NeverFriday

Just a list of some interesting questions found on StackOverflow.

• What is the point of setters and getters?
• Reducing If-Else statements in Java
• When is unit-testing inappropriate or unnecessary?
• Writing commit messages as a solo developer
• How should I test randomness?
• The modern way to perform error handling

I forked the cl-web-utils and oauth2 libraries and started work on a Twilio API.

You can check out the whole project here: https://gitorious.org/om-web-pack

As a change of pace I'm using LispWorks Personal Edition in Windows 7 (64-bit). I've already encountered a compilation error in cl-web-utils. It has to do with the helpers file which has some useful macros and functions, however most of them don't seem to be used and I feel like some of them can be inlined or replaced with functions from Alexandria or another library. We'll see what happens with that.

The changes I'm making to oauth2 are mostly improving the examples and documentation and testing it with a few more APIs like Twilio.

Since I got an ACM subscription, I have been interested in knowing what research papers have practical implications for web developers. There was a blog post by Ted Dziuba that blasted the hype surrounding Node.js, calling it a cancer on the developer community and suggesting that the performance is sub-par and the language used, JavaScript, contains flaws as bad as those found in PHP. He did a micro-benchmark and the amount of requests that Node.js could handle with the simplest function and with a modest load was tiny.

It seems that a lot of computer scientists and programmers assume that the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) is a mere publisher of computer science papers. They forget that the ACM hands out the Turing Award which has been awarded to several prominent computer scientists such as Alan J Perlis, Marvin Minsky, Edsger W Dijkstra, Donald E Knuth, and Barbara Liskov. When I subscribed as a professional, I gained access to the digital library which is rich with computer science papers which are sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical. The papers are found in the numerous transactions and journals that the ACM publishes, and the ACM hosts many conferences and sponsors some amazing events such as the ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) and they even sponsored the Deep Blue vs Kasparov chess game.

The price for a year's subscription was only $200 USD and for students the price is lower than that. Students should have access to the ACM Digital Library through their university so their subscription price is effectively $0 per year. It's incredible to think that so many papers are ignored and don't become popular because of a $200 paywall. $200 is seriously not much.

These are the raw notes I wrote down after I left the hackathon...You can check out the code I wrote here

completed some sort of application for the hackathon, was screwed over by the Wi-Fi routers. Discovered flaws in oauth2 and cl-web-utils packages. Drakma wasn't bad, needs more examples and a bit more documentation for the major functions.

I've signed up for my first ever hackathon, HackTO. The last time I competed in something programming-related was over 3 years ago when I tried some single round algorithms matches on TopCoder. I also tried some of the puzzles in Google's challenge, whatever it's called. My skills are fairly average sadly.

I'll be coding using Common Lisp.

Sometimes software developers have great ideas, such as free software/open source software, and open protocols and using open data formats instead of proprietary formats. These "open" ideas have been extended to databases that are stored by governments and now we have Open Data projects conducted by the City of Toronto, and other cities in an effort to improve public services, increase oversight, and give citizens more access to information that affects them.

The entrepreneurs over at Hacker News who like to pretend they're rich and can turn their little startup into Apple are praising the impressive profits that Apple has reported. What's more impressive is that they fail to make the connection between gigantic profits and the very low amount of wages and salary paid to workers and employees.

Apple apparently makes $409,000 in net income per employee. One commenter congratulates the managers for doing an "epic job". The only epic job they've done is in tricking employees to give up the value that they generate over to the company. The maximum salary that any employee who isn't an executive or manager will make is between 1/4th and 1/3rd of that. For all these entrepreneurs, libertarians, and other capitalist supporters who think that you should be able to earn as much as possible, it should be disturbing that employees are only earning a certain percentage of the value that they produce. It should be shocking and disgusting that a worker on an assembly line in China makes way below minimum wage when the value they produce is very high.

Dan479 has asked on Reddit, "why do they wish to take away our freedom away so badly?" in response to the new bills that have spawned after the fight against SOPA. The reason we get so tired in these fights against people who wish to take away our freedom is because they have infrastructure to support them while we do not. Government bureaucrats and elected officials have a whole system of procedures and processes for various situations. They know how to game the system and make it work for them and they have a network of supporters to rely on.

We don't have that. There's no on-going support for these campaigns against tyranny. We don't have a support network where people help each other learn how to use Tor, Freenet, PGP encryption, BitCoin, etc. We don't have enough infrastructure to make it easy for anyone to continue the fight. It should be easy for someone to go to a website, check out a list of tasks they can do to help (like write to Congress or hand out flyers or design flyers or join a local protest), and then check-in with status reports. That's what all these politicians and bureaucrats have. They may have multiple goals but every single day, they can make at least a little progress on each task. They can take 30 minutes to write a letter to someone or to call them. They can spend an hour reviewing information relevant to the issue and figure out what action to take next. We don't have that. We need to break down tasks into much smaller pieces and we need to let people gather and post more information about the tasks.

I just found out from ReadWriteWeb that someone was messing up data on OpenStreetMaps. This is similar to the vandalism that occurs on Wikipedia. Mentioned in this article was an article from 2010 about poisonous people in open project communities by a member of the OpenStreetMaps community.

This is a separate issue from vandalism but it still hinders a project from accomplishing anything. Basically, there are people in communities who will nitpick on minor details and slow down the process so that nothing gets down, or they will do something else that deters others from making a contribution.