Work - New Year's

For the third time in my department, the smart, dependable, funny, pretty girl is too good for us and leaves for officer's training. It is very sad to lose E.C, and I hope she'll get a decent assignment.

I got First Sergeant two weeks early, for the Jewish new year. Considering the 16 hours long work days and working on the weekend, it really is the least they could've done.

Hurt my finger on the Uzi's magazine holding thingy. Still scored 100% day/night and 12 dead (simulated) Arabshostiles. Yeah, in the IDF, even the software developers are tough! ;-)

Work/Life - Down again

It's true that it's the little things that affect one's mood.

During my night shift I've left a poor impression on an interesting female colleague. I feel like I have no influence on my room. My boss and I disagree about schedules and the exact nature of my job. A friend whom I've met in training is getting discharged because his outfit can't afford him and for the next two years he'll be earning roughly three times more than I'll be earning comes December.

Is aimlessly reading about Prosody a waste of my time?

Life - Moving

Tomorrow I'll be moving about a kilometer north-west, and consequently won't have internet access for a few days. Here's hoping the move will be as painless as possible!

Edit: Well, I had internet the next morning, hurray for the national telco provider. Everything is more or less alright.

Oh, and now that the money is back in the bank where it belongs, I can say I've seen close to a hundred thousand US dollars in cash. Looked like a drug deal right out of a Hollywood movie. Wacko Russians!

Hardware Shopping - Dual Core!

Dual core is all the rage now, and with AMD's entry-level dual core processor killing the competition, one can buy one heck of a machine for quite a reasonable price, when you think about it.

part	make & model	US price	US price in ILS	IL price in ILS	markup
cpu	AMD Athlon 64 X2 (939) 3800+ 2x512KB	365	1678.21	2250	34.07%
mobo	MSI nForce4 Ultra (939) K8N Neo4 Platinum	125	574.73	840	46.16%
ram	OCZ/Corsair/Kingston 2x512MB PC3200 CL2.5	90	413.81	780	88.49%
video	XFX GeForce 6600GT 128MB	150	689.68	1050	52.25%
hdd	Western Digital SATA 160GB 7200RPM 8MB Caviar SE	85	390.82	470	20.26%
total		815	3747.24	5390	43.84%
exchange rate	USD to ILS	1	4.59784

Prices in US are rounded up and include shipping & handling, and don't use rebates (20$ and 25$ mail-in rebates are available). Prices in Israel include 17% VAT.

I chose AMD over Intel because of price/performance, but if Intel's hardware virtualization technology lives up to its hype (together with the rest of the cool new stuff that comes in the designed-in-Israel due-in 2006 next-gen Intel chips), I might reconsider.

Personally, I'd want to get a motherboard with integrated graphics (a GeForce 6150 + nForce 430 based solution sounds promising) because those 1000NIS on a a video card I'm not going to use are bugging me.

Compared to last time I did this, I've upgraded to CL2.5 RAM and swapped a WD for the Seagate hard drive because of availability issues.

We are still being ripped off on RAM.

Work - @#$%^&!

I don't want to name names, but yesterday I've had a surreal experience that exemplifies how badly IT projects are run and why I think it's a disgrace and a waste of money and why a project my outfit working on is going to fail. Again.

As part of my training I've interviewed a development team from a neighboring project. The team lead was a female coder promoted to officer to hide the fact she's a bad developer. Naturally, she became an even worse team lead. The team members themselves are all very inexperienced and have very naive notions about how stuff works in real life, especially concerning QA (especially unit, integration, system and acceptance testing), SCM, performance benchmarking, verifying scalability, deployment, user training, support, debugging in a production environment, maintenance, etc (basically everything other than churning out bad code). They all live in this dream where they release a version 1 in December, when what they had to show me looks nowhere near anything I'd show a client as "ready for release". To find out how bad it really is, I've turned to the systems people: I've managed to interview G.B., who is a team lead of a dedicated group of DBAs who support the project. We've shared war stories like one DBA to another, and man, she has revived my faith in females in IT. The place is full of great people, if only the fucked up institution could inspire them all to work!

Every time I think I'm too much of a "Rosh Gadol" for my job description and how big the gap between what I'm supposed to be responsible for and what I feel responsible for, I get the feeling I was wrong to decline officer training and yet I still believe I'm not the right person to be a great officer (INTJs are simply not leaders. I'd want to strangle people who are slacking, and that's not allowed). Problem is, it might've been better for me and my outfit if I were one. I'll see, maybe I'll change, maybe the environment will change.

God, how I hate "Rosh Katan" people who don't care about their craft!

On a completely unrelated note: E.P. has invited me to his birthday, day after tomorrow. I can't believe how excited I am! Don't have a clue about a present, though.

Books - Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

So, I've read it a while ago and never reviewed. But first of all, let's establish my bias: Not only am I a depressed overly talkative introvert, I'm a fascist as well. I've known it for a while, I get it from me mom. I don't like people who like to avoid work (and especially people who boast about it, a very trendy thing to do in modern day Israel) and I don't like stupid people. I'm working on the latter, as I realize why I'm wrong to do that.

Personally, I have zero experience with autistic kids. Any modern book about the subject must stress they are no worse than any other kid: they can grow to become productive members of society, all they need is love and patience, like any other child. That's all great, and the lesson "if you try hard enough, you can be anything" is important in encouraging children to apply themselves in school etc., but I disagree with the conclusion about the kid himself, as I understand it from the book.

The kid fantasizes about all normal people dying and he having the world to himself, never again being forced to interact with human beings. He carries a knife and pulls it on people seemingly at any available opportunity. He has no respect for police officers or authority of any kind, if he feels he is in the right. He has no compassion for human beings, as creatures who possess a soul and the right to live, but rather treats them like computers that walk. He taught himself A-level math.

I don't know how his arrested social development is connected to normal hormonal changes during puberty (if any), but he's supposed to be fifteen and has shown no interest in girls (or boys, for that matter). I don't know if he'll grasp the intricacies of courting, but I foresee problems on that front, as no one can explain for him in detail what constitutes "sexual harassment" these days - it can be anything, depending on the other person's feelings, a concept he doesn't quite grasp.

I guess that years of kind and firm treatment with a psychologist can help him improve his social skills, and he probably can do well in some scientific endeavor (though mathematicians working alone is a rare thing indeed these days, Andrew Wiles being the exception that proves the norm), but I think he's a disaster just waiting to happen. I can't help but feel sorry for his parents, adulterous as they may be, for at least they qualify for "human". Am I heartless?

Another thing is that I noticed I share some of my nerdier qualities with the main character. For example, he disaproves of euphemisms for the same reason I do. I think it is a warning to us nerds: behave, or people will treat you like they treat autists. And no, simulating asperger-syndrome is not cool, and does not make you a hacker.

Work - More ranting

So, free training. Two years after initial training all coders get an upgrade where they learn about architecture. Actually, the idea is to try and make the coders think outside their projects, technologies and environments and learn broadly about modern IT. Among other activities there are introductory lectures on topics like n-tier, UML, interpersonal communication, database tuning, datawarehousing, design patterns, networks, QA, SOA, dotNET vs. Java, ERP, storage with backup & recovery, security and lots of others. Three weeks total, by the best consultants available. A bloody dream come true for anyone wishing to get any sort of clue about the industry.

The first lecture was given by Eyal Rubin (I think that's the name; anyway, he's a big boss there or something) from 2Train4. Right at the start he got so many blank stares the level very quickly dropped to kindergarten. He had to review OOP, TCP/IP, RDBMS… very, very basic stuff. Someone asked what's a proxy. People didn't know about the existence of stored procedures. He used euphemisms for HTTP, XML, SOAP, SOA to avoid using the terminology after he had to explain "port 80". It took him a while to explain "application server" and how come scalability is not always linear. I was so ashamed I took off my pin.

I know about the five different worlds, and I realize that hadn't I been a huge computer geek, I wouldn't have known about EJB's either, but some of that stuff was covered in the initial training! A bloody TCP socket, for crying out loud, and SELECT statements! Gah.

Work - Need to vent

Our new resource turned out to be a big fat "no hire" with no skill set, a big head and an attitude problem. The guy has never seen any OOD in his life, has no respect for coding standards, no experience in team work, no understanding of PC hardware, doesn't know what "K&R" or "Stroustrup" are. Basically, he lacks all skills the company paid for.

But my main problem is that his motivation for getting the job was completely different from the rest of us: You see, he is fit for combat duty. So, nearing the end of his senior year of high school (when he was already a full year older than his peers, for reason unknown), he had several choices:

1. Enlist, serve three years in infantry, armor or artillery.
2. Go to college, get a degree, serve six years as an engineer (three years paid).
3. Stay in school for an extra year, get an associate degree, serve four to five years (a year or two paid).

He probably decided real military service is for suckers and college is hard, so what kind of associate degree to get? Mechanics, electronics, software. "Computers" sounds like "money", so a year later here he is.

Now, his goal successfully met, he has no motivation to work hard or learn anything.

And his fucking Israeli attitude! @#$%^&*!

Personal - Being late

I have noticed that every time I meet R.Y. while commuting I am… shall we say "not at my best"? I wondered why is that. So I figure: we only meet on a bus at a time that means I'm very late, so it usually means I've tumbled out of bed and into my uniform in under ten minutes.
It's interesting though that my poor state doesn't bother me otherwise. Maybe I should readjust my answers on that meme to get "dork" instead of "geek".

Books - Edward E. "Doc" Smith - Galactic Patrol (Lensman Series Book #3)

So, I've read somewhere that it was among the first, defining works of the Space Opera genre. I got curious. All I've go to say after reading it is thank God it's not 1937. I have never read a fanfic, not on FFN, not even intentionally bad fanfic, that was this horrible. I can hardly call it a proper novel. The very outdated technology and nomenclature was bad enough ("ray guns", "ether"? WTF!), but the over-the-top depiction of absolutely everything, the non-existent characterization, and Gary Stu hero, a notable lack of morals and disregard for human life really made it hard to believe it was a published work (a bestseller?), not something scribbled in a bored 4th grader's note book. The worst parts were the blatant racism and sexism: worship of classical idealized Arian God-like build and features (a seven foot tall blue-eyed blonde male whose body is described by a male narrator, in a male leading character's words, speaking to an obviously intended male reader, as "beautiful") and the stated as truism belief of the narrator that women are inherently feeble minded and are only good for treating the wounded, recreation and procreation. I've wanted to stop reading so many times, but I've kept on to try and see if it got any worse. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that it had, indeed, got worse.

Of purely historical interest nowadays. Avoid if possible, read with caution.

Books - Terry Pratchett - Wyrd Sisters (Discworld, Book 6)

So, the promised review. I've read the Hebrew translation (that's what I had with me), without reading the original before or after (I might yet). I've managed to reverse translate some of the jokes, but still I didn't laugh nearly as much as I remember laughing while reading The Colour of Magic. Partly it's because a peculiarity of mine: while reading or especially watching comedic situations, I often feel embarrassed for the "fool" instead of laughing at him. Thus I didn't laugh too much at Magrat's naïvete or Granny Weatherwax's imposing personality. Reading the reviews I've noticed I've missed some (most?) of the Shakespearian jokes. Gytha Ogg is brilliant ("Three marriages and an adventurous girlhood had left Nanny Ogg with thigh muscles that could crack coconuts"). That's it.

Life - A weekend on base

Last Thursday, fifteen minutes before end of the work week, a guy who is in charge of arranging the duty shifts / rotation calls and says I must stay for the weekend because they really need me and they're very sorry It's on such a short notice and they'll compensate me later. The notice was indeed short — I was already "late for duty" by hours and needed many more to get home and take things for the weekend and get back. So they decided the need was grave and I won't go home. Instead my parents can bring me items I might need¹.

Ridiculous, but an order is an order and thus, I've spent the weekend with some old and new friends. Everything but the weather was great - the guys (people brought laptops and guitars!), the CO ("I don't like to do the paperwork, can we pretend I didn't catch you asleep and you'll stay awake for two more hours?"), the girls (I took guesses at their data, will check Monday how I did), even the notorious cooking (compensated by local take-out joints being open 24/7). We eventually got so tired from the heat and humidity I beat a guy at chess who in usual circumstances would wipe the board with me.

A girl, all of one month in the service behind her (one day out of bootcamp), didn't handle third watch too well (Why go to sleep while there are friends around to talk to? Because you don't share a watch with those friends meaning your sleep cycles aren't in sync, but of course you have to stop being a teenager for a moment to get this) and whined to the CO about being too sleepy on the third night. He took pity and so I got to fill in for her.

She realized she has done something not nice and to appease her conscience (her own words) brought me vending machine coffee and snack bars at around 4AM, claiming insomnia. We end up sitting there talking until dawn and the end of the shift. What's interesting is that instead of the oversized dirty field uniform she wore short, tight, black somethings with more lacy under-somethings in sight. Also she was playing with her hair and rocking back and forth, showing decent amount of cleavage.

I kept my distance, playing the perfect listener and gentleman, letting her tell me a condensed account of her life ages ten to eighteen, and pretending not to notice anything, thinking she didn't need me to be a guy, but two hours later, with first light, the magic gone and we departing in different directions, I realized that maybe she was hitting on me and I was a giant prat for not even taking a phone number², especially since I had the perfect legit reason — to read her her own file off the computer at the office³.

1 - Z.L. has immediately lent me two books he had with him. Book review posts to follow.

2 - or ICQ UIN? What is it that I'm supposed to ask for these days?

3 - For reasons unknown (Well… I can guess, but that would be a really long digression), the military don't tell people how well they tested, and thus everyone feels obligated to get this otherwise completely uninteresting information through black market channels and longish chains of friends-of-friends).

Life - Updates

I've found out (thanks to T.S.) that the military has accepted a plea we (mostly D.Z. and N.K.) filed two years ago about our signing for extra six months of enlisted service being illegal (though they never bothered to tell us). It means I'll be discharged in January '08 instead of July '08, and more importantly I'll get my first real paycheck in January '06. It will be minimum wage I think, but that's ten times more than what I get now!

I got tired of my trusty old Nokia 5120 and replaced it with a Motorola C650. I like Nokia better, but this one had a camera. I'm still learning to use it. It's so bloody children-oriented and the interface is so flashy. It looks unprofessional!
I don't believe I'm typing this, what am I, forty?

I've downloaded episodes of West Wing. It's not bad at all.

My boss' boss' boss and her boss were replaced today/tomorrow (scheduled, not sudden). We'll see how we like the new people.

Today, very suddenly, a new guy was added to my team. He's fresh out of training and we don't know yet how good is he or whether he likes computers/software.

HP Fandom - Wahlee's "This Moment" H/G fluff

I consider Emily a friend, and I loved her previous writing and completely agreed with her in all those shipping wars I didn't really participate in, and I find nothing wrong with the story (except the typography, which I'm sure is not her fault and will be promptly fixed). But after HBP I just want to say Ginny-Sue is, if not strictly OOC, plain dull. Jo didn't tell us, even through the eyes the worst narrator ever, what Ginny is like, except that she appears to be Fred and George's female third twin and is probably good at snogging. We don't really know if her feelings for Harry are any deeper than her celebrity crush from years past. We don't know what she and Harry talk about during their lake-side excursions (if at all). We don't know she loves him and anticipates his idiotic behavior, or why she does something so atypical and quietly accepts it. All we know is that Harry was physically attracted to her and appreciated her unsophisticated sense of humor, and later was happy dating her. So what? Maybe Harry, being depraved of human touch the way he is (thanks to his loving family), needed the kind of relationship Ron had with Lavender, got exactly that from Ginny, and unlike Ron, was deliriously happy about it? Maybe they just talk Quidditch all the time. Maybe the first thing he did was checking whether she's a real redhead. Maybe I'm being stupid and need to go to sleep.

Overanalyzing - How it all began

Or, at least, my best guess is Walt Disney cartoons are partly to blame. When I was six, I used to watch the Sunday morning cartoons with my parents on our new (well… new to us, it being bought from friends who have emigrated to the US) color TV and I remember my favorite show for a while had been Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers and my favorite character was (of course) Gadget Hackwrench.

For those who don't remember: link #1, link #2.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Management

In accordance with Ariel Sharon's plan to leave settlements in Gaza and the West Bank (what a stupid name! But I guess "Judea and Samariya" reveal it to be Jewish land and that's an inconvenient truth these days), the armed forces are in "emergency mode". Thus, some IT systems have been deemed "critical" and cannot go down, ever.
There's an underground war-room-style damage control center with walls covered by big screen maps of communication networks and traffic-light colored status boards. The room is manned around the clock by nervous, sleepy officers (some running on pure caffeine, some are in their third trimester) who are in charge of making sure nothing breaks or fix it before any one notices it broke and then make sure it never breaks again.

In a dimly lighted corner of the room, very important to the story but completely disregarded by everyone else, slacks a well camouflaged software developer turned cheap yet unreliable phone answering machine sitting a twelve hour shift, unmoving, waiting for a phone call that will never come, announcing something important broke and several room-fulls of monitoring equipment never noticed. Blended into his environment, his presence goes completely unnoticed by the war-room's proper inhabitants who forget to act like responsible officers completely on top of the situation and revert to the developers and techs they were a decade ago, not-quite-adults with baby sitters to arrange and chicken-and-egg logistical problems to solve.

Here's a good example of crisis in IT-land: Person A must have item B to be able to leave place C, which he must do to be effective. Item B is located in Place D, some four hours drive from place C and cannot be taken out until it is properly signed off by said Person A, who cannot reach it because he needs it to be able to leave place C. Something must give for the situation to be resolved, namely a set of orders or policy, but that becomes a point of pride for the brass issuing those orders, for if your orders can be waived in favor of someone else's orders, you are obviously less important.

As I watched wise old men with many years of experience in the field (meaning they know shit about current systems) mediate and judge deeply technical issues guided by very little factual knowledge, uncertain advice, caution gained by experience and rules of thumb gleaned from mistranslations of the US military and IT press, I've thought how much I don't want to get promoted to a position where I won't have time to get into the technical details and have to rely on video-conferences with "a boy"* to get a guesstimate on time to reboot a network appliance or help with pivoting some data from SQL Server using Excel. Instead I wished I could be that boy - the one they know is reliable and knows his stuff.

* - they mean "kid", but Semitic languages are chauvinistic. The proper word, "G.I" or "rating", is treated as derogatory.

I have for two years been contemplating a filk tentatively titled "I am the very model of a modern Project Manager", but alas, my rhymes leave much to be desired. I hoped this latest experience would provide inspiration, but my hopes have been shattered to bits upon my active vocabulary's rocky shore.

Life - My God! Genius! Interest improves quality!

I have been talking to anyone who would listen, trying to phrase my ideas about how the world is so fucked up because people don't do what they like. That because people are unmotivated by what they do for money they do it badly. I see it all the time and it looks like the cause of so much grief, and I'm not the only one because all the smart people I talk to agree with me (and not just to get me to shut up), and it's not just in the military or just in Israel, it's everywhere. It's nothing new, Pirsig talks about it, but just catching up on Paul Graham's latest essay I cried out "you've read my mind!". The question is: How can I make a difference? And I'm not ready to start a startup now, nor will I able to for the next three years. Damn.

Found on The Web - Bad Writing

It's so bad, it's good. Better than reading FFN! The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, 2005 Results.

Pop Culture - Serenity

Ooh, I've seen the trailer for Serenity (a.k.a "Firefly - The Movie"). I wanna go see it!

Coding - Topological Sort and Depth-First Search

So, I've actually stumbled into some code at work where I need to implement a topological sort for dependencies. And I've read about DFS and stuff, googled a bit and even opened a real comp-sci textbook we have at the office. While all I really needed was Wikipedia! And I'm prototyping in JavaScript like some microsoftie instead of in Python like real l33t h4x0rz! Oh, the shame!

Anyway, this is what I've come up so far:

Array.prototype.shuffle = function(p_nTimes) {
    if (isNaN(p_nTimes) || (p_nTimes <= 0) || (this.length < 2)) return;
    while (p_nTimes--) {
        var i = Math.floor(Math.random() * this.length);
        var j = Math.floor(Math.random() * this.length);
        var t = this[i];
        this[i] = this[j];
        this[j] = t;
    }
};

function item(p_strName, p_arrDeps) {
    this.Name = p_strName;
    this.arrDeps = p_arrDeps;
    this.bIsInStack = false;
    this.bHasBeenVisited = false;
};

function create_deps(p, k) {
    var deps = {};
    for (var i = 0; i < p; i++) {
        var curr = new item(i, []);
        for (var j = 0; j < i; j++)
            if (Math.floor(Math.random() * 100) % k == 0)
                curr.arrDeps.push(j);
        curr.arrDeps.shuffle(p);
        deps[curr.Name] = curr;
    }
    return deps;
};

function print_deps(deps) {
    for (var i in deps) {
        document.write(deps[i].Name + ': ');
        for (var j = 0; j < deps[i].arrDeps.length; j++)
            document.write(deps[i].arrDeps[j] + ', ');
        document.write('<br/>\n');
    }
    document.write('<br/>\n');
};

function topo_sort_dfs_short_circuit_on_cycle(o) {
    var list = [];
    var cycle = null;

    for (var i in o) {
        (function(p) {
            if (p.bIsInStack) cycle = p.Name;
            if (cycle != null) return;
            p.bIsInStack = true;
            if (!p.bHasBeenVisited) {
                p.bHasBeenVisited = true;
                for (var idxDep = 0; idxDep < p.arrDeps.length; idxDep++)
                    arguments.callee(o[p.arrDeps[idxDep]]);
                list.push(p.Name);
            }
            p.bIsInStack = false;
        })(o[i]);
        if (cycle != null) break;
    }

    return [cycle, list];
};

Next step is trying to see whether a non-recursive implementation is faster (yes, I benchmark JavaScript) and then STL. C# I'll do on company time (haven't installed mono yet).