The Job Search

I’m going to be writing some new types of posts, and therefore introducing a new tag. They’ll be about the time I spent on my job search. I’m now (luckily) employed, but I was on the job market for about 9 months, not including the job searching I did while in college, and have quite a few tales to tell.

I was speaking to a friend recently about our job hunting experiences, and the one thing we immediately agreed upon is that job hunting is a soul crushing experience. Between making cold calls to doing interviews to following up, it’s all a massive time sink. The worst of it is, even if you put in all that time, you have no guarantee of success, just better odds.

The one comfort you can have is this: You have a skill. If you’re in a technical field and you’ve gotten proper training, this skill should be easily identifiable and valuable. Maybe you can program or cook well or can translate another language. And as a job seeker, this skill will be something employers are in need of. And if a business is hiring, they obviously have a need for that skill.

Technological Singularity: an Unrecognizable Future

Do you ever feel like technology just moves too fast? I’ve already posted on how technology has past me by in many ways. But there might be more to it than people falling behind current trends. There’s the idea of a technologic singularity.

The technological singularity is an event in the future when technological progress becomes so rapid that it makes the future “different”. Central to this concept is the concept of accelerated change: technologic breakthroughs allow the next technologic breakthrough to occur sooner and easier. For instance, our technologic improvements in computers have allowed us to study genetic data faster and advanced our knowledge in genetics.

(Ignore that calculations per second, they are a poor measure of intelligence)

Some interesting consequences occur. As we build faster computer and create better algorithms, it allows us to create faster computers and better algorithms. But, that’s really all just an evolutionary trend, when our computers reach a high level of AI it will become revolution. It will be a paradigm shift: a social change so large that will occur and a new generation will be created.

And after the singularity? We will be able to construct machines smarter than us. And in turn, we will become more intelligent. We will become something else.

Before I finish, I would like to recommend The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler as a look at what our future may become.

Loss Leaders

I’m a big fan of Valve’s Steam service. It took me a while to come around though. Even today I still keep local copies of all my games in case of a doomsday scenario. It takes a lot of trust to buy into a Digital Distribution service. Will they respect their customers, because it’s not like you can take your library someplace else if they decide to change their Terms of Service for the worse? Will they remain competitive, or will I have to start buying from other services and fragment my library? Will I still be able to access the things I paid for in 10 years?

One of the things that push me over the edge was their amazing sales. Amazing games for just a few dollars. As someone who was unemployed at the time, or even just price conscious, it was too good to pass up. The basic idea is loss leading. Valve, or the publisher, takes a hit on the sale of a game hoping you’ll come back and buy more games from Steam or from that franchise. In the end, gaining a returning customer at the cost of a game that they may have never bought anyway.

David DeMartini Origin’s, EA’s competing DD service, boss was asked in an interview about these sales to which he responded, “We won't be doing that. Obviously they think it's the right thing to do after a certain amount of time. I just think it cheapens your intellectual property.” Take from that what you will considering partiality of the speaker.

Valve’s business development chief, Jason Holtman, responded to the criticism, “If all that were true, nobody would ever pre-purchase a game ever on Steam, ever again. You just wouldn't. You would in the back of your mind be like, okay, in six months to a year, maybe it'll be 50 per cent off on a day or a weekend or during one of our seasonal promotions. Probably true. But our pre-orders are bigger than they used to be. Tonnes of people, right? And our day one sales are bigger than they used to be. Our first week, second week, third week, all those are bigger.”

What’s underestimated in Holtman’s response is the importance of the social side of gaming. If all your friends are playing a game now, you’re more likely to buy it now to be able to discuss it with them or play it with them. Not to mention, if you happen to pick up a multiplayer game several months after launch, your libel to be greeted by many an empty server.

I’ve recently started dabbling in another Digital Distribution service, Amazon MP3. They too have been a major user of the loss leading tactic. It’s not odd to see a $10 album drop to $3 or songs drop from 99 cents to 25 cents. And boy do they give away free credit like there’s no tomorrow.

They too faced scrutiny for their tactics. One unnamed retailer is quoted in a report as saying, “I love it when they have a successful loss leader pricing deal. I can't stop laughing every time I think about how much money they must be losing”.

The problem is that music doesn’t have the same social aspect as gaming. Outside of people who are really into the technical aspects of music, most really don’t discuss it beyond “like” or “dislike”. There’s no real analog to multiplayer in music. So, there’s no pressure to buy music quickly beyond a few special circumstances like social gatherings. At the same time, this means the price of music will generally stay constant over time. What is a 99 cent song now will remain so for the remained of its life, barring sales.

While Amazon certainly has the money to keep their MP3 Digital Distribution service afloat for quite some time, I question how effective their loss leading strategy will be in the long term.

The Scorpion of Baldora Field

I’m not going to do a lot of the typing this post, this time I have a story. It’s a monolog from Night on the Galactic Railroad about the scorpion of Baldora Field:

Our father told us once about the scorpion of Baldora Field. The scorpion killed other bugs and ate them.

Then one day, a weasel found him. The scorpion fled, and fell into a deep well. He was trapped, and knew he'd die.Then, he thought to himself,"How often have l eaten other creatures? And now, the one time that l was the prey, l fled in utter terror. And look what came of that. I'll die in this well, alone."

"Life is filled with uncertainty. Why didn't l accept my fate? If l had freely given my life to the weasel, I would have given himanother day of life.But now my death will help no one. I am useless. Dear Lord, I beg of you, look into my heart and hear my prayer. In my next life, don't let me waste myself.Let me use my body for the truehappiness of everyone in the world."

And then the scorpion burst into flame: a brilliant crimson glow. And by the light of his burning body, he lit up the night forever.

How beautiful!

I always liked the story. “Put the others before yourself” is a very nice motto. Even if it has a subtle communist overtone. The world would probably be a better place if everyone thought that way. But like the story says, when death has you in its clutches, even the courageous falter.

There was a story a few months ago on 60 Minutes about the cost of end of life care to tax payers. It reminded me of this story. It’s easy for most to expect the old and sick to accept their fate and save the tax payers a few dollars, but it’s much harder to accept it when your time comes.

Web development: HTML, PHP, and SQL

First thing’s first, lets set up our environment. My IDE of choice is Netbeans, but that’s of little consequence. Next, install your PHP stuff. Later down the road, when we use MySQL, these tools will make yourlife a lot easier. In your php.ini file uncomment - extension=php_curl.dll to activate curl.

This post will tell you how to set upyour project. The easiest thing to start with is how to scrape a feed, basically cut and paste, see here. Quick posts to brush on your PHP:

http://php.about.com/od/advancedphp/ss/php_preg_3.htm

http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.array.php

http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_if_else.asp

http://www.tizag.com/phpT/postget.php

http://php.net/manual/en/function.var-dump.php

Now let’s tap into Google APIs. Sign up for your Google License Key. Read how to use the Google API here and here. The Google News API is similar.

Next API were going to use is Twitter, well technically 3 Twitter APIs. The first is to get trending topics, seehere. Next, twitter searches, similar to Google’s search API, but you don’t need a key, see here. The third is a bit trickier, see here for help. Basically download Abraham's TwitterOAuth library add it to your project and go to http://dev.twitter.com/apps, register your app and get your keys.

Now before we jump in and start using SQL, I feel it’s important that you keep in mind the scope of your project. If you simply want to store a small amount of information with no respect to order, you might consider plain text. There’s a certain cost to setting up and maintaining a database and it may even hurt performance if you are just doing a simple project.

OK, ready? Start your server. Open up MySQL Query Browser. Right click on a Schema, create a new one or use a default, and create a new table. Now, let’s connect our new table to our PHP, see here. We’ve been getting json objects for our searches, so let’s store those in the database. For help see here, here, and here. I managed to get away with just using serialize() and mysql_real_escape_string() but not addslashes().

And there you have it. You are now the proud creator of a web application.

Free Energy: E=MC^2

I’ve been interested with some of the more exotic aspects of physics since watching NOVA’s The Elegant Universe. It was mostly about the up and coming String Theory, but also covered the history of the field. By the way, interesting thing about String Theory, it proposes that there is a small chance that you can walkthrough a wall due to quantum tunneling. However, the probability is so small, the time it would take you to try is longer than the projected life of the universe.

E=MC^2 is probably one of the most famous equations in the world. Everyone’s heard of it, but few actually know what it means. Energy equals the product of mass and the speed of light squared. Now the speed of light is a very big number (299,792,458 m/s). So, this means any mass can be converted to energy (a lot of energy!).

Nuclear reactions rely on this principal to create energy. In a nuclear reaction that produces energy, two atoms combine (fusion) or one atom splits (fission) and at the end of the reaction the products weigh less than original reactants. That lost weight is responsible for the sun’s energy and the destructive power of an atomic bomb. That’s a lot of free energy.

Now, when I say free energy, I don’t mean G, although some of the energy that is released is. I mean using the dirt on the ground or particles of air to power our cities. But we’re not there yet, and perhaps we never will be.

You have probably heard of the second law of thermodynamics. Basically it says that entropy can never decrease. When energy is used to do work, some of it is lost as heat and friction and can never be used again. There is an absolute limit on the amount of work that can be done in the universe. One day, the universe will be nothing but entropy with no organization. Rather depressing isn’t it.

I would like to leave you with a story: The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. Perhaps a bit optimistic about the future of human race, but an amusing tale nonetheless.

Blogamania

Good news everyone! I've imported my blog to tumblr. I'm also making use of ifttt so that every subsequent post I make here, Blogger, should show up there too. It should also post links on twitter and Wordpress. Ain't that just grand!

I've actually planning to do a massive toy project that incorporates ifttt and some other neat little things. Problem is, I just have to come up with what the project will be in what little spare time I have.

Anyway, welcome to all the new viewers and I hope you get some enjoyment, and possibly information, out of my posts.

Open Source Software: Doom and Gloom

A few years ago there was a rumor that the Linux Hater's Blog was being abandoned. I took the opportunity to read through his old post. Most of his posts were filled with immature rants and filled with swears, but he had a genuine point at times.

Open source software may not cost you any money, but poorly designed software will cost you time and effort. I have seen more than my share of dropped projects; projects that start out with a small team that slowly erodes away until that last person leaves up a “Thanks for all the fish” post.

The greatest evil of OSS is probably fragmentation. The mantra of OSS source software has always been freedom of choice. And it’s good if you’re a consumer trying to pick a media player or web browser, but it is hell for software developers. Each distro has a different set of libraries and a different kernel and a different set of binaries. Your software might work on distro and not on another at any given time. That’s one of the reasons companies are so afraid to make software on linux, they have no clue what libraries they can support.

I recently found out about the Linux Standard Base, who are attempting to standardize binaries across distos. However, the LSB has failed, to a certain extent. The LSB doesn’t have the influence over the distros that they need. How many distos are going to listen to the LSB and use older binaries for compatibility when they can update to the latest and greatest?

Check out what distros the LSB has certified:

Ubuntu: the latest release certified is 9.04, which is no longer supported. 8.04 (LTS) is also certified, but support ends next month. And having used an LTS this late in this life cycle, I can tell you, they are unusable.

Mandriva: the last desktop version certified is from 2006 (2007.0)!

SUSE: version 11.0 is no longer supported.

Debian: not certified at all.

Fedora: not certified at all.

Mint: not certified at all.

Congratulations Linux Standard Base, you’ve managed to standardize a bunch of Linux distros no one is running!

But that’s not to say OSS is the only software affected by these issues. Let me illustrate it with an example. Before Microsoft released Vista it was codenamed Longhorn and it was a much grander undertaking than the released product. There were, what Microsoft called, the “3 pillars of longhorn”; 3 key technologies that would form the backbone of the finished Longhorn. One of these pillars was WinFS which called for all the files on a computer to be stored in a database. For those less technically minded, this was a big deal and allowed for some neat things to be done.

At the beginning, everything seemed to be going fine; Microsoft released multiple preview releases of Longhorn and, with the exception of the normal bugs, everything was moving along. Then nothing was released to the public for several months; no preview builds, no progress reports, nothing. One day, Microsoft announced that they would be releasing WinFS after Longhorn’s release and would be porting the other 2 pillars back to XP. The reason was, they simply bit off more they could chew, they kept on adding more and more features, they had to eventually crunch bugs and make a release. In the end it WinFS was further delayed and then outright canceled.

At the same time, linux had a similar open source program: Gnome Storage. Like WinFS, it planned to put every file on a computer into a database for organization purposes. What happened to it? Well, it was abandoned. It was done almost entirely by a college student, maybe he graduated, maybe he got a job, maybe he just was no longer interested in it anymore. The end result is Gnome Storage is in a perpetually unfinished state.

Two separate project failed for entirely different reasons.

Banking: Money for Nothing

Happy new year everyone. I've been quite busy recently. So, excuses the large gap between posts. I meant to have this in my last post, but it was already such a meaty post I’ll just create a new post for it. It's not as timely as my last post. It certainly seems like the Occupy protests have wound down, which is a shame. There's rumors of something happening in March, but we'll have to wait and see.

I’ve always had a bane for banks, specifically insurance banks. You pay every month in case something unfortunate happens, making the insurance company nice and rich without providing a single product or service. And when something actually does happen, you have to fight them tooth and nail get them to give you what they agreed.

To understand banks, you must first understand money. A long time ago, paper money was simply a substitute for a real product: gold. You could take your $1 to the bank and receive $1 in gold. This was called the gold standard. But, our economy grew beyond the amount of available rare metal, so we switched to a fiat money. Money now has value because or government says it does, and we have faith in our government and the value of our currency.

The financial crisis of that started in 2007 seems like a complex issues, but it’s actually quite simple. Read a few articles, here and here, and you begin to get the idea. Large investment banks invested sold loans to people who probably wouldn’t pay them back (sub-prime loans). And then sold “insurance” on these “investments”. When people stopped paying their loans, the investment banks were in trouble. Had these had been smaller banks it would have been no big problem. But these were huge international banks, they had insured and invested in many other companies. They were “to big to fail”.

Bear Sterns was lucky, they found a buyer. But Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. Some blame it on the government wanting the free market to take over, others blame Lehman Brothers for being uncooperative. And it sent ripples across the market. When later financial institutions when to the government and essentially held the market hostage for government money, they got what they wanted.

Years ago, this would not be possible. There were laws to prevent banks from becoming too large and taking stupid risks. They were implemented around the great depression to prevent what happened then from happening again. But, our representatives repealed those laws. I don’t know if it was greed or stupidity that led to that decision.

Let me explain, to the best of my abilities, how banks create money out of thin air. Most people believed that money is created at a mint and makes it’s way into everyday life by some form of government magic. But this is not how it happens for most money. Most people know, when you deposit currency at a bank, that bank can loan out the majority of the money to generate income from interest in loans. As anyone can who’s watched It’s a Wonderful Life can tell you, this can get banks in a heap of trouble if everyone wants to withdraw their deposits. What most people don’t know is that banks can loan out more than you deposit (called a monetary base). Lets say you deposit $1 in a bank and the government has set a reserve rate of 1:9, the bank can now conjure $8 into existence and loan out $9!

Now remember how I said our money is fiat currency? How I said our money has value only because people believe in it? That is why preventing counterfeiters is so important, if we did not protect our money, it would become worthless. What would happen if the average person found out that the “money” on their credit card was conjured into exist out of thin air?