Kyle Brady: A Blog

What’s the old adage?  “You can put rollerskates on a cow, and it’s still just a cow.  With rollerskates.  But it’s not always a great idea.”  Never heard of it?  Probably because I just made it up.

She wants those rollerskates.  You can tell.

What am I talking about?  Some people seem to think they can just randomly decide to be in the computer programming world because it’s a “safer bet” than, say, going into business school at the moment.

And they’re wrong.

It’s a Lifestyle

Being a programmer, coder, hacker, or any other variant of the idea of creating computer software (on any level) is not something you just wake up one day and decide to do.  You can’t, even if you wanted to.  This isn’t the same as studying for 4 years at your favorite college to get a degree in Economics and go pretend you know what all those giant spreadsheets mean.

Programming is typically borne from a love of computers, an obsession with them, and a need to know more.  You start tinkering with your Operating System (probably Windows of some sort), modifying things you don’t like and figuring out workarounds for those “people are dumb, treat them that way” software design idea.

Einstein seems to get what I’m saying.

And then you realize that you can create software.  Maybe you start with HTML and websites.  Maybe it’s PHP in the form of a mashup from your favorite websites.  Or maybe you even start playing with C++ or Java.

All while in middle school, or maybe even high school.  Because you definitely know you have a love affair with computers before you go to college, and have a high level of proficiency at any number of things computer-related.

Trust Me

I’m not making this up.  Us programmers are the same people you called geeks, nerds, and whatever else when we were younger, and now we happen to be the cool kids.  It doesn’t matter if you’re 40 or 20, people put you on a higher pedestal when they know you design software, because they simply don’t understand it.

Ask “that guy” that you know about how he got into it.  He’ll tell you.

It’s Important

Why is it important?  Because programming is not just about learning how to program, the syntax, structure, and quirks of a language.  It’s not even about being qualified to cry about pointer management or laugh at people who think Internet Explorer is “the Internet”.

It’s important because programming has alot to do with how you think.  How you approach situations, analyze them, and segment them into solution-oriented tasks.  How you continually test your code, trying to account for every possible outcome, and include contingencies for any and all failures.

Former MBA students:  this is you.

There’s a reason why people are called “Software Engineers” and not “Software Artists”.

Read More

If you come across a scientific analysis of programming or how programmers work, take the time to read it.  Because current findings are that programmers are not just Engineers, but they’re also artists, despite what I said three sentences ago.

Programming requires the massive analytical processes of an Engineer, but it also requires a high level of finesse, creativity, and “out of the box” thinking typically associated with artists.

This means you need both sides of your brain when you are writing your Pizza Hut Ordering System hack.

This is what happens when you only code for the money.

My Point

So here’s my point:  these kids may go to school thinking they can just graduate with a Computer Science degree, be programmers, and make lots of money in a secure job.  They may even accomplish that.

But they’ll never be true programmers.  They’ll probably hate their jobs.  And they’ll definitely never do anything great or revolutionary.

True programmers, the ones that change the world, do it not for the money, even though it’s nice to have.  They do it because they love it.  These are the people who have full-time jobs and multiple side projects, always hoping one day to run their own company or get a research grant to do what they want, on their own time.

Some of the best programmers of today and of yore don’t even have degrees.

How is having a degree, when you’re the wrong type of person, going to make things better?

posted on October 7th, 2008 at 8:15 am by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Coding, College, Computers, Essay, Programming, Rant, Technology

Apparently me wanting to investigate “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” isn’t supposed to be easy.  See if you can follow the logic on this one.

First, I get an email saying Disc 1 is going to ship from Phoenix, AZ.  I didn’t really give it much thought at the time.

Then I get this email today, saying it’ll be here on Monday.

Monday?  Really?  What happened to “Next Day Shipping”?  I didn’t realize that your promises to your customers had a geography clause.

I had previously wondered what happened if a disc in the middle of a series is missing, like “Stargate: SG-1″ has a few “long waits” at the moment.  Here’s what I had found.

So I have a question for you, Mr. Netflix.  How can you be intelligent enough to not ship a series when it’s not fully complete and waiting for me, but you’re not intelligent enough to not ship something when it’s “too far away” (geography clause!) to be here on the normal schedule?

Right.  Because that makes alot of sense.

— — —

Update (9/25/2008 3:15pm PST): I just got off the phone with Customer Service (no hold times or phone menus!), and they supposedly have a system in place that looks for these sort of things.  They didn’t comment on the “Next Day” geography clause, but instead said that they usually don’t remote-ship things if it’s approaching a weekend.

They apologized, and are supposedly shipping out a “Bonus Disk” from my Queue tomorrow.

Hopefully it’s one that’s local and won’t be here next Wednesday.

Update (9/29/2008 9:00pm PST): The disc isn’t here yet!  Just kidding.  I got it on Saturday, and was very surprised that it all went down so smoothly and properly.

Thanks, Netflix, for being awesome.  This is why no-one goes to Block…who?  anymore.

posted on September 25th, 2008 at 3:14 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Movies, Netflix, Rant, Technology

Eran Hammer-Lahav (”EHL”) wrote up a piece on the weird thoughts Microsoft must have since they just patented, in effect, the “Page Up” and “Page Down” button.

Here’s my take on it, with a different end-game scenario than EHL, more-or-less duplicated from a comment I made on his blog:

Microsoft is, and always has been, about collecting as much money as possible, while doing as little as possible. “Stealing” MS-DOS and making huge profits from it, repackaging an OS as a “new” version with very little differences… we’ve all heard that before.

So why should the keyboard be any different? They could potentially ingest massive profits because unlicensed keyboards (aka “not Microsoft”) use the buttons associated with their patent, depending on how the courts interpret the depth and reach of this.

Also, this might be a play at what I’ve thought they might do for awhile: try and control and own as much of the computer as possible. As people move to Macs and Linux, it’s probably becoming more and more attractive for them to disrupt competitors by simply “owning” the technology. If your keyboard (or any other common component) ends up being radically different on a Mac (besides the minimal differences now), users might reconsider switching.

Next they’ll concoct a strategy about LCD monitors!

posted on August 22nd, 2008 at 2:22 am by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Competition, Keyboard, Microsoft, Patents, Technology

I’ve been thinking alot about AI and The Singularity recently. It started with reading “Glasshouse” by Charles Stross, continued with “Accelerando”, and peaked with the IEEE Spectrums’ most recent special issue on Singularity (as applied to technology and human development/evolution).

The reason I wrote this post is to say two things:

1. You should really pickup a book or two from Stross, and read the IEEE stuff (even if it’s online). Both are very detailed and interesting.
2. All that thinking has given me some ideas. Stay tuned.

posted on June 12th, 2008 at 2:51 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: AI, Charles Stross, IEEE, Technology, The Singularity

Oracle, via Wim Coekaerts (VP, Linux Engineering Team) [blog, bio], gave an hour talk today in the Engineering Building at San Jose State, on “The History of Linux at Oracle”- I went not because I get extra credit for a C++ class, but because I would have gone anyways (and will for the rest of the semester)… I’m just like that.

It was a very interesting topic, less of a presentation and more of a true “talk” by Wim, on things that I didn’t know Oracle did or was involved in. I even got to probe him on MySQL during the Q&A. Here’s some of the highlights, my thoughts in brackets:

• Oracle provides Customer Support for Linux.
• Oracle owns alot of smaller database methods, but doesn’t encapsulate them into their own products. Examples are InnoDB and BerkleyDB.
• Oracle is “big” on the Open Source community. Helped to make the Linux Kernel stable, years ago, because they saw Linux as the coming platform for servers, and obviously the databases (like… theirs) on them.
• Oracle is also “big” on virtualization, and provides code back to the community.
• All of Oracle’s systems (development, production, etc.) are Linux. [A distro wasn’t mentioned, but either way that’s a huge deal.]
• Amazon.com was the reason Oracle decided to fully port and support Linux… Amazon demanded it years ago when they decided to take on the entire world of retail-ing everything. [I had assumed MySQL…]
• Oracle does not see MySQL as a competitor, even though it’s now owned by Sun. They see it as a different option for different needs. An example given was that MySQL needs alot of queries to read/write (not simultaneous), where Oracle can write in realtime.
• Oracle even sees MySQL as partially based on them, as InnoDB is theirs, and is apparently used as an under layer of MySQL. [Weird, huh?]

Like I said, some interesting stuff that I don’t think is common knowledge. Alot more was said in much more detail, but those are the biggest points that I remember.

I wish we had more time to get some technical details on the inner workings of Oracle’s systems…

posted on February 7th, 2008 at 5:25 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Events, MySQL, Open Source, Oracle, School, SJSU, SVLS, Technology

[This is my first substantial post in a long time, so just as a warning: it’s going to be long, full of things no-one will like, and probably very very angry. It’s like I have a stockpile of feelings.]

Paradise? Am I talking about Heaven, The Afterlife, The Halls of Valhalla? No. I’m talking about the blogosphere of tech-news reporting.

The Golden Age of Grotesque

Even as little as a year ago, the portion of the blogging world that discussed/”reported” news on the tech world was very diverse and original. You could go to any number of the most popular blogs and find long opinion / editorial pieces, and little gems of news that wouldn’t be on the others. In a word: they were the opposite of mainstream media (”MSM”).

This was a good time.

The Dope Show

But then, something happened. Blogs like TechCrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Gizmodo, etc. began to cover the same things: the most popular internet applications and their progress (Facebook, Google, etc.) and then alot of shiny AJAX bullshit that shouldn’t even exist. And not just individually, but they would rehash the same subjects over and over again (on the same blog), even when it was seen the same amount of times on their friends/competitors.

The Tech Blogosphere

mOBSCENE

The last few months this is what the world of tech blogging looks like:

• Facebook
• Google
• “Google Killers”
• “Digg Killers”
• Microsoft Sucks
• Twitter
• “Twitter Killers”
• VC Investments
• [stupid things that serve no purpose but get funding anyways]

And repeat. It’s like you put a newspaper in the washing machine every night, and read it in the morning. The same news, just jumbled around a little bit.

(S)aint[s]

There are a few diamonds in the rough at the moment, the few originals that do what they feel like, even if it’s not politically correct or even always based on hard facts. Which makes it interesting.

• Valleywag
• Uncov
• Scoble

Valleywag is like a tabloid for Silicon Valley, without all the aliens and pregnancies. Uncov is probably my favorite thing ever, because he/they bash all of the things about “Web 2.0″ and the industry that I absolutely hate (read: stupid crap), and he has a basis in reality that most bloggers don’t: real knowledge, coming from an engineering background. Scoble (”Scobleizer”) is not always interesting, but when he is… man he is. Oh, and people love to hate him, and I like to see the backlash from even just simple statements.

Oh yeah, MSM!

Cake and Sodomy

What sparked this? Aside from being tired of reading the same things on 140,000 different blogs about the same stupid things that don’t matter (or do, but have been rehashed to death), it’s simple: these blogs will only cover your startup/application/company/whatever if you meet at least one of three requirements.

• You’re Famous
• You Have VC/Angel Investors
• You’ve Created a Mashup

I know I’m not the only one who’s noticed this, and yet I haven’t seen anyone else gripe about it. Hello, people? Yeah the Internet called, it wants to give your soul back, you spineless tool.

Mechanical Animals

The reason I bring this up is that I’ve recently launched my first web service/application, mySHOUToutLOUD. We spent some money on Facebook advertising, which turned out to be pretty worthless, but I also thought I might get some coverage from the blogs that (you would think) care, so I sent this email:

We thought you’d be interested to hear about the v1.0 Launch of our service, mySHOUToutLOUD, as of January 1st, 2008. As a new consumer complaints vehicle, we hope to have success in letting individual consumers have a voice in the public eye, in order to help their problems / concerns be resolved with any product or company.

We have attached the press release for this (PDF), but you can view other details at the press site: http://press.myshoutoutloud.com

Hopefully you find this informative, and give our new service a try.

Here’s to a brighter future for the consumer public!

–
The mySHOUToutLOUD Team

“real consumer complaints, for real people”

The press release that was attached can be found here. What happened? Nothing. No reply emails. No signups from the people who check this stuff out.

I got a great reply email from a few people over at Wired and San Jose Mercury News. Does that feel good? Knowing that MSM is more professional and has more basic courtesy than all of you couch slobs that make money from doing nothing?

Oh, Hello! I didn’t see you there, Michael Arrington!

User Friendly

So, in closing, here’s my suggestion to you wannabe-journalists who cover only what Arrington thinks is interesting:

Get your thumbs out of your asses, lose some weight, and find your spine. You wonder why MSM doesn’t see you as a threat, and even CSE didn’t give you “credentials” (albeit diminished) until this year? Probably because of things like this.

—-

P.S. Mahalo sucks.
P.S.S. All song titles courtesy of Marilyn Manson.

posted on January 11th, 2008 at 6:53 am by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Ego, Failure, Industry, Jason Calacanis, mSoL, Programming, Rant, Technology, The Internet, Told You So, Web Startups

If you’re reading this, then chances are you know about Amazon.com’s Kindle, an e-book reader… kind of like an iPod for books. And you also probably know that it’s getting major criticism for everything from it’s battery life to it’s product design to if it’s even useful.

But one major market is being overlooked here, without anyone thinking about the potential effect it may have: students.

Expensive As Hell

Textbooks are super expensive, and it gets even worse when you go to college. $350 for a textbook? And it’s not made of silver? The biggest excuse for the price of textbooks (even if you buy them used online, they’re still very expensive) is the printing. Hardback + many many pages + color + nice and glossy pages = high printing cost.

I guess that makes sense. So why don’t you not print at such a high standard, and lower the prices a little bit, eh? BECAUSE YOU WANT MY MONEY!

Are you spanking for money? Or the money?

Heavy

Most high schoolers (at leas the ones that actually want to go to college) carry a backpack full of textbooks to and from school everyday. Not one of those laptop backpacks, but a super-size LL Bean backpack that is made of that funny material that’ll stretch, but not easily rip.

Doctors and parents complain this is ruining their children’s backs. College kids refuse to bring books to class because it’s so difficult to make that 30min walk across campus with 15 books in their bag, totaling the entire weight of a large hobbit.

Why don’t we use less textbooks then? Oh, maybe because there’s usually 2 books required, if not more, for the average college class, and rumor has it those “Barnes and Noble Campus Bookstore” places highly encourage the use of multiple books, especially when they’re new…

Remember Laptops?

Remember when laptops were going to revolutionize the learning process, about 10 years ago? How parents were fighting for their kids to be able to use laptops in the high school classroom? And colleges were promising to make the texts available via computer?

What happened to that? I know I haven’t ever used a digital textbook in college, and I don’t know of anyone else that does either. But the ones I do hear about are usually clunky: you have to install special software, only install once… sounds like something Microsoft would create, right?

Solution

So here’s my solution. Since publishers are apparently incapable of publishing full-color textbooks in PDF format, and selling them iTunes-style (not through iTunes, but the same idea of online distribution)… which would considerably cut costs, since not only is the book not physically printed, but it’s not shipped anywhere either… why don’t we take advantage of the “I want to be popular” technology of the moment?

“The Solution”

E-book readers like the Kindle (there are others, but this is the one to get the most coverage so far) could be the easy solution. Try this out on college campuses, where the kids have money to spend, and actually might want to learn:

1. Include as part of tuition a one-time fee for an e-book reader. Deliver this at orientation Freshman year.
2. All classes have the option to buy a printed version of a book, but are suggested to use the digital version, available for download at the appropriate location.
3. See how happy it makes everyone.
4. Continue this program every year.
5. Eventually stop even printing these college textbooks.

“Oh but what if it breaks?!?!?!” Easy answer. I’m pretty sure that if you have to pay anywhere between $100-300 every now and then, even if it’s every year, to get your textbooks for a fraction of the cost ($30 Physics books anyone?), no-one is going to complain. So don’t give me that IT crap as an excuse.

Conclusion

Maybe e-readers are not going to be very popular in general population for another decade or two. I mean, seriously, a digital library of books isn’t going to impress anyone… no-one’s iPod or iTunes library is of any interest either, right?

I personally would have chose “Textbook Monopolies Suck”. Whatever.

But at least target the market that would benefit the most: poor college students who hate paying for textbooks every semester. College textbooks have been a problem since probably the dawn of time, and now here’s a way to alleviate the pain.

posted on December 14th, 2007 at 1:58 am by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Books, E-Readers, Education, Future, School, Technology

This is definitely filed under “Coolest News This Week”: it is apparently now theoretically possible to create ‘wormholes’ (ala Star Trek or Stargate) on Earth, and use them as point-to-point relays.

Oh Yeah!

Not Exactly…

If you read into the article, you may get highly disappointed. Let me save you from the trouble: we’re not talking about the ability for people to “teleport” or anything. It was made clear that the most practical application would be in the medical world, moving or inserting very small objects into certain places, or for computers’ calculation processes.

Yeah, But

Who cares, right? The fact that you could do something like this would, itself, be awesome, regardless of whether people could go through it or not. Let’s pretend that, as the article mentions, computer components could be “sent” through such a wormhole…

Instant Delivery

If every household had a small portal, or wormhole device, it would have endless uses. The most obvious? The destruction of traditional mail services! No longer would you have to wait 5-7 days for a letter to come from your grandma! No longer would you have to wait for “somewhere around the 15th of the month” for that electricity bill to show up! It would be instantaneous. Maybe even package delivery too, so you could get your shipment of steroids from Mexico faster…

Other Applications

Here’s some other applications I see coming from this:

• Really creepy things like spy on people, easier than it is now
• “Losing” something now becomes a reality if you don’t exactly know where your wormhole goes
• What if you set up two wormholes in series? Throw a ball through it… would it fall? Or go infinitely throughout the loop?

Not The Space-Time Kind, But The EMF Kind

A Long Ways Away

Anything like this is a long ways away, much like quantum computing or that invisibility cloak, but it’s cool to think about anyways. But it’d be even better if it had uses like human transportation, or interstellar space travel…

posted on November 15th, 2007 at 2:47 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Future, Mass Transit, Physics, SciFi, Space, Technology, Wormholes

I’ve been purposely avoiding writing anything about Google’s new OpenSocial project. Why? Because it had the potential to go in a few different directions and be used different ways, and I wanted the hype to die down before seeing what it’s actually worth. (If you’re totally in the dark, read this and this, and about how it was hacked.)

The Hype

If you believe all the hype, this new initiative may be the end of “walled” social networks, meaning that users would put their data in a centralized location, and then distribute it as they wish to other networks and services.

Hello, Michael Arrington.

As I’ve mentioned before, this is a good idea in principle. Places like Ning, 37Signals, and LinkedIn (despite the fact that I hate Ning) are among the first major supporters of this, and are lauding it’s praises as if it’s the best thing since sliced bread. And the blog network (aka TechCrunch, Mashable, RW/W, etc.) is falling over themselves with self-promotional joy, except for the always-straight-shooting O’Reilly.

The Problem

Here’s the central problem: the hype is about “open data”, and yet OpenSocial is being used to create “applications” that can exist on any social network platform, not de-privatizing data. Who really cares if you can SuperCrotchPunch all your friends across 131 different social networks? No-one (except preteens and frat boys).

Also, these applications have apparently been hacked. It’s unclear as to whether this was Google’s fault or the individual network’s, but it is a problem nonetheless. I know I don’t want my data screwed with by some guy who figured out how the system works… do you?

How about “I VampireStabbed Your Mom”?

The Future

If you poke around the Google Code pages for OpenSocial, you’ll find something called “Data API”, which is labeled as “not released” and only provides documentation. But it gives insight into the true intentions of Google…

It appears that sometime in the near future, this “set of APIs” will be used for what everyone thinks it will (cross-network data), or at least be available for use. The companies/services that had access to these APIs before the general public may already be integrating the next release, but nothing’s been said.

The Final Countdown

Here’s how it breaks down: as it stands, OpenSocial is pretty worthless. Most of the “applications” on these social networks are stupid, childish, and totally worthless, so there’s no need to port them to other systems. In the event that Google does what it claims to be doing, aka “tear down [these] wall[s]”, then chances are it will be successful…

Um, yes?

But the question is will this be done with the lack of enthusiasm as other Google releases, or with the fervor of a true PR engine? The fate of the Internet’s data and Google’s dominance over search may depend on their next few dance steps.

Oh, and Facebook needs to be involved for this to be 100% successful. Which remains doubtful.

posted on November 7th, 2007 at 12:07 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Code, Future, Google, OpenID, Programming, Social Graph, Technology, The Internet

Scoble, the famous self-promoter who many people love-to-hate, did a short post tonight on “ECMAScript“, something of a mashup between C++ and Java that aims to replace (read: fix) Javascript. Is this good (everyone knows Javascript was poorly thought out)? Is this bad (aren’t browsers bad enough as it is)?

The Good

Let’s start with the positives. First, everyone (and I do mean everyone) that has used Javascript knows the following:

• not well thought out
• very hard to develop with
• supported and interpreted different ways (because of the DOM) by different browsers

Given those items, the simple fact that ECMAScript has much better syntax and higher level functionality gives it a major leg up on the competition. A language that is based on both C++ and Java, one would assume, has many more development and debugging tools than Javascript/AJAX currently does. What do you use now? Firebug? And that’s it? Oh right, that’s all there is.

Just like the entire .NET Platform.

If you actually look at some of the specs, you should be impressed. I would love to have structure, syntax, and functionality comparable with compiled/server-side/”normal” languages like C/C++, PHP, and Java. True DOM OOP? Oh how you tease me…

The Bad

Take a look at any website that isn’t built entirely in flash. Chances are that it involves at least one “hack”… something to make the fancy menu work? Or perhaps some dynamic data flow courtesy of AJAX? Or one of those little-known projects like Google Maps that work so fluidly? Let’s look at some info on the three “main” browsers (and pretend Opera doesn’t exist):

• Internet Explorer is a total failure, and is currently trying to play “catch up” with the rest of the browser world. This is not news.
• Mozilla/Firefox has become the poster child for attempting to closely follow the W3 recommendations, and receives praise daily from almost anyone who works with computers.
• Safari has been known to be better than IE, but worse than Firefox. However, with the new/forthcoming release, many of the problems in rendering items, as well as it’s idiosyncrasies, are fixed or improved. There’s even rumors of it being based on the ‘Gecko’ engine…

Gates = Sith = Evil. Get it?

My point? The three most widely used browsers are all terribly different. They can’t agree on how to render certain HTML/XHTML and CSS elements… let alone how to handle Javascript and the DOM. What happens when you try and implement a language that is meant to do more while replacing Javascript?

The Ugly

If you’ve been paying attention the last year or two, then you’re aware that very few (if any?) AJAX applications are custom coded from the ground up. More often than not, they use a library like Prototype or jQuery. Even Google doesn’t… they developed a “translator” that moves Java to Javascript, allowing you to code in Java and then implement it as Javascript/AJAX: it’s called the Google Web Toolkit.

Think about all those applications, pages, sites, and “business models” based around using Javascript and a certain library. Think about how long it took them to figure out how to do what they wanted… and then guess at the cost. Once you’ve wrapped your brain around that, think about how long and costly it would be to switch languages.

That would be the web equivalent of recoding your entire program in C++ when it was written in FORTRAN… it would really be that different.

Pretty much the same thing here.

My Stance

Believe it or not, I don’t have one. I’m divided. I really would like to have everything I described as being a benefit of a “real” language to replace Javascript, but I think the outcome of attempting this would be truly disastrous.

Maybe the answer is not to build another language that sits on the browser for DOM usage… why not build that functionality into server-side languages like PHP or Ruby? I realize that sounds impossible, but what if there was a way for the script to recompile itself (or portions of itself) as necessary? Tie in connections to the browser itself, and doesn’t that meet all the requirements without all the hassle?

posted on October 31st, 2007 at 11:20 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Browsers, Code, ECMAScript, Javascript, Programming, Technology, The Internet