It is getting close to two years since I've been employed by a large international corporation and I've decided to write a blog entry describing my feelings towards this kind of work. This is not a rant against my employers, mind you, but an attempt to explain to folks what being in a corporation actually means. And the best analogy I could find... is marriage.

Now, while this may seem funny it is also very true, if you ask me. People start their career by looking for a direction, rather than an employer, but they use employment as a tool to find and validate that direction. You may have finished college or university, but it is not clear yet where you would like to work. You still nurture thoughts of starting your own company and selling it for billions. You don't know what exactly you are good for yet. How is that different from when starting your love life? You don't know your "type", you look gratefully to any girl that would look back at you, you still hope you will find that "one true love" that will be pristine, beautiful, smart, good in bed and totally in love with you and your greatest fear is that if you talk to her, all kind of crap is going to spew out because you are not yet sure of yourself, or that in the blessed event you get her to bed, you will suck at it.

With experience comes enlightenment, though. You realize that some companies are not worth working for, that some bosses are just insufferable, that you are actually good at some things and you can pursue a career in that direction (while other directions would be a waste of everybody's time) and that being friends with your employer is nice, but not actually required. You realize you have a "type", a sort of working environment where you would like to work, while making yourself and everybody else happy. You are not working for a large company yet, you are just exploring your options and gaining confidence. "Listen", you say to your boss, "it was a great time working for you, but I need my space. It's not you, it's me. I can do better.". You can do that because you start to know your worth (or at least your minimum worth).

After this period of dating, you start to have longer relationships. You start to like your working place, give your loyalty to it, enjoying when your employers are praised of their product. At this stage, most companies are startups or small branches. Your boss is not far from where you could imagine yourself. Maybe he was a skilled worker too and, after "getting the ropes", he started his own company, thus effectively "graduating" to the next level. It's not so far from the "world as a school" view that many students have. This means if you do something bad, you are likely to get the negative feedback from the clients thrown at you, shouted at, made to feel ashamed for failing "the family". Not different from getting scolded by a parent or big brother or maybe a teacher. When you do something right, your boss might reward you, either by praise or by a bonus. You are also likely to find out what went well. You think of your employer as your peer and you start to get feelings of commitment towards the company, maybe even dream that as you evolve as a worker, you will be more and more appreciated, maybe even become owner, pulling that company up with you.

So, at this stage you think your girlfriend likes you as you like her, that if there is anything wrong she will tell you and that the relationship works great. Great disappointment awaits when you become more and more invested in the relationship and her response is just to smile at you more. At one point you tell her that you need more, time when you face reality and see that she will agree with you and break it off either directly or by remaining indifferent to your efforts. You could, of course, become complacent in this dysfunctional relationship, in which neither will make an effort and the results will be mediocre at best. You will not be happy.

Let's assume that it is over. You took the cold shower, realized that as an employee your role is to do your job and maybe take the blame for the bad things you do. No benevolent employer will come to you, pat you on the back, admit that his company has grown largely because of you and bring you up as a partner. You will become a bit cynical, starting to look less at the interesting work and the smart people and more for objective benefits like salary and working conditions. You still have the passion for what you do, after all, it is the reason you went for this career in the first place: you think you are good at it. You also have a medium large resume that proves it. You may not be your job, but you are your work, still.

This is the moment when the corporation becomes attractive and when they start to want you. The working conditions are great, the money is good, there is a system in place that guarantees quality and that allows you to continuously grow. They will even train you. It's like a new dream, now that the first two (having your own firm or being elevated to partner if you work well) have gone out in smoke. There are people that will pay you more to do the same thing and even support you in becoming better.

Once you go this way, you have a stable place to work, great kitchen, good furniture, console games. You are even allowed to play them if you are doing your job well. Your remuneration is not increasing exponentially anymore, but you have good chances you will get a raise annually, after being reviewed by managers and peers. You hardly hear of any of your clients, unless the entire product line is bad. Occasionally you get whiff of comments from clients that sound wonderful, but just feel fake: lots of "great" and "awesome" for a work you know to be good at best and most likely mediocre. With a corporation the strategy may change at any moment: products abandoned, directions chosen arbitrarily, features appearing out of nowhere. You still remember what it meant to be an important part of a company and so you start suggesting ways of improving the end result, only to be met with condescendent pats on the back. Not only your idea is not very good, it is you who doesn't understand what the company wants. Yes, it would work, but best for you and your colleagues, not for the greater entity. If in a small company your superior was somebody like you, only better or richer or older, now you have people of the same age as you that never did your work and that have completely different sets of values determining what and how you do your job. You really want to please them, but you feel misunderstood and you are incapable of understanding them in return.

You have reached the marriage stage. Your wife looked so good when you first met and she still does, only she walks in loose pyjamas in the house, doesn't smile so much, has completely different habits and a weird value system. Doesn't like what you like, wants you to "compromise" all the time and do things for "the couple". And while you "work on the relationship" the result is boring. You hardly hear her complain, but neither do you say anything, that would be rude, you would hurt her feelings. You read psychology books on how to improve your relationship or how to resolve conflicts without aggression. You do the things that you both like a little instead of doing the things you like a lot. Whenever you feel down, disappointed with your life, you consider all the years you gave to the marriage, the children, the way things might still get better in the future. Maybe it's your fault or you can still fix it somehow.

Just as in a marriage, your company does not pay you for your efforts, but for the fact that any other company would pay the same for a man of your qualities. You don't get to choose the direction of your life, because it is not yours anymore. Your job is to do the things you are told, not less and certainly not more, integrate with the process (maybe with your team, but that's a bonus. Process always beats people in a company), appear pleasant and always consider the consequences of your actions and words. Everybody is polite, even if they fire you or tell you your work sucked. If you somehow get noticed and start a real relationship with your betters you are immediately despised by your peers. You go up in the hierarchy for social reasons. If you are good enough in that, you may join the management track and continually getting raises, bonuses and promotions. Fail to do that and everyone will notice how hard working you are right until the moment they don't need you anymore.

And this is the point when you think "Wow, if I ever get out of this, I will start my own company!" only you spent too much time doing menial work and you lost your edge, you lost contact with any potential clients, you lost contact with your field of work, you got used to the comfort of getting a lot of money on a regular basis. You think "Oh, dear, if I quit this, I will have to go dating again and now I am old and forgot how it is done!". You are not really miserable, you are just not happy. You can live with that.

What do I think? You are not made for a single direction only. You may choose to change it at any time or even walk several at a time. Having chosen a direction, you must never stop. Others keep going forward and will leave you behind. The purpose of money is to allow you to survive. It's for housing, nourishment and maybe a bit of comfort, it is not a "level" you reach, or a unit of your value. Your value is determined by the results of your actions. Shitty actions, shitty value, no matter who's at fault. It's never too late to date, because it is worth finding someone you love, even if you end up marrying her afterwards :-)

Of course, you will all ask me now "Siderite, how come you are not following your own advice? Why do you stay?". There are several reasons. I am a little afraid. There is this economic crisis and no one is actually hiring. There are few startups. If I go somewhere else, I would only be switching one corporation for another. I may also be not "not happy" enough; complacency is in my blood. I certainly have that disgusting habit of watching a movie till the end, even if it is a bad one, just to be able to comment on it in full knowledge. I do feel that I have more things to learn here. Rest assured, though, if I spend too much time considering my options until none remain, you will read it in this blog and know not to follow my example.

There was a web toolbar at the bottom of the blog called Wibyia. Damn if I know where these web startups get their names, but it is as good as any other, I guess. Anyway, the bar stuck at the bottom of any page and offered some tools, addons like chat and who is online, and a welcome message to new users. So here I am, pretty snug about my little blog, when I get an email from Wibyia: upgrade for free to the new version of Wibyia! So I click on it, I log in, Bam! a completely new design (a crappy "social" a brightly colored big and ugly thing), less features, a ridiculous admin interface and no way to revert to the previous functionality. At this point I got mad and removed the bar from the blog. If you somehow found it useful, let me know, I will write my own version.

But this prompted some research on the net on how to host files for the blog and I found that I can use Google Drive (in a rather convoluted way) to store the additional js and css I added on the blog. And so here is the new version of the blog, which should work the same, but hopefully load a little faster due to caching of the 50k js and css files.

Oh! And congratulate me for reaching the beautiful round number of 1024 blog entries today! >:-)

Close friends and family of mine live in the world of alternative medicine. They believe and practice homeopathy, all kinds of massages that use bio energy, they take drugs made from plants and use all sorts of essences and stuff like that. I, on the other hand, live in the world of provable science, double blind studies and technology. And yet, after resisting the influence of my peers for so long, there are three stories which, ironically, are from the world of scientific (OK, let's call it commercial) medicine, which make me doubt the validity of my faith in it.

First of all there is a TED talk which I embed here.

This guy, Ben Goldacre, tells the story of experiments that form the basis of our medical beliefs and of the drugs and methods doctors prescribe to patients. As an example, from 53 published experiments on cancer, 47 were NOT replicable. That means only 6% of them were. Why is that? Because scientific papers are being published with overwhelming bias if they present positive results. Therefore if I make 2 experiments and one of them shows success, it is more likely to be the only published. So for everyone reading scientific papers it would appear I was successful 100% of the time.

The second story is slightly related to the first, since the wonderdrug Tamiflu was also mentioned in the above talk. Here is Peter Gotzsche, leader of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen, wondering why Roche, the firm that created Tamiflu and made billions on the bird and porcine flu scares, did not release any of the relevant data on the workings of the drug for over three years now. One might argue that the tonnes of Tamiflu stockpiled by different governments could be completely useless.

But the third story is truly baffling. NewScientist published this article that says two recent studies have shown that beta-blockers, a type of drug used for over 40 years for treating heart problems, has NO effect. It works by blocking the effects of adrenalin and noradrenalin and, it was believed, it helped minimize the risk of heart attack. Apparently, they don't.

So, when I read these stories in no more than a month, how can I trust anything in the world of medicine? It is a highly lucrative business and it was to be expected to be filled with corruption and misdirection, but never have I thought that its basic functionality could be affected. Entering a drug store, I see that the shelves are filled with useless dietary supplements in colorful boxes and bottles, but I always assume that the drugs I get for specific ailments or by name are the real deal, that what is written on the label and prospect is correct. I also feel that people that die or suffer because they chose the wrong kind of medicine do so in a sort of natural selection; I just didn't believe that one of those people could be me.

I had an idea one of the previous days, an idea that seemed so great and inevitable that I thought about patenting it. You know, when you have a spark of inspiration and you tell no one about it or maybe a few friends and a few years later you see someone making loads of money with it? I thought I could at least "subscribe" to the idea somehow, make it partly my own. And so I asked a patent specialist about it.

He basically said two things. First of all, even if it is a novel idea, if it made of previously existing parts that can obviously be put together, then it doesn't qualify as a patent. If the concept is obvious enough in any way, it doesn't qualify. Say if someone wrote a scientific paper about a part of it and you find the rest in some nutjob blog about alien conspiracies, then you can't patent it. The other thing that he told me is that a true patent application costs about 44000$, in filing and attorney fees. I don't imagine that's a small sum for someone in the US or in another rich country, but it is almost insane for anyone living anywhere else.

But there is a caveat here. What if the nutjob alien conspiracy blog would be this one? What if, by publishing my idea here, no one could ever patent it and the best implementation would be the one that would gather the most support? It's a bit of "no, fuck you!", but still, why the hell not? So here it is:

I imagine, with the new climate of "do not track"ing and privacy concerns that search engines will have a tougher and tougher time gathering information about your personal preferences. Google will not know what you searched for before and therefore will not be able to show you the things it thinks you are most interested in. And that is a problem, since it probably would have been right and you would have been interested in those things. The user, seeing how the search engine does not find what they are looking for, will not be happy.

My solution, and something that is way simpler than storing cookies and analysing behaviour, is to give the responsibility (back) to the user. They would choose a "search profile" and, based on that, the search engine would filter and prioritize the results in a way specific to that profile. You can customize your profile and maybe save it in a list or you can use a standard one, but the results you get are the ones you intended to get.

A few examples, if you will: the "I want to download free stuff" profile would prioritize blogs and free sites and filter out commercial sites that contain words like "purchase", "buy", "trial", "shareware", etc; it would remove Amazon and other online shops from the result list and prioritize ThePirateBay, for example. Some of the smarter and tech savy Googlers are using the "-" filter to remove such words, but they are still getting the most commercially available sites there are. A search profile like this would try to analyse the site, see if it fits the "commercial" category and then filter it out. Now, you might think that sites will adapt and try to trick the engine into thinking they are not commercial in nature. No, they won't, because then the "I want to buy something" profile would not find them. Of course, they will adapt somehow and create two versions of the site, one that would seem commercial and one that would not. But the extra effort would remove from their profit margin. Or try a search profile like "long tail", where the stories that get most coverage and are reproduced in a lot of sites would get filtered out, allowing one to access new information as it comes in.

Bottom line is, I need such a service, but at the moment I am unwilling to invest in making one. First of all it would be a waste of time if it didn't work. Second of all it would get stolen and copied immediately by people with more money than me if it did work. Guess what? It's in my free blog. If anyone does it, they can't patent it, they can only use it because it is a good idea and they should make it really nice and usable before other people make it better.

For a few hours, as I stood in the line at the Bucharest prefecture for getting new licence plates after one of them fell down, I had a single word throbbing in my head like a bad headache: decay.

You see, I went there,in Pipera, near the Oracle offices, only half a year ago and I was amazed of the apparent efficiency of the place. You would go and ask at the Information desk on the proper procedure to solve your particular problem, you would take an order number and you would wait until an electronic display would show your number. You could see that the current number is 1 and that it changes every ten minutes or so, so if you have number 20 you have to return in approximately three hours. The building was new, large, with a lot of parking spaces, lit up inside, with clean toilets; in short everything you would want of a governmental building. I then thought: "Belonging to this European Union thing has its perks". The only problem were these peddlers waiting outside the offices, trying to sell you stuff like covers for documents or supports for licence plates. It reminded one you were in Romania.

This time, the electronic displays were dead. The chairs that were in the hallways for people to sit on where mostly broken, and not because of some sort of vandalism, they were just so badly designed that after sitting on them a few times, their backs would bend. Trying to right them back would strain the metal so in the end they would just fall. Half of the neon lights were defective. The male bathroom was just closed and if you wanted to wash your hands or whatever a written sign would direct you to the first floor. The functionaries, never an example of enthusiasm, managed to look even more despondent and despaired at their job. People would stand in long queues, the old Romanian system, waiting for hours to get to one of the few desks that were occupied in order to sign a few papers. The sound system, that was previously used to announce important messages, was now spewing music from a local radio station. At one time, one of the usual announcements also came out of the speakers, but at a lower volume than the music, so you wouldn't understand anything. A woman in the line got sick and went to sit down. Or she just swindled us in order to keep her spot while not standing in the line.

And thus I have wasted three hours and a half there for a signature and two new licence plates. When I got out of the building a female peddler asked me if I wanted covers for my documents. I said no, and she wished me a nice day. I bought a licence plate support from a guy, happy that I didn't have to go somewhere else for one. He even offered to install it for me, but I did it with my wife, like a couple thing.

In the end, the peddlers were the consistent and efficient ones, being even polite while they serviced you, waiting for people to buy their stuff in order to earn a few euros per day.

Apparently it is the week of eulogies on my blog. Neil Armstrong died on August the 25^th. You may remember him: he was the guy that first stepped on the Moon. I didn't know the guy, other people say he was inspiring, a great person and other things like that. A good emotional blog post you can read at the Bad Astronomy site.

But I think that his death, at 82 years of age, is less relevant than the fact we stopped going to the Moon. From the dirty dozen that walked on a space body other than Earth, only 8 remain alive and they are, without exception, born in the early 1930s, so all around 80 years old. Depending on many factors that usually cancel out, these people have around a decade of life left in them, so expect that in 10 years or less we will have no man on Earth that went anywhere else. The death of the last man to have walked on the Moon would be even sadder than Neil's.

That's not only romantically ugly, emotionally wrong, it is plain stupid. It's like we close our senses, humanity as a whole, to the options we have, to the alternatives laid out right in front of us. We act like those retarded tourists that go to an exotic location only once in their life and they return with "Meh! No one spoke English, I didn't have the guts to try the food and the service was crap". Forget the accounting bottom lines and the terribilistic "We gotta stop putting our eggs in a single basket", just think that in a few years we, as the human race, we'll have forgotten what it is like to step on the Moon, the experience gone from our collective memory. We will just sit there, on the bloody couch, counting our money and looking at the picture of the imprint of Neil Amstrong's foot, a simple postcard to replace memories lost.

I am linking four news items. Do you see the connection?
Standard Chartered accused of over $250bn of illegal transactions to Iran
Kim Dotcom judge rules mansion raid was illegal
Gary McKinnon extradition decision delayed until October
TV Shack founder loses round in extradition battle

So let me break this down for you. A British bank is accused of dealing with Iran, against the American embargo laws, to the sum of 250 billion $. It risks losing its licence to operate in the state of New York.

Kim Dotcom, the mega rich founder of MegaUpload, site used almost exclusively to store and share copyrighted material. There are emails of the employees and his detailing the ways they were sharing links to stuff they knew were copyrighted. The New Zealand government raided their offices, arrested him, prepared him for extradition to the US. He was released on bail and the link above explains how the raid was found to be illegal.

Gary McKinnon, a hacker looking for evidence of the US government suppressing information about UFOs and free energy in their military servers, is fighting against extradition to the US. He did minimal damage, and that according to his accusers (McKinnon denied it), he didn't leak the information, he just snooped. The link above shows he is not being extradited yet as the UK home secretary is busy with the Olympic events. If convicted in the US, he is facing up to 70 years of jail. The problem the US government seems most damaging seems to be the bloated cost of 700000$ to "track and correct" the problems McKinnon allegedly caused. In other words, they want him to pay their security costs.

Richard O'Dwyer has hosted links to copyrighted material (not the materials themselves) on UK servers, where such linking is legal (or may be, the discussion rages on). No matter, he is awaiting extradition to the US, where such practices are apparently illegal. The link above shows he lost the first battle against extradition. If convicted in the US, he is facing up to 10 years of jail.

Now do you see the connection? The smaller you are, the larger the punishment. The deed is irrelevant (especially in Great Britain - not so great now, eh?) as well as any national laws when the US is involved. Frankly, I was expecting something like this from my own government, a ridiculous joke that sways whatever way the other nations say, but not from the UK. Canada almost has the same problem, but there the citizens actually rise up against American influence.

I usually comment on big political events in my home country of Romania, although I am not really that involved. The thing is, since the end of the Communist era, we Romanians have chosen worst and worst leaders as time went by, every time being certain in our righteous beliefs that the new guys will be better. Hell does seem to be paved with good intentions after all.

A quick recap for those of you who are not Romanians (or don't share my skewed views on reality). After Nicolae Ceausescu (the dictator, remember him?) was gracefully deposed by way of angry mob and firing squad, we chose Ion Iliescu as our first president. From the initial tableau of a murderous dictator being replaced by a fighter for freedom the image shifted over the years to a delusional old man being replaced by a shrewd manipulator of the system. We did not like that, although the people were pretty used with a single president for the rest of our lives and elected Ion Iliescu twice. Luckily our law says there are only two consecutive presidential mandates for a single person, so we had to change the guy with another.

Well, if we have to change the president, we might as well keep the party, we thought, still entrenched in our habitual maintaining of the status-quo. In order for that not to happen, all the other parties coalesced into a big ball of shapeless mud and rallied behind a single candidate, a university professor, an intellectual. And he won. Welcome to the glorious era of Emil Constantinescu, who, besides being a dusty professor who had no clue about politics or management of any kind, despite being a propaganda secretary for the Communist party in the past, he was a fool with no balls. During his single mandate nothing was done at all, since he didn't know what to do and the ball of mud, now in power, disintegrated immediately after elections. Constantinescu's party, a historical party, important in the political landscape of Romania, all but vanished into oblivion.

Yay! We get to elect our main guy again. Let's go with what we know: Ion Iliescu, the former Communist, posing as a freedom fighter, equally loved and hated. Personally, I think he was OK. You can't be a politician and not be a bit corrupt or manipulative or even downright evil, but Iliescu had style and, while he wasn't an angel at all, he rarely did obvious blunders of incompetence, stupidity or lack of self control. No wonder they chose him an honorary president of the party, he was their only real politician! Now over 70, Iliescu got another mandate before a new champion of justice entered the arena!

The next iteration, two people fought for the most visible position in Romania: Adrian Nastase, a corpulent minion of Iliescu, with an intellectual allure and a lordish demeanour, versus Traian Basescu, a populist fellow, former ship captain and behaving mostly like a Romanian Popeye, championing for democracy and the people in the most crowd pleasing ways. It was tight, so tight that the real results of the election will forever be uncertain. Basescu won, while Iliescu's party won everything else. Nastase's allure and demeanour made him appear too arrogant in front of the populace and they could not possibly elect someone who looks down on them. Also, all that façade with no intelligence to back it was ridiculous.

We have now reached "modern times", the actors having relevance today, after two of Basescu's mandates. You see, as president Basescu immediately moved to impose his position over parliament and senate. If the people have chosen him as their champion, then it would make no sense to have his party as the opposition party. He wiggled his way until his party was in power, through all kinds of tricks and alliances. During his reign, Basescu frequently overstepped his presidential responsibilities, being, again, both loved and hated for it. Adrian Nastase, former Prime Minister, was almost forgotten, like any loser in Romanian cock fights.

Fast forward to today. Basescu is at his last legal mandate. The economic crisis and the abuses of both himself and his party have left him without political capital. Attacked from every side, the two main opposition parties having united into a single political entity (even if their ideological platforms are completely different), Basescu and his minion Emil Boc held on to power as much as they could. Until anticipatory local elections were forced and finally removed Basescu's party from rule. He is next. Again democracy has prevailed.

Or has it? The opposition parties are led by arrogant, relatively young politicians Victor Ponta and Crin Antonescu, more mouth than political clout or experience. Happy to have won the anticipatory elections they see the period until normal elections as an opportunity to consolidate their power in order to have a stable mandate. Instead, they fall into traps (some of them really obvious) at every step. Like the old Romanian fighters, Basescu has retreated and poisoned the wells behind him. If the local elections showed the lowest possible confidence in Basescu's party, now at every mistake of the new power, that confidence seems to grow. So what happened?

First Adrian Nastase is sentenced to jail for stealing as much as he could in a ridiculous and stupid way. The first major politician to go to jail, former prime minister, the mentor of now party leader Victor Ponta, almost president (remember the close elections), he not only loses badly, he attempts suicide when the police come for him... and he fails! He is the laughing stock of the entire country. Yes, that's how we are, if someone tries to commit suicide and fails we laugh at them for being stupid (sometimes we show them how its done, to demonstrate our superior intellect).

The silly thing is, even with Nastase going to jail, I would still choose him over Basescu as president. That is how high hate can rise in this story.

Second Victor Ponta, a doctor of political science, is accused of plagiarism in his doctorate. We could talk of this for ever and still find something new to say, but the truth is that everybody in Romania plagiarises in doctorate thesis. The teachers themselves point towards places where one should gather material for their papers. If you wrote something original (in that rare case you actually did something for yourself instead of Googling it and translating it) the teachers tell you you need five times as large a paper, so they point you to chapters in the books of the people that taught you in university. Take one from three of their books, write a conclusion and you have your five fold quantity of wasted paper. It's how the system works.

Of course, instead of just laying down and accepting such an obvious fact, Ponta half denied it (aka failed to properly deny it and again lost face), then in a wave of brutal and ridiculous moves, dismantled the plagiarism committee and even the Constitutional Court. Well not exactly like that, but it certainly felt like that. The populace is in shock, of course: didn't we elect someone in order to not have fists shoved in our mouths?, they ask.

Finally, as the conflict between Prime Minister Victor Ponta and President Traian Basescu cannot continue like this, the coalition of victors (yes, yes, a pun, sorry!) moved to impeach Basescu. And they did, only now, by law, a popular vote must be organised to see if they can remove the president from office. And guess what! Even if there are virtually no chances for Basescu to remain in seat, there will be so many votes in his favour that the power parties will lose immense political capital which will hurt them badly in the coming permanent elections.

In this light, a question begs for attention: Isn't it possible that Basescu allowed for the party change just after he carefully prepared his attacks against the opposition? Wasn't this all a big political entrapment? And of course it was. Basescu has proven himself a shrewd manipulator himself, a "playing president" as he himself imagined he would be. Instead of winning prematurely, the eager beavers stepped right into it and failed miserably. Remember what happens in Romanian politics when someone fails at something?

So let's review this long long story. We changed a dictator with a freedom fighter, only to find him a former Communist with great political skill. We replaced him with an intellectual, only to find the guy incompetent. We went back a bit, electing a 70 year old man as president for the third time, then replaced him with a populist alpha male with psychopathic tendencies, which now will be replaced, probably, by a loud mouth fool that fell into every trap that was set for him (and his buddy Ponta) Am I the only one who sees this trend as going down?

I have a pretty bad opinion of Apple products: expensive pretentious gadgets that impose all kinds of restrictions upon the user. So bad, in fact, that I delayed saying anything about the iPad I got from work until I was certain I wasn't completely biased. I mean, so many people using iStuff can't be wrong; it had to be me.

But today the bubble just burst. I lost so much time searching for simple apps that open one type of file or another, only to be reminded again and again that Apple doesn't support that kind of file. Why does Apple need to support anything? I just want the app that opens it. The "there's an app for that" meme doesn't seem to apply to most of what I want!

Basically, what I desire is to have access to the files I copy to the pad with the best software available for those files. I don't want to use iTunes, I don't want to split my files based on type and most, most of all, I want to either use paid or free applications, not something in between, like a diseased mutant.

Oh, maybe you didn't know about the "freemium" ecosystem on the iPad. You go to their AppStore application (a software so bad that it forgets the options you chose if you change the search string) and you select if you want applications for IPad and/or IPhone, free and/or paid, based on user rating and category, etc. You see something free that you like, you install it, only a button away, then you start using it. It may be a game or a utility and at first it is all well. And when you want to get a better weapon, continue to the next level, finish the workflow a utility is supposed to support, you get a "buy the full version". This is called "freemium", a disgusting offspring of shareware applications that makes that look benign.

You have the option to "jailbreak" your iPad. There is an app for that (hee hee), many in fact, that hack your Apple jewel and turn it into something that you have full access to. You get a Linux like command line, a place where you can get a lot of the software you want and need, all a button away. Apple does not like that. At every step of the way they will try to fix their broken machine in order to stay broken. So no, my naive friend, the iPad doesn't work like a computer not because they couldn't do it, but because Apple forced this on you. If I didn't give the pad to my wife, I would have jailbroken it for the principle alone.

But why? would somebody ask. What has Apple to gain from maiming their own device, creating crappy applications for a small tablet that costs as much as a decent laptop? It is all because of the AppStore, of course. If they can make a zillion assholes sell you useless junk that my 386 computer did better in the day, they can share a bit of the profit. So not only they rip you off with their cheap device made by labouring children that barely get something to eat, they keep getting money off of you, a trickle at a time. And, because you don't have complete access to the machine, they can force whatever software they want, unsecured, crap, cheap, but one that you can't hack, can't crack and can't use until, yes, you pay them.

Today I searched for an hour for an iPad application that would read .lit files. Yes, the Microsoft ebook format. There are CHM readers, why can't there be LIT readers? Apparently the "Steve" way is to convert the lit files to .epub (on the computer that I have to have in order to use the pad) and then copy them (with iTunes, not directly) in the ebook reader sandbox. If it happens for me to have a movie or some text files and maybe a picture in the same folder, I cannot access it with the epub reader, I have to move everything in its place.

Luckily I found something that even slightly resembles what I need: FileApp it is called, it allows for me to copy files to my Pad via FTP. I can open them, and that means they get copied where the program that uses them needs them (even if they are 4Gb of DVD image). Not a perfect solution, obviously. And you still need applications that can open the files you own without having to convert them.

I hope Windows Surface will be a huge hit, something that would sweep this crap away. Apple can buy Facebook and go to hell together to rot. When Android will be what Linux is today and Windows will be.. well, Windows, and the iPads will be relegated to the bottom, with all the other mini game consoles, then I will be content.

I have been called a hipster many a times and that is because I don't really like mainstream things and, instead, choose to see beauty and purpose somewhere else. I'm not really a hipster, though, since the trends I am following are not the latest and I have no sense of fashion. But enough about me. Let's talk about software and it's latest incarnation: mobile and HTML5/javascript and how I despise the hype around something that is, let's put it simply, a combination of lazy programming and market forces. No real innovation, no quality, no soul. A Hollywood of software, if you will.

People, I've seen this before and so have you. There was a time when computing was done on devices that had single digit megahertz chips at their core. Applications and games thrived. Programmers would always complain about the lack of resources and there was a time when 64KB of memory was thought enough for most computing purposes. It was that time that spawned the algorithmic generation, the guys that usually ask you what a graph is or how to manually do a bubble sort on paper when they hire you to work on web sites. You needed to make your software slim and efficient to work on those devices. Then the processor power, memory and drive capacity just exploded. Each step of the way, applications and games thrived. The problem was... they were the same as before, only larger. Wolfenstein became Doom became Quake became Counter Strike became Call of Duty and beyond, the resolution, the realism, the environment ever evolving, but the game staying the same: get some guns and kill something. But still, it was OK, we like things bigger, we want more pixels. It doesn't matter that the Windows operating system grows exponentially to use the increasing space and processing power, yet we use it in about the same way as before. It doesn't matter that the single player games just look better and have the same or even less complexity than the games ten years before. It's a status quo we can live with.

But then browsers came along. Suddenly, there is a whole new market: online apps. One server to bind them all. And we again lament the lack of resources, as we use slow javascript and try the ever annoying Java applets and somehow we settle on Flash. It can be used on any operating system, almost any browser, let's make games with it and place them online. The only reason we do not make entire web sites in Flash remaining SEO. And we lament the lack of programming tools for something that was originally created only for online animation for commercial ads, but we can live with it. All the games we played so joyfully on 80386 processor machines we can now play in a browser, in Flash, on machines that are 100 times faster. No problem there.

Then the smartphones and tablets arrived, with their new operating systems, their weird resolutions and their direct dislike of Flash. Suddenly Flash is no good anymore: it is not open enough, not fast enough, not compatible enough. Instead, let's switch to HTML5 and Javascript, the backbone of the Web. Let's use those. Sure, now we need a faster Javascript, so we think on it a little and Kaboom! Javascript is suddenly 8 times faster. We need new HTML concepts and ideas and Kapow! the HTML standard suddenly changes after years of wallowing between panels and committees. Nothing can stand in the way of change now, we even have portable devices that are faster than the computers we used 10 years ago.

And so we get to today, when my Athlon II 2500+ computer is too slow to play flash games without overheating, because they are made with frameworks designed to output HTML and Javascript. And that is why I can't even move the mouse in browser based HTML5 and Javascript games, even if what the page I am on only wants to do is let me play Angry Birds, a game that would have worked fine, with almost the same level of graphics and certainly the same level of intelligence and entertainment, on a 33Mhz computer from 20 years ago.

I could live with all that, though. I could buy another computer, after all it is a wonder this one even works anymore, but it bothers me so much that I have games and films and software that have been working on this machine for so long and they are mostly better than what I can find today. It bothers me to buy a smartphone or a tablet only to see my rights to use it restricted and conditioned from the people that make them. It bothers me to have lived 20 years with computers, only to have more pixels at the end. I can even imagine my LCD coffin, being put into the ground, with people crying over the touching (really, you can touch them!) floating images from it, while some people would discuss the number of pixels the coffin has. He lived a good life, he got pixels.

I've finished watching the seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager and, even if I enjoyed watching it, I also think it was the series with the most potential lost from all of them.

First of all, the show should have been called Star Trek Condescension. Each Star Trek series before it had some obnoxious characters, like Bones in The Original Series, even if he was saved by the clever interactions with his counterpart, Spock, or like Deanna Troi in Next Generation, intrusive and opinionated about just about everything that did not concern her, or like Kira Neris, who always had some cause to fight in the detriment of all her other colleagues on Deep Space 9. It was OK, it part of the concept. Voyager has broken that rule, making just about everybody as annoying as possible.

Top of the list: Captain Janeway, who was not only acting like the headmistress of a high school, placed there by divine powers to have children under her care and control, but who was also a complete hypocrite, changing her views whenever it suited her, but quoting larger than life "directives" whenever she wanted out of something. For all her talk of saving lives, if the show was reality, she would have killed her crew numerous times and would have insured just about every major force in the quadrant was an enemy of the Federation. And the worse part is that her acting was perfect: from the condescending tone of her voice to the raised eyebrows, from the hand on her hip to the dismissive smile, her body language was more obnoxious than anything she could have said.

Second in command Chakotay, a man of native-American origins, would have no problem breaking any rule when his Maki training would surface, only to justify anything by either invoking his spiritual ancestors or spouting truisms while fully inhaling before each sentence. While Janeway's condescension was authoritative, Chakotay's was always thuggish, but just as strong and annoying as his captain's. Also, he was making mistakes almost every time it didn't involve physical activity. Not the best choice for a second in comand.

Neelix deserves a special place in the annals of obnoxiousness, as a rodent like alien who comes on board as the lover of this pixie like beautiful blonde. After suffering more than a season rude and abusive bouts of jealousy from him, we spend the rest watching him intrude in everybody's personal lives from his self appointed position of "moral officer" and later of "ambassador". Only in the last season a Q is fusing his jaws and lips and removes his vocal cords, a humanitarian move who only lasted till a few minutes later. Blessed be the silence, though.

There are more, from the loud mouthed doctor who is "evolving" from very rude to intrusive and almost destroys the ship twice with all the good intentions to the duo B'elanna Torres and Tom Paris, who act so superior towards anybody not like them that they would have undoubtedly made the alpha couple in a high school drama.

A good thing about the series is the design. All the technology is consistent in aspect and apparent functionality from the start to the end of the series. Considering Voyager was produced during amazing technological advancements in television and computers, it was probably an effort not many noticed. The human component, so easily removable via computers and nanotechnology, was preserved during the entire length of the series, maintaining that theatrical feel and enforcing the idea that the sci-fi in the series was just a prop for some larger ideas. Unfortunately, the ideas was not that large, and were mostly human centric and ridiculously optimistic.

About the plot, the show is about a Federation starship stranded in the Delta Quadrant, seventy thousand light years from Earth. The way people travel is the most inconsistent part of the series, as they are always struggling to get home, while the same aliens are attacking recurrently, even with less advanced technology. How could they "ambush" Voyager, if they were left behind?

The holodeck and the holographic doctor were used extensively as a plot crutch, whenever they were out of ideas. Meetings with the Borg are common, even if the results are mind baffling. One of the most disgusting things in the series is the treatment of Seven of Nine, a Borg that is being coerced back to individuality despite numerous declarations that it wants to return to the Collective. But Janeway knows best and all the list of annoying characters above proceed thereafter to piss on the Borg heritage of Seven and insist on developing her "humanity". If Voyager would be watched by the people described in the show, it would undoubtedly be considered crass human propaganda for the Federation.

And still, for all the reliance on Borgs to move the plot on, the technological side of the equation was repeatedly ignored. Seven is part Borg and will remain so for the rest of the series, including nanoprobes in her blood. Yet she does not attempt to assimilate anyone, including enemies, when it would have been the best way of solving some of the problems. Borg technology is added to Voyager, but most often reluctantly and only temporary. Seven never develops cybernetic tools for herself, even after her implants save the ship several times. Also the Borg Collective is presented as a mindless community of interconnected people, but at the end a Queen of the Borg is revealed, who has total control and presents a target and a persistent enemy.

Bottom line, for a technological person as myself, I was almost attracted more to the Borg model than the Federation one. While the words "democracy", "freedom" and "openness" were spouted at every occasion, true freedom of thought was only tolerated on Voyager when the captain agreed. The Borg at least used the individual as a conduit for the general thought. The morality lessons in the series were simplistic and antiquated. Voyager, with the idea of a ship stranded somewhere, with problems that needed solutions with limited resources and lots of ingenuity, could have been a series to open minds. Instead, it force fed US concepts from the 60's.

Check out this article. I haven't even read it yet, but the image they present is saying it all. Even someone such as myself, a firm believer in national sovereignty and the right to follow whatever twisted philosophy one chooses as long as it doesn't affect others, can't remain indifferent to it. What you see above and below North Korea are China and South Korea. You can tell North Korea apart, because it is the dark patch.

"Oh, no! Siderite's blog has been hacked", you will think immediately. People who know me know how I feel about having children, and that is: I don't feel anything. I seem to lack that inner feeling that makes people procreate for no good reason. And while I am at the subject, I do not deny the existence of this feeling in the world and I don't believe most people are like described below, at least I hope so, but it just hit me that so many times, people have said something and meant another. I will elaborate. Stay assured, my blog was not hacked yet.

You know those dreams we have when we are young? We will get rich and famous, we will find true love, we will be the best at what we do, we can do anything if we want, we can quit anytime (but we don't want to), we will always have time to lose weight and go to the gym, etc. We actually believe those things will happen for most of our youth and early adulthood and some of us actually do something about it, while the most just expect it will happen if they wait long enough.

Well, after a while, reality hits home and we understand that we actually cannot do all of those things, maybe none of them and that our life will not get any better than it is on its own. Some people, at this moment in life, start thinking about children. This way they can delay losing hope by passing it on to their children. That's why many parents are disappointed with their offspring, not because they actually thought their children were special, but because they forced themselves to believe it. In the end, they spawn other normal people, just like them.

You may feel that I am too much of an asshole saying these things, even more than usual, but I don't think so. You see, the assholes are people who spontaneously start advising you to have children, like they already have or plan to. When they say that, they are saying "For a moment now, I thought you might be better than me and I felt a little threatened. Have some children, please, so I can feel better about myself". Have you ever heard the one about children "fulfilling you"? Do I look half full to you? My life does have meaning and I am quite happy with it. I don't need children, therefore I am not having any. If I look unhappy, it may be because I still have hopes for myself and I still believe I can do better. I get disappointed in myself because I expect a little more from me.

I had to write this post because the only times I actually considered having children for more than one second was when I was depressed for not doing something as well as I wanted or when not having time to fulfil ALL of my dreams. I just realised that. There was never a content, happy time in my life when the thought ever crossed my mind.

Now I know that alphish or hormonal males and females do naturally feel the need to have children. I understand the overall need for our species to procreate (although, not right now, when we are too many to fart without a human nose having to smell it). I also don't begrudge or disrespect people having children (as long as they keep them out of my face). However, think long and hard before you tell someone to have children. What is actually the reason you are saying that? Aren't you a bit of an asshole, even if it were any of your business?

I've had a horrible week. It all started with a good Scrum sprint (or so I thought) followed by a period of quiet in which I could concentrate on my own ideas. And one of my ideas was to optimize the structure of the solution we work on, containing 48 projects, in order to save space and compilation time. In my eyes, I was a hero, considering that for a company with tens to hundreds of devs, even a one second increase in speed would be important. So, I set up doing that.

Of course, the sprint was not as good as I had imagined. A single stored procedure led to not less than four bugs in production, with me being to blame for them all. People lost more time working on reproducing the bugs, deploying the fix, code reviewing, etc. At long last I thought I was done with it and I could show everyone how great the solution looked now (on my computer) and atone for my sins.

So from a solution that spanned from 700Mb clean and 4Gb after compilation, I managed to get it to a maximum of 1.4Gb. In fact, it was so small I could put it all in a Ram disk, leading to enormous speeds. In comparison, a normal drive goes to about 30MB per second, an SSD drive (without encryption) goes to about 250MB/s, while my RamDisk was running at a whooping 3.6GB/s. That sped up the compilation and parsing of files. Moreover, I had discovered that MsBuild has this /m parameter that makes it use more processors. A compilation would go to about 40 seconds, down from two minutes and a half. Great! Alas, it was not to be so easy.

First of all, the steps I was considering were simple:

• Take all projects and make them have a single output folder. That would decrease the size of the solution since there would be no copies of the .dll files, Then the sheer speed of the compilation would have to increase, since there would be less copying and less compilation.
• More importantly, I was considering making a symlink to a RAM drive and using it instead of the destination folder.
• Another step I was considering was making all references to the dll files in the output folder, not to the projects, allowing for projects to be opened independently.

At first I was amazed the solution decreased in size so much and I just placed the entirety of it into a RAM drive. This fixed some of the issues with Visual Studio, because when I was selecting a file through a symlink to add as a reference, it would resolve to the target folder instead of the name of the symlink. And it was't easy either. Imagine removing all project references and replacing them with dll references for 48 projects. It took forever.

Finally I had the glorious compilation. Speed, power, size, no warnings either (since I also worked on that) and a few bug fixes thrown in there for good measure. I was a god! Then the problems appeared.

Problem 1: I had finished the previous sprint with a buggy stored procedure committed to production. Clients were losing money and complaining. That put a serious dent in my pride, especially since there were multiple problems coming from both less attention to how I wrote the code to downright lack of knowledge of the flow of the application. For the last part I am not really the only one to blame, but it was my responsibility.

Problem 2: The application was throwing some errors about the target framework of a dll. It was enough to make me understand a major flaw in my design: there were .Net 3.5 and .Net 4.0 assemblies in the solution and placing them all in the same output folder would break some build scripts. Even worse, the 8 web projects in the solution needed to have their output in the bin folder, so that IIS would find them. Fixed it only to see the size of the solution rise back to 3Gb.

Problem 3: Visual Studio would not be so smart as to understand that if a project is loaded, going to the declaration of a member in the compiled assembly means I want to see the actual source, not the IL code. Well, sometime it worked, but sometimes it didn't. As a result I restored the project references instead of the assembly references.

Problem 4: the MsBuild /m flag would do wonders on my machine, but it would not do much on the build server. Nor would it do its magic on slower, less multiprocessor computers than my own.

Problem 5: Facing a flood of problems coming from me, my colleagues lost faith and decided to not even try the modifications that removed the compilation warnings from the solution.

Conclusion: The build went marginally faster, but not enough to justify a whole week of work on it. The size decreased by 25%, making it feasible to put it all in a RAM Drive, so that was great, to the detriment of working memory. I still have to see if that is a good or a bad thing. The multiprocessor hacks didn't do much, the warnings are still there and even some of my bug fixes were problematic because someone else also worked on them and didn't tell anyone. All in a week's work.

Things I have learned from all this: Baby steps. When I feel enthusiasm, I must take it as a sign of trouble. I must be dispassionate as an ice cube and think things through. If I am working on a branch, integrate the trunk into it every day, so as to not make it harder to do at the end. When doing something, do it from start to finish, no matter what horrors I see while doing it. Move away from Sodom and not look back at it. Someone else will fix that, maybe, you just do your task well. When finishing something, commit it into the source control so it can easily be reverted through a single atomic operation.

It is difficult to me to adjust to something that involves this amount of planning and focus. I feel as if the chaotic development years of my youth were somewhat better, even if at the time I felt that it was stupid and focus and planning was needed. As a good Romanian, I am neurotic enough to see the worst side of everything, master at complaining about it, but incapable of actually doing something. Yeah... this was a bad week.

There is this childish game called "cordless phone", which funny enough is older than any possible concept of wireless telephony, where in a large group of people a message is sent to someone else by whispering it to your neighbour. Since humans are not network routers, small mistakes creep up in the message as it is copied and resent (hmm, there should be a genetic reference here somewhere as well).

The point is that, given enough people with their own imperfections and/or agendas, a message gets distorted as the number of middle men increases. It also happens in the world of news. Some news company invests in news by paying investigative reporters. The news is created by a human interpreting things from eye witness accounts to scientific papers, but then it is reported by other news agencies, where the original information is not the main source, but the previous news report. Then marketing shows its ugly head, as the titles need to be shockier, more impressive, forcing the hapless reader to open that link, pick up that paper, etc. Occasionally there are translations errors, but mostly it is about idiots who don't and can't understand what they are reporting on, so the original message gets massacred!

So here is one of the news of today, re-reported by Romanian media, after translation and obfuscation and marketization (and retranslation by me, sorry): "Einstein was wrong? A particle that is travelling at more than the speed of light has been discovered". In the body, written a little better, "Elementary subatomic particle" got translated as "Elementary particle of matter". Dear "science" reporters, the neutrino is not a particle that needed discovering and it is not part of normal matter, with which it interacts very little. What is new is just the strange behaviour of the faster than light travel, which is only hinted by some data that may be or not be correct and refuted by some other, like supernova explosions, information that you haven't even bothered to copy paste into your article. And, as if this was not enough, the comments of the readers, kind of like myself ranting here probably, are making the reporter seem brilliant in comparison.

Is there a solution? Not really. People should try to find the original source of messages as much as possible, or at least a reporting source that is professional enough to not skew the information too much when summarizing it for the general public. A technical solution could work that would analyse news reports, group them per topic, then remove copies and translations, red flag emotional language or hidden divergent messages and ignore the titles altogether, maybe generate new ones. And while I know this is possible to do, it would be very difficult (but possibly rewarding) as software goes. One thing is for certain: reading the titles and assuming that they correctly summarize the complete articles is a terrible mistake, alas, one that is very common.