Thursday, May 8, 2014
Friday, March 30, 2012
Immigration vs Illegal Immigration
As a person which stands in line, been standing in line for 5 years now waiting for information when my family will be able to stay here in the US. I feel heartfelt for my two oldest kids. Hearing them ask:
"Why am I not an american?" weekly.
And the only comfort I can give them is that we probably will have a green card in another 3-4 years. Not counting the 5 years post the green card is approved. It saddens me to see them, living, playing and speaking like everyone of their friends but not being anything like their friends.
A while ago I asked my son, how his day in school was his question was right back at me:
"Should I do the pledge of allegiance? It feels like I should, but also it is like saying 'thank you' for something I do not get". Quite a statement from an eight year old.
That's when I started to search for any light at the end of the tunnel. I started searching on a number of websites, the only information I find about progress and reform is reform for illegal immigration, but for us that are here working doing everything by the books. For us, at least the ones who are here on EB-3, seem to be with our wait is endless, sometimes the date moves forward by almost a month, sometimes by only a couple of days. Although it is a very sensitive position being here in the US on a visa. That I am in, being tied to a specific employer, where loosing my job would mean that I'd need all collected resources to do a complete relocation within a couple of weeks loosing house, cars, friends, everything. Or I guess not everything just everything that have a monetary value.
But for my two oldest not being born here, but grown up here they would loose a great part of themselves. They are, in their hearts even more americans then their two younger american siblings.
"Why am I not an american?" weekly.
And the only comfort I can give them is that we probably will have a green card in another 3-4 years. Not counting the 5 years post the green card is approved. It saddens me to see them, living, playing and speaking like everyone of their friends but not being anything like their friends.
A while ago I asked my son, how his day in school was his question was right back at me:
"Should I do the pledge of allegiance? It feels like I should, but also it is like saying 'thank you' for something I do not get". Quite a statement from an eight year old.
That's when I started to search for any light at the end of the tunnel. I started searching on a number of websites, the only information I find about progress and reform is reform for illegal immigration, but for us that are here working doing everything by the books. For us, at least the ones who are here on EB-3, seem to be with our wait is endless, sometimes the date moves forward by almost a month, sometimes by only a couple of days. Although it is a very sensitive position being here in the US on a visa. That I am in, being tied to a specific employer, where loosing my job would mean that I'd need all collected resources to do a complete relocation within a couple of weeks loosing house, cars, friends, everything. Or I guess not everything just everything that have a monetary value.
But for my two oldest not being born here, but grown up here they would loose a great part of themselves. They are, in their hearts even more americans then their two younger american siblings.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Stuff that the iPad 3 dictation renders
My son spoke about Abraham Lincoln's father bringing home a new wife:
A father brought a brother and mom but it was a new mom they had now they have three children gain for children
Or:
Yeah radiator apes father brought a new monitor for a she had three new children with her
Or:
One year later aids father broke a new wife she had three new children
But it wasn't quite understandable...
A father brought a brother and mom but it was a new mom they had now they have three children gain for children
Or:
Yeah radiator apes father brought a new monitor for a she had three new children with her
Or:
One year later aids father broke a new wife she had three new children
Thursday, October 28, 2010
JCP
I guess that given what has happened the last months what has happened in the Java world it seems like finally the ember have ignited.
and finally one of the most important contributors and JCP EC members, Doug Lea leaves the JCP.
Im not including the fact that Sun/Oracle haven't managed to squeeze out a new Java release (JDK) from its hairy womb for almost 5 years. And the one that is worked on is been deferred to 2012.
I read the response from Henrik Ståhl, since it is my old colleague, my views might be slightly skewed. But I think I sense that he affirms my belief that Lea's response was one of haste. Now more than ever the JCP needs strong figures with strong ideas. I cannot find a single person right now in the EC. Which will fill Lea's shoes.
In fact, I don't think it is possible to develop software under the Committee form as it is done right now in Java. There is another software language being developed under a committee, C++ and look how great they are doing.
Instead it would have been better if Sun/Oracle chosen the Microsoft path. Microsoft assigned Anders Hjelsberg to be the dictator of C# and to some extent the CLR. And it is clearly visible in terms of the direction of the platform. When Java been bickering and missing the entire mulitcore train. The CLR have built-in parallel support for operating on datasets into the CLR. Java has spawned products like Scala, Clojure... But they are two many steps removed from the hardware to make the right decisions, like cache locality.
It would be better for Java if Oracle appointed an emperor of Java to rule the ecosystem and make the right decision.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Great for Java and Apple
Apple announcing that they are not interested in maintaining Java anymore couldn't be better news for Java. As everyone knows that worked with Java on OSX knows it is a horror story. The release is probably the buggiest versions of Java I've been working with.
Apple, have never really understood or been interested in understanding Servers or server side programming.
For example, I had installed a 1G Ethernet at home, made sure that all switches and hubs actually were 1G. My MacPro had its 2 port 1G Ethernet card which i hocked up booth ports so that I would be able to do VPN and run on the local network at the same time. However network test after network test, showed embarrassingly slow. I managed to reach 30 MB/s where the theoretical limit lays around 120 MB/s. The OSX kernel is so badly written when it comes to networking it should really put a red face on Jobs, when he says that the latest machine is 'Amazingly fast'. Threading is another is even a sadder story.
I think that the point in time is critical for this being good news for Java developers. When 20% of all sold PCs is a Mac. I wonder how high that number is for the high-end PCs, the ones developers often buys. I doubt it is anything but higher, a lot higher!
So why is this critical? If you've ever been to a Java developer conference you'll quickly see that 70-80% of all laptops have an eaten apple on it. If Oracle would not pick up the ball, it would probably leave a huge part of the developer community looking at other languages. With all the things happening (or the things that never seems to happen like Java 7, closures etc) in the Java world it is certainly not the time to force developers to choose between OSX and Java.
I do not think that many would abandon their favorite hardware/OS for Java. Even though the lousy server properties of the Mac. Oracle cannot afford to alienate their biggest developer group, even though they are not using any of the Oracle operating systems.
It would be reasonable to think that Apple will 'give' the AWT code for Cocoa. If that would be the case a Java version on OSX made by Oracle could be released in 6-12 months.
However if Apple for some reason would not give the source to Oracle. I think there is a significantly longer time to release.
Which may be acceptable by developers, since the majority of Java developer are using Eclipse anyways. It is far from the ubiquitous Java model. But if Oracle were to release a headless version of Java for OSX, Eclipse would still maintain SWT for it.
It is certainly interesting times!
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The sixsided machine
Short commute today, working from the Nashua office which has its benefits.
For one, I don't have to sit and wait for 25 minutes where Rte 3 meets 495 and the five lanes converge into 3 lanes.
Working here though is sometimes a bit depressive. The office filled by engineers that been working for the same company their entire lives. Well that is not completely true, they were acquired 20 years ago. When this other huge computer company disintegrated and was chomped up by hungrier sharks.
The atmosphere is very much the one of a sealed off cave, people have been working independently more or less from the rest of the company on the west coast. Their own products stopped selling long time ago so now all the engineers are working on either supporting what they once created or are sent of working for other teams. You can find the most interesting books on shelves on software that were designed in an era where one didn't have to worry about the bottlenecks introduced by the Internet. No one is really interested in doing anything new and management is only trying to maintain their headcount.
For the ones who have seen Office Space, this place is the same, it looks the same, there is the same sets of people who's only contribution is that they have 'People skills'. Or rather they know people from having been employed at the same company for 20 plus years or so.
Anyways, the reason I'm here is to discuss the latest marvel a box with so much computing power no one knows how to utilize it. It brings back memories of when I got my first Amiga, which had a palette of 4096 colors, coming from a computer with 16 colors it seems insane to have that much colors. This computer though is as big as a regular refrigerator and the amount of memory that this machine packs is mind-boggling. The only problem is that we don't quite know how to use it yet.
I read this post about Azuls Zing launch where the conclusion was
"The result is that the 11U Vega appliances could do the JVM work of somewhere between hundreds and thousands of physical servers running a Java stack. And yes, a lot of people thought these performance gains were just not possible."
I certainly belong to the group of people who have a hard time to understand how that statement can be true. Also it seems to miss the elephant in the room, the high availability (HA for short). I dearly would like to see the models how HA is calculated for a monolithic box like this. Scaling is easy, scaling safely is almost impossible.
For one, I don't have to sit and wait for 25 minutes where Rte 3 meets 495 and the five lanes converge into 3 lanes.
Working here though is sometimes a bit depressive. The office filled by engineers that been working for the same company their entire lives. Well that is not completely true, they were acquired 20 years ago. When this other huge computer company disintegrated and was chomped up by hungrier sharks.
The atmosphere is very much the one of a sealed off cave, people have been working independently more or less from the rest of the company on the west coast. Their own products stopped selling long time ago so now all the engineers are working on either supporting what they once created or are sent of working for other teams. You can find the most interesting books on shelves on software that were designed in an era where one didn't have to worry about the bottlenecks introduced by the Internet. No one is really interested in doing anything new and management is only trying to maintain their headcount.
For the ones who have seen Office Space, this place is the same, it looks the same, there is the same sets of people who's only contribution is that they have 'People skills'. Or rather they know people from having been employed at the same company for 20 plus years or so.
Anyways, the reason I'm here is to discuss the latest marvel a box with so much computing power no one knows how to utilize it. It brings back memories of when I got my first Amiga, which had a palette of 4096 colors, coming from a computer with 16 colors it seems insane to have that much colors. This computer though is as big as a regular refrigerator and the amount of memory that this machine packs is mind-boggling. The only problem is that we don't quite know how to use it yet.
I read this post about Azuls Zing launch where the conclusion was
"The result is that the 11U Vega appliances could do the JVM work of somewhere between hundreds and thousands of physical servers running a Java stack. And yes, a lot of people thought these performance gains were just not possible."
I certainly belong to the group of people who have a hard time to understand how that statement can be true. Also it seems to miss the elephant in the room, the high availability (HA for short). I dearly would like to see the models how HA is calculated for a monolithic box like this. Scaling is easy, scaling safely is almost impossible.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Coding Standards
Is there anything that is more religiously charged in a normally atheist world as Coding standards in the Software industry?
So I was in this discussion today about modernizing our style or at least make it more available to all the engineers working on the product. The modernizing, steams from the fact that the coding standard was developed 15 years ago, when Java was still in its cradle. No IDEs existed yet and no one even considered a Java coding standard.
I guess historically most Java developers came from C++, hence it became natural to use the same habits. Therefore our coding standard contains remains of these habits. Like fields are prepended with 'm_'. Fields/local and arguments use some pseudo-hungarian notation to indicate the use and type of variables and constants. Some examples being:
For those who remember the hassle of dealing with strings in C, I would like you to recollect BSTR (Binary strings) and char*. One is zero terminated by a single char '/0' the other includes the length in the first 4 bytes and is zero terminated by two characters '/0/0'.
Since any real world program would contain both types of strings it made perfect sense to use some notation of indicate what type of string was dealt with:
Another interesting argument is that we want to be able to see what type a field is directly from its name. Since we are using the normal Java Bean pattern, it doesn't really work though:
public int getFoo()
{
return m_iFoo;
}
int iFoo = m_iFoo; // fine and dandy
int iFoo = getFoo(); // how can we be sure what getFoo() returns an int
The argument to keep hungarian notation in Java is and will always be about religion and out of sentimental reasons. One factor could be that cosmetically the code looks more advanced more like C code? I cannot explain it in any rational terms though.
Anyways, the commute went fine today, the first couple of miles took 40 min though because of some accident at 128/rte 3. which meant that I missed my sons baseball game tonight.
So I was in this discussion today about modernizing our style or at least make it more available to all the engineers working on the product. The modernizing, steams from the fact that the coding standard was developed 15 years ago, when Java was still in its cradle. No IDEs existed yet and no one even considered a Java coding standard.
I guess historically most Java developers came from C++, hence it became natural to use the same habits. Therefore our coding standard contains remains of these habits. Like fields are prepended with 'm_'. Fields/local and arguments use some pseudo-hungarian notation to indicate the use and type of variables and constants. Some examples being:
- c for counters like 'int Foo'
- i for integer like 'int iFoo'
- a for arrays like 'int[] aFoo'
For those who remember the hassle of dealing with strings in C, I would like you to recollect BSTR (Binary strings) and char*. One is zero terminated by a single char '/0' the other includes the length in the first 4 bytes and is zero terminated by two characters '/0/0'.
Since any real world program would contain both types of strings it made perfect sense to use some notation of indicate what type of string was dealt with:
- bstrMyString for BSTR*
- pszMyString for char*
Another interesting argument is that we want to be able to see what type a field is directly from its name. Since we are using the normal Java Bean pattern, it doesn't really work though:
public int getFoo()
{
return m_iFoo;
}
int iFoo = m_iFoo; // fine and dandy
int iFoo = getFoo(); // how can we be sure what getFoo() returns an int
The argument to keep hungarian notation in Java is and will always be about religion and out of sentimental reasons. One factor could be that cosmetically the code looks more advanced more like C code? I cannot explain it in any rational terms though.
Anyways, the commute went fine today, the first couple of miles took 40 min though because of some accident at 128/rte 3. which meant that I missed my sons baseball game tonight.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)