I have an old page: legendary quotes.

As I gather new ones, I will add new ideas here and prune them over time:

“Just recently I came to a realization, people and organisations exist in a competency / incompetency matrix.

The competent orgs with incompetent people are your blue chips and “traditional” companies. They ship stuff, have customers, grow along with the overall market and economy and are able to survive most non-existential threats and down-turns and even existential ones from time to time. All, or most, the competency is institutional, recorded in implicit knowledge held by people and various tools and processes. Unless those companies loose that knowledge for some reason, things are good.” – hef19898 – On HN

“When making life decisions, going in the direction of more money can be wise. However, we must keep in mind that when we choose money, we don’t choose much. We just decide to decide later.”

“Upper limit of complexity is infinity? An engineer can hold a whole complicated system in his head and work on it. When he leaves and needs to pass it on, he won’t be able to communicate it all. Complexity we can sustain over time is less than today.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2841&v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

Norris Numbers – average amount of code an untrained programmer can write before he or she hits a wall. Clift estimates this as 1,500 lines. Beyond that the code becomes so tangled that the author cannot debug or modify it without herculean effort.

… the very language that one could use to make a comparison is taken away, and the possibility of benchmarking on a different infrastructure is an endeavor akin to rewriting everything from scratch.
https://cerebralab.com/Is_a_billion-dollar_worth_of_server_lying_on_the_ground

““The choice isn’t between automation and non-automation,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, the director of M.I.T.’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. “It’s between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth.””

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” -Banksy

Articles:

The most plausible explanation I’ve seen for people moving off programming onto different jobs:
https://whoisnnamdi.com/never-enough-developers/

A case where tight feedback loops don’t help.
https://brianlui.dog/2020/05/10/beware-of-tight-feedback-loops/

What Color is Your Function?

THE TYRANNY of STRUCTURELESSNESS
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

psychohistory is real:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237458&type=printable

code:

digraph G {

subgraph cluster_0 {
label = “Me”;
node [style=filled];
pension salary dividend mbalance ISA stocks expenses;
color=blue
}

subgraph cluster_1 {
node [style=filled];
NIC VAT CapitalGains IncomeTax Corporation;
label = “Gov”;
color=red
}

subgraph cluster_2 {
node [style=filled];
profits revenue cbalance employee;
label = “Company”;
}

mbalance -> pension;
IncomeTax -> pension [label=”tax relief”];
mbalance -> stocks;
stocks -> mbalance;
stocks -> CapitalGains [label=”10% tax”];
ISA -> mbalance;
mbalance -> costs;
revenue -> pension [label=”40K limit”];
revenue -> VAT [label=”14.5% VAT on revenue”];
cbalance -> dividend [label=”pay shareholders”];
“UK customer” -> revenue [label=”pays for services\n+20% VAT”];
customer -> revenue;
revenue -> profits;
profits -> cbalance;
revenue -> costs;
cbalance -> employee;
profits -> Corporation [label=”19% of profits”];
employee -> NIC;
employee -> salary;
salary -> IncomeTax [label=”20-45% tax”];
costs -> expenses [label=””];
pension -> mbalance;
dividend -> mbalance [label=”2K allowance”];
dividend -> IncomeTax;
salary -> mbalance;
mbalance -> ISA [label=”20K annually”];
}

Assumed Axioms:

1. Technology has impacted the world in 3 waves (List of companies by founding year)
   1. Hardware – Building the infrastructure
   2. Software – Easily scalable businesses e.g. social media
   3. Hybrid – Combining real-life and assuming always available internet.
2. Software is eating the world (source) – “More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services”
3. Startups and tech in general can be thought as an expanding fractal, reaching all areas of our lives (fractal idea).
4. The rise of open source can be explained as eating it’s way up the stack as each layer becomes commoditized.
   

The Past: 1980-1995 – The Transformation of the computer Industry

The industry:

• Had been vertially aligned. i.e. A handful of suppliers, delivered the full end to end package to allow using the hardware and software.
• A significant change was the standardization of the IBM PC
• This and other changes allowed shifting to a horizontal marketplace, allowing companies to specialize within each layer and to save costs and earn more profits.
  Microsoft/Intel probably being the biggest winners.

The Present

Any company essentially bundles a bunch of processes/people that allows solving problems within one encapsulated entity, I’ve blogged before about banks as a stack:

The Future

1. What are the stacks of services that currently deliver value end to end?
2. Is that market vertical or horizontal?
3. What model is likely to win under which scenario? You may even see a mix.
   e.g. Apple has vertical integration of iphones, with some horizontal experimentation allowed within the app store, which they then take-over.
4. You may even find that what wins in the early-stages becomes replaced later.
   e.g. Tableau was excellent software and got deployed at 1000s of companies
   However once it proves the model, the more successful it becomes the easier it may be to replace with an open source alternative.

Prediction: Open Source Eats it’s way up the Pyramid

If you consider most companies as a stack, that software is expanding everywhere and that once it’s used by a significant number of users that an open source version becomes more likely. I think we will see open source companies appear at the bottom of the stack and continue to the top.

Question: What would stop it winning a layer?

Thoughts:

• A small developer user base. If most users are not programmers, no one will write it.
• A small user base. Without a wide base to support it, only 1% of users may pay or contribute for open source so it won’t be supportable. In fact if a piece of poor software is introduced it could result in a failed market. i.e. the open product is bad but good enough such that a “better” commercial alternative isn’t viable.

Steve Case the Third Wave.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4WS4DhekWU

• Hardware
• Pure Software = Overnight
• Hybrid – Real-Life+Software mixed. Internet integrated sometimes invisibly.

1963 – AMD BIG
1968 – Intel BIG
1974 – FoxConn BIG
1975 Microsoft BIG
1976 – Apple BIG
1977 – Oracle
1984 – Sybase Database, MathWorks Matlab, Cisco, Dell BIG
1985 – Corel Draw
1987 – McAfee virus, Wolfram, Peoplesoft ERP
1988 – Avast Security, Trend Micro Security
1989 – Citrix Remote
1990 – BusinessObjects SAP
1991 – AVG security
1991 – Macromedia Multimedia, Palm PDAs, SUSE linux
1993 – Informatica, Qlik Visualization, Redhat Linux, Tucows Domains, Nvidia
1994 – Amazon, RealNetworks Media
1995 – Cisco Webex, MySQL AB
1996 – Ancestry.com, Taleo HR, Sleepycat DB, Juniper Networks, F5 Networks
1997 – Blackboard Education, Kaspersky Lab Security, TIBCO
1998 – BroadSoft Networking, Symbian OS, VMware VMs, Google BIG
1999 – Apache Foundation, Basecamp, DivbX, Fieldglass, Napster, Salesforce
2000 – Tripadvisor, Mobipocket, Sportradar, Jetbrains Java, zipcar
2001 – Foxit, LumenVox Speech
2002 – Shazam, Linkedin BIG, Meetup, GoPro
2003 – Docusign, LogMeIn, Palintir, ServiceNOW, Splunk, tableau, Skype, Tesla
2004 – APIgee, Canonical OS, SugarCRM, Facebook BIG
2005 – Automattic WordPress, Infobright DB, Mozilla Corp, WorkDay HR, Etsy
2006 – MuleSoft, OpenDNS, Xero Accounting
2007 – Heroku, Lucidworks Search, ZenDesk HR, ZeroTurnaround Java, FitBit
2008 – Balsamiq, Github BIG, airbnb BIG, Twilio
2009 – Grindr, NetObjects, PagerDuty, Okta ID, SendGrid Email, WhatsApp BIG, Uber BIG
2010 – Datadog Monitoring
2011 – Firebase, Hortonworks Data, Zoom Video, Twitch
2012 – G2crowd, Looker, PlanGrid, Instagram BIG
2012 – Databricks, Docker

During this lockdown I was due to take some holidays, originally to visit Pisa with Elaine. Instead of visiting Pisa I took a week off to code, for me it was just as much fun, I’m not sure Elaine agreed. This is the outcome of that week:

jq – http://timestored.com/jq/

So far it’s extremely limited, casting, parsing, list definitions and a handful of operations. It has however been insightful. The first 2 days were spent hashing out code to make the pure fundamentals work in any way possible. On the 4th day I began to realise some very verbosely implemented operations could be done in a much simpler way. Then I began to see such savings again and again. Perhaps after the first decade I would have it whittled down to Arthurs two-pager.

An inordinate amount of fun was had when I discovered I could host the application fully in browser  as doppio provides a method of running a full JVM:

jq Online Sandbox – http://timestored.com/jq/

So far it’s useful for basic snippets but I really think such a safe and easily launched environment would be great for onboarding new users to the language.

I quite often find myself wanting to write quick snippets of java. Similar to little bash scripts.

This usually means I have to:
– launch eclipse
– start a new project
– create a new class
– write public static void main
– try to remember why I started eclipse…..

Well no more. I decided we could do things better. I present:

JPad – It lets you run little snippets of java code and instantly see the result rendered (hopefully) beautifully as either html tables or in a console mode..

Let me know what you think? Do you find it useful? Can we make it better? Definitely!

Apologies but there’s lots of bugs and we need to improve result presentation)

Recently I’ve been looking into Julia, below are my somewhat random jumbled thoughts so far. I’ve also put together a function listing for julia that should help beginners. I should mention upfront that I actually really like the idea of Julia and that it has a lot of promise.

1. The long time taken for packages/recompilation is annoying and it failed on me a few times.

2. It just annoys me that the index starts at 1 – different than most other languages.

3. One of the most successful modules in python is pandas. Why not take this further and make DataFrames a full part of julia i.e. Make nulls, dataframes and DataArray the builtin for all vectors. If julia is going to be for manipulating data, there are always going to be nulls. Why have the duplication between julia arrays and DataFrames, make them one and the same.

4.Has a number of builtin functions that duplicate functionality available in just as short a form:

fill(0.,3)
zeros(3)
ones(3)

They add little and pollute the global namespace. Ken Iverson gives a wonderful talk on reducing a language to the minimal core here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUQWuK1L4w

5. There are many small bugs, inconsistencies and irritations such as:

Should super()/subtypes error on anything? because it does.

julia> super(bb)
ERROR: MethodError: `super` has no method matching super(::Regex)
julia> subtypes(bb)
ERROR: MethodError: `subtypes` has no method matching subtypes(::Regex)
julia> super("2")
ERROR: MethodError: `super` has no method matching super(::ASCIIString)

cd silently fails and isn’t cross platform.

julia> cd("/temp/")
julia> homedir()
"C:\\Users\\DAVE"

It should at least throw an error. Even better would be if julia supported forward slashes regardless of platform. Ensuring julia scripts are cross platform.

run(pipe(`echo world` & `echo hello`, `sort`))

The run command is weird, not like other languages at all. It uses backtick to enclose the command, supposedly to allow easy copy pasting
but what’s the point of that when you cant use piping within a single command, so you will need to break out each command separately anyway. Rather than this string interpolation I could just have used join() myself and have less surprise. This interpolation will also possibly cause issues with user entered commands. (A bit more browsing reveals there is a significant number of people find this a more powerful technique)

Writing to a file isn’t visible. This is very non-intuitive:

julia> f = open("a.txt", "w")
IOStream(<file a.txt>)
julia> write(f, "hello!")
6
julia> readall(f)
""
julia> f = open("a.txt")
IOStream(<file a.txt>)
julia> readall(f)
"hello!"

If possible I’d prefer not to have to even specify “w”, rather when its used by a function,
depending if its read or write, those functions handle the underlying details.

Requirements

• Installer that adds link to start menu and file associations to windows
• Running program appears as an exe and has its’ own file name in windows task manager
• Use the built in JRE where possible or ask user to download if not available (bundling considered too large)

The finished installer can be seen at http://www.timestored.com/qStudio/

Solution

The best solution I found was launch4j and innosetup

launch4j

Launch4j was the only wrapper I found that let me keep a jar and have multiple exe’s that pointed to the same jar. Allowing me to have two programs but not double the size. One config to keep in mind when doing this is to use the chdir option with . to ensure paths work out properly.

InnoSetup

the tricky part with inno setup was getting the file associations to work. Here’s what I used:

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[Icons]  
Name: "{group}\qStudio"; Filename: "{app}\qStudio.exe"
Name: "{group}\sqlDashboards"; Filename: "{app}\sqlDashboards.exe"
 
[Tasks]  
Name: qAssociation; Description: "Associate .q extension"; GroupDescription: File extensions:
Name: kAssociation; Description: "Associate .k extension"; GroupDescription: File extensions:
 
[Registry]
Root: HKCR; Subkey: ".q"; ValueType: string; ValueName: ""; ValueData: "qKDBsource"; Flags: uninsdeletevalue; Tasks: qAssociation 
Root: HKCR; Subkey: ".k"; ValueType: string; ValueName: ""; ValueData: "qKDBsource"; Flags: uninsdeletevalue; Tasks: kAssociation 
Root: HKCR; Subkey: "qKDBsource"; ValueType: string; ValueName: ""; ValueData: "q KDB source"; Flags: uninsdeletekey;
Root: HKCR; Subkey: "qKDBsource\DefaultIcon"; ValueType: string; ValueName: ""; ValueData: "{app}\QFILE.ICO"
Root: HKCR; Subkey: "qKDBsource\shell\open\command"; ValueType: string; ValueName: ""; ValueData: """{app}\qStudio.exe"" ""%1"""

Combining into an ANT script

You want to

1. Compile your JAR
2. Create exes for both programs that point to the jar
3. Place the exe’s into an installer

Like so (you need to install inno setup):

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<launch4j configFile="src/main/resources/launch4j-qstudio.xml" />
<launch4j configFile="src/main/resources/launch4j-sqldashboards.xml" />
 
<exec dir="." executable="${INNO.SETUP.DIR}">
	<arg line="/cc '${basedir}\src\main\resources\windowsInstall.iss'" />
</exec >

Finished Installer

Can be found at http://www.timestored.com/qStudio/