Eldar's thoughts

How to "think" like a programmer...

2009-06-07T19:11:00Z

My response to this question on reddit.com

"There's one common denominator among us programmers; we've all been incredibly frustrated when learning to program but have found a way to overcome this frustration and solve the problem at hand. There are different ways to overcome this frustration whether it be theoretical (in academia and books) or practical (problem solving and deductive reasoning)... but to "think" as a programmer, you have to overcome this frustration... time and time again. It's not an easy task and it's fraught with, well... frustration. But if you have to scratch that itch and solve that problem... then that's how to "think" as a programmer. Good luck."

Also... this topic touches on a previous post.

Wusic.NET

2009-02-18T16:51:00Z

Check out my latest creation: Wusic.NET. It's web-music w/ a social twist via faceboook... built using .NET's silverlight platform.

New blog frontend... coming soon.

2009-01-23T16:38:00Z

Preview it at services.radovici.com (will take over eldar.radovici.com when complete). The frontend is written in silverlight; the backend uses phpbb. Still under construction; need to fix dynamic-html compatibility w/ all browsers and rewrite the content for public consumption (as it's just a compilation of notes at the moment).

March 2008 slapping October 2007 across the face

2008-04-16T03:27:00Z

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Systemantics&diff=196989353&oldid=162948012

October wrote: It is written in the style of a serious academic work, and is often mistakenly cited as such. The content is similar in style to Murphy's Law and the Peter Principle, which are both referenced in the work.

March retaliated: Of course, from outside the System of Defining Serious Academic Work, this volume (and others like it) may be seen as utterly serious, merely wearing a fake nose and bushy eyebrows to distract the pedantic system-encysted. One can make a case that it fulfills the spirit of Serious Academic Work: illuminating Reality. As always, the reader should make up his own mind.

Kudos march, kudos.

$100 bet regarding extension methods

2008-04-08T22:07:00Z

An extension method is C# syntactic sugar that adds intellisense functionality to an encapsulated class.

Let's look at an example to see how this works:

public static class AlcoholicString
{
    public static bool IsDrunk(this string str)
    {
        return str.Contains("beer"); //what if i'm null?
    }
}

This returns true for both AlcoholicString.IsDrunk("eldar wants a beer") and "eldar wants a beer".IsDrunk(). The latter is an example of an extension method.

Now the $100 question is does this work for:

string strTest = null;
strTest.IsDrunk(); //will this compile? will this run? what does it return?

Here's the MSDN article.

XPath editor: SketchPath

2008-03-11T16:42:00Z

Having fun w/ XPath? Then try this tool: SketchPath.

The art of Decision Making

2008-02-24T21:19:00Z

Decisions, decisions...

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity." Amelia Earhart

"Make decisions from the heart and use your head to make it work out." - Sir Girad

"Sometimes you make the right decision, sometimes you make the decision right." - Phillip McGraw

Dodgeball videos

2008-01-30T01:13:00Z

McBallers versus Shake n' Bake: Two birds with one stone...

NYCSSC dodgeball drop-in championship game 2/2: Team Shake n' Bake goes down quickly after Brandon and Yomer are taken down with one throw. Kindly produced by © Dwiddy productions.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HWlSW_GghUc

Apple nickel and dime'ing its users...

2008-01-21T23:41:00Z

Why do I feel like I'm being screwed? Maybe because Apple's charging me $20 to upgrade my iTouch to stocked settings.

See the link and chatter at Gizmodo's review: http://gizmodo.com/346760/lightning-review-ipod-touch-january-software-upgrade

Investing like Warren Buffet

2008-01-21T19:59:00Z

I have a large concentration of my net worth in Apple stock [see Buffet on diversification] and in recent weeks, those shares went down 20%. This didn't put a smile on my face but maybe I should've. I'm a net-buyer of Apple stock so today's low price is a discount to what it used to be. This sounds familiar... here's a quote from "The essays of Warrent Buffet - lessons for corporate america."

"If you plan to eat hamburgers throughout your life and are not a cattle producer, should you wish for higher or lower prices for beef. Likewise,if you are going to buy a car from time to time but are not a car manufacturer, should you prefer higher or lower car prices ? These questions, of course, answer themselves.

But now for the final exam: If you expect to be a net saver during the next five years,should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period ? Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for years to come they get elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall."

I'm buying more Apple stock.

Apple financials

2008-01-21T19:17:00Z

Apple is reporting its first quarter earnings after the market-close tomorrow, January 22nd.

Apple had a terrific holiday season and has stood out from the retail pack. Check out these eye-popping comparisons.

The key ingredient to Apple's success this quarter and long-term surprise is the revenue coming from the iPhone. I've posted this before [iPhone's unique royalty and revenue sharing] and want to reiterate the importance of the iPhone's revenue sharing agreements w/ AT&T. Apple makes a percentage of the subscriptions and data plans paid to AT&T for iPhones. Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, estimates the revenue per iPhone to be $18 a month.

And the best news - for us retail investors - might be that the street is in the dark about the revenue sharing... for a number of reasons. The numbers aren't readily available and are not clearly published. Analysts need to infer the revenue sharing numbers from other factors in Apple's financial statements, making this "a rather complex algebra problem". The complexity of iPhone's revenue sharing is evident in the number of analysts positively revising Apple's price targets.

Let's do a little math ourselves. Apple sold 4 million iPhones since its launch. 4 million multiplied by $18 is 72 million a month just for iPhone subscriptions and data plans. That's 864 million a year! And the iPhone has only just begun to sell in international markets. Tack on iTunes music and move rentals... and you got yourself a buy recommendation for Apple.

Principles of corporate america

2008-01-16T05:37:00Z

Caveat: These principles are - for the most part - satirical. Do not read too much into it...

Peter Principle: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Similar observations on incompetence can be found in the Dilbert cartoon series, the movie Office Space, and the television show The Office."

Software Peter Principle: "Describes a dying project which has little by little become too complex to be understood even by its own developers."

Dilbert Prinicple: "Satirical observation stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they're capable of doing."

Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" or "work expands to fill the time available."

Negative Selection (politics): "The person on the top of the hierarchy, wishing to remain in power forever, chooses his associates with the prime criterion of incompetence - they must not be competent enough to remove him from power. The associates do the same with those below them in the hierarchy, and the hierarchy is progressively filled with more and more incompetent people."

Paul Graham's future of technology startups

2008-01-15T19:57:00Z

Paul Graham in this article discusses how technology startups were once started and how they will materialize in the not-so-distant future.

Basically, technology startups are getting easier to start.

"Instead of going to venture capitalists with a business plan and trying to convince them to fund it, you can get a product launched on a few tens of thousands of dollars of seed money from us or your uncle, and approach them with a working company instead of a plan for one. Then instead of having to seem smooth and confident, you can just point them to Alexa."

My favorite part of this article uses an important word: fakeness

"This way of convincing investors is better suited to hackers, who often went into technology in part because they felt uncomfortable with the amount of fakeness required in other fields."

Compensation via Charles Graham

2008-01-15T19:34:00Z

A co-worker brought this article about compensation to my attention written by Charles Graham. If you don't know who Charles Graham is, think of a cross-over between Paul Graham and Maddox [from http://maddox.xmission.com]. :)

Here are a few highlights...

"So you would figure that software managers would figure out a sane way to handle compensation for programmers by now. But, of course, they haven’t. Most of them are your average Econ 101 bean counting weenies."

"That’s why an old co worker of mine told me one day over lunch that the difference between not busting your ass and busting your ass is the difference between a three percent raise and a four percent raise."

"So this poor guy now has to play hardball. He has to threaten to leave in order to get what he clearly deserves, and no matter what happens, it’s all down hill from there."

So how does one end this vicious cycle of corporate america?

I love these Graham guys!

Macros - Why aren't they allowed in C#?

2008-01-15T00:12:00Z

In short, macros are often times misappropriated when there are better and more consistent means to accomplish this programming task. Also... having one less "preprocessor" step makes compilation faster and simpler.

There's a lot of talk about this on Eric Gunnerson's macros post. One comment makes a illustrative analogy on the subject: "I think macros are a lot like chainsaws: dangerous, but very valuable in specific circumstances. Despite the fact it's possible to do dangerously stupid things with both, I find them both useful enough I wouldn't want to give up either."

As I alluded to above, according to Eric Gunnerson's post, there is technically no preprocessor in C#. That's what it says here reasoning that there is no additional preprocessor step in the C# compiler. Using conditional directives, code changes before it's compiled - isn't that preprocessing, at least a logical preprocessing step?