish", replied Bob pointing to the other fish in the aquarium, all of which were much smaller.

"How did he grow so large?", I inquired, "Did he eat the other fish?"

"No, he's an algae eater, he eats all the food that sinks to the bottom."

"Oh, so he's the garbage collector of the aquarium."

"Yes he is. Apparently garbage collectors win."

"Eventually they do, in the long term. And till then they eat garbage."

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Tools Of The Trade

[Today a guest snoozer, written by my girlfriend]

Once upon a time, all people needed to do their jobs was a brain, a phone, a pen or a pencil, and perhaps an abacus. Then a typewriter was invented, and everyone was so happy because they could get rid of their pens and pencils. Then a calculator was invented and everyone was so happy because they could get rid of their abaci. Then the computer was invented and everyone was so happy because they could get rid of their typewriters and their calculators. Then e-mail was invented. And everyone was so happy because they could get rid of their phones AND their brains.

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Production vs. Consumption

My friend John sent me a link to Paul Graham's How To Do What You Love blog post. The following excerpt from this essay drew my attention:

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing?

In the last few years we have witnessed a flurry of perosnal production, mostly fueled by the digital revolution. People take pictures. People film videos. People develop non-commercial software. People write snoozers... And more.

The affordable production and distribution tools are perhaps the most important contribution of computers and networking to civilization. In the TV age people were relegated to consumption. In and of itself there is nothing wrong with being a consumer; society, however, needs a healthy balance between consumption and production. Video games, while being interactive, may develop quick thinking and problem solving skills but still don't directly facilitate creation; they are just TVs on steroids. And as disappointing as it may be to some parents, board games are not much better.

For it is creation that makes the difference, not activity, interactivity, or hyperactivity. And nowadays creation is no longer confined to the realm of governments and corporations, but is finally within the reach of billions of individuals.

Perhaps there is hope after all.

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Heisenberg Rules

My previous employer incentivized employees through quarterly bonuses which were tied to quarterly goals. The completion of these goals was assessed via measurements: if you accomplished 80% of your quarterly measurements you'd receive 80% of your target bonus, etc.

The company naively neglected to account for the little lawyer that wakes up in many of us when it comes to our income. It so happened that people paid much more attention to the measurements than to the goals. Logical, isn't it? After all, it was the measurements, not the goals, that determined the size of the bonus.

And so, just before the release of a critical product, we had the fortune of being visited by elves. We had a quarterly goal to GA that product, and one of the measurements was to have no more than 25 high-severity bugs. Alas before that night the number of such bugs was stubbornly higher. Luckily the elves realized the seriousness of the situation, came to our rescue, and downgraded 12 of the bugs to medium-severity overnight.

An even better story is that of another major product which formally GAed on time, though it was not available for customer shipments for several more months.

Be careful with the manner in which you measure people. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is noticeable at a scale much larger than that of quantum particles.

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What Do I Wear At Night?

Sunglasses.

Yes, sunglasses, sorry to disappoint you; I don't even want to know what you were thinking.

Why do I wear sunglasses at night? So I can keep track of the visions in my eyes.

Confused? Ok, ok, I'll explain --- at least as well as one can explain wearing sunglasses at night. See, I take a weekly spin bike class during which we pedal to the sounds of the instructor's iPod. Occasionally an oldie sneaks into the playlist and I find myself biking down memory lane. Yesterday, for example, I was spinning in the 80's wearing sunglasses at night.

Interestingly enough, Wikipedia says:

The original lyrics for the song were about a totalitarian society that made everyone wear their sunglasses at night. Hart altered the lyrics to be "more romantic" after his record company pushed for something deemed more marketable.

It turns out that even pop/rock lyrics need to be dumbed-down in order to appeal to the audience. Alternatively it's possible that the music marketing execs are the ones who are dumb. Or perhaps both statements hold...

At any rate, the claim that content needs to be dumbed down because the masses are dumb will eventually turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Zzzzz (from behind the shades)...

How Assholes Succeed

Several years ago we received a new VP of Engineering, who quickly turned out to be a particularly evil asshole (sorry, this is the mildest possible description of that person). Within a few months he managed to establish a regime of terror in the organization: employees were humiliated in public, nepotism prevailed, informants snitched, people were afraid to speak, etc.

[This is not an excerpt from some documentary about a totalitarian country or from a Goosebumps novella. This is a true story which took place in Corporate America circa 2001.]

So one day my next-cube neighbor turned to me and said, "We must help this VP succeed."

"Are you kidding me?", I replied, "The guy is a complete asshole. Why on earth would we make him successful?"

"You don't understand", my colleague explained patiently, "The only way to increase the distance between him and us is to get him promoted."

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Signs Of Dictatorship

The tough economic conditions bring out the best in some CEOs --- those whose portrait is splashed across the front page of every issue of the company's newsletter, a-la Stalin.

Example: in such times these suddenly popular CEOs tend to receive "thousands of supportive messages" from employees. So many messages, in fact, that I tend to receive thousands of cries for help from poor postal workers who simply can't keep up with the load.

Another heart-warming phrase during recessons is "all for one and one for all". What these fake musketeers really mean is "all for me and we'll talk about the rest later".

Indeed, it takes a strong CEO to lead a company through crises: when the going gets tough the tough get going. A huge kick in their rear will help these CEOs go, and the farther the better.

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On Attitude

This morning I headed over to the dish trail in Palo Alto. What can I say, the weather in the bay area is fabulous. Half way along the trail a composition of the yellowish vegetation and the blue sky caught my eye.

Would this be a good picture? Hmm, perhaps... Actually, may be not. What if I shift a bit to the right? I'm not sure. You know what, it might. Perhaps it might not... Would shooting from a low angle improve the shot?

So I knelt down and accidentally glanced over to the right. And there, unanticipated, was my shot: a spider crouching in the vortex of its beautiful funnel-shaped web, waiting patiently for a pray:


This reminds me of my teen-age hiking trips to the desert. In the evenings we used to search for wood to feed a campfire. Alas, good fire wood is rare in the desert; all I could find were a few twigs not worthy of picking up. Yet somehow my friend Mickey always managed to return carrying some decent-sized dry branches, enough to keep us warm after sunset. When I finally asked him to reveal the secret of his serendipity he replied that the trick was to start by picking up the worthless twigs; only then one starts noticing the thick branches.

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Symptoms Of Deep Fatigue

In the last couple of weeks I've been living on Diet Coke.

It's one of those periods in which I seem to be chronically tired. Going to sleep too late and barely crawling out of bed in the morning. Rubbing the eyes before noon and being only semi-conscious after lunch. Dozing off throughout the afternoon and then, finally, heading over to the fridge to pick up a Diet Coke, which keeps me going till the evening.

This has become such a habit that I started to worry about developing a dependency on Coke. So this week a short and futile will-vs.-nature battle preceded the inevitable daily walk to the soda fridge.

Today was no exception. I somehow managed to scrape myself out of bed in the morning, rubbed my eyes throughout the morning, and sat like a zombie in front of the computer after lunch. A few hours later it became evident that I was on the verge of falling asleep in the middle of a meeting; I headed, defeated, towards the fridge and collected my daily dosage of Diet Coke.

About half an hour later, after finishing the can, I noticed that the Coke I had picked was decaffeinated.

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Creamy Peanut Butter, Chunky Peanut Butter

The current economic environment is very tough indeed. Companies are looking for ways to cut costs in order to make their numbers and remain profitable.

One large company I know announced to its employees last week that it was not going to lay off people (in this round); rather, it cut all the employees' salaries down by 5%. Uniformly. Across the board. No differentiation between the lean parts and the fat parts, between the money generating divisions and the money spending divisions. Flat rate.

For a society which advocates capitalism, large American corporations are surprisingly socialistic.

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Continuum Of Consciousness

Human beings like to think of themselves as being superior to (other) animals. How so? Some will say that we are blessed with consciousness whereas "lower" animals don't. I can't help settle this question: I've never been inside the mind of a cow. But it may be helpful to look at the evolutionary endpoints.

At the primitive endpoint of evolution we find single-cell bacteria; the thought that bacteria have consciousness is rather disturbing so let's assume that they don't. At the other endpoint, the sophisticated one, we find humans, who, in general, are endowed with consciousness. This begs the Darwinian question, at what point in the progression of evolution was consciousness introduced, and how exactly did that happen?

Or perhaps one of our assumptions is wrong?

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[Homage to the Intermediate Value Theorem]

Tricky Combinatorics

Some 14 years ago Professor Yum-Tong Siu taught a graduate Complex Analysis course at Harvard. In one of the lectures he wrote a theorem on the board, turned to the class, and asked, "how can we proof this?" The deafening silence and the blank stares on the students' faces seemed to have embarrassed Prof. Siu a bit. "Using the pigeonhole principle", he said shyly after a while, "After all there are only finitely many tricks in Mathematics".

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[The pigeonhole principle states that when more than n pigeons are placed into n pigeonholes, at least one pigeonhole hosts two or more pigeons.]

You Got Mail

Apparently modern life is not hectic enough; otherwise why would we keep inventing new ways to interrupt it? Cell phones. Pagers. One way, two way. IM... We are interrupt junkies. Managed to scrape some quiet time to read a book? No worries, mate, in a few seconds the phone will r-r-ring. Enjoying a moment of serenity? Don't panic, an SMS will take care of that soon.

Even email, which was polling-based initially, was turned into an interrupting medium. And nobody does it better than Microsoft Outlook, which launches a full scale attack on your senses as soon as a message lands in your inbox: an icon of an envelope pops up, the computer chimes, a translucent preview of the message fades in...

These notifications may be cool, but are they helpful? Interrupts improve latency, since they force you to drop what you're doing and pay attention to the arriving message. The associated context switch, however, takes its toll. Indeed, polling is better geared towards high throughput.

I wish that our communication schemes could distinguish between messages that are latency-sensitive and ones that are not. For now (most of) my notifications are turned off.

Want to comment about this snoozer? Send me a letter.

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The Unbearable Gödelness Of Human Rights

In this day and age the value of human rights is a corner stone of our (western) society. This begs the question, what do we do with people who don't respect this value, e.g. criminals? Oh, that's right; we deny their human rights.

Gotta love ideals.

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Freedom Of Choice

Up till a year ago or so I used Herbal Essences shampoo; they had a nice and clear product line and I liked the natural scent and feel of the brand. Then one day I ran low on shampoo and headed to the local drug store. To my surprise Herbal Essences changed their marketing strategy: the shampoos were no longer labeled "for dry hair", "for oily hair", etc. Rather, the decision I faced was between "body envy", "color me happy", "drama clean", and their like.

I stood there for 10 minutes looking at the shampoo containers from all sides and angles trying to find some hidden clues giving guidance about the targeted hair type. I could visualize the smug marketing execs of Herbal Essences rubbing their hands in satisfaction as they came up with the new sophisticated naming scheme. It was then that the empowerment we have as consumers dawned on me. Yes! I will show them. I will vote with my money and shift to a different brand. And indeed just a quick glance away, right down the aisle, stood Pantene Pro V shampoos, which were clearly labeled as "for dry hair", "for oily hair", etc.

Boy, was I proud of myself that day.

Later on I found out that Herbal Essences and Pantene are both owned by Procter & Gamble.

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Where Is The Onramp?

A Burger King cup:

HAVE IT YOUR WAY

Maybe you want a lot of ice. Maybe you want no ice. Maybe you want your top securely fastended, or maybe you want to go topless. Hmmm? Maybe you want to mix COKE and SPRITE. May be you want to let your cup runneth over (we wish you wouldn't). Whatever you do, make sure to have things your way.

Thanks. I'll take the highway.

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A Bag Of Crap

(Apologies for the poor quality of the photo; the built-in camera is not one of the iPhone's virtues)


Who wrote this stuff? And who paid for it?

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Time Is Limited

Indeed, it is one dimensional: there is only backwards and forward. In Back to the Future Michael J. Fox visited the past; in Back to the Future Part II he travelled to the future. Where did he go in the 3rd movie in the series?

Zzzzz... (can you tell I'm still enjoying the hospitality of JFK?)

I'm Grounded

It's 10:40 pm and I'm stuck in JFK. After a 5 hour connection I learned that my flight was delayed by at least 2:30 hours. Fun, fun, fun. And more fun.

We were given $7 vouchers for food. Burger King was the only place left open; they could not believe their luck. Bad luck, that is: "we will close as soon as we are done with the line", said the grim faced BK employee as the line was growing by the dozens every minute.

Ah, the feast! $7 at Burger King? It doesn't get any better than that... Boy, I forgot how bad these things are. At least their bags and cups were (unintentionally) amusing --- will post pictures in a few days. Please don't snitch to the TSA that I took pictures in an airport; no, I'm not planning an attack on BK... Hmm, perhaps this is not such a bad idea after all.

Ok, they just added 45 more minutes to the delay.

This blog entry was made possible by Delta Airlines. Thank you, Delta, for your support.

Zzzzz... (I wish)

Meta-morphosis

There is a cute mathematical paradox that goes as follows:

The vocabulary of the English language, while undoubtedly vast, has finitely many words; hundreds of thousands perhaps, but still only finitely many. The number of English phrases with less than seventeen words is therefore finite as well. But there are infinitely many natural numbers (i.e. numbers of the type 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ...) so not all of them can be described by English phrases of less than seventeen words. Some can be --- e.g. 6 can be described by the phrase "six" or by the short phrase "one plus five" --- but some just can't. The principle of mathematical induction tells us then that among all the natural numbers which cannot be expressed in less than seventeen words there is one which is the smallest. That is, there is the smallest natural number which cannot be described by English phrases of less than seventeen words. But wait! Hold on... Counting the words in italics we see that we just managed to describe that number in sixteen words!

How did that happen? The culprits here are the manners in which we used the English language. Indeed, "manners" in plural because we used English in two ways: in a low-level to talk about numbers and in a higher meta-level to discuss the system of numbers.

Other mathematical paradoxes (e.g. Russell's famous paradox) stem from similar dual usage of languages, in low- and meta-levels.

Mankind has long ceased to participate passively in the process of evolution. We have been breeding dogs, genetically modifying plants, transplanting hearts, and much more. Our reach is no longer confined to within the bounds of the evolution system; we have increasingly been manipulating the evolution system itself.

I don't know about you but I hear the music of paradoxes. And at least in Math this music rings trouble.

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Inflation

When I moved to the US after college all my stuff fit into a large backpack. That was 16 years ago; the recent move from Massachusetts to California required a full blown moving truck.

If my household belongings were a stock, the return on investment would have been phenomenal.

During the last couple of months I've been living in temporary housing with just a few boxes of stuff; the entire cargo of that moving truck is waiting patiently in a storage facility. Interestingly I've been doing pretty well with the few items I have with me: I miss only a handful of the stored goods.

If my household belongings were a stock, it would have been a bubble.

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Ice Cream Wars

Imagine a beach on a hot steamy day. People are scattered uniformly along the beach, and on this hot sunny day they could really use a chilling and soothing treat. Luckily two ice cream vendors show up, loaded with goodies. We can call the vendors Ben and Jerry, or Haagen and Dazs, but let's call them Donkey and Elephant; no harm in that.

Donkey and Elephant establish positions on the beach, and customers start flowing. It quickly turns out that both carry the exact same merchandise and sport identical prices. With quality and price being equal, customers choose the closest ice cream vendor.

Let's examine our vendors' business opportunity. Elephant has positioned himself towards the right end of the beach. Donkey is to the left of Elephant, but still right of center. All the customers to the right of Elephant will spend their hard earned dollars at Elephant's, and those to the left of Donkey will do so at Donkey's. the customers positioned in between the two vendors will be split half and half. Hmm... Perhaps a picture can help. Let's depict Donkey's customers in blue and Elephant's customers in red; no harm in that.

Elephant soon realizes that he holds the short end of the beach. After a deep session of meditation he shifts closer to Donkey:

Sweet! Elephant starts dreaming about retirement as more coins pour into his pocket. But then, after the initial indulgence, he realizes that Donkey is still making more money than him. Unacceptable!!! He dips again into intense meditation and comes up with a daring strategy: he will venture farther left, past Donkey!

Life is good for Elephant! He is clearly the king of the beach. But what's that??? Donkey has just moved to his left, towards the center of the beach!

Donkey has regained the lead. Elphant ignores some customers and rushes left, closer to mid-beach, passing Donkey yet again...

At the end of the day our exhausted ice cream vendors have reached the only stable equilibrium: they stand back to back at the exact mid-point of the beach. The customers are split equally between the two.

The American political system is a two body problem, and is therefore rather simple from a statistical standpoint. While people are excited about one candidate or another, in the long term the democrats will win about half the elections and the republicans will win the other half. Any other solution is unstable.

Zzzzz...

(Thanks to David Meiri for the ice cream analogy)

Nothing But Air

This is what I'm currently holding in my hands. Yes, at these very moments, while composing this blog entry. Nothing but Air. Because earlier today I received a new laptop, a MacBook Air. It came with a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, and most importantly with an SSD instead of a hard drive.

I haven't had much run time on it so far, but initial impressions are very positive. It's faster than the black MacBook, at least for web browsing. It's slim and light like a feather. It's spiffy, and it is absolutely stunning. It's expensive, but more than worth every penny that Google paid...

Mark the day on your calendars, amigos, for today is January 1, 0001 A.MBA.

Zzzzz...

Still Looking For A New Year's Resolution?

Last week my younger son Edan told me about a movie he saw, Kung Fu Panda (warning: possible spoilers ahead). Towards the end of the movie the protagonist, a chubby panda bear named Po, receives the elusive Dragon Scroll which holds the secrets of Kung Fu. He unrolls the scroll and discovers that there is nothing but a reflective foil inside.

You see, Dad, said my young offspring, the moral of the story is that there was no special sauce; it was the lure of a powerful secret that motivated Po to believe in himself and succeed.

Hmm..., I said. That's interesting. You know, Edani, that sounds like a good lesson to life. There really are no magical silver bullets; instead of seeking powerful secrets one should focus on believing in oneself and work hard to achieve one's goals.

No, no, Dad, said my dear son. You don't understand. That was just a movie, it wasn't real!

Believing in yourself and working hard to achieve your goals are precious traits. If you have them, cherish them. If you don't, you may want to consider giving yourself these gifts. You can't buy them in a store, though; rather, you have to create them on your own. Moreover, these are recursive gifts, requiring you to believe that you can create them and to work hard to develop them.

Zzzzz...

Today is Tuesday, May 15, 0001

It really is. Not A.D. (Anno Domini) or B.C. (Before Christ), but rather A.i., that is Anno iPhone. Indeed, the iPhone ushered such a profound change into my life that it split it into two: before the iPhone and after the iPhone. The Jan 1, 0001 A.i. date was set on Aug 29, 08 A.D. when this gorgeous piece of hardware became mine in exchange for (quite) a few green notes. And thus began the iPhone calendar (note that this calendar follows the usual convension of skipping the year 0000).

Sorry, Pope Gregory XIII, what goes around comes around; Steve Jobs did to you what you did to Julius Caesar.

Sic semper tyrannis!

Zzzzz...

The Operating Systems War Is Over

And the winner is... The browser.

Not too long ago it mattered what operating system one was running. The different OSes ran on different hardware, had different capabilities, and hosted different applications. Today's major OSes all run on x86 machines (Linux actually supports anything that contains some silicon --- except, perhaps, for Pamela Anderson); they all provide equivalent functionality; and many applications ship on more than one OS.

Web browsers are particularly ubiquitous. The browser is the great equalizer: the more data and applications migrate to the web the less the operating system matters. On the OS highway Windows sees Linux and OS X in the side mirrors, but the flood is raining from the cloud.

In the high tech world a ruling product does not lose to the competition; rather it is eventually displaced by a new technology that simply renders it irrelevant.

Zzzzz...

A Pinch Of Humility

When was the last time you headed out with nothing but cloths on you?

I can't recall the last time I did; too many years have passed since. Nowadays when I get out I always carry something on me --- at the very least a key, to make sure I would be able to get back in. My iPhone and wallet almost always join along too (in that order); the laptop when I head to work; sunglasses when I need to look particularly cool; several Kleenex tissues never hurt; a pen could come in handy; a water bottle in prudent moments. And the list grows...

How do we shuttle all these items around? We can hold them in our hands, or attempt to balance them on our heads, but these methods are somewhat limited and restrictive. Instead we typically resort to employing portable storage accessories such as pockets, pouches, purses, backpacks, and their like.

In contrast some Australian species (marsupials) don't require external storage accessories: they are naturally born equipt with built-in pouches.

You see, even this silly aspect of day to day life begs the question: is homo sapiens really the pinnacle of evolution?

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Life Is Not A Game

The recent eruption of violence in the Gaza strip is far from being a game. On both sides of the fence people die, get injured, and suffer shortage of water, food, and medications; houses get destroyed, property gets damaged, and much more.

There is a different aspect of this conflict that is very much not "gamish" in nature. Let's consult Wikipedia's definition of "game" in order to bring this aspect into focus (the emphasis is mine):

Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interactivity.

Underlying the concept of a game is a set of rules by which all the players abide. This key characteristic is missing from the Gaza strip conflict; indeed, the two sides live by very different value systems. They either play the same "game" with different sets of rules, or engage in different "games" against each other. Either way you spin it, they don't agree on the rules.

In fact this is just one illustration of a more general problem. Different cultures foster different value systems, a divergence that is at the very core of many of the challenges today's global world is facing. Consider suicide bombing. Or blood feuds. Or female genital mutilation. Or... All these are legitimate in some cultures, but completely puzzling to others.

We may excel at games, but we struggle "playing" situations where the different sides live by different value systems.

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Snoozers: A Community Service

Happy new year! And welcome to this blog.

This has got to be a joke. Blog? What blog? I'm writing a blog? Why? Why now? What will it be about?

Good questions, I'm glad you asked. Let's start with "why" and "why now". Well, I've been toying with the idea of writing a blog for quite some time now, and have long ago crossed the Threshold of Unjustified Laziness, i.e. the point in which one spends more time debating whether to do something than it would take to actually do it. Moreover, I recently made a big change in my life --- moved across the US to the west coast and changed employer --- so what the heck, why not change one more thing while I'm at it. Like my good friend Tomer who always chooses to go to the dentist when all hell breaks loose and the world seems to be falling apart; after all, if everything is so bad, just how much more damage can a visit to the dentist pile on? The incremental pain is simply negligible.

My new employer is this obscure company called Google (please don't send me your resume, I don't work in Recruiting). Google aims high, inspires its employees to tackle audacious problems, and strives to make the world a better place. In this spirit I will attempt to make my own contribution to the community by taking the problem of insomnia head-on. How so? By posting Snoozers: random thoughts that cross my mind. My pledge to you, the reader, is that if somehow you will manage not to doze off while waiting for the next Snoozer to be posted, you are guaranteed to be bored to sleep by the content of that highly anticipated Snoozer.

Oh, one more thing (no, I'm not Steve Jobs): I will be relying on quality rather than quantity. That is, it won't be the length of each Snoozer but rather its content that will cause you to submit to sleepiness. The Snoozers themselves will hopefully be rather short, hence necessarily incomplete. The assertion is that there is no need for perfect, whole, sound theories to make you snooze; my half-baked and often incoherent ideas should do the job just fine.

Ok, enough with this introduction. You should be deep asleep by now anyway.

Zzzzz...