NeverFriday

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.

I was looking to buy a few ebooks since I've been using my Android phone for reading moreso than for other applications and I thought the Canadian company Kobo would have a fantastic store. Unfortunately that turned out not to be the case. Their website is confusing and it lists download options. Notice how this is plural rather than singular? Yeah, I noticed that and following that text it said "ADOBE DRM EPUB". That's three separate words and so I thought these were different options.

Gordon Hempton has posted a review of 12 Javascript MVC (Model View Controller) frameworks on his blog, CodeBrief. It includes a table of features but it doesn't include something that more programmers and software developers should be interested in; the license of the framework. Encouraging free software to spread is important especially since copyright law and its enforcement is becoming a bigger problem (think SOPA, DMCA, etc.),

James Yu has written a blog post titled "Designing Great API Docs" on a company blog and it was interesting to see what kind of advice it had. The post suggests that multiple guides should come with the API documentation because when it stands on its own, it is much harder for someone to learn how to properly use it. If all you see are methods and classes, it can be difficult to figure out the flow of the code.

It's shameful that The New York Times has to publish an article about this subject in order for office designers and managers to pay attention; open concept offices are a drain on workers and were tried back in the 90s. They were proven to be awful back then and they're still awful yet almost every single software development company and all sorts of other businesses insist on having an open concept office.

I have de-activated my twitter account (still keeping my identi.ca account), my Google+ account, and my Github account. My reasoning is that, as Eben Moglen says, I want to be part of the solution and not be part of the problem. I believe in using free/open-source software as much as possible and so I've started closing down some accounts on proprietary websites.

I'm trying to design a Design By Contract library for PHP5 and I have been looking at implementations in other languages. What I have noticed is that each implementation defines a contracts language. This should have been obvious to me, and I guess that it was though I overlooked this and was more interested in the meta-programming in PHP problem. So with this contracts language, we need to be able to specify the pre- and post-conditions for functions and methods, and we need to be able to specify constraints such as $x is one of (1,2,3) or $y is a string or null.

Covered in this post are:

• Contracts and meta-programming
• Racket contracts
• Perl contracts
• Java contracts - C4J
• Java contracts - cofoja

I received the 2nd Common Lisp book that I ordered yesterday. Apparently it isn't the greatest book, but so far it isn't too bad. I really like that it, like the other book, has problems and exercises for students of the language to solve. One of the chapters covers string/character manipulation. In it, the book asks the student to implement a spell-checker and outlines four cases that need to be handled in order to find a misspelled word in the dictionary. The cases are: transposition, insertion, removal, replacement. Peter Norvig, a famed Lisp/AI programmer who works at Google, implemented a spell-checker in 21 lines of Python and this book has given me the idea that it's fairly straight forward to do.