Slow day, not the wonderful Saturday ride I had envisioned. I missed Spectrum again, saw them on Canada and lost them. I am really barely able to keep up with those guys!
Then, on a shorter evening ride, a flat. This one was particularly annoying: a nail that punched right straight through the tire. It stuck so deep it took me a lot of convincing to get it out. Remnant of the work they are doing at the intersection of Arastradero and Foothill.
Continue readingI am taking a week off in September to celebrate my birthday by myself and chose my favorite vacation spot: Hawaii. This time it’s going to be the Big Island herself, largest mass in the Central Pacific by far. And of course I needed a good guide book.
Wizard Publishing has a wonderful set of books, created and written with care (if with a tiny bit too much enthusiasm) on three of the major Hawaiian islands. They started out with a Kauai Guidebook that blasts any competitor away, and then followed up with a volume on Maui and the Big Island.
I haven’t been to the Big Island since I read the book, so of course I won’t be able to critique appropriately this book and the value of its information. I will still take the time and talk about the two other books, and how much they have made fact gathering and fact traveling easy.
For one, the detail of the books is incredible. If there is a hike to any place, there is very accurate description as to how to get there, and all the circumstances of the fun. Of course we were a bit disappointed as we saw that the marvelous pools in West Maui were quite stagnant and filthy, and that the famous blowhole was merely fizzing a few droolings – but all in all, it is easy to navigate with the information provided.
Just as important though is the negative criticism. Sometimes it’s mere complaining for the complaint’s sake, but most of the time, there is good reason for the disappointment. The authors will warn you not to go some place, and you better heed the advice!
Will add more info once I come back.
Another wonderful Saturday morning, and the first time I tried to get into the Spectrum ride. It’s been three weeks, now, that some Spectrum rider tells me I should join them, so I tried. Of course, I got delayed by something irrelevant (this time the discovery of friendster, the newest dating site that features degrees of separation. Check it out, I think the concept is one of the best around!
Well, in any case, I got there too late to join the group. I saw them in the distance, but lost them at Arastradero. They must have turned left where I went straight. Didn’t see them at all from there on, but hit another two groups. With my trying to chase Spectrum and by virtue of having to chase the other two groups, I clocked in really nicely. You can check it on the bike log, but I think I made 57 minutes to Canada, and 53 coming back! Much better than last week, where I barely made 1:02 and 59!!!
Continue readingLooks like the season is in full swing… I am riding to work every day, and there are more and more bikers that I greet every morning. One skinny guy from Webcor/AV rides against my direction towards Foothill and is as reliable as a clockwork: if I meet him after El Camino, I am fine – otherwise I am late.
Of course, this can mean only one thing: it is about time to start thinking about my trip to Hawai’i at the end of next month. I think I will take Bianchi with me, I don’t trust the airline with Ti. Will have to get the old goose up and running again, it has been faithfully waiting for me for over a year now.
Continue readingSometimes the inventor of a specific thing is the best person to explain it. There is no better way to learn about relativity than to go back to the original article written by Einstein; how better could anyone explain the value of existentialism than Sartre; Kernighan and Ritchie did a wonderful job at explaining C.
Stroustrup is not one of these. I recall the first time I read his book, back twenty years ago or so. I found it entirely unreadable, with so many exceptions added to the rule that you barely could remember either. There seemed to be no logic in the concepts, everything was very haphazard and unplanned.
Now, with twenty years of experience, a lot of programming languages in the back of my mind, I set out on a voyage of rediscovery, trying to impress myself with a book that I found cryptic and that I now would find insightful and revealing.
Not so. I read all of it for a second time, end to end, marking relevant sentences and trying to absorb the flow. There is none to speak of. The book is still cryptic. Only that now I know there are languages that are better designed, better executed and surely better described.
What made learning C++ so difficult, the astonishing number of rules and exceptions, is in hindsight poor design. Stroustrup tried to squeeze as many options into his language as possible, making C++ look and feel as bastardized as Perl would look after its 5th release.
The compiler tries to be smart, and does a lot of translation implicitly. Of course, this causes all sorts of weird errors, since it may become smarter than the programmer. To obviate, C++ allows you to override behaviors.
In general, C++ sounds like a language written at a time people still thought of memory as a precious commodity, while they were still not sure what they needed of the constructs provided by object orientation.
Take templates, for instance. Hard to tell what they are good for, if not to define collections and default operator behavior. But both cases would have been better served by a different approach, in which collections and operators are handled differently by the compiler, as native language types instead of as constructs.But aside from criticism to the language, the book itself is not well written. There is no general introduction to a concept, just an astonishing amount of rules that are listed in monotonous sequence, barely distinguished by their importance to the programmer. It somehow feels as if Stroustrup considers all rules children of his, and he doesn’t want to favor one over the other.
The book, again, suffers from a lack of structure. Headings, highlights, emphasis are not well distributed, adding to the overall impression of an amorphous entity that becomes inextricable.
C++, as it emerges from this book, is a language for the initiated that has no desire to use any different tool. It is the Perl of the eighties, the language that everyone mucks with, but that very few actually understand.
If you have ever worked in a larger engineering group that uses C++, you’ll have seen those frustrated emails come about, in which a poor chap asks why this piece of code doesn’t work, and there is always some guru that (in the most arrogant tone so typical of the Initiated in the Arcane) tell you about some rule that is on the footnote of a page in the Stroustrup.
It is no surprise that languages with more explicit approaches, like Java and C# are moving on and winning converts all over. C++ seems, in hindsight, a really bad idea.
If you go to Palo Alto Cycle’s web site, you’ll find a list of rides in the area. The first one (at this press time) was called the “Ring of Fire”. Sounded interesting, and it was about around the area that I peruse anyway.
I left home and rode peacefully on Foothill to El Monte. A sharp left turn there and I was on my way up Moody Road. Ah! Moody! A virtually flat ride all the way, I had thought of it as a short cut while trying to conquer Page Mill Road (another Ring of Fire thing). I knew it by heart by now, and I surely was glad that’s where I would start the Ring.
Continue readingMore successful at collecting food stamps than at spending them, I ended up giving the last four away. I had been riding every single day, although I forgot to turn on the bike computer half the time. In the end, it worked me out and it was fun. California in the summer is really a blast, and riding home at night still occurs at daylight.
My colleagues that left for the Tour are back, proud of having mastered Alpe d’Huez and Mont Ventoux. Lucky them! The only hill I did in the last weeks was probably Golden Oak, and I am turning into quite the slob.
Continue readingOne would have thought it quite unnecessary to read yet another book on Intel after reading “Only the Paranoid Survive”. The latter, though, is written by exactly the person that is responsible for all the odd confrontationalism that is so typical of the company, so that I needed one more voice to get clarity.
Well, as I expected to be true, Inside Intel is indeed much more objective about the company, relating very extensively how the bully nature of the CEO could mold the company into a litigious, litigant and confrontational work environment.
The author spares nothing: how Grove pushed his legal team to sue without merit, just to prevent competitors from succeeding in the market; how Grove threw people out because he thought they were no longer fit, which meant they had fallen out of grace of their managers; how Grove introduced a host of measures to make the company an annoying place to work for – late lists being the most famous.
In the end, after reading about Oracle, Sun, Intel, and of course Microsoft, it seems that you need to be an egomaniac to be successful. I have not met any of the leaders of those companies, I admit, and I am just relating what books tell me.
The author compiled a compelling set of events into a dark and unfavorable history of Intel. If you want the dish, it’s there. Successes seem to be falling out of the blue sky, while all failure is homegrown. You decide whether you want to believe that or not. The writing is good, the usual technical blunders aside. Why is it that people writing about technical companies never use a fact checker?
My company came up with something smart: for the month of July, every ‘alternative commuter’ will receive a coupon to be redeemed at the cafeteria, covering lunch. Initially, only carpoolers would benefit, but then the other alts complained and the program was extended.
Now, of course, each morning I fight my own cheapness instead of my laziness, and it’s nice to be on the winning side!
