My new browser

For years I have been a faithful IE user. I say faithful and not loyal because I have only used it because it suited my needs and other browsers were too cumbersome or clumsy to hold my attention for long.

FireFox is infinitely customizable, but it never felt like a well designed app - it felt clumsy to me. Plus, it always had problems rendering tables in an appropriate manner.

Chrome is sleek, fast and elegant, but in many cases it just doesn't work. I'm always finding some site that it doesn't render quite right, a video that it won't play, or a simple customization that doesn't exist.

I've also tried Safari from time to time, but never long enough because I never saw any advantages over IE.

However, a new version of an old browser has impressed me so much that I have switched for what I hope is good. Opera version 10.10 is an amazing piece of art. It renders fast and correctly, plays all the video sites I need (though I did have to "Mask as FireFox" for Netflix!), and has the simple customizations I want. For instance, I can use the address bar to search on various search engines (I'm not limited to Google like I am with Chrome.) If I want to search Bing, then I just type "b " followed by the search string into the address bar and viola! it goes to Bing and searches (I did have to manually set this up, but it was quick and easy). Other niceties include movable tabs for web pages with hover preview and a "speed dial" page that is much nicer and more customizable than Chrome's.

My requirements are simple. I want a browser that is easy to use, works on the sites I frequent, and has simple customizations. I don't want to spend a lifetime studying all the intricacies and hunting down new plug ins. I just want a browser that works. Opera satisfies those needs and left me happier than I was before. Give it a try and let me know if you feel the same way!

C# Timings

Recently, I was adding a bit of debug code to measure how long it took to run various parts of my program (yes, I know a profiler would be more accurate, but I just needed a rough estimate). So, I had 3 or 4 areas in my code where I did something akin to

TimeSpan timer = new TimeSpan();
DateTime startTime = DateTime.Now;
Type1 rval = DoIt(a, b);
timer += DateTime.Now - startTime;

Firstly, this code is ugly. I'm obviously doing many different things here: timing code, calling a function, storing it's result, etc.... It would be much better if I could wrap the timing code into its own function. So, I esentially want something like:

TimeSpam timer = TimeIt( () => DoIt(a, b) );

The code for TimeIt is simple to write

TimeSpan TimeIt(Action a)
{
DateTime startTime = DateTime.Now;
a.Invoke();
return DateTime.Now - startTime;
}

However, that doesn't save the return value of DoIt, so that is useless for my purposes. I need TimeIt to return the value from DoIt. To do this, I make TimeIt a generic method and have it accept a function instead of an action. I pass the TimeSpan in as a reference argument. The calling code looks like

TimeSpan timeSpan = new TimeSpan();
Type1 rValue = TimeIt(() => DoIt(a, b), ref timeSpan);

The TimeIt function looks like

public static T TimeIt(Func f, ref TimeSpan timeSpan)
{
DateTime startTime = DateTime.Now;
T rVal = f.Invoke();
timeSpan += DateTime.Now - startTime;
}

There, now we have a simple and generic way to time a single method that returns a value. If you wanted to go further, you could create a class that held the TimeSpan value so that you wouldn't have to pass it in as a ref, but this worked for my needs and was clean enough so I stopped here. If I need this code again, I'll refactor it into another library and perhaps into its own class. Until then, I'll enjoy the cleanliness and conciseness.

A letter to my representative

I sent a letter to my representative regarding the health care bill and would like to repost it here for others to comment.

Hello Representative Inslee,

I wanted to write a quick letter in opposition to the upcoming health care reform. Believe it or not, health care is undergoing a major revolution today. The problem is that the traditional "insurance" programs of the past are becoming harder to use because people have confused "insurance" with "comprehensive coverage". Allergy medicine, maintenance meds, etc... are not part of any insurance program. Insurance is responsible for covering major and unexpected medical issues. Over the last 5 years, more insurance companies are coming to terms with this and are inventing things like Health Savings Accounts, which, though unpalatble to many consumers, are a cost effective means of giving consumers choice over how to best spend thier medical allowance. Unfortunately, the private sector has not sorted everything out yet, so now is a very inopportune time for the government to intervene. The government is not innovative nor is it cost effective. Instead, it simply throws constiutents money at a problem with little effect until they stop complaining about it. I do recognize the importance of helping our elderly and needy, but I also recognize the precarious position of the american economy and the health care industry. Despite Obama's claim, now is NOT the time to act. Now is the time to rely on capitalism and market forces to sort out what the future should hold and then fit our current medicare and medicaid plans into that future. The economy, the health care industry, and your constituents need you, Representative Inslee, to be a pillar of salt in today's wax and wane congress. You have been in the past and I trust you will be again.

Thanks for your time,
Tanton Gibbs
Redmond, WA

What should Yahoo! do?

Yahoo!'s CEO, Carol Bartz, has stated firmly that Yahoo! is not a search company. In fact, Yahoo!, she states, is much closer to a portal. The goal is not search, but editorial comments and a local feel. A portal, if you will, from a major media/technology firm. Unfortunately, in the coming years, portals will be less and less necessary as people will get their news from a swath of algorithmically mined sources across the social media landscape. I'm afraid the era of Yahoo! dominance has ended and will not return.

Like IBM in the 90's, Yahoo! must redefine itself. Yahoo! must sell the mills.

Again, like IBM, who has become a major integrator, and Kimberly-Clark, who has become a consumer goods powerhouse, Yahoo! must set out on the next phase of it's life - it must enter and dominate a new area or be relegated to a technological side show until it dies. But what should it pursue? To answer that question, we need to look at its strengths and products, especially those that are hard to mimic, such as those related to its core technology.

Yahoo! has world class data centers, meaning they can store and process data cheaper than anyone else (except, perhaps, google). Yahoo! also has a data processing platform that allows it to analyze web scale data quickly and efficiently. It's also beginning to build a dataflow language which allows developers to be productive. Finally, Yahoo! has a respected research organization which keeps it at the forefront of areas such as machine learning and information retrieval.

The question then becomes: "What business needs massive computational power, data storage and processing ability, and makes heavy use of machine learning and information retrieval?" The biggest one I can think of is data marketing. Analyzing billions of consumer and business records as quickly as possible and making decisions on the fly is what data marketing is all about.

Imagine a person walking into an electronics store. Currently, if the person buys something he may get a coupon to promote his buying something more, later. However, this is suboptimal for two reasons. The simplest reason is that the coupon may be unnecessary. The patron may have been planning to return even without the coupon and so the coupon represents wasted revenue. The second reason is that the coupon may be too late. It could be that if the patron would have been given the coupon on the way in then he might have bought more or upgraded or any other number of things that could have produced more revenue. It could even be that a customer doesn't buy anything at all, but would have purchased if a coupon was given beforehand. The holy grail of marketing is to sell an item to each person at an individualized cost. You want that person to pay as much as possible for the item. If person A will pay $100 for a camera and person B will pay $300 for the same camera then you want to issue the $200 off coupon to person A and no coupon to person B.

Now, imagine a system where a customer is recognized by an image recognition system the moment they walk in. Their data is retrieved instantly and a machine learning algorithm is run to determine what the person is shopping for and what the person is willing to pay. From their online profile and twitter account, the algorithm is able to determine that the person recently broke their camera and is looking to replace one. Using data from a company such as this one the algorithm can tell that they are struggling economically and will want to buy a cheaper camera. However, it also knows from statistics that a coupon for the higher priced camera has a good probability to make the consumer stretch his budget and go for the "prestige" item. A few more checks against the data center reveals that the current store location has excess inventory of the higher priced camera and therefore the algorithm decides to dispatch a bigger discount coupon for the better model. The sales attendant walks to the customer and presents the coupon, escorting the customer to the camera aisle. The sale is made and the computer gets an extra volt in its bedtime snack ;-)

More seriously, Yahoo! could perform those computations more efficiently and with better accuracy than an enterprise. Enterprise data centers are not going to reach the efficiency of Yahoo!'s data center. Moreover, enterprise IT programmers are not going to have the time or penchant to do the necessary IR and ML research. Yahoo! is uniquely positioned to do those things; furthermore, since it is dangling on the precipice of disaster now is a good time to bite the bullet and make the change. Not that I expect them to. Change is something that is hard to accept and Ms Bartz doesn't seem like the type to change their core business...if she ever figures out what that is. More than likely the model I express above will be adopted by a new comer...perhaps by these guys.

The Perils of Fanaticism

I found this article on reddit the other day and was immediately struck by its stupidity. Now, usually I wouldn't use such a harsh word, but the ideas contained in it are so preposterous that it doesn't really deserve any better word.

I first want to say that I have no opinion about the book described or the author of the book. I have not read the book and I don't know the author. For all I know, After the Software Wars could be about bunny slippers. Instead, I want to be very clear that I'm arguing only with the points contained in the article.

The article describes how open source produces superior software to a closed source model and uses, as its first example, Wikipedia. It mentions that Wikipedia is not software, but uses it as an example anyway. Seriously. I can't deny that no closed source institution can provide the same quality of data as Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia deals with data, not code, and data entry can be done by anyone. It is very different from a program that requires someone know how to program before they change it.

Next, the article uses two examples to prove that open source software is better than closed source: FireFox and the Linux kernel (over IE and Windows). Wow, this is the height of arrogance and a circular argument. There is no demonstrable way to prove their superiority; I doubt even 4 out of 5 dentists would agree that one is better than the other.

The next part of the article that I find incredulous is that he believes that Google Docs will never catch on, while Linux and OpenOffice will. Yeah, sure. People are going to avoid using something that doesn't take any effort to change to, makes your data available everywhere, and is constantly updated versus something requiring a complete modification of your current computing environment, has to be shared separately, and is updated using magic incantations. While this may sound like I'm a Linux newbie, I'm not. I'm just pointing out the fact that, to most people, yum is something you say before dinner, not the way to update your programs.

The MOST ignorant thing, however, was the following: "If Microsoft, 20 years ago, built Windows in an open way, Linux wouldn't exist, and millions of programmers would be improving it rather than competing with it."

Yeah, right. We don't have various flavors of Linux. We don't have emacs and Xemacs. We don't have hundreds of open source projects that do the same thing in slightly different ways. Come ON! Competition is in our blood. Doing things "our way" is what makes programmers unique. You could have the most awesome open source project on the planet and someone would find a reason to fork and change it. That's just how we work. The idea that everyone will give up their belongings, join a commune, and hum "Linux is king" is not realistic. Just look how many open source programming languages there are. Look how many open source unix-like variants there are. Get a grip on reality and stop pontificating your idiotic ideals.

Ok, next quote. "The biggest difference between Windows and Linux is that free software contains thousands of applications, installable with one click, and managed as one set." First off, I'm not sure what that means. I have never seen a Linux application that was installable with one click. I definitely prefer the Windows model of installation to the Linux model. In addition, the Windows and Linux model of uninstallation is similar, IMO, so I'm not sure what it means to be "managed as one set", nor how that differs from Windows. As for thousands of applications, that is true, but Windows also has a number of free applications and that seems to be growing as the .NET platform usage increases.

The idea that software developers around the world will just give up the idea of profits and join together in harmony is ridiculous. Furthermore, proprietary software has benefits. You can judge the financial soundness of a company to see whether their software will be around in 10, 15, or 20 years. Just look at sourceforge to see the number of free software projects that are abandoned.

I believe strongly in the value of free software and open source software (and I even know the difference). However, I also believe strongly in the value of proprietary software. For a case study in what happens when you are the champion of free software, just look at Sun. Oh, you can't, it's been bought by Oracle, a closed source shop. Yeah, Microsoft should really follow in their footsteps. Sheesh.

Yahoo! Interview

I realize this write up is a bit late, seeing that I already work for Microsoft, but I wanted my interview collection to be complete, so I want to add this one and the interview with Google. Realize, that it has been six or so months since I interviewed with Yahoo!, so my memory has faded a bit. However, I'll go over what I remember.

After my interview with Google, I didn't think I would interview with Yahoo! because it was in the same area of the country - an area I was not impressed with. However, a friend of mine, who works for Yahoo! talked me into interviewing. He said that he could show me around so that I would enjoy the area. I wasn't convinced of that, but at the least it was a free trip to see an old friend, so I decided to take him up on it. In hindsight, I'm very glad I did. First, because getting the Yahoo! offer allowed me to get other offers, but, more importantly, because my friend would passed away in December of last year and it was to be the last time I saw him.

My friend, Nathan, submitted my resume to two groups in Yahoo! The group that contacted me was the Pig group. This was fortunate, because I had just begun using Pig and Hadoop at work. I had also begun interacting with the Pig group through their mailing list. Therefore, I was familiar with the product and could talk about it in our very first call.

I was actually impressed with the phone screenings for Pig. We talked about things relevant to the product, such as how to handle large memory footprints with Java and various join algorithms for large data sets. We also discussed some more trivial things such as some of the differences between C++ and Java and what a virtual function is. I actually got confused at this point and described how compilers typically implemented a virtual function instead of what they did, but we eventually sorted things out.

After the first phone interview, I was fairly confident that things went well. This was mostly due to the fact that the interviewer told me that things went well :) She was the only phone screener to be that blunt. The next phone screener discussed process with me. We talked about TDD, documentation, program management and other things similar to that. It went well and they invited me to Silicon Valley to interview in person.

In retrospect, the best part about going to the Yahoo! interview was getting to see Nathan again. It was the last time I was to see him before the motorcycle accident that led to his death. He took me around the coast and we picked up some strawberries and cherries at a roadside stand. He also took me for a "backstage" view of the Yahoo! scene. It appeared rather normal, other than the guy who had a mini-bar in his cube.

Back to the interview. Like the Amazon interview, all of the Yahoo! interviews took place in the same room. The interviews varied in style, some were more puzzling (how do you find a loop in a linked list), some were more practical (tell everything you would do to design a highly available high throughput web server).

Throughout the interview, I felt I needed far too many hints. I think I did well on the design portions, but the algorithm sections were my weak point. I ended up getting the answers, but hints were necessary. Toward the end, I was just being self-deprecating. I remember one question they asked about how many people I had recommended for hiring (not many about 3) and how many I had interviewed (lots). I made the comment that for my previous company we didn't get Stanford grads and I qualified it by saying that not even I could be a Stanford grad, I just wasn't that good. This interview plus the Google interview plus Microsoft interviews from years before had beaten me down. I was now completely convinced I was useless.

In the end, though, I came away with the impression that the people were very intelligent and would have been great to work with. They talked about the "architect" path that I could take so that I didn't have to become a "people manager" (which sounded good). They seemed to have a great company and it would have been loads of fun. However, I didn't expect an offer.

Surprisingly, they called not too long after the interview with an offer. By this time, I had an interview scheduled with Amazon.com and so I asked to make my decision after that point.

As you know, I didn't choose to go to Yahoo!, but that interview and offer gave me the confidence going into the Amazon.com and Microsoft interviews. Had I not gone to the Yahoo! interview I don't know how I would have done in the other interviews. I know I would not have been as confident and that could have prevented me from getting the position I have now. For that, I'm thankful to both Yahoo! and Nathan.

Thanks Nathan, I'll miss you, prophet!

Short-sightedness

A friend of mine sent me this blog post on why google web drive won't kill windows or anything else. To be honest, I'm surprised by the author's short-sightedness.

First, Scott mentions DropBox as a pre-existing replacement for GDrive. He then points out that Google plans to tie the GDrive in to Google Docs and that DropBox doesn't currently have that functionality. However, he doesn't see that as a game changer. What he doesn't comprehend is that Google has more than just Google Docs. Google has Gmail, Calendar, YouTube, Blogger, and an ever growing number of other sites. They also have an operating system (Android). So, you'll be able to turn on your netbook and have it sync your email, documents, favorite shows and blogs, etc... immediately from the cloud. Don't think that will happen? GMail is already offering an offline syncing mechanism through Gears through GMail Labs How much longer before they expand the syncing mechansim to work with other things like Google Docs, YouTube, etc... Google has consistently been able to deliver on big ideas and this one is one of the biggest.

Scott also mentions the trust issue. Who wants Google to store their most personal documents? I think this will become less of an issue over time. Already people are using services such as carbonite to back thier computer up online. How much different is it to trust an encrypted Google cloud? I think this issue will stay a hot topic for a few years, but in 4 or 5 years when everyone is using the cloud more and more it will become a non-issue except for the most sensitive documents. Google is already heavily advertising its security features.

Another issue is downtime. What happens when the cloud goes offline? Once again, I think this will be less of an issue over time as the cloud becomes more stable. Even now, how often does GMail go down? I think my internet provider goes down more often than GMail does. Moreover, I can't get much done without an internet connection anyway, so offline availability doesn't really help me out much. I think the more Google convinces people that the cloud technology is stable the more they will flock to it and use it. After all there are many benefits to cloud technology such as redundency, multi-computer availability, etc...

Scott is right in saying that there are currently alternatives in DropBox and Windows Live Sync, but only Windows Live Sync has the capability of rivaling GDrive. Microsoft has services in its hotmail mail service and its online office suite. They will have to continue to integrate those into the cloud to keep up with Google. Not only that, but if they could integrate their next XBox platform into the cloud so that you could store your games on the cloud (or just download them directly from the cloud) then that would be a big plus and something that Google can't currently rival. Having a home media system synced to Microsoft's cloud could promote using the Microsoft cloud for other things such as mail and documents.

I certainly believe in Microsoft's ability to beat back the Google threat, but I'm not narrow minded enough to think that GDrive is not a threat. It is the backbone of the internet operating system that Google is building to take on Microsoft.