I’m back in the software business.

http://brickstreetsoftware.com

If you have been investing for any length of time, you are probably familiar with Agora Inc. and their breathless direct marketing pieces about stocks that are poised to skyrocket.

Do not buy anything from Agora Inc. — Agora Inc. does not run money; they publish newsletters. If they were as good at running money as their newsletters say they are, they would not be publishing newsletters. They would be running money; it pays better.

The SEC sued Porter Stansberry and Agora Inc. for fraud in 2003.
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/comp18090.htm

In 2007, they were found guilty and ordered to pay a fine of $1,312,620 and penalties of $240,000. For your reading pleasure, I pulled the documents from Maryland Federal District Court.

Judgement Order

Judgement Opinion

Thanks to Stansberry, I lost some money on VaxGen stock, so I think this couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys. A few years later, I was having lunch with an executive of a biotech company. When I asked him about VaxGen, he said, “Everyone in the business knew that vaccine would never work.”

There have been low-flying fighter jets over Toronto all weekend; the air show is in town. I just saw a P-51 Mustang, an F-16 and an F-22 give demos over the downtown financial district. The F-22 flies like a UFO — it has thrust-vectoring engines and appears to hover in the air as it maneuvers. Wikipedia has a pretty good overview of this plane.

Let’s be thankful that when we see and hear fighter jets flying low, it means we’re having a party.

In March 07, I decided to try out Prosper.com. Prosper is a peer-to-peer marketplace for loans. The allure of Prosper is that you can loan out money at high interest, much higher than a savings account. But there a number of problems with Prosper.

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I was the lunchtime entertainment at a recent CMU Alumni Advisory board meeting. I ended up telling war stories about my dot com startup days. Here are the slides. Enjoy.

Slides (pdf, 384kb)

Riya decides to close their Bangalore R&D office and consolidate engineering in Silicon Valley. India was getting to be too expensive to deal with the hassles:

Coverage in InfoWorld:
http://www.infoworld.com/infoworld/article/07/05/29/riya-wage-inflation-sinks_1.html

CEO’s blog discussing the decision:
http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/2007/04/episode_26_indi.html

One of my clients has been outsourcing a large software development effort to an Indian team. The time zone differences, experience level of the staff, and turnover have been a big drag on productivity.

Originally posted on the main site.

This document describes how schema extensibility is typically achieved in commercial enterprise software applications; in particular, in customer relationship management (CRM) applications. A future update will discuss newer extensibility mechanisms such as native XML column types in databases.

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I have a T-Mobile phone. Their web site has been slow to the point of unusability for the past week. I don’t know if the problem is on my end or on their end, but I have no problem reaching any other site on the Internet so I suspect that I’m ok.

After a week of trying to ignore their dead slow web site, I decide to be a good citizen and call T-Mobile customer support to report it. The first CSR puts me on hold and sends me to tech support. The tech support CSR puts me on hold and sends me to wireless data support. The wireless data CSR says the web site works fine for her. I say, just because it works for you doesn’t mean it works for me. She puts me on hold to talk to her supervisor. After a couple of minutes, she says they have verified that there is nothing wrong with the web site. I say, great, it’s still broken here so please take this data and forward it to the appropriate person. She tries to convince me that nothing is wrong and this is all my fault. I say, just take the data and escalate it to the right people. She says, I’ll ask my supervisor. Fine, I say, and hang up.

I know that the CSR is measured on his or her ability to get me off the phone as fast as possible. But maybe they should measure how they just pissed me off for trying to help them.

Did a quick test of 2 PHP IDEs. I wanted to see if anything could be more productive than my current EasyPHP and XEmacs environment. It was partially motivated by the fact that XEmacs for Windows is broken at the moment.

The test was essentially whether I could download the tool and be productive in 20 minutes.

Zend Studio failed the test. I installed Zend Studio Server and then Zend Studio Client. I then tried to edit and debug my large PHP application. I couldn’t figure out where Zend Studio wanted the files to be and gave up after screwing around with it for an hour.

PHPed passed the test. The help file described how to set up debugging (drop a dll into the PHP extensions directory and edit the php.ini file) and I was able to debug code running in EasyPHP in about 5 minutes. The editor itself is a bit sluggish so I may end up editing in emacs and debugging in PHPed.

Update: XEmacs.org posted an installer for the latest version so that php-mode works again. I didn’t end up buying a license for PHPed since I’m such a cheap bastard and I’m really good at debugging code by inserting print statements…

ToDo: Look at PHP Eclipse

The Linux Desktop Trial lasted about 3 days. Actually, it was a Linux laptop trial, and the verdict is that Linux on the laptop (Fedora 4) has gotten a lot better but it still sucks. The Gnome / X environment is slow and sluggish to use. Configuring WiFi is a huge hassle. And don’t even get me started on print driver support. I’m so happy to be back on Windows; on identical hardware (Dell C400, 1.33ghz Pentium M, 1GB RAM) the GUI environment is much snappier and I have working drivers for everything.

The disk on my WinXP laptop crashed for the second time this year. The new disk that crashed was a Samsung MP0603H 2.5″ 60GB HDD that I bought in mid 2005. It started making clicking noises after about 90 days, and I ignored this since, after all, it was a new drive. This morning, however, MS Outlook started getting flaky so I rebooted. Then the disk wouldn’t spin up anymore. Dead dead dead. Samsung MP0603H 2.5″ 60GB HDD: DO NOT BUY ONE OF THESE! Now I get to learn how good the manufacturer’s warranty is.

So now I’m running on a backup Linux (Fedora 4) laptop. Given that this is my 3rd disk crash this year, I’m going to try keeping all of my email online in a gmail account and to use Yahoo for my calendar. So far I’m very pleased with Gmail’s ability to handle multiple email accounts; you can set it up so that nobody needs to know you are using gmail.

When you are analyzing a query plan in SQL Server, you need to be aware that time spent in User Defined Functions (UDFs) is not included in the query plan. This is a problem because programmers seem to like using UDFs to make their SQL more modular and because it is very easy to write UDFs that kill your performance. (See this article “UDF Performance Costs” for a simple example.)

A reliable way of measuring the costs of a UDF is to run your stored proc with and without the UDF, and to measure the time it takes to run it. I have seen 10x performance improvements between sprocs with UDFs and sprocs rewritten to remove UDFs.

Cringley speculates that Apple will be coming out with an HD video iPod with a retinal scan display.

Link: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050714.html

Update (Oct 2005): Apple released the Video iPod but it does not use the Microvision display. Hope you didn’t buy the stock.

The Economist ran an article on the Cell chip so I figured I better check it out. Nicholas Blachford has an excellent review of the technology here. High level summary: a PowerPC with 8 vector processor units, no virtual memory, and no caches. It was designed for media-intensive consumer-electronics applications like gaming consoles and HDTV. According to the Blachford article, the Sony PS3 will have 4 Cell cores and the graphics will probably scream.

Blachford also speculates that cheap desktop and server computers based on the Cell chip may finally beat out the x86 architecture for general purpose computing. His argument is that Cell will deliver more processing power at lower prices (and at a lower temperature), so industry will naturally start to use Cell parts for general purpose computers. He also speculates that Cell will become the de factor standard architecture for the gaming software industry: Cells are so cheap that you could ship a PS3 as a PC daughtercard; the availability of a $100 PS3 that one could embed in a PC would increase the attractiveness of the PS3 software platform and hurt the PC game platform.

Which brings us to the key point about Cell: it’s going to be a bitch to write software for this thing. Vector processing has been around forever. It’s great for applications that are, well, vectorizable and it blows for everything else. The ability of Cell to win the GP computing war against x86 will depend on how well it can run modern software, with object-oriented programming, virtual machines, and 14 zillion levels of abstraction to help you forget that the software actually runs on grody stuff like hardware. It will be interesting to see if IBM has a research project to get a fast JVM or CLR on Cell. You can think of some obvious ways to partition the problem, like a separate JVM per cell or threads from a single JVM on a set of cells, but it’s not clear whether the memory architecture will make this worthwhile.

The (US) Federal Trade Commission issued recommendations to Congress on ways to reform patent law. The whole affair was rather disappointing. Most of the testimony on software was from people with a vested interest in the status quo: intellectual property lawyers and people from big software companies with large patent portfolios.
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Catching up on a month of reading today. Ran across this:

http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html

Insightful analysis of why the US and Europe don’t connect on foreign policy. A quote:

The current situation abounds in ironies. Europe’s rejection of power politics, its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations, have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil. Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important. And now, in the final irony, the fact that United States military power has solved the European problem, especially the “German problem,” allows Europeans today to believe that American military power, and the “strategic culture” that has created and sustained it, are outmoded and dangerous.

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I got tired of the crappy homegrown bloxsom-ported-to-php blog tool I was using so I moved to WordPress. I wanted something that was PHP (perl reminds me too much of teco) and open source with state-of-the-art functionality. I broke all the permalinks; sorry.

My intention is for this site to be an archive of some of my older technical work on microkernel architecture, mostly so I don’t lose it but also for the occasional traveler that asks about it. In addition, I’ll keep a log of the technical stuff I’m working on and syndicate it to the world (as advocated in this editorial in the Java Developer’s Journal). So enjoy and send feedback.