http://nik.blue-edge.bg Software as executable philosophy Fri, 05 Oct 2007 14:07:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The author of Gmail has a great post called "The problem with conventional databases". He discusses how long term trends in hardware influence the architecture options for heavily loaded servers. In Blue Edge we have used with good success non-database web server architectures, where the application has most of its ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=21 My girlfriend is translating / scientific editing a book about the brain, with exercises. Lots of them are not directly translatable, and one is about solving anagrams. So she needed a bunch of anagrams in Bulgarian, and making an anagram is very different from solving one (and harder). I set ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=20 Continuing the topic of beliefs in software development. The stereotype of programmers (geeks) says they love open source and hate Microsoft. But often it is the other way around - look at any social site dedicated to Microsoft technologies. This strikes me as next to impossible in theory. A religion (or any ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=17 I watched The Departed recently. The first lines in the movie were: I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me. By the mafia boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Too bad the movie didn't quite live up to the good start. http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=18 It is beyond any doubt for me that in software development, people do their jobs supported mostly by faith. That's curious, because programming itself mercilessly points you your own mistakes and demands them to be fixed, and your good intentions or anything else but correct code make no difference. So ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=16 Branding is ubiquitous in modern markets, although it is a popular notion that brands add no real value for the customer. For every piece of clothing by a big name brand you are likely to find another, no-name alternative with same or higher quality which costs less. That is, if ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=14 There is a summer school in cognitive science at NBU. The first week I attended just a neuroscience course by Kalina Christoff (great lecturer), too bad Jeff Elman couldn't come. During the second week, the cognition of apes and young children is in focus and looks very interesting too. If I ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=13 I like to be able to listen to all mp3s linked from a page with just clicking a button, without downloading or copy-pasting individual links in Winamp for streaming. The m3ugen bookmarklet for Firefox does just that, all happening client-side in your browser, without referring to external sites. I had problems ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=12 If you do code reviews with newbies you have inevitably seen it. [code lang="cpp"] if (myBoolVar==true) {...[/code] Or: [code lang="cpp"] if (_some_expression_) { return true; } else { return false; } [/code] Of course this can and should be reduced to: [code lang="cpp"] if (myBoolVar) {...[/code] And: [code lang="cpp"]return _some_expression_;[/code] If you don't think there is ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=11 I tend to write in Bulgarian (my native language) disregarding some rules although I know and can follow them. For example, I often don't place all the commas, emphasizing only the main structure of a sentence with several subordinate sentences (an example follows). Например често не поставям запетайките при всички подчинени ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=10 Since this blog has the word "philosophy" in the tagline, I thought by the fourth or fifth post it's time to deal with this question so that I can solve it and move on ;-) The meaning of life should be different for different people. The meaning of anyone's life should ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=7 Science is about making models that match reality. Engineering is about making reality that matches your models. http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=9 A few coleagues and I use bikes to come to work when the weather is right. This spring the weather is Ok, but the air is pretty dusty because there is a lot of construction work going on in Sofia, the traffic is pretty heavy and the municipalty silently skipped ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=8 I was on a long weekend kayaking the Veleka river with several colleagues and other guys. It was supposed to be "relax" rowing, but turned out somewhat extreme with a lot of natural dams, trees fallen in the river, swift current and overturning our boat twice in the cold water ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=5 What does this mean? At some level programming is really about creating computational models of parts of the world. These models are at least partially verifiable, because we can compare what we get from the model with what we see in reality. The way we build those models reflects our ... http://nik.blue-edge.bg/?p=3